Rebecca Greenfield

Bill Gates “finally” caved to pressure and admitted that CTRL-Alt-Delete was a “mistake,” which seems a little harsh for a three-key combination used by frustrated PC users for decades. “We could have had a single button, but the guy who did the IBM keyboard design didn’t wanna give us our single button,” he said in an interview for a Harvard fundraising campaign. “It was a mistake,” he said, an admission that has tech bloggers cheering.

After much speculation about how Pinterest would make money off of its wildly popular service, the company has finally announced a monetization strategy: Sponsored Pins. “We’re going to start experimenting with promoting certain pins from a select group of businesses,” CEO Ben Silberman explains in a very cautious post on the company blog. The thing is, for now, those ads are free: ”Nobody’s paying for anything yet—we want to see how things go and, more than anything, hear what you think,” he adds.

As users have become both more aware and wary of cookies—the technology that tracks browsing activity for advertising purposes—Google has started experimenting with new tracking methods that don’t use cookies. People want more control over the advertising they see and what companies know about them. Cookies can often feel creepy; it can feel like the Internet knows you too well. Example:

With Twitter’s supposed IPO coming up “by the end of year” its size and sustainability have become a point of much debate. Today a study from Columbia Business School and the University of Pittsburgh gives us a pseudo answer on the question, alleging that Twitter has 500 million users and therefore is big. Twitter, said Columbia Business School professor Olivier Toubia, ”isn’t just going to disappear. It’s just going to become a new way to follow celebrities, corporations, and the like.” Arguably that’s already Twitter’s purpose for a lot of people. But let’s get back to that 500 million number: Is that really so big that Twitter could never disappear?

If you type “gay,” “lesbian,” or “bisexual” into the Tumblr search on the iOS app nothing comes up, even though there are plenty of posts with those tags floating around Tumblr. The censorship, which went into effect the same day as the site-wide porn ban, looks like Tumblr is filtering out an entire community of posters, many of whom post nothing racy. “Gay” does not equal “porn.” But, it turns out, this might not have everything to do with Tumblr, its new owner Yahoo, or the company’s new stance on explicit content. Rather, Apple and its prudish app store guidelines are the most likely culprit. At least that’s what Tumblr claims, per a blog post by Tumblr CEO David Karp (emphasis ours):

After a year of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo workers report a better work-life balance than people at tech companies known for their supposed perks, like, Google and Facebook. For the first time ever, the turnaround tech company made Glassdoor’s top 25 companies for work-life balance, coming in at a respectable number 16, with a 4 star-rating. Yet, notably absent from the list are any of its main competitors. Nokia comes in at number 10, but it’s a Finnish company, so Comment over selling phones. So, what gives, how did Yahoo end up on this list?

The latest startup boom has led to the creation of at least 161 companies that end in “ly,” “lee,” and “li,” which is, naming consultants tell us, 160 too many. There’s feedly, bitly, contactually, cloudly, along with a bunch of other company-LYS, all of which you can find on this Pinterest board, and all but the first ever “ly” name are “just lazy,” Nancy Friedman, a naming consultant, told The Atlantic Wire. The same goes for all the “ify,” “square,” “box,” any made up words, words spelled with extra letters, and the all caps, no vowels start-up names out there. They’re bad names and there’s no excuse for it.

Everyone and their grandma has a smartphone and not even the tech-obsessed feel compelled to upgrade to the latest versions of the best gadgets. Ladies and gents, we seem to have have reached peak smartphone. For the first time since 2008, computer-equipped phone upgrades dropped. This year, only 68 million Americans upgraded their phones, down 9% from the year before, reports the Wall Street Journal’s Spencer E. Ante. At this point, most people—nearly 70%—in this country have a fancy phone with data and computer capabilities on a contract. And that number gets a lot higher when you break it down by demographic: 75% of 18-to-24-year-olds have smartphones; 78% of 25-to-34-year-olds have one, too. There just aren’t that many more people out there to convert.

A year ago today, Yahoo made the surprise announcement that Marissa Mayer, the young Google all-star, would attempt to turn around its dying company, and looking back she certainly has improved a lot of parts of the company—just not the most important part: revenue. The stock has made a steady climb of more than 70% since her arrival:

Less than a month after Instagram debuted its Vine competitor, Twitter’s video-sharing app, Vine, has started to drop off on its own turf. According to data provided to the Atlantic Wire by Topsy, which measures links shared on Twitter, Vine usage has continued to drop since Instavid came onto the scene in mid-June.

Google has updated its beloved Maps phone app for Android—the iPhone update is “coming soon“—and in addition to new “explore” and “reviews” features for learning more about places, it has adopted one of Waze’s signature features. Among the updated navigation features Maps now allows users to “see reports of problems on the road that you can tap to see incident details,” the announcement explains. Waze—the popular Israeli mapping company that Google bought for reportedly over $1 billion this June—because of its crowd-sourced data alerts drivers to construction, accidents, and other interfering incidents. Now Google Maps conveniently does this, too. (Though, to be clear: the Waze technology itself isn’t in this version of the app—just the idea.) As you can see pictured right, the app indicates an “incident.” To see details just tap on it, at which point Google will offer other, faster routes that you can choose to take or ignore. It sounds incredibly useful. But, of course, like with all Maps apps its utility will be in how well it handles real time situations. In practice, the feature will require a lot of very accurate data. Then again, Google has so far been pretty good at that sort of thing vis-a-vis maps.

As of April this year T-Mobile offered the best deal on the iPhone for just $99 up front and no tyrannical two-year contract, and yet the company hasn’t sold enough to save itself from third place. In fact, the company’s share of the wireless market has dropped since it announced its deal, reports Bits Blog’s Brian X. Chen. And while the company has sold a bunch of iPhones, most buyers are upgrading to smartphones for the first time, meaning it hasn’t really lured fancy phone owners from the competition. When T-Mobile made its “bold” move, the tech pundits argued it was the best deal around: T-Mobile still offers unlimited data, users aren’t locked into two-year contracts that subsidize the price of the phone, and certain prices can come out cheaper than competitors. (Though that last part is up for debate.) So, then, why hasn’t T-Mobile lapped up the market?

Not only is Netflix creating compelling original content worth watching on its streaming service, but the HBO-of-the-future is facilitating a similar revolution on the cable networks as well. Hoping to get more exclusive rights to shows that its subscribers value, Netflix has started investing in the type of stuff that appears on the traditional boob-tube first. It helped resurrect the AMC show The Killing, for example, because it knew that its audience would like more seasons of the serial crime drama, reports The Wall Street Journal’s Amol Sharma. In exchange for the cash, Netflix got exclusive streaming rights just three months after the season finale, which is a win-win for viewers (and for Netflix): Not only do fans of a pretty acclaimed show get more of it on cable, but Netflix subscribers also get a chance to watch a well done drama pretty soon after its release—all because it’s what viewers like you want. That’s pretty incredible considering how much junk populates the airwaves just to fill up time.

Forty million dollars may not be a lot of money to Carlos Slim, the world’s second-richest man (current net worth estimate: $66.3 billion), but his investment in the British app start-up Shazam is novel for several reasons. First, while Slim first made his fortune in the Mexican mobile phone business, he has holdings in lots of industries and companies: Saks, The New York Times, Caixabank, as well as mining and construction firms. But he is not known for investing in start-ups. Second of all, Slim generally does not invest in Europe: some holdings in Dutch and Austrian phone companies didn’t work out so well for him, notes Reuters’s Sarah Young. ”He is nursing huge paper losses after their shares declined sharply in the past year.” So this, a non-telecom, non-Mexican investment, seems like a bit of a departure from Slim’s milieu. But, if you think about it a littler harder, it makes some sense.

The average weekly wage in San Mateo County California, the home of Silicon Valley behemoths like Facebook, increased 107.3 percent in the last quarter of 2012, making it the richest place in America—even ahead of Manhattan—all because of a little IPO that happened in May 2012. Here’s how the thinking goes: Facebook went public in May 2012. In November—181 days after the offering—those with vested stock options could cash in. Sure, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised not do that. But if Peter Thiel, one of the earliest and biggest investors in the social network took out something like $1 billion, you can bet some less famous names did as well. In that quarter alone, the roughly 6,200 tech workers in the area collected total wages of $6.8 billion, notes the Wall Street Journal‘s Scott Thurm. “That kind of a jump can only be explained by what’s happening with stock” Doug Henton, chief executive of Collaborative Economics told Thurm. Some of that likely also came from other tech IPOs that year, but Facebook’s was by far the largest.

The latest in iWatch rumors all but confirms this thing is coming, with Apple filing a trademark for “iWatch” in Japan, which is only very exciting for Apple and its investors. Of course the aspiring wearable gadget maker hasn’t commented on its impending invention, but these trademark filings show a company’s thinking about its future. So: At some point in the near future—maybe “late 2014” says one rumor report—the masses will have an iWatch, which could be okay, maybe. Really, this invention is all about saving Apple. Here’s why:

A million dollars is a lot of money for a normal person, but that’s pretty low if you founded the fifth most visited website on the planet, and only pretty good if you were a CEO in 1965. Nonetheless, Wikipedia chief Jimmy Wales just barely cracks six figures in total net worth, despite the 20 billion page views behind his 12-and-a-half-year-old do-gooder website, according to Amy Chozik’s big new profile in The New York Times Magazine. Wales makes less than “car dealers in Ohio,” he admits in the interview. But he’s okay with that: “Their jobs are much, much less interesting than mine,” he added. “Can you imagine Howard Roark saying, ‘I just want to make as much money as possible?'” asked Wales, a libertarian Ayn Rand fan—like any good Internet tycoon.

Wi-Fi in the skies costs too much and goes unused, but Gogo—the world’s airplane internet-market leader, recently IPO’d—doesn’t care because it has more airplanes equipped with wireless than anyone else. “To some degree, there’s an insatiable demand among people for connectivity, and particularly the business traveler who wants to get some work done while they’re flying, and do their e-mails,” Gogo chief executive Michael Small says in a new interview with Bloomberg TV. Except, well, that’s not really true: Only about 6% of fliers used Gogo’s in-flight Wi-Fi when available, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, citing company data. But that “take rate,” as its referred to in the biz, doesn’t really matter to Gogo—at least not yet. “The take rate is no longer a useful measurement,” John Walton, the director of data for Routehappy, which measures flight amenities, told The New York Times‘s Joe Sharkey. “What matters is the idea that you can get online when you want to get online.” What matters to Gogo, then, is that it dominates the in-flight WiFi market now—as small as it may be today, it’s burgeoning… and fast.

Don’t be fooled by the perks at all those Silicon Valley (and Alley) offices—it’s all just part of a subtle plot to control employee behavior. The founders of Fab.com, which just got itself a $1 billion valuation, admitted as much to Bloomberg‘s Sarah Freier. The shopping site wields its beer on tap, free lunch, and ice-cream machine as a means to force Fab employees to send emails in a “certain font,” use high-quality paper, and always “be Fab”—whatever terrible thing that means. Those types of office perks abound at startups, of course, not only as a way to attract the best talent, but also to get that “talent” working on message, official office font included. Each and every kegerator serves as a reminder of what you owe the company. And that’s just the food and drink. Let’s take a look, by way of a couple recent trend stories and startup proclamations, at how the so-called “escalation of perks” keeps employees in line all over the tech world and “progressive” companies the world over.

If all those rumormongers have it right, this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference will be one big game of catch-up for Apple, a technology giant that’s not exactly used to coming from behind. At 10 a.m. in San Francisco, Tim Cook will take the stage to confirm, deny, and/or bolster week’s worth of chatter leading up to the annual nerd-fest-turned-product-announcement. No matter which of the expectations are fulfilled, Apple will no doubt align with its encroaching competition. Probably like this:

Google might actually be fulfilling Julian Assange’s nightmares and turning into the Lockheed Martin of 21st century lobbying, having spent more than the military defense company on pushing issues in 2012, with a record $18.2 million that made it the eighth largest lobbyist in DC.* “The company that once had no use for Washington,” as The New York Times‘s Edward Wyett puts it in a profile of Google’s chief Washington lobbyist Susan Molinari, has a newfound use for lawmakers, not only as it battles anti-trusts suits with money, but also as chairman Eric Schmidt embarks on his new hobby as a part-time ambassador. “What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,” Schmidt and Jared Cohen wrote in their book The New Digital Age, “technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.” That’s a vision of the future highlighted over the weekend by Assange, another digital futurist, in a blistering Times op-ed as “an expertly banalized version of tomorrow’s world.” Google’s vision also, appropriately, includes making the right connections in the nation’s capital.

Elon Musk’s long-awaited blog post take-down has arrived with what he claims is the data to prove New York Times John M. Broder reporter committed some sort of journalistic malpractice to run a bad review of the Tesla Model S’s range capability. The Times continues to vouch for the accuracy of Broder’s report and has another upcoming response to the latest Musk claims, a spokesperson told The Atlantic Wire. Musk, however, has followed through on his promise to publish data logs that he claims show that Broder (and not the car) was to blame for it stalling out on a cold day in Connecticut. But Musk is really going beyond that to a much more serious charge: he claims Broder deliberately set out to sabotage the test in a blatant violation of journalistic ethics.

Sometime in 2013, T-Mobile customers can get themselves an iPhone, according to a for-real official announcement from Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s parent company. Or at least it sure sounds like T-Mobile will get the iPhone, as part of its new deal to sell “Apple products.” Why would that not include the iPhone?

This Friday, hoards of Americans will line up, and wait, and fight, and at way-too-early-for-a-day-off hours, to get discounts that studies have shown aren’t even the best deals around—and they’ll do it because of scientific reasons outside of their control. For those of us who refuse to partake in our most commercial of modern holiday traditions, this insanity may make no sense, especially with Cyber Monday three days later, and without the lines, the other humans, and the fighting. But, like we said, it’s nobody’s fault that humans get so geared-up for a day of torture. It’s a science thing. We like the waiting, and the fighting, and especially the coupons. Here’s the latest research: