April Joyner

This totally should’ve been the official press release. I haven’t decided whether I’m comforted by the fact that Mayer/Yahoo “promise[s] not to screw it up.”

In any case, Karp seems to have found a successul monetization strategy—at least for himself. The $1.1 billion deal is “substantially all” cash. (There’s a novel instance of business-speak for ya!)

From Zach Seward’s article on Bloomberg’s culture of omniscience

From Fast Company’s profile of Nate Silver, whom the magazine has named the most creative person in business

So I came across this company, Bohemian Guitars, that makes guitars from old oil cans. Apparently it’s inspired by the founders’ experience growing up in South Africa. Pretty cool stuff! I’d love to learn more about the South African music that inspired them.

annfriedman:

“There’s nothing tawdry about offering your wares on the street. It’s how magazines and newspapers started. It is a model where the people decide and no one is in charge of the velvet rope deciding who gets to write or who gets the big writing contract or not. In some ways we’re breaking up cartels and creating a true kind of journalistic capitalism.”

—

Andrew Sullivan is doing some real wishful thinking here. The reason he has enough readers to even consider going it alone is that he came up through those traditional velvet-roped media, with the support of big writing contracts. The importance of traditional platforms is true for other supposedly “game changing” funding models, too: The Tomorrow crew was able to get our Kickstarter funded so quickly because we were all known for our work at a traditional media outlet. If we were a group of unaffiliated writers and designers who banded together, I’m confident we wouldn’t have made as much money. (And what we made wasn’t even enough to pay ourselves fairly.) I’d love to live in a world where all readers supported their favorite journalists directly. But the truth is they still have to find out about those journalists. And those journalists still have to hone their skills. Right now, traditional media structures are pretty crucial to both of those things. 

And the same is true for music. Kickstarter et al. are great, but they’re not going to finance a long-term career.

americastestkitchen:

Mochi Ice Cream Inventor Passes Away, Leaves a Legacy: Frances Hashimoto, one of L.A.’s historic Little Tokyo’s most influential community members and inventor of mochi ice cream, passed away earlier this week. Hashimoto saw her famous rice cake-ice cream hybrid become mainstream during her time as the president of Mikawaya, her family’s century-old business selling traditional Japanese sweet pastries and snacks.

Would have been a good one for Inc.’s dearly departed Legacy page.

Gene Marks, in a column on Inc.com

…when he made the infamous remark, “You didn’t build that.” Of course, people seized on those words rather than the whole of his speech. That message is very much open for debate—a lot of entrepreneurs think the government impedes rather than encourages the growth of their businesses—but I think it’s a distortion to claim that President Obama thinks business owners aren’t responsible for any of their successes.

kateoplis:

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific, or a great idea? God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

—

Elizabeth Warren on paying it forward. (Re: this)

A compelling read. One quote in particular I found striking:

Some - like British Ugandan Asian Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - argue that many Ugandan Asians were racist and never saw black Ugandans as equals.

The expulsion was wrong and unforgivable, she says, but adds: “After 40 years, can we please talk a bit about why when Idi Amin threw us out, people cheered?”

(via asiansnotstudying)

felixsalmon:

mattfisher:

My Sister Paid Progressive Insurance to Defend Her Killer In Court

I’ve been sending out some impertinent tweets about Progressive Insurance lately, but I haven’t explained how they pissed me off. So I will do that here as succinctly as possible.

Read More

Wow.

Wow, indeed. A shame—no, actually, an outrage in this case—when a company’s business models depends upon screwing over customers.