“The telly was oblivious to your elation or annoyance, so you fired up Twitter to announce your celebration or grievance. In the morning, you hopped online and gorged on other people recapping their concerns about the same episode. You probably also perused comments from other viewers at the bottom of the page; possibly, even typed in a few words yourself.

You kept talking to the television, but the television wouldn’t listen. But soon, very soon, it will be forced to hear you.”

http://tribecafilm.com/blogs/the-internet-is-screaming-at-your-tv

https://blog.gigya.com/the-landscape-of-social-login-sharing-consumers-want-choice/

http://gigaom.com/2013/07/16/biggest-ever-chinese-internet-takeover-baidu-shells-out-1-9b-for-app-distributor-91-wireless/

“Startups don’t often experience hockey stick growth by themselves. They need a nudge from founders, who need to aggressively market their products and be overly attentive to users in the beginning.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/paul-grahams-startup-advices-do-things-that-dont-scale-2013-7

“Like dozens of other brick-and-mortar retailers, Nordstrom wanted to learn more about its customers — how many came through the doors, how many were repeat visitors — the kind of information that e-commerce sites like Amazon have in spades. So last fall the company started testing new technology that allowed it to track customers’ movements by following the Wi-Fi signals from their smartphones.”

http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-the-depressing-truth-about-battery-technology-2013-7

The first few hires at a company are the most important decisions a founder will ever make. These hires will shape company culture and vision for years to come and can’t easily be undone. At PayPal, Levchin was religious about not making the wrong hire and believed strongly in a unanimous hiring process. If one person on the team didn’t like a candidate, they wouldn’t make the hire. Levchin shared, “There are some legendary-ish tales of me not hiring people because they used the wrong word in an interview…I’m sure we had lots of false negatives, but we have very few false positives.”  It’s better to err on the side of losing a superstar here or there than make a hire that’ll disrupt or ruin a company. A quote from the movie Ronin puts it perfectly, “whenever this is any doubt, there is no doubt.”

http://firstround.com/article/the-trick-max-levchin-used-to-hire-the-best-engineers-at-PayPal