Posts by Nick Papple

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH Seeing opportunities where others see obstacles. “The fact that 41 percent of millennials are cord cutters, and their favorite content is not coming from traditional networks, this was a real opportunity to bring together content they want on a platform,” Brian Angiolet recently told…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH “The need to understand your top fans is acute,” says Mark Williams, head of Spotify’s Artist Services division. Spotify rolls out a new feature for artists today that offers data on fans. “A custom ‘dashboard’ will show demographic and geographic information for each artist’s…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH Why Paris and not Beirut? This was the million-dollar question following the bombings Friday in Paris. Facebook drew criticism after its new Safety Checks feature was activated in Paris, but not in Beirut, Lebanon — that was tragically bombed the day before. Mark Zuckerberg…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH Two cable companies are betting on virtual reality. “What makes NextVR attractive as an investment is that it already has experience streaming major events in virtual reality. In the past month, it was CNN’s key VR partner for streaming the first Democratic debate, and…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH Netflix the first cloud-based studio. Less than a month after Netflix’s first big motion picture release Beasts of No Nation, the company is reportedly coughing up $50 million to finance Snowpiercer director Bong Joon-Ho’s next film, Okja, with Brad Pitt and Dede Gardner’s Plan…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH How Apple is giving design a bad name. “What kind of design philosophy requires millions of its users to have to pretend they are disabled in order to be able to use the product?” When most people think of design they think of visual…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH How to automatically transcribe phone calls. First, why would you want to do this? “When you’re talking to a lawyer who bills at like, $500 per hour, every word is worth a couple dollars,” says John Coogan, co-founder and CTO of Soylent. Coogan found…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH Death of the laptop. Apple announced today that it’s releasing a giant iPad. Pre orders for the 12.9-inch iPad Pro start on Wednesday. How much? $799. What do you get? Apple claims the new iPad Pro is faster than 80% of PCs shipped in…

Here’s what you need to know TECH Facebook hit another milestone today. Last August, Facebook announced that one billion people visited the site in one day. The news was chalked up as a fluke. But today, as Facebook announces third quarter results, the numbers prove this was no fluke. The ‘book averages 1.01 billion users…

Good afternoon, Early Risers! Here’s what you need to know TECH The best headphones in the world. “There is always going to be a market for high quality, and there is always going to be a market for long form,” says Tim Ferriss. If you can create the ‘best’ of anything in the world that…

Here’s what you need to know TECH By 2025 you could be teleporting. “Facebook wants to build a device that allows you to be anywhere you want, with anyone, regardless of geographic boundaries,” says Mike Schroepfer Facebook’s chief technical officer. The topic of ‘effective teleportation’ was discussed at a press event prior to the Dublin Web…