It seems Sarah wasn’t kidding about working right up until she gives birth. In this week’s positively-last-before-the-birth episode of Why Is This News?, Sarah and Paul are prompted by the ongoing reports of Dropbox’s mega funding to talk about valuations.
The typical outrage is over whether a company like Dropbox is “worth” $4 billion, but as we argue, that’s misses the point. Venture… → Read More
In what might (really) be the last Why Is This News before Sarah’s baby gets out of private beta, we’re talking about democracy.
Specifically, we discuss the news that India wants to monitor its citizen’s private messages while Brazil is freezing Google’s local accounts in a tussle over anonymity — and we ask: “wait, aren’t those countries supposed to be democracies?” It’s almost as if privacy… → Read More
Last night, San Francisco’s BART transport system prepared itself to be swamped with Guy Fawkes masks as hacking collective Anonymous urged concerned citizens to take to the streets tracks to protest authorities’ earlier shut-down of the network’s cellphone service.
The hackers had already fired their opening salvo: hacking the BART website and releasing the private user data of thousands of… → Read More
Yesterday, following Robin Wauters announcement that he is “quitting” phone calls (which came hot on the heels of MG’s experiment in curtailing email use), Paul declared that he was quitting breathing.
How did the experiment go? See the video below, in which he and Sarah discuss the curious trend of pundits abandoning technology and ask whether communications overload is really a problem, or… → Read More
German VC firm, Earlybird caught some flack last month with their nonsense presentation claiming that European VC was outperforming the US.
Sarah Lacy and Mike Butcher comprehensively dismantled the claims here and then Bessemer Venture Partners’ David Cowan followed up, highlighting the amusing fact that the report was actually based on the work of Earlybird’s summer intern.
In this… → Read More
We’ve spent much of the last week exploring Berlin, attending the Next11 conference and meeting a few local startups. The biggest problem from a video entertainment standpoint? We both agree that Berlin feels like a better startup town than London.
“Feels like” is an important disclaimer here. Berlin certainly doesn’t have the track record, local sophisticated investor class, nor does it have… → Read More
There are two things we love to do on Why Is This News. The first is to break news about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley. The second is to find excuses to promote our respective books (about things that are happening outside Silicon Valley).
Rare indeed though is the occasion when we’re able to combine both of those things and break news about one of our respective books, from… → Read More
After a brief hiatus, Why Is This News? is back! In this week’s episode, Paul checks in from his Las Vegas hotel room to discuss Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh’s plans to regenerate downtown Las Vegas by moving the company’s HQ into the former City Hall.
In fact, there’s far more to Hsieh’s plan than that, as Paul explained over on the Huffington Post. In the video below, Paul waxes lyrical about Hsieh’s… → Read More
As regular readers might already know, Paul is in Las Vegas for a month, hanging out with strippers reaffirming his belief in the American dream. As a result, this week’s Why Is This News is even less tech-focused than usual.
Still, no matter whether you subscribe to Sarah’s view that 33 days in Vegas is 33 wasted days or Paul’s insistence that there are still stories to be found on and around… → Read More
Hurrah! After a short hiatus while Sarah travelled around Indonesia at the behest of the State Department, Why Is This News is back!
And what better way to mark our triumphant return to your screens than with a whole show dedicated to Indonesia, and specifically the curious lack of a brain drain from the country to the US.
Apparently Indonesian students are so keen to return home after studying… → Read More
This week, Sarah is in New York doing various book-related things – but WITN is all about life outside the valley so she dialled in via Skype to give us an update in what’s happening on the East coast.
Spoiler alert: NY is still no Silicon Valley, but it’s increasingly proving that it doesn’t have to be. We also discussed whether New York’s status as a multi-industry town is a pro or a con when… → Read More
Earlier this week, CrunchGear’s John Biggs sparked controversy (within TechCrunch ranks at least) with a post entitled “Alibaba And The Curse Of Chinese Manufacturing“. In the post Biggs wrote (amongst other things) that…
“Many decry the sad state of American manufacturing but these [Chinese] companies still sell billions in janky garbage that washes up here in huge containers and is sold… → Read More
Earlier this week, CrunchGear’s John Biggs sparked controversy (within TechCrunch ranks at least) with a post entitled “Alibaba And The Curse Of Chinese Manufacturing“. In the post Biggs wrote (amongst other things) that…
“Many decry the sad state of American manufacturing but these [Chinese] companies still sell billions in janky garbage that washes up here in huge containers and is sold… → Read More
Since AOL’s acquisition of the Huffington Post, we know many of you have been looking for signs that TechCrunch has adopted our new editorial overlady’s approach to SEO. This seems like as good a time as any to assure loyal Why Is This News? viewers that we will never – ever – stoop to such cheap linkbaiting tricks, no matter what financial incentives we’re offered to do so.
And so to this week’s… → Read More
After weeks of simmering tensions, finally the Egyptian situation has erupted into violence. Even the media has been caught up in vicious battles.
No, we’re not talking about Anderson Cooper being punched in the face, but rather this week’s episode of Why Is This News in which our disagreement over social media’s role in prompting or assisting revolution descends into a full-on fight.
Video… → Read More
In this week’s Why Is This News, we discuss the latest Silicon Valley bubble. Or specifically, we discuss why there isn’t one – and why New York media has to stop claiming there is every time a company has a high valuation. Yeah, Business Week’s Chris Farrell, we’re looking at you.
Video below. → Read More
After Paul’s Saturday post about Julian Assange resulted in him being labelled a US government stooge – not to mention receiving a couple of death threats (no, really) – he’s decided never again to discuss the founder of Wikileaks.
In fact, after much consideration, he’s decided that he was wrong (as was Vanity Fair) and TechCrunch commenters were right: Assange is an unblemished hero of… → Read More
Aaaand… we’re back. Fresh from our Christmas and New Year break and ready to talk about the Most Important Stories Outside of Silicon Valley. Stories like, uh, Kevin Rose’s new email newsletter.
But, yeah ok, while the jumping off point might be a stretch, we soon get to the meat of this week’s episode: whether we’re seeing a move from fame for fame’s sake to a more targeted, troll free kind of… → Read More
You can always rely on Mike Arrington to liven up a dull editon of Why Is This News. There we were, gamely ploughing through the taping of this week’s episode, only slightly hindered by the fact that Paul had chosen the world’s least interesting subject – Rupert Murdoch’s forthcoming digital newspaper – to talk about, when all hell suddenly broke loose.
Mike, with his trademark disregard for the… → Read More
Three or four jobs ago, (who can keep count?) Paul was a columnist for The Guardian and he made a quick name for himself in Valley circles with a blistering critique of Le Web, a conference he hates so much he attends every year. But he says, after this year, he’s done. (Again.)
He’s back in London now, and he’s almost as miserable. In this edition of “Why Is This News?” we revisit a few familiar… → Read More
Not satisfied with upsetting the entire London web sector, Paul is apparently determined to take on the city’s hospitality industry too.
For the first three minutes of this week’s Why Is This News he abuses his TechCrunch power to vent at the St Martins Lane Hotel for banning him from doing press interviews in his hotel room. Which we’re sure viewers will agree is the most egregious… → Read More
It’s impossible to throw a rock at a media outlet today without hitting a story about Wikileaks. And to make the rock throwing even easier, the subject of this week’s Why Is This News is: Wikileaks – ‘enemy of democracy, just plain fact of life… or both?’
In it, Sarah argues that, for good or ill, the leaking of several hundred thousand diplomatic cables simply reflects today’s reality that no… → Read More
A slight format change for Why Is This News? this week: no guest, just the two of us discussing this week’s big technology stories from outside the valley.
Much to Sarah’s delight, China has been making news again – for good and ill. On the one hand, the government is still clamping down on dissident opinion – sending someone to jail for a 140 character retweet – but at the same time Chinese… → Read More
An even weirder than usual episode of Why Is This News this week ending up with Mike Arrington heckling us through the wall of the studio. But before he did, we sat down with Vineet Devaiah from “social streetview” startup, Phototour.in.
Vineet hails from India but, having come to the Valley to collect an “Emerging company” award from Nvidia, he decided to stick around for a while to meet with… → Read More
As promised, now that Sarah has been in Jakarta for a week, it’s time for the second part of our special Indonesian themed edition of Why Is This News?
In this installment, we discuss the conspicuous absence of Facebook and Twitter executives in what is one of their biggest market and Sarah gives her thoughts on a few of the interesting local startups participating in Jakarta’s SparxUp Start Up… → Read More
Sarah’s latest whistle-stop tour of emerging markets has reached Indonesia, where she’ll be covering – and helping with – a start-up competition. But before all the excitement kicks off, she called in from Skype to explain the differences between Singapore (her previous stop) and Jakarta.
Video below. → Read More
Given Paul’s ability to get into fights even in sleepy towns like Camden, Maine, it’s lucky Sarah does the lion’s share of the travelling.
This week, she’s in Singapore – on a week-long trip to take the island’s entrepreneurial pulse and next week she’ll be returning to Jakarta to do similar there (hopefully, you’ve already sent in your questions for her special South-East Asia… → Read More
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