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Kickstarter is Now a Public Benefit Corporation
Albert Wenger – Sep 21, 2015
I am super excited that Kickstarter is no longer an INC but rather now a PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation. This means the company has changed its Delaware charter to include its mission of supporting creators as pari passu with [...] Read more
Ad-Blocking Points the Way To Decentralizing Power And That’s a Good Thing
Albert Wenger – Sep 20, 2015
Robert Reich has an op-ed piece in the NY Times today arguing that “Big Tech Has Become Way Too Powerful” and that we should apply anti-trust regulation. There is little doubt that network effects have made tech’s new incumbents such [...] Read more
More on Subscriptions and Micropayments
Albert Wenger – Sep 19, 2015
Two days ago I wrote a post explaining why I am bullish on crowdfunding and skeptical on micropayments as an alternative to funding content, especially journalism. The explanation was a bit dry and abstract, but in the comments I provided [...] Read more
Crowdfunding Is More Likely to Replace Ads Than Micropayments
Albert Wenger – Sep 18, 2015
The rollout of iOS 9 and along with it adblocking plugins for mobile Safari has re-ignited the debate over the ethics of removing ads from pages. Marco Arment who released the paid Peace adblocker previously wrote a piece laying out [...] Read more
On Demand Services and (Mis)Understanding Vertical Integration
Albert Wenger – Sep 15, 2015
While thinking about my talk at the On Demand Conference today in New York, I stumbled upon a tweet which quotes a Bloomberg piece on Baidu’s Robin Lee (the CEO): This of course sounds a lot like the on demand [...] Read more
Basic Income and On Demand Services
Albert Wenger – Sep 14, 2015
It is Basic Income Week and I am speaking at the On Demand Conference in New York. That is a fortunate co-incidence as On Demand companies ought to be strong supporters of Basic Income. First, with Basic Income, the distinction [...] Read more
Alternative Credentialing Needed
Albert Wenger – Sep 8, 2015
I happened to be listening to some back to school coverage on TV this morning and of course the Common Core standard was brought up along with the question of college readiness. As we have been homeschooling now for two [...] Read more
The Ashley Madison Hack: A Glimpse of the Post Privacy Future
Albert Wenger – Aug 20, 2015
After some initial uncertainty it appears that the data released yesterday is in fact from the Ashley Madison hack that had been announced a little while back. The data contains not just email addresses but a lot of other information [...] Read more
The Blockstack Summit
Albert Wenger – Aug 18, 2015
About 8 months ago Joel Monegro, who is one of the analysts here at USV, wrote a great post titled “The Blockchain Application Stack.” The post lays out how the bitcoin blockchain can be combined with overlay networks and decentralized [...] Read more