$104 billion. More than McDonalds, CitiBank or Amazon. A price to earning ratio more than five fold Apple, the world’s most profitable tech company. Hmmmm.

Read my thoughts over on The Verge.

He was swag then, still the boss now.

h/t @ sheynkman

I loved your article on Shitter, thought it was very insightful and funny. I own a niche advertising company that prints advertisements and coupons on toilet paper. I grew up in Westchester, NY and currently go to University of Michigan. I thought your readers would love an article on our start up as a follow up on how toilet paper is transforming from what we are used to. Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
Jordan

Jordan Silverman
Co- Founder Star Toilet Paper

click to play

Steve Martin - Martin, Steve

Recently I have found myself daydreaming about what I’ll be covering as a tech journalist a decade from now. There is a deep and visceral desire that keeps bubbling up in my mind during moments when I am riding the subway or taking a shower.

I hope that we can find a way to connect our brains directly to computers so that we can write, draw and communicate with pure thought. For a while this seemed like just a pleasant fantasy, but recently I saw a video where scientists recreated visuals based on brain activity.

Maybe I’ve just written about one to many daily deal sites or casual gaming companies in the past year, but increasingly I find myself longing for a technological advance that will fundamentally alter the way we live and interact.

Pretty much how I felt using cached Spotify on airplane flight.

I realized a few months ago that I was not listening to much music. I didn’t have a streaming app I liked, I had grown to loathe iTunes, few of the services I once used to pirate music still operated and I didn’t feel inspired to muck around with torrents.

There wasn’t time in my daily life for much discovery, I was busy launching Betabeat and helping my girlfriend transition to living in NYC. But just as I slowly realized how much not going to Jiu Jitsu was hurting my quality of life, it struck me on several different occasions how unhappy I was not to be enjoying music on a regular basis.

All this changed in the last two months with Turntable.fm and Spotify. The former was a blessing, because I was able to cover Turntable.fm as part of my work at Betabeat, so using the service paid double dividends. The same is true to a lesser degree for Spotify, which is not local enough to merit continued coverage from Betabeat, but big enough to deserve the occasional story. 

I hope to write a lot over the next couple weeks about how the two services help me to discover new artists that I love, which for me is probably the most powerful thing a music service can do. I’ve already subscribed to my friend Jake’s playlist, Todayz Jamz, through Spotify. Since I met him in Memphis six summers ago, he has proved to be the best way to learn about artists and records that will stick with me. He signed up for Spotify premium and if he keeps this playlist fresh, I expect it will change my life for the better. We’re also planning a semi-private Turntable.fm hang for later this week, so if anyone feels like joining in, just holler.