Category: Work
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SmartNews & Breaker
As a commuter, I have two blocks of time going to and from the office when I am not able to read. During these times, I listen to podcasts as a way to get a deeper perspective on the news of the day or learn something new. Most podcast apps ask you to subscribe or…
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Citizen WTF?
The Citizen app is available in NYC and the SF Bay Area. The app is designed to alert you when crime happens nearby with location-based push notifications. But, because the platform is crowdsourced, it exposes all the idiosyncratic definitions of “crime” that you would expect from its voyeuristic users. Here are some of my favorites.…
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Jordan Peele warns of Fake News
Don’t believe everything you see online. Good on Jordan Peele for making this PSA which uses some readily available software literally put words in Obama’s mouth. You can read more about it on Buzzfeed. We’re about to enter into an intense period of “he said/she said” with the Cohen trial and Comey’s book tour that…
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My Web 2.0 Laptop
When I worked at Yahoo it was at the height of a cultural trend called Web 2.0. The fashion was to put stickers of various startups all over the front of your laptop so people could see how hip you were. I was running into many interesting people so I took a different approach and…
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Carl Bernstein at ONA 17
Recently, SmartNews (my employer) hosted Carl Bernstein, the distinguished, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, at the Watergate Hotel during the annual Online News Association conference in Washington, DC. Under a full moon on a warm DC evening, Mr. Bernstein inspired us all to strive harder to make use of the powerful “reportorial platform” the digital era provides…
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SmartNews CM with Riho Yoshioka
Television markets in Japan are much more centralized than in the United States. Therefore it’s pretty efficient to allocate marketing dollars to old school TV ads (in Japan they are called “CM” as in “commercials”) to give brand lift to online marketing. This month SmartNews dropped a set of short TV spots featuring Riho Yoshioka,…
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Work for SmartNews!
We’re looking for a few engineers for our downtown San Francisco office. Primarily back-end with a strong background in backend development technologies. The bullet points on the job posting say: Coding experience in Java, Kotlin, or Scala Experience operating and maintaining a JVM-based application Experience developing on top of a web framework (e.g. Spring Boot, Ruby…
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SmartNews TV commercials featuring Tamori
SmartNews (where I work) is running a series of TV commercials in Japan featuring Japanese celebrity, Tamori. The tagline for the campaign is “禁断のニュースアプリ” which roughly translates as “The forbidden news application” as in it’s so addicting that you binge use it when you’ve got time alone. News Junkie are you? Check out the US…