When Yahoo acquired Flickr for a relatively paltry $30 million in 2005, founders Stewart Butterfield and Caterina Fake also took to the company blog. Like Karp, they couldn’t contain their glee – “Woohoo!” and said they would be “working with a bunch of people that Totally Get Flickr and want to preserve the community and the flavor of what is here. We’re going to grow and change, but we’re in it for the long haul, with the same management and same team,” which “in spite of our wiseassery, tomfoolery and tendency to hoot spontaneously – is crucial for preserving the Flickrness that is Flickr.” How’d that work out for them? For the first couple of years, things were fine. Fake told Gizmodo that “Yahoo was a good fit initially” and “in the subsequent two years after the acquisition, Flickr blossomed.” Then Yahoo’s Corporate Development department began to bleed Flickr dry, denying it resources because it didn’t generate sufficient revenue. “The money goes to the cash cows, not the cash calf,” as one anonymous Yahoo employee told Gizmodo. Instead of constantly innovating, Flickr management found itself in meetings defending the product.— Yahoo buys Tumblr and Mayer “promises not to screw it up” like past deals
The facts about food stamps conservatives don’t want you to hear
Some good and bad news about your paycheck: pay is beating inflation, but paychecks are smaller than a decade ago
Sympathy, for example, can be hard to really get across in traditional emoticon form. “It’s an under-appreciated emotion in Western culture,” Keltner explains. “We now know what it looks like and sounds like because of science. They created this dynamic emoticon that when you see it, it’s really powerful.”— How Facebook Used Science To Design More Emotional Emoticons
Google’s professed goal of making technology “get out of the way” masks what’s truly taking place. By making technology invisible, Google is also making it omnipresent. As software and gadgets become less in-your-face, they also become more pervasive and more influential, as we in turn become more dependent on them, more accepting of their presence in our lives and less critical of them. After all, how can someone scrutinize what they can’t see? When Google says it’s working on technology that will go away, it really means the opposite: It’s after technology that gets into our heads and takes over.— The Truth Behind Google’s Bizarre Mission to Make Tech ‘Go Away’
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Women made up 32% of all manufacturing employees in 1990, a share that is now at 27%, the lowest rate since 1971
In Seraph, a single male dancer slinks around onstage, carefully studying a small, LED-lit object. The machine charges at him and he rolls away, terrified. The machine—a quadrotor helicopter—takes off and his fear quickly turns to intrigue. The copter swoops over his head, he dives under it. Within minutes, a second drone emerges, chasing him offstage.— Dances With Drones
— DEEP INSIDE TACO BELL’S DORITOS LOCOS TACOSeasoning was [a] major issue, which was as much of a challenge of taste as it was for manufacturing. “A Doritos chip is a flat triangle, and it gets seasoned by being tumbled around in a huge seasoner barrel that rotates. But we couldn’t do that with a taco shell because they would break. We could get the seasoning to stick to the top but we couldn’t get it to stick to the bottom—we just couldn’t get it evenly coated,” Creed recalls. “You don’t want to take one big bite at one end, and it has flavor and the other end has nothing. We had to make sure it was evenly distributed.” “That was the really tricky part,” Gomez says. “Just like anything in manufacturing, it’s all about speed and efficiency. So our seasoner had to season shells fast and it had to season them right every single time. We had teams of engineers working day and night to get the seasoner working.”
A 2010 study published in the journal Addiction found that smokers use e-cigarettes “much as people would use nicotine replacement medications.” The study concluded by saying that more research was needed to ascertain “the safety and efficacy of e-cigarettes for administration of nicotine and other substances, and for quitting and relapse prevention.” The Addiction study was followed in 2011 by one published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (PDF), which found that “e-cigarettes may hold promise as a smoking-cessation method and that they are worthy of further study using more-rigorous research designs.”— Inside the world of vapers, the subculture that might save smokers’ lives
Researchers at Oregon Health & Science University say they were able to implant the nucleus from a skin cell into a donated human egg cell with its nucleus removed, creating an embryo-like cell that has the genetic makeup of the patient who donated the skin cell.— Scientists Convert Human Skin Cells Into Embryonic Stem Cells
The company’s stock has been on an upward swing for months as Google has once again shown itself to be a major innovator in the tech space, with several promising breakthrough products like Glass and Fiber coming to market. By contrast, Apple’s stock price has fallen below $500 a share as Wall Street is concerned about whether it has another blockbuster product in the pipeline.— Google Stock Hits $900 For First Time Ever
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An X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator launches from the flight deck of an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic Ocean. For more photos of the first drone being launched from an aircraft carrier, go here.
This website maps every recurring joke on Arrested Development -
An interactive visualization of running jokes in Arrested Development.