An anonymous reader shares a press release: This week, O'Reilly Media stopped retailing books directly on our ecommerce store. You might say "what!?" Or you might say "what's the big deal?" Before I explain our business strategy here, there are two important things to note: We are absolutely continuing to publish the top-quality books that are important to the communities we serve. 1. We still sell them through Amazon or your favorite retailer. 2. So why the change? It's clear that we're in the midst of a fundamental shift in how people get and use their content. Subscription services like Spotify and Netflix are the new norm, as people opt for paying for digital access rather than purchasing physical units one by one. We've already seen this in our own business -- the growth of membership on Safari far exceeds the individual units previously purchased on oreilly.com. That's one reason for the change.

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During a panel at design firm IDEO, three former Apple employees gathered to discuss the iPhone’s impact after 10 years. All agreed that they’re concerned by society’s addiction to smartphones. “I don’t feel good about the distraction. It’s certainly an unintended consequence,” said Greg Christie, who led Apple’s human interface team. Bas Ording, who designed much of the iPhone’s multi-touch interface, said, “The positive is that it’s easy to use, so a lot of people can use it. The downside is too many people are staring at their phones. I probably do it, too.” And input engineer Brian Huppi, who helped develop the iPhone’s touchscreen, worried about how smartphone use is implicated in automobile accidents, saying “I’ve got to believe there’s just so many accidents on the road now from people looking at their phones.” However, there was also consensus that the iPhone has been as significant of a change as radio, television, and the Internet were, and that we’ll eventually adapt to it.

 

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Tony Haile, writing for Recode: Facebook has a problem. What has driven its growth for the last five years won't drive its growth for the next five. However, the options in front of the company involve the kind of user experience compromises that have maimed platforms that preceded it. Facebook makes its money from the West. Some 30 percent of its users and 73 percent of its revenue is from North America and Europe. The monthly average revenue per user for Western users is $3.33 versus 53 cents for the rest of the world. Facebook is a global company, but a Western business. Facebook's user growth in the West is a little over 1 percent a quarter. In North America, Facebook's monthly active users represent 80 percent of the population above the age of 14. If Facebook wishes to grow its Western revenue at the rate its shareholders demand, a 1 percent user growth rate will not do it. Absent rapid user growth, the other lever for increasing advertising revenue is increasing the number or value of ads that are shown to existing users. However, the News Feed is close to saturation. Facebook believes that it cannot stick any more ads in the News Feed without adversely affecting user retention. This combination of slowing user growth and News Feed saturation has led Facebook to warn of a rapid deceleration in revenue growth over the next six months. For the first time in years, Facebook needs a new lever to pull.

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Months of unrest and chaos have divided the country, but President Nicolas Maduro remains defiant.

Foreign minister describes remarks by Saudi counterpart that Arab countries' demands are non-negotiable as unhelpful.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The ride-hailing company just reached a big milestone: 5 billion Uber rides around the world. With Uber's endless bad headlines, and Lyft gaining real momentum in the war against Uber, it's easy to forget how much else Uber has going on. Lyft is only competing with Uber in the U.S.; billions of Uber's trips have taken place outside America. Uber officially reached 5 billion rides with 156 simultaneous trips at exactly 7:29:06 a.m. GMT on May 20. The company announced the news on Thursday.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Those shameless scammers that cold-call people pretending to be from Microsoft and demanding money after walking users through supposed problems with their computers? They're going down, it seems, with four people arrested in the UK for enabling the rip-off. City of London Police and Microsoft, the real Microsoft, have been working together for two years to trace the operators of the scheme, with the four people -- two from Woking and two from South Shields -- arrested on suspicion of fraud. Although the calls were found to originate from India, the investigators found that the scam was allegedly being run out of the UK, with the poor overseas callers working from scripts and, presumably, not really aware they're doing anything hugely wrong.

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Earlier this month as Verizon completed its acquisition, a number of Tumblr employees, as well as those at other Verizon-owned properties, like the Huffington Post, were laid off. This comes at an interesting time for Tumblr, which is increasingly struggling to find a business model. From an article on NYMag: The future of Tumblr is still an open question. The site is enormously popular among the coveted youth crowd -- that's partly why then-CEO Marissa Mayer paid $1 billion for the property in 2013 -- but despite a user base near the size of Instagram's, Tumblr never quite figured out how to make money at the level Facebook has led managers and shareholders to expect. For a long time, its founder and CEO David Karp was publicly against the idea of inserting ads into users' timelines. (Other experiments in monetization, like premium options, never caught on: It's tough to generate revenue when your most active user base is too young to have a steady income.) Even once the timeline became open to advertising, it was tough to find clients willing to brave the sometimes-porny waters of the Tumblr Dashboard. Since it joined Yahoo, the site has started displaying low-quality "chum"-style ads in between user posts on the Dashboard. Looked at from a bottom-line perspective, Tumblr is an also-ran like its parent company -- a once-hot start-up that has eased into tech-industry irrelevance. [...] It is rare, but not at all unprecedented, for a site to reach Tumblr's size, prominence, and level of influence and still be unable to build a sustainable business. Twitter steers a huge portion of online culture, and has become an essential water cooler and newswire for journalists, tech workers, and otaku Nazis, but still has trouble turning a profit.

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