Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:

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pages: 383 words: 81,118

Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms by David S. Evans, Richard Schmalensee

Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Andy Rubin, big-box store, business process, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, creative destruction, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disruptive innovation, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Jean Tirole, John Markoff, Lyft, M-Pesa, market friction, market microstructure, Max Levchin, mobile money, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, Wayback Machine, winner-take-all economy

The history of OpenTable here draws on a number of sources, including Chuck Templeton (founder of OpenTable), in discussions with the authors, 2015; “OpenTable Founder Chuck Templeton on Starting Up,” interview by Katie Morell, OpenForum (June 23, 2015), https://www.americanexpress.com/us/small-business/openforum/articles/opentable-founder-chuck-templeton-on-starting-up/?utm_source=web&utm_medium=twitter; “Video: OpenTable Founder Chuck Templeton at Chicago Founders’ Stories @ 1871,” interview by Pat Ryan (April 25, 2013), http://www.1871.com/video-open-table-founder-chuck-templeton-at-chicago-founders-stories-1871/; Andrew Rachleff and Sara Rosenthal, “OpenTable,” Case E418 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford Graduate School of Business, November 18, 2011); Benjamin Edelman and Karen L.

Unless otherwise noted, all monetary values we report are not adjusted for inflation. 9. “USA: OpenTable.com Names James Jeffrey Edwards CEO,” just-food, May 18, 2000, http://www.just-food.com/news/opentablecom-names-jeffrey-edwards-ceo_id90312.aspx. 10. Chuck Templeton (founder of OpenTable), in discussion with the authors, September 19, 2015. 11. Ibid. OpenTable started this strategy systematically in New York and then used it in other cities later. 12. Erick Schonfeld, “OpenTable Has a Healthy IPO. Shares Shoot Up 59 Percent, Market Cap Passes $600 Million,” TechCrunch, May 21, 2009, http://techcrunch.com/2009/05/21/opentable-has-a-healthy-ipo-shares-shoot-up-40-percent-market-cap-hits-600-million/. 13.

OpenTable hasn’t ever charged diners a penny. On the other hand, if diners are so valuable that OpenTable finds it optimal to pay them (via rewards) to use its service, why does it refuse to deal with some of them? If a diner fails four times in a year to show up for a reservation that she has not canceled at least thirty minutes in advance, her account is terminated, even if she’s kept many reservations that made OpenTable money.17 Then there’s the fact that OpenTable, which met obvious needs of both diners and restaurants, barely survived. Chuck Templeton had a great idea. And developing a website and table management software was hardly rocket science, even back then.


pages: 270 words: 79,180

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit by Marina Krakovsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Al Roth, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, buy low sell high, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, experimental economics, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, Jean Tirole, Joan Didion, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kenneth Arrow, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market microstructure, Martin Wolf, McMansion, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Network effects, patent troll, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, power law, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, search costs, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social graph, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, the strength of weak ties, too big to fail, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Y Combinator

Not every restaurant has come on board—whereas diners can use the service for free, restaurants have to pay a monthly fee and a smaller fee for each seat booked through OpenTable—but, despite some competition, the service has a vast reach, especially across cities in the United States. Through the service, restaurants can attract more diners, and by taking online reservations up until the last minute, they can reduce idle capacity. Diners win, restaurants win, and OpenTable wins. When Chuck Templeton founded OpenTable in 1998, though, the concept was so novel that restaurants resisted, he says. “Nobody understood the Internet back then,” he recalls.8 To make it easy for diners to try out the service, reservations required nothing more than a first and last name and an e-mail address, and a diner could sign up as something like johndoe@yahoo.com.

Pushing back naturally risks angering the client, which business people are loath to do. For example, Chuck Templeton, the founder of OpenTable, told me that as much as he wanted to protect the interests of both diners and restaurants, that wasn’t always possible, so when push came to shove, the company would rather not lose a restaurant partner, because, as he put it, “The restaurant is the one paying the bill.” But an agency model, who is probably more valuable to an agency than an individual diner is to OpenTable, does expect the agency to protect her interests against an opportunistic client. Sometimes, despite the agency’s attempts to be evenhanded in these disputes, the agency will be caught in the middle, with both sides feeling that the agency didn’t treat them fairly.

As this chapter will show, that’s an important role in a wide range of middleman businesses, from online marketplaces to agencies that match workers with temporary jobs. How OpenTable Secured Restaurants’ Trust in Diners * * * One middleman business that has done an admirable job of deterring bad behavior is OpenTable, the company that revolutionized the way diners make restaurant reservations and was recently acquired by Priceline for $2.6 billion. Instead of having to call up one restaurant at a time until they find an open table at the desired time, diners can go online, put in the size of their party and their preferred seating time, and see a list of restaurants that have openings during that window.


pages: 302 words: 73,581

Platform Scale: How an Emerging Business Model Helps Startups Build Large Empires With Minimum Investment by Sangeet Paul Choudary

3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, fake it until you make it, frictionless, game design, gamification, growth hacking, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, invisible hand, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, Paul Graham, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, search costs, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, software as a service, software is eating the world, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, TaskRabbit, the long tail, the payments system, too big to fail, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Wave and Pay

The network can then be turned on once enough users are acquired through this hook. The network, then, complements the standalone value powered by the initial product/service offering. OPENING IT UP LIKE OPENTABLE OpenTable (and subsequently, other service booking systems) was one of the first platforms to execute this successfully. Entering a highly fragmented market (restaurant), the company distributed booking management systems, which the restaurant could use as standalone software for managing table reservations. This enabled OpenTable to aggregate table inventory, and real-time data on table availability, across restaurants. Once it had enough restaurants on board – and, hence, access to their seating inventory, as well – it opened out the network to allow consumers to start booking tables at participating restaurants.

Once it had enough restaurants on board – and, hence, access to their seating inventory, as well – it opened out the network to allow consumers to start booking tables at participating restaurants. By staging the network creation in this manner, OpenTable succeeded in aggregating a fragmented, technology-laggard vertical, like restaurants, on one central platform, something that may not have been possible if it had started by launching the entire platform and hoping for network effects to kick in. In OpenTable’s case, the standalone model also provides additional revenue streams for the business, in addition to the lead generation fee that it charges for customer reservations.

The standalone mode serves to create a central creation infrastructure for participants to create and manage inventory, e.g. the inventory of seating availability, in the case of restaurants on OpenTable. Referring to the architectural discussions in Section 2, the standalone mode allows the creation and accumulation of core value units. The real-time seating availability, created and managed on OpenTable, is the core value on the platform that consumers consume. RedBus, an Indian bus-booking platform, and one of the biggest success stories from South Asia, used a similar approach to create a comprehensive database of real-time seating inventory across buses.


pages: 324 words: 89,875

Modern Monopolies: What It Takes to Dominate the 21st Century Economy by Alex Moazed, Nicholas L. Johnson

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, disintermediation, driverless car, fake it until you make it, future of work, gig economy, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, jimmy wales, John Gruber, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, money market fund, multi-sided market, Network effects, PalmPilot, patent troll, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, platform as a service, power law, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, source of truth, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, the medium is the message, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

Early Instagram is a great example, as it provided its users with a way to take photos and make them look good long before it evolved into a full-fledged social networking platform. Restaurant booking platform OpenTable used a similar strategy to get restaurants on board. The company realized that even the top restaurants in San Francisco didn’t have back-end reservation systems. They were still using pen and paper to track reservations. OpenTable built a software application to handle electronic booking and targeted the top twenty restaurants in San Francisco, offering to help them set the system up. After these restaurants were on board, others soon became interested. Once OpenTable had this core group of restaurants, it was able to open its platform to allow for consumers to book restaurant reservations online.

containerId=prUS25224914. 14. This idea has also been supported by research from Libert, Wind, and Fenley, “What Airbnb, Uber, and Alibaba Have in Common.” 15. The first quote is from Dennis Schaal, “Interview: OpenTable CEO on How Its Game Changes within Priceline,” Skift, September 29, 2014, http://skift.com/2014/09/29/interview-opentable-ceo-on-how-its-game-changes-within-priceline/. The second quote is from “OpenTable CEO Matt Roberts Talks Restaurants_,” July 11, 2012. YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJy3wrjzLJk. 16. Ellen Huet, “What Really Killed Homejoy? It Couldn’t Hold on to Its Customers,” Forbes, July 23, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2015/07/23/what-really-killed-homejoy-it-couldnt-hold-onto-its-customers/. 17.

But as a platform’s network grows, revenue begins to grow much more rapidly than costs. As this happens, the cost of user acquisition declines and the value the platform creates starts to reach the bottom line. This was the experience of OpenTable, a platform for booking restaurant reservations, as it grew its network of restaurants and diners. “The more supply you had, the easier it was to add diners,” OpenTable CEO Matthew Roberts said. “And the more diners you had, the easier it was to add restaurants.” As a result, “All of our cost structure goes down as we get more mature in every market,” Roberts said.15 The ultimate impact of the network effect is that it enables more transactions.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Create a business around products or services that benefit a single set of users; later, convert the business into a platform business by attracting a second set of users who want to engage in interactions with the first set. Launching a service booking platform like OpenTable, the restaurant reservation system, poses a classic chicken-or-egg problem. Without a large base of participating restaurants, why would patrons visit the OpenTable site? But without a large base of patrons, why would restaurants choose to participate? OpenTable solved the problem by first distributing booking management software that restaurants could use to manage their seating inventory. Once OpenTable had enough restaurants on board, they built out the consumer side, which allowed them to start booking tables and collecting a lead generation fee from the restaurants.

Those who saw the room listings (recipients) and were motivated to rent those rooms became Airbnb users—and many subsequently began renting out rooms of their own, fueling the growth of the platform. OpenTable similarly encourages diners (hosts) to share their dinner reservations (value units) over email or Facebook (external networks) with their friends and colleagues (recipients) who are joining them for dinner. If you’re a platform manager hoping to achieve the same kind of viral growth as Instagram, Airbnb, and OpenTable, you need to design rules and tools that will jumpstart the cycle. Your goal is to design an ecosystem where senders want to transfer value units through an external network to a large number of recipients, ultimately leading many of those recipients to become users of your platform.

With admirable forthrightness, he even posted his spreadsheet online so others could examine and test his assumptions. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark Capital and one of Uber’s Silicon Valley investors, took up the challenge. A venture capitalist famous for having been among the first to spot such technology skyrockets as OpenTable, Zillow, and eBay, Gurley argued that the $17 billion valuation was likely an underestimate, and that Damodaran’s figure could be short by a factor of 25.2 Gurley questioned Damodaran’s assumptions about both the total market size and Uber’s potential market share, basing his calculations on economist W.


pages: 398 words: 86,855

Bad Data Handbook by Q. Ethan McCallum

Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Benoit Mandelbrot, business intelligence, cellular automata, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, commoditize, conceptual framework, data science, database schema, DevOps, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Flash crash, functional programming, Gini coefficient, hype cycle, illegal immigration, iterative process, labor-force participation, loose coupling, machine readable, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, selection bias, sentiment analysis, SQL injection, statistical model, supply-chain management, survivorship bias, text mining, too big to fail, web application

It is certainly speculative—and, as always, hindsight is 20/20—but I can think of many things that we might have done differently at OpenTable if the tools of today were a reality when we started to build the company. However, in as much as OpenTable proved to be a successful venture of which we are all very proud, I will refrain from speculating about this alternative reality. Moving into Government Work Making the transition into the public sector offered an entirely different perspective on data. OpenTable was a small and nimble company, in which we could easily change course. As I entered the enormous bureaucracy of one of the biggest cities in the United States, which had decades of information legacy systems, I was confronted with an entirely different platform and a nontrivial amount of dirty data.

Moving On to the Professional World My history with data has been varied throughout my career. Early on at OpenTable, we lacked holistic insight into the value of our data; we were completely focused on creating a new company. During those early years, it seemed as if decisions and strategies changed daily. Software development was in high gear and the competition was always nipping at our heels. There was little thought as to what we should collect, the form it should come in, and certainly not how we should extract it. However, as OpenTable matured and repeatedly worked through our mistakes, we started to smarten up. A few years in, we hired an experienced engineering vice president who started to add rigor and a plan to the chaotic system.

In this role, he lead the city’s approach to using data to help improve the way the government works for its residents. Before coming to City Hall as Chief Data Officer, he founded and commanded the Chicago Police Department’s Predictive Analytics Group, which aims to predict when and where crime will happen. Prior to entering the public sector, he was an early employee with OpenTable and helped build the company for seven years. He earned his BA from Connecticut College, his MS in criminal justice at Suffolk University, and his MS in computer science at University of Chicago. Brett is pursuing his PhD in Criminology, Law, and Justice at the University of Illinois-Chicago. He resides in Chicago with his wife and three children.


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

After signing on with Benchmark, Gurley extended the eBay concept from products to services. His first hit was a startup called OpenTable, which connected diners to restaurants. Like eBay, OpenTable improved the match between buyers and sellers: it allowed diners to browse restaurants by price, location, and food type, vastly improving the experience of making a reservation. What excited Gurley about OpenTable was that the network effects proved every bit as powerful as theory predicted: as more restaurants signed on, more diners visited the site, which in turn attracted more restaurants. One day, during a review of OpenTable’s progress, Gurley noticed that an outlier sales rep was signing up an extraordinary number of new dining spots.

One day, during a review of OpenTable’s progress, Gurley noticed that an outlier sales rep was signing up an extraordinary number of new dining spots. The reason was that this rep covered San Francisco, where OpenTable already had a strong network. “Oh my God, this is working,” Gurley remembers thinking.[33] After OpenTable succeeded, Gurley began looking for businesses that would do the same in other sectors. “We started discussing this internally,” he recalled. “Which other industries would be transformed if you could put perfect information on top of them?” With OpenTable, the diner could search for Asian food in south San Francisco next Monday at 7:00 p.m., specifying the price range.

He had found a startup that would attack the opportunity he had imagined—one that would do it the right way and with the right sort of chief executive. The next day Benchmark presented a term sheet to Kalanick, and after a bit of back-and-forth the partners led Uber’s Series A round, paying $12 million for one-fifth of the equity.[36] Gurley had landed his OpenTable for black cars. His ambition for the startup was that it might match OpenTable in its results, going public in due course at a valuation of perhaps $2 billion.[37] At this point in the story, nothing about Uber anticipated trouble. Unlike Elizabeth Holmes, Kalanick was a battle-tested adult, and Gurley had carefully checked him out by calling a friend who had backed one of Kalanick’s earlier companies.[38] Unlike WeWork, which Benchmark had bet on despite the partners’ skepticism of real estate, Uber was the type of marketplace business that Gurley understood deeply.


pages: 300 words: 65,976

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong by Barry Glassner

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Dr. Strangelove, fake news, Gary Taubes, haute cuisine, Helicobacter pylori, income inequality, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, New Urbanism, placebo effect, profit motive, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Saturday Night Live, stem cell, sugar pill, twin studies, urban sprawl, working poor

His reservations staff also helped him keep track of VIPs by putting discreet codes beside their names in the reservation book.9 Managing that information—and much more about preferred customers—has become easier for places like Daniel and the French Laundry in recent years, thanks to a San Francisco– based company called OpenTable Inc., best known for its Web site, opentable.com, through which, in principle, anyone can reserve a table at any of more than three thousand restaurants across the U.S. OpenTable’s appeal to restaurateurs like Boulud and Keller lies primarily in its data-tracking software rather than its reservations service. At sought-after restaurants, nearly all space at peak hours is held aside for VIPs. These restaurants tend to offer reservations at opentable.com for their earliest seating or during slow seasons. The French Laundry allots just two tables for each meal, but Keller and his staff make use of the software to other ends.

Brenner, The Fourth Star, pp. 17 and 63. See also Steven Shaw, Turning the Tables (New York: HarperCollins, 2005). 10. Brenner, The Fourth Star, pp. 41–42; David Shaw, “They Have a File on You,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2003. Many restaurants value OpenTable for another reason. Labor and other costs make phone reservations about four times as costly to the restaurant as OpenTable reservations. “Online and InPerson: Tips for Living Like a VIP,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2005. 11. Mark Bittman, “A Taste of Los Angeles,” New York Times, May 7, 2003; Amanda Hesser, “The Chef,” May 7, 21, and June 4, 2003. On treatment of VIPs and regular patrons, see also Steven Shaw, Turning the Tables. 12.

., 189, 259n. 24 types of food and, 176–79, 255n. 3 wealthier Americans and lower rate, 196–97, 263n. 55 weight loss and food marketing, 210–11 working mothers blamed, 181, 182, 257n. 16 Obesity Myth, The (Campos), 193 Oldways Preservation Trust, 6–8 olive oil and olives, 2, 209 Oliver, Jamie, 212 Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan), 70 O’Naturals, 168–71 customer profi le, 170 employees, 168 Ono restaurant, 101 OpenTable Inc., 97, 247n. 10 organic foods Cascadian Farm, 71–73 “expectancy confirmation,” xii farm cooperatives and, 64–65 food industry and, 62–63, 71–75, 245n. 15 health and environmental benefits, 64–65, 242n. 1 “industrial organic,” 72 lunch at expo, 64–65 milk, 62, 65 nutrients vs. nonorganic, 62 rejection of irradiation, 65–68 Rodale and, 63–64 small farmers and, 70–72 TV dinners, 71–72 Organic Gardening (Rodale), 63–64 Organic Valley cooperative, 64–65, 70 Ornish, Dean, 176 Orwell, George, 156 Palms Thai restaurant, 119 Panda Express restaurants, 137–41 best-selling item, 143 training of employees, 143 Paradise Tomato Kitchens, 81–83 pasta, dried vs. fresh, 83 282 Index Pastinelli, Madeleine, 128 Paz, Octavio, 128–29 peanuts, 211 peas, frozen vs. fresh, 83 Pepsico Aquafina water, 45 Mother’s Toasted Oat Bran Cereal, 48 Propel Fitness Water, 48 perfectionism, 200 food snobs and, 202–5 nutritional imperialists and, 201, 202 Per Se restaurant, 94–95, 109, 115 pesticides, 65 Peters, Lulu Hunt, 176 Petrini, Carlo, 220 Philip Morris, 48 Phillips Barbecue, 124 Phrack magazine, 148 Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), 207 anti-Atkins Web site, 214 on beef, 213 studies sponsored by, 214 pineapple, 80–81 Pirate’s Booty, 53 pizza hunger-relief organizations and, 201 as perfect food, 201 Pizza Hut, 141, 142 placebo effect, 24 fortified water and, 46 pleasure in food absorption of nutrients and, 1–2 American attitude vs., 3 Americans sacrificing of, 197–98 bò 7 món, 228 gospel of naught vs., 4 as important for health, 1–3 potato and, 5–6 self-denial of, effects, 3–6 study on food attitudes and, 2–3 Plotkin, Mark, 64 Pochapin, Cheryl, 126 Poe, Tracy, 84–85 Pollan, Michael, 70–72, 74 countercuisine, 72 Pork Board, 32 Post, Charles W., 43 potato as anti-depressive, 4–5 contradictory opinions and, 7–8 as ethnic slur on Irish, 226 health risks of, perceived, 4 marketing health benefits, 211 nutritional and health benefits, 4–5, 6 pleasures of eating, 5–6 specialist farmers for, 110 Yukon gold, 6 Potatoes Not Prozac, 4–5 Powles, John, 21 Powter, Susan, 176 Probyn, Elsbeth, 43, 148 processed and frozen foods convenience of, 61, 84–87 feminism and, 85 history, 84–86 nutrients and, 83 organic TV dinners, 71–72 pineapple wedges breakthrough, 80–81 Procter & Gamble, 79 Propel Fitness Water, 48 Public Citizen, 67 Puck, Wolfgang, 97–99, 115, 116, 156 Putnam, Robert, 121 Putney Swope (fi lm), 43 Index 283 Quaker Oats, 52–53 Quorn, 68–70 R & D operations, 77–81 Burger King, 34–35, 146–47 Flavurence Corporation, 37–40 fresh pineapple wedges, 80–81 Rain restaurant, 41 Ravnskov, Uffe, 22 Reichl, Ruth, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 112–13, 217, 246n. 5 Renaud, Serge, 2 Restaurant, The (TV show), 103–6, 247n. 21 restaurants.


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

You’ll learn that restaurants offering reservations via the service are “required to use the company’s proprietary floor management system, which means leasing hardware and using OpenTable-specific software,” and that OpenTable retains ownership of all the data generated in this way.10 You’ll also learn that OpenTable takes a cut on reservations made of one dollar per seated diner, which obviously adds up to a very significant amount on a busy night. Conscientious diners (particularly those with some experience working in the industry) have therefore been known to bypass the ostensible convenience of OpenTable, and make whatever reservations they have to by phone. By contrast, Google Home’s all but frictionless default to making reservations via OpenTable normalizes that option, the same way the appearance of Uber as a default option in the Google Maps interface sanctifies the choice to use that service.

This is how Google’s assistant works: you mention to it that you’re in the mood for Italian, and it “will then respond with some suggestions for tables to reserve at Italian restaurants using, for example, the OpenTable app.”9 This scenario was most likely offered off the top of the head of the journalist who wrote it. But it’s instructive, a note-perfect illustration of the principle that though the choices these assistants offer us are presented as neutral, they invariably arrive prefiltered through existing assumptions about what is normal, what is valuable, and what is appropriate. Their ability to channel a nascent, barely articulated desire into certain highly predictable kinds of outcomes bears some scrutiny. Ask restaurateurs and front-of-house workers what they think of OpenTable, for example, and you’ll swiftly learn that one person’s convenience is another’s accelerated work tempo, or worse.

This in turn served yet another party’s interest: that of an intruder, who could probe the local network through this unsecured point of access, and see if there might not be something connected to it worth corrupting, or mobilizing as part of a botnet. These interests all contend in the camera from the first moment it’s plugged in, just as your interests and OpenTable’s and Google’s and a restaurateur’s all contend in the Home interface. What is being gathered together in a Tide-branded Amazon Dash Button? Crack open the case,22 and you’ll find a WiFi module and a microcontroller, a microphone, a memory chip and an LED, along with some other harder-to-identify components, all sandwiched on a printed circuit board.


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Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Casper Woolley, one of Hailo’s founders, acknowledges that it would have been extremely difficult to recruit taxi drivers without this. Similarly OpenTable first focused on the needs of restaurants by offering them the tools to easily manage bookings online before opening up its listing of restaurants to customers once it had reached a critical mass.2 The combination of deep understanding of the economics and booking dynamics of the restaurants they sold their software to, combined with a critical mass, allowed OpenTable to negotiate booking fees and in turn invest in advertising and loyalty points to attract many more customers.

The types of key engagement metrics include value exchanged (e.g. gross merchandise value for marketplaces such as eBay or Etsy), transaction numbers (e.g. nights booked at Airbnb,7 messages sent for WhatsApp), activity or participation metrics (e.g. posts or monthly active users for social media8), expressions of interest or connections that lead to off-platform transactions (e.g. restaurant bookings on OpenTable). Tracking of user behaviours through the various rocket stages gives a helpful picture of the platform’s overall health. As we will see in the next three chapters, the key for each stage is to find relevant metrics that capture the main enabling interaction as well as core transactions. Enablers Like any business, it is important to sketch the type of user experience the platform will deliver, the interface it will need, how payments (if any) will be made and what type of technical architecture it may have, as well as the company’s key brand attributes and culture.

While this may be the case, adding a platform to an existing business comes with a number of challenges, including risks of disruption, need for coordination of different business models, alignment of incentives, skills and culture. These issues are discussed further in Chapter 14. Notes 1 www.launchworksventures.com/insights/scaling-up-a-necessity-for-platform-businesses/. 2 OpenTable was able to reach a critical mass of restaurants and diners in some cities first where it launched its platform. It still sold its online booking tools to restaurants in other markets where it was building its presence. 3 See http://venturebeat.com/2012/06/22/reddit-fake-users/. 4 There are many examples of allegations of fake profile schemes.


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The Mesh: Why the Future of Business Is Sharing by Lisa Gansky

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, bike sharing, business logic, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, diversification, Firefox, fixed income, Google Earth, impact investing, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, planned obsolescence, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social web, software as a service, TaskRabbit, the built environment, the long tail, vertical integration, walkable city, yield management, young professional, Zipcar

Increasingly, usage and location information from multiple sources—including embedded chips, mobile GPS, RFID tracking of goods, and UPC codes—can be fused with data collected from the Web to create digital portraits of customer preferences, including what brands they trust. Adding location data is a critical step. The new networks do not manage only strictly digital products, such as e-books; they can now connect you to physical products and services, like a hot meal (which to date can only be digitalized on Star Trek). OpenTable, for example, is a restaurant reservation system with a mobile phone app. Say you’re leaving a movie downtown. The mobile phone app will locate where you are standing and map nearby restaurants with available tables. You can look over the menu and reviews, get directions, and make a reservation while you’re headed toward the restaurant.

The mobile network locates and connects you in time and space with a physical place, the restaurant. The social network, in the form of online reviews by other diners and friends, informs your choice. If you text a note to the restaurant, you might find a physical product—perhaps a dish of spicy Szechuan noodles—hot and waiting when you arrive. Meanwhile, OpenTable and its network of restaurants learn over time, particularly if you send in reviews, which restaurants you, or people like you, prefer. They collect information that allows them to make more relevant and timely offers in the future, customized for you. It’s a bit like having a personal concierge living in your phone who knows your favorite table and drink.

The mobile Web helps users locate a product to share, or people to share with. In most cases, a person actually has to get up from her chair to participate—it’s a physical experience, not just a virtual one. By linking the Web, mobile technology, and physical venues and products, the relevant offers can be located in a specific place and time. Just as someone uses the OpenTable app to make a last-minute restaurant reservation on a mobile phone, he can make a date with a bike, tool, or car. their billions. our inheritance. or, who’s that standing on my shoulders? Mesh businesses also begin with a huge technical advantage. The billions spent in developing the Internet, mobile infrastructure, and certain large platforms—such as Amazon, Google, 3G, Facebook, PayPal, and eBay—have lowered the financial and time barriers for starting new businesses.


Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

Commonwealth (Click here ) A disco ball still spins in this converted Mission dive, but the inventive Californian food dazzles. Top Tips › Reservations On weekends, reservations are mandatory, unless you want to eat before 6pm or after 9:30pm. › Online bookings Most SF restaurants offer online reservations through OpenTable (www.opentable.com) , but if the system shows no availability, call the restaurant directly. Some seats may be held for phone reservations and walk-ins. Date-Night Favorites Jardinière (Click here ) Behind the opera, chef Traci des Jardins hits all the right notes – decadent, smart, sustainable – with a slight Italian accent.

Heart of the City Farmers Market (Click here ) DIY Lunches of roast chicken, heirloom tomatoes, organic berries and more. Top Tips › Food trucks See where your next meal is coming from on Twitter (@Mobile Cravings/sf-food-trucks, @streetfoodsf) . › Coupons Deals at top SF restaurants are available at Blackbird Eats (http://blackboardeats.com/san-francisco) and OpenTable (www.opentable.com) . Hot Deals La Taqueria (Click here ) Where SF’s most memorable meals come wrapped in foil and under $8 – including spicy pickles. Lahore Karahi (Click here ) Classic tandoori dive – a crowd-pleaser in the dodgy theatre district. Spices (Click here ) Whether you like your Szechuan lip-tingling or ‘explosive’ this hotspot delivers.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

Another tactic was offering stand-alone value to one side, much like the coring strategy we talked about for innovation platforms. If the platform could make a service valuable or even essential to one side’s members, irrespective of the number of users on the other side, then it becomes easier to start the ball rolling. OpenTable (which Priceline purchased in 2014 for $2.6 billion) did this when it signed up its first restaurants by offering a very useful computerized table management system and charging only a small monthly fee for the technology. Once restaurants were on board with this solution to their table management problem, it was easier to attract them as users of the reservation platform.

Deliveroo could not charge a lot or raise prices easily because there were different ways for restaurants to deliver food.17 Fourth, some transaction platforms sell technology or other goods and services apart from transaction fees. This approach seemed far superior to delivery services. We can see this with OpenTable, which matched people who want to make reservations with restaurants who accepted reservations online. It charged $1 for every reservation made through its system and 25 cents for reservations made directly on the restaurant’s website, which amounted to a relatively large monthly fee for using the service.

For example, there was a raging debate in August 2018 when Facebook, Apple, Spotify, and YouTube moved to ban Alex Jones, the U.S. right-wing radio host and political commentator of InfoWars.32 In effect, digital platforms were trying to have it both ways: Take advantage of the fact they were not publishers to escape responsibility and, at the same time, increasingly acting like publishers in deciding which views and people were permitted on their platforms. The Workforce: Not Everyone Should Be a Contractor One of the most attractive features of platforms for financial investors is that they can be asset-light. Uber does not own taxis. Airbnb does not own apartments or houses. OpenTable does not own restaurants. Instead, most platforms connect people or companies with valuable assets and skills to other people and companies who want access to those assets and skills. While asset-light platforms potentially provide highly leveraged returns to investors, they create another challenge for human capital: How should platforms manage a workforce largely composed of “independent contractors”?


pages: 305 words: 75,697

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be by Diane Coyle

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Al Roth, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, choice architecture, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, congestion charging, constrained optimization, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, endowment effect, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, framing effect, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Google bus, haute cuisine, High speed trading, hockey-stick growth, Ida Tarbell, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, linear programming, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, low earth orbit, lump of labour, machine readable, market bubble, market design, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, multi-sided market, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Network effects, Occupy movement, Pareto efficiency, payday loans, payment for order flow, Phillips curve, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, savings glut, school vouchers, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, statistical model, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber for X, urban planning, winner-take-all economy, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, Y2K

These features are the opposite of mass production, many items that were more or less the same coming off an assembly line. In the digital economy we have massive economies of scale too, but combined with increasing variety and personalisation. For instance, through digital matching platforms like Airbnb, OpenTable, Uber, or Amazon Marketplace, people are able to satisfy highly specific individual needs or preferences. In some cases, no money is exchanged, not only in the case of Al Roth’s famous kidney exchange described earlier, but also now the numerous, non-profit sharing economy platforms exchanging unwanted goods or sharing equipment, or dogs.

Digital platforms of this kind are also known as two-sided or multisided markets (Evans and Schmalensee 2016a). These indirect network effects are also mutually reinforcing and encouraging of scale. All ‘sides’ of the platform can—at least potentially—benefit the more users there are on the platform. There are many examples, from familiar consumer-facing ones like AirBnB, Amazon Marketplace, eBay, OpenTable, or Uber to business-to-business ones in industries such as chemicals or steel. Digital platforms also have a particular price structure; if people on one side of the market (usually the consumer side) have more other options to choose from and can switch, then the other side has to subsidise them to persuade them to stay on the platform.

Some platforms have succeeded in creating economies of scale and scope in activities where there are no inherent increasing returns, by providing a match between consumers and suppliers. For example, there are few economies of scale in the restaurant business, as each diner needs a meal cooked for them, and each meal needs a certain volume of ingredients. Yet platforms are creating economies of scale and scope either through network effects (matching platforms such as OpenTable benefit both customers and restaurants the more of each category they attract to the platform), or through additional organisational innovations (such as the emerging business of ‘dark kitchens’ (central kitchens serving multiple restaurants) plus delivery logistics. So even in services where scale and scope economies otherwise could not operate, such as haircuts or meals out, digital platforms have created them through algorithms that match buyers and sellers.


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Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance by Julia Angwin

AltaVista, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Graeber, Debian, disinformation, Edward Snowden, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, Jacob Appelbaum, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, medical residency, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, prediction markets, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, RFID, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, sparse data, Steven Levy, Tragedy of the Commons, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game, Zimmermann PGP

I was able to convince some restaurants to give me a reservation without a phone number, by promising that I would call them to confirm the reservation. They said okay, and often if I forgot to call they still kept the reservation. But I found that lying was difficult for me: I got a little bit red and hot whenever I had to say the name Ida. I soon realized that Ida needed an OpenTable account—to book online reservations—so that I wouldn’t have to lie on the phone. But when I tried to sign up for OpenTable, it asked for a cell phone number. I knew that I should just enter a random phone number such as 212-555-1212, but somehow I couldn’t do it. I abandoned the sign-up screen. This was the same problem I had with passwords. The problem wasn’t the technology.

.), and they were a horrifying insight into what Buddhists call the “monkey mind,” leaping from place to place restlessly. Consider November 30, 2010: I started the day reading some technology news. Then, suddenly, I was searching for “Pink glitter tiny toms” for my daughter. Then I was off to the thesaurus to look up a word for an article I was writing, then to OpenTable to book a restaurant reservation, and then a visit to Congress to download the text of privacy legislation. Phew. My searches not only illuminated my inner thoughts, but they also revealed my whereabouts. A bunch of searches for “Berlin city map” were conducted during my trip to Berlin; “Hyatt Regency Pune” was in the midst of my annual trip to see my in-laws in India; my search for “DFW airport, Irving, TX → 3150 Binkley Ave., Dallas, TX 75205” was during a business trip to Dallas.

I started by signing up for a free e-mail account for Ida from Microsoft’s Outlook.com. I steeled myself and entered 212-867-5309 as her backup phone number (after the famous ’80s song by Tommy Tutone). I turned off Microsoft’s targeted ads feature. Feeling quite pleased with myself, I also set up an OpenTable account for Ida, using the Outlook address. I left the phone number entry blank. (I don’t know why that hadn’t occurred to me earlier.) And then I set up an Amazon.com account for Ida, using my friend’s mailing address and Ida’s credit card number. I declined Amazon’s offer to provide Ida with the “Amazon betterizer,” which would provide her with more personalized recommendations.


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Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Tim Koller, McKinsey, Company Inc., Marc Goedhart, David Wessels, Barbara Schwimmer, Franziska Manoury

accelerated depreciation, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, ASML, barriers to entry, Basel III, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, commoditize, compound rate of return, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, discounted cash flows, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, energy security, equity premium, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, index fund, intangible asset, iterative process, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market friction, Myron Scholes, negative equity, new economy, p-value, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, risk free rate, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, six sigma, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, technology bubble, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two and twenty, value at risk, yield curve, zero-coupon bond

This business is similar to other software businesses, such as Microsoft’s Windows operating system and IBM’s MVS mainframe software, both of which still retain more than 80 percent of their respective markets. 5 One piece of data pointing to the potential of a 65 percent share is the restaurant reservation company OpenTable. Before being acquired by Priceline in 2013, OpenTable reported that it had exceeded a 60 percent share in San Francisco. A VALUATION PROCESS FOR HIGH-GROWTH COMPANIES 737 EXHIBIT 32.5 Yelp: Cohort Revenue Model Historical1 Cohort 1: San Francisco Addressable businesses, thousand × Percent claimed = Claimed locations, thousand × Percent converted = Active accounts, thousand × Revenues per account, $ thousand = Cohort revenue, $ million Forecast 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 375.8 37.0 139.0 381.0 45.0 171.4 386.1 52.0 200.8 391.4 58.0 227.0 396.8 62.0 246.0 402.2 65.0 261.4 407.7 65.0 265.0 413.3 65.0 268.7 4.3 6.0 4.4 7.5 4.6 9.2 4.7 10.7 4.8 11.8 4.9 12.8 5.0 13.3 5.1 13.7 2.7 16.0 3.0 22.9 3.3 30.8 3.7 39.2 4.0 47.7 4.4 56.9 4.9 64.7 5.4 73.6 Cohort 2: Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York City, Seattle Addressable businesses × Percent claimed = Claimed locations, thousand 1,372.2 24.0 329.3 1,383.5 37.0 511.9 1,394.2 45.0 627.4 1,405.6 52.0 730.9 1,417.1 58.0 821.9 1,428.8 62.0 885.9 1,440.6 65.0 936.4 1,452.5 65.0 944.1 × Percent converted = Active accounts, thousand 4.1 13.5 4.3 22.0 4.4 27.6 4.6 33.6 4.7 38.6 4.8 42.5 4.9 45.9 5.0 47.2 × Revenues per account, $ thousand = Cohort revenue, $ million 2.4 31.8 2.7 59.1 3.0 83.7 3.3 112.2 3.7 141.8 4.0 171.7 4.4 203.8 4.9 230.6 1 Yelp does not disclose historical data by cohort; we have estimated it here using publicly available data.

To estimate operating margin, triangulate between internal cost projections (versus market prices) and operating margins for established players. In Yelp’s case, the company has not disclosed internal cost forecasts, so we look to internal margin projections for OpenTable, another high-growth company actively serving businesses in local markets. OpenTable provides A VALUATION PROCESS FOR HIGH-GROWTH COMPANIES 739 EXHIBIT 32.7 Revenue Growth of Internet Start-Ups after Reaching $10 Million Threshold1 $ million 300 250 75th percentile Yelp 200 150 100 Median 50 25th percentile 0 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 1 Sample of 75 publicly traded Internet start-ups, normalized to Yelp.

OpenTable provides A VALUATION PROCESS FOR HIGH-GROWTH COMPANIES 739 EXHIBIT 32.7 Revenue Growth of Internet Start-Ups after Reaching $10 Million Threshold1 $ million 300 250 75th percentile Yelp 200 150 100 Median 50 25th percentile 0 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 1 Sample of 75 publicly traded Internet start-ups, normalized to Yelp. reservation services for restaurants. Similar to Yelp, the company generates revenue by deploying a dedicated sales team to local restaurants to encourage enrollment. Before Priceline acquired OpenTable, senior management at OpenTable discussed how economies of scale would lead to target margins above 25 percent. Executives forecast that every expense (operations, sales, technology, etc.) would drop as the company reaches scale. Exhibit 32.8 EXHIBIT 32.8 Yelp: Current and Forecast Margins % 1031 100 23 6 100 14 100 100 21 26 Operating margin 17 General and administrative 11 Product development 38 Sales and marketing Cost of revenues 21 20 16 18 15 13 12 57 51 46 41 7 7 7 7 7 2013 2014E 2015E 2016E 2023E 1 Because Yelp operated at a loss in 2013, operating costs sum to greater than 100 percent. 740 VALUING HIGH-GROWTH COMPANIES EXHIBIT 32.9 Business-to-Business Internet Companies: Key Value Drivers, 2013 Revenues, $ million Google LinkedIn 59,825 25.5 1,529 Monster Worldwide 808 Yelp 233 Capital/revenues,1 % EBITA T margin, % 27.2 4.2 10.3 14.6 (3.5) 2 (6.9) 15.2 1 Capital turnover excludes goodwill and acquired intangibles. 2 Monster Worldwide EBITA margin includes only North America.


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The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

The software underlying Siri, which originated at the California research institute SRI International and was purchased by Apple in 2010, listened to what iPhone users were saying to it, tried to identify what they wanted, then took action and reported back to them in a synthetic voice. After Siri had been out for about eight months, Kyle Wagner of technology blog Gizmodo listed some of its most useful capabilities: “You can ask about the scores of live games—‘What’s the score of the Giants game?’—or about individual player stats. You can also make OpenTable reservations, get Yelp scores, ask about what movies are playing at a local theater and then see a trailer. If you’re busy and can’t take a call, you can ask Siri to remind you to call the person back later. This is the kind of everyday task for which voice commands can actually be incredibly useful.”7 The Gizmodo post ended with caution: “That actually sounds pretty cool.

Lower search and transaction costs mean faster and easier access and increased efficiency and convenience. For example, the rating site Yelp collects millions of customer reviews to help diners find nearby restaurants in the quality and price ranges they seek, even when they are visiting new cities. The reservation service OpenTable then lets them book a table with just a few mouse clicks. In aggregate, digital tools like these make a large difference. In the past, ignorance protected inefficient or lower-quality sellers from being unmasked by unsuspecting consumers, while geography limited competition from other sellers. With the introduction of structured comparison sites like FindTheBest.com and Kayak, airline travel, banking, insurance, car sales, motion pictures, and many other industries are being transformed by consumers’ ability to search for and compare competing sellers.

., robot use by Minsky, Marvin MIT, Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at Mitchell, Tom Mitra, Sugata MITx Monster.com Montessori, Maria Monthly Labor Review Moore, Gordon Moore’s Law in business in computing persistence of spread of Moravec, Hans Moravec’s paradox Morris, Ian mortgages Mullis, Kary multidimensional poverty index Munster, Gene Murnane, Richard Murray, Charles music, digitization of Nader, Ralph Narrative Science NASA National Academy of Sciences National Association of Realtors National Bureau of Economic Research National Review Nature of Technology, The (Arthur) Neiman, Brent New Digital Age, The (Schmidt and Cohen) New Division of Labor, The (Levy and Murnane) Newell, Al new growth theory New York Times Next Convergence, The (Spence) Nike Nixon, Richard Nordhaus, William numbers: development of large Occupy movement oDesk Oh, Joo Hee Olshansky, S. Jay OpenTable OrCam O’Reilly, Tim Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Orteig Prize Orwell, George Oswald, Andrew Page, Larry Paine, Thomas Pandora Partnership for a New American Economy Pascarella, Ernest pattern recognition Pauling, Linus peer economy Perrow, Charles Perry, Mark philosophy, transformative phones, mobile: in developing world see also smartphones photography photo sharing Picasso, Pablo Pigou, Arthur Pigovian taxes Pink, Daniel Pinker, Steven Pinterest Pivot Power Plutarch Polanyi, Michael pollution polymerase chain reaction (PCR) Popular Science Porter, Michael Powerbook G4 Power Law distributions Principles of Economics (Mankiw) printing, 3D privacy, in digital vs. analog world productivity: decoupling of employment from decoupling of wages from effect of spread on in electricity era growth of innovation linked to intangible goods’ effect on mid-1990s U.S. increase in new paths to post-1970 U.S. decline in post-2000 U.S. growth in see also economic growth; gross domestic product (GDP); labor productivity, capital productivity, multifactor productivity, total factor publishing, digitization and Putnam, Robert Quirky R Race Against the Machine (Brynjolfsson and McAfee) Rajan, Raghuram Rampell, Catherine Raymond, Eric reading AI capabilities in Reagan, Ronald regulation: of business of peer economy religion rents, economic resource curse Rethink Robotics retinal implants Rhapsody Ricardo, David Rigobon, Roberto Robinson, James Robotics, Three Laws of robots: business use of; see also automation rapid progress in sensory equipment for skills acquisition by; see also Moravec’s paradox towel-folding see also artificial intelligence (AI) Rockoff, Jonah Roksa, Josipa Romer, Paul Roomba Roosevelt, Franklin D.


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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Strip clubs are nothing new to business, and they have been part of hard-charging tech culture since at least Trilogy’s heyday in the 1990s. The CEO, Joe Liemandt, a.k.a. Hundred-Dollar Joe, led young, impressionable employees on pilgrimages to Las Vegas, where gambling and naked women were the main event. Christa Quarles, now the CEO of OpenTable, was taken to the Gold Club at the end of an interview—a job interview!—with another tech company. “It was more like, ‘Hey, everyone, let’s go out and see if this person is a social fit,’” Quarles remembers. She felt it was clearly part of the interview, a sort of test to see if she could, as she puts it, “hang with the bro culture.”

Nicole Farb, the Goldman Sachs banker turned entrepreneur, said she believes Silicon Valley treats women worse than Wall Street does. Her message: VCs, stop asking women entrepreneurs about their kids! When one man in attendance said that some women weren’t doing enough to support each other, I spotted OpenTable’s CEO, Christa Quarles, getting agitated and mouthing the word “Bullshit!” When I handed her the mic, her voice erupted and her body shook. “In Silicon Valley today, there is a sisterhood of women who are supporting each other, telling each other about board opportunities, giving each other business ideas.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

Over the past decade, Meituan has emerged as a titan by catering to China’s burgeoning urban middle class who are using its all-in-one app to order takeout lunches, make restaurant reservations, book hotels, purchase movie tickets, and redeem vouchers for manicures and massages. This multifunctional app combines Yelp, Booking.com, GrubHub, Uber Eats, Kayak, Fandango, and Open-Table and even loops in a Whole Foods–type grocery store. There’s no single equivalent to Meituan in the United States, where apps typically specialize in one vertical sector. Table 3-3 At a Glance: Meituan Dianping Founder: serial entrepreneur Wang Xing Location: Beijing Launch: 2010 Merger with Dianping: 2015 Status: HKSE listing raised $4.2 billion at a valuation of nearly $53 billion Main Innovation: an all-in-one app for services and an AI-driven moped delivery system 2018 Gross Merchandise Volume:20 $76.9 billion, up 44%, from 6.4 billion food delivery transactions and 284 million hotel room booking nights in China 2018 Financials: $9.7 billion in revenues, up 92%; $1.27 billion adjusted net loss Notable: founder is known as China’s internet cloner; this is his fourth Chinese startup Meituan founder Wang lost his Facebook lookalike due to high cash burn.

., 103 China Investment Corp, 172 China UnionPay, 168 China venture capitalists, 128 Chinese consumers, 3 Chinese culture, 22 Chinese economy, 3 Chinese internet brands, 15 Chinese IPOs, 131 Chinese tourism, 113 ChiNext, 135 Chrysler, 209 Chuhai, 56 City Brain, 163 CloudKitchens, 175 Cloud Valley, 119 Coach handbags, 9 Cohen, Brian, 121 Colin Huang, 185, 192–193 Committee on Foreign Investment (CFIUS), 55 Connie Chan, 86 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Las Vegas, 32–33 Cook, Tim, 32 Costa Coffee, 102 Costco, 186 Coworking, 111 Creagh, Eleanor, 93 Credit Suisse, 171 CSC Upshot Ventures, 146 D Da-Jiang Innovations, 218 Dalian Wanda, 54 DAMO (discovery, adventure, momentum, and outlook) Academy, 56 Dangdang, 44–45 Daniel Zhang, 49 Danke Apartment, 106 David Chao, 154–155 David Li, 81 David Yuan, 157 DCM Ventures, 84, 106, 154–156 Deng Xiaoping, 16, 28, 128 Derrick Xiong, 217 Dick Clark Productions, 52, 54 Didi, 21, 42, 60, 69, 98, 104, 176–179 international operations, 182–183 safety issues, 184 vs Uber, 179–182 Didi Brain, 178 Didi Chuxing, 20, 44, 69, 173–174 DingTalk, 31, 106 DJI, 5, 211–212, 215–220 Doerr, John, 128, 139–140 Donovan Sung, 73 Douyin, 82, 89 Draper, Tim, 52, 136–137 Draper Associates, 137 Draper University, 137 Dropbox, 218 DST Global, 78 Duoduoyou, 95 Duoshan, 43, 85 E EachNet, 138 EBay, 15, 28, 52, 85, 96, 104, 216 Eclipse Ventures, 220 EHang, 5, 152, 216–217 EHi Car Services, 153 Ele.me, 42, 61, 157, 211 Elephant Robotics, 213 11Main.com, 191 Evans, Michael, 50 Evdemon, Chris, 50 Evernote, 104, 117–119 EyeVerify, 63 F Face++, 29, 165 Facebook, 1, 5, 10, 15, 26, 28, 30–32, 43–45, 48, 52, 82, 84, 87, 104, 115, 128, 132, 162, 218 Facial recognition systems, 2 Fallon, Jimmy, 85 Fandango, 90 Fanfou, 95 FANGs, 26, 50 Fang Xingdong, 138 Faraday Future, 207 FAW Group, 33 Fintech, 19 Fire in the Valley, 68 Fishtrip, 116 Flipagram, 88 Fong, Kevin, 137 Ford, 204, 209 Fortnite, 66 Foster & Partners, 216 Fountown, 110 4Paradigm, 165 Francis Leung, 161–162 Frank Wang, 216–218 Freshippo, 98 Friendster, 43 G Gaopeng, 95 Gates, Bill, 208 General Atlantic, 38, 51 General Catalyst Partners, 117 General Motors, 51, 209 Gen Z youngsters, 6 Gerson Lehrman Group, 107 GGV Capital, 11, 55, 86, 112 Glen Sun, 120, 127 Gobi Partners, 149 Go-Jek, 57 Golden Gate Bridge, 11 Goldman Sachs, 151 Google, 10, 15, 26, 28, 33–34, 45, 52, 57, 75, 79, 95, 104, 115, 127–129, 132, 144, 162, 178, 191, 193 Google China, 34–35 Google Pay, 5, 32 GoPro, 219 Grab, 57 Granite Global Ventures (GGV), 138, 143, 151–154, 169, 198, 217 Graziani, Thomas, 186 The Great Wall, 53 Great Wall Motors, 208 Groupon, 15, 43, 69, 95–96, 104, 186 GrubHub, 90 GSR Ventures, 138, 157 Gu, Amy, 118 Guangzhou Automobile Group, 207 Guinn, Colin, 219 Gullicksen, Ken, 118 H Hainan Airlines, 168 Hans Tung, 11, 55, 78, 120–121, 153, 192 Hao, Robert, 115 Haokan, 85 Hariharan, Anu, 87 Harvard university, 11 HAX accelerator, 213–214 Hearst Ventures, 169 Hemi Ventures, 118 He Xiaopeng, 197, 203–206 Hikvision, 162 Hillhouse Capital, 112, 175, 198 Hilton, 9, 54 Hoffman, Reid, 105 Hollywood, 52–55 Hong Ge, 115 Horizon Robotics, 213 Horizon Ventures, 112 Horowitz, Andreessen, 52, 86, 138 Hortons, Tim, 102 H&Q Asia Pacific, 102 Huahua Media, 54 Huami, 77 Huang, 186 Huawei, 5, 13, 16, 73, 76 Hurst Lin, 120, 155 Hyatt, 9 Hyundai, 28 I IBM, 162 IDG Capital, 138, 193, 198 IFlytek, 163 ING Group, 171 Instagram, 1–2, 15, 51 Intel, 16, 144 International Finance Corporation, 171 IPhone, 70 IQiyi, 19, 60, 84 Israel, 56 J Jack Ma, 3, 26, 28, 45, 47, 49–50, 52, 56, 78, 99–100, 135, 154–155, 191 JAFCO Asia, 154 James Mi, 121, 156, 193 Janow, Merit, 17 Japan, 56 JD.com, 18, 29, 38, 88, 98, 147, 185, 187–189, 191, 211 Jenny Lee, 154 Jerry Yang, 106, 154 Jet Li, 52 Jian Lu, 106 Jing Bing Zhang, 219 Jobs, Steve, 3, 68 Joe Chen, 44 Joe Zhou, 140 Johnson, Kevin, 101 Joy Capital, 103 Joyo.com, 75 JPMorgan, 115 Jurvetson, Draper Fisher, 134 K Kabam, 63 Kai-Fu Lee, 34, 123, 147, 165 Kalanick, Travis, 175, 181 Karma Automotive, 207 Katzenberg, Jeffrey, 85 Kayak, 69, 90 Kellman, Joel, 152 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 9 Keytone Ventures, 140 Khazanah Nasional Berhad, 171 Khosla, Vinod, 138 Khosla Ventures, 134, 138 Kingsoft, 74–75, 79 Kitt.ai, 163 KKR, 83 Kleiner Perkins, 140, 148 Koubei, 61 Kramlich, Dick, 139, 142 Kr Space, 110 Kuaidi, 173, 181 Kuaishou, 66, 84–85, 156 L LAIX, 169 Lam, David, 146 Lashou, 95–96 Lasso, 32, 84 Lau, Marvin, 64 Lazada, 58 Lazada Group, 58 League of Legends, 64 Lee, Jenny, 123 LeEco, 54 Legend Capital, 155, 171 Lei Jun, 44, 68, 71, 74–76, 79, 81, 135, 152 Leju, 66 LendingClub, 171 Leone, Doug, 129 LG, 28 Libin, Phil, 117–118 Lightspeed China Partners, 156, 193 Li Guoqing, 44 Li Haipeng, 175 Li Ka-shing, 171 Lin Haifeng, 193 LinkDoc, 169, 171–172 LinkedIn, 15, 104 LinkedIn China, 104–107 Lip-Bu Tan, 139 Little Elephant market, 98 Little Red Book, 189–190 Liulishuo (LingoChamp), 154 Live.me, 88 Livestreaming, 19, 80–81, 88 Li (David) Xueling, 199 Li Zexiang, 217 Li Zhaohui, 67 Lo, Vincent, 152 Long Hill Capital, 148 Lonsdale, Jeff, 138 Luan, Pan, 67 Luckin Coffee, 99–100 business model, 103 Lu Qi, 33 Lyft, 21, 51, 178, 183 M Macquarie Group, 115 Made-in-China business models, 10 Made in China 2025 initiative, 172, 200, 208, 212, 224 Magic Leap, 21 Ma Huateng (Pony Ma), 28 Mail.Ru, 29 Maimai, 106 MakeBlock, 213 Marriott, 9 Marvell, 15 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 94, 168 Master-Card, 32 Matrix China Partners, 138 Matrix Partners, 138 Matrix Partners China, 110, 138, 198 Mavic Pro, 218 Mayfield, 51, 137–138 Mayi.com, 116 McDonald’s, 9 Meeker, Mary, 140 Megafunds, 134 Megvii, 165 Meituan, 175, 189 Meituan Bike, 175 Meituan Dianping, 20–21, 38, 42–43, 61, 69–70, 89–98 bike-sharing business, 94 competitors, 93 deliveries, 91–93 merger, 96–97 revenues, 94 travel and hotel segment, 93–94 Meizu Zero, 72 Messenger, 51 Mi.com, 71 Micron Technology, 16 Microsoft, 30, 33, 75, 79, 144, 162, 193 Milner, Yuri, 78, 83, 171 MIT university, 11 Mobike, 21, 61, 94, 151, 174–175 Mobile payments, 5, 19 MoneyGram, 55, 63 Morgenthaler Ventures, 118 Moritz, Mike, 11, 51, 128–129 Morningside Venture Capital, 84, 198 MOX, 214 Musical.ly, 83, 87–88 MySpace, 28 N Naked Hub, 108–111 Naspers, 66 Neil Shen, 97, 119 Netflix, 26, 48, 81 Netscape, 52 Neumann, Adam, 109 New Enterprise Associates, 51 New Enterprise Associates (NEA), 141–143 New Oriental Education & Technology Group, 135 New Space, 110 New York–based RRE Ventures, 133 Ng, Thomas, 152 Nike, 218 Nike shoes, 9 NIO, 2, 19, 200–201, 206–207 Nuomi, 96 Nvidia, 196 O Ofo, 61, 128, 138, 157, 174–175 On-demand ordering and delivery of takeout orders, 5 O2O, 97 OpenTable, 90 OPPO, 76, 168 Optibus, 56 Oracle, 129 O’Sullivan, Sean, 123, 214 P Page, Larry, 29, 34 Palo Alto, 52 Panda Selected, 175 Parrot, 220 PayPal, 31, 46, 128 Peggy YuYu, 44 Penaloza, 107 Penaloza, Dominic, 107 Perkins, Kleiner, 134 Perkins, Tom, 132 Pinduoduo, 2, 29, 66, 134, 185–188, 192–195 Ping An, 137 Pinterest, 15, 104 Pony Ma, 3 PPDAI Group, 171 Primavera Capital Group, 198 Princeton university, 11 Project Dragon, 15 Project Dragonfly, 104 Q Qiming Venture, 95, 175 Qiming Venture Partners, 129, 150–151 Qiye Weixin, 42, 106 QQ instant messaging service, 29 QR code, 109 QR (quick response) code, 1–2 Qualcomm, 15, 144 Qudian, 171 Quixey, 63 Qunar, 60 R Rational Robotics, 214 Reddit, 64, 88 Redpoint China, 157 Redpoint China Ventures, 133 Renren, 44 Retail commerce, 18–19 Revols, 214 Rework, 110 Richard Chang, 142 Richard Ji, 116 Richard Liu, 78, 123 Rieschel, Gary, 8, 16, 120, 122, 129, 150–151 Riot Games, 64 Robin Li, 3, 28, 33–35, 60, 122 Robinson, Jim, 121, 133 Robotics and drone market, 212 Roomba, 214 Rui Ma, 186 S Samsung, 28, 70, 76 Sandell, Scott, 141 Schultz, Howard, 100 SenseTime, 2, 29, 161, 167–169 camera surveillance technology, 162 Sequoia Capital, 11, 110, 129, 171, 175 Sequoia Capital China, 84, 95, 97, 105, 112, 119, 127–129, 194, 213, 218 Sequoia CBC Cross-Border Digital Industry Fund, 119 Serendipity Labs, 111 Sesame Credit system, 6 7Fresh, 189 7Fresh stores, 98 Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., 208 Shanghai-based Qiming Venture Partners, 8 Shanghai World Financial Towers, 9 Shen, Neil, 128–129, 194 Shenzhen, 2 Short video entertainment apps, 7 Silicon Dragon, 109 Silicon Valley, 20–22, 27, 29, 31, 33, 42, 44, 50–52, 60, 63, 68–69, 79, 95, 105, 117, 129, 132–134, 137–143, 145–146, 150, 153, 158, 178, 192, 196, 199, 204–205, 218–220, 223–225 Silver Lake Partners, 38 Simon Loong, 171 Sina Corp., 95 Sino—US Venture Investors, 135–136 Sinovation Ventures, 110, 146, 165–166 Skype, 1 Snap, 64 Snapchat, 81, 84 Lens Challenges, 69 Social commerce, 20 SoFi, 44 SoftBank, 38, 51, 83, 138, 151, 183 Sonny Wu, 157 Southeast Asia, 56–57, 149 Alibaba and Tencent Investments in, 59 SpaceX, 51, 220 Spielberg, Steven, 52 SQream Technologies, 56 Squawk Box, 86 Stanford university, 10 Starbucks, 15, 99–100, 102–104, 111 initiative with Alibaba, 100–101 Reserve Roastery, 101–102 Startup Asia, 57 “Startup Nation” of Israel, 56 Steven Ji, 128 STX Entertainment, 52 Su Hua, 85 Sun Microsystems, 128 Supercharging stations, 7 T Tai, Bill, 137 Ta-lin Hsu, 102, 139 TangoME, 63 Tang Xiaoou, 167 Taobao, 28, 185, 187 Tao Peng, 113 TechSauce, 148 Temasek, 172 Tencent, 12–13, 20–21, 26, 28–32, 38, 44, 46–48, 51–52, 57, 61, 70, 80–81, 83, 95, 138, 147, 153, 163–164, 171, 190–191, 197, 206, 224 China Literature, 41 corporate culture, 63 diversification strategy, 67 gaming business, 40, 64, 66 growth of, 39–40 social networking service, 41–42 strategic investments, 63–66 in US, 52, 63–65 war with ByteDance, 85 youth culture, 39 Tencent Music Entertainment, 41 Tencent Video, 41, 84 Terminator: Dark Fate, 53 Tesla, 2, 15, 64, 196, 209–210, 220 Thiel, Peter, 138 Thompson, Ben, 77 Tian, Edward, 118–119 Tian Xu, 193 Tiger Computing Solutions, 163 TigerGraph, 163 Tiger Qie, 178 TikTok, 2, 21, 29, 31–32, 39, 43, 66, 69–70, 82, 84, 87 Tina Ju, 140 TMD, 43–44, 69 Tokopedia, 58 The Tonight Show, 85 3D Robotics, 219–220 TopBuzz, 82 Toutiao (Today’s Headlines), 21, 69–70, 80–81, 86–88 Traffic Brain, 178 Trump, Donald, 15, 45, 54–55, 164, 191 Tsai, Joe, 50 Tujia, 116 Twitch, 51 Twitter, 1, 15, 28, 43, 47, 84, 87, 104 U UBazaar mobile, 111 Uber, 21, 44, 51, 57, 60, 64, 83, 103–104, 128, 144, 173, 176–183 Uber Eats, 69, 90 Ubisoft, 64 UBTech, 213 UCAR, 103 UC Berkeley, 11 Ucommune, 110–111 UCWeb, 200 URWork, 110 US-China trade imbalance, 15 Ushi, 107 US IPOs, 131 US market, 46 US privacy laws, 7 US venture fund performance, 130 V Valentine, Don, 132, 139 VC Dixon Doll, 155 Venture capital market of China, 12, 130–158, 224 AI startups, 166 center of gravity for venture investing, 158 cross-border investors, 145–146 digital Silk Road, 136–139 funding for Asian companies, 148 history as a budding venture superpower, 139–140 investment returns, 141 investments in tech companies, 132–135 NEA’s China investing, 141–143 Sino—US Venture investment, 135–136, 146–148 venture firms, 150–158 Video streaming market, 2, 6, 19, 60, 83, 85, 154 Viomi, 77 VIPShop, 189–190 Vipshop, 156 Virtual gifts, 6 Virtual reality, 19 Visa, 32 Visualead, 56 Vivendi, 64 Vivo, 76 Vizio, 54 Volvo, 204 W Waimai, 60 Waldorf Astoria Hotel, 54 Walmart, 57–58 Wang Xing, 43, 89, 91, 94–95, 97 Wang Yi, 169 Wanka Online, 148 Warburg Pincus, 38 Warner Brothers, 51 Wayne Shiong, 121 Waze, 51 WeChat, 1–2, 29, 31, 34–35, 41–43, 46, 82, 106, 115, 144, 177, 187, 191, 197 WeChat Moments, 85 WeChat Pay, 5, 19, 32, 63, 182–183 WeDefend, 170 Wedo, 110 WeFlex, 170 Weibo, 35, 47, 82, 168, 197 Weiner, Jeff, 105–106 Weixin, 41 Wei-Ying Ma, 89 Wei Zhou, 121, 134 WeLab, 170–171 WeReach, 170 WeWork, 15, 104, 111 WeWork China, 108–111 WeWork Go, 109 WhatsApp, 1, 43, 51 Whitman, Meg, 85 William Li, 200, 206 Williams, David, 52 Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati (WSGR), 142–143 Wonder Woman, 52 Woo Space, 110 Workingdom, 110 Wu Xiaoguang, 199 X Xiadong Jiang, 172 Xia Huaxia, 92 Xiaodong Jiang, 142 Xiaomi, 20–21, 68–70, 75, 138, 141, 153, 168 business model, 76–79 core strength of, 73 customers, 72 growth, 72–73 international market, 79–80 Mi Home store locations, 73–74 mobile phone features, 70–71 range of internet-connected devices, 71 sales, 75–76 US market, 73–74 Xiaomi Finance, 80 Xiaonei, 95 Xiaopeng He, 122 Xiaozhu, 116 Xi Jinping, 12, 47, 208 Xpeng Motors, 19, 196–197, 200, 203–206 XPerception, 164 XTMD, 69 Xu Li, 161, 168–169 Y Yahoo!


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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

The total number of trips on the London Underground in February 2022 was roughly 60 per cent of its pre-pandemic level.23 But weekend trips were back to above 80 per cent of their former levels, with travel between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m. during the week nearly fully recovered.24 In the US, office occupancy rates were still below half their pre-pandemic levels in June 2022, but dinner bookings through the OpenTable platform were back up at 90 per cent of pre-pandemic levels.25 Once-bustling office districts in places like San Francisco remain far quieter than before the pandemic, but the social life of these cities has quickly regained its vitality. The lifestyle that the inner city offers is keeping most white-collar workers from moving further away, and its attractions have retained their appeal.

Index abortion here abstract mathematics here Achaemenid Empire here Adani, Gautam here agglomeration effects here agriculture here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and carbon emissions here and disease here, here productivity here, here vertical farming here Ahmedabad here air-conditioning here, here airports here, here, here, here Albuquerque here Alexandria here Allen, Paul here Allen, Thomas here Altrincham here Amazon here, here, here Amazon rainforest here Amsterdam here Anatolia here Anderson, Benedict here Anheuser-Busch here antibiotics here, here, here Antonine Plague here Anyang here apartment conversions here, here Apple here, here, here Aristotle here Arizona State University here Arlington here Assyrian merchants here Athens, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Atlanta here, here Austin here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here axial precession here Baghdad, House of Wisdom here Baltimore here, here Bangalore here, here Bangkok here Bangladesh here, here, here, here Barlow, John Perry here Bauhaus here Beijing here, here Belmar redevelopment here Berkes, Enrico here Berlin here, here, here Berlin Wall, fall of here Bezos, Jeff here biological weapons here ‘biophilia’ here biospheres here bird flu here Birmingham here, here Black Death here, here, here Blake, William here Bloom, Nick here BMW here ‘bobo’ (bourgeois bohemian) here, here, here Boccaccio, Giovanni here Boeing here, here, here Bogota here Bologna here Bonfire of the Vanities here Borneo here Boston here, here, here Boston University here, here Brand, Stewart here Brazil here, here Brexit here, here, here Bristol here Britain broadcasting here deindustrialization here education here enclosure movement here foreign aid here high-speed rail here, here house prices here immigration here industrialization here, here infant mortality here ‘levelling up’ here life expectancy here mayoralties here per capita emissions here per capita incomes here remote working here social housing here Brixton riots here broadcasting here Bronze Age here, here, here, here bronze, and shift to iron here Brooks, David here Brynjolfsson, Eric here Burgess, Ernest here bushmeat here, here Byzantine Empire, fall of here Cairncross, Frances here Cairo here calendar, invention of here Cambridge, Massachusetts here Cambridge University here canals here, here, here ‘cancel culture’ here Cape Town here Catholic Church here C40 Cities partnership here Chadwick, Edwin here Chang’an (Xi’an) here, here, here, here Charles, Prince of Wales here charter cities here Chengdu here Chiba here Chicago here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here childbirth, average age at here childcare here, here, here, here, here China here ancient here, here, here, here call-centre workers here cereal production here civil strife here and Covid-19 pandemic here Cultural Revolution here definition of cities here economic liberalization here entry into WTO here Household Responsibility System here hukou system here One Child Policy here Open Coastal Cities here per capita emissions here rapid ageing here Special Economic Zones here technology here urbanization here China Towns here Chinese Communist Party here cholera here, here, here, here Chongqing here cities, definition of here Citigroup here city networks here civil wars here Cleveland here, here, here, here climate change here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here coastal cities here, here, here, here commuting here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Concentric Zone Model here Confucius here conspiracy theories here Constantinople here, here containerization here, here Copenhagen here, here Corinth here Cornwall here corruption here Coventry here, here covid-19 see pandemics crime rates here ‘cyberbalkanization’ here cycling here, here, here, here Damascus here Dark Ages here, here data science here de Soto, Hernando here deforestation here, here, here, here Delhi here Dell here Delphic oracle here democracy here, here, here Democratic Republic of Congo here, here, here, here, here, here Deng Xiaoping here dengue fever here Denmark here, here Detroit here, here, here, here, here, here, here Dhaka here, here, here, here, here Dharavi here Diana, Princess of Wales here diasporas here, here Dickens, Charles here district heating systems here Dresden here drought here, here, here, here, here, here, here Drucker, Peter here dual-income households here, here Dubai here, here, here Dunbar, Kevin here Düsseldorf here East Antarctic ice sheet here East China Sea here, here Easterly, William here Eastern Mediterranean here, here, here Ebola here Edinburgh here education here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here higher education here, here, here, here; see also universities Japanese school system here Egypt here, here Ancient here, here, here, here Ehrenhalt, Alan here electric vehicles (EVs) here Engels, Friedrich here Enlightenment here Epic of Gilgamesh here Erfurt here Ethiopia here, here Euripides here European Enlightenment here exchange rates here Facebook here, here, here fake news here famine here, here fertility rates here, here, here ‘15-minute city’ principle here Fischer, Claude here Fleming, Alexander here flooding here, here, here, here, here, here, here Florida, Richard here, here food shortages here Ford, Henry here, here foreign aid here fossil fuels here, here France here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Frankfurt here Franklin, Benjamin here Friedman, Thomas here, here Fryer, Roland here Fukuoka here, here Gaetani, Ruben here Galileo Galilei here Ganges River here Garden Cities here Garden of Eden here Gates, Bill here, here gay community here General Electric here General Motors here genetic engineering here gentrification here, here, here, here, here George, Andy here Germany here, here, here, here, here, here Gingrich, Newt here glaciers here Glasgow here Glass, Ruth here global financial crisis here, here, here global population, size of here globalization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Goldstein, Amy here Google here, here, here Goos, Maarten here Grant, Adam here Great Depression here, here Greece, Ancient here, here, here, here, here Griffith Observatory here Gropius, Walter here Gruen, Victor here Gulf Stream here Haiti here Hamburg here Hanseatic League here, here Harappa here, here Harry, Prince here Harvard University here hate speech here Haussmann, Baron here, here Hawaii here Hazlitt, William here healthcare here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here heatwaves here, here Hebei here Heckscher, Eli here Herodotus here Himalayas here Hippocrates here Hippodamus here Hittite Empire here HIV here, here Ho Chi Minh City here Holocene here, here, here homophily here Hong Kong here house prices here, here, here, here, here, here, here Houston here, here, here Howard, Ebenezer here Hudson River here Hugo, Victor here Hume, David here Hurricane Katrina here hybrid working, see remote and hybrid working ice melting here, here import substitution industrialization here InBev here India here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here fertility rates here Indonesia here, here Indus River here Indus Valley here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here infant and child mortality here, here, here, here influenza here, here, here ‘information cocoons’ here Instagram here internet here, here, here, here, here, here invention here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here irrigation here, here, here, here Italy here Jacobs, Jane here, here, here Jakarta here, here James, Sheila here Japan here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here post-war development here schooling system here Jenner, Edward here Jesus Christ here Jobs, Steve here jobs apprenticeships here ‘lousy’ and ‘lovely’ here tradeable and non-tradeable here Justinian Plague here Kashmir here Kenya here Kinshasa here, here Kish here knowledge workers here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Koch, Robert here Kolkata here Korean War here Krugman, Paul here Kushim Tablet here Lagash here Lagos here, here, here, here, here, here, here Lahore here land titling programmes here Las Vegas here Latin language here Lee Kuan Yew here, here Leeds here, here Leicester here Leipzig here, here, here, here Letchworth here life expectancy here, here, here, here, here, here Liverpool here, here Ljubljana here London here, here, here, here, here, here, here bike lanes here Canary Wharf here, here Chelsea here, here, here China Town here cholera outbreaks here City of London here, here coffeehouses here and Covid-19 pandemic here financial services here gentrification here, here, here Great Stink here, here heatwaves here, here house prices here, here hybrid working here, here immigration here, here incomes here, here mayoralty here migration into inner London here population growth here, here, here poverty here, here public transport here, here, here slum housing here social housing here suburbanization here Los Angeles here, here, here, here Louisville here Luoyang here Luther, Martin here Luton Airport here Luxembourg here, here Lyon here McDonald’s here McDonnell Douglas here McLuhan, Marshall here Madagascar here malaria here, here, here, here Malaysia here Mali here malls, reinvention of here Manchester here, here, here, here, here, here, here Manila here Manning, Alan here Markle, Meghan here marriage here Marshall, Alfred here Marshall, Tim here Marx, Karl here Maya here, here measles here, here, here Meetup here mega regions here Mekong River here Memphis, Egypt here, here Mesoamerica here, here Mesopotamia here, here, here metallurgy here metaverse here methane here, here Mexico here Miami here, here, here microbiology here Microsoft here, here, here middle class, rise of here migration policy here millennial generation here Milwaukee here, here Minoan civilization here Mistry, Rohinton here MIT here MMR vaccine here ‘modernization’ theory here Mohenjo-Daro here, here Moretti, Enrico here, here mortality rates here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here motor car, invention of here Moynihan, Daniel here Mumbai here, here Mumford, Lewis here, here, here, here Munich here, here Mycenaean civilization here Nagoya here, here Nairobi here Nashville here National Landing, Arlington here Natural History Museum here natural resource exports here Nestlé here Netherlands here network effects here New Economics Foundation here New Orleans here, here New York here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here carbon emissions here and Covid-19 pandemic here gentrification here, here housing here, here, here incomes here, here Manhattan here, here, here, here, here population growth here, here and rising sea levels here slum housing here suburbanization here, here subway here waste and recycling here New York Central Railroad here New York World Fair here Newcastle here Nextdoor here Niger here Nigeria here, here, here, here Nilles, Jack here, here Nipah virus here Norway here, here Nottingham here Novgorod here ocean and air circulation here office rental and sales prices here Ohlin, Bertil here Oldenburg, Ray here online deliveries here OpenTable here Osaka here, here Oslo here Ottoman Empire here Oxford, population of here Oxford University here Pacific Belt Zone here Padua here Pakistan here, here, here pandemics here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and zoonotic diseases here paramyxovirus here Paris here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Paris Conference (2015) here Park Chung-hee, General here parks here Pasteur, Louis here Pearl River Delta here, here Peñalosa, Enrique here per capita income here Philadelphia here Philippines here, here Phoenix here, here Pixar here plague here, here, here, here Plato here plough, invention of here pollution here, here, here, here air pollution here, here, here, here population growth here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here PORTL here potter’s wheel, invention of here printing press here, here productivity here, here, here, here, here agricultural here, here Protestantism, rise of here public transport here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Putnam, Robert here, here quarantine here railways here, here, here, here, here high-speed rail here, here, here Ralston Purina here Reagan, Ronald here recycling here, here religion here remote and hybrid working here, here, here, here Renaissance Florence here, here, here renewable energy here, here Republic of Letters here République des Hyper Voisins here ‘resource curse’ here Rheingold, Howard here Ricardo, David here Rio de Janeiro here Riverside, San Francisco here robotics here Rockefeller, John D. here Roman Empire here, here, here Rome, Ancient here, here, here, here, here, here Romer, Paul here Rotterdam here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques here, here Sahel here, here sailboat, invention of here St Augustine here St Louis here, here, here Salesforce here San Diego here San Francisco here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here gentrification here, here hybrid working here, here San Francisco Bay Area here, here, here Santa Fe here São Paulo here Savonarola, Girolamo here Scientific American here Scott, Emmett J. here sea levels, rising here, here, here Seattle here, here, here, here, here, here Second Opium War here Seneca here Seoul here Shanghai here, here, here, here, here Shantou here Sheffield here, here, here Shen Nung here Shenzhen here, here Siemens here Silk Roads here, here Sinclair, Upton here Singapore here, here, here, here Slater, Samuel here smallpox here, here Smith, Adam here, here Snow, John here social capital here social housing here, here social media here, here, here, here, here Socrates here solar panels here South Africa here South Korea here, here, here, here, here, here Southdale Center here specialization here, here, here, here, here, here Spengler, Oswald here Starbucks here Stephenson, Neal here Stewart, General William here Stuttgart here Sub-Saharan Africa here subsidiarity principle here suburbanization here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Sunstein, Cass here Sweden here, here Sydney here, here, here, here, here, here Syrian refugees here, here Taiwan here Tanzania here telegraph here Tempest, Kae here Thailand here Thames River here, here Thatcher, Margaret here, here, here ‘third places’ here Tianjin here Tocqueville, Alexis de here Toffler, Alvin here Tokyo here, here, here, here trade liberalization here trade routes here Trump, Donald here, here tuberculosis here, here, here Twain, Mark here Twitter here, here typhoid here, here typhus here, here Uber here Uganda here Ukraine here, here Umayyad Caliphate here unemployment here, here United Nations here, here United States anti-global populism here anti-trust regulation and industrial consolidation here anxiety and depression here broadcasting here car registrations here cost of education here decline in trust here deindustrialization here Gilded Age here Great Migration here house prices here, here immigration here industrialization here inequality here labour mobility here ‘magnet schools’ here parking spaces here patent filings here per capita emissions here, here per capita incomes here remote working here, here, here return on equity here Rust Belt here schools funding here slavery here socioeconomic mobility here suburbanization here tax revenues here US Federal Housing Authority here US General Social Survey here US Trade Adjustment Assistance Program here universities here, here, here University College London here University of Texas here university-educated professionals here Ur here urban heat island effect here urbanism, subcultural theory of here Uruk here, here, here, here, here vaccines here, here Van Alstyne, Marshall here Vancouver here Venice here, here Vienna here, here Vietnam here voluntary associations here, here Wakefield, Andrew here walking here, here, here Wall Street here Warwick University here Washington University here WELL, The here Welwyn Garden City here wheel, invention of here wildfires here, here William the Conqueror here Wilson, Edward Osborne here, here Wilson, William here World Bank here, here World Health organization here World Trade Organization here World Wide Web here writing, invention of here Wuhan here, here Xiamen here Yangtze River here, here Yangtze River Delta here yellow fever here Yellow River here, here Yersinia pestis here Yokohama here YouTube here, here Yu the Great here Zhuhai here Zoom here Zoroastrianism here BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY CONTINUUM and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc This electronic edition first published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin 2023 Ian Goldin and Tom Lee-Devlin have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work All rights reserved.


pages: 282 words: 80,907

Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design by Alvin E. Roth

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Build a better mousetrap, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, computer age, computerized markets, crowdsourcing, deferred acceptance, desegregation, Dutch auction, experimental economics, first-price auction, Flash crash, High speed trading, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, law of one price, Lyft, market clearing, market design, medical residency, obamacare, PalmPilot, proxy bid, road to serfdom, school choice, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, two-sided market, uber lyft, undersea cable

Let’s conduct a blind test: I’ll tell you how three restaurants, call them A, B, and C, handle congestion on a busy night, and I’ll bet you’ll be able to figure out the color of their tablecloths. If we want to eat in restaurant A, we call ahead for a reservation and then chat in my office until the time we are expected. (Or we can search the online marketplace OpenTable, which offers reservations to many restaurants, to compare the availability times of restaurant A and other, similar restaurants.) When we arrive, we’re seated quickly and given a menu. A server soon comes to ask if we’d like something to drink. When the drinks come, the server is ready to take our order, and we chat while the food is prepared.

See also repugnant markets NEPKE, 8, 37, 38, 42, 44, 49, 50 New England Journal of Medicine, 45 New England Organ Bank, 36 New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE), 8, 37, 38, 42, 44, 49, 50 New York City school system, 8, 106–10, 112, 122, 153–61 benefits of revised, 160–61 old compared with new, 155–58 preferences in, 153–54, 156–60 New York State attorney general, 86, 88 New York Stock Exchange, 82–83 New York Times, 110 Nguyen, Hai, 38–39 Niederle, Muriel, 75–76, 176–77 Nixon, Richard, 224 nonsimultaneous chains in kidney exchange, 43–46, 49, 51–52, 235 NRMP, 7–8, 146 Obamacare, 224 objectification, 203 Ockenfels, Axel, 118, 120–21 Oklahoma Land Rush, 57–59, 80, 113–14 once-per-second market, 86, 88 OpenTable, 218 operating systems, 21–22 Orange Bowl, 61–62, 66 orthopedic surgeons, 78–80 Ostrovsky, Mike, 86–87 package bidding, 188–89, 225–26 parking decisions, 72–73, 125–26 Pathak, Parag, 107, 126, 149, 153, 165 payment systems credit cards, 23–26 in Internet marketplaces, 24, 104, 117 mobile, 26–27 privacy in, 119 PayPal, 24, 117, 119 Payzant, Tom, 126, 129 peacocks, 177–78 penicillin, 133–34 Peranson, Elliott, 147–48, 157 performance evaluation, 64 political campaign contributions, 203 politics free markets and, 226–28 in kidney exchanges, 49–51 polycystic kidney disease, 38–39 polygamy, 199 Posner, Richard, 91 price and pricing, 9.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Reserve ahead or take your chances in a restaurant-dense area like the Mission, Japantown, the Avenues or North Beach. If you don’t have a reservation, call to ask if there’s room at the bar, seats for walk-ins or any last-minute cancellations. Most SF rest­aurants have online reservations through their websites or OpenTable (www.opentable.com) , but if the system shows no availability, call the restaurant directly as some seats may be held for phone reservations and walk-ins. Places like French Laundry ( Click here ), Chez Panisse (Click here) and small, celebrated SF bistros like Frances ( Click here ) offer limited seating, so call a month ahead and take what’s available.

French Laundry Californian $$$ ( 707-944-2380; www.frenchlaundry.com; 6640 Washington St, Yountville; fixed-price menu $270; dinner daily, lunch Sat & Sun) A high-wattage culinary experience on par with the world’s best, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry is ideal for marking lifetime achievements – a 40th birthday, say, or a Nobel Prize. Book exactly two months (to the day) ahead: call at 10am sharp, or log onto www.opentable.com at precisely midnight. If you can’t score a reservation, console yourself at Keller’s nearby note-perfect French brasserie, Bouchon ( 707-944-8037; www.bouchonbistro.com; 6354 Washington St, Yountville; 11:30am-midnight) , which is (much) easier to book and makes perfect roast chicken and steak-frites.


San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Reserve ahead or take your chances in a restaurant-dense area like the Mission, Japantown, the Avenues or North Beach. If you don’t have a reservation, call to ask if there’s room at the bar, seats for walk-ins or any last-minute cancellations. Most SF rest­aurants have online reservations through their websites or OpenTable (www.opentable.com) , but if the system shows no availability, call the restaurant directly as some seats may be held for phone reservations and walk-ins. Places like French Laundry ( Click here ), Chez Panisse (Click here) and small, celebrated SF bistros like Frances ( Click here ) offer limited seating, so call a month ahead and take what’s available.

French Laundry Californian $$$ ( 707-944-2380; www.frenchlaundry.com; 6640 Washington St, Yountville; fixed-price menu $270; dinner daily, lunch Sat & Sun) A high-wattage culinary experience on par with the world’s best, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry is ideal for marking lifetime achievements – a 40th birthday, say, or a Nobel Prize. Book exactly two months (to the day) ahead: call at 10am sharp, or log onto www.opentable.com at precisely midnight. If you can’t score a reservation, console yourself at Keller’s nearby note-perfect French brasserie, Bouchon ( 707-944-8037; www.bouchonbistro.com; 6354 Washington St, Yountville; 11:30am-midnight) , which is (much) easier to book and makes perfect roast chicken and steak-frites.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

The company also launched Groupon Getaways, which put Groupon in competition with Priceline.com, Expedia, and other travel companies for leisure travel dollars; GrouponLive, which pitted Groupon against TicketMaster and other companies in the event ticketing market; and Groupon To Go, a food delivery service, a segment that it would take another five years and arguably a Covid-19 crisis to prove out the unit economics of. And that proof came from DoorDash, not Groupon To Go. And there was at least one more—restaurant reservations, a segment Groupon entered via acquisition of the company Savored. This segment already had an established, well-operating leader in OpenTable. And throughout much of this time, Groupon was acting without an effective CEO. After Andrew Mason stepped down as CEO in 2013, it was almost three years before a new full-time CEO was announced—Rich Williams, who came from Amazon. Groupon’s cofounder, Eric Lefkofsky, had stepped in as interim CEO on the firing of Mason.

S&P, 281t, 282t and pricing power flywheel, 194–197, 195f product innovation, 119–123 and Qwikster, 206–208 revenue, 97–102 rise of, 5 sell-offs of, 41–45 share price, 42f, 97f, 271f and streaming service, 212–214 sub forecasts of, 76 Network effects, 170 New York Times, 187 Nike, 173 NILE (Blue Nile), 23–24 No earnings, companies with, 242–254, 243t Obama, Michelle, 128 One Up on Wall Street (Lynch), 1, 2, 5, 77 OpenTable, 31 Orbitz, 90 Other Bets segment, of Google, 208 Outliers (Gladwell), 23, 205 Overature, 80 Overstretching, by Groupon, 30–31 Ownership, of mistakes, 219, 221 Page, Larry: and Burning Man, 220t as CEO of Google, 9, 157 as company founder, 145, 146, 204t, 208 innovation by, 209 and Eric Schmidt, 219 PageRank algorithm, 147 Pandora, 132–133, 166, 210 Past performance, of management teams, 222–223 PayPal, 80, 83, 205 PCLN (see Priceline [PCLN]) Peloton: during Covid-19 pandemic, 17, 303 fundamentals at, 261t Pet Valu, 17 Pets.com (IPET), 67, 68 PetSmart, 68 Pinterest: fundamentals at, 261t market cap of, 247t marketing potential on, 137 profitability of, 248–250, 249t as tech stock, 3 Pitt, Brad, 135 Pittman, Bob, 7, 8 Plated, 20 Platform companies: Amazon as, 119 Uber as, 159 valuation of, 241–242 Podcasts, on Spotify, 128, 131 Postmates, 185f Precision trap, 254–255 Priceline (PCLN): acquisitions of, 80 as competition, 31 fundamentals of, 92t, 95t management teams at, 210 marketing by, 168 revenue, 90–96 reverse stock split of, 28 share price, 92f, 94f total addressable market, 164–165 (See also Booking.com [BKNG]) “Priceline Stock: Dominant, Growing, and Undervalued,” 91 Pricing power flywheel, 192–197 Product innovation, 113–141, 295–296 Amazon vs. eBay, 179 Amazon Web Services, 115–119 defining, 114 of Facebook, 268 Google, 155 importance of getting right, 63 Netflix, 119–123, 273 Spotify, 128–133 Stitch Fix, 124–128 Twitter, 133–139 Uber, 275 Profit, 111 Profitability logic tests, 248–254 Psychology, stock-picking and, 16–17 “Pulling a Google,” 153, 164, 264 Purple Carrot, 20 Quarters: challenges with forecasting, 56 trading around, 74 QVC, 24 Qwikster, 121, 206–208 Rallies in the Valley, 44 Randolph, Marc, 204t, 220t Rascoff, Spencer, 188, 191, 209 Redfin (RDFN), 250–251, 251t Regulation, 308–310 Relevance, of lessons, 305–308 Research, conducting your own, 140 Return on investment (ROI), 147–148 Revenue, 75–111, 294–295 Amazon Web Services, 117f during Covid-19 pandemic, 105–107, 304–305 deceleration of, 110 eBay, 83–86 Facebook, 268 and growth curve initiatives, 102–105 importance of, 77–81 in Internet sector, 81–82 Netflix, 97–102, 272–273 Priceline, 90–96 and stock prices, 63–64 20% revenue “rule,” 107–109 Twitter, 135 Uber, 275 and valuation, 78f Yahoo!


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

In this one “transaction” with Kickstarter, I had the opportunity to engage in half a dozen different ways. The ability to rethink engagements is a hugely powerful technique for creating new ideas. Take restaurant reservations. Before OpenTable and other apps like it, we had to call each restaurant sequentially, wait for an answer, deal with often snooty gatekeepers, and negotiate a specific time to dine. It was a time-consuming and sometimes anxiety-inducing experience. By taking the process online, Open Table allows patrons to check out many restaurants faster, see what time slots are available, and book one without having to beg. Wherever there is a point of interaction, there is potential for innovation.

See Financial capitalism New School, Parsons, 240 New Tech City study, 181 New York, 73, 181–82, 238 Ng, Andrew, 198 Nike, 134–35, 145 Noma restaurant, 159 Novogratz, Jacqueline, 70 NY Creative Interns, 181, 204 Occupy Wall Street movement, 90, 151 Odyssey of the Mind game, 258–60 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 18–20, 27 Oldham, Andrew Loog, 8 Omidyar, Pam and Pierre, 138 Online e-commerce companies, 152, 162–66, 174, 204 Open-source philosophy, 36 OpenTable app, 98–99 Organic food, 154 Organizational creativity, 21–22, 28–33 Organizational knowledge mining, 78–83 Osher, John, 61 OSS. See Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Outdoor grill designs, 178–79 Outside-in thinking, 108–9 Outsourcing in decline of Hewlett-Packard, 225–26 financial capitalism and, 151, 153 loss of innovation by, 144 pivoting and, 179 reversing of, for manufacturing, 160–62 (see also Reshoring) risks of, 174–75 Packaging, Apple iMac, 188 Packard, David, 191 Page, Larry, 121, 207, 212–13 Parker, Sean, 214 Parsons The New School for Design, 16, 240 Participation Indie Capitalism and, 248 maker movement and, 153–56 Passion, pivoting and, 216–17 Past, mining of, 63–66 PayPal, 148, 163, 166, 206, 207, 235 PCs.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

Siri couldn’t know everything, especially not at first, so the founders divided the system—the tent—into six major domains. Those were restaurants, movies, events, weather, travel, and local search. The agents hanging around inside the tent were, of course, not actual people but computerized services that Siri could consult. There were forty-five of them, including Yelp, OpenTable, Rotten Tomatoes, StubHub, Allmenus, Citysearch, Google Maps, FlightStats, and Bing. The brilliance of this architecture was that it was modular and expandable. The programmers could keep inviting new agents inside the tent, and Siri would be able to talk to them. Besides setting up the fundamental organization for Siri, the team faced the difficult challenge of teaching her to fathom what users wanted.

The ontology also helped Siri to understand which external services to tap for different requests. The capabilities of multiple services might be needed to fulfill a single request. Imagine a user asking, “Where can I get the best lasagna in San Francisco?” Siri would check Allmenus to find out which restaurants have lasagna on the menu, Yelp to assess which places had the best reviews, and OpenTable to actually make the booking. A final element of creating Siri involved designing the user experience. While computer programs and apps may be a bit boring, they have helpful visual interfaces—pulldown menus and buttons—that guide users to what is possible to do. With a virtual assistant, the possibilities are much less explicitly defined.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

“No technology could solve for the fact that there was resistance among taxi companies and drivers for this very basic change to the way they ran their business,” Tom DePasquale says. He is not particularly proud of what happened next. In the summer of 2009, Taxi Magic was the object of a prolonged courtship by the Silicon Valley investor Bill Gurley, a partner at the premier venture capital firm Benchmark Capital. An original backer of the online reservation company OpenTable, Gurley, who stands six feet nine inches tall, had been looking for a similar car service that could impose simplicity and efficiency on the archaic world of ground transportation. George Arison recalls Gurley sitting in their Virginia office many times over the course of several weeks, poring over spreadsheets, talking to Partee about the taxi industry, and negotiating with DePasquale about investment terms.

He wanted to work with one investor in particular: Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, who had previously expressed interest in the seed round. Gurley had tracked Uber’s progress closely over the nine months since then, what the former Florida Gators basketball player calls “hanging around the rim.” Sensing the opportunity to bring transportation online in the same way OpenTable had consolidated restaurants and Zillow had aggregated real estate listings, Gurley was aggressive. He went on a bike ride with Chris Sacca in Truckee to talk about the company and drove up to San Francisco late one night to spend two hours with Kalanick at the W Hotel bar, hammering out prospective deal terms.


pages: 425 words: 112,220

The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

Instead, you’re content being in the muck and gain satisfaction from learning something new, not just ticking off to-do items. Rather than seeking a positive outcome, you’re exploring all options to satiate your own interests. The greatest venture investors I know are insanely curious. For instance, over the years that I have known Bill Gurley, the famed investor behind OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Zillow, and Uber, I have always been struck by how deep he’ll explore an interest despite a packed schedule. Whether learning about the transportation industry or oncology and urgent health care, Bill will explore an interest for many months or years without concern for when—or even if—the right investment opportunity will present itself.

(Hogan-Brun), 107 LinkedIn, 181, 258 listening, 321 lists, 374 living and dying, 26, 368–69, 373–75 Livingston, Jessica, 101–2 local maxima, 242, 243–44, 289 Loewenstein, George, 272 long-term goals, 26–27, 66, 299, 304, 350 Loup Ventures, 35 Louvre Pyramid, 200–202 Lyft, 191 Macdonald, Hugo, 37–38 Macworld, 295 Maeda, John, 107, 186, 308, 354 magic of engagement, 273 Making Ideas Happen (Belsky), 159, 190, 222 Managed by Q, 221 Marcus Aurelius, 39 market-product fit, 256 Marquet, David, 167 Mastercard, 275, 303–4 Match.com, 259 Maupassant, Guy de, 201 maximizers, 229, 284–85 McKenna, Luke, 217 McKinsey & Company, 72 Meerkat, 265 meetings, 44, 78, 176 Meetup, 168, 243–44 Mehta, Monica, 26 merchandising, internal, 158–60 metrics and measures, 28, 29, 297–99 microwave ovens, 325 middle, 1, 3–4, 7–8, 14–15, 20, 40, 209, 211, 375 volatility of, 1, 4, 6, 8, 12, 14–16, 21, 209 milestones, 25, 27, 31, 40 minimum viable product (MVP), 86, 186, 195, 252 Minshew, Kathryn, 72–73 misalignment, 153–55 mistakes, 324–25, 336 Mitterand, François, 201 Mix, 256 Mizrahi, Isaac, 324 mock-ups, 161–63 momentum, 29 money, raising, 30–31, 102 Monocle, 37 Morin, Dave, 273 motivation, 24 multilingualism, 107–9 Murphy, James, 92 Muse, The, 72, 73 Musk, Elon, 168, 273 Muslims, 302–3 Myspace, 89, 187–88, 349 mystery, 271–73 naivety, 308–9 Narayan, Shantanu, 289 narrative and storytelling, 40–42, 75, 87, 271 building, before product, 255–57 culture and, 134–36 National Day of Unplugging, 328 naysayers, 295 negotiation, 286–87 Negroponte, Nicholas, 107 Nest, 63 Netflix, 83–84, 126 networking, 138–39 networks, 258–61, 283, 284, 320–21 Newsweek, 38 New York Times, 63, 122, 275 Next, 141 99U Conference, 9–10, 26, 138, 167, 181, 197, 220, 221, 360 no, saying, 282–84, 285, 319, 371, 372 Noguchi, Isamu, 141 noise and signal, 320–21 Northwestern Mutual, 66 novelty, and utility, 240–41 NPR, 196 “NYC Deli Problem,” 174 Oates, Joyce Carol, 192 OBECALP, 59–61 obsession, 104–5, 229, 313, 326 Oculus, 350 Odeo, 36 office space, 140–41 openness, 308–9, 350 OpenTable, 79 opinions, 64, 305–7, 317 opportunities, 282–85, 319, 324, 325, 371 optimization, 8, 14–15, 16, 93–338 see also product, optimizing; self, optimizing; team, optimizing Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy (Sandberg and Grant), 39 options, managing, 284–85 organizational debt, 178–79 outlasting, 90 outsiders, 88, 105 Page, Larry, 60 Pain, 59 Paperless Post, 239 Paradox of Choice, The: Why More Is Less (Schwartz), 284 parallel processing, 33 parenting, 371, 372 Partpic, 120 passion, empathy and humility before, 248–50 path of least resistance, 85 patience, 78, 80–85, 196 cultural systems for, 81–82, 85 personal pursuit of, 84–85 structural systems for, 83–84, 85 “pebbles” and “boulders,” 182, 268 Pei, I.


pages: 475 words: 127,389

Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live by Nicholas A. Christakis

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atul Gawande, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, Columbian Exchange, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, death of newspapers, disinformation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, job satisfaction, lockdown, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, meta-analysis, New Journalism, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, school choice, security theater, social contagion, social distancing, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, trade route, Upton Sinclair, zoonotic diseases

People began to physically distance before being told or ordered to do so. For example, analyses of foot traffic in stores and bookings at restaurants across the world revealed that those began to decline a couple of weeks before collective NPI policies were implemented. The synchrony of the decline in restaurant bookings in OECD nations, seen on the online app OpenTable, was noteworthy. Each country had different distancing policies, different laws and cultures, and different rates of COVID-19; but restaurant bookings all fell to zero over the course of fifteen days as the epidemic struck.129 Parents also began to withdraw their children from school before official closings were announced.

Stadlebauer et al., “Seroconversion of a City: Longitudinal Monitoring of SARS-CoV-2 Seroprevalence in New York City,” medRxiv, June 29, 2020. 128 B. Carey and J. Glanz, “Travel from New York City Seeded Wave of U.S. Outbreaks,” New York Times, May 7, 2020. 129 “State of the Restaurant Industry,” OpenTable.com, July 18, 2020. 130 N. Musumeci and G. Fonrouge, “NYC Parents, Teachers Worried about Coronavirus Spread in Public Schools,” New York Post, March 13, 2020. 131 John of Ephesus, “John of Ephesus Describes the Justinianic Plague,” ed. Roger Pearse, Roger Pearse blog, May 10, 2017. 4. Grief, Fear, and Lies 1 G.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

By the time Gurley arrived at Benchmark, the venture capital firm where he had worked for the past seven years, marketplaces had consumed him. eBay, one of Benchmark’s most successful investments, was a natural marketplace, matching millions of buyers to sellers, all enabled by the rising power of the internet. So was Zillow, an eBay for real estate. OpenTable, one of Gurley’s earliest investments, matched people to restaurant reservations. Grubhub, similarly, connected people to food delivery. DogVacay—Airbnb for pooches—was self-explanatory. Nearly every one of Gurley’s investments relied on one basic thesis: the internet had brought with it a profound capability to meet the desires of existing, real-world people for experiences, places, and things.

See also Isaac, Mike on aggressive culture at Uber, 241 on Greyball, 247 infiltrates all-hands meeting, 279–80, 280n on Kalanick’s comments on India rape incident, 261 ouster of Kalanick and, 289, 295, 300, 304–6, 307 on self-driving software, 255 Nopa, 78 “North American Championship Series” (NACS), 138–39 Northridge, California, 16–25 Northrup Grumman, 332 Norton, Edward, 128, 193 Novick, Steve, xii, xiii, xvi Obama, Barack, xii, 35, 200, 224 administration of, 93, 115 Occupy Wall Street, 132 Ola, 148–49, 187, 257, 261 Omidyar, Pierre, 312 OpenTable, 65 Oregon, 113 the Oregonian, 243 Osborne, Ian, 127, 127–28 O’Sullivan, Dan, 204–5, 206, 207–10 Otto, 181–85, 233–35 Ottomotto, 181 Ovitz, Michael, 23–25, 26, 97, 189, 286 Page, Larry, 9, 34, 54, 96, 121, 140, 158, 178, 202 Google IPO and, 76–77 Kalanick and, 100–101, 105–10 Levandowski and, 180–82, 185, 232–35 Waymo v.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

Whatever the reasons, it was certainly more fun to be on this new side of the equation. 105 Page 105 Svane c06.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 9:08 P.M. S TA R TU P L A N D Amazing firms showed interest in us. Several top Silicon Valley firms wanted to meet with us, and three flew to Copenhagen over a period of ten days, to meet us on our home turf. Benchmark—which invested in OpenTable, Yelp, and Twitter, and many more—knew us from some of their portfolio companies. But Christoph Janz had, at an earlier point, also introduced us to Benchmark’s newest partner, Matt Cohler, and without our really realizing it, the partnership had been following our progress closely. One fine spring day Matt Cohler, who looked all of eighteen, flew to Copenhagen to meet us.


Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Some high-end cookware shops such as Williams- Sonoma (www.williams-sonoma.com) and Sur la Table (www.surlatable.com) also offer casual introductory cooking classes. EDIBLE REGIONAL SPECIALTIES San Francisco Bay Area For coupons and deals on coastal California restaurants, check Open Table (www.opentable.com), Blackboard Eats (http://blackboardeats.com), Restaurants.com (www.restaurants.com), Living Social (www.livingsocial.com), Groupon (www.groupon.com) and Yelp (www.yelp.com). Today, San Francisco’s adventurous eaters support the most award-winning chefs and restaurants per capita of any US city – five times more restaurants than New York, if anyone’s keeping score – and 25 farmers markets in San Francisco alone, more than any other US city.

Rooms in back are quietest. SF MEALS AND DEALS Hope you’re hungry – there are 10 times more restaurants per capita in San Francisco than in any other US city. Check out the recommendations below and foodie sites such as www.chowhound.com and http://sf.eater.com, then scan for deals at www.blackboardeats.com and www.opentable.com – and since SF’s top restaurants are quite small, reserve now. Prices are often more reasonable than you might expect for organic, sustainable fare, though you might notice some restaurants now tack on a 4% surcharge to cover city-mandated healthcare for SF food workers – a tacky way to pass along basic business costs, especially for upscale restaurants.

French Laundry CALIFORNIAN $$$ ( 707-944-2380; www.frenchlaundry.com; 6640 Washington St; prix fixe incl service charge $270; dinner, lunch Sat & Sun) The pinnacle of California dining, Thomas Keller’s French Laundry is epic, a high-wattage culinary experience on par with the world’s best. Book two months ahead at 10am sharp, or log onto OpenTable.com precisely at midnight. Avoid tables before 7pm; first-service seating moves faster than the second – sometimes too fast. Bouchon FRENCH $$$ ( 707-944-8037; www.bouchonbistro.com; 6534 Washington St; mains $17-36; 11:30am-12:30am) At celeb-chef Thomas Keller’s French brasserie, everything from food to decor is so authentic, from zinc bar to white-aproned waiters, you’d swear you were in Paris – even the Bermuda-shorts-clad Americans look out of place.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

“He says, ‘I don’t want to hear from you until this date. And on this date I’ll ask you for terms, and I want you to tell me your terms. Then I’ll come see you.’” Benchmark Capital was ready to give Kalanick its terms. The firm had successfully invested in Internet “marketplaces” like eBay and OpenTable, and it saw Uber as a potential successor. “We had an internal thesis that other industries might benefit from a network layer on top of them,” says Benchmark’s Gurley. “And as we started discussing it, one of the things we thought about was transportation.” Benchmark concluded that the taxi industry was a bad bet because of its arcane rules, fixed pricing, and concentrated ownership.


pages: 561 words: 157,589

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

For Google to remind me to buy currants the next time I’m at my local supermarket, it has to know where I am at all times, keep track of a particular location I’ve asked for, and bring up the reminder in that context. For Siri to make me a reservation at Camino, it needs to know that Camino is a restaurant in Oakland, and that it is open tonight, and it must allow conversations between machines, so that my phone can lay claim to a table from the restaurant’s reservation system via a service like OpenTable. And then it may call other services, either on my devices or in the cloud, to add the reservation to my calendar or to notify friends, so that yet another agent can remind all of us when it is time to leave for our dinner date. And then there are the alerts that I didn’t ask for, like Google’s warnings: “Leave now to get to the airport on time. 25 minute delay on the Bay Bridge.”

The participants in many of those platforms are individuals and businesses operating in the real world of goods and services: the host offering a room on Airbnb, the driver offering a ride on Lyft or Uber, all entrepreneurs of a sort. The iPhone and Android app stores don’t just offer products from Apple and Google; they are platforms for independent developers. Facebook and YouTube depend on both their creators and their consumers. Search engines, Yelp, OpenTable, and other similar sites succeed to the extent that they drive traffic to other businesses, not just to themselves. If they are to break free from the mistakes of the failed philosophy of current financial markets, which too often hollow out the real economy and increase inequality, these platform companies must commit themselves to the health and sustainability of their partner ecosystems.


Pocket New York City Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, East Village, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, ghettoisation, machine readable, messenger bag, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, starchitect, the High Line, urban renewal, walking around money

The trucks ply various routes, stopping in designated parking zones throughout the city – namely around Union Sq, Midtown and the Financial District. Our favourites are Big Gay Ice Cream Truck (www.twitter.com/biggayicecream), Korilla BBQ (www.twitter.com/korillabbq) and Calexico Cart (www.twitter.com/calexiconyc). Top Tips › Reserve a table at a number of restaurants around the city using Open Table (www.opentable.com). Best for Old-School NYC Katz’s Delicatessen Classic pastrami on rye is the name of the game at this New York stalwart and tourist haven. (Click here) Zabar’s New York Jewish charm fills the knish-tinged air on the Upper West Side. (Click here) William Greenberg Desserts Sweet treats à la New York yenta await: hamantaschen (you’ll see) and the best black-and-white cookies around.


pages: 272 words: 66,985

Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Bluma Zeigarnik, Cal Newport, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, functional fixedness, game design, imposter syndrome, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Parkinson's law, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, side hustle, SimCity, Skype, TED Talk, twin studies, Zipcar

This speaks to a trap we increasingly face: bringing new devices into our lives without first questioning their value. Clayton Christensen, a professor at Harvard Business School, developed a useful way of assessing the devices in your life: question what “jobs” you “hire” devices to do for you. Every product we buy should do a job for us—we hire Kleenex to blow our nose; Uber to get from one place to another; OpenTable to book a table at a restaurant; Match.com to find a partner. We hire our phones to do a lot of these “jobs,” maybe more than any other product we own. We hire them to be an alarm clock, camera, timepiece, GPS navigator, video game console, email and messaging machine, boarding pass, music player, radio, subway pass, datebook, map, and so much more.


Frommer's San Francisco 2012 by Matthew Poole, Erika Lenkert, Kristin Luna

airport security, Albert Einstein, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, El Camino Real, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, Maui Hawaii, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, off-the-grid, place-making, Port of Oakland, post-work, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, Works Progress Administration, young professional

• Best for Impressing Clients: Show your business associates you’ve got class—and know what’s hip with the foodies these days—by reserving a table at the Financial District’s Wayfare Tavern, 558 Sacramento St. ( 415/772-9060). E-Reservations Want to book your reservations online? Go to www.opentable.com, where you can save seats at restaurants in San Francisco and the rest of the Bay Area in real time. • Best Romantic Spot: Anyone who loves classic French cooking will be seduced at Fleur de Lys, 777 Sutter St. ( 415/673-7779), under the rich burgundy-tented canopy that swathes the elegant room in romance.

Hint: If you can’t get a reservation, try walking in—no-shows are rare but possible, especially during lunch on rainy days. Reservations are accepted 2 months in advance of the date, starting at 10am. Anticipate hitting redial many times. Also, insiders tell me that fewer people call on weekends, so you have a better chance at getting beyond the busy signal. You can also try www.opentable.com, though online reservations are still taken 2 months in advance. 6640 Washington St. (at Creek St.). 707/944-2380. www.frenchlaundry.com. Reservations required. Dress code: no jeans, shorts, or tennis shoes; men should wear jackets; ties optional. 9-course tasting menu (including vegetarian option) $250.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

This is because most retailers charge the same price for all transactions, regardless of whether they involve credit, debit, or cash, or whether the charge goes to a high-fee card like Amex or a lower-fee Visa, MasterCard, or Discover. The retailer might like to charge 3 percent more for high-commission card sales, but they don’t; instead, they charge a “blended” price to all customers.16 Think credit card companies are the only ones? Think again. The internet has empowered dozens of intermediaries to pull the same stunt: OpenTable, the online reservation platform, gives cash rewards to diners, but they don’t see an extra charge from restaurants. Expedia, the online travel booking platform, hands out reward points, but your flight costs the same whether you book through them or directly on an airline’s website—the list goes on and on.


Frommer's New York City Day by Day by Hilary Davidson

Berlin Wall, buttonwood tree, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donald Trump, East Village, glass ceiling, Saturday Night Live

Now it’s an institution—and lasts for several weeks. Some restaurants offer prix-fixe menus year-round or have discounted menus on certain days or times. For example, the 21 Club (21 W 52nd St., btwn Fifth & Sixth aves; (y 212/ 582-7200) has a $37 prix fixe if you’re seated by 6:30pm. Check out www.opentable.com or www.nycvisit.com for more information on Restaurant Week and participating restaurants. Once a speakeasy, the 21 Club has a legendary Prohibition-era wine cellar. outside of Astoria, but this lovely spot is a great find. Dishes, like the pan-seared sole, are lightly treated with olive oil and lemon to enhance the natural flavors. 197 Franklin St.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

We need to look forward. Most likely we will get the first clues in sentiment readings and high-frequency indicators such as new claims for unemployment insurance benefits, and eventually, in spending and investment data. Jerry is looking for anything else with real-time data. Many of the new apps such as OpenTable and Airbnb have this type of data. We can also look at auto sales, hotel bookings, and truck loadings. The credit card data we’ve been buying should also be helpful to see how consumption is changing. We need to find more of these real-time indicators. We are meeting to talk about what to do.


pages: 286 words: 87,401

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Founded August 1997, Scotts Valley, CA PAYPAL PayPal.com PayPal operates a worldwide online payments system that supports online money transfers and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. Founded December 1998, Palo Alto, CA PRICELINE Priceline.com Priceline provides online travel and related services to consumers and local partners. Its primary brands are Booking.com, priceline.com, agoda.com, KAYAK, Rentalcars.com, and OpenTable. Founded 1997, Stamford, CT ROCKET MORTGAGE RocketMortgage.com Through the Rocket Mortgage website or mobile app, users can upload financial details and get a mortgage loan decision in minutes. Quicken Loans launched Rocket Mortgage in November 2015, Detroit, MI SALESFORCE.com Salesforce.com Salesforce.com provides cloud-based applications for sales, service, and marketing, as well as enabling partners to offer and run their own solutions on the Salesforce Platform.


pages: 294 words: 81,292

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Speech recognition is the art of translating the spoken word to text (not to be confused with NLP, extracting meaning from written words). After Siri translates your query into text, its three other main talents come into play: its NLP facility, searching a vast knowledge database, and interacting with Internet search providers, such as OpenTable, Movietickets, and Wolfram|Alpha. IBM's Watson is kind of a Siri on steroids, and a champion at NLP. In February 2011, it employed both brain-derived and brain-inspired systems to achieve an impressive victory against human contestants on Jeopardy! Like chess champion computer Deep Blue, Watson is IBM’s way of showing off its computing know-how while moving the ball down the field for AI.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

At the time, we did about $100 million in annual revenue, and were on the path toward our initial public offering (IPO), yet we weren’t a household name. That’s because Twilio does not sell products to consumers. We sell a service to software developers that lets their apps communicate with voice, SMS, email, and more. We have amazing customers—Uber, WhatsApp, Lyft, Zendesk, OpenTable, Nordstrom, Nike. But our software hides under the covers, inside websites and mobile apps. In fact, you’ve undoubtedly used Twilio, without knowing it, if you’re a customer of any of those companies or thousands more like them. So having committed half a million dollars to reserve the billboard for a year (yeah, even billboard real estate in the Bay Area is overpriced!)


A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

The meeting, which we held on January 24, 2015, featured spirited discussions on a wide range of topics. The attendees, seventeen in all, gave formal presentations on gene therapy and germline enhancement, on existing regulations that governed genetically modified products, and on the nitty-gritty details of CRISPR. Even more interesting than these presentations, in my opinion, were the group’s open-table deliberations about the future of gene editing. These conversations were enthusiastic and creative, covering topics I had previously grappled with only on my own. As we began discussing authorship of a white paper summarizing our conclusions, we debated who our target audience should be and what kind of outcome we were hoping to achieve.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

I address the well-known foundations of that architecture in chapter 5, but here I want to talk about the rough edges where Google is expanding its ambitions deeper into Encyclopédie territory: a sweeping new ontological project called KnowledgeGraph. Where Siri depends on a relatively small set of curated data taxonomies (e.g., data from OpenTable might include restaurant names, phone numbers, calendar availabilities, and so on), KnowledgeGraph attempts to create similar mappings on the full swath of data available to Google from its search crawlers. KnowledgeGraph is an open ontology, drawing information from “controlled” sources like Wikipedia that are primarily human-edited, but also from the unstructured data of all the web pages Google scans.37 The KnowledgeGraph approach echoes both Diderot and his antecedents, particularly the universalist dream of Leibniz’s mathesis universalis.


pages: 1,540 words: 400,759

Fodor's California 2014 by Fodor's

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, big-box store, Blue Bottle Coffee, California gold rush, car-free, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Donner party, Downton Abbey, East Village, El Camino Real, Frank Gehry, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Kickstarter, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, Mikhail Gorbachev, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, young professional

For popular restaurants, book as far ahead as you can (often 30 days), and reconfirm as soon as you arrive. (Large parties should always call ahead to check the reservations policy.) We mention dress only when men are required to wear a jacket or a jacket and tie. Online reservation services make it easy to book a table before you even leave home. OpenTable covers many California cities. Contacts OpenTable. | www.opentable.com. Wines, Beer, and Spirits Throughout the state, most famously in the Napa and Sonoma valleys, you can visit wineries, many of which have tasting rooms and offer tours. Microbreweries are an emerging trend in the state’s cities and in some rural areas in northern California.

Classics like saag paneer (spinach with Indian cheese), aloo gobhi (potato, cauliflower, and spices), and bengan bartha (roasted eggplant with onions and spices) are also excellent. The chef wants to keep his clientele around for the long haul, too, and puts a little “heart healthy” icon next to some of the menu items. On Friday and Saturday nights famished patrons overflow onto the sidewalk as they wait for open tables. If you try to linger over a mango lassi or an order of the excellent kheer (rice pudding) on one of these nights, you’ll probably be hurried along by a waiter. For better service, come on a slower weeknight or for lunch. | Average main: $16 | 233 Fillmore St., Lower Haight | 94117 | 415/626–1628.


pages: 461 words: 106,027

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

The bootstrapped SaaS world may not have been affected by the pandemic as much as other industries, but we saw second-order effects appearing quickly. For example, you may not be affected by a temporary closure of bars and restaurants directly. Still, if you're running a business that sells to these establishments or those they rely on, you'll see some changes in the future. For SaaS businesses like OpenTable, this happened very quickly, as they saw bookings going down 50% and more within days. This development had a trickle-down effect into many adjacent industries, in the same sector and beyond. Online Sports Betting Platforms, a kind of business that did well in prior recessions, found themselves in a tight spot at the beginning of the pandemic.


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Almost all figured that Amazon’s best days were behind it. The company reached incredible levels of attrition in 2002 and 2003. “The number of employees at that point other than Jeff who thought he could turn it into an eighty-billion-dollar company—that’s a short list,” says Doug Boake, who departed for the Silicon Valley startup OpenTable. “He just never stopped believing. He never blinked once.” They all had their reasons. David Risher left to teach at the University of Washington’s business school. Joel Spiegel wanted to spend more time with his three teenage kids before they left home. Mark Britto wanted to get back to the Bay Area.


pages: 309 words: 114,984

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Before I go any further, it’s important that you understand that I am all for the wiring of healthcare. I bought my first computer in 1984, back when one inserted and ejected floppy disks so often (“Insert MacWrite Disk 2”) that the machine felt more like an infuriating toaster than a sparkling harbinger of a new era. Today, I can’t live without my MacBook Pro, iPad, iPhone, Facetime, Twitter, OpenTable, and Evernote. I even blog and tweet. In other words, I am a typical electronically overendowed American. And healthcare needs to be disrupted. Despite being staffed with (mostly) well-trained and committed doctors and nurses, our system delivers evidence-based care only about half the time, kills a jumbo jet’s worth of patients each day from medical mistakes, and is bankrupting the country.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Such automated processes have long guided our planes, run the physical backbone of the Internet, and interpreted our GPSes. In short, they improve the quality of our daily lives in ways both noticeable and not. But where do we call a halt? Similar protocols also influence— invisibly—not only the route we take to a new restaurant, but which restaurant Google, Yelp, OpenTable, or Siri recommends to us. They might help us fi nd reviews of the car we drive. Yet choosing a car, or even a restaurant, is not as straightforward as optimizing an engine or routing a drive. Does the recommendation engine take into account, say, whether the restaurant or car company gives its workers health benefits or maternity leave?


Cable Cowboy by Mark Robichaux

AOL-Time Warner, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Bear Stearns, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, corporate raider, cotton gin, estate planning, fear of failure, financial engineering, Irwin Jacobs, junk bonds, Michael Milken, mutually assured destruction, oil rush, profit maximization, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Telecommunications Act of 1996, vertical integration

., 28–30 McNealy, Scott, 222, 223 Media One, 250 –252 Merrill Lynch, 83 Met zenbaum, Howard, 145, 160 Microsoft: Comcast investment by, 209–211, 214, 231 interest in TCI, 199, 200, 227, 228 Japanese holdings of, 275 MSN venture, 157, 220 technology standards and, 216, 217, 222–223 Microwave technology, 12, 51, 52, 54, 74, 240 Milken, Michael, 90, 198–199 Monopoly status: of Bell Atlantic, 142 in Bell Atlantic -TCI merger, 144 of cable companies, 62, 64, 74, 103, 111, 118, 120, 128, 184 of Microsoft, 216 of TCI, 135, 136, 142 Motion Picture Association of America, 55 Motorola, 259–260 Movie Channel, 82, 109, 146 Movies: on cable, 55 on HBO, 50, 52 pay channels for, 112 rights to, 56, 88, 90, 146 Movie theaters, control of, 83 MSN, 157, 223, 276 MSNBC, 130, 220 MT V, 61, 77, 82, 87– 88, 148, 174 Multivision, 107 Murdoch, Rupert, 90, 130, 182–192, 231, 260, 276, 277, 282 Must carry requirement, 129 Naify, Marshal, 82 Naify, Robert, 82 Nashville Network, 148 National Association of Theater Owners, 50 National Cable Television Association, 11, 31, 73, 108 National Digital Television Center, 125, 240, 241, 249 National League of Cities, 73 National Telef ilm Associates (NTA), 33 –37, 39 NBC network, 88, 118 Negative-option billing, 112 Newhouse Broadcasting, 60 News, on cable T V, 58, 88. See also CNN 307 9486_Robichaux_bm.f.qxd 8/28/02 9:55 AM Page 308 308 Index News Corporation, 130, 182–192, 231, 260, 273, 275 New York Times, 62 NFL broadcast rights, 86, 91, 191 Nickelodeon, 58, 148 Noski, Charles, 262 O’Brien, Dan, 191 Open Cable, 217, 221 OpenT V, 277 Padden, Preston, 183, 185, 189 Paramount Pictures, 133 –136, 158, 180 Parsons, Dick, 255, 258 Parsons, Ed, 9–10 Parsons, Grace, 9–10 Pay T V services, 16, 56 Personal communications service (PCS), 157 Piracy, of cable channels, 107 Playboy Channel, 86 Priceline, 266 Prime Network, 60 Primestar, 127, 186 –188, 190 –192, 276 Programming: for DBS, 185 fees for, 86 – 89, 173 –174 original, by cable channels, 92 ownership of, 59–61, 85– 86, 133, 158 Public -access channels, 16 Public Broadcasting System, 110 QUBE, 63, 64, 76, 77, 124 Quello, James, 131, 132 QVC Network, 93, 111, 112, 115, 132–136, 158, 214, 260 Rasmussen, Bill, 57–58 Rattner, Steven, 207, 213 Redstone, Sumner, 91, 134 –136, 145–147, 158, 175, 180 Regulation: dismantling of, 72–74 of early cable T V systems, 15–16, 54 –55 Liberty spin-off and, 112–113, 117 of ownership, 79 of rates, 128, 131, 149–150 reevaluation of, 95–96, 102–111, 117–121 Rent-a-citizen, 65–66 Resorts International, 48 Rigas, John, 126, 278 Ritchie, Dan, 82, 195, 196, 200 –201, 207, 226 Road Runner, 210 Roberts, Brian: in AT&T deal, 236, 270, 271, 276 Gates and, 208–215, 218–219, 227 Media One bid by, 250 –252 in QVC deal, 133 TCI and, 199, 200 Roberts, Ralph, 85, 133, 199, 200, 212–214, 219 Robertson, Pat, 58, 60, 190, 191 Rogers Cablesystems, 231, 235 Romrell, Larry, 12, 40, 79, 138, 170, 194, 198, 243, 244, 248, 284 Ross, Steve, 1, 41, 63, 82 Salt Lake City Tribune, 230 –231 Sammons Communications, 62 Satellite Home Viewer Act, 107 Satellite technology, 50 –52, 56, 57, 74, 125, 276 –277.


User Friendly by Cliff Kuang, Robert Fabricant

A Pattern Language, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bill Atkinson, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, computer age, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, data science, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, en.wikipedia.org, fake it until you make it, fake news, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, Google Glasses, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Dyson, John Markoff, Jony Ive, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Norbert Wiener, Paradox of Choice, planned obsolescence, QWERTY keyboard, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, RFID, scientific management, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skinner box, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tacit knowledge, Tesla Model S, three-martini lunch, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vannevar Bush, women in the workforce

The beauty of this approach is that it only takes one outlier to give you a fresh perspective, but you have to follow up and engage the outlier one-on-one (without judgment) to better understand how his or her needs or motivations veer from the norm. Perhaps this person has evolved a different mental model for celebrating special occasions with family or entertaining clients that could be a valuable insight for OpenTable, LinkedIn, or American Express. Designers generally prefer to build on existing behaviors we can observe in the world today—even if they might seem pretty unusual at first—rather than potential future behaviors dreamed up by marketing executives. Are people likely to order their groceries by talking to a fridge?


pages: 712 words: 212,334

Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe

always be closing, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, East Village, estate planning, facts on the ground, Laura Poitras, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical residency, moral panic, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norman Mailer, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, tech billionaire, TED Talk, tontine, Upton Sinclair

$12 million home: Tuija Catalano to Rich Hillis of the San Francisco Planning Commission, re: 2921 Vallejo Street, Oct. 16, 2017 (citing a complaint by Marianna and her husband, James Frame, in a property dispute). chain of restaurants: “Hedge Fund Tosses Family That Controls Maker of OxyContin,” Wall Street Journal, March 7, 2019; “On Hospitality with Jeff Lefcourt of the Smith and Jane,” OpenTable, April 2, 2016. £26 million home: “Homes Gossip,” Evening Standard, July 20, 2010. financing company called Rooks Nest: “How Family Fortune Bankrolls London Arts,” Evening Standard, March 19, 2018. “non-profit incubator”: Details on Marissa Sackler are from “Marissa Sackler: Busy Bee,” W, May 19, 2014.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Rough Guides

3D printing, Airbnb, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bonfire of the Vanities, Broken windows theory, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crack epidemic, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, greed is good, haute couture, haute cuisine, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, junk bonds, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Lyft, machine readable, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, paper trading, Ponzi scheme, post-work, pre–internet, rent stabilization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Scaled Composites, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, young professional

The $325 nine-course prix fixe is a series of small plates that seek to transcend the standard dining experience; whimsical ideas along the lines of “Pearls and oysters”, which pairs oysters with tapioca and caviar, should give you some idea – and it all works. Menu changes regularly; reservations accepted by phone (or on opentable.com) two months prior to the day, and jackets are required for men. Mon–Thurs 5.30–10pm, Fri–Sun 11.30am–­1.30pm & 5.30–10pm. Tom’s Restaurant 2880 Broadway, at 112th St 212 864 6137, tomsrestaurant.net; subway #1 to 110th St; map. The greasy-spoon diner – celebrated in song by Suzanne Vega and whose exterior doubled for Monk’s in Seinfeld – is no great shakes food-wise, but the prices almost make up for the quality.


Western USA by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Biosphere 2, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donner party, East Village, edge city, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mars Rover, Maui Hawaii, off grid, off-the-grid, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supervolcano, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

French Laundry CALIFORNIAN $$$ ( 707-944-2380; www.frenchlaundry.com; 6640 Washington St, Yountville; fixed-price menu $270; 11:30am-2:30pm Sat & Sun, 5:30-9pm daily) A high-wattage culinary experience on par with the world’s best, French Laundry is ideal for marking lifetime achievements. Book exactly two months ahead: call at 10am (or try OpenTable.com at midnight). If you can’t score a table, console yourself at Keller’s nearby note-perfect French brasserie Bouchon; or with chocolate cake at Bouchon Bakery. SONOMA VALLEY More casual, less commercial than Napa, Sonoma Valley has 70 wineries around Hwy 12 – and unlike Napa, most welcome picnicking.


pages: 769 words: 397,677

Frommer's California 2007 by Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert, Matthew Richard Poole

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, indoor plumbing, Iridium satellite, Joan Didion, Maui Hawaii, retail therapy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration

Hint: If you can’t get a reservation, try walking in—no-shows are rare but possible, especially during lunch on rainy days. Reservations are accepted 2 months in advance of the date, starting at 10am. Anticipate hitting redial many times for the best chance. Also, insiders tell me that fewer people call on weekends, so you have a better chance at getting beyond the busy signal. You can now also try www.opentable.com, though online reservations are still done 2 months in advance). 6640 Washington St. (at Creek St.), Yountville. & 707/944-2380. www.frenchlaundry.com. Reservations required. Dress code: No jeans, shorts or tennis shoes; men should wear jackets; ties optional. 9-course chef’s tasting menu or 9-course vegetable menu $210, including service.


USA Travel Guide by Lonely, Planet

1960s counterculture, active transport: walking or cycling, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big-box store, bike sharing, Biosphere 2, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Day of the Dead, desegregation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, edge city, El Camino Real, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, glass ceiling, global village, Golden Gate Park, Guggenheim Bilbao, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information trail, interchangeable parts, intermodal, jitney, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, machine readable, Mars Rover, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, Quicken Loans, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, supervolcano, the built environment, The Chicago School, the High Line, the payments system, three-martini lunch, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

French Laundry CALIFORNIAN $$$ ( 707-944-2380; www.frenchlaundry.com; 6640 Washington St, Yountville; fixed-price menu $270; 11:30am-2:30pm Sat & Sun, 5:30-9pm daily) A high-wattage culinary experience on par with the world’s best, French Laundry is ideal for marking lifetime achievements. Book exactly two months ahead: call at 10am (or try OpenTable.com at midnight). If you can’t score a table, console yourself at Keller’s nearby note-perfect French brasserie Bouchon; or with chocolate cake at Bouchon Bakery. SONOMA VALLEY More casual, less commercial than Napa, Sonoma Valley has 70 wineries around Hwy 12 – and unlike Napa, most welcome picnicking.


Lessons-Learned-in-Software-Testing-A-Context-Driven-Approach by Anson-QA

anti-pattern, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, finite state, framing effect, full employment, independent contractor, information retrieval, job automation, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, Ralph Nader, Richard Feynman, side project, Silicon Valley, statistical model, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, web application

., a boundary case) of a variable, a promised benefit, an allegedly compatible device, or any other promise or statement that can be proved true or false. Each row is a test case. Each cell shows which test case tests which items. Table 3.2: Specification Traceability Matrix Open table as spreadsheet SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC ITEM 1 ITEM 2 ITEM 3 ITEM 4 ITEM 5 ITEM 6 Test Case 1 X Test Case 2 X X X X X X Test Case 3 X X X Test Case 4 X X X 61 Table 3.2: Specification Traceability Matrix Open table as spreadsheet Test Case 5 SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC SPEC ITEM 1 ITEM 2 ITEM 3 ITEM 4 ITEM 5 ITEM 6 X X X Test Case 6 TOTALS X 3 2 X 3 3 1 6 If a feature changes, you can see quickly which tests must be reanalyzed and probably rewritten.

Table 3.3 is a combination test table that achieves "complete testing," when the criterion of completeness is that every value of every variable must appear in at least one test. Table 3.3: All Singles—All Values are Represented at Least Once Open table as spreadsheet VARIABLE 1 VARIABLE 2 VARIABLE 3 Test Case 1 A (Win 2K) I (Netscape 4.73) V (Disk option 1) Test Case 2 B (Win 95) J (Netscape 6) W (Disk option 2) Test Case 3 C (Win 98) K (IE 5.5) X (Disk option 3) Test Case 4 D (Win 98 SP1) L (IE 5.0) Y (Disk option 4) 63 Table 3.3: All Singles—All Values are Represented at Least Once Open table as spreadsheet Test Case 5 VARIABLE 1 VARIABLE 2 VARIABLE 3 E (Win ME) M (Opera 5.12) Z (Disk option 5) This approach is often used in configuration testing to reduce the number of configurations under test to a manageable number.

This is a much more thorough standard than all singles, but it still reduces the number of test cases from 125 (all combinations) to 25, a big savings. Table 3.4: All Pairs—All Pairs of Values are Represented at Least Once (25 Instead of 125 Tests) Open table as spreadsheet VARIABLE 1 VARIABLE 2 VARIABLE 3 Test Case 1 A I V Test Case 2 A J W Test Case 3 A K X Test Case 4 A L Y Test Case 5 A M Z Test Case 6 B I W Test Case 7 B J Z 64 Table 3.4: All Pairs—All Pairs of Values are Represented at Least Once (25 Instead of 125 Tests) Open table as spreadsheet VARIABLE 1 VARIABLE 2 VARIABLE 3 Test Case 8 B K Y Test Case 9 B L V Test Case 10 B M X Test Case 11 C I X Test Case 12 C J Y Test Case 13 C K Z Test Case 14 C L W Test Case 15 C M V Test Case 16 D I Y Test Case 17 D J X Test Case 18 D K V Test Case 19 D L Z Test Case 20 D M W Test Case 21 E I Z Test Case 22 E J V Test Case 23 E K W Test Case 24 E L X Test Case 25 E M Y To show how to create an all-pairs test set, we'll work through a simpler example, step by step.


pages: 996 words: 180,520

Nagios: System and Network Monitoring, 2nd Edition by Wolfgang Barth

business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, RFC: Request For Comment, web application

To set up a connection to the database nagdb as the user nagios, both parameters are passed on to the plugin: nagios@linux:nagios/libexec$ ./check_mysql -H dbhost -u nagios -d nagdb Uptime: 19031 Threads: 2 Questions: 80 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 12 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 6 Queries per second avg: 0.004 In contrast to PostgreSQL, with MySQL you can also make contact without establishing a connection to a specific database: nagios@linux:nagios/libexec$ ./check_mysql -H dbhost Uptime: 19271 Threads: 1 Questions: 84 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 12 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 6 Queries per second avg: 0.004 With a manual connection to the database, with mysql, you can then subsequently change to the desired database, using the MySQL command use: user@linux:~$ mysql -u nagios mysql> use nagdb; Database changed mysql> With this plugin, a subsequent database change is not possible.

/check_multi -f contrib/check_multi.cmd MULTI CRITICAL - 35 plugins checked, 7 critical (network_rsync, proc_acp id, proc_httpd, system_syslog, system_users, nagios_system, dummy_critical), 2 warning (nagios_tac, dummy_warning), 2 unknown (network_if_ethl, dummy_unknown), 24 ok [1] network_ping PING OK - Packet loss = 0%, RTA = 0.06 ms [2] network_interfaces OK: host 'localhost', interfaces up: 6, down: 0, dormant: 0, excluded: 0, unused: 0 [3] network_if_eth1 Either a valid snmpkey key (-k) or a ifDescr (-d) must be provided) ... [16] system_load OK - load average: 0.89, 0.71, 0.71 [17] system_mail TCP OK - 0.000 second response time on port 25 [18] system_mailqueue OK: mailq is empty [19] system_mysql Uptime: 5573 Threads: 1 Questions: 140 Slow queries : 0 Opens: 137 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 19 Queries per second avg : 0.025 [20] system_ntp NTP OK: Offset −0.07118669868 secs [21] system_portmapper OK: RPC program portmapper version 2 udp running [22] system_rootdisk DISK OK - free space: / 287 MB (31% inode=81%); [23] system_ssh SSH OK - OpenSSH_4.3p2 Debian-9 (protocol 2.0) ... |MULTI::check_multi::plugins=35 time=10.92 network_interfaces::check_ifs tatus:: up=6,down=0,dormant=0,excluded=0,unused=0 system_load::check_load :: load1=0.890;5.000;10.000;0; load5=0.710;4.000;8.000;0; load15=0.710;3. 000;6.000;0; system_mail:: check_tcp::time=0.000225s;;;0.000000;10.000000 system_mailqueue::check_mailq:: unsent=0;2;4;0 system_ntp::check_ntp::off set=−0.071187s;60.000000;120.000000; system_rootdisk:: check_disk:: /=620M B;909;937;0;957 system_swap::check_swap::swap=3906MB;0;0;0;3906 system_u sers:: check_users::users=25;5;10;0 nagios.org_dns::check_dns::time=0.039 187s;;; 0.000000 nagios.org_http::check_http::time=0.674044s;;;0.000000 s ize=21530B;;;0 The first line of the output—starting with MULTI CRITICAL—summarizes all the executed checks.


pages: 280 words: 40,881

JQuery UI by Eric Sarrion

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Firefox, Ruby on Rails, web application

This menus object (described below) consists of the following properties: oldHeader jQuery class object corresponding to the menu that is closing. oldContent jQuery class object corresponding to the content menu that is closing. newHeader jQuery class object corresponding to the menu that is opening. newContent jQuery class object corresponding to the content menu that is opening. Table 3-3 describes the options for managing menu events. Table 3-3. Options for managing menu events Option Function options.change The change (event, menus) method is called when selecting a menu (either manually or by the accordion ("activate") method), after the animation has taken place (the selected menu was opened and the previously open menu was closed).


Nagios: System and Network Monitoring by Wolfgang Barth

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Debian, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, RFC: Request For Comment, web application

To set up a connection to the database nagdb as the user nagios, both parameters are passed on to the plugin: nagios@linux:nagios/libexec$ ./check_mysql -H dbhost -u nagios -d nagdb Uptime: 19031 Threads: 2 Questions: 80 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 12 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 6 Queries per second avg: 0.004 In contrast to PostgreSQL, with MySQL you can also make contact without establishing a connection to a specific database: nagios@linux:nagios/libexec$ ./check_mysql -H dbhost Uptime: 19271 Threads: 1 Questions: 84 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 12 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 6 Queries per second avg: 0.004 With a manual connection to the database, with mysql, you can then subsequently change to the desired database, using the MySQL command use: 120 6.9 Monitoring LDAP Directory Services user@linux:˜$ mysql -u nagios mysql> use nagdb; Database changed mysql> With this plugin, a subsequent database change is not possible.


pages: 193 words: 47,808

The Flat White Economy by Douglas McWilliams

access to a mobile phone, banking crisis, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer age, correlation coefficient, Crossrail, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, George Gilder, hiring and firing, income inequality, informal economy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, loadsamoney, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, smart cities, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, vertical integration, working-age population, zero-sum game

Figure 4.1: Total number of UK coffee shops by outlet and by type with forecasts6 (Source: Allegra Strategies Ltd) Coffee shops represent both a statement of lifestyle for the Flat Whiters and a focal point for creativity. Trendies pride themselves on being coffee connoisseurs, while the coffee shops with their free Wi-Fi and open table arrangements act as ideal meeting places for the creative processes required by Flat White industries. Throughout the day and much of the night, the sight of young people absorbed in silver MacBook screens besides a paper cup is common throughout the East End. Flat Whiters often have fairly cramped accommodation.


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

It can be hard to figure out a complaining person’s intent—are the complaints legitimate, or is the complainer playing games? What you can do, however, is keep good metrics on the client who says something negative about you. If a customer posts on Yelp that he had a terrible experience at a restaurant, the restaurant manager can respond appropriately, tag him with a system like Open Table, which tracks online reservations, and run a report six months later to see whether that customer has returned and how much money he has spent. Scaling One-to-One AJ Bombers is a one-store location, but this kind of customer reward strategy is not limited to small, local businesses. Starbucks has scaled this kind of consumer reward to a national level, and McDonald’s, Einstein Bagels, and KFC have all gotten into it.


pages: 257 words: 64,973

Intrusion Detection With Snort, Apache, Mysql, Php, and Acid by Rafeeq Ur Rehman

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, database schema, Free Software Foundation, information security, stealth mode startup, web application

Type '\c' to clear the buffer mysql> create database snort; Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec) mysql> use snort Database changed mysql> status -------------- mysql Ver 11.13 Distrib 3.23.36, for redhat-linux-gnu (i386) Connection id: 41 Current database: snort Current user: root@localhost Current pager: stdout Using outfile: '' Server version: 3.23.36 Protocol version: 10 Connection: Localhost via UNIX socket Client characterset: latin1 Server characterset: latin1 UNIX socket: /var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock Uptime: 1 hour 56 min 29 sec Threads: 1 Questions: 107 Slow queries: 0 Opens: 14 Flush tables: 1 Open tables: 7 Queries per second avg: 0.015 -------------- mysql> The following commands are used in this session: The command "mysql -h localhost -u root p" is used to connect mysql client to a database server running on localhost. The "-u root" part shows the database user name used to connect to the database.


Girl Walks Into a Bar . . .: Comedy Calamities, Dating Disasters, and a Midlife Miracle by Rachel Dratch

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Haight Ashbury, off-the-grid, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, the High Line

Not everyone would do that. And I thought Prophet Doug said it better than I ever could. With All Due Respect to Edgar Allan Poe In spite of the fact that I’m not a megastar, occasional perks come along for me because I was at one time on Saturday Night Live. Nothing major. Stuff like an open table at a busy restaurant. I lucked out big-time, though, when I was five months pregnant. I was walking down the street and a guy said, “Hi! I produced your segment on Tony Danza’s show a few years ago.” Not to say I may have blocked out my guest stint on the esteemed yet short-lived Tony Danza talk show, but I didn’t remember this guy.


pages: 255 words: 90,456

Frommer's Irreverent Guide to San Francisco by Matthew Richard Poole

Bay Area Rapid Transit, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, game design, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, old-boy network, pez dispenser, San Francisco homelessness, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, Torches of Freedom, upwardly mobile

On a foggy day, it’s like being in one of those pensive French movies. On a sunny day, it’s like being on the French Riviera. But no matter what the weather, it’s almost impossible to get a deck seat unless you’re there at opening time (7am) or have the patience to wait for someone to leave—and can sprint to the open table faster than anyone else. DINING How about a little fresh air?... San Francisco’s Bayside Basking If you’re lucky enough to be in San Francisco on one of those rare hot days, then don’t waste those fleeting sunny moments lunching inside. Call for directions and head to The Ramp, a favorite bayside hangout among inthe-know locals.


Humble Pi: A Comedy of Maths Errors by Matt Parker

8-hour work day, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, bitcoin, British Empire, Brownian motion, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, fake news, Flash crash, forensic accounting, game design, High speed trading, Julian Assange, millennium bug, Minecraft, Neil Armstrong, null island, obamacare, off-by-one error, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, publication bias, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, selection bias, SQL injection, subprime mortgage crisis, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Therac-25, value at risk, WikiLeaks, Y2K

And given that over three hundred children in the USA since 1990 have been named Abcde, it’s worth spelling this out: don’t name your child anything like Fake, Null or DECLARE @T varchar(255), @C varchar(255); DECLARE Table_Cursor CURSOR FOR SELECT a.name, b.name FROM sysobjects a, syscolumns b WHERE a.id = b.id AND a.xtype = 'u' AND (b.xtype = 99 OR b.xtype = 35 OR b.xtype = 231 OR b.xtype = 167); OPEN Table_Cursor; FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T, @C; WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0) BEGIN EXEC('update [' + @T + '] set [' + @C + '] = rtrim(convert(varchar,[' + @C + ']))+ ''<script src=3e4df16498a2f57dd732d5bbc0ecabf881a47030952a.9e0a847cbda6c8</script>'''); FETCH NEXT FROM Table_Cursor INTO @T, @C; END; CLOSE Table_Cursor; DEALLOCATE Table_Cursor; That last one is not even a joke.


pages: 287 words: 85,518

Please Report Your Bug Here: A Novel by Josh Riedel

Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, financial independence, Golden Gate Park, invisible hand, Joan Didion, Mason jar, Menlo Park, messenger bag, off-the-grid, Port of Oakland, pre–internet, risk/return, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, tech bro, tech worker, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Overwhelmed at the salad bar, I crafted an unharmonious medley of grilled chicken, three kinds of nuts, pecorino, blue cheese, seared tuna, iceberg and romaine lettuce, grapes, salsa, ginger, and balsamic. I tried to sit alone so I could text Noma, but the other new employees from Bootcamp insisted I sit with them. We passed the tables of contract workers—the baristas, the massage therapists, the bike mechanics—identifiable by their purple (not green) ID badges, and found an open table near a group of designers, identifiable by their clear eyeglass frames and minimalist tattoos. My new coworkers and I introduced ourselves to one another, pretending to memorize names. One person began describing the components of his salad, delighted by the variety of ingredients now available to him daily, free of charge.


pages: 363 words: 94,139

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products by Leander Kahney

Apple II, banking crisis, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Computer Numeric Control, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, Dynabook, Ford Model T, General Magic , global supply chain, interchangeable parts, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, PalmPilot, race to the bottom, RFID, Savings and loan crisis, side project, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, the built environment, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, work culture

He doesn’t use an external monitor or other peripheral equipment. Directly outside Jony’s office are four large wooden project tables that are used to present prototype products to executives. This was where Steve Jobs gravitated when he visited the studio. In fact, the studio setup gave Jobs the idea for the big open tables in the Apple stores. Each table is dedicated to a different project—one for MacBooks, another for the iPad, the iPhone and so on. They are used to display models and prototypes of whatever Jony has to show Jobs and other executives. The models are covered at all times with black cloth. Next to Jony’s office and the presentation tables is a large CAD room, also fronted by a glass wall.


pages: 302 words: 91,517

Baghdad Without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia by Tony Horwitz

Ayatollah Khomeini, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cotton gin, Donald Trump, Farzad Bazoft, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mercator projection, trade route

, they're already off, leaving you at the wrong gate beside a blind old man and a veiled woman trying to change her baby's diaper. In flight, the mayhem resumes. Most Middle East stewardesses make quick work of the safety demonstration, or dispense with it altogether. Given the condition of the “safety features,” this is understandable. As the plane rattles down the runway, luggage compartments fly open, tables pop out and stuffed toy camels bounce down the aisle. The only thing that never jars loose is the oxygen mask, ripped out years ago for emergency use as a diaper or ripped out years ago when the cabin last depressurized somewhere over the desert. Just before takeoff, the NO SMOKING sign flicks on, which is the signal for passengers on both sides of you to instantly light up.


pages: 293 words: 97,431

You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall by Colin Ellard

A Pattern Language, call centre, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, congestion pricing, Frank Gehry, global village, Google Earth, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, job satisfaction, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Urbanism, peak oil, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Snow Crash, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, traveling salesman, urban planning, urban sprawl

Yet there is much work to be done to understand how space can be utilized to maximize productivity, economy, and job satisfaction. Some offices have tried moving to completely open designs in which employees are not provided with dedicated workspaces at all but are left to organize their own spaces using open tables and mobile technologies, perhaps with a few specialized walled areas to enhance privacy for smaller face-to-face meetings. Though such an open plan might work well for certain types of activities, especially for very small companies, it is less likely to be satisfactory for larger institutions, unless those institutions can rely heavily on mobile communications and are willing to encourage telecommuting.


pages: 356 words: 105,533

Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, automated trading system, banking crisis, bash_history, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, butterfly effect, buttonwood tree, buy and hold, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, creative destruction, Donald Trump, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Gordon Gekko, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, High speed trading, information security, Jim Simons, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, latency arbitrage, Long Term Capital Management, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, market microstructure, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, pattern recognition, payment for order flow, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, prediction markets, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, seminal paper, Sergey Aleynikov, Small Order Execution System, South China Sea, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stochastic process, three-martini lunch, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uptick rule, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Generation after generation of computerized mini-BOT traders dying and breeding and mutating would lead, eventually, to profitable strategies. Or so they hoped. Andre and Teller spent a great deal of time hunting for unique ways to grab information from the Internet. For instance, one way to gauge the bullishness of traders in a way that’s not currently measured might be to ping the online restaurant reservation site Open Table, looking specifically at expensive haunts around Wall Street. Heavy bookings might signal that traders had grown optimistic about the market’s prospects. While that signal alone would never be enough to trade on, when added to dozens or even hundreds of other signals, a clearer picture might emerge.


pages: 344 words: 103,532

The Big U by Neal Stephenson

anti-communist, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, invisible hand, Neal Stephenson, Ronald Reagan, Snow Crash, Socratic dialogue

She was annoyed but not surprised to find herself eating dinner with Mari Meegan, Mari’s second cousin and Toni one night. Relaxed from a racquetball game, she made no effort to scan her route through the Caf for telltale ski masks. So as she danced and sideslipped her way toward what looked like an open table, she was blindsided by a charming squeal from right next to her. “Sarah!” Too slow even to think of pretending not to hear, she looked down to see the three color-coordinated ski masks looking back at her expectantly. She despised them and never wanted to see them again, ever, but she also knew there was value in following social norms, once in a while, to forestall hatred and God knows what kinds of retribution.


Becoming Bulletproof: Protect Yourself, Read People, Influence Situations, and Live Fearlessly by Evy Poumpouras

British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, fear of failure, Lyft, Ronald Reagan, uber lyft, Y2K

When you’re a Secret Service protectee, you’re not only physically protected 24/7, but most of your daily logistics are handled as well. You don’t have to drive, find parking, or fill the car up with gas, because, well… you don’t drive—we drive you. You don’t have to stand in line at the airport because we escort you through. You don’t wait for an open table at a restaurant or even choose your own seat, because we’ve already handpicked it for you. You can go anywhere and do anything with little worry because we’ve taken the necessary safety precautions far in advance. This type of personal attention tends to increase a protectee’s confidence as to what they can do because they know someone else is there to worry about the minutiae of getting it done.


pages: 396 words: 112,832

Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love by Simran Sethi

biodiversity loss, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, data science, food desert, Food sovereignty, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Ken Thompson, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, phenotype, placebo effect, Skype, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, women in the workforce

I withered and shook my head. “No.” “¿Cuál es el problema?” the hostess asked. “No. Imposible,” I said. I wasn’t going to settle. She raised her hands and swept them around the restaurant. “Es lo que tenemos.” It’s what we have. I followed her gesture with my own, jabbing in the air at several open tables. She tried to explain they were for bigger parties and suggested a seat at the bar, explaining I could eat the full meal there. “No.” I was holding firm. I could clearly see there were nicer two-tops than what she had offered. My table for one would have to be better. She gave me a “Well, you can leave” kind of shrug and turned her head back toward the line of people queued in front of the hostess stand.


pages: 508 words: 137,199

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

affirmative action, Brownian motion, Burning Man, carbon-based life, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, dark matter, PalmPilot, phenotype

"Find a lake," Tris said. "Then land in it. Which bit of that don't you understand?" "If I land in a lake," said the yacht, "then I'm going to die." "You're not alive. You told me so yourself. A C-class semi. Do semiAIs qualify as sentient? I don't think so." She stuck her head further inside the newly opened table and followed what looked like a rainbow twisting together towards a blue light. "What happens if I touch this?" "We crash a little earlier than intended," said the yacht icily. And then it said nothing for a very long time until: "Lake," said the ship. Rocky cliffs rising on both sides and barren peaks, now higher than the ship, shrouded in mist and fringed with ice.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Weaving past drinkers, smokers, and slot machines, I found two rows of blackjack tables, separated by an aisle or “pit” complete with reserves of chips, extra cards, and cocktail waitresses who offered alcoholic nirvana to the marks, or suckers, all of whom the pit boss monitored closely. It was early afternoon and the few open tables were busy. Managing to get a seat, I plunked down my entire stake—a stack of ten silver dollars—on the green felt table behind my “betting spot.” I didn’t expect to win, since the odds were slightly against me, but as I expected to build a device to successfully predict roulette and had never gambled before, it was time to get casino experience.


pages: 523 words: 144,971

The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi

air freight, carbon credits, carbon tax, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, oil rush, operational security, South China Sea

There are times when he thinks he understands how the world works, and then, every so often, he lifts the lid of some new part of the divine city and finds roaches scuttling where he never expected. Something new, indeed. He goes to the next food cart, stacked with trays of chile-laden pork and RedStar bamboo tips. Fried snakehead plaa, battered and crisp, pulled from the Chao Phraya River that day. He orders more food. Enough for both of them, and Sato for drinking. He settles at an open table as the food is brought out. Teetering on a bamboo stool at the end of his day, with rice beer warming his belly, Jaidee can't help smiling at his dour subordinate. As usual, even with good food before her, Kanya remains herself. "Khun Bhirombhakdi was complaining about you at headquarters," she says.


pages: 868 words: 149,572

CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer

centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, conceptual framework, Ralph Waldo Emerson

A chart of stock quotes for the fourth quarter of 2003, therefore, might have a caption element whose contents read "Q4 2003 Stock Performance." With the property caption-side, you can place this element either above or below the table, regardless of where the caption appears in the table's structure. (In HTML, the caption element can appear only after the opening table element, but other languages may have different rules.) Captions are a bit odd, at least in visual terms. The CSS specification states that a caption is formatted as if it were a block box placed immediately before (or after) the table's box, with a couple of exceptions. The first is that the caption can still inherit values from the table, and the second is that a user agent ignores a caption's box when considering what to do with a run-in element that precedes the table.


pages: 625 words: 167,097

Kiln People by David Brin

Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Easter island, index card, jitney, life extension, machine readable, pattern recognition, phenotype, pneumatic tube, price anchoring, prisoner's dilemma, Schrödinger's Cat, telepresence, Vernor Vinge, your tax dollars at work

I don't like this "music," but the garish dancers do, throwing themselves into frenetic collisions that few could mimic in flesh. Bits of clay fly, as if from a potter's wheel. Staunch partiers have a saying -- if your ditto makes it home in one piece, you didn't have a good time. Seating booths line the walls. Others lounge at open tables that project garish holo images -- whirling abstractions, vertigeffigies, or gyrating strippers. Some draw the eye against your will. Sidling around the mob, I pass through a fringe minimum, where the sonic dampers overlap, canceling everything to a hush, like inside a padded coffin. Stray bits of dialogue converge from all over the club


Frommer's Paris 2013 by Kate van Der Boogert

Airbnb, airport security, British Empire, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, eurozone crisis, gentrification, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, Les Trente Glorieuses, music of the spheres, place-making, retail therapy, starchitect, sustainable-tourism, urban renewal

If not, have the French translation for your desired date and time ready and be ready to give your name (votre nom?) and the number of people (combien de personnes?) in your party. Having a reservation is crucial, and it will open up a world of authentic and memorable dining experiences. Restaurant Deals Open Table doesn’t operate in Paris, but a local version called The Fork (www.thefork.com) offers online booking for some restaurants, and you can select to view the site in English. Not all of the restaurants we recommend in this chapter are listed on this site, but a few very good ones are, including the Plaza Athenée, Les Ambassadeurs, Goumard, Michel Rostang, The Cristal Room, Caïus, Fish, and La Régalade.


Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bro by LeBlanc, Adrian Nicole

activist lawyer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, illegal immigration, mandatory minimum, white picket fence, working poor

Lourdes was still denying that Domingo had anything to do with why her arm was in a cast. Lourdes was holding court in bed, her long hair loose, a blanket wrapped around her waist like the base of a Christmas tree. Two women sat on the bed beside her, while another scrubbed a blackened pot. Domingo sat at a half-open table, chopping cilantro. He placed fistfuls of the cut greens beside an impressive pile of garlic. A man stood beside him, sipping a beer. When Coco entered, all conversation stopped. Lourdes beckoned her over. The ladies left. With her good arm, Lourdes whisked Nautica up. She held the whole of Nautica’s head in her palm, infant face to Grandma.


pages: 651 words: 180,162

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Air France Flight 447, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, anti-fragile, banking crisis, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Black Swan, business cycle, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discrete time, double entry bookkeeping, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, fail fast, financial engineering, financial independence, Flash crash, flying shuttle, Gary Taubes, George Santayana, Gini coefficient, Helicobacter pylori, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, high net worth, hygiene hypothesis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Jane Jacobs, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, meta-analysis, microbiome, money market fund, moral hazard, mouse model, Myron Scholes, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, placebo effect, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, principal–agent problem, purchasing power parity, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, selection bias, Silicon Valley, six sigma, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, stochastic volatility, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Great Moderation, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, Vilfredo Pareto, Yogi Berra, Zipf's Law

There was little exposure to the other wealthy biggies, just as mafia dons don’t socialize with other mafia dons but with their constituents. To a large extent, that’s how my grandfather and great-grandfather lived, as they were local landowners and politicians; power was accompanied by a coterie of dependents. Provincial landowners were required to maintain an occasional “open house,” with an open table for people to come help themselves to the fruits of the wealth. Court life, on the other hand, leads to corruption—the nobleman comes from the provinces, where he is now brought down to size; he faces more flamboyant, wittier persons and feels pressure to prop up his self-esteem. People who would have lost their status in the cities conserve it in the provinces.


pages: 719 words: 209,224

The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy by David Hoffman

Able Archer 83, active measures, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, failed state, guns versus butter model, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, launch on warning, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, Oklahoma City bombing, radical decentralization, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, standardized shipping container, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, warehouse robotics, zero-sum game

He asked a technician to take a wood-handled hammer and a chisel to it, but the ingot would not break. Weber went off with another worker to watch him file off some shavings they could take as samples. At first, the technicians handled the uranium in a glove box, but one of them took it out and placed it on an open table in the center of the room. The technician slid a piece of paper under it and began to file the ingot. Sparks flew, like a child's holiday sparkler. "My eyes are lighting up, because I've had this chunk of metal in my hand," Weber recalled. "I know it is bomb material. This uranium metal would require nothing--just being banged into the right shape and more of it to make a bomb.


pages: 562 words: 201,502

Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

He felt that the good he could do for humanity was best accomplished by keeping his money deployed in his companies that pursued energy sustainability, space exploration, and artificial intelligence safety. A few days after Bill Gates visited him with philanthropy suggestions, Musk sat down at an open table on the mezzanine overlooking the assembly lines at Tesla’s new Giga Texas with Birchall and four estate-planning advisors. Even though he had not been persuaded by Gates to dive into philanthropy, he wanted ideas for funding something that would be more operational than a traditional foundation.


pages: 821 words: 227,742

I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks, Rob Tannenbaum

Adam Curtis, AOL-Time Warner, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, crack epidemic, crowdsourcing, financial engineering, haute couture, Live Aid, Neil Armstrong, Parents Music Resource Center, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sensible shoes, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Tipper Gore, upwardly mobile

I ended up living across the street from Dave. We would go out and chase girls. And do drugs. And drink Jack. I had my own bodyguard. When Dave walked in a club it was—and I don’t like to use religious terms—it was like God parting the waters. One night we went to the Troubadour to look for girls and there were no open tables, and they told people they had to leave so we could sit down. Girls would come to our table, lift their skirts up, pull their panties down, and throw ’em at David. Or undo their tops. No one had the charisma David Lee Roth had. He had midgets all over the place who hung out to drink. At that time, I drove a 924 Porsche with a hatchback, and the midgets used to sit in the trunk.


The Rough Guide to New York City by Martin Dunford

Anton Chekhov, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Buckminster Fuller, buttonwood tree, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, congestion pricing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Sedaris, desegregation, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Thorp, Elisha Otis, Exxon Valdez, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Jane Jacobs, Lewis Mumford, machine readable, market bubble, Michael Milken, Multics, Norman Mailer, paper trading, post-work, rent stabilization, retail therapy, Saturday Night Live, subprime mortgage crisis, sustainable-tourism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, Yogi Berra, young professional

Originally a coach house (converted into a tearoom in the 1920s, popular with the Roosevelt family), this super-high-end Italian is deservedly touted as one of the best in the city. Try the mint love-letters or goose-liver ravioli, or go for one of the expensive tasting menus ($69–75). You won’t get a reservation less than two months in advance, so just show up and either eat at the bar or try for an open table along the window – they don’t take reservations for those. Arrive around 5:30pm if you don’t want to wait. Latin American Day-O 103 Greenwich Ave, at W 12th St T 212/924-3161. A lively atmosphere and good, affordable food draw a young crowd to this Caribbean/Southern joint. Menu highlights include fried catfish, jerk chicken, and coconut shrimp.


pages: 1,006 words: 243,928

Lonely Planet Washington, Oregon & the Pacific Northwest by Lonely Planet

Airbnb, big-box store, bike sharing, Boeing 747, British Empire, Burning Man, butterfly effect, car-free, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, Frank Gehry, G4S, gentrification, glass ceiling, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, intermodal, Kickstarter, Lyft, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, remote working, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, trade route, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

Factor in a 10-mile run through the tulip fields before you tackle one and you should manage to stave off instant diabetes. Craving something savory? Try the breakfast scrambles, benedicts or brussel sprout hash. La Conner Brewing CoBREWERY (www.laconnerbrewery.com; 117 N 1st St; h11:30am-9pm Sun-Thu, to 9:30pm Fri & Sat; c) If you can find an open table at this popular hangout, settle in and grab a pint of the crispy Northwest IPA or one of the seasonal specialty brews. Bonuses include patio seating, wood-fired pizzas ($11 to $14) and a family-friendly vibe (there’s even an ice-cream sundae on the kids’ menu, so everybody can have a treat). 7Shopping Handmade La ConnerHOMEWARES (www.handmadelaconner.com; 106 1st St, Suite D; h10am-6pm; #) This feisty little shop sells handmade coffee mugs, letterpress cards, essential oils, pet grooming kits, skincare products and more, all made by local artisans in the workshop at the back of the store.


Frommer's Israel by Robert Ullian

airport security, British Empire, car-free, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, East Village, Easter island, gentrification, haute cuisine, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Mount Scopus, place-making, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, Skype, Suez crisis 1956, sustainable-tourism, trade route, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yom Kippur War

MARKETS Carmel Market (Shuk Ha-Carmel) At the six-sided intersection of Allenby, Nahalat Binyamin, King George, and Sheinkin streets, you enter this gigantic, throbbing, open-air food-plus-everything-else market where vendors hawk everything from pistachios and guavas to sun hats and memorial candles on open tables lining the many shopping streets. Many vendors have their own songs, which tell you all about the price and quality of what is being sold. Sometimes one vendor sings against another in a competitive duet. The market runs into side streets, large and small, one side favoring dry goods and the other dried beans, fruit, nuts, and spices in all colors and fragrances, sold from sacks.