All Posts By
David Marin
The pirates that shaped the music industry
Napster was wild and it blew the horns of change for the music industry. With the Internet opening up to the world in the nineties, it was bound to happen.
Too Big to Fail: Bailouts explained
Broadly speaking, a bailout is to provide financial assistance to an entity about to fail. And yes, in recent history the US government has stepped in a few big times to save the day.
Digg: Six Feet Under
Digg was a massive website for sharing news back in 2005. In that boom of the interactive web, it became famous for allowing users to vote for their favorite stories.
The Hypocrite Reason Facebook is suing Apple
These two companies have been holding grudges for years, and now Apple is hitting Facebook where it hurts. Let's talk about what these tech giants are fighting about, look out for any double standards, and what could be some of the implications for us, the commoners.
Amazon: A company in its Prime?
Let's look back at some of the good and the bad in these twenty-six years of tech history, with Jeff Bezos at the head of Amazon.
Farmville and the plague that killed it
When Facebook opened its platform for developers, back in 2009, Farmville leveraged the social platform and soon managed to amass more than 32 million daily players and about 90 million total. The game is over now, but its legacy of monetization and addictive mechanics on video games is real.
Only Fans explained: how much money can a nude make?
What do you get if you can have influencers and explicit pay-per-view content in the same place? What you get is OnlyFans, and people are still figuring out the morality around it.
The Assassination of Movie Theaters
HBO recently shocked the movie industry when they announced that their 2021 movies would be released simultaneously in theaters and on HBO Max. A decision like this could be the final blow to that centennial rite of watching movies in a dark room with a giant screen, blasting sound, and a hundred other people.
Fyre Festival: dumb planning or genius scam?
The infamous Fyre Festival wasn't at all what its organizers promise. It was in fact, a complete chaos and an enormous scam.
Among Us: when indie goes mainstream
Video games have a rightful place in popular culture. Some of them are so wildly popular that they turn into a global phenomenon, and Among Us is the latest one.
Why is Slack worth $27B to Salesforce?
Salesforce, the customer relations management company, just got Slack for itself for a good $27 billion.
The biggest Ponzi scheme in Wall Street history: Bernard Madoff
Bernie Madoff: A $64 billion disaster that left immeasurable tragedy for thousands of victims, orchestrated by a Wall Street sociopath.
Quibi: celebrity endorsements weren't enough
Celebrity endorsements weren't enough for Quibi to succeed.
The Windows Phone: an $8 Billion fiasco
In the light of a supposed second round for Microsoft making phones, let's remember the OG Windows Phone.
Shopify: quietly moving $30B a year
In May 2020, Shopify became the largest Canadian public company when it surpassed the Royal Bank of Canada by raising its market capitalization to $120B.
Apple vs Fortnite: the battle for the AppStores
No one saw it coming. At least not the millions of teenagers and young adults who played Fortnite on iPhones or iPads. On August 13, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store for good. It is a high stakes dispute, and yet all this Fortnite affair is probably just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Welcome to Slidebean Forensics: the App Store battle.
Boston Dynamics: The company making robots to replace us
Robots you may see killing humans in recent Netflix shows, look a lot like robots that are available in the market. Yes, you may have seen that Black Mirror episode where a robotic dog hunts people, and you may notice the uncanny resemblance with Spot, the newest robot dog from Boston Dynamics.
Mixer: Why Microsoft keeps failing at being cool
One of the privileged industries experiencing growth during the current pandemic crisis is the gaming industry. Yet in this atmosphere of growth and opportunity, many were affected when all of a sudden the game-streaming platform Mixer, owned by Microsoft, announced that it was shutting down, recently in June. Does this mean Microsoft lost the battle for game-streaming services? Are they relying on Facebook’s social and streaming DNA; while they can focus on making games available to more people?
Segway is closing down: the road to extinction
It was bound to happen, and it just happened. Last June, Segway's president, Ms. Judy Cai, announced that the company was utterly ceasing the Segway PT production, or as it was initially named, the Segway HT, for "Human Transporter."
Amazon Fire: Jeff Bezos' failed phone
We have talked about phone companies in the past. Remember those episodes about Blackberry or Motorola, companies who once were at the very top of the industry and somehow ended up falling in battle. Today, we will not exactly talk about a phone company but about a phone, yeah, a particular one. A phone that, for better or worse, had everyone's attention just by existing, just because it was created by one of the largest internet companies in the world: the Amazon Fire Phone.
How did Microsoft ruin Nokia?
Nokia is a Finnish multinational corporation that goes all the way back to the nineteenth century and started with wood mills that produced mainly paper. Yes, the same Nokia that a hundred years later created cultural icons like the 1110 phone model a lot of you probably rocked at some point, back in the early 2000s.
What happened to Blockbuster: Why didn't they buy Netflix?
You may have heard the argument that this company was meant to be what Netflix is today. But it may not be all that simple. So, let's talk about Blockbuster, the movie rental giant that dominated the market and delivered home entertainment to virtually everybody in the US during a couple of decades, reaching its pinnacle in the late 1990s; and then succumbed to the changes that the new millennium brought.
Google Plus: A $585 MILLION mistake
If there was one big and powerful tech company that could dethrone Facebook from its social media kingdom, who would that be? Think about it, there aren’t really a lot of options.
The death of Periscope and Meerkat | Company Forensics
Today’s episode of Company Forensics is about live-streaming apps, something that we all take very much for granted today as we’re not impressed anymore by seeing anyone going live on social media, to broadcast whatever from their phones. Literally, whatever... which is probably part of the problem here, but we’ll get into that later on.
What happened to Vine? | Company Forensics
In today’s episode of Startup Forensics, we’re going to throwback to Vine and dig into some key aspects of its rise and fall, including Twitter’s acquisition of the company, along with some product, and competition analysis.
About Author
David Marin
Customer Success Manager at Slidebean. Writer since a kid. Yeah, started with little poems, stories, and moved to TV and film scripts after professional scriptwriting studies. Tech passionate and curious by default.
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