MediaFile

Silicon Valley startup YouSendIt, which began as a file sharing and storage company, is getting a corporate makeover. YouSendIt comes off, and Hightail gets papered on.

Advertising is a funny medium. TV spots, radio jingles, banner ads — none of these are meant to get us to rise out of our seats and run to the store. Instead, most advertising is meant to impress something upon us: an idea, a favorable opinion, a subtle memory of a brand name. As social media has gotten more sophisticated, however, a funny thing appears to have happened online: People with products to sell aren’t even bothering to call themselves advertisers.

Below is an unedited transcript of the video interview I conducted with Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ, in April.

There’s a lot to unpack in Yahoo’s reported $1.1 billion deal for Tumblr, but much of the reporting today is focused on the rather bland challenge of turning Tumblr into a profitable company. Forcing Tumblr to make money will eventually become an important mission for Yahoo, but for now it’s far from the point.

It is one of the oldest and thorniest questions of the digital music era: How much should artists and musicians be compensated for the Internet broadcast of their songs? And who gets to decide that rate?

The Samsung Galaxy S4’s tagline — “The next big thing is here” — is a telling pitch. The Galaxy is the world’s second best-selling phone, behind the iPhone.  And the latest version unabashedly claims that bigger is better. But considering the S4 in a different light, maybe we shouldn’t think of it as a big phone. Maybe we should treat it like a very small tablet and leave our real tablet home.

Nest Labs is scaling fast.

The Silicon Valley company formed by Apple alums Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers, who helped build the consumer gadget giant’s iPod and iPhones, has acquired  Boston-based startup MyEnergy. The fledgling company helps homeowners understand their total energy use by presenting and analyzing all their electric, gas and water usage over certain time periods, and comparing it to other other homes in the neighborhood.

Not so long ago Blackberry made phones that set the bar. They were avatars of serious cool among the power set, a visible token that you had arrived. Then came the iPhone, and there went Blackberry’s cachet.

In my tech predictions of 2013 I somehow missed that this would be the year of the smartwatch. But now the most established names in tech are realizing the future may be all in the wrist.

Below is an unedited transcript of the video interview I conducted with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures: