Adobe just announced its intention to buy Figma for $20 billion, which would be among the largest software acquisitions in history. More notable still is the timing and price paid: $20 billion represents more than 50 times the startup’s annual recurring revenue at a time when public comps are trading at around one-tenth of that level.
Why is Adobe willing to risk so much to buy Figma? Because it has to. With this acquisition, Adobe is recognizing that its persona-based approach
Even without their logos, you might be able to identify them as Polaroid products. They’re all emblazoned with the company’s “spectrum” stripe of rainbow colors and have white plastic cases and big red buttons linking them to other Polaroid devices all the way back to the 1970s.
It’s just that these Polaroid products
It will soon be illegal in the state of Texas for YouTube to ban videos from white supremacists or ISIS. The same will be true for Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram.
In fact, with a few limited exceptions, any content moderation these sites do—including “de-boosting” or “de-monetizing” videos or posts—will open them up to being sued in Texas. In effect, they’r
Jen, a student I taught early in my career, stood head-and-shoulders above her peers academically. I learned she had started off as an engineering major but switched over to psychology. I was surprised and curious.
Was she struggling with difficult classes? No. In fact, Jen’s aptitude for math was so strong, she had been recruited as an engineering prospect. In her first year, her engineering classes were filled with faces of other women. But as she advanced, there were fewer an
After taking on Apple and Pandora, Spotify appears to be setting its sights on Amazon.
In what seems to be the beginning of a new phase for the company, Spotify on Tuesday announced
In the fall of 2014, Slack was the hottest startup in software. And that September, it went through a hot-startup rite of passage: It made its first acquisition.
The company it bought, Spaces, had only two employees. They’d built a tool for sharing text, links, images, and other items, which Slack saw as a useful extension of its core messaging platform. It was something like a word processor, but focused o
When we talk about virtual assistants, Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are usually the first names that come to mind.
But let’s be honest: Those sorts of digital helpers are mostly just voice-controlled command systems—combined with a bit of basic automation. By and large, they don’t do a heck of a lot to actually assist us in any life-changing, efficiency-enhancing ways.
Gamification predates video games, but it was video games that systematised the mechanics and aesthetics that gamification appropriated—most of all, achievements.
Achievements have existed in video games for decades. As early as 1980, Activision’s games on the Atari 2600 came with manuals promising fabric patches if you reached a particular high score or completed a challenge.6 Owners of