Daily Archives

He may have quit… his job at The Denver Post where he was senior editor, but Larry Ryckman didn’t leave journalism. His former company, owned by a hedge fund, faced numerous budget cuts and layoffs. Such financial and personnel decisions created an environment where corporate owners and journalists could not coexist; a scenario that happens all too often.

Time for a change… and Ryckman founded The Colorado Sun. The company has a 10-person staff and is owned by journalists rather than a corporate overlord. Most of the funding came from Kickstarter and Civil Media, a blockchain company that supports a decentralized model for journalism. And Civil Media is where this gets even more interesting…

Debuting cryptocurrency… is what Civil Media plans to do. Odd, right? However, token owners will oversee newsrooms that are part of Civil and can challenge any content that fails to coincide with a journalistic code of ethics. CEO Vivian Schiller will ultimately decide if changes are imposed. This plan is supposed to create a world of independent, ethical journalism without all the spam, trolls, and misinformation. Can you smell that? That is the smell of innovation at work!

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Samsung claims to have done it… created an “unbreakable” and flexible display to be used in smartphones. The average smartphone display is covered in glass and is very prone to shattering. However, Samsung will be coating their new screens with a “fortified plastic window.”

It can be dropped… from about 4-6 feet without breaking which means you can drop it – unless you are freakishly tall. So technically not unbreakable and certainly not indestructible, especially for the accident-prone. These claims have been verified by Underwriters Laboratories, a company that does testing for OSHA (so they are probably legit).

There are durable options… such as ‘Gorilla Glass 6′ by Corning which is less likely to crack when dropped, but it doesn’t flex. There have also been plastic screens that could flex but were much more prone to scratches. Thus, the crack-resistant, flexible screen is pretty cool. The new screen should debut this year with Samsung’s foldable (yes, foldable) smartphone.

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The now infamous flight 1380… that left one passenger dead after being partially sucked out of a window has cost Southwest Airlines $100 million, according to the company. CEO Gary Kelly thanked his people for their “heroic efforts” made to address the incident and ultimately move forward.

The impact was expected… to come out in second-quarter earnings and that is precisely what happened. Southwest pulled advertising as result of the incident which negatively impacted bookings. The repercussions from the event will likely be left behind in the third quarter, and the company expects to be back to business as usual.

And as always… rising fuel costs have slowed Southwest and just about every other airline down in 2018. In response to the expensive fuel, Southwest plans to slow expansion and capacity. The airline’s stock is down 20% this year. As unfortunate as it may be, here is to hoping for better days at Southwest Airlines.

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Going where no company… has gone before by losing over $100B in market value in just one day. Only two companies have come even remotely close to such a staggering figure. And those two losses were brought to you by Intel (-$90,737B) and Microsoft (-$80,025B) in 2000. It has been a minute since we have seen a company lose such enormous value so quickly.

What caused it… well, the company posted weaker-than-expected revenue and less-than-stellar global daily active users, a significant figure for the company. You can chalk much of that up to the data leaks and fake news scandals. Facebook also expects revenue growth to slow down for Q3 and Q4 – more unwelcome news for investors.

There is turbulence ahead… and several analysts downgraded the stock due to high levels of uncertainty for Facebook. Today was a day that Mark Zuckerberg probably wishes he had stayed in bed for. And you thought you had a lousy day…

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