A lot of people are mad at Ticketmaster, and have been for a long time. (Did Swifties directly create an antitrust trial? Discuss.) The US government’s case against Live Nation-Ticketmaster appeared poised to lay bare some of the strangeness of the music business, and maybe even change the way the company works. And then, well, […]
Today, I’m talking with Chris Cocks, CEO of Hasbro. You know, Hasbro — the toy and game company that makes some of the most iconic products in the world, from toy lines like Transformers and My Little Pony to board and tabletop games like Monopoly, Magic: The Gathering, and Dungeons & Dragons. Chris was last […]
The hottest toy of 1998 was sort of adorable, and sort of annoying. It couldn’t do much – couldn’t do anything, really – but it could look at you, it could say some nonsense phrases, and it seemed uncannily aware of the world around it. That’s all Furby needed to pretty much take over the […]
Until now, most mobile phone companies have worked to ensure their phones won’t start fires. (Occasional Samsung devices excepted, of course.) But this week at Mobile World Congress, we found a company that dared to go in a different direction. Oukitel’s WP63 rugged smartphone includes a built-in fire starter, and this is what it looks […]
Today on Decoder, let’s talk about prediction markets, which continue to insert themselves into the news cycle and the news itself in increasingly weird, unsettling, and potentially illegal ways. My guest today is Liz Lopatto, senior reporter at The Verge, who owns what we cheerfully call the chaos beat. Liz has been writing a lot […]
Year after year, we mostly know what to expect from our smartphone upgrades. Galaxy, iPhone, Pixel, or whatever else, everything seems to get slightly better (and occasionally more expensive) without many surprises in store. That’s not to say there are no new ideas left in smartphones, though. You just have to know where to look. […]
Today, I’m talking with Zillow CEO Jeremy Wacksman. Zillow is one of those apps that really exemplifies what you might call the smartphone era of software: the company built a great mobile app for looking at real estate listings, and it turned into not just entertainment for so many of us, but what has become […]
In many ways, Samsung’s new phones are fairly normal upgrades. The S26 lines come with some useful new things – particularly the Privacy Display on the S26 Ultra, which looks like an extremely cool bit of tech and a really useful new feature – and a lot of iterative year-over-year changes. The new camera features, […]
Today, we’re talking about the future of Xbox. Phil Spencer, a two–time Decoder guest who’s led Xbox for more than a decade, retired last week. But in a shocking twist, his deputy and long-assumed successor, Sarah Bond, is also out too, and the Xbox division is now in the hands of Asha Sharma, one of […]
Lucena got the idea for Mappa after trying to build a marketing team but continually feeling like she had made the wrong hires.