Philippe Matthews Show Guru Advice, Author Reviews, Tech Reviews, Entertainment News

Chegg

The founders of True & Co. put lacy thongs in the swag bags at a mostly male tech conference; their eyebrow-raising approach to launching caught the eye of a few women investors

Sure, there's a place for self-promotion, but history suggests overhyping your business can backfire. Whether it was your third-grade teacher, your beloved granny or your mom, someone probably told you to keep a good head on your shoulders and not get too cocky. Self-confidence is great, they probably said, but a reasonable amount of humility is important for both mental health and maintaining solid relationships

The Internet gives angry customers a megaphone; even one angry one can do a lot of damage. Here's how to defend your company and defuse a crisis.

The pilot episode of a new television series can send it rocketing toward ratings success, renewal, and eventual syndication, or plummeting toward cancellation. But in the world of Internet TV, says Netflix , "don't expect overnight results." That's the message the company sent yesterday while announcing its quarterly financial results. On Monday, the company released its first-quarter financial earnings, and beyond the immediate results (26 million global streaming users, $870 million in revenue, a $0.08 loss per share), Netflix spent time qualifying the benefits of its original programming efforts

Breaking news from your editors at Fast Company, with updates all day.

As announced this week, the new Apple TV brings a new UI, better internal specs, and full HD capability to the table. But there's the business equivalent of an Easter egg hidden in it for Netflix subscribers: From now on, if you want to join Netflix you can do it through your Apple TV, and Apple handles the payments via its iTunes back channel. Essentially it works like this: The Apple TV functionality hinges on your iTunes user account, the same kind that's powered 25 billion app downloads to date

By tossing the two-week standard in favor of an honor system with unlimited time off, some companies are seeing an exponential rise in productivity. Now, they just have to be mindful of staff burnout

So-called collaborative consumption is changing the way we buy just about everything. What you can learn from this still-growing trend.

After achieving two important milestones, what's next for Eventbrite? The last time Fast Company caught up with the folks at Eventbrite , the online ticketing service was celebrating the opening of its first international office in London. Now, it has two more benchmarks to be proud of: It issued its 50 millionth ticket, and CEO and cofounder Kevin Hartz tells

At the end of the month, Netflix subscribers will no longer be able to stream Starz content--one of the largest providers of movies and TV shows. Netflix puts on a happy face: "We are confident we can take the money we had earmarked for Starz's renewal . . .

Apple's foray into retail was supposed to be a disaster. "I give them two years before they're turning out the lights on a very painful and expensive mistake," one critic infamously said in 2001, a comment that would prove slightly prescient considering the number of brick-and-mortar stores that would shutter in the years to come--Gateway, Circuit City, CompUSA

Two thousand years before smartphones, Plato suggested that excessive democracy would lead directly to tyranny, because sooner or later the majority will choose to trample the rights of the minority.

Yesterday Coinstar, the parent company of Redbox, the 35,400-kiosk-strong movie-rental service, announced a joint venture with Verizon to provide a subscription-based streaming video service, thus positioning the companies in direct competition with Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon. Coinstar also announced that it would acquire NCR's entertainment business , which includes its former rival Blockbuster Express, adding more than 9,000 kiosks to Redbox's roster around the country. Now new details about the combined companies' plans have emerged.

The Coinstar subsidiary announces plans to partner with Verizon to compete with streaming video giants Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu. Coinstar subsidiary Redbox today announced a new partnership with Verizon for the launch of a streaming video service.