Daniel Lyons

“Is any job safe? I was hoping to say 'journalist,' but researchers are already developing algorithms that can gather facts and write a news story. Which means that a few years from now, a robot could be writing this column. And who will read it? Well, there might be a lot of us hanging around with lots of free time on our hands.”

“There's often a good, honest case to be made that a century-old company has not only a knack for growing and managing a P&L, but also, perhaps, a heart and soul.”

“Conventional companies try to find new uses for capabilities they already have. Transformers look at what the market needs and then go build it, hiring new people and/or taking people off other jobs.”

“NBC Universal has created a role called 'talent branding specialist' - a marketer whose job is essentially to put the company on the radars of the most sought-after candidates.”

“We like the John Gruber model - he writes some long stuff that's very thoughtful and analytical, and then other stuff, he just adds a bit of commentary. I like that.”

“Hubspot's leaders were not heroes but rather a pack of sales and marketing charlatans who spun a good story about magical transformation technology and got rich by selling shares in a company that still has never turned a profit.”

“Net-neutrality proponents howled when Comcast started throttling traffic from BitTorrent, a bandwidth-hogging program people use to swap video files. The Federal Communications Commission sided with the open-Internet folks, ruling that Comcast could not selectively choke off traffic.”

“My prior stint at 'Newsweek' was a very different world. So it's what it's like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It's not entirely pleasant! It's like, 'Oh, I don't fit.'”

“One way Groupon hopes to gain an edge is by using software to learn about its members so it can deliver more relevant offers: my wife will get the manicure-pedicure deal, but I'll get an offer on fly-fishing lessons. The key now is execution - delivering great customer service and keeping everybody happy on both sides of the transactions.”

“Nvidia's CEO, Jen-Hsun Huang, is an engineer and a chip designer. He cofounded Nvidia and still runs it like a startup.”

“I often wonder what the world would be like if more companies were like Apple.”

“People in startup-land live inside it. They see themselves as really good people even when they're doing something that's very bad. There's a huge disconnect from reality in the tech world.”

“Amid all the job losses of the Great Recession, there is one category of worker that the economic disruption has been good for: nonhumans.”

“My job, originally, was to write blog posts for their 'HubSpot' blog. They have a business model built on content. Then I was writing e-books for them, and after I came back from L.A., they had this new plan to launch a podcast.”

“I was working at 'Forbes,' and I covered big enterprise companies - IBM, Sun, and EMC - and it was kind of boring. 'Forbes' only came out every other week, so it was not the most fast-paced job in the world. It was very nice, comfortable.”

“I guess I always had made some assumptions about what it would be like to work in a tech company, and some were right, and some were wrong. I had a lot of, looking back on it, now naive ideas about how companies build their brands, and a lot of those notions I ended up realizing were kind of wrong.”

“These days a typical netizen has dozens of online accounts. If you really want to be safe, you need to have a different password for each one, and each password needs to be incredibly complicated, with a mix of capital letters, symbols, and numbers. Who can keep all that stuff in their head?”

“The iPod Touch is basically an iPhone with the phone part taken out, which is fine - since making calls is the one thing that the iPhone doesn't actually do very well.”

“The iPod wasn't the first MP3 player. Nor were the iPhone and iPad the first in their categories. The real reason for the success of these devices - the true unsung hero at Apple - is the iTunes software and iTunes Store. Because Apple provided them, it wasn't just selling hardware.”

“If a developer wants to sell something via an iPad app - it's called an 'in-app purchase' - the transaction must go through Apple, which keeps 30 percent of the money and passes 70 percent on to the developer.”