“The home phone is relatively cheap, incredibly reliable, and - if you buy the right phone - will work for years without replacement. Oh, and far as I can tell, a home phone won't give you brain cancer. In a perfect world, the hard line should have become a platform for building out an entire app ecosystem for the home. And yet... it didn't.”

American entrepreneur, author and journalist

John Linwood Battelle is an American entrepreneur, author, and journalist known for helping build influential media businesses. He helped launch Wired in the 1990s, started The Industry Standard during the dot-com boom, and later founded Federated Media Publishing in 2005. Battelle went on to reshape parts of that company’s business, including the 2014 sale of its direct sales arm and the relaunch of its programmatic advertising operation under Sovrn Holdings. He later created NewCo Platform, an events company focused on visits to newer kinds of businesses in cities around the world, and co-founded The Recount in 2019, which was sold in 2023.