Also: Why the Web of today is a big disappointment; Maker Studios tussles with its biggest YouTube star.
Meet Mailbox for iPhone.
Mailbox for iPhone: a next-generation email app inspired by Sparrow and Clear [THE VERGE]
Whereas most Mail apps rely on buttons to archive, delete, and file emails for later, Mailbox relies on a simple and colorful set of swipes. “Email was designed 30 years ago for computers chained to desks,” Underwood says. “Everything about it is slow and clunky. If you want to make it fast and mobile-friendly, the entire experience needs to be modernized.” Swiping a message to the right archives it (symbolized by a checkmark), while swiping a message to the left saves it for later (a yellow clock symbol). Swiping a message to the right and holding deletes it (symbolized by a red x), and swiping a message to the left and holding opens a List screen where you can move / label messages. In grand total, there are four ways to act on a message in your inbox, which means there’s a bit of a learning curve, but it’s worth it.
The Web we lost [ANIL DASH’S BLOG]
We’ve lost key features that we used to rely on, and worse, we’ve abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world. To the credit of today’s social networks, they’ve brought in hundreds of millions of new participants to these networks, and they’ve certainly made a small number of people rich.
Eight things Marc Andreessen said to Quartz that made us sit up and listen [QUARTZ]
7. Forget hotels. The whole property market is turning upside down
“AirBnB is gonna eat real estate.” Not just hotels, not just vacation rentals, not just sublets: Andreessen predicts that the online rental platform will do to real estate what eBay and other online sellers did for goods. And then it will eat the travel industry’s lunch too. (Caveat: He’s an investor).
YouTube powerhouse Maker Studios fights with its biggest star. It’s not pretty. [ALL THINGS D]
In a post published on New Media Rockstars, a digital media news site, Johnson (pictured above) laid out a series of complaints against Maker. Along the way, he reports that Zappin “got drunk with me one night and informed me that he was a ‘convicted felon’ and that he was waiting for his criminal record to be expunged so that he could officially become CEO of Maker.”
High-tech factories built to be engines of innovation [THE NEW YORK TIMES]
These experts say that in industries that produce complex, high-technology products — things like bioengineered tissues, not light bulbs — companies that keep their research and manufacturing employees close together might be more innovative than businesses that develop a schematic and send it overseas for low-wage workers to make. Moreover, clusters of manufacturers, where workers and ideas can naturally flow between companies, might prove more productive and innovative than the same businesses if they were spread across the country.
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