Hamish McKenzie
PandoDaily
San Francisco, CA, United States
Contact Hamish
Discover and connect with journalists and influencers around the world, save time on email research, monitor the news, and more.
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Past articles by Hamish:
Is WhatsApp the new MySpace?
The last year has been very active for WhatsApp. The world’s leading messaging app has continued to see explosive growth, and is now seeing 400 million active monthly users – an important metric th... → Read More
Report: Chinese developers massively outspend the US on mobile ads as they target emerging markets
Chinese app developers are outspending US developers on mobile ads, and they appear to be aggressively targeting developing markets in Asia and the Middle East, according to a new report from AppFl... → Read More
Face++ shows more evidence of innovation from China (aside from that moon landing)
If you’re ever looking for evidence of Chinese startups being able to innovate at the same pace as their US counterparts – apart from, you know, the country’s recent successful soft moon landing – ... → Read More
Meet the latest subscription ebooks service: Entitle
First we had Oyster, then Scribd got into it, and now the US has another subscription ebooks service: Entitle. Entitle launches today after a four-month beta period under what is one of the worst i... → Read More
Founders Fund pumps $7M into super-resolution startup that could combat cancer
Matthew Putman has released two albums, authored a book of poems, produced off-Broadway plays, as well as a film, taught himself calculus by reading “Calculus for Dummies,” and survived cancer – tw... → Read More
There will be blood: WeChat's payments prowess makes it a target for Alibaba
While people in the US laugh at how ugly QR codes are, WeChat is using them as a killer payments tool. And it’s starting to scare the world’s biggest ecommerce player: Alibaba. China’s leading mobi... → Read More
Anti-surveillance petition out-does the Death Star. White House must now respond
A couple of days ago, it looked like Mark Stanley’s “We The People” petition asking for reform of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act would fall well short of the 100,000 signatures needed to... → Read More
The War Nerd: United Drones of Congo
Last week the United Nations announced that it would deploy drones, or UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) in Eastern Congo. It doesn’t sound like much of a story, unless you’re Alex Jones, with his an... → Read More
Sorry, Instagram: Kik, now at 100M users, shows how a platform trumps messaging
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post arguing that Kik, a mobile browser disguised as a chat app, is the dark horse of the Internet. Now, some updates from the Waterloo, Ontario-based company: Kik ... → Read More
Waywire's new face looks a lot more like Robert Scoble than Cory Booker
Remember Waywire? The video curation startup “founded” by Cory Booker, who only ever seemed to have a figurehead-type role with the company, had a quiet, face-saving exit in October, when it sold t... → Read More
What swimming the English Channel taught me about startups
The first to swim the 23 and 1/2 watery miles from Dover to France was a steam ship captain, Matthew Webb, who in 1875 made the crossing in 21 hours and 45 minutes, despite jellyfish stings and unf... → Read More
Snapchat vs. SpaceX: Which gets more attention?
On the one hand, we have Snapchat, an immensely viral app that lets people send disappearing messages to each other. It has been in the news recently for turning down a $3 billion acquisition offer... → Read More
Yahoo acquires QuikIO, yet another startup to add to its video team
Early this morning, the creators of a little known but excellent cross-platform video streaming app called QuikIO sent a farewell note to its users. After December 31, the “FedEx of media files” wo... → Read More
Silicon Valley vs the NSA: We need more than just a website
A beautiful website and a stake in the ground. That’s what we got last night from the US’s tech giants in an attempt to ratchet up pressure on the government to rein in the surveillance state. Toda... → Read More
Vice Mayor of Sausalito accused of misusing funds from his concert ticketing startup
While fallings out between startup founders aren't unusual, it's not often that they come to litigation. And it's full-on weird when one of the parties in that litigation -- the founder and CEO of ... → Read More
New from Upworthy: Another record month, and an insistence that it's not headlines that matter
First, the huge metric. Last month, Upworthy pulled in 87 million unique visitors. For an 18-month-old media company, that is simply jaw-dropping, even accounting for the much talked about Facebook... → Read More
Flipboard vs Medium, native vs Web
Medium rearranged the furniture yesterday and in doing so changed the way we should look at the whole house. It’s not just that founder and CEO Evan Williams has finally declared Medium to be a "pl... → Read More
5 potential pitfalls of the Innovation Act
Tomorrow, the US House of Representatives is likely to vote on the Innovation Act, a landmark bill that has bipartisan support and would make life harder for the patent trolls that file frivolous l... → Read More
Google, Omidyar, and Ashton Kutcher lead investments in civic tech, says new Knight report
Google, the Omidyar Network, and Ashton Kutcher are among the leading investors in civic technology according to the Knight Foundation’s first report on the subject, which is being released today. ... → Read More
Nuanced blackmail? A Chinese startup scores an unlikely win over a patent bully
CooTek, the Shanghai-based maker of the TouchPal smartphone keyboard, expected to be sued by Nuance Communications. After all, the Burlington, Massachusetts-based software company, best known for o... → Read More