A UI designer and web developer, Gabriele Cirulli “created” 2048 in the span of a weekend. But the creative process – aka developing an original idea and making it work –is the work of Sirvo LLC, better known as Greg Wohlwend and Asher Vollmer. It took them 570 emails and six months to create Threes, a paid-for mobile game.  2048 is its clone. Or rather, 2048 is a clone of 1024, which is another clone of Threes. They are both free. Understandably, Shirvo are cheesed. But what this really demonstrates is the difficulty of building an “economic moat” (copyright, Warren Buffet) around digital products. And is the main reason the Oracle of Omaha refuses to invest in digital. 

Something big happened on Thursday. Microsoft made Office available on their rival Apple’s iPad. That means just one thing: their tablet, the Surface, is a failure. (It sold 4m worldwide in 2013, while Apple sold 26m iPads in just the last quarter. ) Mircosoft’s new CEO says its part of their new “mobile-first, cloud-first” strategy. The Economist is more pithy. “If they can’t sell the devices, at least they can sell the services.”

As you can see from the chart, the first six hours of a post’s life is crucial if it wants to get up-voted onto on Reddit’s much prized front page. A full description of how Reddit’s algorhythim works  is here. But to keep it simple, your post needs the same three things that all news needs: relevance, exclusivity and, the big one, timeliness. Without that you got nothing, friend.