Facebook, YouTube, Google, and GoDaddy have all moved cautiously to limit or remove hate speech, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis from their platforms -- while Reddit and 4Chan have so far remained on the sidelines, as the platforms of choice for both Trump supporters and outspoken extremist groups.

Like you -- I assume -- I hope-- I was saddened and sickened by the events that unfolded in Charlottesville last weekend. Saddened by the hatred. Sickened by the violence. Filled with grief, and despairing of our ability to soothe these tensions and heal these divides. To be clear -- because these times require us to make no assumptions -- I denounce, unequivocally, neo-Nazism, the alt-right and white supremacy. Denouncing these things is easy (for most of us). Figuring out what to do about them is hard.What should we do, for example, about hate speech?

Venture capitalist and creator of the web browser as we know it Marc Andreessen famously wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal in 2011 titled "Why Software Is Eating the World." He argued that the disruption of business by the internet and software was only just beginning, and that all industries around the world would eventually find themselves hollowed out -- or "eaten" -- by digital-first, software-based competitors. Certainly, we've already seen Andreessen's thesis play out in different arenas. Who in the ad industry is likely to be served up next to ravenous software competitors?

A tale of two coffee shops and their respective mobile experiences. One is a literal business school case study in how to do it, while the other is slightly less so.

Google is almost 20 years old. The domain Google.com was registered on September 15, 1997. Given that 20 years is an eternity in internet years, it's actually amazing that it's stood up as well as it has for the past two decades. Whether Google's naysayers care to admit it or not, that's due to Google's almost religious devotion to the quality of its search results. That devotion extends to advertising. Google has always paid a lot of attention to the balance between user experience and monetization. But it's not the presence of ads that has led to this perceived decline ...

Is it time for tech to shift its focus and begin to actively manage the balance between free speech and hate speech? Yes, according to Shahak Shapira, who spray-painted actual messages of hate available on Twittter, on the sidewalk outside Twitter's German headquarters in Hamburg. Twitter promptly removed the comments IRL but not virtually.

The agency holding companies continue to find themselves the pariahs of the industry, implicated in dubious media-buying practices, non-transparent digital media processes - and now by murky advertising production practices as well.

In the 1970s and '80s, agencies would seek to fulfill client business and marketing goals on TV by grouping prospects into broad descriptions of desired gender and age, say "women 18-45" for a new laundry detergent, with which they could negotiate with any one of the three -- then four -- broadcast networks. Frankly, although data has become the new lingua franca, this process is still very common. This must change. Here's why:

Many companies in data and analytics are hanging their hats on identity and the promise of connecting people across multiple platforms in an effort to further deliver "people-based marketing," which might be the buzziest buzzword of 2018. The core concept is solid, but identity connection is at best one area of tactical requirement to implement a true strategic effort. A strategy for people-based marketing requires scale in recognizing the people you are trying to identify, accuracy across all the channels where your audience might be, and integrations to activate that audience.

One week ago today, John Flannery took over as the new CEO of General Electric. He's only the third person in the past 36 years to have held the role. GE has been around for a long time. It actually predates the Dow Jones Index by four years (having been founded in 1892) and is the only one of the 12 original companies listed that still exists. It -- perhaps more than any other company -- serves as a case study for the evolution of the multinational mega corporation. But GE is in trouble. Share prices are down. It's struggling ...