Adam L. Penenberg

"Adam Penenberg's lively book opens a window to all of our futures..."--Ken Auletta, author of The End of the World as We Know It "If you want to understand all things viral, this is the place to start. Penenberg's reporting gives us a ringside seat for some of the biggest viral success stories in history, from Tupperware to Ning."--Dan Heath, co-author of Made to Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die? "One of the most astounding things about the Web age is how the best advertising is often no advertising at all. Penenberg masterfully explains how this works with case studies of products that were designed to spread. Every product can use a dose of this technique; this is the book to get to learn how."--Chris Anderson, author of The Future of a Radical Price "In tight, engaging prose, Adam captures the essence of the ever-scaling power of the virus. It's not just for geeks anymore."--Seth Godin, author of Tribes "Penenberg discovers the perpetual motion machine for business and marketing... Buy this book. Catch a virus. Make a fortune."--Jeff Jarvis "Penenberg has unlocked the secret to the most successful digital businesses. An indispensable read."--Robert Safian, Editor-in-Chief, Fast Company "Instead of entrusting your business to a guru with an agenda and a ghostwriter, you should be turning to a pro journalist like Adam Penenberg, who understands the way media and money interact, has the critical faculty to engage with these phenomena in an unbiased fashion, and the technical facility to explain them to you in an entirely engaging, informative, and actionable way."--Douglas Rushkoff, author of Media Virus and Life How the world became a corporation and how to take it back. Here's something you may not know about today's Internet. Simply by designing your product the right way, you can build a flourishing business from scratch. No advertising or marketing budget, no need for a sales force, and venture capitalists will flock to throw money at you. Many of the most successful Web 2.0 companies, including MySpace, YouTube, eBay, and rising stars like Twitter and Flickr, are prime examples of what journalist Adam L. Penenberg calls a "viral loop"--to use it, you have to spread it. After all, what's the sense of being on Facebook if none of your friends are The Never before has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little. In this game-changing must-read, Penenberg tells the fascinating story of the entrepreneurs who first harnessed the unprecedented potential of viral loops to create the successful online businesses--some worth billions of dollars--that we have all grown to rely on. The trick is that they created something people really want, so much so that their customers happily spread the word about their product for them. All kinds of businesses--from the smallest start-ups to nonprofit organizations to the biggest multinational corporations--can use the paradigm-busting power of viral loops to enable their business through technology. Viral Loop is a must-read for any entrepreneur or business interested in uncorking viral loops to benefit their bottom line.

The good news is that public defender Summer Neuwirth just won her first case, which involved a brutal rape and kidnapping. The bad news? Her client was guilty. What's more, he knows all about Summer's past.As Summer pursues her next case, this time to keep an innocent woman off death row, elements of that past--a mysterious case of childhood amnesia, her police officer father's involvement with a serial killer, a terrifying attack she survived just months earlier--entwine with her present legal work, her missing mother, and her rocky relationship with a private investigator, all of which culminate in a thrilling trial... and terror.

A fascinating look at how games can help us learn, create, and innovate Once thought to be nothing more than diversions for children and nerds, games have become an integral part of everyday life. Educators are trying to make learning more fun by introducing games into the classroom while cutting-edge managers are doing the same in the workplace. Doctors, scientists, and entrepreneurs are deploying games to help solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. But according to Adam Penenberg, it’s not the games themselves that improve our lives, but rather smart game design and its impact on the brain that can lead us to become immersed in a task we find enjoyable. The individuals and institutions that have used games to achieve this effect are often rewarded with astounding results. Drawing on the latest brain science on attention and engagement plus his own firsthand reporting, Penenberg shows how organizations like Google, Microsoft, hospitals, and the military have used game design in bold new ways.

True Ailey is a journalist in a strange land, exiled by his network to a damp Southeast Asian republic gouged out a war-ravaged peninsula weeping monsoon tears. When his friend is murdered, True sets out to find the killers, and in the process untangles a vast conspiracy that threatens to upend the global balance of power. Set in the near future, Virtually True takes readers on a wild ride through a world where nothing is what it seems, corporations rule, technology has been woven into the fabric of people's lives, and information can be both weapon and life-saver. Award-winning journalist Adam Penenberg, whom Slate called "one of the best-known technology writers in the world," has peopled a literary thriller with unforgettable characters and crafted a plot worthy of Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, and Martin Cruz Smith.

"Blood Highways" is the heart-wrenching account of the biggest product liability case in history: the Ford-Firestone fiasco. At the center of the story are two people: Tab Turner, a charismatic trial attorney from Arkansas, who has made a career out of forcing Ford and other automakers to own up to knowingly trade human lives for profits; and Donna Bailey, a single mother and outdoor enthusiast who fought back from the brink of death to confront those ultimately responsible for her accident. Weaving together harrowing depictions of the accidents and their consequences with the stories of the men and women who labor to police the auto industry and its reckless cost-cutting, Blood Highways will transform the way you view corporations, the government, the courts, and the media. Above all, this book shows the price the public pays in wrecked and mangled lives when companies focus more on shaving costs than making quality products.

In 1998, while working for Forbes Digital, Adam Penenberg exposed the lies of New Republic wunderkind Stephen Glass. The expose was a watershed moment for online journalism and later became the basis of a movie starring Hayden Christensen. Now for the first time, Penenberg tells the story behind the including for the first time revealing what happened after his famous story went live. And, as Stephen Glass attempts to prove that he's rehabilitated enough to practice law (really), Penenberg considers whether modern journalism's most famous "fabulist" really does deserve a second chance.

Imagine your main business competitor building a world-class, satellite-equipped "war room" to secretly scope out and monitor your progress developing international ventures. Incredible? Imagine your classified product prototype mysteriously landing on the market under a brand name belonging to your archrival. Astounding? This isn't the story line from the latest John le Carre novel; this is modern-day corporate America -- and it's full of secret agents and operatives, stealing and selling your intellectual property for profit. Peopled by riveting characters displaced from now defunct post-Cold War agencies, Spooked exposes a fascinating tapestry of real-life corporate spying occurring within publicly traded companies such as Dow Chemical, Avery Dennison, 3M, Sony, Motorola, and dozens of others. Adam Penenberg, top investigative journalist for Forbes, and Marc Barry, founder of a Manhattan-based corporate-intelligence agency, uncover and describe in thrilling detail some of the greatest corporate-espionage capers of all time. A brilliant expose, Spooked unravels the truth and hypocrisy behind the multi-billion-dollar corporate-intelligence industry.

During the Golden Age of Aviation of the 1920s and 1930s, two great pilots stood above the rest: one-eyed Oklahoma farm boy Wiley Post, shy and awkward on the ground but a daredevil in the sky; and Jimmie Mattern, a handsome, charismatic Hollywood stunt pilot from Texas. The whole world followed their exploits through screaming newspaper headlines as they flew in planes made of little more than wood, canvas, and bailing wire, competing to be the first solo flier to circumnavigate the earth. Only one would succeed, though the other would become more famous than he could have ever imagined. And both would change the face of aviation forever.

Documents the efforts of lawyer Tab Turner to hold major sport utility vehicle manufacturers responsible for hundreds of deaths and injuries caused by their decision to use cheaper and dangerous tires.

Who would be the first aviator to singlehandedly fly all the way around the globe? That was all anyone wanted to know in the summer of 1933, when Wiley Post and Jimmie Mattern set out from New York in a pair of wood-and-canvas propeller planes. Post, a one-eyed Oklahoma farm boy with a desperate past, was as comfortable in the cockpit as he was socially awkward back on the ground. Mattern was a Hollywood stunt pilot and social sidekick of Howard Hughes who had fallen on hard times, and an accident-prone daredevil who'd walked away from more plane crashes than he could count. They were friends as well as rivals, members of a small fraternity of aviators—their circle included Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart—at a time when flight was still a perilous business. Each was determined to conquer one of the last frontiers in a rapidly civilizing world—and neither knew the dangers that lay ahead. In Cloud Racers, Adam L. Penenberg tells the story of Post's and Mattern's rollicking journey from the canyons of Manhattan to the wilds of the Russian Arctic and back again, and brings back to life an era in which the sky remained a place of mystery and wonder.