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Yes, Elon Musk finally released his flame throwers to the consumer market … and people promptly began using them in totally inappropriate ways. It is a predictable side effect of our culture of Everyday Stardom that consumers behave badly … just because they can. This week, there were plenty of examples that maybe we don’t
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This week Crayola branched out in a new direction by launching its own line of colorful beauty products. In the same week, Blackberry continued their own quest to maintain relevance and resurrect their fading brand by announcing the KEY2 (a new phone featuring a full keyboard) and Kodak showed off the first photos taken on
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Is Twitter useful anymore (or was it ever)? Most of us who have been on the platform for some time have likely experienced a downward shift in its value. For me, the platform used to offer an interesting stream of real time commentary from friends and acquaintances. Over time it became a noisy flood of
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This week AirFrance became one of the first airlines to experiment with subscription pricing by announcing a new pre-paid travel product called Le Pass which allows frequent travelers to purchase pre-paid coupons to lock in pricing. A few days later, Mercedes-Benz followed BMW, Porsche and Cadillac by launching their own monthly all-inclusive subscription model, at
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Should technology be a source for hope or fear? That was the question that seemed to emerge this week as I read several stories offering a recap from the TED Global conference as well as new initiatives in natural language search from Google and a legal debate about how and if people should be able
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Social media is under attack and all of us are trying to figure out what to do about it. Should we use Facebook less like a newspaper and more like a telephone? Is the best solution for the manipulated outrage on Twitter to just to turn it all off? An Op-Ed in the NYTimes this week tackled
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This week my story picks range from exploring the future of luxury marketing and healthcare to addictive game design to the world of people who are paid to watch Netflix content. I have to admit, the one about the Netflix content taggers did intrigue me – as I never really thought about how all of
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If you are a fan of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror, this was a surreal week. Walmart patented autonomous robot bees (which get hacked to kill people in one episode) and China introduced a social rating system that gives citizens scores based on “good behaviors” (a plot line that leads to chaos in another episode).
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I spent the early part of this week at SXSW and one of the themes of my talk (see slides here) was our shifting relationship to the truth. I believe we must choose to venture beyond our own media bubbles and seek out information from unfamiliar sources. This week the largest ever study of fake news found
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In this recap, there are many stories of companies behaving badly, stupidly or with evil intent. United airlines replaced their employee bonuses. BrewDog launched a painfully bad pink beer for women and MIT found that more than half of all ridesharing drivers make less than minimum wage. There is hope, though, like the success story of Arby’s
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