This week’s stories include the reimagining of some racist logos from the past, the emerging field of digital nutrition, the dangers of Facebook Groups and what the popularity of boxed mac & cheese can teach us about disruption today and what it may mean for our long-term future. For longtime readers of this email, I
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The Queen-inspired film Bohemian Rhapsody film was poorly rated by critics, yet became a big box office hit. Earlier this year, the same thing happened to Hugh Jackman’s The Greatest Show musical film about the life of PT Barnum. Why are critics so out of touch with what real people like? And why do we love the
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This was a week filled with more social media stupidity than usual. In a single day I read two disturbing stories that got me thinking about the dangers of our social media addiction. In one, an excited baseball fan posted a picture of his World Series ticket (with the bar code visible) only to an observant thief
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The Washington Post story this week revealing the “previously unreported ratings system” used by Facebook to rate the trustworthiness of users on a scale of zero to 1 has all the usual components of an outrage-worthy announcement. How dare Facebook think they can rate all of us? What if they abuse this system or someone hacks it?
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Last week Netflix announced that they would be stopping their long standing policy of asking customers to vote on early pilots for programs to see if they have enough critical mass and audience to continue. In the same week, at a television industry event a Netflix executive shared that Netflix finds demographics to be useless
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Facebook is fond of running experiments, even though in the past this hasn’t gone so well. Yet these missteps haven’t stopped them from trying. Over the past several weeks, there has been reports of several new innovative features that they are testing which may soon have a significant impact on your online life and behavior.
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How do you get attention for a sleepy little Swiss ski resort town that few people have ever heard of? Ban photos and promise to fine tourists for sharing them online. That’s the genius strategy behind this move from the town of Bergün, but the explanation of why is even better. “We don’t want to
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Sometimes it is hard to pick the perfect caption for your selfie, but Brazilian publisher Leya has a solution to help … and introduce you to some of their newest authors in the process. The brand launched a chatbot that will ask you about your photo and then suggest a quote from one of their
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During its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) this past week described by one media outlet as a “parody of itself,” Apple launched a video intended to show developers how much the world needs them and the apps they build. The video, unfortunately, ended up illustrating just how much havoc Apple could wreak if it chose to
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If you are a parent, one of the things that probably keeps you up at night is how to monitor your kids activity online and keep them safe from scams, cyberbullying or worse. This newly launched tool from Google looks to be a wonderful resource both for parents and also educators to teach kids everything
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