Oct 12, 2021 | mobile, networking, trends
Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, the business model of food-delivery apps went largely unconsidered by the diners who relied on them for midday kale salads and late-night taco feasts. Platforms such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub often charged restaurants commissions of up to thirty per cent per order, and they were evasive about how (and how much) their couriers were compensated. But for most restaurants delivery comprised only a fraction of total sales. Then the covid-19 pandemic turned virtually all restaurants into takeout-and-delivery-only businesses, and the brutal economics of the delivery apps became a matter of life-or-death urgency, for both the restaurants selling food and the couriers delivering it.
Source: The Fight to Rein in Delivery Apps
Oct 12, 2021 | video
The TV industry has been debating the wisdom of Netflix’s binge release model since that Super Bowl weekend back in 2013 when the streamer dropped the entire first season of House of Cards all at once. Netflix argues its approach is best because it prioritizes customers, and that younger audiences in particular want to feast on big batches of content all at once rather than have episodes spoonfed to them over a few months. Hollywood’s old guard makes the case that tossing out a full season in one day dramatically shortens a show’s pop-culture half-life and makes their art feel disposable.
Source: Do Streaming Release Strategies Even Matter?
Oct 11, 2021 | justice & equality, video
The new series, airing on Hulu, is trying to make the very 2002 premise of the comic it’s based on work in 2021.
Source: The tricky trans politics of FX’s Y: The Last Man
Oct 11, 2021 | games & graphics, mobile, networking, trends
Live sports and gambling have a long co-dependent relationship, which is expanding beyond casinos to over-the-top video. The new field of dreams for incremental billions in revenue began in 2018 after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the federal anti-sports-gambling law.
Source: Streaming Video Betting Big on Legalized Sports Gambling
Oct 10, 2021 | algo, audio, networking
Machines have long excelled at activities involving consistent reproduction of a fixed object – think identical Toyotas being mass-produced in a factory. More improvised activities are less rule-based, more fluid, chaotic or reactive, and are more process-oriented. AI has been making significant strides in this area.
Source: Why improvisation is the future in an AI-dominated world
Oct 10, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Average investors were not able to get in on the last decade’s start-up boom in private markets. Once that seemed unfair. Now it looks lucky.
Source: Lifestyles of the Rich and Gullible: Theranos and Ozy Edition
Oct 9, 2021 | algo, networking, trends
I visited the first Ghost Kitchens restaurant in a New York Walmart. Ghost kitchen companies have exploded over the last year and a half as delivery grew. Virtual restaurants cut down on labor and real estate costs, making them appealing to owners.
Source: I ordered food from 5 different brands in a stark white room inside a suburban Walmart and I’m convinced it’s probably the future of fast food
Oct 8, 2021 | justice & equality, video
“If you watch television, if you watch films, you should think about who is making them and under what conditions.”
Source: The People Who Make Your Favorite Movies and Shows Are Fed Up
Oct 8, 2021 | games & graphics, video
Squid Game adds to other recent South Korean screen productions, most notably the 2020 Oscar-winning film Parasite, in providing a sharp critique of the socio-economic inequality that plagues the lives of many in South Korea. More specifically, it speaks to the deepening household debt crisis affecting the lower and middle classes.
Source: Squid Game: the real debt crisis shaking South Korea that inspired the hit TV show
Oct 8, 2021 | games & graphics, justice & equality, networking
Twitch has been widely criticized for an ongoing scandal involving “hate raids” aimed mostly at its BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ users. These attacks are carried out by bots programmed to spam streamers’ chats with offensive messages. The conditions became so bad that Twitch users started a campaign — #TwitchDoBetter — to push for change, and at one point arranged a digital “protest” where streamers boycotted the platform in solidarity with hate raid victims.
Source: Lesbian gamers say Twitch is failing them
Oct 8, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Researchers have worked for decades to tease out the relationship between teen media use and mental health. Although there is debate, they tend to agree that the evidence we’ve seen so far is complex, contradictory and ultimately inconclusive. That is equally true of Facebook’s internal marketing data, leaked by Haugen, as it is of the validated studies on the topic.
Source: Facebook’s own data is not as conclusive as you think about teens and mental health
Oct 6, 2021 | audio
Is the collapse of genre boundaries and the erosion of fervent musical loyalties a good thing?
Source: Spotify Has Made All Music Into Background Music
Oct 6, 2021 | algo, audio
Everyone who uses Siri has their own tales of frustration — times when they’ve been surprised not by the intelligence but the stupidity of Apple’s assistant, when it fails to carry out a simple command or mishears a clear instruction. And while voice interfaces have indeed become widespread, Apple, despite being first to market, no longer leads. Its “humble personal assistant” remains humble indeed: inferior to Google Assistant on mobile and outmaneuvered by Amazon’s Alexa in the home.
Source: Hey Siri, what happened?
Oct 5, 2021 | algo, justice & equality, networking
Estherina Bewintara, a 29-year-old mother and designer in Jakarta, normally processes orders for her online furniture shop once her baby is asleep, typically between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. But on Monday night, as she was coordinating a stock update over a WhatsApp call, she noticed something was wrong.
Source: How the Facebook outage crippled businesses and communication around the world
Oct 5, 2021 | algo, games & graphics, trends
In recent months you may have heard about something called the metaverse. Maybe you’ve read that the metaverse is going to replace the internet. Maybe we’re all supposed to live there. Maybe Facebook (or Epic, or Roblox , or dozens of smaller companies) is trying to take it over.
Source: What is the metaverse, and do I have to care?
Oct 5, 2021 | mobile, networking
Many of those pills are being traded openly via social media, particularly on Snapchat, the most popular app among U.S. teens. Snapchat has been linked to the sale of fentanyl-laced counterfeit pills that have caused the deaths of teens and young adults in at least 15 states, according to The Partnership for Safe Medicines, a nonprofit public health group. NBC News independently confirmed deaths in 14 of the 15 states and identified five additional states not included in the research.
Source: When one pill kills
Oct 5, 2021 | algo, networking, trends
Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone.
Source: The Internet Is Rotting
Oct 5, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Police struggle to catch online fraudsters, often operating from overseas, but now a new breed of amateurs are taking matters into their own hands
Source: Who scams the scammers? Meet the scambaiters
Oct 4, 2021 | justice & equality, networking
Facebook’s algorithm intentionally shows users things to make them angry.
Source: 9 Horrifying Facts From the Facebook Whistleblower’s New 60 Minutes Interview
Oct 4, 2021 | mobile, networking
TikTok is having a very good week, it seems. It started with a Reuters story saying the social video platform has passed the 1 billion user mark in a shockingly short time. Next came the Bytedance property’s hosting its own event, TikTok World, at which it announced several new innovations to attract advertisers , creators and influencers.
Source: TikTok’s latest good news: its ads are sticky and effective, and rich people spend a lot of time there
