A startup named Cooler Screens is piloting a new door for commercial freezers and refrigerators that’s equipped with a camera, motion sensors, and eye tracking in six Walgreens pharmacies around the country, including the one off of Union Square. The doors can discern your gender, your general age range, what products you’re looking at, how long you’re standing there, and even what your emotional response is to a particular product.
Just when we thought Apple’s stock could not get any worse, bad news for iPhone sales in China. Qualcomm has won an import ban on several iPhones in China.
Artists and bands everywhere have been worried for a while about whether SoundCloud would change drastically in order to survive, thanks to the ever growing losses that the company was experiencing. The platform is the main window to the outside world for many indie act’s music, and for many the thought of finding a new service is daunting. It looks like you can put that worry on hold though, as the company has reported an increase of revenue by 80%, and while it’s still not profitable, the losses are dropping.
IF YOU RE-READ the first few chapters of The Innovator’s Dilemma and you insert “Apple” every time Clayton Christensen mentions “a company,” a certain picture emerges: Apple is a company on the verge of being disrupted, and the next great idea in tech and consumer electronics will not materialize from within the walls of its Cupertino spaceship.
On Saturday I watched my 12 year old son scoff down his meal so that he could rush upstairs to get logged on with his friends in time for a Marshmello live streamed event on Fortnite. As you can see from the video this was Marshmello appearing as a Fortnite character, on stage with his music playing. Meanwhile Fortnite players moved around the ‘concert venue’ showing off their dance moves – all of which of course had been purchased in app with Fortnite VBucks. In-game live experiences like this are nothing new, but it may just be that we are beginning to get to a tipping point in shared gaming experiences for Gen Z that will shape their entertainment expectations for years to come. Tweens and teens are already spending more time socializing via social media than real world contact, connected gaming is adding to that mix.
VR has had early success in the world of live events, with platforms like NBA + Intel True VR and NextVR. These technologies allow viewers to get a 360-degree VR view courtside or from midfield and provide a way for fans to virtually attend an event, even if they can’t can’t travel to see their favorite team or aren’t able to pay full price for a ticket. But the challenges with video resolution on today’s VR devices and high-bandwidth requirements for rich 360-degree content make this a nonstarter for broad consumption. Tech and sports enthusiasts might suffer through these limitations to watch a regular season game in a new way, but the Super Bowl is something different altogether.
The way people interact with Facebook is changing how they can be persuaded to think about or do a particular thing.
With tons of information presented at the same time, your brain is forced to decide quickly what’s relevant or interesting. Facebook and other social media services take advantage of this – pushing you to slip easily from thought to behavior. It emphasizes your impulses and decreases the opportunities for you to think more thoroughly about your perceptions, attitudes and decisions.
The recent news that Facebook is in early stages of combining the messaging features of several of its properties, as reported by The New York Times last week, raises many questions about how advertisers and users will be affected. In this eMarketer Analyst Insight, Debra Aho Williamson and Jasmine Enberg explain what it could mean for these two groups.
These little audio visual preambles offer the on-screen equivalent to liminal space. In architecture theory, a liminal space is essentially a transition between one space and another. When you walk into a movie theater, you don’t actually walk directly from the parking lot, through a door, and into a room with seats and screens. First, you walk through the concourse, maybe buying some popcorn–which boosts the theater’s bottom line, okay. But the concourse also gives your mind a cleansing area, to shake off the stress of the day and prepare you to sit for two hours in a dark room. This is exactly the experience Netflix wants to create, just without the building or the popcorn.
Digital media has always been a turbulent business, but last week’s layoffs suggest a reason for panic. The cause of each company’s troubles may be distinct, but collectively the blood bath points to the same underlying market pathology: the inability of the digital advertising business to make much meaningful room for anyone but monopolistic tech giants.
