In Stockholm, the advertising company Clear Channel owns more than 1,000 digital kiosks serving an endless loop of ads to citizens. It’s the sort of high-tech urban installation we wish might do more than just sell us things. And beginning in November of last year, Clear Channel partnered with the city to give these signs new purpose: to offer homeless people directions to the nearest shelter on particularly cold nights.
2018 was an unprecedented bad year for technology that has eroded consumer trust. But you won’t see any mention of that this week. Because it’s the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It’s the time of year when gadget manufacturers everywhere line up to dazzle us with their latest takes on thin and shiny. It’s one long “This Is Fine!” cartoon, playing out in the stale cigarette-scented air of the Hilton Las Vegas–with canapés!
Privacy and security are the two things we need out of CES that we most certainly won’t get (despite Apple’s giant ad). Instead? I’ve gotten pitches for $15,000 massage chairs, delivery robots, and, as always, more TVs than I can count. It’s like the industry is telling us, kick back, binge on a show, and stuff your face until this nightmare has come to an end.
The last big innovation explosion — the proliferation of the smartphone — is clearly ending. There is no question that Apple was the center of that, with its app-centric, photo-forward and feature-laden phone that gave everyone the first platform for what was to create so many products and so much wealth. It was the debut of the iPhone in 2007 that spurred what some in tech call a “Cambrian explosion,” a reference to the era when the first complex animals appeared. There would be no Uber and Lyft without the iPhone (and later the Android version), no Tinder, no Spotify.
Everybody, I’d like to announce that the retail apocalypse has been officially cancelled. It turns out, humans do occasionally like putting down their smartphones, leaving their sofas, and going to a real brick and mortar store to make a purchase.
Netflix announced that their original movie ‘Bird Box’ generated over 45 million streams in just the first week making it the best first 7 days ever for a Netflix film. However, some analysts say that their $12 billion in debt and mounting costs will require Netflix to either raise subscription prices again or create an advertising model.
Pandora is considered the world’s most powerful music discovery platform, using algorithms to determine which music to play to a subscriber at any given time. The question is how do they do it so successfully?
One year ago, I described the media apocalypse coming for both digital upstarts and legacy brands. Vice and BuzzFeed had slashed their revenue projections by hundreds of millions of dollars, while The New York Times had announced a steep decline in advertising.
Twelve months later, it’s end times all over again. There have been layoffs across Vox Media, Vice, and BuzzFeed (and dubious talk of an emergency merger). Mic, once valued at $100 million, fired most of its staff and sold for $5 million. Verizon took a nearly $5 billion write-down on its digital media unit, which includes AOL and Yahoo. Reuters announced plans to lay off more than 3,000 people in the next two years. The disease seems widespread, affecting venture-capital darlings and legacy brands, flattening local news while punishing international wires. Almost no one is safe, and almost everyone is for sale.
Clearly we’ve reached a saturation point with tech overload. Many of us have found ourselves falling into reward-center feedback loops, craving the dopamine hits that likes and comments give to the brain or the instant gratification of one-click shopping. We’re not exploring and learning anymore — we’re zombie scrolling, buying things we don’t want, and spending precious hours staring at pictures we don’t care about.
We already know Alexa had a good Christmas — the app shot to the top of the App Store over the holidays, and the Alexa service even briefly crashed from all the new users. But Alexa, along with other smart speaker devices like Google Home, didn’t just have a good holiday — they had a great year, too. The smart speaker market reached critical mass in 2018, with around 41 percent of U.S. consumers now owning a voice-activated speaker, up from 21.5 percent in 2017.
From a critical remove, then, streaming is a strangely liminal space, one not yet secure in its place in the media landscape. It’s a land of opportunity and nonsense, a media format beyond its Wild West stage yet not quite formed into something that can be subjected to mainstream media analysis. Streaming is a place for big-time, multi-million-dollar celebrities. It’s also a place where marginalized people form communities around games and people they love, where niche gaming communities like speedrunning can grow healthily.
A single design studio is responsible for branding a slew of mega-successful startups like Casper and Allbirds. Here’s how it took over the world–or at least your feed.
Teens credit social media for helping to build stronger friendships and exposing them to a more diverse world, but they express concern that these sites lead to drama and social pressure.
