No surprise: Alexa might not be the most impartial shopping tool. While this may not be the biggest problem facing brands upping their digital presence, as voice searching—and purchasing—becomes more widespread, voice-search rankings could be more of an issue.
Source: Brands’ Voices May Be Muffled on Amazon Echo | eMarketer Retail
$100 billion. That’s how much U.S. consumers will spend online for food and beverages by 2025, according to new a new report from Nielsen and the Food Marketing Institute.
Source: Inside the FMCG Industry’s $100 Billion Path to Online Maturation
Some found love; others learned valuable lessons about time stamps.
Source: Opinion | You Up? College in the Age of Tinder – The New York Times
The internet has sparked a new kind of economy, as creators find new ways to directly reach their audiences and customers. Services like Etsy, WordPress, and Amazon’s Twitch don’t have a lot in common, except for the fact that they give creative people ways to make a living doing what they love.
Source: How much people make from YouTube, Etsy, Instagram: CHARTS – Business Insider
The user who posted the video, “mike m.,” stands by his baseless theory that a student at the school is really an actor. And he says he’s “not going to stop.”
Source: The Making of a No. 1 YouTube Conspiracy Video After the Parkland Tragedy – The New York Times
Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia were focused on Robert Mueller. But after news broke about the shooting, they quickly changed their focus.
Source: After Florida School Shooting, Russian ‘Bot’ Army Pounced – The New York Times
Like the Amazon River itself, Jeff Bezos’s company cuts a powerful, meandering channel through the business landscape, changing every industry it touches.
Source: Amazoned: Is Any Industry Safe?
Curators are increasingly crafting exhibits with selfie-seeking Millennials in mind. In L.A., a hotbed for the trend on the West Cost, installation shows sell out in minutes.
Source: Museums woo a new generation with ‘Instagram worthy’ art – CSMonitor.com
In recent years, YouTube’s identity has shifted from a video sharing platform and streaming to a cultivator of subcultures. For fans of any YouTuber or YouTube community, this is not news; but for anyone on the outside, the idea of watching a single creator day in and day out for years is still a strange and foreign concept.
YouTube content creators and their audiences share a far more intimate relationship than television audiences share with even the most iconic characters from some of the longest running shows. The medium itself is far more personal—vloggers sit down and talk directly to the camera, while the viewer takes in the video at eye-level, watching on a laptop screen or, quite literally, from the palm of their hand.
Source: What Miranda Sings’ Short-Lived Netflix Series means for YouTube’s future – Ampersand
The defendants, including Breitbart, Time, and The Boston Globe, warned a loss would “cause a tremendous chilling effect on the core functionality of the web.”
A new way to pay the bills!
Source: Salon is offering readers the option to suppress ads in exchange for cryptocurrency mining power.
In the summer of 2017, a now infamous memo came to light. Written by James Damore, then an engineer at Google, it claimed that the under-representation of women in tech was partly caused by inherent biological differences between men and women. The memo didn’t offer any new evidence – on the contrary, it drew on longstanding sexist stereotypes that have been disproven time and again, and it included only the vaguest mention of decades of research in relevant domains such as gender studies. Given the expansive resources at Google, his omissions didn’t stem from a lack of access to knowledge. Instead, they pointed to an unwillingness to accept that social theory is actually valid knowledge in the first place.
Source: The tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory | Aeon Ideas
Google, ARM, and Amazon were all in the news this week for their work on custom chips for AI applications. Here’s why we’re only going to see more of them in the future.
Source: AI Weekly: Get ready for AI chips everywhere | VentureBeat
The Embrace smartwatch was designed for epilepsy patients. But its impact could be much broader.
Source: This MIT Startup Is Developing A Fitness Tracker For Your Brain
Data science is an exciting, fast-moving field to become involved in. There’s no shortage of demand for talented, analytically-minded individuals. Companies of all sizes are hiring data scientists, and the role provides real value across a wide range of industries and applications.
Google is making email a lot more interactive, to save you all those confusing clicks.
The internet of things has never quite found its footing, and some proclaim the once-hyped concept is dead. Even as tech companies like Apple, Amazon, and Google pour money into smart speakers, there’s no real, tangible use for them. Other companies have tried–to little avail–to sell us dumb smart products like smart refrigerators and smart water bottles. And smart homes? They spy on users–and they’re just plain annoying.
For Matt Webb, a technologist at R/GA London, the potential of the internet of things isn’t inside your home. It’s outside of it. “It’s where we can finally start assembling parts to make products or services or companies with a smaller number of people or with greater ambition than before,” he says. “IoT is solving problems in the business space really clearly.”
Source: Is The Internet Of Things Dead, Or Is It Growing Up?
Why virtual reality is struggling to take hold in a world of Too Much Content—and where (and how) it can thrive.
Source: Can VR Survive in a Cutthroat Attention Economy? | WIRED
Do you still use Yahoo? Do you still remember MySpace? Compaq? Kodak? The cases of startups with superior ideas dethroning well-established incumbents are legion. This is the beauty of “creative destruction” – the term coined by innovation prophet Joseph Schumpeter almost a century ago. Incumbents have to keep innovating, lest they be overtaken by a new, more creative competitor. Arguably, at least in sectors shaped by technical change, entrepreneurial innovation has kept markets competitive far better than antitrust legislation ever could. For decades, creative destruction ensured competitive markets and a constant stream of new innovation. But what if that is no longer the case?
Source: Are the Most Innovative Companies Just the Ones With the Most Data?
While the Apple HomePod is the “best sounding” smartspeaker and has a “measurably better” user experience in many areas, its underlying AI assistant — Siri — failed dramatically in a query test versus Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Microsoft Cortana, according to Loup Ventures.
Source: Test finds HomePod’s Siri ‘at the bottom of the totem pole’ in smartspeaker AI
