trends

What Miranda Sings’ Short-Lived Netflix Series means for YouTube’s future 

Feb 18, 2018 | ,

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 tech bias: why Silicon Valley needs social theory

Feb 18, 2018 |

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

Is The Internet Of Things Dead, Or Is It Growing Up?

Feb 12, 2018 | , , , , ,

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?

Are the Most Innovative Companies Just the Ones With the Most Data?

Feb 11, 2018 | ,

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?

Test finds HomePod’s Siri ‘at the bottom of the totem pole’ in smartspeaker AI

Feb 10, 2018 | , ,

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