17th October 2015
1) Haunting. A photographer edits out our electronic devices from pictures to highlight our lonely lives.
2) Off the front pages for quite some time, Michael Dell has just sealed the biggest deal in Tech history with the purchase of EMC for $67 Billion. ‘For Dell this puts them firmly in the centre of the IT stage in a period of huge change, not just in storage, but across a range of next-generation technologies, including virtualisation, cloud, convergence and security, …(and) gives them real enterprise credibility.’
3) From Wired Magazine. A new study looks at where sea levels are likely to be in 30 years and how much land may be swallowed up.
4) Driverless Cars, Buses and Trucks. Singapore is planning for them.
5) The Power of New Social Channels – Cosmopolitan is getting 3,000,000 viewers a day on Snapchat Discover. – ….’people share Cosmo content in large numbers, which is an activity that is not typically associated with Snapchat. That may be changing, as Cosmo’s Discoverstories are shared up to 1.2 million times daily…‘
At the same time, Snapchat is retreating from home grown content. ‘There’s bound to be tension when a platform tries to do original content, an area already well served by traditional publishers and everyday users alike. With their tech orientation, platforms also don’t always get what it takes to create quality editorial content, and their history of hiring journalists has been checkered‘.
6) Is Google Books leading researchers astray? ‘…the problems begin with a basic disjunction between the way culture works and the way Google collects materials for its database. Generally speaking, once a book has been scanned, it’s entirely accessible, meaning that Google has no reason to index it again. There are, of course, exceptions – as researchers note, “new editions and reprints allow some books to appear more than once” – but, for the most part, the one-to-one rule apparently applies.’
7) The Death and Life of The Great British Pub. ‘The massive number of pubs in Britain, something between 50,000 and 60,000, is credited by some to the Black Death. Plague-struck, the 14th-century Britons who had not been annihilated were left in an emptier land, earning higher wages, perhaps better inclined to enjoy themselves. They spent more time and money than ever before in purpose-built taverns or private residences that would sell them drink‘.
8) From the smart people at @brandlearning (friends of the Filter) a summary of key findings from the 12th Advertising Week Conference in New York and where the theme of balancing old and new came into play.
9) Well now, I feel somewhat personally aggrieved to hear this – A group of beard enthusiasts were reported to the police because someone thought they were ISIS.
10) Pretty good for the core? A Harvard student breaks Guinness record by standing on a workout ball for five hours.
And finally… fancy a change in location? Here is NASA’s detailed guide of how to get to, and successfully live on Mars.