13th November 2015
1) #Re-branding Explained (see above)
2) Bob Dylan and The Hot Hand. From @newyorker – Is There Such A Thing as a Creative Streak? ‘Take popular music. From 1965 to 1969, the Beatles, following a series of records that leaned heavily on Chuck Berry and Little Richard, peeled off a string of albums that changed everything in popular music.’
‘…In 1606, during a moment of religious fracture, horrific plague, and the political wake of the Gunpowder Plot… Shakespeare wrote not only “Lear” but “Macbeth” and “Antony and Cleopatra.’
3) If Facebook is the publishing platform of the future – exactly what is happening here? Facebook’s traffic to top publishers fell 32 percent since January. Ah ok – we are ok to read publishers content, just as long as it is on Facebook –
‘But the most common theory is that as Facebook has been trying to keep users in its ecosystem, it’s encouraged publishers to upload their articles and videos directly to the social network, whether it’s video or its Instant Articles feature that began rolling out in May’.
4) From The Verge: YouTube Music is here – and it’s a game changer (One day Google might be that search engine that YouTube owns.) ‘Now you can pay $10 a month and get the world’s biggest video library, ad free and offline, a well-built streaming music service with stock catalogue music, and a hybrid music video experience that is unlike anything else out there.’
And in related news – You Tube now supports 3D virtual reality video.
5) So, Chinese billionaire and former taxi driver Liu Yiqian has bought Amedeo Modigliani’s 1917-18 painting, Nu Couché for $170.4 million. A good time to catch-up with a history of insane art prices?
6) Uber for Break-ups. Of course, why has it taken so long….?! ‘For $10, you can buy a text sent to your significant other informing him or her of the cessation of your affection. For the same amount, you can buy an email version of that note. For slightly more—$20—you can buy, if you are feeling traditional or especially official about it, an actual letter announcing the breakup.’
7) Very cool. A company in Scandinavia are building a platform that lets friends and families create a permanent digital legacy of the deceased, called Ekko Forever. ‘How we deal with social profiles of the deceased is an unsolved problem, this attempts to tackle it head on by turning it into a digital celebration’.
Here is my blog post on a closely related subject – Do You Want To Live Forever ? Well Now You Can In A Digital Afterlife.
8) A crowdsourced mapping startup is using computer-vision technology to turn user-submitted photographs into a searchable, 3-D map of the world.
9) Just in case you didn’t know already….here are the Apps most favoured by Millennials. The top 3 may surprise you – Yik Yak, Venmo and InstaSize.
10) Interesting new read Superforecasting, The Art and Science of Prediction.
‘Tetlock’s thesis is that politics and human affairs are not inscrutable mysteries. Instead, they are a bit like weather forecasting, where short-term predictions are possible and reasonably accurate… The techniques and habits of mind set out in this book are a gift to anyone who has to think about what the future might bring.’ The Economist
and finally… Unnerving. This is what it looks like when a ballistic gel body dummy gets shot up with bullets.