5th March 2016
1) In the latest instalment of #LikeAGirl, P&G’s Always campaign points out that Emojis are sexist (video). Have a watch, it is very well observed.
2) The battle with the cyber arm of ISIS (and others) is ramping up. The US government needs Silicon Valley more than ever as it looks to deal with security threats in cyberspace. The Pentagon is bulking up the US Cyber Command, aiming to reach 6,200 employees across 133 teams devoted to cyberdefence. Their newest recruit – Eric Schmidt.
3) Looks like the App Store Gold Rush is over – ‘For all but a few developers, the App Store itself now resembles a lottery: for every breakout hit like Candy Crush, hundreds or even thousands of apps languish in obscurity’. Welcome to Life and Death in the App Store.
4) Heading for SxSw this year? They have got quite a line up. Mr and Mrs Obama are delivering separate keynotes. Unsurprisingly, this is the first time in the 30-year history of SXSW, that a sitting President and the First Lady have participated in the event.
5) An unexpected benefit of Facebook’s new ‘Reactions’ – Apparently, Law enforcement and intelligence agencies will benefit from the open source intelligence delivered by Facebook’s new feature, which they will be able to mine for sentiment analysis of criminal and terrorism suspects.
6) Never mind about the Album, could the Album Review be on the way out? This is the problem, in the digital age – ‘With so many voices shouting wildly for attention, it has become a veritable trash pit of amateur opinions and toxic discourse. The ushering in of a new generation of free-to-low-wage clickjockeys, outrage-generators, and online opinionistas racing against one another to be the first out of the gate with a piping hot take, is largely said to have contributed to the death of the professional critic, and reduced collective feedback of art to a pass/fail, “classic or trash” consensus’.
7) We spend a good deal of time watching TV and also eating fast food. Now McDonalds can save us time , by allowing us to combine the two. McDonalds are now making happy meal boxes that turn into virtual reality headsets. As Adweek’sDavid Gianatasio explains: “It’s kind of like Google Cardboard – with fries.” Welcome to – ‘Happy Goggles.’
8) Striking and clever. Animals meet geometry in a striking illustration series.
9) This surprised me: which countries have the worlds most powerful passports and which are the weakest?
10) The insect migration record has been broken by a tiny dragonfly. 14,000 kilometres is the new record.
Everybody relax. Looks like there is no danger from the impending rise of the robots. Here, to show us why, is the wonderful (and clever) Simone Giertz and her ‘World of Shitty Robots’. Up first – The Applause Machine (video).
Still on robots and ending on a thoroughly erudite note – in this video, a real dog really does not like Robot dog at all.