Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 55
August 6, 2020
August 5, 2020
The One Thing That Could Change Media and Eliminate Fake News
Award-winning journalist Eric J Scholl published a story this week where he deconstructs Jonathan Swan’s interview with President Trump. As he notes in the article, the most powerful thing about the interview is how Swan fact checks the President DURING the interview and refutes his false claims in the moment. As Scholl writes:
“If you can challenge forcefully, real-time, you don’t need to go back and do fact-checking. And that’s the real success of it. And at least part of the reason this type ...
August 4, 2020
Today’s Perfect Tourism Campaign: Send Your Virtual Scream To Iceland
There are many things these days that might make you want to scream out loud – but it’s not always easy to find a place to do it. Now, in a timely new campaign for Iceland tourism, you can send your most heartfelt scream to them and the Icelanders will release that scream in nature for you. The campaign is called “Looks Like You Need Iceland” and it’s a perfect way to remind people about the therapeutic effects of a scream but also of being out in a remote place far from others. While people may...
August 3, 2020
Tokyo 2020 Is Now The Longest Marketed Olympic Games In History
The Tokyo Olympics was scheduled to be happening this week and I was planning to be there. I’m a big Olympics fan so this week I can’t help but think about all the athletes who trained for years only to have their big shot delayed. What I didn’t consider, until reading this article, was that the team marketing the Games just had their task extended by a full year. How do you promote a big event that may or may not happen and keep excitement going at a time when people can’t imagine gathering for...
August 2, 2020
The First Robot Many People Loved Is Getting a Second Life
Last year in I wrote about a story from WIRED about the unexpectedly real sense of loss that many owners of the Jibo robot were feeling when its parent company announced they would no longer be supporting the social bot. Now another company has acquired the rights and patents to Jibo and have plans for a bold new future in healthcare and education for the robot that has become newly relevant thanks to the pandemic.
For years Jibo has offered perhaps the most advanced case study of how humans can...
July 31, 2020
Why CES Going Digital Is A Big Deal
By now, events going digital is not really big news – so you might wonder why I’m singling out this week’s announcement from CES. When the world’s largest tech conference goes virtual, that’s a different magnitude. More importantly, the announcement coming six months before the event will offer plenty of runway for every exhibitor and participant of the show to completely reimagine what they will do to stand out and get business done. I believe several years from now when we look back on how qui...
July 30, 2020
July 28, 2020
Millennials Move Into Childhood Bedrooms and Revisit Their Youth
Many young city dwellers left their apartments to move back home with parents when Covid-19 shut down everything. For most, that meant moving back into their childhood rooms, and having a unique forced opportunity to make peace with their own younger selves.
This NY Times article explores how many are treating it as a chance for introspection. They are going through their childhood notebooks, cleaning up all the memorabilia that they had shared from growing up and high school and remembering wha...
July 27, 2020
Netflix’s Controversial New Show On Indian Arranged Marriages
A new Netflix eight-part mini-series called Indian Matchmaking has been sparking a big debate online because of how it shines a spotlight on what one observer called “Brahmanical patriarchy … shaped by gender, caste, and economic relationships.”
The show tells the story of arranged marriages from the perspective of a famous matchmaker who uses “biodata” to connect people. Watching it reminded me how lucky I am to be married to an amazing woman, along with just how stupid most of us can be when d...
