Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 60
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...
July 26, 2020
World Population Will Decline Starting In 2064, Shifting the Current World Order
After peaking at 9.7 billion people in the year 2064, researchers believe that the world’s population will begin to decline. The primary reason cited is more empowerment of women/girls and widely available contraception. The researchers go on to talk about the major impact this is likely to have on economies around the world, and particularly the balance of power as current “third world” nations will be the ones who likely have the highest percentage of productive young people working.
Still, th...
July 25, 2020
How Ultra-Niche Phones Are Going Tiny, Rugged and Bringing Back Keyboards
Each time a “game-changing” new mobile phone is announced with a camera that has incrementally more megapixels, it sparks another moment of tech envy. Every few months we are forced to regret the decision to buy our own inferior phones that seem nowhere near as awesome as the new one that makes our previous version obsolete. But what about those people who want something besides the best HD camera and screen resolution with a sub-par phone?
It turns out there may be a market for more unusual pho...
July 23, 2020
5 Virtual Presentation Lessons From Comic-Con
I have wanted to go to the Comic-Con event for years, but never quite managed to make it. This year, I finally can – because the entire event is happening virtually. It is happening all weekend, and there is already an excellent panel online you can watch on how teachers are using comic books to help students learn.
Over the past few days, there have been panels on “causeplay,” the future of gaming and a Star Trek panel featuring a table read of the season finale from Star Trek Discovery. It wa...
July 22, 2020
Trader Joe’s and the Slow Death of Brand Personality
I believe brands should act in human ways and have a personality. In fact, I wrote a book on it more than a decade ago called Personality Not Included, and I have long used Trader Joe’s as an example of how to effectively create and share a personality. From their unique “Fearless Flyers” to the way they have retitled ethnic foods with slight variations of their brand name, I enjoy the way they bring their brand to life. This week, thanks to pressure from an online petition, they will remove th...
July 21, 2020
How Researchers Trained and Created AI With Psycopathic Tendencies
What happens when you train an AI algorithm only with murderous images from horror films or macabre photos from the Internet? A seriously disturbed AI, as researchers at the MIT Media Lab discovered. The AI, named “Norman” after the lead character from the horror film “Psycho,” reacted disturbingly in image association tests and exhibited severe tendencies toward seeing the world as more aggressive, violent and negative – no matter what it was presented with afterwards. It’s an excellent reminde...
