Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 66

How Twitter Is Killing Our Culture (And Why We Probably Won’t Fix It)

Is Twitter useful anymore (or was it ever)?

Most of us who have been on the platform for some time have likely experienced a downward shift in its value. For me, the platform used to offer an interesting stream of real time commentary from friends and acquaintances. Over time it became a noisy flood of retweets and half formed opinions. The demise of Twitter into “the world’s most anarchic social media platform” is the topic explored in an article from WIRED contributor Felix Salmon this week...

Why Everyone Wants To Sell Everything As A Subscription

This week AirFrance became one of the first airlines to experiment with subscription pricing by announcing a new pre-paid travel product called Le Pass which allows frequent travelers to purchase pre-paid coupons to lock in pricing. A few days later, Mercedes-Benz followed BMW, Porsche and Cadillac by launching their own monthly all-inclusive subscription model, at a significantly lower rate ($1095 versus $2000 per month). The software industry also has increasingly converted most of their cu...

How To Sue A Robot And What The TED Conference Is Really Like

Should technology be a source for hope or fear? That was the question that seemed to emerge this week as I read several stories offering a recap from the TED Global conference as well as new initiatives in natural language search from Google and a legal debate about how and if people should be able to sue robots. As is often the case with big questions like this, there isn’t really a single answer. All that’s certain is the questions will get bigger and more urgent as time moves forward.

What...

Extinct Animal Zoos, Ungendered Baby Names And How To Save Social Media

Social media is under attack and all of us are trying to figure out what to do about it. Should we use Facebook less like a newspaper and more like a telephone? Is the best solution for the manipulated outrage on Twitter to just to turn it all off? An Op-Ed in the NYTimes this week tackled that issue and shared a few interesting solutions for how we might yet survive this social apocalypse without resorting to deleting our friendships along with the noise. Other stories this week explore whet...

Selfie Medicine, Luxury Marketing And How To Get Paid To Watch Netflix

This week my story picks range from exploring the future of luxury marketing and healthcare to addictive game design to the world of people who are paid to watch Netflix content. I have to admit, the one about the Netflix content taggers did intrigue me – as I never really thought about how all of those relevant suggestions from the service might actually have humans behind them organizing the content instead of just algorithms. It is somehow comforting to think that when the robots take all...

Black Mirror Predicting Reality, Coke Uses Blockchain And Spotify Tries To Be The Netflix Of Music

If you are a fan of the Netflix sci-fi series Black Mirror, this was a surreal week. Walmart patented autonomous robot bees (which get hacked to kill people in one episode) and China introduced a social rating system that gives citizens scores based on “good behaviors” (a plot line that leads to chaos in another episode). Along with Facebook’s data breaches, it raises the question of whether we can trust technology. Is the solution to remove human intervention from technology? Coke’s use of b...

Why We Love Fake Stories, Perfume That Smells Like Nothing And My Slides From SXSW

I spent the early part of this week at SXSW and one of the themes of my talk (see slides here) was our shifting relationship to the truth. I believe we must choose to venture beyond our own media bubbles and seek out information from unfamiliar sources. This week the largest ever study of fake news found that fake stories are shared far more widely on social media because they often engage our emotions more deeply. Where do you find truth? Who do you believe? I’m not sure anyone has the answe...

SXSW Top Trends, Predictably Dumb Companies And Disturbing Problems With Ride Sharing

In this recap, there are many stories of companies behaving badly, stupidly or with evil intent. United airlines replaced their employee bonuses. BrewDog launched a painfully bad pink beer for women and MIT found that more than half of  all ridesharing drivers make less than minimum wage. There is hope, though, like the success story of Arby’s CEO Paul Brown. What’s his secret? Asking his employees to suggest what they might do if they were in charge for a day and then listening to their sugg...

AI Outperforms Lawyers, Seeking Love With DNA Matches And Google “Right To Be Forgotten”

This week you’ll find stories of DNA-based dating to automated agriculture, but there was one that captured my attention most. It relates to the latest report and findings from Google around their four year journey to pore through 2.4 million “right to be forgotten” requests. How can you get something that has been shared online to be taken down? It’s a question that many of us will likely find ourselves asking at one point or another in our lives. Google’s new report and transparency around...

StockX Takes On Ebay (And Wins), Predictive Banking And A Surprising Gamble From Moviepass

This was a busy week with continuing stories from the Olympics, teens showing leadership, and the launch of a questionably moral new reality show from Netflix. Other stories this week take a deeper look at the potential of predictive banking, the rapid rise of StockX as a competitor to eBay and Emirates wonderful new ad that offers a much better solution to desperately asking for an upgrade every time you travel.

The Surprising Gamble That Might Save Moviepass

A few weeks ago, too-good-to-be-...