Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 71
March 26, 2018
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...
March 15, 2018
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...
March 8, 2018
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...
March 5, 2018
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...
February 26, 2018
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 MoviepassA few weeks ago, too-good-to-be-...
February 15, 2018
Gender At The Olympics, Diesel Sells Fake Products and Why Apple’s Homepod Is A Bad Buy
The value of branding was questioned in a few stories this week, including one of a perfume store selling scents without the “noise” of marketing or labels and retailer Diesel launching its own store selling knockoffs. Other stories this week feature a fascinating data analysis of what might happen if women and men could compete against one another at the Olympics and L.L. Bean’s new plans to create connected boots (and whether their consumers will go for it). I hope you enjoy the stories thi...
February 8, 2018
The Disruption Issue: Norway’s Olympic Curling Pants, Saudi Solar And Soap Fetishes
This week disruption was the theme in multiple stories featuring everything from new ASMR videos, to rocket launches to more than one story warning about the downside of technology. The stories remind us that regardless of whether we call these changes disruption or evolution, most of them don’t help everyone equally. There are winners and losers … and as you’ll see in several stories this week, the losers will be heard eventually.
The Forgotten Consequences Of The Sharing Economy
The devast...
February 1, 2018
Why Are Icelanders So Creative? Hint – It’s Not Their Environment
The power of empathy was a big theme this week, in stories from Amnesty International and a “robotherapy” chatbot. Both look at new and interesting ways for us to better understand one another and get help when we most need it.
New Survey Reveals Multiple Reasons Why Icelanders Are So Creative
A new published study finds several reasons for a current boom in Icelandic creativity. An educational shift 20 years ago to value creativity more highly played a large part. A less appreciated reason a...
January 26, 2018
Spy Testing, Open Source Furniture and How To Find A Pet That Likes Your Music
I spent the early part of this past week thinking a lot about transformation as I spoke at the SocialMedia.org Winter Meeting in front of a group of strategists running social media for large brands. The theme, if there was one, seemed to be how to inspire more people around us (and especially our leaders!) to embrace disruption. Sharing new ideas like the ones featured in this newsletter every week is a good start. I hope you enjoy these selections.
January 19, 2018
Smog Tower, Sh*Thole Namibia, Chilean Fog Beer And How Kids See Gender Identity
New Study Finds That Kids Are More Flexible About Gender Identity
One of the trends my team and I uncovered and wrote about this year in Non-Obvious was “Ungendered” – a term that describes how our shifting definitions of traditional gender roles are leading some to reject the notion of gender completely. A new study released this week from Vanderbilt University studied children’s reactions to a genderless robot character on the Amazon show Annedroids and its conflict about whether to call it...
