8 shocking predictions for life after 2020 from Google's genius futurist

http://www.techinsider.io/ray-kurzweil-most-extreme-predictions-2015-11



http://uk.businessinsider.com/15-startling-incredible-and-provactive-predictions-from-googles-genius-futurist-2015-9

Who are the most powerful people in the media right now?

http://www.theguardian.com/media/ng-interactive/2015/nov/30/mediaguardian-100-2015-interactive-guide

The Future of Work

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/29/five-ways-work-will-change-future-of-workplace-ai-cloud-retirement-remote


By absorbing the most routine aspects of our jobs, optimists argue, machines are freeing us up to concentrate on more creative, thoughtful activities. This may be true for some, but, as the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author Martin Fordsays: “The reality is that a very large fraction of our workforce is engaged in activities that are on some level routine, repetitive and predictable.” If this is the case, retraining a large portion of the workforce to engage in more creative activity beyond the reach of automation will pose an enormous challenge.

From Cleopatra to John Carter: The Biggest Box Office Turkeys in Hollywood History

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/photos/2015/11/biggest-movie-turkeys

Ironically, what few mention is that Cleopatra was also the highest grossing movie of 1963, and yet still failed to make a profit. They truly don’t make them like that anymore—for a very good reason.

The rise and fall of the unicorns

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21679202-some-private-technology-firms-are-having-trouble-justifying-their-lofty-valuations-rise-and


Many investors in unicorns had bet that a new generation of technology firms would unsettle the old guard, but that has not happened as quickly as they had predicted. Tech giants like Amazon, Google and Facebook have continued to grow impressively, especially considering their already large size; and they have been adept at entering new markets that startups might otherwise have claimed. For example, Facebook has bought and built messaging apps that compete with Snapchat, and Dropbox has a rival in Amazon, whose cloud-storage business is large and growing quickly. Compared with most profitless startups, the big firms are not outrageously valued. It may become clearer to investors that they not only overestimated the unicorns but underestimated the incumbent firms’ growth prospects.

Why are some movie stars bomb-proof?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/film/by-the-sea/angelina-jolie-box-office-flop/

“There’s never-ending debate about do big stars actually sell movies,” says the sales executive. In his 2012 study The Economics of Creativity, finance professor S Abraham Ravid of New York’s Yeshiva University concluded that they didn’t. Star worship “is all but a myth”, he wrote. “Stars can still sell magazines, but not movies” His research showed that the most successful films consisted – surprise – of simple, well-told stories.

Anton Corbijn is bowing out of professional photography

http://www.economist.com/blogs/prospero/2015/11/musical-iconography


PHOTOGRAPHY as a slow, analogue art-form is dead. Over 200,000 photos are uploaded to Facebook per minute—that’s six billion each month—and there are over 16 billion photos on Instagram. Thanks to digital products anyone can be a Photoshop hack, selfie whore or filter junkie. We see with our smartphones, not our eyes. What need do we have for old-fashioned specialists using toxic chemicals to make a physical print that can be neither insta-shared nor “liked”?

Man says he invented 'Phuc Dat Bich' hoax to fool news media and Facebook

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/25/man-says-he-made-up-vietnamese-name-hoax-to-fool-news-media-and-facebook

The post went viral in mid-November. Media including the Sydney Morning Herald, news.com.au, SBS, BBC.com, the Herald Sun and 9news.com.au – reported the story, though Phuc Dat Bich gave no interviews.  

Not one journalist had got confirmation that “Phuc Dat Bich” was indeed his name.

Suspicions were aroused by technology publisher and journalist Trevor Long who wrote this prescient post on his website EFTM examining the evidence and concluding it was probably fake.

“What is the evidence?” Long asked. “His passport. Not that a journalist from any of the above organisation have sighted his passport – that he posted a photo of his passport on Facebook.

Even Michael Lewis Was Surprised Hollywood Bet on The Big Short

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/11/the-big-short-movie-michael-lewis


One thing the author didn’t worry about when he wrote his 2010 best-seller was how to interest filmmakers. Who would—or could—make a movie about credit-default swaps? As Brad Pitt, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Christian Bale bring the book’s complex narrative to life, Lewis expresses his astonishment.

Inside the Sony Hack

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/users/2015/11/sony_employees_on_the_hack_one_year_later.single.html?utm_content=bufferf0f5e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Animation by Lisa Larson-Walker. Images by dotshock/Shutterstock, courtesy of Footage Island.

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-hacking-of-hollywood-51c25895512f#.kx70yi8lw

Virtual-reality devices - Ready, headset, go

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678797-new-vr-headsets-are-being-launched-technologys-appeal-uncertain-ready-headset-go

... firms in other industries believe that virtual reality has potential to change their businesses and the way they interact with consumers. “People are valuing experiences more than things,” says Raja Rajamannar, chief marketing officer of MasterCard. The credit-card company is discussing how it might use virtual-reality technology to give customers insights into places they would like to visit and hotels where they could stay. Advertisers and even newspapers (see article) are thinking of how to use it to reach people in clever, attention-grabbing ways. Ford is using Oculus headsets to help its designers see what new cars will look like before they are built. Industries that train through simulation, from aviation to medicine, will derive clear benefits from virtual reality.

Is this the woman who killed off the lads' mag?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/is-this-the-woman-who-killed-off-the-lads-mag/

Latest figures show more than 33,450,000 web users a month are visiting the site, which is followed on Facebook by half of all British men aged 18 to 24, plus a growing number of 13- to 17-year-old boys. It has become one of the most visited websites in the UK, reportedly receiving more traffic than both LinkedIn and PayPal. In the week it was announced that publication of “lads’ mags” FHM and Zoo was being suspended, these figures are particularly significant.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/22/men-behaving-better-lads-mags-digital

Satellite wars

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/637bf054-8e34-11e5-8be4-3506bf20cc2b.html

A new arms race in our skies threatens the satellites that control everything from security to communications

The folly of Empire: how Star Wars menaced Hollywood

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/19/the-folly-of-empire-how-star-wars-menaced-hollywood

...for their $4.05bn, Disney did want something from George Lucas. The purchase had included the rights to Star Wars and so the fictional empire would be revisited. Why not? For just as Lucasfilm was the source of so much hi-tech movie-making, so it had inspired star fleets of franchises for mainstream cinema: the Harry Potter films, Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Pirates of the Caribbean and so many other reiterations not quite as distinguished or so much fun, but all contributing to the principle that cinema now makes a world that never was and never could be. It’s even possible that the glory of Star Wars helped sustain that creaking dinosaur, James Bond.

Newspapers - Up against the paywall

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678799-many-publishers-still-see-little-alternative-continual-cutbacks-up-against-paywall


Advertisers are keen to spend more on video and sponsored content, two areas in which readers’ attention is easier to hold (and which are not threatened by ad-blockers). But readers are not trained to expect video from their newspapers, and newspapers often lack the experience and resources to make them to a high enough standard. Some are making strong efforts, though. This month the New York Times released a “virtual reality” app, with a series of slick 360-degree videos that the newspaper says kept readers engaged for close to 15 minutes on average.

Measuring the global empathy gap

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/terrorism-and-empathy

The charge that Western mass media failed to report on the bombs in Beirut does not withstand a simple web-search. According to Google, 5,190 articles appeared on the subject on November 12th (the day before the Paris attacks). As of November 18th, 15,000 are available, with more than 400—including one in the New York Times—dedicated to comparing the treatment of the tragedies in the two cities. However, it is true that the attacks in Paris generated coverage on a different magnitude, yielding 2.5m stories on November 14th (although these figures probably overstate the disparity, since they count each appearance of wire-service reports that can be published hundreds of times). And after an initial surge in search traffic for “Beirut” following the bombings, the internet’s interest quickly waned, only to recover following the news from Paris. Even then, searches for “Beirut” did not reach even 1% of the maximum volume for “Paris”

FHM was a bible for normal men. It will be missed (even by those who campaigned for its death)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/fhm-was-a-bible-for-normal-men-it-will-be-missed-even-by-those-w/

The writing was on the wall for the lads mags with the introduction of widely available broadband internet around 2003, and, soon after, cheap smartphones. Men weren’t just consuming internet porn for free, but spending all their waking time fiddling with their phones. Those of us weathering the storm editing these titles during period after period of double-digit circulation decline knew print was a dead man walking.

Government data-requests to Facebook

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-11

FHM and Zoo magazines to suspend publication

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/17/fhm-zoo-magazines-suspend-publication

Both titles have seen steep declines from their heyday. FHM’s circulation fell to less than 67,000 for the first six months of this year, 20% less than in 2014, while Zoo was selling just over 24,000 copies, a fall of more than 12%. 

That compares to the more than 700,000 copies FHM was selling in 2000, while Zoo launched in 2004 with a circulation of 200,000 before peaking in 2005 at more than 260,000.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/sex/12000809/FHM-and-Zoo-closure-Feminists-should-mourn-the-death-of-lads-mags.html

How Fox ate National Geographic

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/nov/14/how-fox-ate-national-geographic

Inside Atlético Madrid: can the club go global?

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/da99c814-88b2-11e5-90de-f44762bf9896.html#slide1

Atléti will also gain from a revolutionary change in Spanish football: clubs have just agreed to divide their TV money more equally. “That’s a game-changer,” says Kenyon. For years, every Spanish club negotiated its own TV deal. That suited Real and Barcelona, which in 2013/2014 each got €140m from broadcasters. However, smaller clubs got peanuts. Consequently, Real and Barça monopolised the best players. This inequality allowed a midsized country in economic crisis to fund two world-beating teams. But it also made the Spanish league boringly predictable. As one Atléti official phrases the question: “Do we want to have a league or just two clubs that we clap?” Finally, under pressure from government, Real and Barcelona consented to a new, more redistributive system.

The story of how pop was made—and who made it

http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21678193-story-how-pop-was-madeand-who-made-it-bopping-brilliant


Sweden, the country that produced ABBA, never lost its appetite for soaring melodies. Its government offered free music education. Moreover, its artists were not constrained by racial boundaries in American music, and could produce “a genre-bursting hybrid: pop [white] music with a rhythmic R&B [black] feel”. And because English was not their first language, they were free to “treat English very respectless”, as Ulf Ekberg of Ace of Base, a band, says, “and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody”.

“Authenticity” is being peddled as a cure for drooping brands

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21678216-authenticity-being-peddled-cure-drooping-brands-its-real-thing


However, authenticity is far easier to pull off when your product has some real-world qualities that its competitors lack. The most striking recent example is that of America’s craft beers. As drinkers turn against the pallid swill pumped out by mass-market brewers, the craft brewers have almost doubled their market share in the five years to 2014. Although many long-established, heavily advertised but mediocre products are losing force, and the fickleness of consumers is making it harder for them to maintain premium prices, for those firms that get the product right and have a genuine story to tell, the rewards can still be huge. The textbook example of this is Apple, whose devices’ superior design and ease of use make it a powerful brand in a commoditised market. Last year it had only 6% of the revenues in the personal-computer market, but 28% of the profits. That’s real authenticity.

The Mysterious Death of the Man Behind Putin's Media Machine

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/business/article/the-mysterious-death-of-the-man-behind-putins-media-machine/548764.html


Lesin was present at the creation of Russia's state-dominated media sector. As press minister he forced media magnate Vladimir Gusinsky to cede control of television station NTV while Gusinsky sat in a jail cell. In 2005, he helped create Russia Today, now RT, a television network that broadcasts Russia's point of view in multiple languages and aims to undermine Western news narratives. Afterward, he served as an adviser to the Kremlin.

James Bond film Spectre’s opening weekend in America

http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2015/11/daily-chart-5

"Disinformation Review" - new EU information

http://eeas.europa.eu/delegations/ukraine/press_corner/all_news/news/2015/2016_11_04_1_en.htm

Its objective is to show the European public the high amount of such disinformation attacks that target European audience every single day, to expose the number of countries targeted, and, thus, to explain to the European audience the breadth of this problem. The data and information collected would help to conduct a better analysis and, thus, be ready to counter and pre-empt possible misinformation attacks in the future.

One Man's Revenge Against Russian Propaganda

https://globalvoices.org/2015/11/03/one-mans-revenge-against-russian-propaganda/#

"How much contradiction can Russians absorb without going crazy? At any point in time, they believe two opposite things. For instance, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, but we are winning the war. Because we cannot lose. Because Russians can never lose. But there are no Russian troops in Ukraine. So whatever is broadcast, they will believe, because it’s instinctive. Even if it’s lies, we’ll believe them because it’s our guys who are telling the lies. Because everyone is lying, and we’re going to stick to our lies"

https://noodleremover.news

How the Mad Men lost the plot

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/cd1722ba-8333-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd.html


Brands are not the rich sources of differentiation marketers like to think of them as, but short cuts through the complexity of decision-making. Most consumers aren’t aware of, or interested in, the difference between Nescafé and Kenco and don’t want to spend longer than they need to thinking about which they prefer. They just want to get coffee and get home. Marketers are usually surprised to hear this and find it hard to accept — they like to imagine that people who buy their brand are deeply attached to it. But the data show that even people who regularly favour one brand over others will pick a competitor if it happens to be more easily available or cheaper that day. In the words of Sharp’s mentor, Professor Andrew Ehrenberg: “Your customers are customers of other brands who occasionally buy you.”

The Fat Jew: 'Social media is running out of steam'

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11962516/The-Fat-Jew-Social-media-is-running-out-of-steam.html

"What's funny is that I love billboards and classic, traditional forms of advertising," the Fat Jew reveals. "The problem with the internet is that everything is so disposable, you know? People forget whatever they see, like, three seconds later. But if I were to put up, say, a billboard of me wearing a thong made of beef jerky to advertise a beef jerky company, you're going to look at that for more than three seconds.

Steve Jobs: the legacy of Apple's mysterious co-founder

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/nov/01/steve-jobs-the-afterlife-film-michael-fassbender-danny-boyle-alex-gibney


Since Steve Jobs’s death from cancer in 2011, the myths keep accumulating. Tim Adams assesses his legacy and speaks to Danny Boyle and Alex Gibney, directors of two new films – one a drama, the other a documentary – about the mysterious Apple boss

It’s Star Wars v Hunger Games in a box office battle – but don’t rule out 007

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/oct/31/star-wars-hunger-games-james-bond-battle-box-office-franchises

Force Awakens may become the highest-grossing film of all time, eclipsing Avatar, which banked $2.8bn around the world.But Katniss could still be victorious. The Force Awakens has failed to secure a release date for this year in China, where it is not as well known as the Hunger Gamesfranchise, which is enjoying a surge in popularity.