Bamboo Innovator

Media companies took a battering from the internet. Cash from digital sources is at last repairing some of the damage

Media companies took a battering from the internet. Cash from digital sources is at last repairing some of the damage

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

THIS summer a made-for-TV movie about a tornado carrying man-eating sharks was a surprise hit in America. The preposterous plot of “Sharknado” may strike a chord with media bosses who have watched the internet ravage their business over the past decade. Newspapers have lost readers and advertising to the internet. Book and music shops have closed for good. Sales of DVDs and CDs have plummeted. The television industry has so far resisted big disruption but that has not stopped doomsayers predicting a flight of advertising and viewers. In 2008 Jeff Zucker, then the president of NBCUniversal, a big entertainment group, lamented the trend of “trading analogue dollars for digital pennies”. But those pennies are starting to add up. And even Mr Zucker, now boss of CNN Worldwide, a TV news channel, has changed his tune. Old media is “well, well beyond digital pennies,” he says. Read more of this post

With Gmail Overhaul, Not All Mail Is Equal; Google Funnels Offers Into ‘Promotions’ Folder, Tops Them With Its Own Ads; Kate Spade, Groupon and Gap Want Out

August 15, 2013, 7:24 p.m. ET

With Gmail Overhaul, Not All Mail Is Equal

Google Funnels Offers Into ‘Promotions’ Folder, Tops Them With Its Own Ads; Kate Spade, Groupon and Gap Want Out

DREW FITZGERALD

For some retailers that rely on emailed promotions, Google Inc. GOOG -1.17% is adding insult to injury. When the search giant overhauled its free email service three months ago, it set up algorithms to automatically siphon the flow of airfare offers and spa deals away from users’ main inboxes and into an easily bypassed “Promotions” folder. But there is another wrinkle: For Gmail users that do visit those Promotions folders, the first items they see will often be ads sold by Google. The ads are different from those that already appear inside users’ opened messages. Instead, they look like emails sitting in an inbox but are shaded yellow and feature informational “i” icons explaining their purpose. Marketers still complain that the ads threaten to draw attention away from the coupons and pitch emails they want their targets to read first. Read more of this post

With 400,000 subscribers, Birchbox expands from beauty-in-a-box to lifestyle products

With 400,000 subscribers, Birchbox expands from beauty-in-a-box to lifestyle products

BY ERIN GRIFFITH 
ON AUGUST 15, 2013

At the earliest stages of venture capital investing, VCs prefer companies stay lean and spend their capital very carefully. But once they know they’ve got a winner, they want to fuel as much growth as they can, as fast as they can. Witness the CEO Supper Club conversation between Lerer Ventures partner Ben Lerer, and Birchbox CEO Katia Beauchamp. (Lerer Ventures is a Birchbox investor as well as a PandoDaily investor.) Lerer scolds Beauchamp for not being aggressive enough. When Beauchamp says that Birchbox’s product is beholden to the whims of its suppliers, Lerer tells her she should start making and branding her own products and control her supply. It doesn’t sound like the first time they’ve had this conversation. Read more of this post

Watch: A Welding Robot That’s Learning to Create Art Forgeries

Watch: A Welding Robot That’s Learning to Create Art Forgeries

BY KYLE VANHEMERT

08.15.13

e-David is a welding robot that’s learning to create perfect copies of paintings. Image: Universität Konstanz

The collision of art and technology takes many forms. One recurring, especially straightforward one is a robot with a paintbrush. It’s easy to see the fascination; there’s something poetic about the idea of imbuing a machine with the soul of an artist. But while many of these projects involve some sort of effort to approximate human creativity in mechanical form, with e-David, the goal is a bit different. Its creators are simply trying to build a machine that can paint perfect copies of other paintings–a flawless mechanical forger. In other words, instead of giving their robot an artist’s soul, they’re trying to lend it a painter’s eye. Read more of this post

The Internet’s Verbal Contrarian; writer Evgeny Morozov has quickly become the most prominent critic of the utopian promises coming from Silicon Valley

August 14, 2013

The Internet’s Verbal Contrarian

By NOAM COHEN

For every revolution, there is a counterrevolutionary. And so the digital one has brought us Evgeny Morozov.

A 29-year-old émigré from Belarus, Mr. Morozov has quickly become the most prominent, most multiplatformed critic of the utopian promises coming from Silicon Valley. His first book, “The Net Delusion,” looked skeptically at the belief that social networks were responsible for fomenting political change across the globe, and in the new “To Save Everything, Click Here” he has expanded that critique to question whether the Internet has improved anything. Read more of this post

Sony Grabs Lead in Race for Internet Pay TV, posing new competition for cable, satellite and phone companies which have long sold subscription TV services

Updated August 15, 2013, 7:42 p.m. ET

Sony Grabs Lead in Race for Internet Pay TV

Preliminary Deal to Carry Viacom Channels Is Content Coup for Planned Service

AMOL SHARMA And SHALINI RAMACHANDRAN

6758.TO -0.97% In the technology industry’s race to build an online version of pay television, Sony Corp. 6758.TO -0.97% just took the lead. The Japanese company has reached a preliminary deal with Viacom Inc.VIAB -1.75% to carry the media giant’s channels, such as MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, on its planned pay-TV service, people familiar with the matter said. None of the other companies vying to launch Internet-based pay TV, including Intel Corp.INTC -2.39% and Google Inc., GOOG -1.17% has reported such a major content deal. Like its technology rivals, Sony is planning to stream cable channels and on-demand programming over the Internet, posing new competition for cable, satellite and phone companies that sell subscription TV services. Read more of this post

The entertainment industry and online media: Pennies streaming from heaven; Is the internet really so different from the phonograph?

The entertainment industry and online media: Pennies streaming from heaven; Is the internet really so different from the phonograph?

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

FASTER than a speeding bit, the internet upended media and entertainment companies. Piracy soared, and sales of albums and films slid. Newspapers lost advertising and readers to websites. Stores selling books, CDs and DVDs went bust. Doomsayers predicted that consumers and advertisers would abandon pay-television en masse in favour of online alternatives. Jeff Zucker, then boss of NBCUniversal, spoke for all media moguls in 2008 when he condemned the trend of “trading analogue dollars for digital pennies”.

It has been a long wait, but those digital pennies are starting to pile up. The internet once destroyed jobs and companies, but it has now become an engine of growth for old media, including music, television and books (see article). In 2008 around 12% of consumer spending on media and entertainment products was devoted to digital ones; it should reach around half by 2017. Admittedly, many parts of the media industry will not recover their highs for years, if ever. The music business is about 40% below its peak of 1999. But the internet has stopped bludgeoning old media and is now boosting it. In 2012 recorded music had its first year of (very modest) growth in more than a decade. Read more of this post

Facebook is bad for you: Get a life! Using the social network seems to make people more miserable

Facebook is bad for you: Get a life! Using the social network seems to make people more miserable

Aug 17th 2013 |From the print edition

THOSE who have resisted the urge to join Facebook will surely feel vindicated when they read the latest research. A study just published by the Public Library of Science, conducted by Ethan Kross of the University of Michigan and Philippe Verduyn of Leuven University in Belgium, has shown that the more someone uses Facebook, the less satisfied he is with life. Past investigations have found that using Facebook is associated with jealousy, social tension, isolation and depression. But these studies have all been “cross-sectional”—in other words, snapshots in time. As such, they risk confusing correlation with causation: perhaps those who spend more time on social media are more prone to negative emotions in the first place. The study conducted by Dr Kross and Dr Verduyn is the first to follow Facebook users for an extended period, to track how their emotions change. Read more of this post

Cisco and the Tech That Time Forgot; Its Disappointing Outlook Underscores How Lumbering Tech Giants Can Become Too Big for Their Own Good

August 15, 2013, 2:50 p.m. ET

Cisco and the Tech That Time Forgot

Its Disappointing Outlook Underscores How Lumbering Tech Giants Can Become Too Big for Their Own Good

ROLFE WINKLER

Enterprise-technology companies should be a dynamic bunch. But investors are right to treat them like the pack of dinosaurs they have become.

Cisco Systems CSCO -7.17% is the latest to disappoint Wall Street, joiningOracle, ORCL -2.50% Intel,INTC -2.39% Microsoft MSFT -1.73%and International Business Machines IBM -0.93% . Though Cisco’s latest quarterly results mostly met expectations, its outlook for next quarter—calling for lighter sales than expected—has investors worried that, like the others, it just can’t be relied upon to sustain top-line growth. Read more of this post

Can an app get kids to behave in school? 15 million teachers and students are willing to give it a try

Can an app get kids to behave in school? 15 million teachers and students are willing to give it a try

BY DAVID HOLMES 
ON AUGUST 15, 2013

When Sam Chaudhary and Liam Don moved from the UK to Silicon Valley to start an ed-tech company, they soon found themselves with no place to live, no support network, and struck by the realization that the startup idea they left their homes, friends, and girlfriends for was kind of terrible. “Those were really dark emotional days,” says Chaudhary.

So Chaudhary and Don hit the pavement. They knew they still wanted to change education in some way, but their original idea, a piece of technology that helped improve group dynamics among students, was in Chaudhary’s words “a solution without a problem.” They began to learn everything they could about what was wrong with education, interviewing hundreds of teachers and surveying thousands more. What they found was that the biggest problem teachers faced wasn’t related to content or cognition. It was behavioral. “Forty percent say they spent over half the time dealing with behavior,” Chaudhary says. “You might as well send the kids home in December.” It’s also one of the most painful problems new teachers face, Chaudhary found, and the biggest reason they leave teaching. Read more of this post

3D scanners are getting cheap so fast, the age of 3D piracy could soon be upon us

3D scanners are getting cheap so fast, the age of 3D piracy could soon be upon us

By Rachel Feltman and Christopher Mims 7 hours ago

Just two weeks ago we wrote about the Fuel3D, a device for scanning 3D objects so you can replicate them on a 3D printer, with a proposed price tag of around $1,000. Now MakerBot, the leading maker of desktop 3D printers, is launching its own 3D scanner next week, and Signe Brewster at GigaOM is betting it will cost just $500.

That would make it appealing as an accessory for hobbyists who already own the MakerBot Replicator. It’s a low guess, but not unreasonable; since MakerBot today officially merged with the much larger Stratasys, which makes professional-level 3D printers for industrial prototyping, it has a lot of resources to scale the Digitizer up to cheap mass production. Read more of this post