Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet. | | | | | Adam Goldstein aka "DJ AM" (Showtime) | | | | | | “Hate, it has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.”
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| | rantnrave:// I spent the better part of the last year fighting for my life and in the last week I felt better than I have in 20 years. Something from that heart surgery opened me up emotionally. The events of the last few days just took all the joy out of it. Building up to it, I've never witnessed such division and hate. One of those times when I didn't know whether to retreat and filter or confront and reason. Yesterday, I didn't publish. I was speechless and sad. Today, I'm ready to fight again. ABRAHAM LINCOLN once said: "America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves." I believe this with every bone in my body. I'm trying to make sense of it all by reading, listening and hearing. We don't seem to be preventative in this country. We respond to tragedy and catastrophe. Is this the tipping point for unity? I'm hopeful when I see those who suffer oppression denounce the police shootings. I wonder if police now will think more about gun control and assault weapons. Legitimate brutality? Will police denounce the bad apples in their own ranks? The Dallas Police Chief did. There is enough hurt on all sides to become one side. Lots of perspectives in our REDEF MediaSET: Race, Police, Guns, Murder, Anger, Pain, Civility, Respect, Sadness and Tragedy. More added soon... SHOWTIME continues its tradition of screening some of the best music documentaries (DAFT PUNK, THE EAGLES, BOWIE, etc) of our time. Last night I watched KEVIN KERSLAKE's THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DJ AM. A sad and all-too-familiar tale of creative talent, good intentions, addictions, appetites, fear of disappointment and death too soon. You know how it ends but it's still compelling. I didn't know the man but by the end you think of him as a friend. I just wanted to give the guy a hug. He was a pioneer in the "DJ as rock star" world but couldn't escape early sadness and later tragedy. Good perspectives from friends and those around him. I know from experience that it's hard to ask for help when you're sick. Real friends stay on you and help pull you out and surround you with support. It's not shunning responsibility, but some need the pressure from others. The film is stacked with regrets from friends... Happy Birthday (yesterday) to MARC ANDREESSEN, ALICIA GOLDSTEIN, HAYLEY BARNA, MATT STRAUSS, ANTHONY JACOBSON, SCOTT CUNNINGHAM, STEVE GRIMES and WENDA HARRIS MILLARD (today). | | | - Jason Hirschhorn, curator |
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| Some say they are targetted due to their skin color. Others due to their uniform. Gun violence, racism, police brutality, good cops getting killed. Is this the tipping point for unity? These are just some of the perspectives we've reviewed in the last few days. | | |
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| Outspoken virtuoso DJ Tommie Sunshine explores the past, present and future of electronic dance music (EDM) in this documentary series that dispatches its host to nine cities around the world to explore the electronic dance music scene in each. | | |
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| I am in Nosara, a small, sleepy village on Costa Rica's northwest coast, with my wife, Gabrielle, to try something I have only scant experience with and which she has none: surfing. Which is why we are at Surf Simply, a seven-day intensive surf camp. | | |
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| Childhood disintegrative disorder, a rare and severe condition, rapidly melts away a child’s abilities. A new theory proposes that this little-known condition turns back the developmental clock. | | |
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| Do you really want to know what it’s like to get smothered by a linebacker? | | |
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| American Psychological Association |
| Psychologists and other child development experts are exploring how parents’ use of technology affects kids and the best ways to help families reconnect in the Digital Age. | | |
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| Busted | | by Ryan Gabrielson and Topher Sanders |
| Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them? | | |
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| Fraud, Santeria rituals and an unsolved killing at Doral Bank. | | |
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| It was clear from FBI Director James Comey's congressional testimony Thursday that he thinks Hillary Clinton lied to the American people, even if he was reluctant to say it in so many words. But then he didn't need to. We've known for over a year that Clinton has been lying about her server. | | |
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| In Wisconsin, a self-described soccer mom confessed to another soccer mom about taking money from the local club, only to discover she was taking even more money. A woman in Vermont was convicted of stealing from a fund established to honor a dead child who had been a club member. | | |
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| There is a conceit among many senior editors in the U.K. that Britain has " the best journalism in the world." At its best, certainly, British journalism is very good indeed. | | |
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| We've always have a curveball of an interview at Pandoland. A session that attendees might normally expect at a "tech" event but that wound up being a lot of people's favorite. This year that session was unquestionablythe one starring novelist Margaret Atwood. | | |
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| Hat tip to Allison Williams. From the air, the lines etched in the floor of the desert were hard to see, like drawings left in the sun too long. As our pilot cut tight turns over a desert plateau in southern Peru, north of the town of Nasca, I could just make out a succession of beautifully crafted figures. | | |
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| As we all know, the internet changed how we chose what to read. It removed the old bundles and aggregation systems and created new ones, and those new systems result in different things being read in different amounts and from different kinds of publishers. It seems to me that much of this is going to happen to retail. The current bundles and aggregation models will be split up and people will chose in new ways, and that will remake at least some brands in the same ways that publishers have been remade. Once everything is online, ’How do you get people to look at your content?' is actually a very similar question to 'how do you get people to look at your product?' For products as for journalism, there are things that can cut through - that people will deliberately and consciously go to - and there are very-low-volume items in the 'long tail' that will be surfaced though search. But then there is a broad middle of more-or-less commodity, more-or-less undifferentiated choices that depend on distribution and aggregation to be chosen. That particular story is perfectly well written, but it’s read because it’s in that magazine and that magazine is bought because it’s on the rack, and now people don’t come to stories like that anymore. And equally, that particular product is bought because it was ranged and placed at eye level, and now it's not going to be being bought like that either. Today, those stories get their traffic, very often, from Facebook - Facebook recommends stories it thinks (based on its machine learning model) you might like. There's not really an equivalent for products. Amazon is Google for products, but we have no Facebook for products. - Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) July 6, 2016Amazon in particular and ecommerce in general is good at search. Amazon, very obviously, is Google for products. It's good at giving you the best-seller you've heard of or the water filter for your fridge (the long tail). It's not so good at the things in the middle. Amazon is great at selling you what's on the table in the front of the bookshop, and at selling one copy a year of a million or so obscure titles, but it's not very good at showing you what's on the shelves at the back of the bookshop. It's not so good at selling the mid-list - things that you didn't know existed, or didn't know you wanted, before you saw them. It does have a recommendation product, but it's not clear how well it works, and indeed an interesting question for Amazon is how far it can grow before running into categories for which its commodity merchandising model doesn't work so well. (Even in print books, Amazon's market share only reached a quarter of the market after 20 years of ruthless execution).More broadly, it strikes me that 15 or 20 years ago people used to try to distinguish in ecommerce between ‘high touch’ and ‘low touch’ products, on the basis that it would be easier to buy online things that you didn’t have to touch first. That was true up to a point, but it turned out that many fewer things were ‘high touch’ than we thought, while same-day delivery and free returns are eroding much of the rest: we’ve now reached the point that it’s not clear that there is anything that cannot be bought online. But actually, the real barrier now is often not touching it, but knowing about it. These are things where a lot of the role of a physical shop is curation, recommendation and demand generation rather than logistics: the shop shapes your choice but it also tells you about things you didn't plan to buy, and you can't search for things you hadn't thought about. Some of these products might not get bought at all if you hadn't been shown them - you went in for one book and came out with ten. How will that work online? Without that, we'll have more of the polarisation one can often see in ecommerce today, between bestsellers on one hand and the long tail on the other with the middle squeezed. So, someone needs to do the demand generation - to tell you there's something you might want. That might be physical retail, or advertising, or media - the fashion or home magazine or the book review, online or offline. Indeed, some online brands are creating their own print magazines (for example, ASOS and Net a Porter), or creating physical retail to show the product and build awareness, but where you order online. It can also be the brand itself: there's an interesting case study in Walker & Company (an a16z portfolio company). The founder spotted an under-served market in personal grooming products, but also spotted that it was now possible to reach that market online without necessarily going through all of the barriers that traditional large-scale physical distribution would place in the way of a new brand, at least at first.However, there is clearly also an opportunity to do this at massive scale, for many people across many products - that's kind of the point of the internet. From that perspective this is not a particularly solved problem. Google doesn't do demand generation. Etsy, ProductHunt and Pinterest (the latter two both A16z portfolio companies) are building solutions from different directions, and a great many people trying to replicate some form of the boutique model online as well, as I suggested here - to create some kind of specialist curation. As machine learning ripples out across the tech industry, entrepreneurs will probably also find entirely new and better ways to answer 'what would I like'. That might include Google, indeed. That kind of scalable automation, though, could also go in completely the opposite direction for some things - away from any kind of decision at all. You put an Amazon Dash on the machine, or perhaps it can measure what you’re used and re-order by itself, and so you in effect subscribe to the product, and once done you’ll probably never bother to change brand. Or, say to Siri or Alexa or Google Assistant ‘Hey, order some more soap powder’ and the same brand is added to your next delivery. (And in both cases your choice of channel is just as now locked in as your choice of soap powder, once you've set the default.) Either way, an impulse purchase in one of 2 or 3 retailers you might have stopped in at, based on real-estate portfolio on one hand and eye-level placement and brand equity on the other, shifts to auto-renewal or a natural language parser. Given that P&G and Unilever's combined ad budget is larger than the global revenue of the recorded music industry, this means that subscription soap powder could be a much bigger deal than subscription music. What will you have to pay to be Google Assistant's default choice of dishwasher tablets? | | |
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| How rap mixtapes evolved from a humble regional format to a worldwide phenomenon. | | |
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| Ralph Lauren himself, a still-youthful 76, remains the company's chief creative officer and executive chairman. He built the company by evoking an idyllic past from which hard times were banished, taking inspiration from Ivy League college students, prewar British aristocrats and frontier cowboys. | | |
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| “The nature of love is about paying attention to the people who matter, about still giving when you are too tired to give.” | | |
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| Viral content seems democratic. But it’s still mostly controlled by the big media companies. | | |
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| "The Perfect Weekend for an Introvert" is far from perfect, technically. The two-minute video, hot out of Buzzfeed's L.A. content mill, feels like a five-second joke stretched into 120. But the idea for the video was pretty good: so good, in fact, that Akilah Hughes claims to have had it six months ago. | | |
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| Human beings try to find patterns to explain the reason behind almost every phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that there is a pattern to rely on. Superstitions are a classic example where spurious patterns were generalized to explain many a phenomena. | | |
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| How Yankee Candle took over the world, one wacky smell at a time. | | |
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| | | | | Eddie Vedder and Betchadupa cover Split Enz |
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| © Copyright 2016, The REDEF Group |
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