“Indian food delivery company Zomato is setting up micro-hubs to pilot last-mile delivery for already delivered food. “Walkers” will pick up the food from designated kiosks, and take it to the exact floor or location. The experiment aims to make deliveries frictionless by eliminating the need to call riders and wait for crowded elevators. A…
Month: April 2024
“STEREOPHONICS – “Dakota” – Popular: #1007” (Freaky Trigger)
“There’s the germ of something interesting here – an idea of kitchen-sink rock, writing directly but artfully about the real lives of kids in post-industrial Britain. You can see why it would work – and in a few months we’ll see it working a lot better. But there’s a tension even in early Stereophonics between…
“April 28, 2024” – Letters from an American
“In 2019, Barr explained to an audience at the University of Notre Dame the ideology behind the strong executive and weakened representation. Rejecting the clear words of the Constitution’s framers, Barr said that the U.S. was never meant to be a secular democracy. When the nation’s founders had spoken so extensively about self-government, he said,…
“One weird trick to fix Hollywood” – Read Max
“Any diagnosis of the crisis–and any sense of a path forward–needs to address the fact that the smartphone, and a host of software technologies built on it, have birthed what is essentially a parallel, non-union, motion-picture industry consisting of YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch, Twitter, and their many other social-video rivals, all of which rely on…
“Andrea Fleck-Nisbet breaks glass, pulls alarm” – SHuSH
“When distributors go down, they tend to take publishers with them—the publisher’s inventory and cash are all tied up in the distributor. Jack Stoddart’s General Distribution Services filed for bankruptcy in 2002 and claimed or threatened the lives of a whole raft of publishing houses including Key Porter, House of Anansi, ECW, and Douglas &…
“A Never-Ending Block Party” – Jason Scott
“Block, block, block. Report and block. Mute and block. You will feel parts of your soul unclench that you didn’t previously understand were balled into tights fist of stress and simmering disaster. I’m involved in dozens, sometimes hundreds of interactions in a given week, and I do it. You should consider this your license to…
“NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth” – NASA
“A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked:…
“Oh the Humanity – Why You Can’t Build Apple with Venture Capital” – Benjamin Sandofsky
“The Apple Way works best when they take an existing product and make it amazing. The best pitch for Apple Watch wasn’t “The Rolex of Tech,” but rather, “A very fancy FitBit.” It also helps when a product leverages Apple’s existing ecosystem, and the goodwill Apple had earned from customers. The Apple Watch connected to…
“What is the civil war in ‘Civil War’ about?” – Read Max
“Ultimately the movie seems much less concerned with making a particular political or moral statement (or even exploring the politics or morals of its fictional scenario) than it does with efficiently and energetically moving its truck of adrenaline junkies from one suspenseful action set-piece to the next. It’s like finding a 1967 alternate-history novel published…
“How One Small Video Game Publisher Creates Big Hits” – Jason Schreier (Game On, Bloomberg)
“Having what Elliott calls a “sticky” demo is helpful — a slice of the game that grips players and doesn’t let go. Balatro, which transforms poker hands into an addictive “roguelike” that fans can’t stop playing, is a good example of this phenomenon. The game is difficult to explain but nearly impossible to put down…