The What? Who? Why? and How Much?! of Non-Fungible Token Art
Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) have been all over the news recently.
A collage of digital art by ‘Beeple’ (Mike Winkelmann) sold for $69 million at Christie’s; the Kings of Leon released an album as an NFT; and people have even started buying virtual houses as NFTs.
When the winning bidder for the Beeple painting, “Everydays: The First 5000 Days”, received their prize they didn’t get hold of a physical item. Instead, they got a .jpg file containing the image and a record of their ownership on a blockchain.
NFT art is a buzzy trend at a time when retail investors are looking for alternative ways to invest their cash. …
I asked the data. Plus: Many other questions.
Originally published in the hi, tech. newsletter.
Very few of us had a good 2020, but Netflix bucked that trend. It added over 40 million new subscribers, taking the global total to more than 200 million. 74 million people in the US have a Netflix subscription today.
New challenges emerged, too. The competitive landscape is crowded and Netflix needs new ways to keep us all watching.
Plus, it can be difficult just to find something good to watch on there.
I’ve taken a step back and looked at the numbers I could find, to answer the following:
- Which country has…
How does it work, is it any good, and how quickly will Facebook and Twitter copy its best features?
Clubhouse is a voice-based social network that feels part corporate conference, part conference call, part corporate podcast. You’ve probably heard of it.
I wanted to take a look at how this new approach to social media might affect:
- How we network
- How we communicate
- How we learn
- How we build status (Or social capital, if you will)
Here we go.
💬 Prologue
I don’t know if you’ve been on social media lately, but let me let you in on a secret. Often, it’s an unpleasant place to be.
Social media can be noisy, combative, and anxiety-inducing.
You might say that’s because social…
Nostalgia is a heady drug - for a little while.
Remember Bebo?
I steered well clear, but I have memories of huddling round a fridge-sized PC at pals’ houses, waiting for the dial-up internet to grind its gears so they could look at a profile like this:
I have a theory that people only started stencilling ‘Live Love Laugh’ on their kitchen walls when the internet took their Bebo walls away.
With no digital outlet for such formulaic creativity, we all took matters into our own hands. Property prices are yet to recover.
But Bebo is coming back!
The original creator is coding it himself and he has plenty of…
But have the populists already moved on to new tactics?
Twitter has announced a new Wikipedia-style fact-checking feature, called Birdwatch.
The idea is to develop a community of people who can help annotate Tweets that contain questionable material. Twitter’s research finds that adding this context is more helpful to users than applying a ‘True’ or ‘False’ label.
Birdwatch allows people to identify information in Tweets they believe is misleading and write notes that provide informative context. We believe this approach has the potential to respond quickly when misleading information spreads, adding context that people trust and find valuable.
Twitter will make all Birdwatch data available for public download. There is a pilot version live here, in the US only.
…
It won’t be better than Google. But does that even matter?
Bing! has some nifty and unique features; DuckDuckGo offers privacy; Ecosia plants trees when people use its search engine.
Still, we use Google. It had an 88% share of the global search market in October 2020, Statista tells me.
Crawling, indexing, and then ranking all of the Web, in response to billions of daily queries, is a pretty big job. DuckDuckGo, for example, licences its index from Bing!. Even with the heft of Microsoft behind it, Bing! has had limited success in attracting users.
Huawei, for all its resources and its huge user base, only resorted to building its own…
Apparently, we’re all “confused” about what data it will send to Facebook
WhatsApp caused quite the ruckus a couple of weeks ago.
It emerged that WhatsApp was set to force users to accept data-sharing with Facebook, or have WhatsApp removed from their device.
You can read an excellent write-up on that situation here from my colleague Rob Thurner.
WhatsApp has pushed this privacy policy update back, from Feb. 8 to May 15. It says there was too much “confusion” about what it really means.
WhatsApp has shared some detail on the data they plan to share, in handy visuals like this:
Those glasses are coming, like it or not.
Facebook has been reflecting on 2020 — but not for long.
In a post entitled “No looking back”, the social network immediately reneged on the title’s promise by boasting about its 2020 successes.
Notably, people used Virtual Reality a lot more, and this has emboldened Facebook’s vision for its upcoming Horizon platform.
Smart Glasses
Next, they looked ahead to 2021. The headline item is a pair of “smart internet glasses” that Facebook is at pains to convey, do not offer Augmented Reality. As noted in hi, tech. last year, they will likely be made by Ray-Ban.
The glasses will launch “sooner rather…
Can you remember what life was like before Google bought DoubleClick?
One thing I do care about — even more than the ROI of SME ad budgets or a well-implemented digital transformation — is wildlife conservation.
The RSPB has released its 2020 report on the state of the UK’s birds (here, if you’re interested), and it finds that there are 19 million fewer pairs of breeding birds today compared with the late 1960s.
What would it be like if there were 40 million more birds in the country? Can you imagine?
I can’t really, myself. The best approximation my lazy mind can conjure is Hitchcock’s The Birds.
I reckon it’d be…
Populism is built on the belief that a shadowy minority élite is suppressing the majority. Only one man (it’s almost always a man) can save the majority by winning power, draining the swamp, and restoring the rightful order.
So the argument goes.
That argument loses credence as the votes roll in and the majority votes for the other side.
In a predictably petulant response to this reality, Donald Trump has tried to sow doubt on the veracity of the US election results.
In response, Twitter has sown doubt on the veracity of his tweets.
Clark Boyd
Author of the world-famous https://hitech.substack.com/ I used to be with it, but then they changed what ‘it’ was.
