History of scratching
A brief history of scratching | FACT magazine – a great piece on scratching but skips over many of the greats prior to Q-Bert et al such as Mr Mixx, Cash Money, DJ Supreme and DJ Pogo. Scratching went through massive changes from the mid-1980s to the mid 1990s. Q-Bert et al were standing on the shoulders of other scratching innovators
Consumer behaviour
Researchers reveal millennials will take a 25,000 photos of themselves in their lifetime | Daily Mail Online – lifeblogging or qualitative ‘quantified self’?
Bill Drummond (of The KLF) fame did this really good talk about how the iPod (and you could add smartphones) have changed our relationship with music
Are Millennials Delusional? Half Say They’ll Cover The Cost Of College For Their Kids – Forbes – quite how they will do this is another matter given the hockey stick pricing model that education seems to be following
Economics
Five myths about the Chinese economy | McKinsey & Company – China has been faking it. it’s economy lacks the capacity to innovate, environmental degradation is at a point of no return, unproductive investment & rising debt fuels its rapid growth and its stability is threatened by polarising inequity – nice piece by McKinsey that points the counterarguments to these oft-quoted ideas. Under-estimating or over-estimating China are both flaws in the west. One thing I would point out is that McKinsey has done work for the Chinese government, Chinese state owned companies and even Chinese military connected firms. More on China here.
Luxury
Italian brand Stone Island put together this ‘look book’ video for their Shadow Project range. It has all the classic Stone Island design traits using adventurous materials and textures.
Marketing
Tic-Tac have put together a great tie-in with local Hong Kong independent musicians and music festival Clockenflap (Hong Kong’s answer to Glastonbury). Budding artists can submit their own video with a chance to play at Clockenflap.
FutureDeluxe did this great bit of CGI work for the adidas X Primeknit football boot.
Media
Cross Device Tracking Creates New Privacy Concerns, FTC Says | Advertising Age – “They do this under the veil of anonymous identifiers and hashed P.I.I. [personally-identifiable information], but these identifiers are still persistent and can provide a strong link to the same individual online and offline,” Ms. Ramirez said, in language that challenges the typical rhetoric from companies that track consumers.”Not only can these profiles be used to draw sensitive inferences about consumers, there is also a risk of unexpected and unwelcome use of data generated from cross device tracking” (paywall) – interesting that cross device tracking is seen as a ‘new privacy concern’ rather than an established one. This delay between regulatory attention and development is why cross device tracking companies have such an advantage over governments and consumers
TBS is giving eSports its mainstream moment with new weekly program – Digiday – interesting move, US media following normal practice in Korea
Retailing
Here’s where teens shop as old favorite stores go extinct | Fusion – Malls still are super important to teen culture as physical spaces you can go to hangout without parents
Security
From Radio to Porn, British Spies Track Web Users’ Online Identities | The Intercept – basically you have no privacy, presumably this would allow them to zoom in on Tor users at some point?
Software
Google faces new US antitrust scrutiny, this time over smartphones – CNET – the US antitrust scrutiny could turn to action that would fragment Android distributions quite dramatically… More Google related content here.