DataDownload: Giant heavy metal robots stalk the earth

7 min readJun 19, 2021

DataDownload: Giant heavy metal robots stalk the earth A weekly summary of all things Media, Data, Emerging Tech View this email in your browser

Excited to announce that Machines + Media 2021 is live on YouTube — check it out here. This week, some great stuff. Like Pokemon Go creator Niantic finally getting Transformers rights from Hasbro — after eight years of negotiation. And a great dive into the rise and fall of old-school tech giant Kodak.

What happens to Clubhouse when people decide to talk IRL? Computers predict your taste in art. And a 2018 podcast featuring Lina Khan, who just got appointed FTC Chair (great dive into her thinking). Lots to ponder. Stay cool.

Best,
Steve

Steven Rosenbaum
Steve@NYCMedialab.org
Executive Director
The NYC Media Lab Must-Read Pokémon Go Creator Has a Plan to Be More Than a One-Hit Wonder

Pokemon Go beat the odds to become a surprise pandemic hit. With player’s ability to pursue virtual characters through public spaces curtailed, Niantic tweaked the game to make it lockdown-friendly. The result? The active user base increased by 15% through May 2021. Consumer spending on Pokemon Go skyrocketed by 49% over the same timeframe — to $1.4B.

The company just announced a partnership with Hasbro to launch Transformers: Heavy Metal after spending eight years negotiating for the rights. According to Niantic CEO John Hanke: “It’s almost as if [Transformers] was designed for augmented reality. It’s about giant robots coming to Earth and having battles in the middle of Los Angeles. For us, giant robots walking around the real world is just too good to pass up.” Niantic has also announced a collaboration with Nintendo to adapt Pikmin, as well as a game based on Settlers of Catan.

Bloomberg / 6 min read Read More The Rise and Fall of an American Tech Giant

Long before smartphones and Instagram, there was Kodak. Founded in 1880 by George Eastman, the company “invented the first easy-to-use consumer camera and thereby amateur photography; it achieved a near-monopoly on the consumer-film business, capturing the imagination of the entire world.” By the time Eastman took his own life at 77, he had practically built the city of Rochester, NY. Now home to more than 200k residents, Eastman long ago funded Rochester’s colleges, hospitals, cultural institutions, and parks.

But nearly 90 years after Eastman’s death, Kodak is a shadow of its former success and has been in rapid decline for years. In 2005, Kodak had gross revenue of nearly $11.4B. By 2019, revenue shrank nearly tenfold to $1.2B with just $182M in profits. Kodak attempted to “kind of reinvent [themselves],” according to CEO Jim Continenza. The company applied for a $765M loan from the federal government and attempted a pivot to pharmaceuticals. Former White House trade advisor, Peter Navarro, speculated that Kodak might be positioned for “one of the greatest second acts in American industrial history.”

Within days, however, the dream began to unravel. Sen. Elizabeth Warren asked the SEC to “investigate Kodak for allegations of insider trading, and pointed to large stock purchases before the official loan announcement and other suspicious activity.”

The Atlantic / 37 min read

Pundits are already opining that Clubhouse is quickly fading into irrelevance now that pandemic restrictions are lifting. In a discouraging sign for avid Clubhouse members, the app is now frequently mentioned in the same breath as… Google+. Many of its influencers have started hosting events where people talk to each other IRL. “Leiti Hsu dedicates at least one night to hosting her Dream Dinner Party. She hops on Clubhouse to interview guests, describing the food and atmosphere of her fictitious party as a gateway into deep, emotional conversations.” But recently, Hsu brought her Clubhouse experience into the real world.

In-person parties like Hsu’s “could represent Clubhouse’s worst-case scenario: why would anyone tune in to an app when they could join in person and eat eggplant katsu with a bunch of cool, creative people?” Though no hard numbers are available, anecdotal evidence suggests that fewer users now log into Clubhouse regularly. A spokesperson, though, “denies the app is shrinking in any way, saying it’s instead growing. Millions of people have joined since the Android launch.”

The Verge / 8 min read Read More Computers Predict People’s Tastes in Art

A new study from Caltech shows that an algorithm “can accurately predict which painting a person will like” with a high level of accuracy. It breaks paintings into low-level features — like contrast and saturation — and high-level features requiring human judgment, such as whether a painting is dynamic or still. Using Amazon’s crowdsourcing platform, Mechanical Turk, 1,500 volunteers were asked to “rate paintings in the genres of impressionism, cubism, abstract, and color field.”

After the results were fed into the system, it predicted people’s taste in art with high precision. “I used to think the evaluation of art was personal and subjective, so I was surprised by this result,” says lead author Kiyohito Iigaya.

Caltech / 5 min read Read More The Case for New Social Media Business Models

Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter face growing scrutiny. Is it time for a radical rethink? “Does the attention economy inevitably lead to the spread of least common denominators, like falsity, hate, [and] polarization?” asked MIT Sloan professor Sinan Aral, host of the recent Social Media Summit at MIT.

The answer appears to be yes. “Business models built on engagement and popularity often lead to divisive, emotional content because that is what algorithms tend to favor, Aral noted. A study he co-authored found that false news online is 70% more likely to be retweeted than the truth.”

Aral was joined by tech luminaries Scott Galloway and Guy Kawasaki on a panel brainstorming a better social media future. Galloway suggested that growing antitrust sentiment in Washington may lead to the government regulating social media platforms like public utilities and imposing taxes on companies that use algorithms to amplify content.

MIT Sloan / 6 min read

As part of Bloomberg & NYC Media Lab’s Machines + Media 2021 virtual event, experts on our “Future of Tech in NYC” panel answered the question: Is the post-pandemic future bleak or bright for NYC’s tech sector? Furthermore, they discussed what’s driving their predictions.

Speakers included:

Steven Rosenbaum (Moderator), Executive Director at NYC Media Lab
Julie Samuels, Executive Director at Tech:NYC
Ben Sun, Co-Founder of Primary Venture Partners
Karen Bhatia, Senior Vice President of Tech at NYCEDC

nycmedialab (YouTube) / 49 min watch

Watch Now What We’re Listening To Podcast: Antitrust Pt 2: The Populists

The antitrust movement against big tech continues to gain momentum in Washington and beyond. One indication of this direction is the recent appointment of Lina Khan as FTC Chair. Khan first found herself in the public eye when — as an unknown Yale law student — she published Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox. This interview with Khan on the University of Chicago’s Capitalisn’t podcast took place in 2018, just over a year after the publication of that paper, and offers considerable insight into her thinking.

Spotify / 30 min listen

Listen Now Virtual Events Free Event: Verizon 5G Edge and AWS Wavelength Media Streaming Immersion Day
Date: June 21, 2PM-4PM EDT
On this Immersion Day, learn the fundamentals of 5G Edge and AWS Wavelength. Register Here.

Free Event: Ray Summit 2021 — Scalable ML and Python
Date: June 22–24
A three-day, free virtual interactive event. Ray Summit brings together developers, AI and ML engineers, data scientists, and architects to build scalable AI and machine learning systems. Register Here. A Deeper Look What Data Scientists Learned by Modeling the Spread of Covid-19

Covid-19 has sparked “a golden age” in technological innovation for disease modeling, according to Lauren Ancel Meyers, integrative biologist and professor at UT Austin. In the last year, “we’ve probably advanced the art and science and applications of models as much as we did in probably the preceding decades.” Hopefully, such innovations leave us better prepared to deal with the next outbreak of a virulent and deadly virus, as well as minimize the ongoing devastation.

Smithsonian Magazine / 12 min read