Covered this week; Inside Facebook’s plan to protect the US midterms… Colin Kaepernick continues to push… The politicians are coming for Silicon Valley… Burt Reynolds dies at 82… Quantum computing is almost ready for business… Where is Apple putting that billion dollar television programming investment? Type your name in logos…
September 3, 2018
As we start to ramp up towards the midterms… the weaponization of social media by outside forces is an aspect of the current electoral theater that we need to collectively get a handle on. Facebook is at the core of this and the entity that holds the most responsibility for making sure what happened in 2016 doesn’t happen again this time around.
Two weeks ago, on a hastily scheduled conference call with journalists, Facebook executives announced what many felt was inevitable: Someone, perhaps Russia, was once again trying to use the social network to “sow division” among U.S. voters, this time before November’s midterm elections.
The “bad actors,” as Facebook called them, created bogus events; posted about race issues, fascism, and President Donald Trump; and paid Facebook to promote their messages. “Some of the activity is consistent with what we saw from the IRA before and after the 2016 elections”.
September 4, 2018
This dude is not going away… Colin Kaepernick continues to push… and Nike joins the fight, whatever their reasons are for doing so, doesn’t matter, this is as it should be.
This is not some small, left-leaning company that has decided Kaepernick is on the side of angels in this fight. It is one of the world’s largest conglomerates, a setter of trends and arbiter of what’s cool.
September 5, 2018
With all the daily distraction that is the Trump presidency, so many important issues fall to the wayside in terms of coverage and the general awareness of the constituency. One such issue is the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee has a pretty big opening salvo going on The Hill today… Kara Swisher offers up her opinion on the goings on, and as always, it’s pretty on point.
On Wednesday morning, the Senate Intelligence Committee will grill two prominent Silicon Valley leaders and a piece of furniture.
Specifically: A chair. Presumably, wooden.
The pair of executives will be Sheryl Sandberg, the Facebook chief operating officer, and Jack Dorsey, the founder and chief executive of Twitter. They will be lightly pummeled about their responsibility for election meddling by foreign powers and the related use and abuse of fake news on their enormous communications platforms.
The chair would have seated either Larry Page, the co-founder of Google and chief executive of its parent company, Alphabet, or Sundar Pichai, who now runs Google. But neither accepted the committee’s invitation to appear. They offered up the company’s top lawyer, Kent Walker, in their stead, which the senators did not like so much, and thus the empty seat.
September 6, 2018
Burt Reynolds, the wryly appealing Hollywood heartthrob who carried on a long love affair with moviegoers even though his performances were often more memorable than the films that contained them, died on Thursday in Jupiter, Fla. He was 82.
September 7, 2018
A little look into the future… I wish I could say I understood all this.
Today the startup launches a project in the mold of Amazon Web Services (AWS) called Quantum Cloud Services. “What this platform achieves for the very first time is an integrated computing system that is the first quantum cloud services architecture,” says Chad Rigetti, founder and CEO of his namesake company. The dozen initial users Rigetti has announced include biotech and chemistry companies harnessing quantum technology to study complex molecules in order to develop new drugs.
September 8, 2018
What are we going to find out from Apple this coming Wednesday? One area of interest is Apple’s billion dollar investment in TV programming. The question remains, how would original programming be supported on the hardware side? Soon we shall know…
Apple has nabbed big-name deals with Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, M. Night Shyamalan and Steven Spielberg, among many others. The company has hired two top television executives to spearhead the effort. And the company has been deploying a $1 billion budget in the last year to recruit projects from those high-profile film and television stars.
September 9, 2018
Because I’m lazy today… type your name in logos.
