We haven’t seen this issue getting much attention lately, but things have changed since the lockdowns. It was a time when isolation became the New Normal, with people working from home; at least the concept of the metaverse rising in the patois; and like Google, Zoom became a verb.
Did the younger generations, especially those who were coming of age during the time of isolation, withdraw into the metaverse? There’s no doubt that the space is alive and well and growing and expected to reach 1.4 billion users in just seven years, with gaming and ecommerce being the most popular sectors to date.
As for it becoming the new workplace, hold on there, baba louie.Read More...
It’s mid-August and thoughts of back-to-school and returning to work are in high gear. Or at least amping up.
Especially since tech companies are tightening their rules on remote work.
“Zoom, once the poster child for remote work during the pandemic, is now forcing a significant number of its employees back to the office, joining the growing chorus of tech companies pivoting away from remote work. Despite its explosive growth and popularity as a virtual communication tool, Zoom seems to have caught the in-office fever. The company’s hybrid approach demands that employees within 50 miles of an office show up in person at least two days a week, supposedly to foster team interaction,” theNew York Times reported.Read More...
We’ve been postponing covering ChatGPT as it is still relatively early days, although elements of it – re AI – have been there for quite some time. OpenAI’s ChatGPT is a definite disruptor, even more than Facebook was in its day, when it heralded the Age of Social, but this time, sans Mark Zuckerberg’s ego and/or iron-fisted control. Yet, or as far as we know. But when was the last time we stopped and considered the dystopian side of the shiny new thing before we realized that, say, our privacy and personal data would be gone, perhaps forever, or worse, thanks to, say, a communications assist?
As a writer, we will tell you that, while AI may correct our typos, since we key so quickly, great. As for its grammatical suggestions or recommendations for completing a sentence or thought? AI is clearly not an original thinker and is wrong 90+% of the time – without exaggeration.Read More...
A lot has changed since the lockdowns and the Submit or Flight response that ensued, when the migration from the Draconian rules of the tech hubs – Silicon Valley and New York in particular – began.
Working conditions shift with each new industrial revolution and despite the fact that the Information/Internet Era has been somewhat established for close to 20 years, we haven’t really seen a change. Until now.Read More...
The line is a reference to a comedic variety show hosted by Drew Carey, Whose Line Is It, Anyway?, which was basically an homage to the absurd.
Enter Meta, the Company Formerly Known as Facebook, which some wags have referred to as Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to escape his many problems in the physical world. Not the least of which is his loss of a younger audience, and every advertiser knows that it’s best to get them when they’re young. Even Instagram can’t seem to hold on to those younger eyeballs. In Meta, kids can strap on their headsets (and CFKAF is betting that they will) and enter their own virtual worlds – with friends too, if they choose. Although it won’t be the Oculus headset, since FB is killing off the brand, which means, btw, as Techcrunch pointed out, that it took Zuck roughly 15 seconds to tell his first lie: “Our mission remains the same — it’s still about bringing people together. Our apps and our brands — they’re not changing either.”
“Mr. Zuckerberg painted a picture of the metaverse as a clean, well-lit virtual world, entered with virtual and augmented reality hardware at first and more advanced body sensors (or neural implants?) later on, in which people can play virtual games, attend virtual concerts, go shopping for virtual goods, collect virtual art, hang out with each other’s virtual avatars and attend virtual work meetings,” wrote The New York Times.Read More...
We were half joking last week when we suggested that, in many cases in tech, so-called terms of service be renamed ‘terms of servitude.’ Given the amount of data scraping and surveillance we’ve seen because of the lockdowns (think the enormous spike in Amazon and Walmart online orders, while mom and pops were forced to close). It’ll be interesting to see what fresh hell comes next. The New Normal? Might want to think New Police State.
It’s right about mid-summer, the halfway mark, and we hear more and more about how two of the tech capitals – New York and Silicon Valley – are ‘back.’ We also hear a lot of debate online about when events should be scheduled again where people will meet in person, at an actual venue. September? October? Some have already started, although in many cases, we see that the number of attendees is somewhat, if not greatly diminished, which was not necessarily true when the events were being held online.
We also wonder how many startups – and how much new funding – was a result of the new borderless ecosystem. Do these new friendships/affiliations simply go away when the world goes back to in-person events and meetings? We regularly attend a now-online, formerly in-person event whose attendees span multiple states and several continents due to the lockdowns. As venues reopen and some people return to the tech hubs – not all will – and in-person events, will the online participants be cut off? So long and thanks for all the fish?Read More...
