Month: June 2019

Urban legend has it that the average person eats eight spiders per year while sleeping. While that (thankfully) isn’t true, a new body of research points to a similar statistic that unfortunately seems to be all too real: people ingest approximately five grams of plastic per week. The data comes courtesy of the World Wildlife…

Facebook is hustling to settle with the FTC before privacy concerns becomes factor in agency’s investigation of whether FB violated a 2012 consent decree.

Facebook invested in Indian social commerce startup Meesho, marking the first time the social network took equity in a startup from that country. Terms of the transaction were not revealed, and Facebook had not responded to a request for comment at the time of this post. Meesho has raised over $65 million to date, not…

Twitter released six additional datasets regarding accounts that were removed in four countries–Iran, Russia, Spain and Venezuela–for coordinated, state-backed activities. The social network released two sizable datasets last October chronicling activity by Russia’s Internet Research Agency (1.24 gigabits of tweet information and 296 GB of media in 302 archives) and a set of accounts that…

Insider Inc., the publisher of Business Insider, Markets Insider and Insider, will combine with eMarketer in 2020 in an effort to bolster the business-to-business digital research and intelligence services that both companies provide, Axel Springer said Thursday. The German publisher, which owns both properties, said Insider Inc. and eMarketer will combine as of Jan. 1,…

Inamoto & Co, the Brooklyn agency that was founded by former AKQA execs Rei Inamoto and Rem Reynolds three years ago, is stripping its moniker of the former’s last name as it grows and sets its sights on Tokyo. Newly minted IxCO will open its first international office in Tokyo this summer in an effort…

Impersonation of people and companies is a key tactic. Globally, 1.2% of all email sent was suspicious and probably false in Q1 2019, the report adds.

Facebook is testing other new sections in Watch, including a way to find videos popular with friends.

Most people think their speech sounds like a Shakespearean sonnet, but in reality, it’s like what a non-Phish fan hears when they listen to Phish: painful and meandering.

While strong women characters abound on ad-supported TV, many of them are defined by their central relationships with male characters. Netflix’s “Jessica Jones” has the distinction of being Marvel’s
first female lead and title character in either television or movies. It stars Krysten Ritter, one of the most casually charismatic actors on television. In this week’s edition I analyze the
significance of this series as it enters its third and final season on Netflix.