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Media & Tech

Phone Drones: Virtual Agents Answer Customer Service Call of Duty

That a large portion of one’s customer service call are outsourced to India or other exotic locales is old news. We ‘ve all been patched through to a phone bank half a planet away to speak with someone trained to suppress their native accent and make references to your local weather and high school sports…

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Media & Tech

Why Do Men Put Their Penises Online?

?To tweet or not to tweet?? ? that should have been the question for former U.S. representative Anthony Weiner whose infamous social media snafu made him and his briefs-ensconced boner a household name synonymous with ?moron.? Not only did Weiner’s foray into softcore porn (and subsequent revelations about ‘sexting? with numerous women) provide a wide…

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Media & Tech

iCloudius: Apple’s Man in the Sky

When it rains it pours for Apple CEO Steve Jobs. The lauded gadget guru qua rainmaker came out of medical leave to formally introduce attendees of Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference to a bevy of new products, among them the much anticipated announcement of the iCloud. Apple’s own spin on so-called cloud-computing, which, sans the…

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Media & Tech

Venture Capital: Start Me Up

Money makes the world go around’really, really fast?which is why one’s head tends to spin with each new billion-dollar valuation and smug twenty-something on a magazine cover. This isn’t anything new; it’s even something of a Bay Area tradition. Or at least that’s the impression one might get watching Something Ventured, Daniel Geller and Dayna…

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Creative & How-To's Media & Tech

Publish Your Goddamn Book Already

Publishing is dead. Long live publishing. Or at least, self-publishing, which, thanks to a plethora of services and a general de-stigmatization of the so-called vanity press could be entering something of a golden era. So where are the literary breakouts? The through-line from Gutenberg’s invention of movable type to the desktop publishing revolution of the…

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Media & Tech

QR is PR: How QR Codes are changing the media landscape

They look like the bastard offspring of a crossword puzzle and a crop circle. QR codes, also known as “quick response” or “quick read” codes, are often seen lingering on the corner of magazine ads, clothing tags or band fliers as a bridge for our digital and terrestrial worlds through the aid of one’s smartphone.…