Boho
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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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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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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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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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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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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.…
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Cut the Cord
?Cut the cord? has become the rallying cry for those interested in abandoning cable television in favor of streaming online video to their phones, tablets, desktops and ??forsooth! ??televisions. It’s an apt phrase, not merely for its echoes of severing the umbilical cord in the delivery room but for its metaphoric reach into that almond-shaped…
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Blade Runner’s Sequel Sickness
Certain films are so singular in vision, so spectacular in their realization that they’re fundamentally immune to the disease of sequel-itis, or its often more virulent form, prequel-itis. Among those in this rarified canon are Citizen Kane (of course), Casablanca (duh) and, until last week, Blade Runner. Whether or not one agrees that the futuristic…
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Gaming the Story | Insights from The Art of Immersion by Frank Rose
A ringing cake. Sure, it reads like a lost lyric from ?MacArthur Park? but it’s actually a key moment in the history of media, marketing and perhaps even marzipan. As recounted by Wired Magazine contributing editor Frank Rose in his recently released tome, The Art of Immersion ? How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood,…