ZeroHype

In their quest to be customer centric many companies conduct post interaction surveys to gauge customer satisfaction. These come in the form of telephonic, email, sms or web-based surveys. These have reached epidemic proportions and are now counter productive. If a customer has received outstandingly poor or great service they will be moved to communicate this. Companies should rather be geared to collect and analyse these spontaneous and authentic reactions. The current trend of gauging satisfaction after each and every interaction wastes time, becomes reflexive and generates more noise than signal. At the very least these dip stick surveys should be limited to annual questionnaires or risk low quality and indifferent responses which entirely defeats their purpose. Zaheer

Read this old article in the Guardian about the   assassination of Patrice Lumumba . He was the victim of the Cold War and America’s ruthlessness to maintain its supply of uranium from the Congo. This led me down the path of the history of the Congo. Leopoldo the II used it as his private backyard and then later colonized it. The Congolese people suffered greatly at his hands.  Up to ten million  have been said to have died. The Belgians never acknowledged this and even recent attempts to revisit their role in the Congo have been  whitewashed . Zaheer

Media companies are battling because the price of digital advertising is tending towards zero. Consumers don’t want to pay for ads which annoy, steal attention and, most importantly, do not add value. Even if Google and Facebook continue to develop their intelligent advertising engines consumers will continue to resist because ads don’t add value, they are not useful. Technology (in the shape of software, algorithms, ad platforms) is eating the advertising industry and consumers are not taking to the regurgitated product. Ads will have to adapt, add value, is that even possible? (And the answer is NOT native advertising). Ads will have to genuinely provide useful information, provide ideas and inspire consumers. Check out Umar Haque’s  article on the state of advertising and media .

My summary of Evgeny Morozov’s article on   Tech Titans are busy privatising our data . Data is the new currency. It drives advertising markets. Big tech firms like Facebook and Google are subsidising their services heavily to harvest data to support their revenue streams which are driven by advertising spend. Historically, these large firms are ideologically opposed to advertising. At the same time their influence and power will grow as they own the information infrastructure and will continue to reap the data windfall. The Internet of Things will accelerate data gathering and the resultant power of the holders of this data. Consumers will continue to mortgage their private data for ‘free’ services. Almost all industries are being disrupted. There’s no reason to believe that the advertising industry will survive the disruptive forces. Eventually the ad-driven subsidies will end and the big tech firms will start charging for the services they provide (even if they don’t really want...

Been looking for a straight forward explanation of SR and GR, quite like this: Special Relativity Observers in different frames of reference will measure mass and speed differently, because space and time will expand and contract so that the speed of light in a vacuum is constant to all observers. General Relativity Mass and energy are related, and they curve space and time, which are also related. Source