Blog: tech

The last two weeks have seen social platforms, especially TikTok, abuzz with clips of TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew’s hearing before the US congress, answering lawmakers’ questions about the social media app’s data protections for users and its relationship with China.

As entertainment companies start planning their next big steps for the coming year, the success and failure of their strategic decisions will hinge on one big, and perhaps surprising, existential question : is this it for the tech industry? Planning for 2023 seems to mean planning for disruption, and this is no easy thing to do – especially given the changes already wrought by the last three years of predominately virtual working.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has had a rocky start. A lack of a clear corporate and product strategy has alienated advertisers and users alike. Twitter’s brush with profitability is now being replaced by serious concerns over the platform’s long-term future direction.

When the first season of Stranger Things entered the zeitgeist in 2016, its set, soundtrack, and all-around vibes fit perfectly with the 80’s cultural revival of the time. Americana ‘hipster’ was out, and retro was in; neon clothes took over the streets and House beats dominated the airwaves.

At the fourth annual NFT.NYC conference in New York, the sentiment fell somewhere between faint excitement and “so this is still a thing, right?” Unlike this time last year, when the music industry was hooked on crypto, this year’s event arrives at a time when the crypto market, like much of the economy, is in decline.

The October 18th Apple event –for all its usual showmanship – did not have anything hugely innovative to unveil. New colours of the Apple HomePod, a new tier of AirPods, and the return of MagSafe charging, distinctive input ports, and actual keys instead of a touchpad on the upgraded MacBook Pros were the main highlights (aside from the new M1 chip, which was unveiled at the last event and has since merely been upgraded and put into more devices).

The last two years under a pandemic have driven more music creators in a DIY direction. Equipment and instrument sales reported record-breaking growth over lockdown – Sweetwater, for example, had its best year ever, breaking over a billion in sales .

Last Wednesday, 48 US State attorneys general and the US Federal Trade Commission filed lawsuits against Facebook, echoing the hearings before Congress earlier this year in declaring that the company’s practices violate fair competition laws.

In last week’s Take Five I highlighted a Vox story which reported that over the last year the number of companies using terms like ‘tech’ or technology’ in their documents is down 12%. This is an early indicator of a much more fundamental concept – we may have already reached peak in the tech sector, the business sector that has driven the fourth industrial revolution.

Leeds United are set to become the latest soccer club to feature in an original documentary series, with tech major Amazon securing a deal for a behind-the-scenes look at Argentinian manager Marcelo Bielsa’s dramatic first season in charge of the English Championship side, according to the Daily Mail .

MIDiA has just published its annual predictions report . Here are a few highlights. 2018 was another year of change, disruption and transformation across media and technology. Although hyped technologies – VR, blockchain, AI music – failed to meet inflated expectations, concepts such as privacy, voice, emerging markets and peak in the attention economy shaped the evolution of digital content businesses, in a year that was one to remember for subscriptions across all content types.

In case you haven’t heard, this week, mainland Europe’s northernmost capital Helsinki is ground zero for tech and media. It all kicked off on Tuesday November 28 with the two-day Slush Music 2017; the main Slush event, which opened yesterday, concludes today.

With US listed public companies’ quarterly earnings currently being drip-fed to Wall Street, here are two of the implications for Media and Advertising entities from Tech’s Big Four Q3 earnings: Amazon’s Media Presence is Continuing to Grow: While Amazon did not break out its specific numbers around the nascent advertising and media group aspects of its business, its revenue defined as other, is alongside its emerging subscription revenue (Prime, Amazon Video etc), is the fastest growing element of the Amazon ecosystem.