Can selfies really be art? London's Saatchi Gallery thinks so

London's Saatchi Gallery is planning a new exhibition to explore the importance of selfies as an art form.
It will feature not only self portraits by the likes of Vincent Van Gogh, but also more recent celebrity selfies.
Members of the public will also be invited to submit their own photos for inclusion in the exhibition.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-38716722

The media boss who swapped winning Oscars for kids TV

Michael Donovan, a veteran of the film and TV industry, is the founder and boss of DHX Media.
Outside of the big Hollywood studies, the Canadian company is the world's next largest owner and distributor of children's TV programmes.
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Titles in DHX's vast portfolio include Teletubbies, In the Night Garden, Bob the Builder, and Inspector Gadget. In total, it has a library of more than 11,800 - and growing - episodes across all its shows. And its revenues last year totalled $260m (£212m).
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He stumbled on the fact that there were many libraries of animated film and TV series going cheap because - in the new internet-dominated marketplace - it was wrongly assumed that there was no value in them.
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"In the world of Netflix, 34% of all the minutes viewed are family and children's programming," says Michael.
In the old broadcast world it used to be just 3%, as this was all the time that broadcasters would give to kids' shows. But with streaming services, viewers can choose exactly what they want to watch, and it is often children who are holding the remote controls.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-37702090

Tech Talent: Map of the UK's digital clusters

19 September 2016

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37380696

http://www.shazam.com/

 

Trump's Twitter debate lead was 'swelled by bots'

The investigation was led by Prof Philip Howard, from the University of Oxford, and is part of a wider project exploring "computational propaganda".

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The researchers then analysed which of these had been posted by bots. They identified an account as such if it had tweeted at least 50 times a day across the period, meaning a minimum of 200 tweets over the four days.
The results suggested that 32.7% of such pro-Trump tweets had been posted by bots and 22.3% of such pro-Clinton ones.
In total, that represented a total of 576,178 tweets benefiting the Republican nominee and 136,639 in support of the Democratic one.
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37684418

Major labels sue YouTube ripping site

The world's biggest record labels are suing a website that allows users to download the audio from YouTube videos.

Universal, Sony, Warner Bros and other labels launched legal action against the German operator of YouTube-mp3.org in a federal court in Los Angeles.
They are seeking damages from the company and its owner that include $150,000 (£115,000) for every alleged instance of piracy.
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"Stream ripping has become a major threat to the music industry, functioning as an unlawful substitute for the purchase of recorded music and the purchase of subscriptions to authorised streaming services," the labels said.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-37482570
http://www.youtube-mp3.org/

China’s demanding consumers are fuelling a huge new industry

More commonly known on the Mainland as O2O – online to offline – users order products and services online and take delivery in their homes or offices. Industry analyst iResearch expects the O2O market for lifestyle services to reach 1.6 trillion yuan ($240bn) in 2018, almost double its size of 879.7 billion yuan last year.
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Ele.me, one of China’s largest food delivery apps. It started eight years ago as an online food delivery service for Shanghai university students seeking quick and easy meals, and now has 70 million users and handles five million food orders daily.
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In contrast, US food delivery company Grubhub, which owns the Grubhub and Seamless apps, has about 7.4 million active users and gets an average of 271,000 daily orders.
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Labour and logistics costs are also lower in China than in other developed markets, making it much less costly to provide such on-demand services, says Wan Yuchen, a Shanghai-based analyst in China Market Research Group.
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For example, food delivery services in China often run promotions that offer free delivery, and the average cost of standard delivery is usually about $1.
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20160921-chinas-demanding-consumers-are-fuelling-a-huge-new-industry

Where in the world is my data and how secure is it?

More than half of the world's rentable cloud storage is controlled by four major corporations. Amazon is by far the biggest, with about a third of the market share and 13 massive data centres in the US, three in South America, five in Europe, 11 spread across Asia, and three in Australia.
The next three biggest providers are Microsoft, IBM and Google, and each of them adopts a similar global pattern of server farms.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36854292

How cinema is striking back against home entertainment

Last year was a bumper 12 months for the movie business, with global box office takings hitting a record $38bn (£29bn; €34bn), including an unprecedented $11bn in the US.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36779183

So you think you chose to read this article?

Recent start-up Echobox has developed a system it says takes the human guesswork out of the mix. By analysing large amounts of data, it learns how specific audiences respond to different articles at different times of the day. 

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Programs such as Chartbeat and Echobox also give publishers the ability to test different headlines and promotional tweets for the same story in real time.  

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And programs like SocialFlow - used by some sections of the BBC website - apply algorithms to try to anticipate when the social media audience will be most receptive to an update. 

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36837824 

https://www.echobox.com/