Sam Blumenthal
@samblumenthal
Sam Blumenthal
Livestreaming and
A few weeks later, a designer brand that was moving its headquarters reached out to the couple to help sell excess inventory. The brand had about 700 pairs of shoes it wanted to unload. Within three hours, during a livestream on Taobao, Yuan and Zhang sold all the merchandise.
CNBC • Singles Day sales to get tremendous lift from livestream events, as U.S. retailers play catch-up
In a world of branded quasi-commodity products like coffee with little barriers to entry, the social interaction — or atmosphere of the store’s community — is ultimately what
differentiates a brand and creates defensibility.
Sam Blumenthal • Social Retail: Immersion & Serendipity
From 2019 to 2020, deepfake videos grew 6,820x (!), from 14,678 videos to 100 million videos. They began to invade mainstream internet platforms. Tom Cruise, for example, isn’t on TikTok. But you’d be forgiven for thinking he is: the account @deeptomcruise posts (very convincing) deepfakes of Tom Cruise.
Substack • The Rise of Synthetic Media & Digital Creators
What is revolutionary about on-demand streaming in general and Netflix in particular is that the service has commoditized time: on Netflix Sunday at 9pm is no different than Tuesday at 11am or Friday at 6pm; there is no prime time. Thus Netflix will release original series all at once, because why not? Best to maximize the number of minutes over... See more
stratechery.com • Netflix and the Conservation of Attractive Profits - Stratechery by Ben Thompson
They are technically complex, but socially promiscuous in a way only much simpler digital things, such as plain text files or JPEGs, have been so far. As we’ve discussed, they’re also kinda content-free. They bear no necessary payloads, pointers, programmed affordances, or rights. All those things are optional extras. The NFT itself is just a token... See more
Venkatesh Rao • Magic Beans - by Venkatesh Rao - Ribbonfarm Studio
Accounting and
