Academic Blog: Emergent Media & Markets

FinTech is a relatively recent buzzword that has been used to refer to financial technologies ranging from mobile payments to insurance that "are disrupting financial services" (Marr, 2017). The expansion of the shared economy was mentioned in the Week 4 posts, and FinTech is very much a part of this trend. According to Bernard Marr, "FinTech like crowdfunding, mobile payments, and money transfer services is revolutionizing the way small businesses start up, accept payments, and go global, and they are making it easier than ever to start and run a business.". Robinson and Verhage claim that "FinTech has unsettled just about every corner of global finance". China is currently ahead of the curve when it comes to adoption of FinTech services, which is evident in the fact that most citizens rarely carry cash or even a wallet, but conduct the majority of their transactions over WeChatpay or Alipay. As Surane and Cannon put it, in China, "money flows main...

AFX Elite, the conceptual audio effects company seeks to use machine learning to create quick and easy sound design for your budget film production. Just give us your video and we'll do the rest - cleaning up background noise, adding in footsteps and appropriate foley, as well as sound mixing service are provided by our company. With our extensive library of sounds and patented algorithm, we create quick and clean audio to serve your filming needs, whether you're an aspiring wedding videographer, or an indie filmmaker.  Our Market:  - Smaller-budget film production companies, indie filmmakers, home-movie makers who want better sound in their videos.  Do they already exist?  - Yes How about the technology?  - Yes, and this video is a cool example of it.  What specific needs, wants, desires, and hopes do they have? (The Market) - cheaper cost, and short time-frame. - having good quality audio even with a lower budget (especially home videos). ...

I ended up deciding to make Week 6 and 7 two-part blogs because even though the Sessions notes didn't require them, the brief kind of did? I've actually already exceeded 3000 words if you include the text in the concept posts, but it's a min not a max so good luck with the reading, Julian :D)  From Aristotle's early musings on automation, to Asimov's "Runaround", robots have inspired fear as well as awe in humans. Our relationship with the idea of robots has been reflected in their portrayal in media. We've dreamt up Jetson's-style worlds in which they can enrich our lives, as well as dystopian futures where robots have supplanted humans and use us as batteries. For now, we're still amused as early robots stumble over themselves, or annoyed as Alexa mis-hears what command you're telling her. But their progress is already much faster than we had anticipated, and we are facing the possibility of a world where robots will be a part of man...

I'm gonna say right off the bat that I think the term "Gamification" is over-used and becoming rather meaningless. This is coming from someone (me) who wrote about "Gamification and Web Advertising" for one of my Level 5 contextual studies papers. There's only so much that avatars and badges can do for making a not-very-fun activity more palatable. The primary motivator for creative collaboration, most of the time, is profit.  There is more literature about how employers can utilise gamification to make their employees more motivated and efficient, compared to gamification as a tool for equal collaboration. Atrivity is a service which lets companies "convert training material or product information into questions", creating a game where employees need to compete in answering questions about the company and have their results posted in a leader board. That definitely doesn't seem demeaning or boring in any way, and employees will surely have f...

The Sharing Economy, a movement largely embraced by younger individuals, denotes a shift away from capitalistic spending an owning, towards a system where goods and services could be shared by a group of people, lowering cost and extending the usage of the good or service. The growth of the Shared or Collaborative Economy is very much influenced by current changes within creative industries. Just as a service like Uber would not have been able to take off without the innovations in smartphone and mobile application technology, the existence of such new services creates opportunities for the creative industry to expand and evolve new strategies to face the new challenges faced. One key way that the sharing economy has changed the creative industry is the shift from agency-based design to freelance work. Sites like Behance allow designers to showcase their work to potential clients. Fiverr, a website that gives people "Freelance services, on demand", advertises how easy it ...

The previous blog post covered how companies either intentionally or unintentionally make it difficult for consumers to really read through the terms and conditions of an app or service they want to use. According to Finn Lützow-Holm Myrstad, it takes over 30 hours to read the terms and conditions of apps in an average smartphone. For my concept, I want to propose a designer-driven collective project which collects, screens, and explains these terms and conditions to users in a clear way. The project should use machine-learning algorithms to find patterns and flag concerning terms within an app or service's T&Cs. It can be an app or a browser plugin, or both. The project is intended to hold companies more accountable for the data they collect and use, and educate consumers about what they're giving up, as well as offering alternative apps or services which may better serve their needs. Users will be able to look for specific tags and keywords, give feedback to companies...