The vinyl industry is a mess — and this British company thinks it has the tech to fix it

Sep15
by on September 15, 2022 at 8:31 am
Posted In: Plugged


Vinyl has undergone one hell of a renaissance. In 2006, the format was effectively dead. But since then? Vinyl records have experienced year-on-year growth, with the US alone clocking 41.7m units sold in 2021, a 45-fold increase from 16 years ago. While in Germany, sales went from 0.3m in 2006, to 4.5m last year. Those numbers are somewhat misleading though — and their exuberance hides a darker story. Vinyl sales are strong, but the industry itself is at breaking point. From rising costs to a huge printing backlog, from mainstream label dominance to environmental concerns, and from material shortages to…

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Macron’s dream of a European metaverse is far from a reality

Sep14
by on September 14, 2022 at 1:23 pm
Posted In: Insider


European businesses, investors, and talent are all vying for a ticket on the metaverse hype train. Even political heavyweights are making moves — or, at least, pronouncements. French President Emmanuel Macron wants to build “a European metaverse” to challenge US and Chinese tech giants. The EU’s digital chief, Margrethe Vestager, meanwhile, is mulling new antitrust regulation. But their ambitions are a long way from being realized. “The reality is there is no European big tech player of relevance in that whole metaverse future,” says Rolf Illenberger, the cofounder of Munich’s VRdirect, a virtual reality platform for enterprises. “It’s being defined by…

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AI stalks influencers in the wild to expose horrors of high-tech surveillance

Sep13
by on September 13, 2022 at 8:42 pm
Posted In: Insider


Influencers may crave attention by “occupation,” but a new AIexperiment shows they can’t always control their admirers’ gazes. Dubbed “The Follower,” the project tracks Instagrammers in the wild. In the process, it offers a glimpse at the terrifying capabilities of automated surveillance. The experiment is the brainchild of Dries Depoorter, a Belgian artist who previously caught our attention by monitoring politicians using phones at work. Credit: Dries Depoorter“The Flemish Scrollers” uses automatically tags lawmakers using phones during government meetings. For his latest demonstration of tech’s dangers, Depoorter analyzed feeds from open cameras, which offer easy access to images of public…

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What does Europe’s approach to data privacy mean for GPT and DALL-E?

Sep13
by on September 13, 2022 at 1:00 pm
Posted In: artificial intelligence


The global AI explosion has supercharged the need for a common sense, human-centered methodology for dealing with data privacy and ownership. Leading the way is Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), but there’s more than just personally identifiable information (PII) at stake in the modern market. What about the data we generate as content and art? It’s certainly not legal to copy someone else’s work and then present it as your own. But there are AI systems that attempt to scrape as much human-generated content from the web as possible in order to generate content that’s similar.  Can GDPR or…

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Atenció! TNW is bringing its conference to València in 2023

Sep13
by on September 13, 2022 at 12:01 pm
Posted In: Events, World Domination


What’s big, good for your brain, and about to land in Spain? That’s right, TNW València! On March 30th and 31st in 2023, we’re bringing our world famous tech event to España. To achieve this, we’ve partnered with the Ajuntament de València (that’s the city council) for two days of celebrating and showcasing the best of Southern European tech and startups. So… why València? Easy: it’s Spain’s fastest-growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. On top of that, it has the country’s highest number of startups per capita. You feel pretty silly for asking now, don’t you? “In València we firmly believe in public-private…

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