Category: Architecture

How Apple’s new audio subscriptions are upending podcasting

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Back in 2005, an ebullient Apple CEO Steven P. Jobs announced the integration of podcasting into Version 4.9 of its desktop iTunes software, calling podcasting “TiVo for radio.” Sixteen years later, during its April 20, 2021, “Spring Loaded” event, Apple has once again signaled a long-term corporate commitment to podcasting. But this time, instead of introducing listeners to the medium, Apple is creating the technical infrastructure for paid subscriptions through its Apple Podcasts service. Creators will now have the option to require a payment for audiences to access their content on Apple’s platform, with Apple taking a 30% cut of the revenue . Paid subscriptions aren’t new. But as scholars who study the podcasting industry , we believe the integration of paid subscriptions into podcasting’s most powerful platforms could reshape the medium in significant ways. Read More …

Remote work made digital nomads possible. The pandemic made them essential

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This story is part of  The Road Ahead , a series that examines the future of travel and how we’ll experience the world after the pandemic. In April, a radio DJ, a marine ecologist, a water polo player, and a migrant studies scholar flew to idyllic Dubrovnik, a seaside city in Croatia with a vast labyrinth of medieval architecture famed for composing the scenery of the cult fantasy TV show Game of Thrones . Hailing from Finland, Japan, and the United States, the travelers were among 10 lucky winners of a first-of-its-kind  digital nomad residency contest, for which the prize was a month-long stay in the lush “Pearl of the Adriatic” with complimentary meals and lodging. The residents ate, drank, networked, and day-tripped to the cliffs of Konavle—home of 2020’s most beautiful beach in Europe—and the island of Mljet, which is shrouded in dense forest that features exciting hazards like venomous snakes and wild mongooses. Ostensibly, they were there to brainstorm how to design Dubrovnik as a nomad-friendly city in the digital age. But for Croatia, the real goal was to market its own image away from a “holiday playground,” as program director Tanja Polegubic calls it, into a serious long-term destination for remote workers. You could think of it as striking while the iron is hot—or really, while Croatia is hot: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the country saw an influx of workers fleeing expensive cities in western Europe. “Asia wasn’t an option, so a lot of people were looking to the Balkans because the further east you go, it’s a lot cheaper,” Polegubic says. Croatia’s not alone: Countries spanning the Caribbean isle to the Arabian desert are suddenly pivoting to court digital nomads in the post-coronavirus era, dangling everything from free vaccines, to tax breaks, to the chance to live in tropical paradise. Call it a new global arms race, where the weapon in question is an arsenal of highly skilled remote workers—ones that were trapped in their homes during the pandemic, but could now be untethered by it from their offices forever. With a new class of human capital up for grabs, countries are looking to stockpile talent, and digital nomads are living a new reality: They’ve become a hot commodity. COVID-19 was an existential crisis: For the first time, a community built around having no fixed address was forced to shelter in place.” Digital nomads, ironically, are easy to locate. By nature of their lifestyle, many have built careers on the internet: sharing snapshots of dreamy landscapes spun from coconut palm trees and rainbow-colored villas, hosting blogs that detail the ins and outs of life perpetually on the road Read More …

Remote work made digital nomads possible. The pandemic made them essential

Posted onAuthoradmin

This story is part of  The Road Ahead , a series that examines the future of travel and how we’ll experience the world after the pandemic. In April, a radio DJ, a marine ecologist, a water polo player, and a migrant studies scholar flew to idyllic Dubrovnik, a seaside city in Croatia with a vast labyrinth of medieval architecture famed for composing the scenery of the cult fantasy TV show Game of Thrones . Hailing from Finland, Japan, and the United States, the travelers were among 10 lucky winners of a first-of-its-kind  digital nomad residency contest, for which the prize was a month-long stay in the lush “Pearl of the Adriatic” with complimentary meals and lodging. The residents ate, drank, networked, and day-tripped to the cliffs of Konavle—home of 2020’s most beautiful beach in Europe—and the island of Mljet, which is shrouded in dense forest that features exciting hazards like venomous snakes and wild mongooses. Ostensibly, they were there to brainstorm how to design Dubrovnik as a nomad-friendly city in the digital age. But for Croatia, the real goal was to market its own image away from a “holiday playground,” as program director Tanja Polegubic calls it, into a serious long-term destination for remote workers. You could think of it as striking while the iron is hot—or really, while Croatia is hot: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the country saw an influx of workers fleeing expensive cities in western Europe. “Asia wasn’t an option, so a lot of people were looking to the Balkans because the further east you go, it’s a lot cheaper,” Polegubic says. Croatia’s not alone: Countries spanning the Caribbean isle to the Arabian desert are suddenly pivoting to court digital nomads in the post-coronavirus era, dangling everything from free vaccines, to tax breaks, to the chance to live in tropical paradise. Call it a new global arms race, where the weapon in question is an arsenal of highly skilled remote workers—ones that were trapped in their homes during the pandemic, but could now be untethered by it from their offices forever. With a new class of human capital up for grabs, countries are looking to stockpile talent, and digital nomads are living a new reality: They’ve become a hot commodity. COVID-19 was an existential crisis: For the first time, a community built around having no fixed address was forced to shelter in place.” Digital nomads, ironically, are easy to locate. By nature of their lifestyle, many have built careers on the internet: sharing snapshots of dreamy landscapes spun from coconut palm trees and rainbow-colored villas, hosting blogs that detail the ins and outs of life perpetually on the road. Read More …

How Google tried—and failed—to use AlphaGo as a bridge to China

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In the spring of 2017, a year after the match in Korea , AlphaGo played its next match, in Wuzhen, China, an ancient water town 80 miles south of Shanghai along the Yangtze River. With its lily ponds, stone bridges, and narrow boat canals that snaked between rows of small wooden houses topped by rock-tile roofs, Wuzhen is a village meant to look as it had centuries before. Then a 200,000-square-foot conference center rises up among the rice paddies. It looks a lot like the wooden houses spread across the village, except it’s the size of a soccer stadium. Its roof spans more than 2.5 trillion tiles. Built to host the World Internet Conference, an annual gathering where Chinese authorities trumpeted the rise of new internet technologies and marked the ways they would regulate and control the spread of information, it was now hosting a match between AlphaGo and the Chinese grand master Ke Jie, the current No.-1-ranked Go player in the world. The morning of the first game, inside a private room down a side hall from the cavernous auditorium where the match was due to be played, Demis Hassabis sat in a plush, oversized, cream-colored chair in front of a wall painted like an afternoon sky. This was the theme across the building: cloud-strewn afternoon skies. Wearing a dark-blue suit with a small round royal-blue pin on the lapel and no necktie—suddenly looking older and more polished than he had the year before—Hassabis said AlphaGo was now much more talented. Since the match in Korea, DeepMind had spent months improving the machine’s design, and AlphaGo had spent many more playing game after game against itself, learning entirely new skills through digital trial and error. Hassabis was confident the machine was now immune to the kind of sudden meltdown that arrived during the fourth game in Korea, when Lee Sedol, with Move 78, exposed a gap in its knowledge of the game. “A big part of what we were trying to do with the new architecture was close the knowledge gap,” Hassabis said. The new architecture was also more efficient. It could train itself in a fraction of the time, and once trained, it could run on a single computer chip (a Google TPU, naturally). Though Hassabis didn’t exactly say so, it was clear, even then, before the first move of the first game, that the 19-year-old Ke Jie had no chance of winning Read More …

The 10 most innovative dining companies of 2021

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The dining companies on this list are doing more than survive the COVID-19 crisis. They’re setting themselves—and the entire industry—up for future success. Chicago-based reservation management platform Tock is helping independent restaurants offer order and delivery services, while Slice does something similar for local pizzerias. Sensor company OneDine has adapted its technology to help restaurants set up new drive-through services, and New York-based architecture firm Rockwell Group allows them to create outdoor spaces quickly and efficiently Read More …