The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable

The year's most notable directors join for The Hollywood Reporter's Director Oscar Roundtable. The directors include Quentin Tarantino ('The Hateful Eight'), Tom Hooper ('The Danish Girl'), Alejandro G. Inarritu ('The Revenant'), Ridley Scott ('The Martian'), Danny Boyle ('Steve Jobs') and David O. Russell ('Joy').

16 mobile theses by Benedict Evans

Benedict Evans ends 2015 with a recap of sorts of his research by presenting 16 mobile theses (and corresponding posts.):

1. Mobile is the new central ecosystem to tech.
2. Mobile is the internet.
3. Mobile isn’t about small screens and PCs aren’t about keyboards - mobile means an ecosystem and that ecosystem will swallow ‘PCs’.
4. The future of productivity.
5. Microsoft's capitulation
6. Apple & Google both won, but it's complicated. 
7. Search and discovery.
8. App and the web.
9. Post Netscape, post PageRank, looking for the next run-time.
10. Messaging as a platform, and a way to get customers. 
11. The unclear future of Android and the OEM world. 
12. Internet of Things.
13. Cars.

14: TV and the living room

The tech industry spent a quarter-century trying to get to the TV set to take it online - that was going to be the mass-market computer. Now it looks like this might finally be happening, but it’s almost a side-show - Microsoft declared Xbox is no longer a strategic asset, TVs are accessories to the smartphone, and it’s the smartphone, not the TV or PC, that delivered the computing revolution and took computing into the living room. 

15. Watches.
16. Finally, we are not our users. 

Go to his blog and read all of them, it is an important rabbit hole to fall into. 
 

The 14th thesis resonated with me as I begin the year pondering television, filmed content, advertising and technology and how they are not so much converging but running on parallel tracks that sometimes touch and often depend on each other for survival. 

The Clock of the Long Now

The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build The 10,000 Year Clock—a grand, Stone Henge-like monolith, being constructed in a mountain in West Texas.

The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s insatiable thirst to solve life’s biggest problems.

The Internet Lives in a Huge Hotel in Manhattan

A great photo series by Taylor Glascock in Wired, showing the very real places that make the internet and the cloud:

Garritano always knew the Internet is as much a place as it is a thing, one where vast networks in frigid rooms move enormous amounts of data around the world. But he didn’t have a real understanding of how all that info moves from one place to another, and he wanted to find out. He’s spent the last few months doing just that, shooting at five “carrier hotels” where many networks converge to form a single, larger network. That’s why they called it the Internet. It allows an unlimited number of different networks to come together as one.

The Fracking of Attention

Martin Weigel, Head of Planning at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam, has written a keenly observed essay on the role we play everyday in, well, fracking people's attentions: 

So attention is personal – what we attend to defines our reality.

Attention is finite – it is a scarce and thus valuable resource – not just to those who wish to monetise it, but to those to whom it belongs.

And attention is hackable – the world is overpopulated with those skilled in the art of capturing and redirecting attention for their own purposes.

Surely then, we have a responsibility – dare one say, an ethical duty – to the audience.

And to the attention we see to hack.