BradBerens.com
Thoughts about where our real and digital worlds collide.

  • Can self-driving cars save local businesses?

    In the Center’s Future of Transportation project, we’ve seen that the impending arrival of self-driving cars has implications far beyond getting people out from behind the wheel. For example, we asked our respondents if they’d be interested in special kinds of self-driving cars that featured on-the-go services like a meeting room for productivity, a living…

  • Brief Review: “The Fifth Risk” by Michael Lewis

    Lewis is such a remarkable writer that I sometimes find myself envious of his ability to forge a compelling story where there doesn’t seem to be anything. It’s useful to contrast The Fifth Risk with Bob Woodward’s Fear, which I inhaled last month. Woodward’s book ferrets out things that happened — crescendos of malevolence and arias…

  • Beware the “Words with Friends” scammers

    New predators are stalking older women via chat in online games. Here’s how to protect yourself and your family. My mother is nobody’s fool. She is also such a fan of the online Scrabble knockoff “Words with Friends” (WWF) that I might use the word addiction to describe her relationship with the game and only be…

  • Amazon’s real reason for launching “Free Dive” isn’t about ad revenue

    Late last month, the business rumor mill exploded with the story that Amazon subsidiary IMDB was to launch “Free Dive,” an ad-supported streaming video service that would be free to anybody who had an Amazon Fire TV device. Free Dive would be distinct from Amazon’s mostly ad-free Prime Video on Demand service because no Amazon…

  • Paging Dr. Alexa

    Two personal events over the summer made me realize that one of the most compelling use cases for digital assistants concerns senior citizens. I was primed to think this because this week the Center has released a mini-report — Sharpest Edge: Digital Assistants — that explores how programs like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, Eva, and…

  • Why the NRA should worry about “ghost guns”

    Whatever your politics and however you feel about private gun ownership, the “ghost gun” debate that has emerged over the last few weeks has implications for every kind of business in the digital age. What is a ghost gun? In brief, activist Cody Wilson won a round in his long-running legal action against the Federal…

  • New Media Math & the President’s NYT Obsession

    Earlier this month, I argued that the president has a fundamentally different way of measuring media. Instead of balancing positive against negative coverage in order to suss out average sentiment, the president views all media coverage as a tool to advance his agenda. The media is both incapable of understanding this different sort of math and…

  • Streaming superheroes and the DC Universe

    DC Entertainment — home to Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, the Justice League and a part of the recent AT&T acquisition of Time Warner — has announced a new streaming video on demand service called DC Universe that will premiere in 2019. The service is a competitor to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Video, and other Over…

  • My dystopian vision of the future and TODAY’S terrifying NPR article about health care and your personal data

    My science fiction novel Redcrosse came out in 2011: the question behind Redcrosse was, “what would happen if your credit card company and your health insurance company became the same company?” Got high cholesterol? Then don’t order that pepperoni pizza and pay with your credit card because your health insurance premium will go up. In…

  • AQ: The President’s No-Lose Media Equation

    Here’s a thought experiment: what if the White House held a press conference and nobody came? What if the president tweeted and nobody saw it? What if late-night talk show hosts didn’t mention the president once during their monologues? These things would disturb the president more than the sharpest satirical barb because the president understands…