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

  • The Real Problem with Facebook Live

    This morning’s Wall Street Journal has a smart look back at Facebook Live after about a year of the service being available, although it misses the real Achilles heel of the service. Here is a relevant snippet from WSJ: Nearly a year later, many publishers say Facebook Live viewership is lackluster. Facebook is still tinkering with ways for…

  • CES 2017 for Brands: a Skeptical Review

    Most years at CES you can spot me leading tours, and most years after the show is over I sit down to ponder what I made of it all, what the pundits got right and what they missed. While in past years I’ve given presentations on these things, this year I wrote it up for…

  • My 2016 in Books

    This is the third year that I’ve kept a running list of every book that I’ve completed for the first time and then shared that list here as the first thing I write on either the last day of the old year or the first of the new. You can see the 2015 list here…

  • Playing “Whack-a-Mole” with Apple News on my iPhone

    I love my iPhone. The dangerous problem is that while sometimes I love it the way a writer loves a favorite pen while at other times I love it the way an alcoholic loves beer. Or like Brokeback Mountain. I wish I knew how to quit you, iPhone. Today, I had a lovers quarrel with…

  • Amazon’s Robot Bodega

    Don’t miss this important piece from The Verge, which gives great context around this promotional video about Amazon Go, the robot bodega: As The Verge captures, there are no cashiers and no checkout lines: you grab what you want and just go. At the moment, there are human stockers at the Amazon Go beta in…

  • David Brooks Calls for a Third Party

    I thought I was as done with the election as a boy can be, but despite a Coyote-plummeting-off-the-cliff decline of interest in the news I noticed David Brooks remarkable column from election day, “Let’s Not Do This Again” in which he resignedly calls for a third party to break the D.C. deadlock. Here’s a relevant excerpt:…

  • A Modest Proposal: Bring Back the Whigs, or… R.I.P. GOP

    Today, in a remarkable interview on NPR’s “Morning Edition,” Florida-based, long-time Republican strategist and lobbyist Mac Stipanovich conceded that Hillary Clinton will win the presidency — and that he himself will vote for her because “I loathe Donald Trump with the passion that I usually reserve for snakes.” The interview is worth listening to in…

  • SHORT: Don’t Miss REDEF Original on Truth in Advertising

    From the “too long for a tweet” department: I just finished Adam Wray‘s powerful Fashion REDEFined original article “With Great Power: Seth Matlins on how Advertising can Shift Culture for the Better.” It’s about Seth Matlins‘ efforts to change how advertisements featuring too-skinny and Photoshopped models body shame girls and women (men too, by the way).…

  • What the NY Times missed about “Rizzoli & Isles”

    Earlier this week, New York Times TV critic Mike Hale reviewed the opening of the seventh and final season of the TNT original cop show, “Rizzoli & Isles.” Here’s a relevant snippet: On television, as in life, comfort food comes in all sorts of flavors. There’s the tart apple pie of “NCIS,” the solid corned…

  • TechfestNW: Daimler’s Ambitious Vision for Self-Driving Trucks

    I was reminded this week of a 1983 episode of the classic TV show “Knight Rider” featuring a self-driving truck named Goliath as the villain-of-the-week who battled heroes Michael Knight (played by a young David Hasselhoff) and K.I.T.T., a self-aware and self-driving Pontiac Trans Am. This boyhood memory clanged into my awareness because now, 33…