This Week's 3 Bells
1 Facebook's US election role 2 Samsung's nightmare 3 Print your food
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Did Facebook swing the US election?
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Most of the world was left completely flummoxed by Donald Trump's election to the world's top job last week. How did the most racist, misogynistic and generally unpleasant campaign in living memory succeed? There have been many explanations offered, and an unlikely culprit is in the dock: Facebook.
The contention is that a blitz of fake news on Facebook and other social media sites swung this election. Very negative (and false) stories were peddled by both sides, and got unprecedented traction. The stories about Hillary Clinton stuck; she lost. Here's a mea culpa from one of the writers of fake stories.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg thinks it is a "pretty crazy idea" that "fake news on Facebook, which is a very small amount of content, influenced the election in any way." Some pundits disagree: they say that with Facebook's enormous hold on the world's attention, it must act more responsibly and do more gatekeeping of its content, the way old-world media companies do. Others think trying to control what people read on the internet is a very slippery slope indeed...
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Facebook has such influence in the world today that it will probably have little choice but to tighten some controls on content. The bigger story here is the growing irrelevance of old media.
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Samsung's nightmare continues
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You wouldn't want to be doing PR for Samsung right now, huh? If it wasn't bad enough that its best-ever smartphone began exploding and had to be recalled all over the world (the 3 Bells covered it here), the electronics giant now faces another huge problem: exploding washing machines! NBC tells us that "the company recalled nearly three million of its top-loading washers after receiving more than 700 complaints about the faulty machines, including some that exploded, and shot metal and glass across a room." Yikes.
There's a huge lesson here for Samsung: its massive global marketing machine has outpaced its capacity to do the boring stuff: quality control, supply chain management, and customer care. And Samsung may be the one caught in the headlights right now, but many consumer electronics firms are cutting corners on safety. They will be found out.
Photo credit: Dennis Haslam / Flickr (adjusted)
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Don't oversell your products. In the long run, it catches up with you. Make sure you're on top of the basic, tedious stuff like safety and control before you go on marketing sprees.
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Print your food and eat it!
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Print your food? Say what? Yes, 3D printers can now use fresh food ingredients to 'print' out great looking food right in your home. And you can limit the amount of additives, preservatives and unhealthy ingredients as you wish.
Reality check: it only works on foods that consist of purees and mashes, which still have to be produced separately. The machine doesn't cook the food; it just shapes it - but very nicely! The best current use case is in feeding babies and the elderly. At the moment pastas, pizzas, candy and desserts are the preferred options. It may not be your thing right now, but pause for a moment to reflect where we are going with this over the next 5 years...
Photo credit: 3D Print Today (adjusted)
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A huge devolution of consumer products is taking place in front of our eyes. We are in the early days yet, but I have little doubt that we will be doing many things right in our homes that were unthinkable before.
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