The declining popularity around Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean movies continues — in the U.S., at least — with the release of Dead Men Tell No Tales.
The fifth entry in the series is looking at an opening weekend domestic estimate of $62.2 million at the box office. It’s good enough for a first-place finish, but it isn’t the runaway success Disney was likely hoping for.
Dead Men is pacing toward the series’ second-lowest opening in the U.S., after the 2003 original. The Curse of the Black Pearl opened with $46.6 million domestically, but back then it was also an unproven blockbuster based — seemingly impossibly, at the time — on a theme park ride.
Pirates‘ fortunes improved in subsequent releases, with the second, third, and fourth movies opening at $135.6 million (2006), $114.7 million (2007), and $90.2 million (2011), respectively. While that downward trend in opening weekends suggests diminishing interest in the series among U.S. audiences, the opposite is true at the foreign box office.
Disney’s success has only increased with each successive Pirates. The first movie finished at $350.2 million overseas, but the next iterations went bigger: $642.9 million in 2006, $654 million in 2007, and $804.6 million in 2011.
Dead Men is already up to $208.4 million in foreign ticket sales after a near-simultaneous global opening that includes key markets like the U.K. and China.
New Zealand born UFC star Mark Hunt is preparing for one of the most challenging fights of his career, so his training team decided perform a haka in support of his effort, but with one very special celebrity addition: Jason Momoa.
Momoa, best known for his role as Khal Drogo on Game of Thrones and his upcoming role as the lead in the film Aquaman, can be clearly seen in the middle of the haka, supporting Hunt with the same moves as the rest of the group.
As the intensity of the training ramps up, and the anticipation of the fight grows, there’s no better time to secure your UFC Tickets to be part of this exhilarating journey, witnessing these highly skilled athletes clash in the Octagon.
And if it seems like Hunt is taking his next fight incredibly seriously with his comments and photos on Instagram, it’s with good reason.
How do social media giants cope with an ever increasing torrent of offensive material posted by their users? On this week’s Tech Tent we look at the problem of moderation, after Facebook’s training manual detailing how it decides what to allow and what to delete was leaked.
We also talk about the future of work as the robots advance, and we ask whether a retro phone is a sign that we are getting tired of being connected all the time.
The Moderation Game
When the Guardian published leaked documents showing how Facebook’s army of content moderators are trained, two things struck me. First, the huge scale of the problem – 6.5 million complaints a week just about fake accounts.
And then the impossibly thin line the moderators have to tread between the demands of free speech and the need to purge the network of content which will offend millions of its users.
But Professor Sarah Roberts tells us not to feel too bad for Facebook and other social networks – after all their businesses are all about getting users to post more and more content:
“Social media platforms are dependent on user-generated content to gain and keep users… and at the end of the day they are interested in delivering those users to advertisers.”
Prof Roberts has spent many years talking to the people who work as moderators for Facebook and other firms – a stressful and challenging job which is usually outsourced and not well paid. She says it’s not a glamorous aspect of the social-network industry and firms would rather spend their money on tools to get their users to share more.
But now they are suddenly waking up to the fact that they have to police content which often showcases the worst aspects of human behaviour, And the political pressure on them is rising – witness the call at the G8 summit from UK Prime Minister Theresa May for an international effort to stamp out extremist content online.
Framing policies on extremism that will work around the world won’t be easy. The British government’s view of what is extremist may differ from that of the Turkish or Russian authorities, but moderators will have to apply the same rules in both countries.
But these are the same challenges faced by global media organisations – so Facebook, a far more profitable business than any of them, won’t get a lot of sympathy as it grapples with the moderation challenge.
Nokia’s retro rebrand
This week saw the rebirth of the Nokia phone business, with a brand new device going on sale, Well I say brand new, but in fact the Nokia 3310 is a retread of a much loved old model. It’s very much not a smartphone – instead it is aimed at people who mainly want to call and text on a phone that will easily last a week without a recharge.
I tried putting my smartphone away and living with the 3310 – you can see the results here.
When we visited a shop as the phone went on sale we found quite a few people who were enthusiastic about returning to a simpler time when you didn’t need to be glued to Snapchat or Twitter on the move,
But it is worth remembering that the 3310 is really just a clever PR stunt to get the Nokia brand talked about again. The real priority for HMD Global, the firm licensing the brand, is to to sell new high-end Android smartphones. The danger is that the phone-buying public will see Nokia as a charming retro brand, rather than a rival to Samsung and Apple in shaping our mobile future.
A future with robots
It seems every week we hear a new doom-laden prediction about the impact of robots and other forms of automation on jobs. But are we looking at this the wrong way – too inclined to hang on to the world of work as it is today, too unimaginative about how it could be transformed for the better by technology?
That is the view of Riel Miller, who rejoices in the wonderful title of head of foresight at Unesco. For many years he has been paid to think ahead and he tells us that only by imagining a different future for work can we make things better today.
We spoke at the Innorobo robots fair in Paris, surrounded by devices which looked as though they could soon be replacing humans in all sorts of functions. But he wants us to relax about that.
“When you project a future where we’re all going to work in coal mines for ever, you see the future in one way, and you see the present in one way, When you see a future where robots do the mining and you have to do something else you see the present in a different way,” he said.
Miller tells us that everyone, from prime ministers to van drivers, wants to find meaning and value in their lives – and that by imagining different ways of working we can achieve that.
And he feels we can exaggerate the scale of the change we are going through – what he calls the hubris of the now. “I look to the generation that came out of World War Two where female labour force participation changed dramatically, and changed the power structures of our society.”
He says we need to stand back and accept that the future is coming at us.
The robots, like other tools invented by humans, can help us or harm us. But they are not going away.
A popular concept in science fiction is the singularity, a moment of explosive accelerating growth in technology and artificial intelligence that rewrites the world. One of the better explanations for how this could happen is described by the Scottish sci-fi author Charles Stross as “a hard take-off singularity in which a human-equivalent AI rapidly bootstraps itself to de-facto god-hood.”
To translate: If an AI is capable of improving (“boostrapping”) itself, or of building another, smarter AI, then that next version can do the same, and soon you have exponential growth. In theory this could lead to a system rapidly surpassing human intelligence, and, if you’re in a Stross novel, probably a computer that’s going to start eating people’s brains.
The singularity still seems to be a long ways off (until we crack Moore’s Law), but at Google I/O, we got a glimpse of our future robot overlords from Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Lifelong Learning
The new technology is called AutoML, and it uses a machine learning system (ML) to make other machine learning systems faster or more efficient. Essentially, it’s a program that teaches other programs how to learn, without actually teaching them any specific skills (it’s the liberal arts college of algorithms).
AutoML comes from the Google Brain division (not to be confused with DeepMind, the other Google AI project). Whereas DeepMind is more focused on general-purpose AI that can adapt to new tasks and situations, Google Brain is focused on deep learning, which is all about specializing and excelling in narrowly defined tasks.
According to Google, AutoML has already been used to design neural networks for speech and image recognition. (Fun fact: The networks to accomplish these two tasks are usually nearly identical. Images are typically analyzed by looking at repeating patterns in pixels, and speech is analyzed by turning sound into a graph of frequency over time that’s analyzed the same way). Designed by AutoML, the image recognition algorithms were as good as those designed by humans, and the speech recognition algorithms were, as of February 2017, “0.09 percent better and 1.05x faster than the previous state-of-the-art model.”
Stack up all the hard drives and flash sticks you want, but online storage space is still a premium commodity. Without some regular attention to storage room on your phone, tablet or laptop, you’ll likely to find stuff clogging up your device.
Rather than slow your tech to a crawl, just start sorting through all the stockpiled videos, images, documents and other low-priority digital content and push it to your 1TB of cloud space from Zoolz Dual Cloud Storage (now just $29 from TNW Deals).
Purchase your piece of cloud real estate, then take a minute to decide whether to store your data in your 500GB of instant access storage or in your 500GB cold storage locker for data you don’t use very often. No matter what you decide, your files are fully protected behind military-grade AES-256 encryption.
Meanwhile, Zoolz also helps keep your system running fast and clutter-free with automatic backup scheduling, bandwidth throttling, icon overlay, file retention, and more.
Using 1TB of cloud storage space for life would normally cost you about $3,600, but while this limited time deal lasts, you can stake out that cloud space for yourself for only $29.
Guns and Roses was a constant presence in my yellow Sony Walkman, and later my Jeep Wrangler’s aftermarket CD player. The band’s leader, Axl Rose, was famous (or perhaps infamous) for a great many attributes; but organizational guru sharing advice, he was generally not.
But, as I attempt to transition a company from start-up to a scale up, his words, not Welch’s or Buffet’s or Collins’, ring most loudly in my ears. My personal experiences, captured in four GnR classics, highlight the self-realization needed initiate the scale-up process, the need to focus on fundamentals, the emotional persistence required and the need to take a longer view of what is a difficult and elusive journey.
Like GnR’s music, the scale-up phase is at once frenetic, exhilarating, angst ridden, inspirational, exasperating and satisfying. So, join me on a quick journey on how to transition a company from a start-up to a scale-up… if you have the “Appetite.”
Nearly two decades ago, low-cost airlines barely existed. Today, they account for more than half of total capacity in Southeast Asia, allowing many people to fly for the first time. This boom can be traced back to one charismatic businessman: Anthony Fernandes, better known as Tony.
A former Warner Music executive, Fernandes bought then-ailing AirAsia from the Malaysian government for RM 1 in 2001 and turned it into Asia’s first low-cost airline.
From a company with only two jets, 250 employees, and millions of dollars in debt, he has flown AirAsia to new heights – today, it has 220 planes, employs 20,000 people, and carries 65 million passengers annually. AirAsia has been named the world’s top budget airline for eight consecutive years and this year, it became the first such to get US authorities’ green light to fly to American airports.
It wasn’t a smooth journey. During a recent fireside chat with Catcha Group CEO Patrick Grove, Fernandes shared some of the valuable lessons he learned along the way.
“It’s a shame if young brands emerging under the current climate ignore the idea that the future must be greener in order to be brighter,” says Samriddh Burman, Founder of The Burlap People. For the 30-year-old, starting an environmentally-conscious brand and having that brand revolve around jute were both forgone conclusions.
Samriddh’s family has been making and exporting value-added jute bags for over 40 years. Samriddh worked as a marketing executive at his family’s jute firm before moving on to work for a sports travel company. But his passion for environmental sustainability and creativity weren’t being fulfilled in cookie-cutter corporate jobs. So he quit to start up.
Picture a new fashion magazine running multiple campaigns across platforms for three months; a mobile recharge company running paid campaigns in the first week of every month across Google AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter; a customised bicycle shop making videos to engage their potential customers, and an e-commerce portal working with a lot of affiliates and getting good conversion.
Now, picture this–being able to check each campaign’s individual performance on each channel, week-on-week, comparing the achievements and failures of each, seeing what the total reach has been, what was the click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) or cost per visit (CPV), to see which keywords are giving the max conversion, which ones are not working even though one is paying a lot for it, the audience retention and cost per view for video campaigns, and ultimately, what one’s return on ad spend (ROAS) is.
