Tag: small business news

Robinhood makes Wall Street feel like a game to win—not a place where you can lose your savings

Posted onAuthoradmin

Wall Street has long been likened to a casino . Robinhood, an investment app that just filed plans for an initial public offering , makes the comparison more apt than ever . That’s because the power of the casino is the way it makes people feel like gambling their money away is a game. Casinos are full of mood lighting , fun noises, and other sensory details that reward gamblers when they place coins in slots. Similarly, Robinhood’s slick and easy-to-use app resembles a thrill-inducing video game rather than a sober investment tool. The color palette of red and green is associated with mood, with green having a calming effect and red increasing arousal, anger, and negative emotions . Picking stocks can seem like a fun lottery of scratching off the winning ticket; celebratory confetti drops from the top of the screen for the new users’ first three investments. But just as people can lose a lot of money gambling at the casino, the same thing can happen when you trade stocks and bonds—sometimes with disastrous consequences, such as last year when a Robinhood user died by suicide after mistakenly believing that he’d lost $750,000. I study how people behave inside game worlds and design classroom games . Using gamelike features to influence real-life actions can be beneficial, such as when a health app uses rewards and rankings to encourage people to move more or eat healthier food. But there’s a dark side too, and so-called gamification can lead people to forget the real-world consequences of their decisions. Games explained Generally speaking, games—whether played on a board, among children or with a computer— are voluntary activities that are structured by rules and involve players competing to overcome challenges that carry no risk outside of their virtual world. Read More …

Inside Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s alcohol- and snacks-saturated battle for Oscar buzz

Posted onAuthoradmin

A month out from the 2021 Academy Awards telecast—which airs on April 25—the battle to win the love of Hollywood has turned into the year of the crate. Over the past few weeks, everyone from the indie studio A24 to indie stalwart Fox Searchlight (now a division within Disney) to Universal have dispatched across town crates of artisanal food to woo their way into the hearts—and stomachs—of the Hollywood press corps, the influential body of scribes who feverishly chronicle every twist and turn in the jostle leading up to the Oscars. Netflix, which leads this year’s nominations haul with a whopping 35 nominations for films, including Mank , The Trial of the Chicago 7 , and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom , has also been lavishing edible swag on reporters, but has become more known for gifting booze. To support Malcolm & Marie , a moody art film starring Zendaya and John David Washington—which looked like an early contender but ended up not nabbing any nominations—Netflix sent out bottles of top-drawer scotch. (I’m sure it didn’t go to waste.) Swag and Oscar campaigning have always gone hand in hand during awards season—the three (to six) month swirl of parties, dinners, brunches, and getaways sponsored by the studios and streamers to stir up buzz for their contenders. But in a season that has been turned on its head due to COVID-19—in-person screenings have been verboten , along with glad-handling galas—studios and screening companies have had to be more creative about how to get the word out about their films. Even the fall film festivals, such as Venice and Telluride, which are traditionally relied on to build early buzz and critical acclaim for films, went virtual in 2020, lessening their ability to fuel word of mouth and serve as showboating opportunities for stars and filmmakers. As a result, studios and streamers are coming up with new ways to transform their projects into events. Take Nomadland . The Best Picture frontrunner—it cemented this position by nabbing the top award at the Producers Guild Awards—stars Frances McDormand as a peripatetic Amazon worker who finds beauty and serenity amongst fellow RV dwellers in the American Southwest. The film premiered at festivals last fall, but when it launched on Hulu in late February and officially came out in theaters, Fox Searchlight announced a virtual global premiere. The tactic, in part, was to keep the film feeling fresh so far along in its run, and with the delayed Oscars still a ways off. (During campaign season, the fear of peaking too soon—what many believed killed A Star is Born ‘s Best Picture chances in 2019—haunts all awards publicists.) Invitees to the event were sent the aforementioned crate—stuffed with gourmet cheese, “humanly raised” salami, and trail mix—to enjoy while watching the film. This at-home viewing party atmosphere has become de rigeur this season in an attempt to replicate the feeling and fun of an Oscar screening/gala, and to elevate the living room viewing experience beyond turning on the tube in your pajamas (though you can still do that, of course). One publicist attributed the format to Netflix, which has been throwing “virtual premieres” ever since COVID-19 hit. Invitees who RSVP “yes” to a Netflix premiere see the film show up in their Netflix preview row, and are then sent popcorn or a DoorDash coupon to enjoy with the show Read More …

This viral TikTok perfectly explains how the COVID-19 vaccines work

Posted onAuthoradmin

A few weeks ago, several epidemiologists and doctors who usually take to Twitter to share news articles, studies, and reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began sharing the same TikTok meme. The TikTok video is a short skit by an actor named Vick Krishna who turns the mundane process of vaccination into a good-versus-evil thriller to explain how the mRNA vaccine works. It’s been viewed 6 million times on TikTok alone, and has been shared on other social platforms and in text messages where it’s harder to measure its reach. I immediately sent the video to everyone in my life who had displayed even the slightest tone of skepticism in regard to the COVID-19 vaccine. Most people who show a little wariness toward the new vaccines are not anti-vaccine, per se, they just want to fully understand what it is they’re having injected into their body. Unfortunately, there are few resources that plainly explain vaccine technology . And in the absence of good and easily understood explainers , misinformation thrives. But Krishna’s video isn’t just a good explainer of how the technology works. It’s also entertaining enough to go viral, a rare achievement for wholesome health information on social platforms that are designed to promote salacious, outrageous, and enraging content—the very stuff that pandemic-related misinformation is made of. Last May, Joan Donovan, research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University and an expert on disinformation, eloquently laid out the problem : Algorithms enable COVID-19 misinformation to spread quickly and reach millions, while facts about the pandemic and health languish, seen by a only a few. “Do we need to have an enormous pro-vaccine movement waste tons of resources on that [content] just because social media has decided to preference the voices and positions of people who will go online and advocate for dangerous or mistaken points of view? What would be the value in that?” Donovan said. “Nevertheless, that’s one of the only solutions on the table.” More commonly, memes about the vaccine tend to play on negative tropes. For instance, there is a seemingly harmless TikTok meme, best identified as “me after I get the COVID-19 vaccine,” where people show videos of themselves rhythmically convulsing or barking like a dog or feigning other strange side effects. These are meant to be playful, but they actually play on anti-vaccine ideas that the shots are in some way harmful. This meme has been replicated and reposted an incalculable number of times on TikTok and Instagram Reels, then reposted on YouTube and Twitter Read More …

Why Amazon workers in Alabama are trying to unionize

Posted onAuthoradmin

This article was produced by Capital & Main, an award-winning journalism nonprofit. It is co-published here with permission. The union organizing drive at the mammoth Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama located 20 miles south of Birmingham, Alabama, has the feel of both a social and religious movement. There are five days until the mail-in ballots will be counted to determine whether the company’s 5,800 employees will gain union representation. Last week, organizers and workers gathered at the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union’s scruffy office to go over their final push and to talk to reporters from around the world who have descended upon Birmingham. Jennifer Bates, an African American “learning ambassador” at the Amazon facility—she trains new workers—believes that her courage to fight the corporate giant comes from a spiritual source, “the Almighty, the creator of all things.” She also traces her personal strength to the civil rights movement that rocked Birmingham in the early 1960s. “I really believe that in this organizing drive we are following the foot soldiers who came before us,” she says. Josh Brewer, the union’s lead organizer, is an ordained minister from Michigan who found his way into the labor union movement while trying to ensure his life had purpose, and he was immediately given some of the toughest organizing challenges. Brewer sees the Amazon campaign as a “David vs. Goliath” battle, his biggest career challenge so far. On this day Brewer has one eye on the office television to see if a tornado sweeping through Mississippi and Alabama is going to require moving into the basement, as he reflects on the five-month and 24/7 commitment that he has made to the unionization effort Read More …

Meet BetterUp, the Silicon Valley startup where Prince Harry now works

Posted onAuthoradmin

Prince Harry is now working for a company called BetterUp, a coaching platform for employers, as its Chief Impact Officer. He says joining BetterUp is an extension of his desire to help people lead more meaningful lives. But what exactly does BetterUp do? Founded in 2013, BetterUp aims to offer more people the opportunity to access expensive executive coaching that can help them be more productive and achieve personal goals. It combines individual one-on-one coaching with a series of educational resources and practice exercises to help people excel at work. To do that, the platform focuses on giving people tools for tackling their work, advocating for promotions, and offering advice on other aspects of their lives that may be inhibiting their growth at the office. This includes coaching on better eating habits and effective parenting. The upper echelons of management are usually the only ones with access to this kind of coaching, but BetterUp is trying to bring it to the corporate working masses. The company charges employers a monthly subscription fee per employee for access to the platform and its coaches. Clients include Airbnb, Google, Hilton, and Warner Brothers, and individuals can also sign up for the platform through a free trial. Read More …