Fast-food restaurant Sonic will debut their new line of milkshakes with a campaign especially designed for Coachella. On April 16, festival-goers will be able to order a #SquareShake exclusively through Instagram and pay by posting a picture to their accounts.
Source: ‘Instagram-Exclusive’ Milkshake Hints At The Future Of Social Commerce
It’s for the Coachella music festival, but it’s not difficult to imagine Sonic or some other major (or regional) brand rolling out a similar promotion.
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Dr. Thomas Whitley and Rev. Sam Harrelson talk about soup, signal cues, sex demons, and how a Trump Standard Version of the Bible (TSV) would translate passages. There’s also a BeardCast segment at the end for Friends Of The Show.
The post Thinking Religion 74: Trump 3:16 appeared first on Thinking.FM.
Taking a photo and posting it on Instagram, with or without a mug in the frame, is a way for all of us to become our own historians, grasping at tangible evidence of our time on the planet. “Instagram,” Suler said, “is therefore a tool for validating one’s life.”
Never forget…
I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. It’s much better than a physical book, because obviously if you put your physical book in a Ziploc bag you can’t turn the pages. But with Kindle, you can just push the buttons.
The bot era has officially begun. In a widely expected move, Facebook today announced tools for developers to build bots inside Facebook Messenger, bringing a range of new functions to the popular communication app. Facebook believes Messenger can become a primary channel for businesses to interact with their customers, replacing 1-800 numbers with a mix of artificial intelligence and human intervention. If they are embraced by the general public — which is still far from certain — bots could represent a major new channel for commerce, customer support, and possibly even media.
Source: Facebook launches a bot platform for Messenger | The Verge
Expect to see much more about this in the coming months and get ready to change how you interact with many services and businesses.
If you are a business or church or nonprofit or provide a service, it’s time to start thinking about messaging and bots.
The concept is to reduce the size of the spacecraft to about the size of a chip used in electronic devices. The idea is to launch a thousand of these mini-spacecraft into the Earth’s orbit. Each would have a solar sail. This is like a sail on a boat – but it is pushed along by light rather than the wind. A giant laser on Earth would give each one a powerful push, sending them on their way to reaching 20% of the speed of light.
Source: Hawking backs interstellar travel project – BBC News
Fascinating.
Remember what I said yesterday about messaging bots becoming the main way you interact with tech services?
Now, when you tap the More button in Messenger for iOS or Android, you’ll see Dropbox as an available source. With the Dropbox app installed on your phone, you can share any file in your Dropbox without having to leave the Messenger app.
Source: Share Dropbox files directly from Facebook Messenger | | Dropbox Blog
The ancient Greeks and Romans were more lavish than the modern world in their expressed affection for beasts. Theirs was a splendid opportunity to know animal life at first hand, not because there were more animals, but on account of the very close relationship effected by polytheistic principles and religious customs.1 Both literature and art attest that there were but few animals not dedicated to gods or goddesses; since religion penetrated ancient life so deeply, it is understandable that animals were freely admitted into the house, and gradually attempts were made to transform even the fiercer beasts into pets and companions.
Source: Greek and Roman Household Pets — CJ 44:245‑252 and 299‑307 (1949)
Just seeing the difference in emoji presentations is revelatory in itself. But then it gets even more interesting. GroupLens researchers asked subjects to rate 22 anthropomorphic emoji from five platforms by sentiment, using a scale that ranged from strongly negative (-5) to strongly positive (5). And here’s where you start to see where “grinning face with smiling eyes” goes so very wrong. Apple’s average sentiment ranking was almost -1, while Microsoft, Samsung, LG, and Google all were 3 or above.
Source: That Emoji Does Not Mean What You Think It Means
My wife (and almost all of my close friends that I’d use emoji with) is an iOS user and I’m an Android user… that’s led to a few miscommunications before we realized that the emoji we were sending “cross-platform” didn’t carry the same intended meaning.
Perhaps that’s one of the beautiful aspects of emoji and symbolic language additions… the meanings are left to the receiver to first decrypt and then to import meaning into based on their own background, experiences, culture (and operating system).