During November and December last year, Transport For London used the London Underground’s Wi-fi network to track the hashes of MAC numbers as they moved through the system. Although tracking the start and end points of a journey is relatively easy, how a large volume of people move between stations has been harder to understand.

Perhaps the number one reason to do the trial was to better understand the journeys that people actually make on the Tube. At the moment, TfL can tell what station you started and ended your journey at based on your Oyster card – but it can’t tell how you got between two locations. [In the example] you can see how popular different routes between Liverpool Street and Victoria are.

So if you travel via Oxford Circus, you do the same as 44% of other people. If you lazily sit on the circle line you do the same as 26% of people making the same journey. And if you change twice – once at Holborn, then again at Green Park, then congratulations, you’re a psychopath.

Big data wins again, and no doubt ‘better adverts’ is the trade off for being anonymously tracked.

A delightful counter-historical for the entertainment world, as Peter Judge’s post has been brought back to the wold. What if the BBC had cast a black actor in Doctor Who in 1963, through all the regenerations, and into the new series?

One thing’s clear. The fourth Doctor would still be everyone’s favourite:

4: Derek Griffiths
The most outlandish and best-loved Doctor, Derek Griffiths was the first to be born in Britain, His previous TV work included Play School and Please Sir! but Doctor Who gave him somewhere to express himself. He made the character something of a hippy, with flamboyant clothes, and an anarchic manner. Fans still copy Griffiths’ large sideburns and wide collars, and of course his scarf.

The only constant in publishing today is change. While many print empires have passed away, others are working through the transition towards digital. The New Yorker has been smart and adapted for the new environment while preserving its identity. Benjamin Mullin for Poynter looks at how it’s working out:

In those days, the print schedule reigned supreme, which meant that the magazine’s famously rigorous system of copy editing and fact-checking held sway over The New Yorker’s metabolism.

In the years since, The New Yorker has undergone a massive digital remaking. It’s established a separate web operation that’s unchained writers and editors from the time-intensive print edition. It’s colonized platforms like podcasts, YouTube, mobile applications, Instagram and Snapchat. And it’s built a digital staff of about 40 people, hiring several full-time journalists tasked with writing primarily for the website.

How The New Yorker brought the soul of the magazine to the web.

Podcasts should, like people making a Terminator TV series, plan for a final episode. Even if it’s ‘go on hiatus’ think about what you leave if it is the last one. As it is with genre TV, as it is with The Voicemail:

This isn’t the last episode of The Voicemail, but it’ll be the last one you’ll hear for a while. In it, James and Stefan discuss what’s been happening in their respective lives since the last time they recorded, what news items caught there eyes during the show’s brief hiatus, and what they’re looking forward to in 2017.

Goodnight, guys, it’s been fun. Sleep well, you’ll most like kill The The Voicemail in the morning…

Basically you try, try, try again. Keep trying until you get everything lined up. And in the process you’ll also be working on a reusable first-stage rocket. The Verge’s Sean O’Kane on that picture:

It appears that there was some post-processing done on this photo, which adds to its dramatic nature. But even without the added contrast and vignetting, the photo is still a rather lucky sum of a number of fast-moving parts. The rocket is in the middle of using its engines to remove itself from its free fall from space. The drone ship had been positioning and steadying itself against the ocean’s waves while it waited for the rocket to descend. And all this obviously happened while the Sun slowly “moved” through the sky thanks to the Earth’s rotation.

That said, Elon Musk proves that you can be a Bond Vilian in real life…

Not your low-cost ten-a-pen pen, but the more high-end pens with well fitting barrels and balls for smoother writing experiences.

Ballpoint pens aren’t actually new to China. Its 3,000 pen manufacturers make around 40 billion of them a year and fulfill 80 percent of the world’s demand. There’s just one problem: China doesn’t possess the advanced alloys and machines necessary to make a high-quality pen ball and socket. As a result, 90 percent of China’s pen tips are imported. Pens made from Chinese components are widely acknowledged to be inferior — a point made by Premier Li Keqiang in a 2015 television appearance. “That’s the real situation facing us,” he said. “We cannot make ballpoint pens with a smooth writing function.”

And while it’s a curious story, Tim Worstall spins it out to illustrate a point about national wages and productivity in China compared to the west.

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Gene Cernan died today.

I’ve posted it above, and I’m going to listen to it again.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, –and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of –Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air…
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew —
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Fifteen years after the reveal of the first iPod (with a world changing 5GB of storage), Nobuyyki Hayashi recalls the presentation,the first sample machines handed to journalists (for the flight home), and the twenty hand-picked albums that were loaded up on the iPod.

Of course there was a big push to not ‘steal music’ so alongside the iPod were CD copies of those twenty albums. Hayasi still has them, and it makes for a fascinating playlist.

I love the fact that Jobs and his team included two albums from The Beatles (‘A Hard Day’s Night‘, and ‘Abbey Road‘), a band that would be one of the last groups to appear in digital form in the iTunes Music Store.

I’m travelling a lot in November, so a quiet week at home with virtual reality, reality TV, and a picture show are exactly what I need to prepare to gather a clutch of air miles. What have I been reading to while away the hours? I’m glad you asked…

You can sign up to have this posted out to you every week, subscribe to the newsletter version here.

VR’s Biggest Problem

I posted this on the blog over the weekend, but it deserves another airing. Virtual Reality has a problem that is not far from the surface. Can anyone ensure a harassment-free environment, asks Jordan Belamire?

What Next For Twitter?

With the news that Disney is not going to bid for Twitter (nor will Salesforce, Google, Facebook, etc…) what next for the no longer limited to 140 character messaging service? John Brandon has a radical idea. Nothing. It’s done. Go home. Start again:

I use Twitter all day, but the truth is–tweets are becoming like white noise on a lost FM radio station.

…Do we ever check Twitter? Not at all. Never. It’s becoming a rat’s nest of nonsense, a place to grumble about the debates. I used to post questions on my Twitter feed, which now has about 11,000 followers, and expect a few people to send me some tips about how to fix a Wi-Fi signal at my house or troubleshoot a laptop issue, but fewer and fewer people respond these days. They’ve grown silent. The service has 313 million users but Twitter can’t seem to attract any new attention at all.

Why You’ll Be Deleting Your Twitter Account In The Next Six Months.

Why Is The Internet Hard To Read?

Kevin Marks (one of the key developers in the history of podcasting who never gets enough credit) is struggling on the web. Is it age catching up and failing eyesight? Or are the designers out to get him and make text that’s impossible to read the standard look for the web? Turns out its the latter.

There’s a widespread movement in design circles to reduce the contrast between text and background, making type harder to read. Apple is guilty. Google is, too. So is Twitter.

…if the web is relayed through text that’s difficult to read, it curtails that open access by excluding large swaths of people, such as the elderly, the visually impaired, or those retrieving websites through low-quality screens. And, as we rely on computers not only to retrieve information but also to access and build services that are crucial to our lives, making sure that everyone can see what’s happening becomes increasingly important.

We should be able to build a baseline structure of text in a way that works for most users, regardless of their eyesight. So, as a physicist by training, I started looking for something measurable.

How The Web Became Unreadable

Never Trust Anyone Who Updates Shakespeare Rocky Horror For The Kids

Frankly I still feel both apprehensive and uneasy about this remake, why it was needed, and if it’s going to be able to stand on its own. I mean, surely Brad and Janet can just call for an Uber instead of heading to the scary castle? And then there’s the music… Lou Adler talks about updating the music for the 2016 TV remake of ‘The Rocky Horror Picture Show’ and that’s perhaps the part I’m confident that the show will get right.

There was also the matter of Richard O’Brien’s music for the show, which decades ago tapped into the prevailing glam-rock sound of the mid ’70s — and spawned a stand-alone hit in the deathless “Time Warp.”

…Today, though, rock hardly dominates the mainstream the way it once did. So Cisco — known for his group Whitestarr and his work with the rapper Shwayze — saw himself as a kind of a translator: someone who could reinterpret “Time Warp,” “Dammit Janet” and “Touch-a Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” for younger viewers raised on hip-hop.

“These songs are rock standards,” he said. “I didn’t wanna flip the music on its back and make it EDM. But I did wanna flip it on its side — steroid it up, give it fatter drums.”

Steroids? Yes. EDM? No.

Simulating Brexit In Football Manager 2017

Put this down to unintended consequences but the ‘make Football as lifelike as possible’ gaming franchise is now simulating the various Brexit options in-game because of the direct impact it will have on Football:

There is also the option that sees us adopt a system like Italy’s, where there is a limit on the number of non-EU players in each squad. The limit of non-UK players that British clubs are allowed could range from anything as high as 17 to as low as four.

“If you only had four non-UK players per squad, that’s going to make things difficult. All of a sudden Championship-quality players are moving into the Premier League to fill up slots. That could mean the overall quality drops, and that means the TV money goes down.

…Jacobson goes on to highlight further potential scenarios: referendums on independence could mean players from Scotland or Northern Ireland need a work permit to move to the UK and the Bosman ruling, which allows players to move for free at the end of their contracts, could be scrapped in the UK. Jacobson is keen to stress that these really are all possible within the new game.

Brexit is simulated in Football Manager and its going to make it harder than ever.

Quick Links

What happens when you ditch a smartphone and go dumb? Documentally finds out.

The BBC puts episodes of ‘The Adventure Game’ on digital sale. Gronda, gronda!

The winning pictures from 2016’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year are, as you would expect, stunning.

What I’ve Been Up To

Two items of note from me this week in addition to the usual coverage of the mobile tech industry over on Forbes.

The first was an update to ESC Buzz. Inspired by Popurls, Alltop, and other headline-displaying sites, ESC Buzz gives you all the headlines from the ongoing world of the Eurovision Song Contest. Head over to www.escbuzz.com for more. Secondly, I made a second appearance on Keep Dancing, an unofficial Strictly COme Dancing podcast, to talk about the three-act structure and plotting in reality TV shows.

At the start of November  I’ll be attending the Web Summit (Lisbon 7-10 November 2016), before heading to Malta for a week of radio broadcasts (more on that in the near future). December will see me in the capital for TechCrunch’s Disrupt London (5-6 December 2016). Next year’s plans include attending SXSW (Austin, 10-20 March 2017). If you want to meet up at any of these events, let me know.

‘Trivial Posts’ is a mostly weekly series of posts that brings together interesting posts, ideas, video clips, essays, images, and anything else that catches my eye on the Internet. Read it online, or subscribe to the email newsletter version here.

Virtual Reality is (still) the brave new world, and like any new world it’s going to get polluted. If the experiences of – and I fear it will be – then VR has a problem. And it’s one as old as the digital hills. Female harassment:

So, there I was shooting down zombies alongside another real-time player named BigBro442. The other players could hear me when I spoke, my voice the only indication of my femaleness. Otherwise, my avatar looked identical to them.

In between a wave of zombies and demons to shoot down, I was hanging out next to BigBro442, waiting for our next attack. Suddenly, BigBro442’s disembodied helmet faced me dead-on. His floating hand approached my body, and he started to virtually rub my chest.

…Remember that little digression I told you about how the hundred foot drop looked so convincing? Yeah. Guess what. The virtual groping feels just as real. Of course, you’re not physically being touched, just like you’re not actually one hundred feet off the ground, but it’s still scary as hell.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

There are a lot of players in VR right now. Who can build VR for everyone, and not just replicate a Trump Locker Room? I’ll happily cheerlead for that team.

Because a heap of junk can look graceful in two supercut videos, one of the Millennium Falcon from the Star Wars trilogy, and one from The Force Awakens.

Sneaking out last week on its YouTube channel was a recording of Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You‘ for a John Peel Session. It’s the faster version used to open a number of live shows.

…and every time I listen to it I can hear Status Quo’s 12-bar boogie-woogie trying to break out.

A slightly delayed Trivial Posts this week, but it’s still full of the best stories, links, and articles that I’ve found online this week. You can sign up to have this posted out to you every week, subscribe to the newsletter version here.

Who’s Line Was First Anyway?

They might be ten-a-penny on panel shows and in comedy clubs, but when did the lust for improvised comedy start in the UK? John Dowie discovers the first giants for Chortle… Jim Sweeney and Steve:

Just as the Sex Pistols had inspired a generation of kids to form bands, so Alexei Sayle inspired a load of performers to crawl out of the comedy woodwork. An Alternative Comedy Circuit was formed and Jim and Steve were performing in it, taking suggestions from the audience, then acting them out. And always brilliantly. Many of us wanted to know ‘how they did it’. The only way to find out, they told us, was to do it. The Rupert Pupkin Collective was formed, a free-form outfit comprised of whoever came along that night. Shows were staged at the Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. The only rule was that there were no rules. There were also no ‘theatre games’.

The Pioneering Giants Of British Improv

Your Super Soaraway Search Engine

A long time ago (in digital terms), The Sun went behind a paywall. Recently it decided to ditch that model and start with the ad-supported model of publishing news. It started with almost no search-engine power because of the paywall blocking everything. What happened next? Jessica Davies looks at the modern day way of building traffic:

News UK chief customer officer Chris Duncan likened the feeling of The Sun shedding its paywall, to “coming blinking back into the light.” But The Sun has been busy and, with the help of Facebook, has soared in traffic. “Having been absent for a few years, we’re now right back up,” he said. The traffic speaks for itself: Today, The Sun has 20 million monthly visitors (compared to a couple million last December) — just 7 million shy of Mail Online in the U.K., according to comScore.

How The Sun Used Facebook

Show Me (Thirty Percent Of) The Money

Staying with monetising the news, David Pidgeon reports on the income the Guardian receives from people buying advertising on the website. In true MacGyver fashion, the Guardian did this by buying advertising on its own site to watch the flow of the cash.

“There’s leakage. The money that goes in is not the same as the money that goes out,” Nicklin said. “There are so many different players taking a little cut here, a little cut there – and sometimes a very big cut. A lot of the money that [advertisers] think they are giving to premium publishers is not actually getting to us.”

Nicklin said the Guardian had purchased its own ad inventory to try and assess where the money was spent across the entire supply chain and saw, in some instances, that only 30 pence was making it back to the publisher.

Where did the money go? Guardian buys its own ad inventory

When One Man Can Make A Difference

There’s rather a lot of polling going on in the United States at the moment, and huge decisions are made on the output of these polls. Why do the opinion of 19-year-old in Illinois change the polls so much that he can be responsible for a percentage point shift in a poll of 3000 people? Nate Cohn (no not that Nate) investigates for The New York Times:

He’s a panelist on the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, which has emerged as the biggest polling outlier of the presidential campaign. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the U.S.C./LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took a nominal lead.

Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he’s weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.

…How has he made such a difference? And why has the poll been such an outlier? It’s because the U.S.C./LAT poll made a number of unusual decisions in designing and weighting its survey.

Distorting National Polling Averages

But Not Inverted

How do you make an eclipse last seventy-four minutes? You borrow the first Concorde prototype, crank it up to mach 2, and sit in the shadow till you run out of potential runways to land at. Chris Hatherhill looks at a lost moment in aviation history for Vice.

The plan seemed deceptively simple. Closing in at maximum velocity, Concorde would swoop down from the north and intercept the shadow of the moon over northwest Africa. Traveling together at almost the same speed, Concorde would essentially race the solar eclipse across the surface of the planet, giving astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to study the various phenomena made possible by an eclipse: the ethereal solar corona, the effect of sunlight on the darkened atmosphere, and the brief red flash of the chromosphere, a narrow region around the sun that’s usually washed out by the much brighter photosphere.

When Astronomers Chased A Total Eclipse In A Concorde

Quick Links

Thanks to the trailer for Top Gear Two (sorry, The Grand Tour, having the same initials cut confuses me), I’ve spent most of this week with The Kongos ‘Come With Me Now‘ on loop. I’m expecting to see official Amazon Music playlists pop up after each episode of TGT.

Is putting on a good dance enough to find success at Strictly Come Dancing? Eleanor Chalkley investigates for Keep Dancing.

What I’ve Been Up To

A quiet week on the content front, just two big pieces to draw your attention. The first is a review of the latest Pebble Smartwatch, imaginatively called the Pebble 2. The second is the regular news podcast for the Eurovision Song Contest as countries continue to decide how to select their songs for the Contest in May.

At the start of November  I’ll be attending the Web Summit (Lisbon 7-10 November 2016), before heading to Malta for a week of radio broadcasts (more on that in the near future). December will see me in the capital for TechCrunch’s Disrupt London (5-6 December 2016). Next year’s plans include attending SXSW (Austin, 10-20 March 2017). If you want to meet up at any of these events, let me know.

‘Trivial Posts’ is a mostly weekly series of posts that brings together interesting posts, ideas, video clips, essays, images, and anything else that catches my eye on the Internet. Read it online, or subscribe to the email newsletter version here.

In a week where I did a last-minute trip to New York, looked at the iPhone camera lens, and remembered the horrors of Bros’ ‘Push’ album, the internet kept me relatively sane with links and stories aplenty. Here are some of those stories. You can sign up to have this posted out to you every week, subscribe to the newsletter version here.

Ken Doesn’t Need The Bros Reunion

What happened to Craig Logan, the original bassist in Bros? Turns out that he’s quite happy to not be famous, but ended up with a huge career in the Music industry. Ian Burrell finds out what happened next to Smash Hits’ Ken:

He refers to Bros now as “my crazy little, funny little pop band”. Still, while most of the American superstars he works with have never heard of what was once a British cultural phenomenon, Logan also says of his days as an artist that he does not “regret it for a millisecond”. That includes the recollection of playing Wembley in 1988 and spotting Eric Clapton in the front of the audience with his family. “I remember thinking, ‘God, he’s going to think I’m shit’. It was enough to give me the heebie-jeebies.” A framed photograph on the wall of his villa shows him in silhouette on stage with Bros, although he has chosen an arty shot that makes him barely recognisable. “It’s the only one I put up because no one can tell who it is.”

I Never Wanted To Be Famous

One Song To The Sample Of Another

Thanks to the rise of sampling in the music industry, there’s a veritable goldmine of moments to choose from. So why do so many tracks end up using ‘Amen, Brother’? David Goldenberg investigates for FiveThirtyEight:

There’s one song that’s been sampled far more than any other, according to one measure. The website WhoSampled.com, whose audience obsessively tracks what’s sampled, says that a 1960s track called “Amen, Brother” by The Winstons is the most-sampled track in history, and it’s not particularly close. By its count, more than 2,000 songs have sampled a particular drum beat from “Amen, Brother” that’s now known as the Amen Break.

It Only Takes Six Seconds To Hear The World’s Most Sampled Song

We Can Remember Him For You

Reading like a Charlie Brooker script from Black Mirror, Casey Newton tells the story of Eugenia Kuyda and her quest to build a ‘bot that recreated her deceased friend Roman Mazurenko through a mix of texts, messages, and digital footprints:

As she grieved, Kuyda found herself rereading the endless text messages her friend had sent her over the years — thousands of them, from the mundane to the hilarious. She smiled at Mazurenko’s unconventional spelling — he struggled with dyslexia — and at the idiosyncratic phrases with which he peppered his conversation. Mazurenko was mostly indifferent to social media — his Facebook page was barren, he rarely tweeted, and he deleted most of his photos on Instagram. His body had been cremated, leaving her no grave to visit. Texts and photos were nearly all that was left of him, Kuyda thought.

…Reading Mazurenko’s messages, it occurred to Kuyda that they might serve as the basis for a different kind of bot — one that mimicked an individual person’s speech patterns. Aided by a rapidly developing neural network, perhaps she could speak with her friend once again.

Speak, Memory

Can You Use The Diamond Rio MP3 Player Today?

Ars Technica’s Andrew Williams digs out the eighteen year old Diamond Rio MP3 player (base specifications, 32 MB of musical storage) to see just how well it works with today’s technology.

The root of the problem highlights how our relationships with our computers have changed in the last 20 years. Windows couldn’t see the Rio PMP300 because the software wasn’t just looking for the player, it was looking for the player exclusively on the LPT1 parallel port. Windows 10 is designed to let its users be virtually clueless and get on just fine nonetheless. Windows versions of old were not nearly so idiot-proof, much as Microsoft might have tried to sell us that exact idea way back when.

Kids, you’ve never had it so good…

Can This Classis 18-Year-Old MP3 Player Still Cut It?

The Best? There Are Other Lessons To Learn

Some uplifting words from Ross Craig on why you should always be learning from people in your field, especially those who you see as being bad:

So if a terrible sitcom comes onto my screen, or a terrible YouTube video appears on my Facebook feed, or a comedian I’d leap into a river to avoid listening to crops up on Mock The Week?—?they’ve done something well.

The end product? Bad.

Getting it to the stage where I could notice it? Good.

Why You Need To Learn From The Worst

Quickies

American television runs at 29.97 frames per second. Matt Parker attempts to explain why…

Say hello to the Scottish Geek Network.

Pokemon Go, three months later.

What Have I Been Up To

As I mentioned last week, I decided to fly to New York at around thirty hours notice to see a baseball game (the Giants/Mets wild card sudden-death game). So that was flying out Tuesday, game on Wednesday, home on Thursday, and a bundle of meetings in the gaps.

Writing took at bit of a back seat, but I still had time to look at the importance of Facebook’s Messenger Lite application for basic Android smartphones, and Apple’s use of lower-quality sapphire crystal in the iPhone camera lens.

Later this year I’ll be attending the Web Summit (Lisbon 7-10 November 2016), and TechCrunch’s Disrupt London (5-6 December 2016). Next year’s plans include attending SXSW (Austin, 10-20 March 2017). If you want to meet up at any of these events, let me know.

‘Trivial Posts’ is a mostly weekly series of posts that brings together interesting posts, ideas, video clips, essays, images, and anything else that catches my eye on the Internet. Read it online, or subscribe to the email newsletter version here.

Everything looked so calm and predictable as the weekend started. Instead, I’m off to do some last-minute travelling, but not before I share some links and articles that I enjoyed this week on the web. You can sign up to have this posted out to you every week, subscribe to the newsletter version here.

You Helped My Battleship Transport Wool!

There’s nothing like a good family board game at Christmas, and a big stack of them by the table during the rest of the year. So The Observer’s look at the resurgence of board games – especially the so-called ‘German’ board games that rarely pit you directly against your opponents family members – is welcome, even if many of us are already here collecting brick, timber, and ore:

“About five years ago, I noticed we were selling fewer miniatures,” says Wooding, “so I started putting shelves of board games down here” – he gestures to rows of colourful game boxes with snappy titles, Small World, Agricola, Carcassonne, Pandemic – “and every time we did that the takings went up.” He also noted a decline in what he tactfully describes as the “stereotypical gamer” – dyed-in-the-wool hobbyists who would typically be lone, white men.

“You get a lot more couples now – young, professional, just bought somewhere. They still want to meet up with mates but they don’t want to go out and get pissed any more. They like the idea of getting a game out, having a few drinks, bit of fun for two or three hours around the table.”

The Rise And Rise Of Tabletop Gaming

G’Day World!

As ‘International Podcast Day’ dawned around the world, my old podcaster-in-crime from The Podcast Network took to the stage at OzPod 2016 to talk about how to earn a living from podcasting when you’re not a celebrity. Monty Munford reports for Forbes:

“I don’t claim to be the biggest or the best podcaster in the world – far from it. However I have spent over a decade talking to myself in a little room and wondering if anyone would be entertained by it. I’m just an average guy who has ideas and opinions he wants to share with other people.

“When I set out to build the website for a premium-subscriber-only podcast, I expected it to be easy. On the contrary, I found it to be extremely time consuming and complicated. It takes a lot of work, but people will pay for premium content and the market is ready for it,” said Reilly.

In the end I settled on podcasting the Eurovision Song Contest, while Cam went for Caesar. I think we both managed to give up our day jobs!

Podcasting In Australia is Big Business

When Candy Crush Saga Is All You Have

The BBC’s Leo Kelion looks at the fortunes of King Games. In 2012 Candy Crush Saga accelerated the company towards the top of the mobile charts for downloads and income. As the follow-up games failed to find the same success, King Games are still riding the crush train nearly five years later. What does happen next?

“King reported it had 409 million monthly active users at the end of June 2016,” notes Jack Kent from the research firm IHS Markit. “That’s its lowest level since 2013 and a drop from a peak of 550 million users in early 2015. “It still has a huge audience to monetise… but it needs new intellectual property or a revamp of its existing titles to achieve significant growth.”

Life Beyond Level 2000

Sign, Shake Hands, Smile, Take The Cash

Writing for The Hollywood Reporter, Lesley Goldberg looks at one of the most profitable jobs for an actor in a ‘genre’ television… appearing at a convention. If you wonder why everyone wants to be on these shows – apart from regular employment – the numbers offer you the answer:

According to multiple sources familiar with convention deals, the basic guarantee rate for genre stars is in the $5,000 to $10,000 range per appearance — with leads on such current TV series as The Walking Dead, Once Upon a Time, Supernatural, The Vampire Diaries, Netflix’s Marvel shows and The CW’s DC Comics fare commanding anywhere from $35,000 to $250,000 and up, depending on their popularity and the frequency with which they appear. At top conventions, it’s not uncommon for a star to earn anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 on top of their guarantee (more if they spend extra time signing).

How to Take Home “Garbage Bags Full of $20s”

Quickies

The ‘old soaks’ who cover the Edinburgh Fringe look back on the 2016 Festival with wit, skill, insight, and a few sweary words (well, Kate Copstick is involved).

Speaking of swear words, OFCOM’s reports into the strength, power, and association of certain words is now available in its ‘Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio‘ report (PDF Link). Which naturally comes with a earning that ‘this guide contains a wide range of words which may cause offence.’

What Have I Been Up To

As the San Francisco Giants started to play the last game of the regular season, I was looking at a quiet week. As the ninth inning sent the Giants into the Post Season and a Wild Card game with the New York Mets on Wednesday, I had a last-minute trip to see the game all ready to be booked. So…

If you’re around in New York on Wednesday or Thursday, I have an almost empty diary and looking to meet interesting people and see some great new tech and ideas. Get in touch ASAP!

Other trips for the rest of the year include the Web Summit (Lisbon 7-10 November 2016), and Tech Crunch Disrupt in London (5-6 December 2016). Next year’s plans include attending SXSW (Austin, 10-20 March 2017). If you want to meet up at any of these events, let me know.

‘Trivial Posts’ is a mostly weekly series of posts that brings together interesting posts, ideas, video clips, essays, images, and anything else that catches my eye on the Internet. Read it online, or subscribe to the email newsletter version here.