Westworld Rickroll’d Us: In anticipation of Season 2 (debuting this Sunday!) Westworld creators teased they would reveal the entire plot of the new season if a post on Reddit got 1,000 upvotes. Of course, the post reached that goal within hours – and fans were rewarding with a 25-minute video titled “Westworld Season 2 — A Primer,” which was the most elaborate Rickroll ever. Amazing. Can’t wait for Sunday! (LINK)
Use Google to ‘Talk’ to Books’: Google’s new Talk to Books tool gives conversational answers for questions but with citations from real books. For example, if you search “What was Prince’s band’s name?” and it delivers not just the answer but links to full digital version of books with the answer highlighted. Pretty amazing use of technology and a glimpse into the future of libraries. (LINK)
Amazon and Reddit Exploding: This week we learned Amazon has exceeded 100 million paid Prime subscribers! CEO Jeff Bezos said in 2017 Amazon shipped more than 5 billion items with Prime worldwide. It also came out the active number of Reddit users is as large as Twitter! It’s a more than 30 percent increase in less than six months, marking Reddit as the sixth most-visited website in the world. Oh, and visitors spend longer on Reddit.com than any other site in the Top 50, regardless of category – even compared to top ‘adult’ sites. According to TheNextWeb, Reddit can credibly claim that it’s even more engaging than porn. Luckily it’s mostly SFW. Well mostly. (LINK)
Dejarik IRL: You know the famous “holochess” hologram strategy game in all the Star Wars movies – where players direct a collection of holographic alien characters to battle each other for dominance? Thanks to the new update to Star Wars: Jedi Challenges now anyone can play it! It uses augmented reality to project the holographic pieces to your own table (or really, anywhere you want). And it only took 41 years from the first movie to create. (LINK)
Alexa Blueprints: Amazon has released a new feature that lets anyone make custom skills without knowing any code. These “blueprints” act as templates for making questions, responses, trivia games, narrative stories, and other skills with customizable answers unique to each user. We know what we’ll be doing this weekend! (LINK)
GREG SWAN 