Morning Bulletin: The Fidget Cube, Elon Musk doppelganger & BBC pay
This morning we distract ourselves with the Fidget Cube, an as yet unrealised gadget which has taken Kickstarter by storm as well as an Elon Musk impersonator and moves to force the BBC to out all employees taking home more than £150k a year.
The BBC will be forced to divulge the salaries of all employees and presenters who take home more than £150k per year following the addition of a transparency clause inserted into a draft Royal Charter. However, the broadcaster warns that this will limit its ability to attract top talent.
Ad Week meanwhile distracts itself with a profile of the Fidget Cube, ‘a viral gadget you didn’t know you needed’. A kickstarter campaign has raised nearly $4m to make the pointless black box a reality, with an inactive cog, switch and button on each face to keep your fingers busy.
UK business media group Informa has swooped on US based information services provider Penton in a $1.56bn deal according to Reuters as the British business seeks to turbocharge growth through a combination of new debt and equity.
Bank of America analysts have published an eye-catching report in which they suggest to clients that there is a 20 to 50 per cent probability that we are all living in a Matrix-style simulation, although if we do live within a fabricated universe we may never be able to prove it.
Tesla has reportedly begun legal proceedings against oil executive Tom Katz, who is the chief financial officer for Quest Integrity Group, for falsely impersonating Elon Musk. Katz allegedly emailed Tesla’s own chief financial officer using the address elontesla@yahoo.com in an attempt to obtain private earnings data.
Advertisers have been left in the lurch by changes to iOS 10 according to Campaign, which reports that changes to the popular operating system have cut the amount of information Apple shares with brands, limiting advertisers ability to target ads and obtain attribution data.
Lawyers are hoping to slash paper work and repetitive admin tasks by signing up British technology firm Luminance to devise a new form of AI software which can read and ‘think’ like a human lawyer by scanning hundreds of pages of documents a minute looking for errors.
Channel 4 has insisted it will be a safe pair of hands as the new home of Great British Bake Off following its switch from the BBC amidst concern that the popular format could flounder in the absence of presenters Sue Perkins and Mel Giedroyc.
Amidst a flurry of retailer financial statements, Next has posted a fall in half year profits and plans to increase prices in 2017 in a double whammy for the High Street fashion brand.
Department store chain John Lewis has seen pre-tax profits slide by 14.8 per cent to £82.4m over the six months to July as a combination of heightened competition and rising staff pay took their toll.
Millenial-centric news feed Mic is to monetize its Facebook video streams by intermittently flashing a brand’s logo during playback after the social media giant banned the use of custom banner ads in Mic’s editorial content.