Category Archives: Mind Uploading

This story appears in the June 2017 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe

Reader Resource

Apply now to be an Entrepreneur 360 company. Let us tell the world your success story. Get Started

Gary Vaynerchuk arrives at his Manhattan office at 8 a.m. Theres no slow ascent -- no sipping coffee while scrolling through emails, no idle chitchat to forestall the onslaught of responsibility. Instead, as he does every morning, he quickly huddles with the two people who will accompany him throughout the day: his personal assistant, which is typical of most executives, and his personal videographer, which is, lets just say, a profoundly Gary Vaynerchuk kind of role.

The assistant, Tyler Schmitt, runs Vaynerchuk through the days schedule. There are 24 meetings, including check-ins with the staff and clients of his digital media agency, VaynerMedia, as well as a wild assortment of guests -- social media stars, athletes, actors, musicians, many with entourages in tow. As usual, the action will be captured by the videographer, David Rock, nicknamed D-Rock. When the time comes, D-Rock will raise his camera, train it on his bossand barely take it off him all day, except during sensitive client meetings.

Related:10 Steps to Becoming a SuccessfulEntrepreneur

All right, you guys ready? the 41-year-old CEO says to Rock and Schmitt, who are now standing with a few other members of what, internally, is known as either Team Gary or Garys Team -- a 16-member group that also includes a brand director, designers, merchandisers, influencer marketers and business developers. Lets start the show.

At 8:10, the guests start arriving. Theres an interview with a potential executive hire, a podcast recording with Digg founder Kevin Rose, a talk with a young Dallas entrepreneur who won face-to-face time with Vaynerchuk in a Twitter competition. Then another meeting, and another, in blocks of five minutes up to an hour, with Vaynerchuk gesturing, laughing, swearing freely, peppering each visitor with questionsand offering assessments. You need a teammate, so let the things you arent gravitating to yourself lead you to the partner youre looking for, he tells Daina Falk, creator of the Hungry Fan sports tailgating site and cookbook, who is working to manage her brands growth. I really do think Facebook is Netflixs biggest competitor, so listen -- write a TV show, but do it on Facebook, he tells Greg Davis, Jr., a.k.a. Klarity, a 32-year-old actor who wants to expand his social following.

Theres a string of internal confabs. If Im the bottleneck, lets try a meeting where everyone hurls questions at me and I can only say yes or no, just to clear up the things that get clogged, he suggests to his management team. (They try it two days later. It doesnt work; Vaynerchuk talks too much.) Theres the surprisingly businesslike crew from hit Instagram meme-machine FuckJerry, reps from the NHL, a Los Angeles style blogger and rapper Sean Combs social media team. Diddys trying to reach a new audience, says Deon Graham, the boss. Vaynerchuk is all over it. Puff has energy, so lets give your new team the reins on new ideas, he says. The ideas themselves will come after a dinner meeting between Combs and Vaynerchuk, which Graham vows to set up. After a round of the requisite selfies, which almost every visitor takes with Vaynerchuk, they bounce. More meetings convene. Scheduled ones, impromptu ones, conference room drop-ins, Sorkin-esque walk-and-talks. I ask Schmitt, the personal assistant, what happens if someone cancels a meeting. He looks at me blankly. He finds a meeting.

Through it all, Rock is a persistent fly on the wall, training his DSLR on the action. Sometimes hes in the room, sometimes he grabs scenes from outside the glass partition, moving the camera around for dramatic effect. Originally, Rock produced this reality show himself -- filming and editing the videos of Vaynerchuk and uploading them to social. Now he has a team of videographers, which speeds the turnaround. The meetings I witness today will be cut up, subtitled, set to a beat and released tomorrow as a show called DailyVee on YouTube (to Vaynerchuks 645,000 subscribers) or in quick hits on Twitter (nearly 1.4 million followers) and Instagram (1.7 million).

The clips tend to capture Vaynerchuk frenetically hammering home his favored themes -- focus on your strengths, work your ass off, spot the next big shift and get there first, stop obsessing over stuff that doesnt matter, be the bigger person, give more than you getand above all, execute. All this output, plus his relentless social media engagement and videos where he answers viewers questions, has fostered an ever-growing group of fans who treat him as an all-knowing sensei, enamored with his ability to cut right to the heart of their problems. And that, in turn, has turned him into an entrepreneurial celebrity. In addition to the videos, he pumps out books, podcastsand many conference keynotes, and is now costarring in Apples first-ever original TV series -- a tech-based reality competition called Planet of the Apps -- alongside Jessica Alba, Gwyneth Paltrowand will.i.am. Last spring when he tweeted that he was in London and offered to meet with followers, 200 people converged on a city park, all hoping to pick his brain, #AskGaryVee-style. (That would be his YouTube Q&A show, of course.)

This high profile has also drawn a different, less flattering kind of attention. The world of entrepreneurship is, to be frank about it, full of hucksters -- people who had one business success, or maybe skipped that part entirely and went directly into wisdom-spouting mode. To the polished bosses of old business in their sepulchral C-suites, Vaynerchuk can look a lot like King Huckster himself. After all, who the hell is so sure of their golden word that theyd pay a videographer to tail them?

Related:22 Qualities That Make a GreatLeader

Vaynerchuk insists this doesnt bother him. Underestimating me is what I fucking live for, he says. And anyway, to dismiss Vaynerchuk is to overlook something important about how to build a brand today. He is the living, breathing version of what digital marketing can do -- because once he started mainlining himself into the internet, it helped him be a successful entrepreneur, which made him a celebrity, which helped him become an even more successful entrepreneur, which made him an even bigger celebrity, with each part feeding the other. His net worth has grown to $160 million, and his fast-growing agency now employs more than 700 people and pulled in $100 million last year.

Gary Vaynerchuk is, in other words, what every brand wants out of social media. He connects and excites and inspires loyalty. So, the thinking goes, if brands want all this -- to connect and excite and inspire loyalty -- they should be more like Gary Vaynerchuk.

If youve ever heard Vaynerchuk interviewed, youve likely heard him tell his origin story -- in which a small-time wine guy discovers the power of digital marketing. But the tale is really more than that; its about how a small-time wine guy realizes the power of personality. His father, Sasha, took over an anonymous New Jersey liquor store in the early 1980s, shortly after emigrating from the then Soviet Union, where his son was born in 1975. Vaynerchuk assumed operations after college in 1998 and began experimenting. He rebranded the store as the Wine Library, then initiated online sales and fired off weekly emails to customers with special deals -- both pioneering moves at the time. Sales grew from $4 million annually to $45 million in just five years.

Entrepreneurs will often say that constraints are valuable -- that they force people to be creative. Wine was Vaynerchuks constraint. Alcohol is hard to market; there are regulations about advertising, servingand transporting it. But, he realized, there were no restrictions on marketing himself talking about wine. In early 2006, barely a year after YouTube launched, Vaynerchuk created a daily show on the platform called Wine Library TV. He turned out to be a natural communicator, something he attributes to growing up trying to understand his father. My dad doesnt talk. He literally doesnt talk. The human does not speak, Vaynerchuk jokes. So Ive had to spend my life trying to extract from him what he was thinking and feeling. This turned out to be a valuable skill, because marketing, by its very nature, requires the same sort of intuition.

You must infer and analyze based on small, stray amounts of feedback. You listen, in effect, by speaking and listening for echoes.

Wine Library TV earned him coverage in Time, an appearance on Late Night with Conan OBrienand a book deal. It also made him itch for a bigger platform. The YouTube show gradually evolved into conversations about business and entrepreneurship. His followers became more interested in marketing than merlot. At that point, wine became a constraint that was no longer valuable. I had so many ideas but couldnt execute them all at the Wine Library, he says.

Related:12 Secrets to Supercharging YourPersonal Brand

This, it seems, is where Vaynerchuks philosophy crystallized. Like every marketer, he originally thought he needed somebodys product to sell. A marketer without a brand to manage seemed like a bricklayer with no bricks to lay. But the digital revolution changed that. It may be an old observation now, but what Wine Library TV taught Vaynerchuk back then was still a revelation: People could be brands. He could be a brand. And by treating himself like one, he could fashion himself into a walking, talking R&D lab, testing his more forward-thinking marketing theories on himself, without having to gain some clients permission first. Then, if his personal brand took off, he could package those theories and strategies and sell them to clients, in effect helping them be more like Gary Vaynerchuk. I never actually set out wanting to be a personal brand, leveraging that to sell my own stuff, he says. Instead its how I learned my craft, by being the plumber and the electrician and the general contractor. I got to test my beliefs.

One of those beliefs became this: Provide value over and over again -- educate, entertain, enlighten -- and then present your ask to the audience. Subscribe to my channel. Buy some wine. Read my book. (Hed go on to spell this out in his 2013 book Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. The jabs are the value; the right hooks are the asks.) So he handed control of the wine shop back to his father and began preparing for his biggest ask yet: If you like my social media insights so much, hire me to execute them on your behalf. In 2009, Vaynerchuk and his brother AJ launched VaynerMedia.

In its first few years, as Vaynerchuk transitioned away from the wine operation, VaynerMedia lingered in double-digit personnel and a few million per year in revenue. With time, however, came traction. The company opened offices in Los Angeles, Chattanoogaand London. It signed bigger and bigger brands. Last year revenues were up 50 percent over the previous year, to $100 million. In 2016 it moved into shiny new digs in a massive Manhattan high-rise to house the agency, a newly launched investment fund (Vayner/RSE)and a two-year-old sports agency (VaynerSports).

The VaynerMedia office is a spectacle. It contains endless rows of open-space desks populated by more than 700 strategists, marketing expertsand business-development personnel -- most of them young and few with typical agency backgrounds -- who manage clients digital marketing campaigns, influencer programs, e-commerce strategies and technology integration, as well as personal brand development for celebrities, CEOs, artists and athletes. The staff also includes 200 writers, designers, photographersand animators, all focused on helping large companies and huge stars act more like their boss.

Here, on a grand scale, is where Vaynerchuks philosophy that what works for a one-man brand can translate to the worlds largest companies -- including General Electric, Unilever, Diageo, Toyotaand Chase -- is put to the test. Louis Colon III, director of the Heritage line at Fila North America, says Vaynerchuks strategic personal touch on social resonated immediately. Gary understands firsthand what it is to be an underdog and an entrepreneur, Colon says. Were in a highly competitive industry in footwear and apparel, and for us to stand out, he helped develop a cadence of interesting storytelling that keeps the consumers attention. Thats meant a steady stream of product launches amplified through social media placements and collaborations with athletes, artistsand retailers, on their channels and Filas. We never ask for the sale, we just ask to be a part of the conversation and to have the consumers attention.

And what does a brand do with all that attention? It engages. Through Vaynerchuks personal brand-building, hes found that heavy engagement -- replying basically to everyone who reaches out -- boosts not just your following but also your reputation. Today, 85 percent of his 135,000 tweets are replies. He wrote a book about this, 2011s The Thank You Economy, and the point is reproven on social all the time.

Sometimes his clients need more than content help; they need to be awakened to the breadth of digital possibility. When Toyota hired Vaynerchuk to help with social strategy, it wasnt leveraging new social tools or platforms fast enough. Garys point was that anyone marketing for today is a full day behind. That opened everyones mind up, says Jack Hollis, a group vice president and general manager at Toyota Motor North America. Vaynerchuk pushed them to be in new places first. Facebook video could become as significant as TV ads, he said. Demographically appealing influencers should be hired to help market specific car models, rather than brand-wide. Toyota did so, and entered Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat in ways it hadnt before -- even as Vaynerchuk warned that the clock was ticking fast on every new strategy.

But as VaynerMedia helps teach brands what it knows, Vaynerchuk is also creating a pipeline for ideas to come in -- so that hes learning from the next generation of social stars. This is a big part of why he so happily meets non-clients in his office. During that endless-meeting day, for example, he sat down with Farokh Sarmad, the 22-year-old founder of a luxury lifestyle Instagram feed and website called Mr. Goodlife. The guy had racked up millions of followers, but he wanted Vaynerchuks advice on growing his business further. Vaynerchuk sensed a mutual opportunity, so he began a trade. First he provided value. Rely less on Instagram, he told Sarmad, because at any moment the platform could change its terms and screw him. Ill help you build infrastructure to be independent, Vaynerchuk said. Then he made his ask. I want to siphon off as much exposure as possible from your audience. When we meet again, be prepared to have that meeting.

Related:2 Key Lessons inBrand Building

Once Mr. Goodlife departs, Vaynerchuk admits he may not get much out of that deal. Their two brands barely overlap. But thats fine. I dont think equal trades are always necessary, he says. What I gain from these exchanges is the big-picture wisdom -- the psychology of how creators and followers view these new platforms, the nuances of how theyre used. I get peoples insights and make my own decisions for both my own brand and, yes, the brands that hire VaynerMedia.

The man feeds the brand, and the brand feeds the man. The synchronicity has worked well for him so far. And hes discovering that as both parts of his life grow bigger, the balancing act gets even more complicated.

Vaynerchuk hands me his cellphone and points to a text message he received earlier in the day. Its from a client asking him to personally tweet about their promotion. He shakes his head. Theres a bright line around that, he says. Ive done maybe four posts in seven years that have promoted clients, and only because they were noble causes.

These requests happen every few months. Its wise to turn them down. If he sold access to his Twitter feed, it would devolve into spam and trigger a tailspin: Hed become less interesting to fans and brands alike. Yet its easy to understand why a client would expect otherwise. Vaynerchuk and VaynerMedia are ascendant, intertwined entities. Toyota, for example, also hired him to speak at a critical meeting with the companys regional directors. And as he builds his sports agency, hell occasionally pitch himself as part of a deal. Sign his athlete, he might say, and youll also gain access to him, behind the scenes, advising on marketing. It can get confusing -- when hes for sale, and when hes not.

To strike the balance, hes building it into the very fabric of VaynerMedia. Hes clear up front with clients about what his role will -- and will not -- be. To make clients comfortable with a team of people who are not named Gary Vaynerchuk, he makes a big deal out of hiring top talent. He calls his company the honey empire -- as in, a powerful entity built to attract people -- and dubs his executive in charge of HR, Claude Silver, the chief heart officer, to emphasize the importance of treating workers well. If we get the people part right, Silver says, youll see phenomenal results in the empire part.

Hes also built what he calls the Office of the CEO, a team of four VaynerMedia veterans who serve as his proxies throughout the company. Theyre stationed in the mission control center, right outside his glass-walled office -- alongside, rather symbolically, all the Team Gary personnel. The four Office of the CEO members consult continuously with division leaders, update Vaynerchuk, and then funnel his feedback back outward. That way everyone at this increasingly sprawling company can feel like they have a line in to the boss. The goal is to build a bigger, scalable version of the chief of staff idea, Vaynerchuk says, to give me more operational eyes and ears in different pieces of the business. If Im going a thousand miles per second and cant keep up with everything, this gives me a way to see things through.

Heres one thing he wont do, though: Pull back on the Gary Vaynerchuk show. I get so much out of it. It allows you as a talker to listen and get feedback, on a vast scale, he says. But in conversations with him, I can see him working through the distinction -- wanting to support both his personal brand and his business, but without one overlapping the other. I dont want anybody to hire us because of me, he says. Its OK to be aware of us because of me, but thats where it ends. Look, marketing and personal branding are important. Its real. But it doesnt trump what goes on behind it.

Related:6 Rules For EffectiveFeedback

Instead, hes come to think of his two brands as on divergent paths -- that one day, VaynerMedia can be a thriving media company thats eventually fully separated from his own brand, in both appearance and practice. Because when he looks back at the worlds greatest companies, he sees that they succeeded not because of their leaders public profile but because of their leaders true skills as an entrepreneur. If youre good enough at what you do, the market plays itself out, he says. Steve Jobs was ridiculously great at self-promotion. Bill Gates wasnt. They both won.

In a digital world, yes, a person can become a brand. Vaynerchuk has done that. Building a brand that stands on its own? Thats harder. But do it right, and it lasts longer than any one man.

Eric Adams is a freelance technology, travel, and business writer, and a photographer.

See the original post:

What Gary Vaynerchuk Learned by Experimenting on Himself - Entrepreneur

Boy, I sure have been writing lots of tips about iCloud lately. Is it something in the water? Maybe its the cycle of the moon? Have I finally lost my mind?

No, no, and yes. But that doesnt have anything to do with this tip.

So anyway, Ive been uploading a ton of stuff lately into iCloud Drive. I finally decided that I like it enough to consolidate everything into the Desktop and Documents syncing feature and abandon some other services Im using. But Ive been noticing how supremely unhelpful the little pie chart progress indicator is when Im uploading a large number of files:

That icon, available in Finders sidebar during an upload, is way less info than I want to have sometimes. But how do you get more? Well, one way is toturn on Finders Status Bar, the option for which is under the View menu.

When you do that and click on the iCloud Drive option in Finders sidebar, suddenly youll get a lot more information about your uploads.

Well, thats about a billion times more interesting.

I leave the Status Bar on all of the time anyway, as I like how itll typically show me the number of items in a folder and the space remaining on the drive Im looking at.

In that screenshot, you can see right above the Status Bar that I also have the Path Bar on (View > Show Path Bar). This is helpful if youd like to have a trail of breadcrumbs, so to speak, leading back withinthe folder structure youve navigated through. Any of the location icons in the Path Bar are double-clickable, as well, to return youto someplace youve been. Useful if you tend to drill way deep down into folders and then forget where you came from! Not that I ever do that myself, oh no.

Wait, where am I?

More:

iCloud Drive: How to See the Status of Uploads - The Mac Observer

Shay Carl Butler came to fame and fortune via a unitard .

In August 2007, after a video of the father of two dancing in his wife Colettes workout outfit went viral, he realized there might be a business in domestic antics. The former granite-countertop installer, who says he didnt even own a computer until 2004, began recording his life and posting the videos and didnt stop for almost a decade, through weight loss, the birth of three more kids and the ever growing wealth of his family.

Shaytards , as Butlers main channel on YouTube is known, became wildly popular. Collectively, its videos have been watched more than 2.6 billion times. The most popular videoat about 23 million views, titled WE GOT A SWIMMING POOL! is typical; it features 15 minutes of wholesome family fun, in which the most noteworthy thing that happens is that one child reports that another got hit in the nuts by a water balloon.

Vloggingthe frequent recording and uploading of personal videos, usually on YouTubehas become a big business, or rather a sea of businesses, with operators as small as one person and as large as a massive production company. (Butler was one of the co-founders of Maker Studios, a conglomerate of YouTube channels that was sold to Disney for $500 million in 2014 but absorbed into the company on May 4.) And family vlogging is the ultimate family business: you literally get paid for raising your kids. The more fun a family has, the more viewers and, ergo, money they get. Popular clans can attract sponsorship, advertising and, at the very least, a lot of free stuff to play with on camera. Brands seeking a PG-rated YouTube outlet have flocked to family vloggers like the Mormon-raised Butlers, who now live on a huge property, complete with a studio and horses, in Idaho. YouTube metrics firms estimate that the Shaytards channel brings in anything from $2,000 to $38,000 every month just in ad revenue.

Thousands of these families live out their lives in the lens of the webcam: from the megapopular folks at Family Fun Pack a family of seven Californians, including parents Kristine and Mattto We Are the Freemans! , who have just 400 subscribers after five months of daily uploads. And its a growing genre; YouTube says that time spent watching family vloggers is up 90% in the past year.

But recently, several prominent YouTube families have got into strife, some in the way families often do, only with a lot more spectators, and some because the pressure to get spectators seemed to muddy their judgment. With a camera and an Internet connection, any parents can put their home life on YouTube. But its becoming clear that a childhood in which a part of every day must be given over to public consumption and commentary is not ideal for every kid, or even every adult. As family vlogging matures, some of its perils are beginning to emerge.

In February, Butler, who had previously said he would leave YouTube in March, abruptly stopped vlogging. A webcam girl by the name of Aria Nina released an explicit series of direct Twitter messages the father of five had sent her over the course of a few months. Then Butler announced that he was struggling with alcoholism and needed to rehabilitate. Its been impossible to keep up this perfect happiness is a choice mentality, he wrote on Twitter . Since then, Shaytards has gone silent.

The pressure of being the perfect family wasnt what prompted Mike and Heather Martin to shut down DaddyOFive, which had attracted hundreds of thousands of subscribers and was their chief source of income. In April, the Ijamsville, Md.based couple were called out by other YouTubers for appearing to be particularly cruel to their younger children Cody, 9, and Emma,12, during their prank-style videos.

In one video, Cody is blamed for mysterious ink stains on the carpet in his bedroom. He crumples in a confused heap as the elder Martins shout obscenities at him, before they let him in on the joke: its invisible ink, and they put it there! In another video, the kids are encouraged to flip water bottles with the added twist that if their bottle doesnt land on its base, someone will hit them. Thats how Emma gets slapped hard across the face by her stepbrother. The kids insisted that they enjoyed their rough-and-tumble on-camera life, but even with that and an apology from Mike and Heather, Frederick County Circuit Court granted the youngest two kids biological mother emergency custody.

The Martins are now under a gag order, and through a spokesperson, they declined to comment for this story. But Heather told the Baltimore Sun that things simply got out of hand. What started out as family fun crossed the line, she said. When I stepped back and reflected and looked at how this would appear to other people, I was able to take myself out of character andme just being MomI put myself in other peoples shoes to see how bad that some of this looked.

Child psychologists say that most kids are very resilient and can adapt to the circumstances in which they are brought up, including fame, but they warn that there are danger areas in family vlogging. All children want to please their parents, says Harold Koplewicz, a psychiatrist and head of the Child Mind Institute , who adds that the DaddyOFive pranks were clearly abusive. We trust the caretakers in our lives that theyre looking out for us. If theyre not, it makes us very anxious and uncomfortable. As they grow into adolescence, he adds, kids need some privacy to be able to make mistakes, and they need parents who are their protectors, not their employers.

YouTube says it took down the DaddyOFive videos that violated its standards and stopped feeding ads to the Martins as soon as viewers alerted it. Malik Ducard , global head of Family and Learning at YouTube, says the vast majority of family vloggers find it to be a positive experience. I see a lot of true family love in these families, he says. I feel like theyre families I know down the block. Most of them, he adds, dont need to be told to prioritize their loved ones over their viewers.

Some vloggers are well aware of the dangers. No one knows what the implications [of family vlogging] will be in the future, says Rossana Burgos, matriarch of the megasuccessful Eh Bee Family channel. And so for us, every single step, we think, How is this going to affect [our kids] in 15 years? The family has tried to conceal their two kids real names, calling them Miss Monkey and Mr. Monkey online, but they get recognized almost everywhere they go. They also dont work every day. We dont think putting up videos every day is a good idea, especially when you have children involved, Burgos says.

Of course, YouTube fans dont have to meet their idols to interact with them. The company, which is owned by Google , actively encourages its families to engage in the comments section. This can mean that kids could be exposed to a lot of opinions that even adults find hard to negotiate. Even in the beginning, people would leave really rude comments, Kristine of Family Fun Pack has said. Really disturbing things. She never knew how seriously to take them. Is this a kid or a legitimate adult? You never really know. The Eh Bee parents dont allow their kids to be online unless they are in the room with them.

Even when parents nurturing skills are perfectly appropriate, anonymous commenters can make painful situations worse. After Caleb LeBlanc died in October 2015 of an undiagnosed heart condition at the age of 14, the Internet swirled with speculation about the real cause of his demise. His family, known on YouTube as Bratayley (2.4 billion video views), not only had to deal with shock and grief, but had to process why so many people were suspicious of the parents. (The Maryland state medical examiners office confirmed that the death was due to a previously undiagnosed heart condition.) The family still vlogs regularly, because, they say, they want to be celebrating life.

Despite the drawbacks, experts are cautious about criticizing what could just be family scrapbooking writ large. The effect of fame on children is hard to discern, says Alan Kazdin, director of the Yale Parenting Center , pointing to the social and material advantages that come with it. What famous families sacrifice may be worth less than what they gain. Many of them eventually post a video of their new house. And the Eh Bee family is about to set off on their second trip around the U.S., courtesy of an allergy medication.

And perhaps that, in the end, is what makes family vlogging so irresistible, despite the potential downsides. It forces people to create a more interesting life for the camera. As Missy Lanning, a mother of two and the matriarch of Daily Bumps said in a video of her familys many adventures, Because we daily vlog, we have chosen to live our life to the fullest, and its awesome.

Excerpt from:

The YouTube Parents Who are Turning Family Moments into Big Bucks - TIME

After years of upheaval, the music industry is still pulling itself out of the doldrums. News that music revenues grew 5.9% to 12.2bn in 2016 largely thanks to the continuing evolution of streaming was met by a howl of discord in many quarters (not least an article in the Quietus that stated, perhaps fairly, that for independent and small-label artists, the Valhalla of a Spotify-curated playlist is as distant a proposition as Simon Cowell signing Fat White Family). Nevertheless, there are plenty of independent musicians building enduring careers away from the limelight. Weve spoken to five soloists about how theyve grown outside of the label model, whilst receiving little to no exposure in the mainstream outlets normally seen as key to future success.

Shes got over a million YouTube subscribers, 477,000 Twitter followers, a Top 40 EP, Intertwined, that also went to No 5 in the iTunes album charts, plus one Shorty award for best musician on YouTube. But unless you have a teenage child with a love of pensive, cutesy folk, its unlikely youll have heard of the singer, serial vlogger and ukuleledon Dodie Clark. And the 22-year old is just fine with that: I like it! Weve been brought up in a world where mainstream fame separates you into black and white, and the celebrities are untouchable. Ive basically lived my life online through songs and vlogs and videos. Im not untouchable.

Though she counts herself as a musician she started uploading music online when she was 15 much of her income comes through brand work. In the past, this was writing songs for Kelloggs and Barclays; now its Chupa Chups sponsoring her tours and giving her thousands of sugar-free lollipops for her fans. Despite a slight reticence about how shes perceived outside of her YouTube bubble, she does profess to aspirations to go more mainstream. It would be interesting to document it, she says, I cant think of many people doing that.

Thirty-year-old Tom Rosenthal is about to release his third album, Fenn (named after his second daughter), and has been releasing music on the internet since 2005. Hes racked up Spotify streams of around 55m, 22m YouTube views, and been courted by major labels keen to release his gently epic ballads, which channel Brian Wilson-esque whimsy through the mind of the classic British kook. But why would I change everything to make just 20% of the money when I currently make 80%? Tom says. If you want to be the next Ed Sheeran, it might be beneficial. But I dont.

Tom puts his success down to several factors: a penchant for songwriting, obviously. But most crucial are a constant stream of content (hell be releasing a video for every song on Fenn), and building a granite-strong fanbase. This last year, Ive sent out thousands of personalised notes to people. Its nothing to do with songwriting, but it connects you to people in a (hopefully) lovely way. If you build the foundations of a strong house, its hard to knock down.

When we call the Shaolin kung fu-trained rapper ShaoDow (pronounced sha-ow-dough), hes about to leave south London to manage a pop-up shop in Gatesheads Metrocentre shopping mall. Retail work might not be that unconventional a sidejob for the budding musician, but Shao is different: hell be selling all his own-branded caps, hoodies and tees. He also has a range of branded headphones and wrote a manga book The Way of the Shao to go with 2016s album of the same name. Hes also a rapper, of course, selling around 25,000 albums independently and touring with the likes of Stormzy and Skepta. The temptation is to see him as an architect and gatekeeper of a brand, rather than a musician?

To a degree you have to be, nowadays, he says. My income split is about 60% music and 40% merchandise. But I want to get to a point where I can hire people to do the other stuff, so I can be in the studio making music.

A lot of people recognise me in Hackney, says 24-year old Paige Mead, AKA Paigey Cakey, though half the time its because we went to school together.

Cakey might not have the mainstream profile of other Hackney musical alumni like Rudimental, JME or Professor Green, but that doesnt mean the MC couldnt sell out the Hackney Empire in 2013. That show was dope, but that was in the early stages of my career. If I did it now, it would be so much better.

Paigeys media career started on screen. She was in cult ghetto sci-fi film Attack the Block, and then a role in BBCs Waterloo Road helped raise her profile and drew attention to her music. Both careers now feed off each other, though shell freely admit the role that social media has played in her success: Social networking is the best thing. Dont be shy. I try to engage with everybody so they know Im a human being. And always put your music out there time waits for nobody!

For every star, theres a hundred broken dreams, says the virtuosic guitarist Jon Gomm. Ive seen too many of my friends sign major deals, then have their lifes work left to rot, owned by a corporation who wont release it or market it.

Jon started having ukulele lessons at just two years old and has a mind-skewering method of playing his acoustic guitar, retuning the strings as he goes to create bass, and using the body of the guitar to generate drum, bongo, bass and snare sounds. Hes toured full time since 2004, and album sales are now in the tens of thousands for each release (theres been three). Also, uniquely, none of his music is on Spotify.

Jon has a fervent belief in social medias importance, saying: Its almost everything now. This perhaps isnt surprising, since a 2012 tweet from Stephen Fry about his song Passionflower helped fire him into a wider consciousness. Elsewhere, he says dont be afraid to put your money where your talent is. It drives me crazy when my musician friends dont want to spend money on advertising or hiring a PR person. You have to invest in your own music, as any business has to invest in itself.

Read more:

How to be a DIY pop star: lollipops, kung fu and other fail-safe strategies - The Guardian

A 24-year-old Scotsman has experienced first-hand that otters aren't as cute and cuddly as they make themselves out to be.

Rory MacPherson, a forestry worker from Lockerbie, captured the moment he was chased down by an angry otter along a deserted road south of Glasgow.

In a video uploaded to Facebook, the wild animal can be seen trying to bite MacPherson's feet before running at him at full speed as he tries to make an escape to his nearby car.

"I'm being chased by an otter!" he shouts in the video.

"What're you doing pal?"

Since uploading the footage, which has received over 300,000 views, MacPherson told the BBC that he had nearly hit the animal with his car, "so I pulled to a stop, got out and it was still there and I tried to get closer".

"I don't know what made it go a little bit crazy," he said.

"It's not often you see an otter, never mind get the chance to photograph it".

MacPherson also told the BBC that his attacker had used its "huge" teeth and refused to leave his feet alone.

"I thought I'll run away and hopefully it won't catch up with me. It's made for a funny video."

ALSO ON HUFFPOST AUSTRALIA

The rest is here:

The Moment An Angry Otter Hunts Down And Attacks A Scotsman - Huffington Post Australia

Share

Share

Share

Email

An Asian-Australian math teachers unique teaching style has turned him into Australias favorite high school teacher.

Co-head mathematics teacher Eddie Woo, whose parents migrated to Australia in the early 1970s, has been teaching at Cherrybrook Technology High School in Sydney for about ten years now.

His charisma and technique have earned him the admiration not only of his students but other learners across the country after he began recording all his lessons and then uploading them online for other learners to view for free.

According to ABC.net, Woo began uploading videos on YouTube to help a student who was diagnosed with cancer and missing school back in 2012.Soon, his videos became a hit on the video-sharing site, reaching new learners and fans beyond the country

Wootube now has over 50,000 subscribers, accumulating almost 4 million views in total.

I did some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations, as a maths teacher would, and if you add it up, thats about 11 million minutes of people sitting there watching me run around in front of my whiteboard explaining concepts to my classes, which is just mind-boggling! Woo was quoted as saying.

His efforts have not gone unnoticed. According to Cherrybrook Technology High School principal Gary Johnson, Woos channel aids in partly making up for Australias shortage of maths teachers. His unique style has also drawn interests from those who are not generally into math.

To keep lessons interesting, Woo often uses pop-culture references in demonstrating mathematical equations. He engages students by making them laugh and keeping them entertained while learning.

Year 12 student Emily Shakespear explainedto ABC.net how Woos teaching style has made her more interested in the subject.

I dont want to say it, but he sucked me into maths, she said.

Its difficult to understand how someone in Sydney can influence thousands of people across the whole country, said Owen Potter, another student in the school.

Passion personified, Woo is the teacher one would wish he/she had as a student. Thankfully, he has made it possible so that anyone can be his student.

Watch him discuss Calculus here:

View post:

Australia's Best Math Teacher is a Super Fly Asian Man - NextShark

Emily VanCamp is over the moon about her engagement to Josh Bowman.

PEOPLE caught up with the Captain Americaactressat the PEOPLE andEntertainment Weekly VIP Upfronts party on Monday evening in New York City, and the star revealedshes been in a whirlwind since announcing the news last week.

Its literally only been a couple of days, but its amazing, she said. Im really happy!

VanCamp, 31, revealed her engagement to Bowman, 29, on Instagram last Thursday, uploading a photo of herself covering her face with her hands, putting her sparkly diamond engagement ring on full display.

A post shared by Emily VanCamp (@emilyvancamp) on May 11, 2017 at 12:54pm PDT

FROM PEN:EWs Top Ten Rom-Com Movie Moments

Romance rumors first linkedthe two actors as a couple in January 2012. The two alsopreviously costarred as on-screen husband and wife onRevenge.

VanCamp also opened up about the happy newsat the Fox Upfronts on Monday.

Its been a crazy week, VanCamp, whose medical drama The Residenthas just been picked up as a pilot, toldEntertainment Tonight. I found out about the show two hours after we got engaged so it was, like I dont think I slept for three nights. Its been good, its been really positive.

As for the proposal? It took place in a forest, and VanCamp gushed thatBowman did good.

We were in nature on a hike kind of doing what we do, she said. It was very, sort of, us. Itwas great beautiful.

And for now, wedding planning isnt even on her mind.

I never was the girl who knew what she wanted to do for a wedding, she said. [Im] just enjoying this moment. Its really nice, you know?

Link:

Emily VanCamp on Her Engagement to Josh Bowman: 'It's Amazing I'm Really Happy!' - PEOPLE.com

After Ek Tha Tiger, Katrina Kaif and Salman Khan are all geared up to woo the audience once again with yet another action-packed thriller, Tiger Zinda Hai. Considering how the reel jodi has always proved to be a big hit on the big screen, we surely have high expectations from the film.

Salman Khan/Instagram

But before exciting us with their trailer, Katrina has been giving us glimpses from the location. Katrina, who recently made a debut in the world of Instagram, has been showing us Abu Dhabi through her posts.

All this while, she had been uploading solo photos of hers, however, today Katrina posted a picture with her co-star and former boyfriend, Salman Khan.

Posing for a black and white picture, Katrina and Salman are looking straight into the camera. Mind you, Salman is shirtless and Katrina right behind him, making it a very cosy snap.

Twitter

The movie is slated to release on 15th August, 2017 and is directed by hit machine Kabir Khan.

Topix Offbeat

The Weekly Brief | Mack Weldon

Kiwi Report

Activly

Vikings: Free Online Game

Livingly

The rest is here:

Up, Close & Personal! Katrina Kaif Just Posted A Picture With Salman Khan And It's Hot - Indiatimes.com

The Martech conference is conveningin San Francisco this week. Credit: George Slefo

The TL is a part laundromat, part high-end coffee bar, and it's just around the corner from this year's Martech conference at the Hilton Union Square in San Francisco. It's the type of place that can dry your undergarments while also serving you a delicious cup of java.

James Thomas, CMO of ultra-hot marketing technology startup Allocadia, is there, sipping his cappuccino out of a paper cup. The seven-year-old company, with clients including Microsoft, GE and Phillips, provides insights into things like the return on investment for sponsored events. It also aims to show what type of return brands get when they advertise on Facebook, among other things.

Thomas, a curly-haired man with a slim build from Vancouver, is giddy because in a few hours Scott Brinker, editor at ChiefMartec.com, host of the Martech conference and godfather of all things marketing technology, will crown Allocadia for having one of the best "martech stacks."

I don't know exactly what a so-called martech stack is, so Thomas explains.

"Think about a car," he says. "It has a collection of parts and technology, but ultimately, its job is to get you from point A to point B."

"A martech stack, in this case, is a number of different technologies from a number of different companies that's meant to attract and retain customers in the most efficient way possible." To combine into a machine, that is, that gets marketers all the way from point A to point B.

Allocadia is just one of 5,381 different companies that operate in the marketing technology space, up from 150 in 2011 by Brinker's count. And nearly all of them are laser-focused on providing brands data in areas like workflow management, content, social media or analytics.

Over at the Martech conference expo hall, 4-year-old email marketing company Iterable claims they're snagging clients like AT&T and Yelp away from behemoths like Salesforce because it's easier to use and take less time to integrate data than competitors.

"Say someone starts creating a profile on CareerBuilder, but exits out before uploading their resume," an Iterable salesman says. "That's a hole in the funnel. We specialize in plugging that hole by messaging the person on whatever device they're on. We get them to come back to CareerBuilder and finish building their profile."

Wrike, which specializes in workflow management, says its customers include Tesla, Sony Playstation and Hulu.

"It just blows my mind when I go on LinkedIn Jobs and see how many of them require applicants to know how to use Wrike," says a sales associate. "Slack is one thing when you're managing one or five people, but how do you manage hundreds for a big project? That's where Wrike comes in."

Companies like Allocadia, Wrike and Iterable are among the 30 or 40 -- sometimes more -- different parts that make up a marketing technology stack. Outfits like these are aggressively pursuing a new breed of marketer called "chief marketing technology officers," whose primary duties include selecting different vendors to assemble the stack. Microsoft, for one, has added such roles to build out its stack.

"It's chaos," Thomas says of choosing vendors to make an optimal martech stack. "We're making it really hard for marketers."

To hear Thomas explain it, picking which vendors to work with is difficult because there are so many, and most can't easily integrate with one another.

The whole idea of having a martech stack is to create a one-to-one relationship with the consumer. And imagine knowing when the best time to reach that person is, on which device and with what creative.

That's martech's sales pitch, and legacy brands like Nestl, for example, are buying into it. Microsoft recently described the companies that it has pulled together into the marketing stack that it uses for its own marketing, which consists of several dozen different companies. An operation of such scale, Thomas says, would cost at least $15 million per year.

And that's not including the cost of mantaining a team with the chops to integrate and make sense of all the "Big Data" that's going to come through.

"The idea of the stack is to bring order to the chaos," Thomas said. "There's so much data and things like AI are helping make sense of all of it, but we're still one or two years away."

Each stack is built around a "core" -- think Marketo, for example. But it then branches off into different areas like data acquisition and management, content creation, SEO and social. None of this is integrated into one giant, easy to use platform, either. Instead, teams are put in place for each of the branches, experts at using and understanding each of the different companies' offerings. Data from the different branches eventually gets plugged into the "core" of the stack.

Of course, there's a lot more to it and it's still too early for many brand marketers to start worrying about what their martech stack will look like. Ultimately, though, they'll get there, according to Thomas.

"The people who say, 'Half my money spent on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half' are going to get fired," he said. "Why? Because the technology to measure it is already out there."

~ ~ ~ CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article said Allocadia was two years old. The company is seven years old.

Excerpt from:

What Exactly Is a Martech Stack? - AdAge.com

Avant Arte is one of the biggest and most influential art publishers on Instagram. Founded by Curtis Penning and Christian Luiten in 2015, the platform has rapidly evolved into a key player for the younger generation of enthusiasts and collectors. Despite its initial success in the digital world, Avant Artes true achievement lies in the combination of the physical and the virtual. Knowing that an image on Instagram cant replace the experience, Penning and Luiten have big plans.

This week, Avant Arte launched its new storewith limited edition prints in collaboration with eight of todays masters.

Tell us about your background in art and what led you here?None of us come from an arts background or have families who are invested in collecting. We grew up with hip hop music that was our kind of art. When Jay-Z published Picasso Baby in 2013 and mentioned around ten world-famous artists from Basquiat to Da Vinci, we started thinking: What is our generation of artists? Who are the Picassos of this generation? We began compiling a lista very long listof works which we thought stood out from the masses. As we started uploading the images on Instagram, more than 100 people were following us every day.

Screenshot of Avant Artes Instagram feed. Courtesy of Avant Arte.

What has been your proudest moment so far?Well, we recently passed the 500k mark of followers on our Instagram channel. We are very happy to reach so many people and who seem to share and enjoy our selection of art works.

But of course it is not all about numbers. We feel very humbled that there are a lot of art world professionals and collectors who follow us and use our Instagram to discover things they maybe havent seen yet. The last months have been a great experience, we have had the privilege to work with fantastic artists for our website and show their work in a physical exhibition too.

Tell us about the exhibition. Was there a particular situation, good or bad, that was memorable for you?Probably every single situation, our first show was crazy. We collaborated with Unit London for a group show in their gallery space in London. Most of the pieces were already sold before the show because people had seen them on Avant Artes Instagram. The opening night surpassed all of our expectations, people were queuing up in drizzly weather to get a peek into the gallery. Can you imagine? A week after the show the New York Times published an article on the exhibition.

Katrin Fridriks, Waving miracle Magic Mind (2017). Courtesy of Avant Arte.

Why do you think Instagram is important for the art world?As a social media platform, Instagram is incredibly well-suited to the art world. It is predominantly visual and allows you to discover artists from all over the world at any time. There are no entry barriers, it is all at your fingertips, which makes it a great tool.

But at Avant Arte, we are very conscious that nothing can replace the physical experience of art in a space. It is important for us to curate and host offline exhibitions, we dont want to be associated with digital media only. Art is more than that.

The artnet Gallery Network is a community of the worlds leading galleries offering artworks by todays most collected artists. Learn more about becoming a member here, or explore our member galleries here.

More:

artnet Asks: Avant Arte and What It Brings to the Instagram Landscape - artnet News