Business
The weather is dominating much of the conversation at the moment with #stormdudley trending across the UK. Severe winds and driving rain led to some dramatic images and video clips being shared across social media. One of the most shared shots was taken by photographer @peter_j_byrne and shows an enormous wave crashing into the seafront at Blackpool. Remember Storm Eunice is up next and the weather disruption is far from over. Facebook’s news feed will now be called simply ‘feed’, probably due to the fact that there’s a lot more that ‘news’ in it. I’m not convinced but researchers at Gartner believe within 4 years, 25% of us will use the meta verse for at least an hour every day to buy things, work, socialise or be entertained. The suggestion seems to be that rather than shops having a simple website, they’ll offer a more immersive, virtual reality experience so it’ll look and feel like you’re walking round the store, rather than browsing a website. Of course the technology geeks see this brave new world as a licence to print money so it’s in their interests to make us all thing it’s going to catch on. Here’s one for music fans - Apple has bought an artificial intelligence company that’s working on technology that would make songs sound different depending on where you listen to them. So for example a song sounding mellow when you wake up in the morning but becoming heavier and with more drums as you walk into your local gym. And within an exercise session, new music could be generated depending on how fast you’re moving.