Commercial and TV production company Picrow has named Tiffany Caprice as its head of marketing and new business development. She will report to company founder/director Peter Lang. Caprice is no stranger to Picrow, having helped Lang cast his decade-long branding campaign for USAA Insurance while working in a sr. role at Dan Bell Casting. Caprice also cast talent for independent films and commercials through Sanford Casting. Caprice said that Picrow, having produced content for Amazon (including Transparent, Mozart in the Jungle, Goliath, Patriot, I Love Dick), is poised for further expansion, growing the careers of its directors with varied projects. She will also look to develop more business-direct production and branding. As a hybrid studio, production and post house, Picrow can take on any portion of a project (production, post) or handle work from inception to finish. Spots, documentaries, TV shows, branding films and theatrical features get produced at Picrow, which also maintains the turn-key production collective The Hall which recently won a Gold ADDY for its “Unforgettable” Disney commercial campaign….VR production and post studio Bipolar Id has signed with UTA for film and TV representation, as well as indie firms Bespoke (Meredyth Mann) and Obsidian (Brady Hurt, Matthew Butcher) for commercial representation in the East Coast and Midwest, respectively. Bipolar continues to be repped commercially on the West Coast by ResourceLA (Dana Balkin). On the heels of a VR campaign for MINI and innovative 360° experiences for Google, Carnival Cruise Line, Toyota and Nissan, Bipolar is gearing up for further expansion into commercial markets and original content. Bipolar’s recent projects include a stereoscopic 360° experience for the launch of the Google Daydream VR headset, co-produced with B-Reel….
Growth Brings Growing Pains–and Bots–To Bluesky
Bluesky has seen its user base soar since the U.S. presidential election, boosted by people seeking refuge from Elon Musk's X, which they view as increasingly leaning too far to the right given its owner's support of President-elect Donald Trump, or wanting an alternative to Meta's Threads and its algorithms.
The platform grew out of the company then known as Twitter, championed by its former CEO Jack Dorsey. Its decentralized approach to social networking was eventually intended to replace Twitter's core mechanic. That's unlikely now that the two companies have parted ways. But Bluesky's growth trajectory — with a user base that has more than doubled since October — could make it a serious competitor to other social platforms.
But with growth comes growing pains. It's not just human users who've been flocking to Bluesky but also bots, including those designed to create partisan division or direct users to junk websites.
The skyrocketing user base — now surpassing 25 million — is the biggest test yet for a relatively young platform that has branded itself as a social media alternative free of the problems plaguing its competitors. According to research firm Similarweb, Bluesky added 7.6 million monthly active app users on iOS and Android in November, an increase of 295.4% since October. It also saw 56.2 million desktop and mobile web visits, in the same period, up 189% from October.
Besides the U.S. elections, Bluesky also got a boost when X was briefly banned in Brazil.
"They got this spike in attention, they've crossed the threshold where it is now worth it for people to flood the platform with spam," said Laura Edelson, an assistant professor of computer science at Northeastern University and a member of Issue One's... Read More