Cast & Crew Entertainment Services, a provider of technology-enabled payroll and production-management services to the entertainment industry, has brought Andrew Patterson on board as chief technology officer.
Patterson joins Cast & Crew from PayPal Holdings, Inc. in San Jose, where he was sr. director, transaction engineering, for the past three years. He will sit on the executive committee and report directly to Eric Belcher, Cast & Crew’s president and CEO. As Cast & Crew’s new CTO, he will oversee several critical areas, including the corporate technology and security teams. He also will direct and manage the company’s engineering team and its development of Cast & Crew’s digital products.
Prior to PayPal, Patterson was the CTO at Mercury Payment Systems (now Vantiv Integrated Payments). Earlier, he spent more than eight years at Toronto-based Moneris Solutions, Canada’s largest payment processor, rising to the level of VP, payments software and emerging products. Previously, he was director, software development for Paradata Systems Inc. for eight years.
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