Agency Redscout has named David Mikula as its creative director and Jamie Kim as director of creative production. Mikula and Kim will lead Redscout’s creative department in partnership with Redscout’s industrial design director Gina Reimann. Both will report to Redscout’s founder and CEO Jonah Disend, and will be based in its New York headquarters. Most recently, Mikula was a creative director at Digital Kitchen and prior to that he worked as a creative at Wieden + Kennedy. During his career, he has worked with brands such as Nike, Electronic Arts, Microsoft, Whole Foods, Dodge and Coca-Cola to create award-winning user experiences, products and campaigns. Most recently, Kim was a founding partner at WE ARE PI. Prior to that, she held roles at Wieden + Kennedy as a sr. producer and AKQA as a digital producer. Her work has earned numerous industry accolades including an Effie Award, Cannes, Webby Award, D&AD, FWA and Eurobest….Cinelicious Pics is a newly launched distribution company bringing handpicked cinema to U.S. audiences for the first time via theatrical release, VOD, Blu-Ray & DVD and television. The company was inspired by a unique partnership between entrepreneur and film restoration expert Paul Korver and former head of film programming for the American Cinematheque, Dennis Bartok. Cinelicious Pics’ key ingredients include an eclectic mix of new U.S. independent and foreign features and docs plus restored art house and cult classics, brought to pristine viewing quality by sister post & digital restoration studio Cinelicious, founded by Korver. Both companies are located in Hollywood. Cinelicious Pics will roll out its first releases theatrically in the fall of 2014, starting with director Adam Rifkin’s documentary portrait of a truly outsider artist, Giuseppe Makes A Movie; Icelandic director Ragnar Bragason’s dark, intense drama of faith, loss and heavy metal music in the 1990s, Metalhead; and the acclaimed documentary Elektro Moskva from filmmakers Elena Tikhonova and Dominik Spritzendorfer, uncovering the secret history of Soviet Space Age Electronic Music and a new generation of indie rock musicians in Russia re-using these long-lost electronic synthesizers. Cinelicious Pics plans to release a dozen films annually….
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