WELCOME TO EMMY BLOG

Deadheads may want to take a long, strange trip to their local grocery store: The Grateful Dead are getting their own branded "Grateful Greens" salad blend —  featuring Dead-inspired packaging  and all — thanks to a new partnership with Gotham Greens. Gotham Greens — which specializes in  sustainably-focused indoor farming at greenhouses  across the country — explains that the new  Grateful Greens  lettuce blend is essentially the company's best-selling Gourmet Medley (featuring butterhead, green, and red leaf lettuce) but repackaged with plenty of Grateful Dead-related upgrades. The packaging features the band's iconic Dancing Bears along with a QR code that points towards additional content, including a custom Grateful Dead playlist. (Don't expect any unreleased cuts; it's a Spotify playlist.) Additionally, Gotham Greens says that for every package sold, they will plant trees in partnership with  ForestNation . CREDIT: COURTESY OF GOTHAM GREENS Gotha...

Delivery services like DoorDash were born out people's desire to eat restaurant food at home and, thanks to mobile ordering, to barely have to interact with those restaurants in the process. Eventually, the industry realized,  Hey, if people don't want to interact with the actual restaurant, why even have an actual restaurant?   And virtual kitchens were born . Then came the next step: If the kitchens are virtual, why not just have food from a bunch of different restaurants  delivered out of the same place ? But now, the concept is coming ironically full-circle. If you have a complex that's already serving food from multiple restaurants, and you have room for seating, why not let people dine in? And thus, meet the "virtual" food hall that also has indoor seating.. DoorDash announced yesterday that their ghost kitchen arm ( known as DoorDash Kitchens ) had opened a location in Brooklyn that also includes limited indoor seating, a first for the brand. The company st...

If you think that  wine  reviews seem to repeat the same words, relying on a familiar set of adjectives and other descriptors to convey what it's like to have a particular varietal in your glass, you're not entirely wrong. A group of researchers at Dartmouth College seem to have noticed the same thing — and that's one of the reasons why they were able to create an  artificial intelligence  (AI) algorithm that could write its own wine reviews, despite having never had a single drink.  Scientific American   reports that  the researchers used around 125,000 reviews that were published in  Wine Enthusiast  magazine to train their program and to teach it how wine reviews were usually written. They also repeated the process with over 140,000 reviews from the  RateBeer  website. The AI used those reviews, along as details about each drink's winery or brewery, ABV, and cost, to start generating its own.  "[I]t was just a very uniq...

It’s a pivotal time for brands as they figure out how to navigate the metaverse. And one of the first places where they’re trying to do that is in the user-generated content (UGC) world of  Roblox . Should brands be more worried about what users might do with their brands? Or should they embrace the fact that players love them so much that they will go through enormous amounts of work to create video game homages to those brands? 6.6K 1 Play Video Lines in the Sand - The Geopolitics of Game Creation Roblox has more than 50 million players a day. I talked about that and more with Craig Donato, chief business officer at Roblox, in a wide-ranging fireside chat at Stanford University Graduate School of Business AME x Gaming Clubs’ Future of the Arrts Media, and Entertainment Conference. Donato took every question that I flung at him and he answered a bunch of questions from the audience as well. Donato has been at Roblox as CBO for more than five years, and before that he was at Next D...

Like it or not,  the metaverse  is becoming an increasingly popular music venue — including, apparently, for ceremonies. As  Hollywood Reporter   explains , Logitech has  revealed  what it says is the first music awards show in the metaverse. The second annual Song Breaker Awards will take place in  Roblox  on April 30th at 1PM Eastern, with pop star Lizzo making her virtual performance debut. Social media star Bretman Rock will host. The awards show will honor ten creators who either started or "amplified" internet trends, including musician Gayle (who has thrived on  Billboard 's Song Breaker Chart) and Grammy nominee Walker Hayes. Personalities like Jaden Smith, Roblox veteran MeganPlays and  Twitch streamer Shroud  will also make appearances.  You can already access a pre-event "experience" and virtual Logitech store in Roblox. If you miss the main show, you can still watch two additional performances on the 30th (4PM and 5...

Spotify announced today it will become the first music streaming brand to have an official presence within Roblox, with the launch of “ Spotify Island, ” a place where artists and fans will gather to play interactive quests, unlock exclusive content and buy artist merchandise. The new Spotify Island destination in Roblox will actually consist of a central mainland surrounded by a collection of themed islands, which players can explore and interact with by walking, running, jumping, and touching and picking up various objects. The worlds themselves feature a color palette centered around Spotify’s shades of greens, with oranges and purples mixed in. There’s also a musical play box in the top right corner of the world, which will feature a soundtrack powered by  Soundtrap , one of Spotify’s audio creation tools. The music here can be played or paused, or players can skip tracks, the company says. Image Credits:  Spotify An in-game merch store, meanwhile, will feature a variety o...