posted: 29 March, 2019

Welcome to the fifth edition of Dispatches, our hand-picked round-up of the most interesting ideas, innovations, and insight from the global retail, fashion, and tech industry news.

This week includes a delve into the psychology of video game music (“little dopamine detonator that go off in your head”, as Charlie Brooker puts it) and whether it changes how you play, explore coders’ primordial urge to eliminate inefficiency wherever it lurks, and take a peek at a side of Seoul where, for now, time stands still: Clock Alley.

• Top Scores
  From Pong to Red Dead: How video game music has always played players.
  [BBCJ]

• The World’s greatest delivery Empire
  Meituan has changed how China eats, re-shaped city life, and escalated a rivalry with Alibaba.
  [Bloomberg Businessweek]

• Coders’ primal urge to kill inefficiency – everywhere
  For software engineers, lack of friction is an aesthetic joy, an emotional high, the ideal existential state. It’s what drives them and shapes our world.
  [Wired]

• In Seoul, it’s called ‘Clock Alley’
  Yeji-dong has focused on the sale and repair of watches and clocks since the early 1960s. But no one is sure about its future.
  [NY Times]

• To make a new kind of shoe, adidas had to change everything
  adidas’ South Asian factories churn out 720 million shoes a year, but production is slow and inflexible. In Bavaria, robots can make every pair unique. Welcome to the Speedfactory.
  [Wired]

• Future shock: inside Google’s smart city
  Plans to build a tech-fired Utopia in Toronto are gaining momentum – as privacy fears grow.
  [Financial Times]

• Companies cannot afford to ignore older workers
  An ageing population and later retirement means employers will soon have little choice.
  [Financial Times]

• McDonald’s bites on big data with $300 million acquisition
  [Wired]

• How do you know where your olive oil really comes from?
  [BBC]

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