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Fast Company
03-06-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Meet Soot, an explosive new media experience that's killing the social feed
My daughter is 7 years old, and when she wakes up, the first thing she'll often do is position herself in the center of an unruly pile of stuff on our basement floor. Construction paper. Tape. Stuffed animals. Pipe cleaners. Markers. Bits of ribbon. To me, it's the definition of disarray. To her, it puts the creative process in arm's reach. It provides exactly what she needs to, minutes later, emerge with a charming invention or piece of art. I mention this not only as a proud father, but because it's the best metaphor I've been able to find to describe Soot. Soot is a visual catalog that's in many ways reminiscent of Pinterest, Behance, or even Instagram. But with $7.7 million in funding, its team is focused less on building the next social network than challenging the status quo of creative UX. Instead of showing just one image or a few images at a time, Soot displays hundreds to thousands of images on your screen at once, allowing you to mainline loosely sorted visual information. Built upon open-source AI and data viz technologies, Soot sorts and organizes images by visual similarity, or by metadata like an artist's name. The spacing is intentionally organic rather than overly rigid, so that what you're looking at becomes a resolved shape instead of a grid. And what you're left with is less a feed or website than it is a digital painter's palette, or a vast mood board of visual inspiration for you to wade through with your cursor. In this sense, the premise of Soot is perhaps more philosophical than directly practical. 'It's 2025, and we're still surfing in the vertical linear scroll. [People] look at the feed as the upper limit of what we can do,' says Soot cofounder Jake Harper. Harper believes that the file structures of the Macintosh share the same logic with the scroll of TikTok or Instagram. These are linear organizational views optimized to show you one thing buried under another at a time. The folders and subfolders that inhabit our desktop interfaces force us to inefficiently dig for information and can devolve from discovery to compulsion. 'Instead of having information in a scroll, you could see from structures that [pool] like a well that's not as insidious as the feeds,' he says. 'A lot of the negative impact of computers is inherent to the geometries of the interface.' An exploratory interface Harper began his career designing as a sound artist with Soundwalk Collective, before making his way to the self-driving car company Zoox (acquired by Amazon) to lead the expression and communication of robotic vehicles. His cofounder, Mary Nally, is the founder of Drop Everything, a creative retreat taking part every two years on the tiny Irish island of Inis Oírr. Soot is organized into invite-only personal spaces, and then everything from the service combines onto a site called Soot World. That includes 4 million pieces of media at the moment, from its 25,000 users in a private beta. Each Soot space can be built from media sourced in all sorts of ways, from direct uploading to copy and pasting URLs from YouTube or a social media account. Monthly subscriptions will be available for individuals, and also companies, as the service scales. But what about the Soot experience itself? A tour through the Guggenheim's catalog demonstrates how the interface sings. Drag around, and you'll see the groupings of impressionists like Monet abutting geometrically focused futurists like Gino Severini, before arriving at the dynamic explosions of Wassily Kandinsky. In terms of art history, you can tap into each piece to see its name, year, and provenance, revealing that it's all a bit of a blender. But zoomed out visually, Soot creates a gradient vibe that just makes sense. 'I remember the first time I saw all my own artwork in Soot,' Harper says. 'It was like, damn, seeing things from 15 years ago—a rejected student project next to something I made a week ago. It was a really weird experience.' The interface is fascinating in that it demonstrates just how low a lift our single image feeds are in an era when we all have supercomputers in our pockets. The fact that I can mouse over thousands of images through my browser, without my aging Macbook cursing at me through the fan, is a most certain demonstration that our computers are able to do a lot more than we ask of them these days. Zooming in and out in Soot with my trackwheel is instantaneous. And the entire school of images (they do self-organize almost like fish) moves with a satisfying inertia. That said, in my own observations, I found that I was really only focusing on one image at a time. Soot didn't open some new capacity in my brain. But seeing these interrelated ideas in my peripheral vision still seemed meaningful. And being able to explore a swatch of images in X, Y, and Z space felt more like true exploration than the whims of the algorithm. I am curious to see where Soot goes next, and can only imagine how we might begin to push the norms of UX as ideas like this leave the web browser and entire spaces like VR. I honestly don't know if the next 20 years of visual interface looks more like this, or more like the conventions in the 20 years we've had before. But I do think that, in the era of AI and seemingly limitless processing, we need more experimentation rather than less. We need to stretch what we think might be possible before we settle for what's worked so far. 'We're not fully there yet. Right now we're in our GPT2 era,' says Harper, alluding to the moment before OpenAI went mainstream. 'The core users love it, but it's not ready for mass-market adoption.'
News18
01-05-2025
- Business
- News18
India's Creative Economy To Provide More Jobs Than Manufacturing, Says Adobe CEO
Last Updated: WAVES Summit 2025: Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen believes India's creator economy will surpass manufacturing in jobs. WAVES 2025: Adobe Systems CEO Shantanu Narayen expressed strong confidence that India's creator economy is set to employ more people than the manufacturing sector in the future. Speaking at the inaugural World Audio Visual Entertainment Summit (WAVES), Narayen highlighted that in the age of Artificial Intelligence (AI), exceptional talents are flourishing globally. He stated, 'I genuinely believe that India's creative economy is positioned to employ more individuals than the manufacturing economy." This week, Adobe introduced a free app named 'Content Authenticity" to safeguard the work of digital creators and honor intellectual property. At the event, Narayen explained, 'We are advocating for Content Credentials, which promotes an AI rights framework to protect originality and ensure transparency in this new era of Generative AI." With Content Credentials, creators can decide what attribution information is attached to their digital work, such as their verified name (powered by Verified on LinkedIn) and links to social media accounts (Behance, Instagram, LinkedIn, and X). This helps creators receive proper attribution for their work and connect with their online audience, Adobe noted. India's Rise Of Orange Economy At WAVES 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared the rise of India's orange economy, the creative economy encompassing music, films, food, gaming, and animation. 'This is the beginning of the orange economy in India," he said, emphasizing upon the growing global influence of Indian cultural exports. 'Indian films' reach is across the world. India's food is getting popular across the world. And I know, India's music too will gain popularity around the world." The Orange Economy, also known as the 'creative economy,' is a concept that includes sectors related to creativity and cultural industries. According to the United Nations Economic Network, the creative economy is an evolving idea that focuses on the contribution and potential of creative assets to drive economic growth and development. This economy integrates economic, cultural, and social aspects, interacting with technology, intellectual property, and tourism objectives. It consists of knowledge-based economic activities with a development dimension, featuring cross-cutting linkages at macro and micro levels to the overall economy. First Published: May 01, 2025, 14:16 IST
Yahoo
06-02-2025
- Yahoo
Opera has unveiled 'the world's first browser with mindfulness at its core' and, to my surprise, I might be convinced
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Opera, the company behind the gaming browser Opera GX, has just released the early access release of Opera Air, which Opera calls "the world's first browser with mindfulness at its core". With a less cluttered UI than its gaming counterpart and built-in binaural beats, I've tested it today and I see the vision. I feel my chakras more than ever while I'm searching the web for opinions on video games, thoughtful comments on articles, and the latest news from around the globe. Opera Air looks rather similar to Opera's other browsers but the main differences lie in two features: Boost, which are binaural beats-enhanced songs right in the browser itself that you leave playing while you do work (or doom scroll); and Breaks, which are meditation exercises to encourage mindfulness. Before Opera Air, I was stressed, anxious, tired. After Opera Air, I am still all those things but I have a pretty new browser and feel just a little better. Having used Opera GX on and off for the last few months, I like many of the features of the browser but it can feel a bit cluttered thanks to the level of customisation. Opera Air, which you can download and test for yourself right now is the antithesis of this. Opera Air is simple and clean. Once downloaded, you pick a theme and start browsing. Those themes are all very natural, like stones on grass or floating bubbles (okay, those bubbles are man-made but you get the point). In Speed Dial, which is essentially your home screen, you only start with a few pinned websites and they all fit a similar theme. Mindful, Headspace, Calm, Behance, Penzu, and Medium. All of these apps are focused on mindfulness and introspection, be it via writing or meditation. As is Opera's MO, you can customise your home screen apps but the selection at the start isn't too shabby. There is a strange irony in the announcement for Opera Air saying it has 'no subscriptions', then adding multiple subscription paywalled apps to the Speed Dial but they're still a decent selection of websites. The Boost feature has a solid selection of song loops, and you can customize how loud the track, ambient sounds, and binaural beats are, which means you can fine-tune your experience. The Creativity Boost sound in Boost has rhythmic water drops, which I only started noticing as I started to write this sentence. I don't quite know if they make me any more productive but it's certainly a relaxing experience. They also pause automatically when another sound comes out of your browser, making Boost quite intuitive throughout the flow of the day. In the Breaks feature, you can customise sets of exercises or meditation. They are narrated with a voice, pause when you click away, and some of them even use your camera to register if you are correctly doing them. It's a frankly bizarre experience, but one that made me feel better afterwards. Engaging in mindfulness exercises can make you feel a bit silly, especially in an office full of people writing, but Opera Air encourages light mindfulness a surprising amount given it's, well, a browser. Opera Air has surprised me just enough to make me want to use it for a little longer. I don't know if I can reasonably ask for any more. Best gaming PC: The top pre-built gaming laptop: Great devices for mobile gaming.
