Photo NFTs: A way for photographers to make money? – Protocol

Justin Aversano thrived selling photographs as NFTs, and now his startup is helping others sell theirs.
Quantum Art is an NFT marketplace for photographers; here is Shawn Theodore’s work.
Justin Aversano is known for selling one of the highest-grossing photographs ever.
Now he’s going after a much bigger challenge: trying to make photography (and other art) profitable for the many who have felt taken advantage of by the rise of social media and instantly shareable content.
His startup Quantum Art is an NFT marketplace for photographers. The photographs have been moving fast, with about $10 million in total sales so far. The highest price paid was 15 ETH, or more than $47,000.
Bringing offline artists into NFTs so they can pay their bills and live off their work is a striking change for many in the photography world. For the NFT world, which was popularized early on with pixelated, ironic artwork, it means an injection of serious artwork. And for both groups, it’s a striking riposte to the “right-click, save” attitude that’s reflexively dismissive of internet art.
A clear way to sell photography and fight rip-offs is a meaningful change in an industry where photographers typically promote their work on Instagram or other free social media platforms. Aversano sees Quantum as a way to address some of the challenges the internet presents for artists.
“We were getting paid in likes and comments, and all of our works were being devalued because of how scrollable things became, and [we] lost our appreciation for images and made everything disposable,” Aversano said.
Previously, many artists had to pay for their own promotion and hope to get discovered. But now that’s changed, he said.
While NFTs have become popular for speculators, they have especially taken off for certain types of digital art — think Bored Ape Yacht Club or CryptoPunks selling for millions. But for fine artists who aren’t crypto-native, the crypto model can seem inaccessible.
Aversano had proved for himself that NFTs could work for photography. Last year, he sold 100 NFTs from his photography collection “Twin Flames” with help from crypto experts he met, like investor Gmoney. He originally hoped to pay off his debts for creating the series.
The collection of 100 photographs, each of a different pair of twins, is a tribute to and reflection on Aversano’s own twin who passed away in utero. “Twin Flames” was minted in February 2021 and many of its pieces have sold for sky-high prices. Collectors include Gary Vaynerchuk and Snoop Dogg. And one of the NFTs was sold in a live auction at Christie’s along with printed, physical photographs for $1.1 million.
And one of Aversano’s “Twin Flames” NFTs sold in November for 871 ETH, or just more than $4 million at the time — reportedly one of the most expensive photographs ever sold. The sale’s proceeds of 850 ETH went to RAW DAO, a group set up to help photographers.
With NFT experience under his belt, Aversano co-founded Quantum Art with the help of others he had met working on “Twin Flames.” The goal is to make it possible for other photographers to get paid for their work, he said. It’s an outgrowth of work he’s done to help photographers display their work in person through a nonprofit he co-founded, SaveArtSpace.
Quantum, launched in October, started by selecting one photographer each week to release a series of new NFTs, then promoting the series to Quantum’s community of photography enthusiasts and collectors on Discord. A number of the projects have sold for high prices. Quantum seeks photographers with a unique perspective and a cohesive theme or narrative — the styles range from portraits to landscapes to social justice-themed images to the abstract. Buyers don’t get to choose which photo in the collection they purchase (in order to gamify the system, make it more fun and increase trading, Aversano said).
The community that has grown around Quantum is part of what makes the NFTs so popular, Aversano said. In the traditional art or photography world, the artists, collectors and art enthusiasts don’t always interact, except maybe at an art show. But in Quantum’s Discord, artists will join and meet others to talk about their work and develop relationships, he said.
“Artists take time to craft their style and their signature and their eye,” Aversano said. “And that’s why we’re seeing more success in Web3 — because people are slowing down. They’re not scrolling, they’re paying attention to support photographers’ work or all artists’ work, and actually value these images more than in Web 2.0, where we were the ones paying corporations to show our work. Now it’s the other way around.”
Aversano now wants to build that community through a series of in-person art hubs, the first of which is planned in Los Angeles, he said. Quantum, which recently raised $7.5 million in series A funding led by True Ventures, also has plans to expand into other forms of art beyond photography, he said.
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Tomio Geron ( @tomiogeron) is a San Francisco-based reporter covering fintech. He was previously a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, covering venture capital and startups. Before that, he worked as a staff writer at Forbes, covering social media and venture capital, and also edited the Midas List of top tech investors. He has also worked at newspapers covering crime, courts, health and other topics. He can be reached at tgeron@protocol.com or tgeron@protonmail.com.
Tinder’s co-founder and a former Facebook leader discuss the current state of social media and where it’s heading.
Zaven Nahapetyan and Christopher Gulczynski have created a new social network.
Sarah (Sarahroach_) writes for Source Code at Protocol. She’s based in Boston and can be reached at sroach@protocol.com
Web3 is in a weird place. Some existing platforms, like Facebook and Twitter, are tiptoeing into the internet’s next phase with NFT profile pictures, the metaverse and crypto. But according to Christopher Gulczynski, one of Tinder’s co-founders, a former Bumble CPO and a former Facebook engineering manager, those platforms can’t “ever compete in what Web3 will be.”
“There’s so much development happening in Web3,” said Gulczynski, who was responsible for Tinder’s “swipe right, swipe left” on matches. “All the tech startups are based and rooted in Web3. It’s stuff that you haven’t heard about yet because everyone’s building.”
Gulczynski and Zaven Nahapetyan, a former engineering manager and organizational lead for Facebook, left their respective platforms to help build Niche, which lets people form communities around shared interests or topics, like sports or Taylor Swift. The platform is still in beta, with applications opening up on Monday. Gulczynski and Nahapetyan said members of a Niche community will act as part owners, and it won’t rely on ads to generate revenue.

GREG CROSS (CEO, Soul Machines)
GREG CROSS (CEO, Soul Machines) is one of the original tech nomads, spending his career traveling to and living in every major tech market in the world. He now lives in New Zealand but creates businesses that compete on the international stage. Most recently, PowerbyProxi, a wireless charging company he co-founded, was sold to Apple in 2017. In 2016, Greg co-founded Soul Machines to build a Human OS™ for Artificial Intelligence and explore the future of human-machine cooperation.
Soul Machines is at the cutting edge of AGI research with its unique Digital Brain, based on the latest neuroscience and developmental psychology research. Partnering with innovative people and brands like Carmelo Anthony, Procter & Gamble, NESTLÉ® TOLL HOUSE®, Maryville University, and The World Health Organization, Soul Machines is re-imagining what is possible in the delivery and underlying economics of empathetic customer experience. Greg holds multiple chair positions, is the Sir John Logan Campbell Executive in Residence at the University of Auckland Business School, and was inducted into the New Zealand Hi-Tech Hall of Fame in 2019.
Nicklaus meets and chats online with his Digital Twin in May 2022.
Soul Machines co-founder and CEO Greg Cross and his co-founder Mark Sagar, Ph.D., FRSNZ are leading their Auckland and San Francisco-based teams to create AI-enabled Digital People™ to populate the internet, at first, and soon the metaverse. As this field has grown over the past six years, enterprise brands and celebrities have increasingly turned to Soul Machines to digitize their workforces and level up in how they engage with customers and fans.
They humanize AI to create Digital People that take input from the environment — a question, a facial expression like a smile — and respond in real time. Digital People, such as the one used by Nestle to serve as a digital cookie coach on its website, allow brands to offer an empathic and ultra-personalized customer experience.
Using similar autonomous automation technology, Digital Twins take the customer and fan experience to another level. The celebrity-based avatars boast lifelike features because a real person is captured, creating a “Digital Twin” of the star’s likeness. It can answer customers’ questions with responses that are aligned with the celebrity’s expertise, background and legacy.
The entertainment and sports industries could benefit from developing interactive digital avatars, but the cross-pollination of virtual animation and AI must veer far from 2Pac-hologram territory. Soul Machines’ approach is layered with next-gen AI applications, such as its Digital Brain technology, which allows for natural-language processing and empathetic, responsive behavior. In layman’s terms, that means we could talk to these Digital Twins in real time, but in the entertainment world, that relationship could get even more compelling.
Protocol spoke to Cross to learn more about their newest release, a Digital Twin of Jack Nicklaus, the retired golfing champ who’s won a stunning 117 tournaments. Depicting Nicklaus at 38 years old, his Digital Twin represents the potential of this technology, allowing fans to ask questions and hear stories from his 60-plus years on the links.
Digital Twins will soon partner with retail brands (among others) to offer expertise and recommendations on products and services, as well. Cross takes us on a tour into a technology that may be nascent now but could soon become the competitive edge tha
t sets successful brands apart from the rest.
Extensive capture technology maps Nicklaus’ facial expressions.
What motivated you to launch Soul Machines with Mark Sagar, and what makes your Digital People appealing to brands?
I’m a serial tech entrepreneur, and I just came out of a previous business that sold to Apple. I started looking around for my next move and, through a mutual friend, was reintroduced to Mark. I had met him before, and he blew me away with who he is as a person and his commitment to his life’s work. He’s won two Academy Awards for the animation technology he built that was used in films such as “Avatar” and “King Kong.”
We had a beer, and he talked about coming up with a new paradigm for animating digital characters, and Soul Machines began soon after, in July 2016.
As for our Digital People, we see them as the future of customer and fan engagement. We’re living in an increasingly digital world, and the major challenge for brands is creating those personal connections with fans in a more digital world. And that’s where Digital People become important.
We, as humans, are hardwired to emotionally engage face-to-face. Soul Machines technology can autonomously automate back-and-forth conversations that are each unique. We see Digital People being such an incredible way to create scalable customer interactions in digital worlds.
What competitive advantage would these avatars offer to enterprise brands?
If I create a digital workforce, all of a sudden, I’ve created a highly scalable workforce that is always on. Those customer-centric Digital People can have 1,000 or 100,000 conversations, and these are uniquely personal interactions that are hard to achieve and staff in the real world today. Conversational AI becomes that repository for the brand experience.
Also, brands get a smoother consistency of experiences with Digital People who can retain all that data from those interactions. Especially as we move into metaverse worlds of tomorrow, adopting this technology will truly offer competitive advantages to brands.
The Digital Jack Nicklaus avatar is fascinating to us. How did you create it? How did he react to the idea?
We’ve always wanted to be in the digital celebrity experience space. We first worked with rapper will.i.am in 2019 by creating his Digital Twin for an AI documentary series.
We wanted to test this concept further by having amazing CGI lead to hyper-realistic people who are autonomously animated to create the ultimate fan experience.
We are in talks with a range of different celebrities. We enjoyed the enthusiasm Jack Nicklaus and the Nicklaus Companies have for moving the brand into the future.
With Soul Machines, he wanted to extend his brand to the next generation of golfers. He wanted to be 38 again, when he was at the prime of his career, so we scanned him and his son Gary, who looks so much like him. The kind of storytelling engagement that will come from Digital Jack will build off all the tournaments he’s won and the many golf courses he’s designed.
Share your vision for how you think the metaverse will mature in the coming years, and how Soul Machines will play a role in that maturation.
We are only at the beginning of the metaverse. The hardware that brings it to life hasn’t matured yet, and isn’t defined as a tech stack now. The most important thing for us is to encourage brands to think about how investing in something today creates seamless experiences tomorrow.
AI gets stronger and better with each interaction, and that’s why Digital People provide the most personable and scalable customer experiences that will live on the metaverse and elsewhere. We envision a digital workforce that can move seamlessly between 2D and immersive worlds, and that’s really exciting to us.
Credit Karma’s chief people officer said many layoffs can — and should — be avoided. Here’s how she steers clear of them, and why she thinks you should, too.
HR chiefs disagree as to whether cutting jobs is shameful or an unavoidable part of staying afloat.
Are layoffs a scarlet letter on your company’s reputation? Not all HR leaders agree.
Tech companies have already cut thousands of jobs this year; some are now implementing a second round of layoffs. But even among some of Silicon Valley’s most seasoned HR chiefs, there’s substantial disagreement over whether cutting jobs is shameful or an unavoidable part of staying afloat.
“If your company does layoffs, [it] seems like you should be disqualified from any ‘best place to work for’ lists/surveys for at least one year following,” Credit Karma’s HR head, Colleen McCreary, posted on LinkedIn earlier this month. “And if they’re handled poorly, that disqualification extends even longer, especially large public companies who should know better.”
McCreary, whose full title is chief people, places and publicity officer, keeps reputation in mind when thinking about personnel decisions. She told me she wrote the post after cringing at other companies named to “best of” lists for company culture despite being “in a continual habit of laying people off.”

Putting aside the veracity of “best places to work” lists — McCreary dismissed most of them as “bought and paid for,” anyway — should companies consider any layoffs to be a mark of shame?
It depends on a few things. McCreary directed most of her criticism at companies conducting habitual layoffs rather than one-off “business reaction” cuts.
McCreary also cut some slack for the companies that did layoffs during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, and praised Airbnb as one example of a company that conducted pandemic-related layoffs while employing “a lot of empathy” and later offering laid-off workers the opportunity to return.
Larger companies in general have more responsibility to find a way to retain their workers, she said.
“I think the expectation is much higher, the bigger your organization is and the larger your company is, to be able to defend why someone couldn’t be moved around or retrained into working in another part of the company,” McCreary said.
Yet even the current market downturn shouldn’t be an excuse for a round of layoffs in most cases, McCreary said.
“We’ve known that this inflation experience was coming. It’s not unpredictable. We were talking about it for almost a year now,” McCreary said. “Just as many companies are thinking about long-term product strategy, you’ve got to be thinking about the short-term impact of those kinds of things.”
Not everyone agrees. Nolan Church, who served as chief people officer at Carta before co-founding the executive talent marketplace Continuum, called McCreary “incredibly smart” and said her background speaks for itself.
But her post, he said, amounted to rubbing “salt in the wound” of leaders who were making tough choices.
“I think her post lacks empathy,” Church told me, stating that HR professionals tend to hold “some of the most luxurious beliefs that exist within a company.”
As a first-time founder, Church said he has a new appreciation for a set of challenges that he didn’t grasp even as a senior executive. Other HR leaders could benefit from empathizing more with leaders who are “actually in charge of the P&L, running the business and making sure that they can make payroll,” he said.

Pressure from investors to grow
at all costs led many companies to over-hire in the last two years. Church disagreed with McCreary that this level of inflation was predictable.
“Investors are the arbiter of how CEOs run their companies,” Church said. “When the macroeconomic rug gets pulled from founders, everything changes, unfortunately.”
In Church’s view, leaders have two choices here: Don’t make any changes, and “end up like Fast,” the payments startup that suddenly shut down in April, or “pull the emergency brake and course-correct,” likely by cutting jobs. Continuum this month launched a “product line” of layoff consulting services aimed at helping leaders make these decisions.
“Survival is the name of the game in moments like this,” Church said.
David Hanrahan, who stepped down as Eventbrite’s chief HR officer in May, called McCreary’s post “provocative,” recalling that LinkedIn and Salesforce had made it on “perennial best employer lists” despite layoffs in 2020.
“Marc Benioff had committed to no layoffs at the start of COVID for 90 days, and just a few months after that period, I think he laid off 1,000 employees,” Hanrahan told me. “And then they announced a hiring effort of, like, 12,000 employees.”
Yet at many large companies, layoffs are the norm and often fly under the radar. Hanrahan said it would be “a little bit too crude” to say “you’re not a ‘best employer’ if you lay people off.” He agreed with both McCreary and Church that the circumstances around a layoff matter.
Better.com provides a “perfect example” of a bad layoff, Hanrahan said, between the announcement over Zoom and a lack of ownership on the part of the company’s leadership. Cutting pay, reassigning workers internally to limit layoffs and trimming costs like SaaS contracts can make for a much more defensible layoff.
Survival is the name of the game in moments like this.
When Credit Karma took a 70% revenue hit in 2020, McCreary said the company cut pay in order to keep jobs, and offered employees “off the bus” packages if they proactively resigned. And Credit Karma moved several dozen employees in departments like recruiting and marketing (that needed to shrink) to other positions.

This is a great alternative to layoffs, Church and Hanrahan agreed, though it’s much more available to large companies than small ones. So why don’t more big companies move employees to new roles rather than lay them off?
“Executive teams don’t trust their next-level leaders to have been managing their workforce,” Hanrahan said. When they realize they need to cut 30% of their head count operational expenditure, “they assume that that means we’ve got 30% of people who are underperforming, and let’s just go find them.”
If you truly want to avoid layoffs, start planning now. McCreary recommended that management teams commit in advance to either no layoffs or only using layoffs as a last resort. Executives should continuously scrutinize whether their hiring plans make sense relative to their revenue.
And for companies with at least 100 employees, no more than one-third of workers should be new to the company. (McCreary defined “new” as having joined within the past year.)
“That’s a pretty big warning sign of: Can those people even be productive and effective in your organization?” McCreary said.
Finally, McCreary recommended that HR leaders undertake a “people review” every quarter: Sit down with managers and discuss their teams, where the gaps are and whether any employees should be moved around.
“I’m hopeful that more people will get the word out that you can do this better,” McCreary said. “I think it’s better for society at large if we take care of each other.”
The metaverse is moving forward as humanity is regressing. How do we protect our civil and human rights in new virtual worlds?
It is critical to protect our civil and human rights in these new digital spaces.
Kenya Wiley is an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s communication, culture and technology master’s program.
As the internet has revolutionized our way of life in the last 30 years, the metaverse is poised to shape our future by seamlessly connecting our digital and physical worlds. The metaverse is virtual film and fashion, VR workrooms, new online communities and more. But these new spaces, if left unchecked, could amplify existing crises around racial inequity, digital privacy and threats to American democracy. Election misinformation remains a huge issue online, and decentralized metaverse communities make it easier to spread. As the Jan. 6 hearings remind us, another attempted insurrection is possible if we don’t lay careful foundations to prevent it.
Now, while the metaverse is still in its infancy, it is critical to protect our civil and human rights in these new digital spaces.
Anyone who has lived through the pandemic has likely experienced metaverse technologies — whether that’s through virtual backgrounds or makeup filters during Zoom meetings, avatars on social media or VR for guided workouts or gaming. The next phase of the metaverse and a decentralized Web3 internet will take us further, as we’ve seen through the rise in NFT art, virtual sneakers linked to physical pairs and token-gated shopping for special perks and products.

Tech talent will craft every part of these virtual realms and immersive experiences, yet an inclusive metaverse will remain elusive without diverse creative and tech teams. However, real change in diversity, equity and inclusion in tech remains elusive. Big Tech only increased Black representation in technical positions 1% between 2014 and 2021, with Black talent representing only 3.7% of technical roles overall, the 2022 State of Tech Diversity report by the Kapor Center and NAACP found. Support for Black startups is also low, providing fewer opportunities for creative entrepreneurs to partner with established brands on metaverse activations. Black founders received 1.3% of $288 billion of venture capital between February 2020 and February 2021, according to the report.
Data privacy is an even bigger challenge in the 3D world. Twenty minutes of VR can generate 2 million unique data elements, and immersive experiences in the metaverse will magnify the amount of data collected — including not only online behavior but also eye-tracking and movements of other parts of the body. No wonder that 69% of consumers expressed concerns about privacy in the metaverse, according to a recent industry report. Those concerns are now heightened by the Supreme Court’s reversal of Roe v. Wade, because prosecutors and anti-abortion activists can scrutinize personal reproductive health and location data in states that have criminalized abortion.
Building equitable and inclusive metaverse communities will require thoughtful collaboration between academia, industry and government. Here are some suggestions:
Teach t
he humanities. Universities must equip students with skills that go beyond tech. Tomorrow’s graduates must think critically across disciplines and be great problem solvers. In this way, they will be able to develop innovative solutions and include talent from different backgrounds as they create experiences and products in both the digital and physical worlds.

This starts with a solid foundation in the humanities, even for students in STEM fields. I always begin the semester for my fashion law and social justice course with readings and a learning conversation on how the labor and land of enslaved Africans and Indigenous communities, respectively, built American fashion. These early discussions set the foundation for our later class sessions on the intersection of fashion tech, civil rights law and privacy.
Recruit and retain more people of color. Brands entering the metaverse must proactively recruit talent from underrepresented and marginalized communities as they build their Web3 teams. It’s crucial that companies offer equitable pay and a safe space for talent to feel welcome and included. As the Great Resignation has shown, employees will leave if they are not valued and respected.
Brands must also ensure that they protect consumer privacy by being open and transparent about their data collection practices and keep data safe and secure. Companies collect and analyze vast amounts of data today; data collection will continue to surge in VR and virtual stores and throughout the metaverse ecosystem. If companies are to lead in Web3, they must make racial equity and data privacy key components of their environmental, social and governance (ESG) programs.
Congress and the White House must take action to address the civil and human rights challenges plaguing America. The Supreme Court has made it clear that our basic civil rights are at stake by prioritizing guns over humans and by gutting privacy rights in its opinion to overturn Roe. The metaverse will accelerate virtual experiences layered over our real lives. If you think the quantity of digital ads and cyber breaches are bad now — to say nothing of the use of stolen data to influence elections — imagine a future where we spend most of our work life in VR and companies surveil and sell data on your every facial move without real privacy protections. House lawmakers are currently advancing comprehensive federal privacy legislation, though it is very unlikely the bill will pass the Senate. Our only hope at the federal level is for the Federal Trade Commission to propose privacy rules.

The creative and tech sectors are taking us into the next digital revolution of blockchain technology, NFTs and Web3 — building exciting opportunities in fashion, sports and entertainment. But first, we must commit to protect our civil and human rights and provide equal access to everyone if we are to drive the metaverse and humanity forward. All that is at stake is our future.
Jeremy Toeman’s startup AugX Labs accidentally built a viral hit game. Toeman decided to stick with his original plan for the company anyway.
AugX Labs founder Jeremy Toeman told Protocol about following his vision for the company.
Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety’s first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.

Digital media veteran Jeremy Toeman launched a new startup to democratize video production last year. Before embarking on that task, Toeman challenged his team to make and ship a small Wordle-like web game as a kind of warmup.
That game, Moviedle, unexpectedly became a viral success, to the point where the company licensed it to media recommendation startup Likewise this week. A viral hit that generates some real money: For many startup founders, that would have been a pretty good reason to pivot. Toeman tells us why he decided to stick with his original plan.
Toeman’s story, as told to Protocol, has been edited for clarity and brevity.
I was putting together this great team. Really talented folks, but they had never worked together before. If you were to hire four great musicians, before they go on stage, you would probably have them do a session or two, right? I wanted us to have the experience of shipping a product together, and I set a few rules for the team: It has to be something we can do quickly, it has to do with video and it can’t cost a lot of money.

At the same time, the Wordle clone craze happened. I’m a movie nerd, and I had this idea: What if we make a Wordle-like movie game? So we built it in about a week. We sent it to our friends, put it on Product Hunt. It was growing nice and steadily. The number of active users went from 100 to 1,000. And then I woke up one morning, and instead of 1,000, it was 65,000. Then 100,000, 200,000 — and it kept on growing.
It all came down to this one Australian TikToker. I guess the algorithm picked up his video about it, and it went viral and was shown about 2.5 million times. That translated into all these players that loved the game and started tweeting about it. Then Questlove tweeted about it, and a bunch of other celebrities got on board.
All of a sudden, we had to really think about this. When I shared the first stats with the team, I told them: I don’t want you to just think of the game. I want you to think that we’ve made this little game to advance our own company, and we’ve created tons of joy for all these people. Watching the tweets come in was just so exhilarating, and the team’s morale went just crazy.
But we also realized: This is actually monetizable. This is legit traffic, a few hundred thousand movie fans on a platter. Whether you’re a studio or a streaming provider, somebody should want to be part of this. I started reaching out to some people I knew in the industry, which is how I ended up striking a deal with Likewise.
Ultimately, I decided that this is not a pivot. I’m not going to deny that came to mind. But we’re so close to shipping our core product that not seeing that through would be a terrible mistake. Secondly, I am 100% convinced that this micro gaming space is going to be here for the long term — but I am not convinced that I know which games will matter in the long term. Will people get tired of Moviedle after six months, or will they play it every day for 10 years? I don’t know. We ended up hiring a contractor to focus on expanding the game technology. This way I keep my core team really focused on the core product.

If it had never gone viral, I would still look at this as a great decision. Just by spending the week building it, the amount of learning we had as a team advanced us
by about 20 business days. And having been able to give so many people moments of joy just feels good. I believe those things are contagious, and they’ll help us make better products.

Wednesday, June 29
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Wednesday, July 6
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Wednesday, July 20
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Janko Roettgers (@jank0) is a senior reporter at Protocol, reporting on the shifting power dynamics between tech, media, and entertainment, including the impact of new technologies. Previously, Janko was Variety’s first-ever technology writer in San Francisco, where he covered big tech and emerging technologies. He has reported for Gigaom, Frankfurter Rundschau, Berliner Zeitung, and ORF, among others. He has written three books on consumer cord-cutting and online music and co-edited an anthology on internet subcultures. He lives with his family in Oakland.
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