Welcome to another edition of What We’re Reading, Marxent’s weekly series featuring staff members highlighting the best articles, videos, music and more they saw over the prior 7 days. This week, those finds included stories from The Guardian, LinkedIN, LiveLeak, YouTube and many more. Up first, it’s …

The Best Thing We Read This Week …

There’s plenty of 360 video out there, but until now none of it offered a true Virtual Reality experience — one where the viewer could move around within the scene. As explained in this Wired article: “Photography company Lytro, which early last year shifted from still cameras into the world of VR, has unveiled what it’s calling the first 6DOF 360-degree film. Moon lasts less than 45 seconds, but it shows a peek at what simply hasn’t been possible yet.” Lytro gets bonus points for playing with the whole “Stanley Kubrick faked the moon landing” conspiracy theory.

The Best Thing We Heard This Week …


Data Analyst Josh Howell has had Zipper Club’s debut single “Going the Distance” stuck in my head for a few weeks now. “Atwood Magazine did a great write up of the song, and I definitely agree that Zipper Club will be a quickly rising star in alt rock,” he says. “‘Going the Distance’ feels simultaneously timeless, familiar, and new and captures the feel of routine and letting imagination run wild to cope with monotony.”

Frequent contributor Brian Turner took time out from AR app development to share Bastille’s new song, “Send Them Off!” “The beat alone is enough to put you in a good mood. But if you listen to the lyrics, you hear someone struggling with feelings of jealousy. I’m really looking forward to the album’s release on September 9th.”

The Best Thing We Wrote This Week …

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Businesses spend millions of dollars each year in an attempt to earn enough customer trust that the shopper will be willing to buy a product online without touching it first. But consumers want to feel the fabric, touch the material, and experience the comfort and quality before they buy. This is a problem. But times are changing, and as Senior Project Manager Tim Sandlund reveals, how mixed commerce is being used by retailers to bolster sales even as they are closing stores at astonishing rates.

Marxent CEO Beck Besecker was this week’s featured guest on the Retail Tech Podcast. Beck joined host Darius Vasefi to talk about the potential for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, and how businesses are already using these technologies to interact with consumers and upend the buying process.

Speaking of appearances, Marxent Product Manager Vince Kilian will be a featured speaker at October’s Arena Tech Night, a networking event in Columbus’ Arena District for people who are passionate about technology, and enjoy networking with others who share that same passion.

And last but definitely not least, we added a new entry in our How We Got Here series, this one profiling Julian Edraisa, Marxent’s resident 3D Artist and soccer enthusiast who believes he can play real-life soccer if only because he has mastered FIFA 16. (It’s only a video game, Julian!) You can check out the rest of the How We Got Here series here.

But Wait, There’s More …

Graphic Designer Gabbi Hardin followed up on something she shared a few weeks ago: “I watched charity: waters new video this week (shocking, I know). The founder, Scott Harrison, talks about his journey from Club Promoter, to founder of a nonprofit and how charity: water got to where it is today. It’s a 20 minute video, so a pretty big time commitment but so so so worth it.”

Sales Director Rich Manno shares what he rightly calls, “By far the most important thing anyone will read this summer” — Are these HOT DOGS OR LEGS?!? “Will we ever really know?!” Rich asks. A man can dream, Rich. A man can dream.

Growth in technology is coming to the Midwest, which will have more startups than Silicon Valley in 5 years.

Marxent Project Engineer Kelly Parsons stumbled upon this story about how our entire universe is (possibly) just one giant holographic projection. “It’s an interesting article that normal (non-astro-physics major) people can understand — though it helps to be a Virtual Reality expert,” she says.

And Finally …


We’re closing it out this week with one more musical selection, this one from Marketing Creative Director Joe Johnson — and it’s a whole album. Joe requested I let Killer Mike’s lyrics describe the album for him: “This is not a fiction that is sold by conglomerates / This is Soul of Black Folks mixed with Donald Goines shit / Better said rob a bet, esoteric I could get / This is John Gotti painting pictures like Dali / This is Basquiat with a passion like Pac / In a body like Biggie, telling stories like Ricky.”