Apple CEO Tim Cook recently sat down to discuss Apple Music and its place in the burgeoning music streaming world, once again touting the service’s human content curation as a key benefit over competitors like Spotify.
Source: Cook says Apple not in music streaming for the money, touts human content curation
How CEO Daniel Ek plans to beat Apple, Amazon, and Google at the music game.
Source: Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination
Snapchat released its second-quarter results showing a declined in daily users to 188 million, but ad sales were strong up 44 percent to more than $260 million.
Source: Redesigned Snapchat sees users drop by 3 million for quarter | Digital – Ad Age
They have weaponized social media, and we are all paying the price.
Source: Opinion | The Expensive Education of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley – The New York Times
With buying power of over $140 billion Gen Z’ers are rightfully so an appeal for brands. Engaging with them, especially on social media, can be challenging. Here’s 5 ways to meet those challenges head on.
Facebook stock fell 24 percent overnight not because of political scandal but because there just aren’t enough people for it to grow.
Source: Facebook Earnings Show Slow Growth Due to Lack of Humans
With everyone from Amazon to will.i.am trying to get us to talk to their speakers, should listeners be excited, or worried?
Source: How Smart Speakers Are Changing the Way We Listen to Music | Pitchfork
From Apple, Facebook, and Nest alum Mike Matas, Lobe makes it so you don’t need to be a data scientist to build incredible AI tools.
Source: Lobe Is A Machine Learning Platform For Complete Idiots
The retailer wants to translate the best parts of its stores–like the friendliness of its greeters and the local preferences of its shoppers–for the web.
Spotify missed big on its bottom line. Investors sold the stock on the news. In recent after-hours trading, shares in the streaming music company were down $14.30 a share, or 8.41%, to $155.70
The streaming music company’s number of paying subscribers grew to 75 million during the first three months of the year, in line with expectations and maintaining Spotify’s lead in a heated battle with Apple Music, which has 40 million paying subscribers. But diminishing revenue-per-user, as Spotify races to boost its membership through discounted family and student plans, took a toll.
Google is secretly building a social-gaming startup, part of its effort to create fledgling companies within the internet-search giant.
Source: Google Wunderkind Is Building a Secret Social-Gaming Startup – Bloomberg
A 21-month study finds that as users are fed more ads, they listen less; some subscribe, but not enough to compensate for lost ad revenue.
Source: Pandora Learns the Cost of Ads, and of Subscriptions | WIRED
Ahead of the 2019 launch of Disney’s Netflix competitor, the company’s digital arm will launch a free, over-the-top video app aimed at millennials sometime this summer. The hook for advertisers is that they’ll have a way to reach Disney’s millennial audience, without the concerns that have afflicted YouTube in recent months.
A Call to Minimize Distraction & Respect Users
Source: An Apology for the Internet — From the People Who Built It
Decades of research has shown that you can get a pretty accurate picture of the US population from a sample of under 3000 people, if you choose them carefully. If you really, really want to drop your margin of error as low as possible, you look at about 9000. After that, there’s just not a lot of gains to be had. U.S. pollsters looked at the intentions of hundreds of thousands of Americans and still called the 2016 election wrong. Politicians’ careers depend on accuracy. Creative people’s careers depend on insights, and that’s where small data rules.
Source: Big Data Is A Sham
True enough. But big data companies are not trying to predict population trends. They want to microtarget individuals.
Marketers have long had a symbiotic relationship with the social network. But user concerns about data has companies taking a harder look at how they work with Facebook.
Source: Facebook’s Current Status With Advertisers? It’s Complicated – The New York Times
Netflix’s content investment strategy is seen as the key instigator for its growth, especially as Netflix invests more in local-language fare. In 2018, Netflix plans to spend $10 billion on content and marketing: $8 billion in content (both originals and licensed acquisitions), yielding 700 originals in total; and $2 billion on marketing, with Q1 marketing spend reaching $479 million, up 77% YoY. Going forward, more spend will go to producing original content or licensed originals as a percentage of overall investment, compared with spending on licensed content.
Source: Netflix impresses on subscriber growth in Q1 – Business Insider
Processors with artificial intelligence will spread from today’s top-end phones to cars, PCs, security cameras, smart speakers and mainstream phones.
Source: AI chips soon will power PCs, cars, security cameras and smart speakers – CNET
Where does technology exploit our minds’ weaknesses?
Source: How Technology is Hijacking Your Mind — from a Former Insider
Facebook may complain that these changes to data collection and use would destroy the company. But while these changes would certainly challenge the business model of many players in the digital economy, giant companies like Facebook would be in the best position to adapt and forge ahead.
If anything, we should all be thinking of ways to reintroduce competition into the digital economy. Imagine, for example, requiring that any personal data you consent to share be offered back to you in an “interoperable” format, so that you could choose to work with companies you thought would provide you better service, rather than being locked in to working with one of only a few.
Source: Opinion | We Already Know How to Protect Ourselves From Facebook – The New York Times
