Spotify thinks it is going to do very well this year, by generating a big increase in revenue and paid subscribers, while improving its margins. And it thinks its losses will shrink. It would be surprising if Spotify didn’t have a good story to tell at this point. Its shares will start trading — via a “direct listing” instead of a traditional IPO, next Tuesday, April 3.
Whatever your position on the ethics of Facebook, the biggest challenge facing the world’s foundational social network right now is not #deletefacebook, data security, or PR punditry over whether Mark and Sheryl took too long to talk to journalists. It’s not even that the company has inadvertently been cast in history’s greatest spy drama–which just happens to be playing out on our TVs and in our news feeds and is the reason this story penetrated news cycles beyond tech media. (Despite all these things, business continues to boom.) Facebook’s real problem–its vulnerability–is the gulf that exists between people’s negligible understanding of its business model and what Facebook’s business really is.
“In my opinion, the biggest issue that Facebook needs to address is its business model that relies on data surveillance,” Ricks says. “Facebook is one actor in a complex web of data brokers, digital services, political organizations, social platforms, and financial institutions that have profited off the mass exploitation of people’s data. Until that changes, I worry that Facebook may just be making cosmetic fixes to its platform.”
An “app,” in the eyes of your average consumer, is something you literally download onto your phone or computer. It’s a piece of software in your possession. Implied in this mental model is a sort of containment. An app is like a caged tarantula we can take out now and again. But when we put it away, it stays put away, because no one wants to wake up in the middle of the night with a giant arachnid on their face.
When Facebook began allowing apps to connect with its service to expand what users could do on the social network in 2007, this model was destroyed overnight. You were no longer downloading a piece of software that you somehow owned or that you somehow could unplug. You were connecting to a service that lived on servers, an omnipresent entity that was always there and always watching, even after you long stopped tending those Farmville crops or responding to those Words with Friends requests.
Automaker General Motors is said to be planning a new peer-to-peer car rental service, similar to existing offerings by Daimler-backed Turo and startup Getaround, to debut as early as this summer.
Netflix hasn’t been coy about its plans to take over Hollywood. The company has already said it could spend up to $8 billion on content this year alone. But, for all the awards House of Cards and Icarus rack up, one of the reasons Netflix has tasted success so rapidly is its streaming technology. That’s an area it has been perfecting in-house since 2010, when it became more than a simple mail-order DVD rental shop.
For Netflix, the tech is just as important as the storytelling. Regardless of how many shows or movies Netflix produces, it needs to ensure that its 118 million subscribers can watch them without issue — no matter where they are in the world, which smartphone they own or how fast their internet is. Netflix even recently re-encoded its entire catalog (said to be around 6,000 titles) to produce the best possible picture using the smallest amount of bandwidth, which was made possible by an AI technology it developed called Dynamic Optimizer.
So Alexa decided to laugh randomly while I was in the kitchen. Freaked @SnootyJuicer and I out. I thought a kid was laughing behind me. pic.twitter.com/6dblzkiQHp
Android customers continue to be more loyal to the Android operating system than iOS users are to the iOS operating system, according to new data shared today by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. Android saw a 91 percent loyalty rate in 2017, compared to 86 percent for iOS, with loyalty rates for the two operating systems remaining largely steady since early 2016. Android loyalty has hovered at 89 to 91 percent since January 2016, while iOS loyalty has been between 85 and 88 percent.
For all categories of information — politics, entertainment, business and so on — we found that false stories spread significantly farther, faster and more broadly than did true ones. Falsehoods were 70 percent more likely to be retweeted, even when controlling for the age of the original tweeter’s account, its activity level, the number of its followers and followees, and whether Twitter had verified the account as genuine. These effects were more pronounced for false political stories than for any other type of false news.
Despite popular assumptions that young adults are social media-obsessed, new data suggests that many have considered a temporary—and even permanent—reprieve from their newsfeeds.
Aside from performing routine tasks like setting alarms and making calls, connected smart speakers are becoming part of the path to purchase, with more than half of US users buying goods via such devices.
In order to keep the Millennial generation analytically meaningful, and to begin looking at what might be unique about the next cohort, Pew Research Center will use 1996 as the last birth year for Millennials for our future work. Anyone born between 1981 and 1996 (ages 22-37 in 2018) will be considered a Millennial, and anyone born from 1997 onward will be part of a new generation. Since the oldest among this rising generation are just turning 21 this year, and most are still in their teens, we think it’s too early to give them a name – though The New York Times asked readers to take a stab – and we look forward to watching as conversations among researchers, the media and the public help a name for this generation take shape. In the meantime, we will simply call them “post-Millennials” until a common nomenclature takes hold.
The simultaneous use of second-screen devices—smartphones, tablets and desktops/laptops—while watching TV has increased year to year and will continue through at least 2019.However, 2018 will be the first year in eMarketer’s forecast in which the use of desktops/laptops in this context declines.
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