Top 20 Internship Fields
This is high season for securing a summer internship, an essential talent pipeline for employers and steppingstone for students. Postings peak in March, with 30,443 advertised positions in March 2016 (if you don’t have anything by May, you’re probably out of luck). But before sending that résumé, take a good hard look at what’s on it.
Source: Top 20 Fields for Internships: Get Your Skills On – The New York Times
How AR Will Change Mobile Shopping
People age 18 to 24 spend an average of 94 hours per month on apps, and those age 25 to 34 spend 86 hours. And customers now favor mobile retail apps, which take up 54% of all digital retail time. And yet, just 1% of all transactions take place on mobile, while we still spend $1.1 trillion in stores. In short, mobile time is not relative to mobile purchases. But augmented reality could help change all that.
Source: Here’s how AR can solve digital’s toughest problems – Business Insider
To get a copy of the slide deck, click here.
Live Music Trends for 2017
Sponsors spend $1.4 billion on the music industry in the United States each year, and that number is only going up. Instead of investing in large activations or stages at festivals, our experts predict that brands will focus more on building relationships with specific artists in the next year.
Source: 4 Major Live Music Trends Changing The Industry This Year – hypebot
Tinderstorms
When the warmth’s away, the daters will play. That appears to be what Tinder’s data suggests when it comes to cold weather and dating habits. Earlier this week, the northeastern portion of the United States was pummeled by Snowstorm Niko, which dumped some 18 inches of snow in parts of the country. But if history is any indication, snowed-in folks took the opportunity to be extra productive … on their dating apps.
When Winter Storm Jonas hit the same region of the nation in January 2016, Tinder reported seeing an increase of 10 percent on the day of the storm, resulting in more than 25 million matches during the worst weather. In fact, during Snowmaggedon 2016, nearly two billion swipes were made by folks apparently yearning for warmth — preferably provided by another person.
Source: Tinder Matches and Swipes Go Up During Snowstorms, Data Shows | Digital Trends
How AI Will Grow Up
Machines contain the breadth of human knowledge, yet they have the common sense of a newborn. The problem is that computers don’t act enough like toddlers. Yann LeCun, director of artificial intelligence research at Facebook, demonstrates this by standing a pen on the table and then holding his phone in front of it. He performs a sleight of hand, and when he picks the phone up—ta-da! The pen is gone. It’s a trick that’ll elicit a gasp from any one-year-old child, but today’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence software—and most months-old babies—can’t appreciate that the disappearing act isn’t normal. “Before they’re a few months old, you play this trick on them, and they don’t care,” says LeCun, a 54-year-old father of three. “After a few months, they figure out this is not normal.”
Source: The Future of Computers Is the Mind of a Toddler – Bloomberg
AI Is the Future of Google Search
The truth is that even the experts don’t completely understand how neural nets work. But they do work. If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus. If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language—words or phrases that people might type into a search engine—it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them. In some cases, it can handle queries better than algorithmic rules hand-coded by human engineers. Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more.
Source: AI Is Transforming Google Search. The Rest of the Web Is Next | WIRED
Tech is the End of the Middle Class
At a time when the Trump administration is promising to make America great again by restoring old-school manufacturing jobs, AI researchers aren’t taking him too seriously. They know that these jobs are never coming back, thanks in no small part to their own research, which will eliminate so many other kinds of jobs in the years to come, as well. At Asilomar, they looked at the real US economy, the real reasons for the “hollowing out” of the middle class. The problem isn’t immigration—far from it. The problem isn’t offshoring or taxes or regulation. It’s technology.
Source: The AI Threat Isn’t Skynet. It’s the End of the Middle Class | WIRED
Netflix Wins Super Bowl Buzz Battle
Netflix dropped the highly anticipated trailer for the second series of “Stranger Things” during the Super Bowl last night, earning the streaming service the biggest buzz generated by any of the big game commercials on Sunday night.
Will Snap Go Pop?
The Los Angeles-based company released the financial details in its filing for an initial public offering on Thursday.
- The company filed for a $3 billion IPO, though that is a placeholder amount and certain to change as the company sets a price on the deal.
- In the filing, Snap disclosed that Snapchat has 158 million average daily active users as of the fourth quarter of 2016.It had annual revenue of $404.4 million in 2016, up from $58.6 million in 2015.
- It plans to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SNAP.
- Snap is planning to list shares in March, and could fetch a valuation of as much as $25 billion, people familiar with the matter have said.
- Annual revenue of $404 million is up from just $58.6 million in 2015, the filings show. It grew daily active users by almost 50% in the past year.
- Still, its losses are also growing — to $514 million in 2016, from almost $373 million a year earlier.
New DJ Tech
Although selection may always be at the core of DJing, technology also plays a large part in how they practice their craft. Here we look at eight exciting new pieces of technology that are redefining the future of DJing.
Source: 8 New Technologies Redefining How DJs Play Live – hypebot
My Starbucks Barista
The launch of My Starbucks Barista comes amid the growing usage and adoption of voice-first devices.
- Voice usage is growing. In Q1 2016, 55% of US voice assistant users used their assistants regularly (daily or weekly), according to MindMeld. That’s up from 49% of users the previous quarter.
- Voice-first device shipments are increasing. Shipments of voice-first devices, such as the Amazon Echo and Google Home, will reach 24.5 million units in 2017, according to VoiceLabs’ recent State of the Industry report. That’s up from 6.5 million devices shipped in 2016.
Source: Starbucks unveils voice ordering – Business Insider
See also: What restaurateurs can learn from Starbuck’s mobile ordering challenges
Facebook AI Is Looking at You
With 1.2 billion people uploading 136,000 photos and updating their status 293,000 times per minute, until recently Facebook could only hope to draw value from a tiny fraction of its unstructured data – information which isn’t easily quantified and put into rows and tables for computer analysis.
Deep Learning is helping to play a part in changing that. Deep Learning techniques enables machines to learn to classify data by themselves. A simple example is a deep learning image analysis tool which would learn to recognize images which contain cats, without specifically being told what a cat looks like. By analyzing a large number of images, it can learn from the context of the image – what else is likely to be present in an image of a cat? What text or metadata might suggest that an image contains a cat?
Make America’s Robots Great Again
American factories still make a lot of stuff. In 2016, the United States hit a manufacturing record, producing more goods than ever. But you don’t hear much gloating about this because manufacturers made all this stuff without a lot of people. Thanks to automation, we now make 85 percent more goods than we did in 1987, but with only two-thirds the number of workers.
This suggests that while Mr. Trump can browbeat manufacturers into staying in America, he can’t force them to hire many people. Instead, companies will most likely invest in lots and lots of robots.
And there’s another wrinkle to this story: The robots won’t be made in America. They might be made in China.
Source: How to Make America’s Robots Great Again – The New York Times
Spotify Playlists That Work for Indie Artists
Curated playlists are how many fans listen to and discover music; and a great way for independent artists to market their music. But which Spotify playlist deliver the most new fans? According to AWAL, the top five are:
1, Indie Pop Chillout
95,197 followers
By Spotify Canada
2. Your Office Stereo
51,703
By Spotify UK
3. Indie Pop!
604,307
By Spotify
4. Cill Mode:On
94,995
By Spotify Netherlands
5. Alternative R&B
533,620
By Spotify
Source: Which Spotify Playlists Get You The Most New Fans? – hypebot
People Won’t Talk to Alexa or Siri in Public
Virtual assistants are supposed to be a linchpin of tech’s future. Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Samsung, and others have all made big investments in the tech. Many of them are using the idea of a disembodied, information-fetching helper as a selling point for new devices.But while these assistants are infiltrating more and more gadgets, they still face a few giant hurdles on their way to wider acceptance. One, as this chart from Statista shows, is simple: People just don’t want to use them in public.
Source: Where people use virtual assistants: CHART – Business Insider
Design In The Age Of AI
We’re on the cusp of a new era of design. Beyond the two-dimensional focus on graphics and the three-dimensional focus on products, we’re now in an era where designers are increasingly focusing on time and space, guided by technological advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, and smart environments.
Source: 10 Principles For Design In The Age Of AI | Co.Design | business + design
Microsoft Declares Psych War on Apple
Even if Microsoft loses out to a sale to a MacBook, it has changed the mindset of a consumer from an automatic purchase to a considered purchase. The Surface range was in play, even for a short time. These tiny moments of mind share will add up over weeks, months, and perhaps years, and the thinking will be that these tiny drips will wear down one of Apple’s weakest areas in its portfolio to Microsoft’s advantage.
The connected car craze
The Internet of Things has created a new market in the automotive industry, which is showing no signs of slowing down. Connected cars and their associated services are expected to grow from $13.6 to over $42 billion by 2022.
A glimpse of our collective future can be seen in Cadillac’s Book by Cadillac entrance — an on-demand, luxury lifestyle-driven vehicles by subscription. The $1,500-a-month car subscription service allows members to swap out different models of high-end sedans and SUVs, beginning in New York in February. It’s the same business model as ClassPass or Netflix, but for the GM-owned Cadillac brand, competing with the likes of Audi’s luxury mobility offering, Audi on Demand.
Tostitos’ Party Bag Will Help Call Uber If You’re Drunk
Doritos might have crashed out of the Super Bowl after a decade of fun ads, but Frito-Lay still has a few party tricks up its sleeve for this year’s big game. The chip maker’s Tostitos brand has made a limited-edition “Party Safe” bag that can tell when you’ve been drinking, and will help you get home safely from that Super Bowl party.
The special bag, created by Goodby Silverstein & Partners, comes equipped with a sensor connected to a microcontroller calibrated to detect small traces of alcohol on a person’s breath. If any alcohol is detected, the sensor turns red and forms the image of a steering wheel, along with an Uber code and a “Don’t drink and drive” message. The bag also uses near-field communication (NFC) technology, allowing fans to tap the bag with their phone to call a ride. With Uber and Mothers Against Drunk Driving, Tostitos will offer partygoers $10 off their Uber ride during and after the Feb. 5 game.
Source: Tostitos’ New Party Bag Knows When You’ve Been Drinking and Will Even Call You an Uber | Adweek
The Rise of Programmatic Advertising
Ad tech companies are intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, and add value to the ad delivery process by consolidating inventory, automating workflows, and offering precise targeting capabilities at scale. The automation of ad buying is also known as “programmatic advertising” — that is, using technology and software to buy digital ads. Programmatic ad spend in the US is quickly ramping up: It will top $20 billion this year and reach $38.5 billion by year-end 2020.
FBI Releases Gamergate Records
The FBI has posted a heavily redacted report of its threat investigations during the Gamergate controversy in 2014 and 2015. The 173-page document (not counting 61 deleted pages) primarily seems to cover harassment of critic Anita Sarkeesian and game developer Brianna Wu, including a shooting threat that caused Sarkeesian to cancel a planned talk at Utah State University. Ultimately, the investigations petered out: the FBI wasn’t able to identify the people behind some of the threats, apparently declined to prosecute others, and appears to have struggled with jurisdictional issues.
Source: The FBI has released its Gamergate investigation records – The Verge
Schools That Graduate The Most Unicorns
Domenichino, The Virgin with the Unicorn, (working under Annibale Carracci), 1604 – 1605, Fresco, Farnese Palace, Rome., Source: Wikimedia Commons
Stanford is the winner by a mile, with 51. Harvard comes in a distant second, with 37. The University of California with its 10 campuses, trails in third place with 17, and the Indian Institute of Technology, at 13, comes in fourth.
Why care about unicorn founders? Since November 2013, when venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term in a TechCrunch article, the business world has come to see a $1 billion valuation as a benchmark for breakout success in the growing field of venture-backed startups.
Source: The Schools That Graduate The Most Billion-Dollar Startup Founders
Gen X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials
We all know the stereotype: silly millennials, tethered to their phones, unable to accomplish the simplest tasks without scrolling their Instagram feeds, snapping their friends and/or tweeting inanely. But a Nielsen report released this month shows that Americans ranging from the ages of 18 to 34 are less obsessed with social media than some of their older peers.
Source: Generation X More Addicted to Social Media Than Millennials, Report Finds – The New York Times
Movies Starring You in a Thousand Plotlines
Moriarty believes that as computer graphics improve, the faces of actors, or even political figures, could be subtly altered to echo the viewer’s own features, to make them more sympathetic. Lifelike avatars could even replace actors entirely, at which point narratives could branch in nearly infinite directions. Directors would not so much build films around specific plots as conceive of generalized situations that computers would set into motion, depending on how viewers reacted.
“What we are looking at here is a breakdown in what a story even means—in that a story is defined as a particular sequence of causally related events, and there is only one true story, one version of what happened,” Moriarty said. With the development of virtual reality and augmented reality—technology akin to Pokémon Go—there is no reason that a movie need be confined to a theatrical experience. “The line between what is a movie and what is real is going to be difficult to pinpoint,” he added. “The defining art form of the twenty-first century has not been named yet, but it is something like this.”
Source: The Movie with a Thousand Plotlines – The New Yorker
Hacker Nightmare: An AI Writes AI Software
Progress in artificial intelligence causes some people to worry that software will take jobs such as driving trucks away from humans. Now leading researchers are finding that they can make software that can learn to do one of the trickiest parts of their own jobs—the task of designing machine-learning software.
Live Sports Drive Social TV
Beyond trying to use social media to simply create the next viral sensation, many consumers are using social channels to communicate about their media consumption, including the programs they’re watching on TV. In fact, according to an analysis in the report leveraging Nielsen Social insights, there were an average of 14.2 million social media interactions about TV across Facebook and Twitter each day this past fall in the U.S. alone. Across platforms, social TV activity peaked on Sundays this fall as audiences took to social media to talk about NFL games, specials and Sunday series. Nearly half (43%) of weekly Facebook activity and a third (33%) of weekly Twitter activity occurred on Sundays. On Facebook, the next-busiest day was Saturday—a day known for college football and pro baseball.
Source: A New Megaphone: Social Media Gives Consumers a Chance to be Heard on What They Watch
Big Ten Network to Air League of Legends E-Games
In a recognition of the popularity of e-sports on college campuses, most Big Ten universities will field teams in the multiplayer online game League of Legends and compete in a style resembling conference play, in a partnership with the Big Ten Network. Besides streaming competitions on the internet, the Big Ten Network will broadcast select games, including the championship in late March, weekly on its cable network, which is available to more than 60 million households nationally. In the first broadcast, on Jan. 30, teams from the Big Ten’s two newest members, Rutgers and Maryland, will face off, according to a Big Ten Network spokesman.
Source: Big Ten Universities Entering a New Realm: E-Sports – The New York Times
Netflix Rules
Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in Netflix series The Crown.
A year ago, Netflix boldly declared that it planned to conquer the global market for streaming television, adding more than 130 countries to its service map. It also promised to start delivering material profits in 2017 after operating at breakeven profitability for several quarters. On Wednesday, the company released business results showing that it is on its way to reaching those targets, even as competition accelerates from services like Amazon and Hulu.
Source: Netflix Profit Rises 56 Percent to $67 Million – The New York Times
Censoring App Stores
App stores backed by giant corporations have created choke points for the internet, which governments are now exploiting. In the last few weeks, the Chinese government compelled Apple to remove New York Times apps from the Chinese version of the App Store. Then the Russian government had Apple and Google pull the app for LinkedIn, the professional social network, after the network declined to relocate its data on Russian citizens to servers in that country. Finally, last week, a Chinese regulator asked app stores operating in the country to register with the government, an apparent precursor to wider restrictions on app marketplaces.
Source: Clearing Out the App Stores: Government Censorship Made Easier – The New York Times
Snapchat Tells Investors to Shut Up
Snap’s founders say they’re limiting shareholder power from the outset in the name of transparency, since the founders want to be in control for the long-term . . . . Since Spiegel is just 26 years old and Murphy is 28, investors better be comfortable with having them around for a decades to come.
How BitTorrent Became a Zombie Startup
Some startups are born lucky. By the chance of their timing, their technology, or the individuals who helm them, they experience Facebook-size success. Others fail quickly. There is luck in this, too — in an immediate, concise conclusion. Far more startups, having raised funding on the merits of an idea and a team, plod along for years or even decades, constantly casting about for the idea or customer or partnership that will transform them. Their investors are patient, and then exhausted, and then checked out, and then impatient. Their executives change, and then change again. The founders leave, or they hang on in hopes the company they conceived will somehow eventually prove itself. They are zombie startups.
The Age of Alexa
The overall play for Amazon, says Forrester Principal Analyst Thomas Husson, is to continue to make Alexa more useful with more smart home integration and more media capabilities. Why? The more people use Alexa devices, the more likely they are to spend money on Amazon. And so, unlike many rivals, it can afford to take a loss on the gadgets. “Amazon will increasingly subsidize Echo by bundling content (think music, video) with the device,” Husson says. “They can afford this since this is not core to their business model: the end-goal is to facilitate interactions.”
Source: Amazon Echo vs. Google Home vs. Microsoft Cortana vs. Apple Siri – Business Insider
See also: Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017
Why AI Poker Is Very Hard
“
“In a complete information game you can solve a subtree of the game tree,” says Professor Tuomas Sandholm, who built the Libratus system with PhD student Noam Brown. AI trying to win a game of chess or Go can work through how a sequence of moves will play out. “With incomplete-information games, it’s not like that at all. You can’t know what cards the other player has been dealt,” he explains. “That means you don’t know exactly what subgame you’re in. Also, you don’t know which cards chance will produce next from the deck.”
Incomplete information games have thus far proved much harder to solve. CMU’s AI focuses on information sets, a grouping of possible states that take into account the known and unknown variables. It’s a massive mathematical undertaking. “The game has 10 to the power of 160 information sets, and 10 to the power of 165 nodes in the game tree,” says Sandholm. That means there are more possible permutations in a hand of poker than atoms in our universe. “And even if you had another whole universe for each atom in our universe and counted all the atoms in those universes, it would be more than that.”
Source: This AI will battle poker pros for $200,000 in prizes – The Verge
See also:
Netflix Saturation
Netflix is continuing to make big gains in international markets, but there’s evidence that it might have hit a ceiling in the US, according to analysts at UBS. “In the US, after nearly a decade of streaming service availability, it appears that penetration of streaming services has stagnated around 50% of US [broadband] homes,” the analysts, led by Doug Mitchelson, wrote in a note distributed Friday (based on a proprietary survey of 2,000).
Source: Netflix hits maturation and saturation in the US – Business Insider
When Trump Tweets, Trigger Listens
Very few people can move financial markets with their tweets, but like it or not, President-elect Donald Trump is one of them. And while you can’t do anything to prevent the madness, you can keep up with it using a new tool from Trigger Finance.
Source: Trigger tells you when Trump tweets about your stocks | TechCrunch
VR Done Dirt Cheap
The Within app uses 360-degree video technology, similar to virtual technology.
A variety of apps, some using Google’s Cardboard viewer, allow users to sample films and games with 3-D imagery.
Source: Virtual Reality on the Cheap? Try These Apps on Your Phone – The New York Times
Blame It on Netflix
There was a lot to criticize about broadcast TV, but it brought the nation together. Streaming services are doing the opposite.
Source: How Netflix Is Deepening Our Cultural Echo Chambers – The New York Times
2 Google Home Bots Trying to Dialog
Two Google Home devices are deep in conversation. And thousands are watching the robots attempt to mimic human interaction. The bots’ ongoing chat, which has ranged from the meaning of life, religion, love, ninjas and Chuck Norris, is streaming on Twitch. The video has had nearly 780,000 views as of Friday afternoon since it started streaming a few days ago.The bots have been aptly named Vladimir and Estragon, perfect for their endless chatter reminiscent of the two perpetually waiting characters in Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot.
Source: 2 Google Homes sound like they are drunk flirting, and the internet can’t get enough
Amazon’s Alexa at CES 2017
Amazon isn’t at CES in any formal capacity, but once again, it seems to be everywhere thanks to Alexa. Since opening up its voice assistant to other companies’ products, we’ve seen it put in all types of gadgets and gain some strange integrations. And at CES this week, the continuation of that is one of the biggest trends we’ve seen. Here are the highlights:
- Westinghouse, Element, and Seiki are all building TVs that include Fire TV software and a remote that includes Alexa voice control.
- LG put Alexa in a refrigerator, which also has a giant 29-inch touchscreen.
- LG also put Alexa into Hub, its smart home robot.
- Lenovo’s Smart Assistant is basically an Echo by a different name.
- Mattel’s Aristotle is sort of like an Echo, but with features designed to help parents care for newborns.
- Bixi is making a portable puck with Alexa in it.
- GE is presenting its LED ring lamp, which is kind of like what would happen if you put a halo on an Echo Dot.
- Omaker made a portable speaker with Alexa.
- Onvocal made these horrible business neckbuds with Alexa.
- This five-device charging dock includes a speaker with Alexa support.
- A dancing robot.
- A prototype alarm clock.
- A “bedside clock speaker,” which I think is sort of like an alarm clock.
- LG made a wide-eyed robot that uses Alexa.
- Ford is putting Alexa in Fusions and F-150s. Yes, cars!
- Volkswagen plans to do the same (with its own cars, not the F-150).
- Inrix is integrating Alexa with its OpenCar platform. More cars!
- Huawei is including an Alexa app by default on its new Mate 9 smartphone.
- Martian put Alexa in its mVoice smartwatch (poor implementation though).
- Alexa is also inside this creepy eyeball camera.
Source: Amazon’s Alexa is everywhere at CES 2017 – The Verge
Music Streaming Subscription Surge
In streaming’s earlier years, when doubts prevailed across the artist, songwriter and label communities, one of the arguments put forward by enthusiasts was that when streaming reached scale everything would make sense. When asked what ‘scale’ meant, the common reply was ‘100 million subscribers’. In December, the streaming market finally hit and passed that milestone, notching up 100.4 million subscribers by the stroke of midnight on the 31st December. It was an impressive end to an impressive year for streaming, but does it mark a change in the music industry, a fundamental change in the way in which streaming works for the music industry’s numerous stakeholders?
Source: Music Subscriptions Passed 100 Million In December. Has The World Changed? | Music Industry Blog