Category: Tech

$2 Billion and Counting

Daniel Ek, Founder and CEO of Spotify, on Taylor Swift, revenues and the myths about the streaming industry.

He properly nailed it.

It’s not about Spotify and others not paying artists fairly, it’s about fans not willing to pay and play it the old way.
$2 billion, not a bad number.

In the long run how much is worth your favorite CD or your one-time iTunes purchase to the artist compared to decades of playbacks on that same album ?
I betcha my Led Zeppelin IV would be platinum-plated if Spotify existed at that time.

Why link free and paid? Because the hardest thing about selling a music subscription is that most of our competition comes from the tons of free music available just about everywhere. Today, people listen to music in a wide variety of ways, but by far the three most popular ways are radio, YouTube, and piracy – all free. Here’s the overwhelming, undeniable, inescapable bottom line: the vast majority of music listening is unpaid. If we want to drive people to pay for music, we have to compete with free to get their attention in the first place.

→ Spotify

Why the Chess Computer Deep Blue Played Like a Human

What Kasparov might have sensed when he played Deep Blue is something that appeared like that creative randomness, which he took to be a “human” intuition of danger. Deep Blue programmer Feng-Hsiung Hsu writes in his book Behind Deep Blue that during the match, outside analysts were divided over a mysterious move made by the program, thinking it either weak or obliquely strategic. Eventually, the programmers discovered that the move was simply the result of a bug that had caused the computer not to choose what it had actually calculated to be the best move—something that could have appeared as random play. The bug wasn’t fixed until after game four, long after Kasparov’s spirit had been broken.

→ Nautilus

San Francisco Is Smarter Than You Are

A good environment and a greener living is like the energy to innovate.

If people are to cities as neurons are to brains, and cities (unlike brains) do not have any known limit to their size, then gigantic cities of the future might produce innovations on a scale that wouldn’t be possible for the cities of today. Faced with pollution, disease, and scarcity, should we be looking to creative environments rather than to individual innovators?

→ Nautilus

How One Boy With Autism Became B.F.F.’s With Apple’s Siri

I have to say the subject of autism affects me as one of my uncle is also living in his own thoughts. It’s delightful to hear about the positive impact of technology on people who would not have access to it, just a few years ago.

My kindest thoughts to you, Eric.

“It’s not that Gus doesn’t understand Siri’s not human. He does — intellectually. But like many autistic people I know, Gus feels that inanimate objects, while maybe not possessing souls, are worthy of our consideration. I realized this when he was 8, and I got him an iPod for his birthday. He listened to it only at home, with one exception. It always came with us on our visits to the Apple Store. Finally, I asked why. “So it can visit its friends,” he said.”

→ The New York Times

Farewell, The Magazine.

Glenn Fleishman :

“In the newspaper and periodical world, we spell some things differently for reasons of space and to make sure the meaning isn’t lost. The first, or lead, paragraph (graf) of an article is called the “lede”: it’s where we tell you what the story is going to be about before we tell you the story. “Burying the lede” is when you hide the most important fact farther down, as I’ve done here.”

The Magazine was much more than what it used to be called.

Originally initiated by Marco Arment, the former lead developer at Tumblr and the founder of Instapaper, its aim was to promote longforms and to be the simplest magazine platform for plain text on the iPhone and iPad. No PDFs, no cumbersome layout that’s trying to fit the large and small screens at once, just the interface filled with a beautiful typography.

Thanks to a little monthly-subscription, the editor and owner (in this case Glenn) commissioned writers on virtually any kind of stories.

Back in August, I sent an email to Glenn to thank him for his work and his commitment, also to let him know that I was keeping my subscription on, even though I wasn’t reading it much lately. Maybe I sensed what was going on ?

Today, this proved to be unsuccessful and I’m sad to hear that it is shutting down as I am a long time subscriber — since Marco released it —, an enthusiastic reader and a firm believer that this was the way to produce, or at least to build the modern platform that magazines deserve.

This was one of those service that you were willing to support for a few bucks, just to let it operates by itself. Like funding a nonprofit organization in the background.

Farewell, The Magazine.

→ Glenn Fleishman