Amazon is taking another swing at streaming music, but this time with Alexa as its not-so-secret weapon. Will the hardware that’s insinuating itself into our home lives (and turning our tots into tyrants) make the difference? Alexa’s already done a good job making Siri seem dumb. No one ever sits you down to teach you how …
Friday 5 — 2.26.2016
Snapchat now allows users to design and submit their own geofilters — overlays that appear on snaps sent within a defined area and timeframe. Techcrunch explains how to make your own., If you’re now perpetually wandering around with earbuds in, you’re likely spending some of that time listening to Spotify. But you may not know some of Spotify’s lesser-known, cool features, …
Friday 5 — 5.22.2015
For those of you already planning your Memorial Day driving routes, Google Maps has released useful, new features alerting users to delays and detours as you enter your destination. Beyond the time estimate, new cards provide additional context about potential delays. Related trivia: Google Maps also released the top destinations from Memorial Day 2014. Google is once again showing tweets in …
Friday 5 — 12.12.2014
Facebook is surging ahead on mobile revenue as well as mobile market share. Facebook now accounts for about one-fifth of all data used on mobile phones, and owns four out of the top ten apps in the Apple iOS store and Google Play. More over at Quartz. Dark social is a term introduced by Alexis Madrigal two …
Friday 5 — 9.12.2014
When Spotify bought music intelligence platform Echo Nest, they gained access to a trove of data, and a smart team of people who could optimize curation. A new Spotify Insights blog focuses on telling scientifically-driven stories about music. This first post takes a look at how music migrates, and the varying musical influence of cities around …
Friday 5 — 6.13.2014
Amazon launched a streaming music service — a relatively commoditized offering with competitors like Spotify, Beat, and Rdio. The differentiator may not be a more robust feature set, in part because Amazon’s offering does not include Universal Music Group’s catalog. Instead, as this article points out, the Prime bundling with free shipping and book lending may …
Friday 5 — 11.22.2013
Spotify closes another $250M in funding at a >$4B valuation. The streaming music service enabling instant listening now has more than 6 million paid and 24 million active free users. Is it inciting generational warfare to imply that the youngs shape the direction of technology differently and more significantly than the olds? Mathew Ingram makes the …
Unpacking the algorithms behind online experiences
Relinquishing human free will to the machines generally gets a bad rap. In the media, all kinds of scientists are nefarious in their data-driven ways — even well-intentioned science yields Frankenstein’s monster far more often than the reasonable paleontologist in Jurassic Park. The Terminator franchise in the 1980s was among the first to introduce the concept …