What is and what might be

They have much less in common than you might expect.

The key step in creating a better future is insisting that it not be based on the assumptions, grievances and dead ends of the past.

The future won't be perfect. We won't be perfect. But we can be kind. We can listen. We can give opportunity the benefit of the doubt.

The future won't always work. We won't always succeed. But we can be alert and seek out the possible instead of the predicted.

The future won't always be fair. But we can try. We can care. We can choose to connect.

It can be better if we let it.

 

[Have you read about The Marketing Seminar? This is our last session before the fall.]

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/536223480/0/sethsblog~What-is-and-what-might-be.html

Alexa gets a DVR recording skill

Slowly but surely, Alexa’s becoming a more competent catchall video assistant. Back in January, Amazon launched its Video Skill API designed to offer more control over apps from cable and satellite companies. An update this week brings the ever-important ability to use the smart assistant to start recoding.

The skill joins a number of functions already available from top providers, including Dish, TiVo, and DIRECTV and Verizon — each of whom will likely be updating their Alexa skill set to reflect the new feature. The whole thing works pretty much as you’d expect.

Say, “Alexa, record the A’s game,” and the associated service will do just that. Or, you know, any baseball team, really. 

Also new in this update is the ability to jump directly into frequently used navigation options, like DVR interfaces or video services like Netflix orPrime, the example that Amazon gives in its post on the topic. Once in a specific program, users can ask it Alexa to do things like pause the show, and the assistant will comply.

The new skills are available now to developers and should be hitting some of the aforementioned services soon.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/30/alexa-gets-a-dvr-recording-skill/

Azure’s availability zones are now generally available

No matter what cloud you build on, if you want to build something that’s highly available, you’re always going to opt to put your applications and data in at least two physically separated regions. Otherwise, if a region goes down, your app goes down, too. All of the big clouds also offer a concept called ‘availability zones’ in their regions to offer developers the option to host their applications in two separate data centers in the same zone for a bit of extra resilience. All big clouds, that is, except for Azure, which is only launching its availability zones feature into general availability today after first announcing a beta last September.

Ahead of today’s launch, Julia White, Microsoft’s corporate VP for Azure, told me that the company’s design philosophy behind its data center network was always about servicing commercial customers with the widest possible range of regions to allow them to be close to their customers and to comply with local data sovereignty and privacy laws. That’s one of the reasons why Azure today offers more regions than any of its competitors, with 38 generally available regions and 12 announced ones.

“Microsoft started its infrastructure approach focused on enterprise organizations and built lots of regions because of that,” White said. “We didn’t pick this regional approach because it’s easy or because it’s simple, but because we believe this is what our customers really want.”

Every availability zone has its own network connection and power backup, so if one zone in a region goes down, the others should remain unaffected. A regional disaster could shut down all of the zones in a single region, though, so most business will surely want to keep their data in at least one additional region.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/30/azures-availability-zones-are-now-generally-available/

The Podcast Fellowship (a summer program)

[If you know a full-time student in need of a worthy summer project, please share with them...]

Summer internships are a problem. Too often, you're working for free, doing very little of value and learning less. Two out of three might be okay, but that's a lousy combination.

Too often, careers are shaped based on too little input from a busy office. And far too often, privilege and existing relationships play a role in who gets to do something productive.

In real life, after college, you're less likely than ever to have a real job in a real office. You're also hoping to be doing a job you actually like, where people aren't telling you what to do all day. Why train for the worst outcome all summer in a dead-end internship?

Alex DiPalma and I are pleased to invite you to consider an experiment, open to a hand-picked group of students this summer. A virtual program, available wherever there's a laptop and an internet connection. Alex is a successful podcast producer, who has worked on Akimbo, with Minnesota Public Radio, with Cal Fussman, with Food4Thot, among other shows. She knows what's up.

The idea: You should build a podcast. A thirty-episode series, a podcast that captures insights and experiences in an area you care about.

Are you hoping for a career in urban planning? Make your podcast about that. Over the course of the thirty episodes, you can interview leaders in your field. You can capture your thoughts on the big (and small) issues of the day. You can lead and you can teach. And no one can stop you.

It doesn't matter how many people listen to it. It doesn't matter that it doesn't have a sponsor. It matters that you made it.

By the end of the summer, you'll have published your work to anyone who cares to subscribe. You'll have developed assertions, made connections and most of all, shared with generosity. You won't be a technical wizard, you'll have something better than that--the confidence that comes from having built and shipped generous work.

The program itself works like this: We'll accept applications until April 10th, 2018 at 5 pm. Alex will go through the applications and invite a cohort to join the program. It will run every weekday from June 28 to August 15th, using an online community platform we're customizing just for you. You can live anywhere in the world. You can already have a summer gig. All you need is the desire and a commitment to put in the time.

[We're accepting applications from non-students, but students get priority.]

Throughout the program, we'll be teaching you useful techniques, challenging you to invent new ones, and most of all, connecting you with other students who are going where you're going. This online mastermind group will take a real commitment, a few hours a day at minimum. But if you put in the time, you'll earn the body of work you'll end up creating.

The program costs $10 a day, because we want people to have skin in the game. Financial aid is available. The application is here, and we hope you'll consider it.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/536020176/0/sethsblog~The-Podcast-Fellowship-a-summer-program.html

Wondery wants to become Hollywood’s podcast dream factory

When Hernan Lopez, the former chief executive of Fox International, started the podcast network Wondery roughly two years ago with a seed investment from his former bosses at Fox Networks Group, podcasting was still emerging as a media platform.

Now, with voice ascendant, and podcasting proving to be a breeding ground for new narratives that other storytelling mediums can latch onto — the move into the reinvention of radio for the 21st century seems prescient.

It’s not just Fox that is now backing the podcast business; new investors led by storied venture capital and private equity investor Alan Patricof’s Greycroft Partners are coming aboard with a $5 million commitment to expand the scope of Wondery’s wonder factory. Additional investors include Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Advancit Capital — the investment vehicle for Shari Redstone (daughter of billionaire media mogul Sumner Redstone).

Previous investors BAM Ventures, Watertower Ventures, Fox Networks Group and BDMI also participated in the round.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Wondery intends to add new shows to its stable, including American Innovations, Dr. Death and I, Survivor, and has optioned Sward and Scale and Tides of History as projects for movies and television.

While traditional media companies are being forced to join forces and combine assets to protect their market from new competitors like Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Hulu and Netflix coming from the tech industry, new media platforms like podcasting are opening up opportunities for different kinds of studios to emerge. 

“I believe there’s a huge opportunity in audio,” Lopez says. “There isn’t anywhere close to enough quality audio content being produced.”

On average, the modern consumer listens to four hours of audio per day, according to Lopez. Even though most of that is music, an increasing number of Americans are turning to podcasts as a new form of entertainment. And podcasts are beginning to attract more advertising dollars.

“In the podcast world the ads seem to work. They’re native, they’re integrated into the shows. The listeners are welcoming,” says Wondery’s chief executive. That in itself would be a welcome change for media companies hungry for new ways to maintain their ad-supported business models. 

Netflix, Amazon and Hulu have trained a generation of consumers on subscription models that eschew advertising altogether — but podcasts still hold out promise, says Lopez.

Demographics are another key reason that advertisers are moving to podcasts, he says, and Comscore research (funded by Wondery) seems to back up his assertions.

According to Comscore, nearly one in five Americans aged 18-49 said they’d listened to podcasts at least once a month — a number that increases when it’s restricted to the highly coveted demographic of men between the ages of 18 and 34, while nearly one in three men 18-34 do so. Podcast listeners are also more likely to have a college degree, make more than $100,000 and be early adopters of electronics, consumer goods and entertainment.

Advertisers are beginning to take notice, with $119 million spent on podcast advertising in 2016 and an estimated $220 million spent on podcast ads last year (according to estimated figures in a survey underwritten by major podcast networks).

Some of Wondery’s podcasts have already racked up impressive numbers. Dirty John has been dowloaded more than 20 million times; American History Tellers has been downloaded more than 3 million times; and Business Wars more than 2 million times, says Lopez. 

Wondery is also bucking the media trend of serving up micro-content to audiences.

“We don’t produce much micro-content — if any,” says Lopez. “The stories that we tend to gravitate towards tend to work better in long-form. We have to keep their attention for as long as possible.”

Lopez’s Wondery isn’t the only company to rake in money from institutional investors for building a podcasting empire.

On the other side of the country in the borough of Brooklyn stands Gimlet Media, the $20 million king of the podcast market these days. Gimlet raised from a slew of investors, including WPP, Betaworks, Stripes Group, Lowercase Capital, LionTree Parters, Emerson Collective, Cross Culture Ventures and music manager turned investor Troy Carter.

Success among podcasts is also translating into options in other formats. As The New York Times noted yesterday, podcasts are getting “the Hollywood treatment.”

Wondery’s own “Dirty John” is being turned into a series for two networks — true crime stories on Oxygen and as the basis for a scripted series on Bravo. Meanwhile, “Welcome to Night Vale,” “Alice Isn’t Dead,” “Up and Vanished” and “Crimetown” are all being turned into series by different production companies.

“In the last year or so, podcasts have been the thing,” Matt Tarses, the creator of “Alex, Inc.” (a new ABC show based off of Gimlet Media’s “Startup” podcast) told The New York Times.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/wondery-wants-to-become-hollywoods-podcast-dream-factory/

New federal rules blamed in disappearance of Kindle erotica titles

The upcoming Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, in addition to making Microsoft move to reduce obscenity on its platform, has hit erotica authors on Amazon. After many authors saw their rankings stripped on the Kindle store, essentially reducing their availability and visibility, while forcing others in the romance category to recategorize or get dinged as well.

The Digital Reader followed the changes this week, reporting that “I have seen numerous reports on Facebook, KBoards, and elsewhere that Amazon has adopted a new policy where some romance titles, most notably those titles that Amazon has identified as erotica, have been removed from the Kindle Store best-seller list.” Amazon’s changes began on March 22.

Delisting titles from the Amazon Kindle store essentially buries them completely, leading to massive revenue loss for indie authors. One author received a note from KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing – discussing the changes:

I’m following up concerning some of your books missing their best sellers ranking.

After hearing from our technical team we have confirmed that this is due to a recent update to the filter option for Erotica ebooks.

All adult themed titles will be filtered from the main category sales rank as part of this update. However, you will still continue to keep all of your category rankings. I know this wasn’t the answer you were looking for but appreciate your understanding on this policy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

The FOSTA Bill is ostensibly about preventing online sex trafficking and has already caused Craigslist to shut down its online personals. However, it can also be construed as a bill that prevents sexual material of all kinds from receiving ready distribution online, a fact that is giving some big content providers pause. The Digital Reader notes that “the change in policy only affects the main Amazon site, and not other sites like Amazon UK.”

I have reached out to authors and Amazon for further comment.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/new-federal-rules-blamed-in-disappearance-of-kindle-erotica-titles/

New federal rules blamed in disappearance of Kindle erotica titles

The upcoming Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, in addition to making Microsoft move to reduce obscenity on its platform, has hit erotica authors on Amazon. After many authors saw their rankings stripped on the Kindle store, essentially reducing their availability and visibility, while forcing others in the romance category to recategorize or get dinged as well.

The Digital Reader followed the changes this week, reporting that “I have seen numerous reports on Facebook, KBoards, and elsewhere that Amazon has adopted a new policy where some romance titles, most notably those titles that Amazon has identified as erotica, have been removed from the Kindle Store best-seller list.” Amazon’s changes began on March 22.

Delisting titles from the Amazon Kindle store essentially buries them completely, leading to massive revenue loss for indie authors. One author received a note from KDP – Kindle Direct Publishing – discussing the changes:

I’m following up concerning some of your books missing their best sellers ranking.

After hearing from our technical team we have confirmed that this is due to a recent update to the filter option for Erotica ebooks.

All adult themed titles will be filtered from the main category sales rank as part of this update. However, you will still continue to keep all of your category rankings. I know this wasn’t the answer you were looking for but appreciate your understanding on this policy.

Please let us know if you have any further questions.

The FOSTA Bill is ostensibly about preventing online sex trafficking and has already caused Craigslist to shut down its online personals. However, it can also be construed as a bill that prevents sexual material of all kinds from receiving ready distribution online, a fact that is giving some big content providers pause. The Digital Reader notes that “the change in policy only affects the main Amazon site, and not other sites like Amazon UK.”

I have reached out to authors and Amazon for further comment.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/new-federal-rules-blamed-in-disappearance-of-kindle-erotica-titles/

Amazon may launch a bank account aimed at teens, says report

Amazon has been in discussions with banks to create a product aimed at teens and other younger users who don’t have their own credit cards, or an interest in applying for one, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The company reportedly has held early stage talks with banks including JP Morgan Chase and Capital One, with the goal of creating some sort of checking account-type service that would make it easier for Gen Z customers to shop Amazon’s site.

This is not the first time Amazon has been said to be talking to banks about establishing some sort of banking product of its own.

Earlier this month, The WSJ reported Amazon was talking to big banks, including JPMorgan Chase, about building a checking account product. Bloomberg essentially confirms this earlier reporting, with the additional emphasis on the product’s youth appeal, and why it matters.

Most notably, it has to do with the younger generation’s approach to credit – or rather, how they’re not all that interested in obtaining a credit card. In fact, those ages 18 to 24 prefer using debit to credit, noted Bloomberg.

In addition, many young users don’t qualify for credit, and younger teenagers couldn’t even apply. Teens under 18 also can’t set up their own bank accounts, without parents’ consent.

Amazon had previously addressed the teen market with its Amazon Cash cards that let anyone add cash to an Amazon account by purchasing a card at a local retailer and giving the cashier the amount they want loaded into their Amazon account.

The company also last year launched a way for teens to shop the site independently of their parents – creating their own lists, and making purchases via parents’ accounts, while abiding by pre-set spending limits parents set or by getting purchases approved after parents’ review the requests.

But more recently, a number of alternative banking products have arrived for teenaged users, like Current, which ties into a chore-and-allowance system parents set up in an app, and Greenlight, whose “kids” debit card works both inside and outside the U.S. There’s also a host of millennial-flavored investing products on the market that help younger users learn to save, tuck away their digital loose change by rounding up purchases, or teach users how to invest.

Amazon may see the potential then, in going a similar route. Meanwhile, the banks may be interested in working with the retailer, given their need to find new ways to appeal to millennial shoppers wary of signing up for credit cards.

Bloomberg noted Amazon’s banking product could also entice users by reducing or eliminating traditional fees, or by taking advantage of Alexa in some fashion.

We’ve asked Amazon if it’s commenting on the report, and will update if the company has more to share.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/amazon-may-launch-a-bank-account-aimed-at-teens-says-report/

Excel is getting smarter

Excel is the workhorse of many industries and if you love your spreadsheets, the following news will likely make you unreasonably happy: Excel is getting smarter, thanks to a fresh infusion of artificial intelligence. As we previously reported, the Excel team has spent the last few months adding new machine learning-powered features to the application and starting today, Office 365 users who opt in to the Office Insiders program will get to experience the first crop of these new features.

The general idea here is to make Excel smart enough to understand some of your entries and offer you additional information. For now, this applies to geographical data like the names of cities, states and countries (but also Zip codes), as well as stocks.

Say you have a list of towns in Oregon. Excel will recognize that these are towns in what is objectively the best state in the U.S. and then allows you to pull additional data from Microsoft’s Bing knowledge graph to work with (think population and other demographic data). Similarly, for stocks and index funds, Excel can now automatically pull in financial data about a company.

Rob Howard, Microsoft director for Office 365, told me that the team decided to start with these two features because Excel users already tend to work with a lot of this data. “The really powerful thing about these new data types is that they are fundamentally new building blocks that we are introducing,” he said. “It’s another example of the places where we are taking AI and AI services to tools that people are already familiar with.”

The new feature sits in the Excel ‘Data’ tab, which now includes a new feature for transforming cells into these new data types. If Excel doesn’t quite know what to make of your data (Portland, ME or Portland, OR, for example), it’ll ask you to choose.

Howard wasn’t quite ready to talk about what data types the team is working on now, but he did say that one area the team is working on is integrations with internal data in a company. Every business has plenty of proprietary data that is typically hard to find and hard to use (and often sits in Excel sheets). The Microsoft Graph is the company’s effort to break this data out if its silos and the Excel team is looking for ways to bring it into spreadsheets, too.

The new version of Excel with support for these new data types is now available as a preview in Office 365 Insiders in English. It’ll roll out to all office 365 subscribers at some point in the future.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/excel-is-getting-smarter/

Terry Myerson, EVP of Windows and Devices, is leaving Microsoft, prompting a big AI, Azure and devices reorganization

Big changes are afoot at Microsoft. The company has announced that Terry Myerson, the longtime Microsoftie who headed up the company’s Windows and Devices businesses, is leaving the company, and along with that the company changing up its executive management. The full memos from Satya Nadella and Myerson are below, but here are the basics:

Terry Myerson is out but is staying on for some months in a transition phase. It’s been in the works for months, the company said.

Rajesh Jha will lead Experiences & Devices. (Note that Windows is being dropped from the title.) It will include Windows, Office, third-party applications and devices focused on a more integrated Microsoft 365.

Scott Guthrie will lead Cloud + AI Platform. This is separate from R&D and will be about applying AI in the business. It will include distributed computing (cloud and edge) and AI covering infrastructure, runtimes, frameworks, tools and higher-level services around perception, knowledge and cognition.

Jason Zander is now EVP of Azure.

Harry Shum stays on in his role leading AI + Research.

The moves underscore how Microsoft is pushing itself hard to refresh its strategy to align with the next phase of how the tech world is evolving. Myerson has been with the company for more than 20 years, and has been running the Windows business since 2013, so this is a significant shift for the company and a signal of how that shift is not just happening in its products, but among its people, too.

To be clear, Microsoft remains one of the world’s tech leviathans, with Windows still the world’s most ubiquitous desktop operating system. But resting on your laurels cannot happen in the tech world (just ask Microsoft’s disastrous former partner, Nokia).

Microsoft missed the boat in mobile — an area now dominated by Google and Apple both in terms of devices and controlling the platforms that monetise mobile beyond devices. It’s been doubling down on its enterprises business and has — from what I’ve heard — been surprisingly good at delivering a new and cohesive set of services by way of Office 365.

Now the big frontiers are areas like AI and cloud services. In both it’s it’s fighting cheek by jowl with the likes of Amazon, Google and many more. In cloud, its big challenge now is to continue to make sure that its software development — specifically by way of its unified, cloud-based Office 365 services — aligns with its cloud ambitions and makes the whole package more compelling for end users. In AI, the game very much remains open: by all accounts AI-based services will be at the core of how all computing develops going forward, and considering that every problem today is a tech problem, that’s a big playing field to cover.

Here is Satya Nadella’s email to the company:

From: Satya Nadella
Sent: Thursday, March 29, 2018 7:29 AM
To: Microsoft – All Employees; All MS Store Employees FTE <davidpor_org_fte@microsoft.com>
Subject: Embracing our future: Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge

Team,

Today, I’m announcing the formation of two new engineering teams to accelerate our innovation and better serve the needs of our customers and partners long into the future.

Over the past year, we have shared our vision for how the intelligent cloud and intelligent edge will shape the next phase of innovation. First, computing is more powerful and ubiquitous from the cloud to the edge. Second, AI capabilities are rapidly advancing across perception and cognition fueled by data and knowledge of the world. Third, physical and virtual worlds are coming together to create richer experiences that understand the context surrounding people, the things they use, the places they go, and their activities and relationships.

These technological changes represent a tremendous opportunity for our customers, our partners — everyone. With all this new technology and opportunity comes a responsibility to ensure technology’s benefits reach people more broadly across society. It also requires that the technologies we create are trusted by the individuals and organizations that use them.

Today’s announcement enables us to step up to this opportunity and responsibility across all our Solution Areas.

With change comes transition, and one transition we have been planning for is for Terry Myerson to pursue his next chapter outside Microsoft. Terry has been instrumental in helping me arrive at this new organizational structure, and I deeply appreciate his leadership and insight as we’ve worked through the opportunity that lies ahead. Over the past several years, Terry and the WDG team transformed Windows to create a secure, always up-to-date, modern OS. His strong contributions to Microsoft over 21 years from leading Exchange to leading Windows 10 leave a real legacy. I want to thank Terry for his leadership on my team and across Microsoft. He will work with me on the transition over the coming months.

Moving forward, Rajesh Jha will expand his existing responsibilities to lead a new team focused on Experiences & Devices. The purpose of this team is to instill a unifying product ethos across our end-user experiences and devices. Computing experiences are evolving to include multiple senses and are no longer bound to one device at a time but increasingly spanning many as we move from home to work and on the go. These modern needs, habits and expectations of our customers are motivating us to bring Windows, Office, and third-party applications and devices into a more cohesive Microsoft 365 experience. To further this vision, we are making the following leadership changes:

• Devices: Panos Panay will now serve as our Chief Product Officer and will lead our devices vision and further our product ethos across hardware and software boundaries for our first-party devices, while creating new categories and opportunities for the entire ecosystem. He will be the key leader ensuring end-to-end devices business execution excellence.
• Windows: Joe Belfiore will continue leading our Windows experiences and will drive Windows innovation in partnership with the PC and device ecosystem. The future of Windows is bright as we continue to innovate across new scenarios and device form factors, and more deeply connect to our Microsoft 365 offerings. Joe will share more about the Windows roadmap at Build.
• New Experiences and Technology: Kudo Tsunoda will continue to lead this team to define how we engage users with high-value experiences to help them achieve more.
• Enterprise Mobility and Management: Brad Anderson will continue to lead our Windows Enterprise deployment and management efforts with even tighter alignment across Microsoft 365 and will partner closely with the EMS teams within Cloud + AI Platform.

Second, Scott Guthrie will expand his existing responsibilities to lead a new team focused on Cloud + AI Platform. The purpose of this team is to drive platform coherence and compelling value across all layers of the tech stack starting with the distributed computing fabric (cloud and edge) to AI (infrastructure, runtimes, frameworks, tools and higher-level services around perception, knowledge and cognition). To facilitate these new capabilities, we are making the following leadership changes:

• Azure: Jason Zander is being promoted to executive vice president, Azure, and will lead this team. The Windows platform team led by Harv Bhela, Henry Sanders and Michael Fortin will join Jason’s team. Windows platform is already a core part of Azure across both the cloud and edge, and this shift will enable us to accelerate our efforts to build a unified distributed computing infrastructure and application model. Roanne Sones will continue to lead our technical engagement with OEMs, ODMs and silicon vendors, and her team will also join Jason’s team.
• Business AI: The Customer Service, Marketing and Sales Insights teams, previously led by Gurdeep Singh Pall, will join James Phillips’ Business Applications Group. I am thankful for Gurdeep’s leadership in building these new AI solutions that are going to help differentiate Microsoft in this area. This is a notable example of taking research breakthroughs to start new product efforts grounded in customer needs and then mainstreaming them.
• Universal Store and Commerce Platform: Eric Lockard and his team will also join the Cloud + AI Platform team to both help with our own digital transformation and add new capabilities to our business application efforts.
• AI Perception & Mixed Reality (MR): Alex Kipman will lead this new team, which brings together all our speech, vision, MR and additional perception capabilities into one team. This team will continue to build first-party products and the core building block cloud services for third parties on Azure. XD Huang, Yu-Ting Kuo and their teams will join this group, as well as Gurdeep’s Ambient Intelligence team. Alex and team will take guidance on all AI-related areas from Harry Shum and work very closely with AI + Research (AI+R).
• AI Cognitive Services & Platform: Eric Boyd will lead this new team and drive our AI Platform, AI Fundamentals, Azure ML, AI Tools and Cognitive Services. Joseph Sirosh and team will join this new group. Eric and team will take guidance on all AI-related areas from Harry Shum and work very closely with AI+R.

Harry Shum will continue to lead our third engineering team, AI + Research, which is instrumental in the key technology advances required across all our product teams. When we established AI+R nearly two years ago, our primary goal was to accelerate the adoption of AI innovations from research into product, and the changes we are making today reflect our strong progress. In fact, just yesterday I spent time at TechFest and came away inspired by all the innovations and most importantly how quickly they were making their way into our products. We will continue to drive investments in AI+R across research and AI breakthroughs that are key to our long-term success.

As we make technological progress we need to ensure that we are doing so responsibly. To this end, Harry and Brad Smith have established Microsoft’s AI and Ethics in Engineering and Research (AETHER) Committee, bringing together senior leaders from across the company to focus on proactive formulation of internal policies and how to respond to specific issues in a responsible way. AETHER will ensure our AI platform and experience efforts are deeply grounded within Microsoft’s core values and principles and benefit the broader society. Among other steps, we are investing in strategies and tools for detecting and addressing bias in AI systems and implementing new requirements established by the GDPR. While there is great opportunity, ensuring we always act responsibly for our customers and partners will continue to be a hallmark of our work.

To truly get the best impact from our efforts, we will have to push ourselves to transcend Conway’s law. Having a deep sense of customers’ unmet and unarticulated needs must drive our innovation. We can’t let any organizational boundaries get in the way of innovation for our customers. This is why a growth mindset culture matters. Each one of us needs to push on what technology can do for people and for our world. It will take courage to keep learning and growing together — encouraging one another’s individual strengths, building more diversity and inclusion across our teams, and collaborating as One Microsoft. It’s amazing what we have been able to accomplish together, and yet I still believe we are in the very early days of what is possible.

We’ll talk more about these changes at the Q&A next week and the important work ahead.

Satya

And here is Terry Myerson’s email:

Team,

It is an emotional day for me as I look toward starting my next chapter outside of Microsoft in a few months. We’ve been discussing this for some time, but today it becomes real.

Satya’s leadership and insight in defining a Microsoft 365 experience, built on top of an intelligent edge/intelligent cloud platform is inspiring. I believe in it, and that these changes are great for Microsoft. Change can be invigorating for us all and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to work with Satya on helping define this new structure. I will be around as we work through this transition, and then I will continue to root on Satya and this team every day.

Microsoft has been my work, my team, and my purpose for 21 years. Over the years I have worked with so many of you to take on big challenges and serve our customers. I’ve learned so much. We’ve accomplished so much together. And I have had so much fun. Your passion, commitment, and sheer brilliance has kept me inspired. You have taught me new ways of looking at the world. You made me a better leader. And together, we have delivered products that positively changed the way people work and live. I am grateful for each of you.

Most recently, with Windows 10 we set out to restore the trust of our consumer and business users and set Windows up to be a key part of the new Microsoft. With us now approaching 700M active Windows 10 users, commercial usage growing 84% YOY, Xbox One running a Windows 10 core, Surface innovation highlighting the Microsoft 365 experience, HoloLens bringing breakthroughs in computer vision, a universal store enabling GamePass, Azure reserved instances, and Office distribution, and a revitalized partner ecosystem – we’ve made incredible progress, and set the foundation for a new chapter to begin.

But it’s time for me to take a break, and then look forward to my own next chapter. I’m excited to see what’s next professionally. In the meantime, I can’t wait to spend quality time with my family and pursue a few big life goals.

While today I have many emotions, I’m mostly filled with gratitude and optimism – gratitude for the experiences I have had and optimism for the future ahead.

Sincerely, thank you for all the incredible experiences we’ve had together.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/terry-myerson-evp-of-windows-and-devices-is-leaving-microsoft-prompting-a-big-ai-azure-and-devices-reorganization/

TuneIn launches a discounted audio subscription for Alexa owners and Prime members

TuneIn, the free radio service that allows you to stream news, sports, music and podcasts, is today rolling out a new subscription offering for Alexa customers in the U.S. TuneIn Live, as the premium live audio subscription is called, will offer play-by-play calls from thousands of live sporting events, plus access to premium news stations, talk shows and other content. This is the first time that TuneIn premium content has been made available over a voice platform, like Alexa, the company notes. It’s also available at a discount for Alexa owners and Prime members.

The subscription content comes from TuneIn partners like MLB, NBA, NHL, and the NFL, as well as news stations like CNBC, MSNBC, Al Jazeera, Newsy, and others.

The broader TuneIn service also pulls in content from over 120,000 owned and operated as well as partner radio stations, and 5.7 million on-demand programs. TuneIn is the audio streaming partner for daily fantasy sports providers like FanDuel and DraftKings, too.

The company’s free product, which has been accessible on Alexa, has greatly benefited from consumer adoption of smart speakers, like Amazon Echo.

“TuneIn has been an integration partner for Alexa since 2014, and with the continued growth in smart speaker adoption, we’ve certainly seen strong growth in both users, and overall listening hours,” Tony Archibong, VP of Distribution and Business Development at TuneIn, tells TechCrunch. “Across our entire portfolio of speaker integrations – including Alexa, Sonos, Bose, etc. – we have seen over 1 billion listening hours streamed in the past 12 months alone.”

The company now claims 75 million monthly active users – up from 60 million in 2015 – and is supported across over 200 connected devices including via platforms like Sonos, Cortana, Tesla, Bose, Roku and Xbox One, as well as Echo speakers.

Before today, TuneIn sold Premium subscriptions that cost $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year. But the company has teamed up with Amazon on its Alexa Premium subscription offering.

Instead of $9.99 per month, Amazon Prime members can buy a subscription for $2.99 per month. Non-Amazon Prime members with Alexa can instead subscribe for $3.99 per month.

The lower pricing is due to the fact that the TuneIn Live subscription for Alexa only works on Alexa-enabled devices, like Echo, Echo Spot, Echo Dot, and others.

It’s unclear if there’s a revenue share here or if Amazon is helping to subsidize the cost of the discounted subscriptions, and the companies won’t discuss deal terms.

But a discounted Alexa subscription is something Amazon is familiar with, having already launched a low-cost music subscription for Echo owners itself. The Amazon Music Unlimited Echo Plan lets Amazon Echo owners access all the benefits from Amazon’s on-demand music service on a single Echo device for $3.99 per month, instead of $7.99 per month for Prime members, or $9.99 per month for non-Prime members.

For TuneIn, a discounted Alexa subscription could allow the company to further take advantage of the demand for audio programming in the Echo device owner market. And for Amazon, it makes sense to work with TuneIn because it gives Echo owners more content options, while also providing Prime members with another perk.

“TuneIn Live brings a delightful experience to Alexa customers with the ability to stream live audio of virtually any sporting event or news broadcast throughout your home,” said Rob Pulciani, Director, Amazon Alexa, in a statement. “Just ask Alexa to open the TuneIn Live skill and play your favorite team’s game – even synchronize playback across multiple Echo devices around the home so the whole family can hear as they move around the house.”

The skill can be enabled on Alexa device with the command, “Alexa, open TuneIn Live.”

TuneIn Live is available as of today, Major League Baseball’s 2018 Opening Day.

 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/tunein-launches-a-discounted-audio-subscription-for-alexa-owners-and-prime-members/

Video/podcast roundup

Some interviews and talks you might enjoy:

 

 

Podcast: Project Management with Rocketship.fm

Podcast: Talking with Anthony Iannorino. 

Daily Grind podcast.

Don't Quit Your Day Job with Cathy Heller.

Podcast with Heneka Watkis Porter

Podcast with Joe Ferraro.

 

 

Tropical MBA podcast.

Podcast: Design Matters with Debbie Millman (a backlist classic).

 

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/535803852/0/sethsblog~Videopodcast-roundup.html

LinkedIn is introducing auto-playing video ads

In a move that was probably inevitable, LinkedIn is introducing video advertising as one its Sponsored Content formats.

Although my LinkedIn newsfeed already includes plenty of video, Abhishek Shrivastava, director of product for LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, explained for advertisers, the only way to incorporate videos was to link to other websites. Now, the Microsoft-owned professional network is rolling out a native ad format, where video ads will appear as standalone posts in the feed.

The video ads will play automatically, though with the sound turned off initially.

Other social networks introduced video advertising years ago, but LinkedIn is a different environment — Shrivastava touted this as a way to bring “sight, sound and motion” to business marketers, while the company announcement declares that the company is going “all in on B2B video.”

Shrivastava added that while most videos are seen as ideal for “top of the funnel” marketing (i.e., building awareness, rather than sealing the deal), LinkedIn’s Video for Sponsored Content is designed to work “across the funnel.”

So yes, the videos can be designed to build brand awareness, but they can also point directly to the advertisers’ desktop or mobile website, or even be used to collect leads. And they can incorporate LinkedIn’s ad targeting and conversion tracking capabilities.

LinkedIn says it’s been testing the format with more than 700 advertisers since October, resulting in engagement times that are nearly three times longer than those for regular Sponsored Content.

In addition to the video ads, LinkedIn is also introducing the ability for businesses to include native video on their Company Pages — so a company that’s hiring might highlight a video about their culture and work environment.

LinkedIn says it will be rolling out these capabilities to all businesses over the next few weeks.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/29/linkedin-video-ads/

Microsoft can ban you for using offensive language

A report by CSOOnline presented the possibility that Microsoft would be able to ban “offensive language” from Skype, Xbox, and, inexplicably, Office. The post, which cites Microsoft’s new terms of use, said that the company would not allow users to “publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity)” and that you could lose your Xbox Live Membership if you curse out a kid Overwatch.

“We are committed to providing our customers with safe and secure experiences while using our services. The recent changes to the Microsoft Service Agreement’s Code of Conduct provide transparency on how we respond to customer reports of inappropriate public content,” said a Microsoft spokesperson. The company notes that “Microsoft Agents” do not watch Skype calls and that they can only respond to complaints with clear evidence of abuse. The changes, which go into effect May 1, allows Microsoft to ban you from it services if you’re found passing “inappropriate content” or using “offensive language.”

These new rules give Microsoft more power over abusive users and it seems like Microsoft is cracking down on bad behavior on its platforms. This is good news for victims of abuse in private communications channels on Microsoft products and may give trolls pause before they yell something about your mother on Xbox. We can only dare to dream.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/28/microsoft-can-ban-you-for-using-offensive-language/

GoDaddy to move most of its infrastructure to AWS, not including domain management for its 75M domains

It really is Go Time for GoDaddy. Amazon’s cloud services provider AWS and GoDaddy, the domain registration and management giant, may have competed in the past when it comes to working with small businesses to provide them with web services, but today the two took a step closer together. AWS said that GoDaddy is now migrating “the majority” of its infrastructure to AWS in a multi-year deal that will also see AWS becoming a partner in selling on some products of GoDaddy’s — namely Managed WordPress and GoCentral for managing domains and building and running websites.

The deal — financial terms of which are not being disclosed — is wide-ranging, but it will not include taking on domain management for GoDaddy’s 75 million domains currently under management, a spokesperson for the company confirmed to me.

“GoDaddy is not migrating the domains it manages to AWS,” said Dan Race, GoDaddy’s VP of communications. “GoDaddy will continue to manage all customer domains. Domain management is obviously a core business for GoDaddy.”

The move underscores Amazon’s continuing expansion as a powerhouse in cloud hosting and related services, providing a one-stop shop for customers who come for one product and stay for everything else (not unlike its retail strategy in that regard). Also, it is a reminder of how the economies of scale in the cloud business make it financially challenging to compete if you are not already one of the big players, or lack deep pockets to sustain your business as you look to grow. GoDaddy has been a direct victim of those economics: just last summer, GoDaddy killed off Cloud Servers, its AWS-style business for building, testing and scaling cloud services on GoDaddy infrastructure. It also already was hosting some services on AWS prior to this: its enterprise-grade Managed WordPress service was already being hosted there, for example.

The AWS deal also highlights how GoDaddy is trimming operational costs to improve its overall balance sheet under Scott Wagner, the COO who took over as CEO from Blake Irving at the beginning of this year. 

“As a technology provider with more than 17 million customers, it was very important for GoDaddy to select a cloud provider with deep experience in delivering a highly reliable global infrastructure, as well as an unmatched track record of technology innovation, to support our rapidly expanding business,” said Charles Beadnall, CTO at GoDaddy, in a statement.

“AWS provides a superior global footprint and set of cloud capabilities which is why we selected them to meet our needs today and into the future. By operating on AWS, we’ll be able to innovate at the speed and scale we need to deliver powerful new tools that will help our customers run their own ventures and be successful online,” he continued.

AWS said that GoDaddy will be using AWS’s Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes and Elastic Compute Cloud P3 instances, as well as machine learning, analytics, and other database-related and container technology. Race told TechCrunch that the infrastructure components that the company is migrating to AWS currently run at GoDaddy but will be gradually moved away as part of its multi-year migration.

“As a large, high-growth business, GoDaddy will be able to leverage AWS to innovate for its customers around the world,” said Mike Clayville, VP, worldwide commercial sales at AWS, in a statement. “Our industry-leading services will enable GoDaddy to leverage emerging technologies like machine learning, quickly test ideas, and deliver new tools and solutions to their customers with greater frequency. We look forward to collaborating with GoDaddy as they build anew in the cloud and innovate new solutions to help people turn their ideas into reality online.”

 

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/28/godaddy-to-move-most-of-its-infrastructure-to-aws-not-including-domain-management-for-its-75m-domains/

When your ideas get stolen

A few meditations:

Good for you. Isn't it better that your ideas are worth stealing? What would happen if you worked all that time, created that book or that movie or that concept and no one wanted to riff on it, expand it or run with it? Would that be better?

You're not going to run out of ideas. In fact, the more people grab your ideas and make magic with them, the more of a vacuum is sitting in your outbox, which means you will prompted to come up with even more ideas, right? 

Ideas that spread win. They enrich our culture, create connection and improve our lives. Isn't that why you created your idea in the first place?

The goal isn't credit. The goal is change.

 

[A new episode of Akimbo is out today, with riffs about infinite and finite games. Feel free to subscribe, and please steal these ideas. Ready to spread your ideas? Check out The Marketing Seminar... don't forget the purple circle.]

 

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/535576394/0/sethsblog~When-your-ideas-get-stolen.html

Azure’s new Serial Console gives you a direct window into the dark heart of your VMs

Azure developers and sysadmins have long asked for the ability to get access to a serial console for their virtual machines (VMs). While it’s generally easy enough to log into a VM after it has booted, things get far more complicated if the machine doesn’t boot for some reason. Troubleshooting that can be a nightmare. With today’s launch of the Serial Console in the Azure portal, developers get a full view of their machine’s boot process that should make fixing these kind of issues far easier.

“It’s like connecting a keyboard and monitor to the machine,” Azure corporate VP Corey Sanders told me.

While Azure (and all of its competitors) support all kinds of automation tools like Ansible, Chef and Puppet, as well as SSH connectivity and configuration management, sometimes that just isn’t enough to fix an issue. What’s relatively easy to diagnose and fix on a local machine (think a mistake in a config file or a new driver install that has gone awry), isn’t always all that easy to diagnose in the cloud, after all.

“I’ve been working with virtual machines and infrastructure for many years now,” Sanders said. “This has been a consistent top request from users. […] The amount of improvement that this can bring to sysadmins lives is huge.”

The new console access works for Linux and Windows VMs in the Azure cloud. Since Linux was built for this kind of scenario, there is nothing users have to do to enable this. Windows is a bit of a different beast, so for Windows machines that already run in Azure, developers do have to flip a switch and type a few commands to turn this on. On machines you start up now, everything should already be set up. In Sanders’ view, all developers with existing machines should probably do this right away.

Not every developer in an organization should probably have access to the serial console by default, so during the beta test, Microsoft decided that only users who have “VM Contributor” or higher privileges to the virtual machines should be able to access the serial console.

It took Microsoft a while to launch this feature (and it’s worth noting that Google also offers access to the serial console while AWS gives you the console’s output and screenshots). The reason for this, Sanders says, is that it’s not trivial to enable these kind of features securely. “The connectivity here is not through the network of the VM,” he explained. “It’s through the host and the hypervisor and to enable that in a secure and performant way was quite challenging.”

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/26/azures-new-serial-console-gives-you-a-direct-window-into-the-dark-heart-of-your-vms/

Comparing Apple, Google and Microsoft’s education plays

Today’s Apple event in Chicago was about more than just showing off new hardware and software in the classroom — the company was reasserting itself as a major player in education. The category has long been a lynchpin in Apple’s strategy — something that Steve Jobs held near and dear.

Any ’80s kid will tell you that Apple was a force to be reckoned with — Apple computers were mainstays in computer labs across the country. It’s always been a good fit for a company focused on serving creators, bringing that extra bit of pizzazz to the classroom. In recent years, however, there’s been a major shift. The Chromebook has become the king of the classroom, thanks in no small part to the inexpensive hardware and limited spec requirements.

Based on Google’s early positioning of the category, it appears that the Chromebook’s classroom success even managed to catch its creators off-guard. The company has since happily embraced that success — while Microsoft appears to have shifted its own approach in response to Chrome OS’s success.

Apple’s own responses have been less direct, and today’s event was a reconfirmation of the company’s commitment to the iPad as the centerpiece of its educational play. If Apple can be seen as reacting, it’s in the price of the product. Gone are the days that schools’ entire digital strategy revolved around a bunch of stationary desktops in a dusty old computer lab.

But while education has been a piece of the iPad strategy since the product launched eight years ago next month, the tablet was long price-prohibitive. The company has addressed that through school discounts and lowering the overall cost of the line, as the tablet market has started to stagnate, but the last couple of upgrades have dropped pricing down to a far more approachable $299.

A one-iPad-per-child approach is still out of the realm of plenty of public schools, but it’s easy to see how the product could be appealing for school IT managers looking to roll out the iPad cart to classrooms. And additions like Managed Apple IDs have made it easier for multiple kids to share the same device, as a cost-cutting measure.

Along with devoted educational software, the company demonstrated how existing apps like Clips and Garage Band can be repurposed within the educational context to help bring a level of multimedia interactivity to the learning process. The company even sat us down in classrooms today to walk us through some of those projects.

Of course, right now, the market is Google’s to lose. The company reportedly controls around 60 percent of the market. Much like Android, the heart of Chrome OS’s approach is an embrace of third-party manufacturers, which have helped keep the cost down.

Schools with tight budgets can pick up a dirt-cheap Chromebook for $100-$150 less than an iPad. It’s easy to see how that’s an appealing proposition, especially when broken units are just par for the course in the hands of students.

In spite of its success, Google’s certainly not an island. Yesterday’s announcement of the first Chromebook tablet was both a response to Apple’s involvement in the space and a preemptive strike against today’s event, though the new Acer device is actually $30 more expensive than Apple’s educational discount. The company sort of shot itself in the foot on that one, but expect to see more competitively priced slates from other hardware partners.

Microsoft held its own education event in May of last year, showing off its solution to Chrome OS. Thus far, however, Windows 10 S has been kind of a mess, thanks in no small part to some pretty convoluted messaging on the company’s part. The company plans to streamline things a bit by making 10 S a mode inside of Windows 10.

The idea is basically the same, either way, offering a stripped-down version of the operating system that can be locked down from outside apps, so teachers can make sure nothing unseemly makes its way onto the device. It takes less of a toll on the hardware, with the company introducing a new line of PCs starting at $189 — a clear swipe at the Google’s dominance.

In fact, the company came out and said as much in the accompanying press material, saying the products were “the same price as Chromebooks, with none of the compromises.” And while Google’s online office applications have grown in popularity, Microsoft software is still nearly ubiquitous in offices, so there’s something to be said for prepping kids for the real world through use of such applications.

from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/comparing-apple-google-and-microsofts-education-plays/

Apple doubles down on book creation with iPad app

Apple’s ebook creation tools – first launched in 2012 – have long played an interesting if minor role in the ecosystem. While Amazon has the indie book world sewn up with Kindle Direct Publishing, the desktop-based iBooks Author has always been the multimedia alternative and a favorite for folks creating one-off texts. Although there are no clear numbers (the last announcement happened in 2015 when Apple claimed seeing 1 million new iBooks users per week), there is some evidence that it behooves indie authors to at least support the platform and with the new iPad Author tools it looks like creators – and educators – will be able to create and distribute their own iPad-based texts.

The app, which is part of Pages and is called Digital Books in new iOS parlance, allows users to create multimedia books just as they would create regular documents. The app also supports group editing and multiple templates allow you to flow images and text into the app seamlessly.

The new application is a direct attack on the current popular educational authoring tool, Google Docs. Anecdotally, the Brooklyn schools my kids attend all finish and turn in their homework via the schools own private Google accounts, a fact that probably keeps iOS educational team leads up at night. This move from a dedicated desktop app mostly aimed at indie authors and higher education to an iPad app aimed at small groups and, presumably, elementary and high school teachers who want to produce their own lightweight content, is a step in the right direction.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/apple-doubles-down-on-book-creation-with-ipad-app/

Udacity debuts a dedicated School of AI with three new nanodegrees

Udacity is intruding three dedicated new nanodegrees (its own accelerated learning program) in the field of artificial intelligence, which will become part of its new School of AI. AI has been a subject Udacity has taught nearly since its inception, beginning over five years ago, and the field has changed a lot since. It’s seen over 8,000 graduates from its nanodegree program, which means that its alumni make up an estimated 3 percent of the world’s total AI engineering pool, according to the company.

Now, it’s intruding an AI Programming with Python nanodegree, as well as a Computer Vision program (which it created with Nvidia and Affective) and a Natural Language Processing nanodegree build in partnership with Amazon Alex and IBM Watson. In addition to the three new focuses courses of study, Udacity is also revamping its core AI Nanodegree to focus on a core curriculum taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

In a few months, Udacity will also debut a new Reinforcement Learning AI program to bring the nanodegree total in the School of AI to four. This was build in partnership with Nvidia, too, as well as with Unity.

This new focus emphasizes the value of the field to the market Udacity servers, and shows where its hiring partner interest lies. AI fundamentals, and these specific areas, are applicable across a range of different product goals and development efforts, and should serve graduates well in a number of different fields.

from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/27/udacity-debuts-a-dedicated-school-of-ai-with-three-new-nanodegrees/

It's time

Time to get off the social media marketing merry-go-round that goes faster and faster but never actually goes anywhere.

Time to stop hustling and interrupting.

Time to stop spamming and pretending you're welcome.

Time to stop making average stuff for average people but hoping you can charge more than a commodity price.

Time to stop begging people to become your clients, and time to stop feeling badly about charging for your work.

Time to stop looking for shortcuts and time to start insisting on a long, viable path instead. 

Time to start contributing.

There are lots of ways to embrace modern marketing, but the there's no doubt that you'll be better off once you do.

Modern marketing is the practice of making something worth talking about, developing empathy for those you seek to serve and being in the market in a way that people would miss you if you were gone.

Today's the first day for signups for the proven, effective Marketing Seminar. We've worked with more than 5,000 students so far and they've made a substantial impact with their work. The Seminar is not just videos--it's an ongoing cohort, months of working directly with your peers, engaging, challenging and learning what works (and what doesn't.)

It might be just what you need to transform your work. If you click the purple circle on the bottom of the page, you'll save a bunch of money, but hurry, as the discount gets a little less valuable each day.

And, if you're the sort of student who would prefer to skip the discussion board and binge watch, we've just made the Seminar available in an all-video highlights format as well.

It's time to change the way you engage with the market. I'm hoping we can help.

       

from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/535364524/0/sethsblog~Its-time.html