Sunday, September 30, 2018

The war over music copyrights

VC firms haven’t been the only ones raising hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in a booming market. After 15+ years of being the last industry anyone wanted to invest in, the music industry is coming back, and money is flooding in to buy up the rights to popular songs.

As paid streaming subscriptions get mainstream adoption, the big music streaming services – namely Spotify, Apple Music, and Tencent Music, but also Pandora, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, and others – have entered their prime. There are now over 51 million paid subscription accounts among music streaming services in the US. The music industry grew 8% last year globally to $17.3 billion, driven by a 41% increase in streaming revenue and 45% increase in paid streaming revenue.

The surge in music streaming means a surge in income for those who own the copyrights to songs, and the growth of entertainment in emerging markets, growing use in digital videos, and potential use of music in new content formats like VR only expand this further. Unsurprisingly, private equity firms, family offices, corporates, and pension funds want a piece of the action.

There are two general types of copyrights for a song: the publishing rights and the master rights. The musical composition of a song – the lyrics, melodies, etc. – comes from songwriters who own the publishing right (though generally they sign a publishing deal and their publisher gets ownership of it in addition to half the royalties). Meanwhile, the version of a song being performed comes from the recording artist who owns the master right (though usually they sign a record deal and the record label gets ownership of the masters and most of the royalties).

Popular songs are valuable to own because of all the royalties they collect: whenever the song is played on a streaming service, downloaded from iTunes, or covered on YouTube (a mechanical license), played over radio or in a grocery store (a performance license), played as soundtrack over a movie or TV show (a sync license), and for other uses. More royalty income from a song goes to the master owner since they took on more financial risk marketing it, but publishers collect royalties from some channels that master owners don’t (like radio play, for instance).

For a songwriter behind popular songs, these royalties form a predictable revenue stream that can amount to tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars per year. Of course, most songs that are written or recorded don’t make any money: creating a track that breaks out in a crowded industry is hard. This scarcity – there are only so many thousands of popular musicians and a limited number of legendary artists whose music stays relevant for decades – means copyrights for successful musicians command a premium when they or their publisher decide to sell them.

Investing in streaming economics

In 2017, revenue from streaming services accounted for 38% of worldwide music industry revenue, finally overtaking revenue from traditional album sales and song downloads. Subscription streaming services hit a pivot point in gaining mainstream adoption, but they still have far to go. Goldman Sachs media sector analyst Lisa Yang predicted that by 2030, the global music industry will reach $41 billion in market size as the global streaming market multiplies in size to $34 billion (nearly all of it from paid subscriptions).

Merck Mercuriadis is seen on the left. (Photo by KMazur/WireImage for Conde Nast media group)

Earlier this week, I spoke with Merck Mercuriadis who has managed icons like Elton John, Guns N’ Roses, and BeyoncĂ© and raised £200 million ($260 million) on the London Stock Exchange in June for an investment vehicle (Hipgnosis Songs) to acquire the catalogues of top songwriters. His plan is to raise and invest £1 billion over the next three to five years, arguing that the shift to passive consumers paying for music will take the industry to heights it has never seen before.

Indeed, streaming music is a paradigm shift from the past. With all the world’s music available in one interface for free (with ads) or for an affordable subscription (without ads), consumers no longer have to actively choose which specific songs to buy (or even which to download illegally).

With it all in front of them and all included in the price, people are listening to a broader range of music: they’re exploring more genres, discovering more musicians who aren’t stars on traditional radio, and going back to music from past decades. Consumers who weren’t previously buying a lot of music are now subscribing for $120 per year and spreading it across more artists.

Retail businesses are doing the same: through streaming offerings like Soundtrack Your Brand (which spun out of Spotify), they’re using commercial licenses – which are more expensive – to stream a broader array of music in stores rather than putting on the radio or playing the same few CDs.

Much of the music industry’s market growth is happening in China, India, Latin America, and emerging markets like Nigeria where subscription apps are replacing widespread music piracy or non-consumption. Tencent Music Entertainment, whose three streaming services have roughly 75% market share in China (a music market that expanded by 34% last year), is preparing for an IPO that could give it roughly the same $29 billion valuation Spotify received in its IPO in April. Meanwhile, music industry revenue from Latin America grew 18% last year.

Western music is infused in pop culture worldwide, so as these countries enter the streaming era they are monetizing hundreds of millions of additional listeners, through ad revenue at a minimum but increasingly through paid subscriptions as well.

At the talent management, publishing, and production firm Primary Wave, founder Larry Mestel is seeing emerging markets drive more revenue to his clients (like Smokey Robinson, Alice Cooper, Melissa Etheridge, and the estate of Bob Marley) as new fan bases engage with their music online. He raised a new $300 million fund (backed by Blackrock and other institutions) in 2016 to acquire rights in music catalogues amid a market he says has improved substantially due to growth opportunities stemming from the streaming model.

It’s not just streaming music platforms that are driving growth either. Streaming video has exploded, whether it’s from short YouTube videos or the growing number of shows on platforms like Hulu and Amazon Prime Video, and with that comes growing sync licensing of songs for their soundtracks; global sync licensing revenue was up 10% year-over-year in 2017 alone. Over the last year, Facebook signed licenses with every large publisher to cover use of song clips by its users in Instagram Stories and Facebook videos as well.

The inflating valuations of songs catalogues

Catalogues are commonly valued based on the “net publisher’s share,” which is the average amount of annual royalty money left over after paying out any percentages owed to others (like a partial stake in the royalties still held by the artist).

When Round Hill Music acquired Carlin for $245 million in January to gain ownership in the catalogues of Elvis Presley, James Brown, AC/DC, and others, it paid a 16x multiple on net publisher share, which is high but not uncommon in the current market when trading catalogues of legendary artists. Just three years ago, multiples anchored in the 10-12 range (or less for newer or smaller artists whose music has not yet shown the same longevity).

Avid Larizadeh Duggan left her role as a general partner at GV to become Chief Strategy & Business Officer of Kobalt

Kobalt, which raised $205 million from VC firms like GV and Balderton Capital to become a technology-centric publisher and label services powerhouse, has also become an active player in the space. Aside from its core operating business (where it stands out from traditional publishers and labels for not taking control of clients’ copyrights), it has raised two funds ($600M for the most recent one) to help institutional investors like the Railpen pension fund in the UK gain exposure to music copyrights as an asset class. In December, their fund acquired the catalogue of publisher SONGS Music Publishing for a reported $160M in a sale process against 13 other bidders looking to buy ownership in songs by Lorde, The Weeknd, and other young pop and hip-hop artists.

Too high a price?

The natural question to ask when there’s a rapid surge of money (and a corresponding surge in prices) in an asset class is whether there’s a bubble. After all, last year’s industry revenues were still only 68% of those in 1999 and the rate of growth will inevitably slow once streaming has captured the early majority of consumers.

But the fundamentals driving this capital are in line with a secular shift – it’s evident that music streaming still has a lot of room to grow in a few short years, especially as a large portion of the human population is just coming online (and doing so over mobile first). Plus as new content formats like augmented and virtual reality come to fruition, new categories of music sync licensing will inevitably accompany them for their soundtracks.

Each catalogue is its own case, of course. As Shamrock Capital managing director Jason Sklar emphasized to me, the rising tide isn’t lifting all boats equally. The streaming revolution appears to be disproportionately benefiting hip-hop, rap, and pop given the youth skew of streaming service users and the digital-native social media engagement of the artists in those genres.

Beyond the purchase price, the critical variable for evaluating a deal in this market is also the operational value a potential buyer can provide to the catalogue: their ability to actively promote songs from the past by pitching them to new TV shows, ad campaigns, and any number of other projects that will keep them culturally relevant. This is where strategic investors have an advantage over purely financial investors in publishing rights, especially when it comes to the longer tail of middle-tier artist’s whose music doesn’t naturally get the inbound demand that the Beatles or Prince catalogues do.

With strong long-term market growth and a wide range of possible niches and strategies, music copyrights are an asset class where we’ll see a number of major new players develop.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/30/the-war-over-music-copyrights/

Inadequacy on parade

A never-ending stream of pictures. People who are prettier than you, happier than you, more confident than you. Weddings that are fancier than yours was, with sun-dappled trees, luscious desserts and delighted relatives. Or perhaps it’s the status updates from everyone who is where you aren’t, but wish you were.

And the billboards and the magazine ads always show us the people we’d like to be instead of the people we are.

In the short run, gazing at all this perfection gives us a short hit of dopamine, a chance to imagine what it might be like.

Over time, though, the grinding inadequacy caused by the marketing machine wears us down.

It’s okay to turn it off.

 


PS Consider The Bootstrapper’s Workshop. Today, Sunday, is the last day to sign up for it, and we’re not sure when it will run again. If it’s for you, please don’t miss it.

Since it began just a few weeks ago, there have been 500,000 pageviews, more than 15,000 user visits and 31,000 posts. All from people on a journey similar to yours, one in search of a sustainable model for creating significant value and earning a living while doing it.

The workshop is open for more than two more months. Hope you can join in.

       


from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/572095412/0/sethsblog~Inadequacy-on-parade/

Saturday, September 29, 2018

“Zeige Deine Wunde” (show me your wound)

Joseph Beuys didn't make pretty art.

When I was 12, I saw an exhibit he had at the Guggenheim in NY. As its centerpiece was a 3,000 pound block of lard, wrapped in felt. It was bizarre, it smelled a bit and forty or more years later, I haven't forgotten it.

Beuys was transformed by near-death experiences he had as a youth. And that wound informed the art that he made. He shared his pain and more than that, the route to his salvation.

This isn't what we want from everything in our lives. We often choose convenience, solace or reassurance. But more often than we realize, the dance with fear and mortality and risk that others engage in becomes part of our cultural landscape.

       


from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/571981338/0/sethsblog~%e2%80%9cZeige-Deine-Wunde%e2%80%9d-show-me-your-wound/

Friday, September 28, 2018

Nielsen: US smart speaker adoption grew to 24% in Q2 2018, 4 in 10 own more than one

In the second quarter, the adoption of smart speakers — like Amazon Echo and Google Home devices — grew to 24 percent in the U.S., up from 22 percent the prior quarter, according to new data from Nielsen, released this week. The measurement firm took a look at how consumers were using their speakers, when, as well as how many were buying multiple devices.

The firm found that 4 out of 10 smart speaker owners have more than one device — a sizable percentage that points to consumers finding enough value in their first device to add more throughout the home.

The living room is the most popular location for smart speaker placement (63 percent), followed by the bedroom (35 percent) and then the kitchen (28 percent).

This is not surprising, given that the primary use case for the devices is music streaming, with 90 percent of smart speaker owners saying they stream music at least once per week.

Searching for real-time information like weather or traffic, followed by searches for historical facts, were the next most popular activities, at 81 percent and 75 percent, respectively. News was tied for fourth place, with 68 percent listening in a typical week (68 percent also said they chatted with their assistant for fun and used alarms and timers).

That so many people are chatting with their smart assistants, like Alexa and Google Assistant, in a more playful capacity is worth noting here. It’s not enough for these voice platforms to be good at finding and retrieving information and taking actions, they have to do that with some personality, too. Amazon has even gone so far as to give Alexa her own opinions on things like pets, beer, movies, colors and more, which change from time to time.

Smart speakers are also acting as a bit of an extension of our mobile devices, the report said. Nielsen found that consumers were syncing data from their phones to the voice-based devices for things like audio streaming (53 percent) and shopping apps (52 percent), and more. This latter figure seems to indicate that many are, in fact, using their smart devices for shopping-related activities, despite earlier reports that downplayed shopping’s connection with smart speaker devices.

A recent report from The Information, citing leaked Amazon data, claimed that consumers were not making purchases through Echo devices. However, it seems that consumers are taking a first step toward purchase — list making — through Alexa. When the sale later goes through, however, it’s on the web, mobile web or in the native app, not directly from the speaker. Whether or not that’s actually impacting sales, or just offering consumers a different way to create their purchase reminders, still remains to be seen. But there is a connection between the devices and the shopping app, this data shows.

Consumers were also found to use their smart speakers more often on weekends, and in the afternoons, increasing as it got later in the evening, the survey said.

Also notable is that consumer sentiment toward their smart speakers is highly positive.

Indeed, 75 percent said they’d like to learn how to do more with the devices, and 72 percent said they would recommend them or purchase them as a gift for family and friends.

The data in the report comes from a new Nielsen consumer tracking survey called MediaTech Trender, which aims to understand consumer sentiment and behavior around emerging technologies, like smart speakers, VR and other platforms. This particular survey was conducted among 2,000 U.S. consumers, and will continue to be done on a quarterly basis.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/28/nielsen-u-s-smart-speaker-adoption-grew-to-24-in-q2-2018-4-in-10-own-more-than-one/

The daily

Is there something you do every day that builds an asset for you?

Every single day?

Something that creates another bit of intellectual property that belongs to you?

Something that makes an asset you own more valuable?

Something that you learn?

Every single day is a lot of days. It’s easy to look at the long run and lull yourself into skipping a day now and then.

But the long run is made up of short runs.

 

[And a first reminder that the February (!) session of the altMBA is now accepting applications. I hope you’ll consider it.]

       


from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/571819146/0/sethsblog~The-daily/

Thursday, September 27, 2018

Microsoft will end support for Skype Classic in November

This summer, Microsoft pushed off the inevitable end of Skype Classic (7.0) support after a fair bit of user backlash. Nearly a month after the original September deadline, the company announced today that it’s going to pull the plug in November — for real this time.

The company is killing Skype 7 support on the desktop on November 1, following suit for mobile and tablets two weeks later on the 15th. The initial delay was motivated by vocal users unhappy by the changes brought on by Skype 8 in the name of simplification.

One user went so far as launching a Change.org petition asking Microsoft to “Keep the desktop version of Skype alive for professional users.” That’s since racked up in excess of 1,000 signatures, demanding the company keep enterprise features lost in the shuffle.

For its part, Microsoft says that it’s listening and responding to the outcry over abandoned features.

“We’re continuing to work on your most requested features,” the company writes in an update to the original announcement. “Recently we launched call recording and have started to roll out the ability to search within a conversation. You’ll soon be able to add phone numbers to existing contacts, have more control over your availability status, and more.”



from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/microsoft-will-end-support-for-skype-classic-in-november/

SwiftKey on Android now has two-way translation baked in. Qué bien

The Internet is of course amazing if you want to send messages across borders. But different languages can still put a wrinkle in your conversational flow, even with all the handy translation apps also on tap to help turn zut alors into shucks!

So Microsoft-owned SwiftKey is probably still onto something with a new feature launching today in its Android app that bakes two-way translation right into the keyboard — which should save a lot of tedious copy-pasting, at least if you’re frequently conversing across language barriers.

It’s not clear whether the translation feature will be coming to SwiftKey on iOS too (we’ve asked and will update with any additional details).

Microsoft Translator is the underlying technology powering the core linguistic automagic. So SwiftKey’s parent is intimately involved in this feature addition.

Microsoft’s tech does continue to exist in a standalone app form too, though. And that app is getting a cross-promotional push, via the SwiftKey addition, with the company touting an added benefit for users if they install Microsoft Translator — as the keyboard translation feature will then work offline.

(SwiftKey had some 300M active users at the time of its acquisition by Microsoft, three years ago, so the size of that promotional push for Translator is potentially pretty large.)

The translation option is being added to SwiftKey via a relatively recently launched Toolbar that lets users customize the keyboard — such as by adding stickers, location or calendar.

To access the Toolbar (and the various add-ons nested within it) users tap on the ‘+’ in the upper left corner.

With translation enabled, users of the next word predicting keyboard can then switch between input and output languages to turn incoming missives from one of more than 60 languages into another tongue at the tap of a button, as well as translate their outgoing replies back the other way without needing to know how to write in that other language.

Supported languages include Italian, Spanish, Germany, Russian and Turkish, to name a few.

And while the machine translation technology is doing away with the immediate need for human foreign language expertise, there’s at least a chance app users will learn a bit as they go along — i.e. as they watch their words get rendered in another tongue right before their eyes.

As tech magic goes, translation is hard to beat. Even though machine translation can often still be very rough round the edges. But here, for helping with everyday chatting on mobiule messaging apps, there’s no doubt it will be a great help.

Commenting on the new feature in a statement, Colleen Hall, senior product manager at SwiftKey, said: “The integration of Microsoft Translator into SwiftKey is a great, natural fit, enhancing the raft of language-focused features we know our users love to use.”



from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/swiftkey-on-android-now-has-two-way-translation-baked-in-que-bien/

Amazon’s Thursday Night Football live stream will feature real-time stats, Amazon.com shopping

Amazon is taking full advantage of its deal to live stream Thursday Night Football games, which it snagged the rights to earlier this year. The company will this year launch a TNF pre-game show, co-stream the games on its video game streaming site Twitch, and will leverage Prime Video’s “X-Ray” technology to give viewers access to real-time stats, team info, and the ability to shop for team merchandise on Amazon.com.

X-Ray for Prime Video typically offers viewers information about cast and characters in a TV program or movie, as well as info about the music and, sometimes, additional trivia.

In the case of TNF, however, the focus will be on the players and teams.

With the start of the games today, September 27, at 8:20 PM ET, X-Ray on Prime Video will debut a new experience across Fire TV devices, including Fire TV Cube, 4K, Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick, which will give fans live stats and player information, without taking them away from the action.

Instead, viewers will be able to push the “up” button the Fire TV remote to see information like Game Leaders and Team Stats to track top players rushing, passing, receiving, and more. They can deep dive into a favorite team through the new “Teams” tab to learn facts like who owns the team, or how many Super Bowls they’ve won, among other things.

The X-Ray feature will also display real-time play stats and history, available through a “Play History” tab.

While these options are largely repurposing Amazon’s X-Ray feature and putting it to use for sports, the “Shop” option takes things a step further.

Amazon will now allow U.S. viewers to shop its site via X-Ray for things like team hats, t-shirts and other gear – all right from the TV screen.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has tried to blend TV viewing with shopping. It also launched a TV app in the past and even tried a watch-while-you-shop show, Style Code Live, which it later canned. During this year’s Prime Day, it ran QVC-style videos for selected products. But X-Ray isn’t typically used for shopping.

Also new this year to the stream is the option for all-female audio commentary from sports journalists Andrea Kremer and Hannah Storm. Amazon said this is the first time two women commentators have covered an NFL game in its entirety.

The option will be joined by others, including a Fox Sports commentary from Joe Buck and Troy Aikman, plus a Spanish-language feed, and a U.K. English feed.

Meanwhile, over on Twitch (which Amazon owns), the game will be live-streamed on the Prime Video channel, where it will include interactive extensions.

Instead of X-Ray, there will be an overlay featuring similar real-time stats, including NFL standings and team stat pages.

Viewers will aso be able to chat using NFL emojis (Twitch’s emotes), that include team logos and other Twitch originals, like those for touchdowns, flags, catching and running with the ball, and more.

The popular Twitch streamer GoldGlove will also co-stream the game with his own commentary on September 27.

Amazon and Twitch will stream 11 TNF games this season across over 200 countries, starting tonight with Vikings vs. Rams at 8:20 PM ET, following the pre-show at 7:15 PM ET.

 



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/amazons-thursday-night-football-live-stream-will-feature-real-time-stats-amazon-com-shopping/

Amazon’s Alexa Fund invests in three voice startups

Founded in 2015, Amazon’s Alexa Fund is devoted to helping kickstart early-stage voice startups. This week, it’s announced support for a trio of new companies. 

There’s Bamboo Learning, which was an early partner for Amazon’s Alexa Presentation Language (APL). The startup develops music educational skills, teaching users about notes, instruments, chords and tempo, along with other bits of music vocabulary.

Endel, meanwhile, is designed to use soundscapes to help users relax. According to the company, “Our core algorithm is based on circadian rhythms, pentatonic scale and sound masking. The sounds adapt to different inputs – like time of day, weather, heart rate, and location.”

There’s also healthcare startup Aiva, which uses voice assistants to help route users to healthcare professions. Both Aiva and Endel are Techstars alumni.The three companies will get funding from Amazon and will take part in Amazon’s Demo Night.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/amazons-alexa-fund-invests-in-three-voice-startups/

In search of your chord

There are 88 keys on a piano.

64 colors in the big box of Crayola.

You can’t own a key and you can’t own a color.

But once you start combining elements, the possibilities go way up.

The opening chord of a Hard Day’s Night is a unique signature. So are the colors in a Lilly Pulitzer dress.

Your work can struggle to fit in. Or you can do the hard work of having it stand out.

As you can see from the notes on the single chord the Beatles developed, it’s not obvious or simple. And most of the time, it doesn’t even work. But if you find a chord and stick with it, again and again, for years, then, over time, it might become yours.

 

       


from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/571652960/0/sethsblog~In-search-of-your-chord/

Wednesday, September 26, 2018

Amazon is opening a new brick-and-mortar store in NYC featuring its best sellers

Amazon is expanding its brick-and-mortar footprint with a new kind of store, the company announced this afternoon. On Thursday, the retailer will open an “Amazon 4-Star” store in New York, where all the items it sells are rated 4 stars and above, are a top seller or are new and trending on Amazon. It’s effectively a real-world introduction to Amazon’s best products, in other words.

The store will be located in SoHo, on Spring Street between Crosby and Lafayette Streets, and will be open 10 AM – 9 PM Monday through Saturday, and 11 AM – 8 PM on Sundays.

The 4-Star store, Amazon explains in an announcement, is “a direct reflection of our customers—what they’re buying and what they’re loving.”

Amazon, thanks to its massive e-commerce site, does know what sells. The average rating of all the products it stocks in the new store is 4.4 stars, and combined, the products have amassed more than 1.8 million 5-star customer reviews, the retailer says.

The store is divided into sections like “Most Wished For” items, which represent those people are adding to their Amazon Wish Lists, as well as “Amazon Exclusives,” and “Frequently Bought Together,” which represents the Amazon algorithm come to life. It will also feature some locally popular products in its “Trending Around NYC” section.

At launch, the store includes items like the card game Codenames (4.8 stars, with more than 2,000 customer reviews); a Lodge 3.5 Inch Cast Iron Mini Skillet (4.4 stars, with more than 10,900 customer reviews) and, naturally, Amazon’s own devices like the Echo Spot (4.5 stars, with more than 5,600 customer reviews) and the Fire TV Stick (4.4 stars, with more than 197,000 customer reviews). Both the Spot and Fire TV Stick were top sellers on Amazon Prime Day this year, and are among Amazon’s overall best sellers.

What’s interesting about Amazon 4-Star is how the items are priced.

Shoppers who are Prime members will pay the Amazon.com price for their purchases, while non-Prime members will pay the list price. The store will also work as a fairly expensive user acquisition strategy for Amazon, given the cost of real estate — non-Prime members will have the option to sign up for a free Prime trial in the store in order to get the Amazon.com discount.

Amazon has been steadily expanding into real-world venues in recent years. It acquired a large brick-and-mortar footprint with its acquisition of green grocer Whole Foods, and has been steadily launching its new cashierless Amazon Go stores in select markets, as well. It also has some Amazon Books stores and other pop-ups focused on device sales around the U.S.

The retailer didn’t say if it intends to bring 4-Star to other locations either in or outside NYC in the future.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/amazon-will-open-a-new-brick-and-mortar-store-in-nyc-featuring-its-best-sellers/

In Senate hearing, tech giants push lawmakers for federal privacy rules

Another day, another hearing of tech giants in Congress.

Wednesday’s hearing at the Senate Commerce Committee with Apple, Amazon, Google and Twitter, alongside AT&T and Charter, marked the latest in a string of hearings in the past few months into all things tech: but mostly controversies embroiling the companies, from election meddling to transparency.

This time, privacy was at the top of the agenda. The problem, lawmakers say, is that consumers have little of it. The hearing said that the U.S. was lagging behind Europe’s new GDPR privacy rules and California’s recently passed privacy law, which goes into effect in 2020, and lawmakers were edging toward introducing their own federal privacy law.

Here are the key takeaways.

Tech giants want new federal legislation, if not just to upend California’s privacy law

For once, the tech giants seemed to agree with one another.

AT&T, Apple, Charter and Google used their time in the Senate to call on lawmakers to introduce new federal privacy legislation. Tech companies spent the past year pushing back against the new state regulations, but have conceded that new privacy rules are inevitable.

Now the companies realize that it’s better to sit at the table to influence a federal privacy law than stand outside in the cold.

In pushing for a new federal law, representatives from each company confirmed that they support the preemption of California’s new rules — something that critics oppose.

AT&T’s chief lawyer Len Cali said that a patchwork of state laws would be unworkable. Apple, too, agreed to support a privacy law, but noted as a company that doesn’t hoard user data for advertising — like Facebook and Google — that any federal law would need to put a premium on protecting the consumer rather than helping companies make money.

But Amazon’s chief lawyer Andrew DeVore said that complying with privacy rules has “required us to divert significant resources to administrative tasks and away from invention.”

Sen. John Thune (R-SD) asked the representatives why lawmakers shouldn’t adopt the same standards seen in Europe and California at a federal level, but none of the companies could answer.

“That question lingers here,” said Thune. “The opposition that you’ve expressed to these rules is one that can nonetheless accommodate the kind of rules that we’ve seen in GDPR and California.”

Google made “mistakes” on privacy, but evades China search questioning

Google took a rare moment to admit it hasn’t always taken the right approach to privacy — though, it wouldn’t point to any specific incident.

“We acknowledge that we have made mistakes in the past, from which we have learned, and improved our robust privacy program,” Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, said in his opening statement.

But that, lawmakers said, contrasted with recent reports of the company’s return to China — almost a decade after it pulled out of the country after allegations of Chinese efforts to hack into the search giant’s systems and ethical conflicts with China’s censorship policies.

Google reportedly began working on “Dragonfly,” a China-focused search engine that would block certain keywords to fall in line with China’s censorship rules. The effort has been widely decried by human rights groups, and led to a high-profile resignation.

Prior to the Senate hearing, a former Google engineer sent a letter to the committee asking lawmakers to pressure Enright to respond.

Google to date has refused to confirm or comment on the reports, but Enright said that “there is a Project Dragonfly.”

“We are not close to launching a search product in China,” he said, in response to one lawmaker. Later, he said that he didn’t think the company “could or would launch a product” without including its privacy and security policies.

Startups might struggle under GDPR-ported rules, companies claim

Startups and small businesses with slimmer resources than the tech giants could be a major casualty if GDPR-like rules were ported into federal law.

Enright said that ensuring compliance under GDPR was complicated and costly, but wouldn’t put a figure on how much Google had spent on complying with GDPR when asked by one lawmaker. Enright suggested that it was likely in the millions of dollars.

But even larger companies like Charter, which are wholly U.S.-based and have no European presence, said they wouldn’t know how they would be affected if GDPR principles were ported over stateside.

Charter’s policy chief Rachel Welch said that the U.S. should “put its own stamp” and not just roll over GDPR principles.

Apple added that self-employed developers and software house startups could suffer under new federal privacy rules. The company has some 20 million developers that rely on its app store to sell their software. “Small companies don’t have teams of lawyers to draft things,” said Apple’s Bud Tribble, and asked that any new federal rules should consider startups “to help make things clear and so that businesses have one set of rules than many sets of rules to follow.”

It’s a line parroted by tech giants before and without much evidence to back it up. Although some companies have shuttered operations in Europe, other startups hit the deadline and continue to thrive.

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) called for greater representation from startups to help understand the cost breakdowns to understand it better.

Thune said that the committee won’t “rush through” legislation, and will ask privacy advocates for their input in a coming hearing.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/in-senate-hearing-tech-giants-push-lawmakers-for-federal-privacy-rules/

Alexa is reported down across Europe

Reports are coming in that Amazon’s Alexa service is down in parts of UK, Spain, Germany and Austria. According to Down Detector and Twitter, the problem started surfacing around 8am local time and still continues. Interestingly, some users are reporting the issue is isolated to Echo Dot 2 models and while other Echo devices are still working. Sometimes. Other reports say everything is down. When users try to talk to their Echo devices, Alexa will report an error with connectivity and spin a red ring around the top.

Because of this outage, users will have to use wall switches to turn on lights, press buttons to make coffee and look outside to assess the weather. Sucks. I know.

As Engadget points out in their coverage, the outage could stem from Amazon Web Service issues at the company’s Ireland facility. Amazon is now reporting that those issues have been resolved so there’s a chance Alexa will be coming back online shortly.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/alexa-is-reported-down-across-europe/

Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs

Say hello to the Bandwidth Alliance, a new group led by Cloudflare that promises to reduce the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers. The overall idea here is that customers who use both Cloudflare, which is turning eight years old this week, and a cloud provider that’s part of this alliance will get a significant discount on their egress traffic or won’t have to pay for it at all.

The alliance is open, and others may join still, but right now it includes virtually every major and minor cloud provider you’ve ever heard of — with one exception. Current members include Automattic, Backblaze, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, IBM Cloud, Linode, Google, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Packet, Scaleway and Vapor. Some of these will now offer free egress traffic to mutual customers with Cloudflare, while others will offer at least a 75 percent discount.

That’s quite the alliance, but as Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, once the first member joined, the rest of the pieces fell into place quickly. Surely it also helped that both Google and Microsoft have invested in Cloudflare.

Why would these businesses choose to do away with what’s a minor but high-margin business, though? “The argument that we made to them was a pretty simple argument: it makes sense for you to charge for transit when you are actually paying for it,” Prince said. Most of the time, though, those costs are very minor and Cloudflare, thanks to his massive number of global peering locations, can ingest the traffic directly from the cloud provider with no middlemen involved.

The first company Cloudflare partnered with was Google, thanks to that company’s CDN Interconnect program, which launched in 2015. Cloudflare was one of the initial partners in the program, though as Prince noted, there was still a lot to learn for all parties involved, especially because traffic was sometimes routed in very unpredictable ways that circumvented the cost savings mechanisms. Cloudflare learned from this, though, and is now using its own Argo technology to intelligently route traffic.

As Prince noted, though, one thing that turned out to be harder than anticipated was ensuring that the cloud vendors would know that one of their customers is a mutual customer. Some have that instrumentation in place, while Cloudflare needs to pass a special header to them so they can know where their traffic is coming from.

Prince also argued that this will make it easier for many companies to use multiple cloud providers without having to pay extremely high bandwidth cost. While Cloudflare’s early focus was very much on web traffic, Prince said that more than half is now API-based traffic, and that’s exactly the kind of user who will likely save quite a bit of money thanks to this.

The one company that’s not part of this alliance, of course, is Amazon with its AWS platform. Prince said that Cloudflare has talked to them, though, and the group is open to all cloud and CDN providers.



from Amazon – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/cloudflare-partners-with-microsoft-google-and-others-to-reduce-bandwidth-costs/

Cloudflare partners with Microsoft, Google and others to reduce bandwidth costs

Say hello to the Bandwidth Alliance, a new group led by Cloudflare that promises to reduce the price of bandwidth for many cloud customers. The overall idea here is that customers who use both Cloudflare, which is turning eight years old this week, and a cloud provider that’s part of this alliance will get a significant discount on their egress traffic or won’t have to pay for it at all.

The alliance is open, and others may join still, but right now it includes virtually every major and minor cloud provider you’ve ever heard of — with one exception. Current members include Automattic, Backblaze, Digital Ocean, DreamHost, IBM Cloud, Linode, Google, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Packet, Scaleway and Vapor. Some of these will now offer free egress traffic to mutual customers with Cloudflare, while others will offer at least a 75 percent discount.

That’s quite the alliance, but as Cloudflare CEO and co-founder Matthew Prince told me, once the first member joined, the rest of the pieces fell into place quickly. Surely it also helped that both Google and Microsoft have invested in Cloudflare.

Why would these businesses choose to do away with what’s a minor but high-margin business, though? “The argument that we made to them was a pretty simple argument: it makes sense for you to charge for transit when you are actually paying for it,” Prince said. Most of the time, though, those costs are very minor and Cloudflare, thanks to his massive number of global peering locations, can ingest the traffic directly from the cloud provider with no middlemen involved.

The first company Cloudflare partnered with was Google, thanks to that company’s CDN Interconnect program, which launched in 2015. Cloudflare was one of the initial partners in the program, though as Prince noted, there was still a lot to learn for all parties involved, especially because traffic was sometimes routed in very unpredictable ways that circumvented the cost savings mechanisms. Cloudflare learned from this, though, and is now using its own Argo technology to intelligently route traffic.

As Prince noted, though, one thing that turned out to be harder than anticipated was ensuring that the cloud vendors would know that one of their customers is a mutual customer. Some have that instrumentation in place, while Cloudflare needs to pass a special header to them so they can know where their traffic is coming from.

Prince also argued that this will make it easier for many companies to use multiple cloud providers without having to pay extremely high bandwidth cost. While Cloudflare’s early focus was very much on web traffic, Prince said that more than half is now API-based traffic, and that’s exactly the kind of user who will likely save quite a bit of money thanks to this.

The one company that’s not part of this alliance, of course, is Amazon with its AWS platform. Prince said that Cloudflare has talked to them, though, and the group is open to all cloud and CDN providers.



from Microsoft – TechCrunch https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/26/cloudflare-partners-with-microsoft-google-and-others-to-reduce-bandwidth-costs/

High value

… is not the same as low price.

The price is obvious. It can be seen from a mile away. But value is more subtle. It often needs to be experienced to be understood.

The price is the same for every person who buys that item at retail. The value is different for everyone.

Low price is the last refuge for marketers who don’t have the patience or guts to demonstrate value for those that need it.

       


from Seth Godin's Blog on marketing, tribes and respect http://feeds.feedblitz.com/~/571491566/0/sethsblog~High-value/