La combinación de ADN y genealogía tiene un gran potencial para identificar a personas adoptadas, niños abandonados y concebidos por donación; incluso, para ayudar en investigaciones criminales. Pero debe usarse de manera responsable
Source: MIT
Un nuevo informe de IESE Business School ha entrevistado a directores de innovación de 44 empresas para crear una hoja de ruta con la que las grandes corporaciones pueden encontrar su mejor camino para innovar a la velocidad de las ‘start-ups’
Source: MIT
The social network’s new feature looks eerily similar to a dating app created in 2012—but as in the past, Facebook can get away with it
Source: Wired
In April, Spotify and Hulu teamed up on a discounted bundle of both of their services for $12.99 per month, following a similar deal for students launched last fall. Now, it seems, the streaming service is considering expanding its entertainment bundle offerings to include one with Scribd’s audiobooks service, too.
In a consumer survey that recently popped up in Spotify’s mobile app, the company asks a lot of questions about audiobooks — and more specifically, about a bundle with Spotify, Hulu and Scribd combined.
.@Spotify to offer @hulu or @Scribd in addition to the premium plan
pic.twitter.com/pW1ijxEbLE
— Kevin Natanzon (@kevntz) May 3, 2018
The survey begins with questions about media consumption habits involving reading or listening to non-music content — like if the customer had listened to an audiobook or podcast in the past three months, or if they’ve read a physical book, magazine or e-book.
It then asks the customer how they listen to audiobooks, how often and using which format — downloads, borrowing, CDs or subscriptions.
In a question about subscriptions, Spotify asks, “Which is your main audiobook subscription service taht you use?”
The survey taker can then choose from: Playster, Scribd, Amazon Prime, Downpour, Otto, Audiobooks.com, Kindle unlimited, Audible, Kobo and Other.
But the most interesting question is the one where Spotify tries to get a feel for consumer interest in a Spotify/Hulu/Scribd bundle.
The bundle, the survey explains, would add an additional $2.99 per month on top of the existing Spotify Premium for Family subscription, which currently costs $14.99. Like the Hulu/Spotify deal, it would offer access to Hulu’s Limited Commercials plan along with a Premium subscription to Spotify — in this case, however, its family plan. But for an extra $2.99 per month — bringing the total to $17.98 per month — the customer would receive 1 free book credit per month from Scribd’s library of audiobooks. (Scribd usually is $8.99 per month for unlimited books).
These audiobooks would be ad-free and could be listened to offline, the survey notes.
Of course, a survey question doesn’t mean that a deal currently exists or is being offered to customers. It doesn’t even mean Spotify will follow through by offering a deal with Scribd. But it is an interesting signal about Spotify’s plans — especially given its recent partnership with Hulu, and its earlier comments about exploring different bundles in the future, which were made after its first bundle launched.
The issue facing Hulu and Spotify’s services — and Scribd as well, for that matter — is a war with platform giants like Amazon, Apple and Google, which are already bundling streaming services for music, video and, in Amazon’s case, books, magazines and audiobooks, and a host of other perks via Amazon Prime.
Apple, too, is exploring a magazine subscription service, according to reports; and its upcoming over-the-top TV service is expected to be bundled with Apple Music. Google, meanwhile, is planning a revamp of its music subscription service, which will incorporate YouTube video.
That means rivals like Spotify, Hulu and Scribd will have to fight back with deals of their own — and maybe even consolidation efforts through M&A at some point.
Reached for comment, a Spotify spokesperson responded, “We continuously test new products and features to better the on platform experience for our users. This is not an indication of an upcoming partnership at this time.”
At this time. Yep. Noted.
Source: TechCrunch
On World Password Day, Twitter discloses a major gaffe that left user passwords potentially vulnerable.
Source: Wired
A year and change after the car maker pleaded guilty to obstructing investigations and importing cars under false pretenses, Volkswagen’s former CEO Martin Winterkorn has been charged with conspiracy and wire fraud in a U.S. court. All of this stems from a diesel emissions scandal that ultimately found VW paying $4.3 billion in penalties.
Winterkorn stepped down from his role at Volkswagen in September of 2015, only a matter of days after the German car maker confessed to outfitting 11 million cars with a device designed to cheat at emissions testing.
Winterkorn is the highest ranking of a number of former executives named in an indictment unsealed by U.S. courts today. Initial claims by VW had suggested that the cheating was only known by lower-level executives, but the indictment suggests that the former CEO was alerted to the situation as far back as 2014.
”The indictment of Winterkorn alleges that he was informed of VW’s diesel emissions cheating in May 2014 and again in July 2015,” the Justice Department said in a statement issued today. “The indictment further alleges that Winterkorn, after having been clearly informed of the emissions cheating, agreed with other senior VW executives to continue to perpetrate the fraud and deceive U.S. regulators.
The scandal has continued to plague the automaker. Last month, CEO Matthias Müller stepped down from the CEO role three years after replacing Winterkorn.
Source: TechCrunch
NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago and This American Life announced today that they’ve acquired Pocket Casts, a podcast app created by Australian developer Shifty Jelly.
That might sound like a lot of owners for one app, but the idea is to run Pocket Casts as a joint venture. And while former iHeartRadio executive Owen Grover is becoming CEO, NPR says the existing Pocket Casts team will remain in place, with founders Philip Simpson and Russell Ivanovic holding leadership roles in the company.
All four of the acquirers have released their own apps already, but buying Pocket Casts should give them another way to become more involved in distribution and reach listeners directly. (This seems to be a growing concern among all public radio organizations — in 2016, public radio marketplace PRX spun out a for-profit company called RadioPublic to focus on mobile apps.)
At the same time, NPR says Pocket Casts will continue to offer podcasts from a wide variety of producers.
Laura Walker, president and CEO of New York Public Radio (which includes WNYC Studios), said in the announcement:
Public radio has been at the vanguard of audio innovation and podcasting, bringing in new listeners, experimenting with new forms and topics, fostering engagement and community, and cultivating new talent in the industry. And yet despite this remarkable renaissance, the listening experience — particularly around discovery — has remained virtually unchanged. Pocket Casts will enable us to forge a closer relationship with our listeners, provide audiences with more ways to enjoy audio programming, and create a more tailored discovery experience that helps listeners find their next must-listen podcast.
Source: TechCrunch
Yes, it’s that time again — password changing time. On Thursday, Twitter revealed that a bug caused the platform to store user passwords in unmasked form. Normally, sensitive personal data like passwords would be stored in hashed form using a mix of letters and numbers to protect the content of the password itself. In this instance, it sounds like plain text passwords were stored openly without any hashing on Twitter’s internal logs.
Twitter notes that it currently has “no reason to believe password information ever left Twitter’s system” or that these unprotected passwords were accessed by hackers, but the risk of the unknown remains. The company has advised users to change their passwords as a precautionary measure.
Here’s what Twitter says happened:
“We mask passwords through a process called hashing using a function known as bcrypt, which replaces the actual password with a random set of numbers and letters that are stored in Twitter’s system. This allows our systems to validate your account credentials without revealing your password. This is an industry standard.
Due to a bug, passwords were written to an internal log before completing the hashing process. We found this error ourselves, removed the passwords, and are implementing plans to prevent this bug from happening again.”
We’ve reached out to Twitter for more details on the bug and additional information about how this could have happened.
It’s pretty unusual for a company of this size to make such a basic security mistake, but that’s just another reason for users to take password protection into their own hands on all services using protections like two-factor authentication and a password manager like LastPass or 1Password.
Source: TechCrunch
I/O doesn’t actually kick off until next Tuesday, but Google’s been steadily trickling out news this week. Perhaps it’s priming the pump for next week’s big event, or maybe the company just had more news than it could cram into a couple of keynotes. Whatever the case, today brought some new additions to the wearable operating system formerly known as Android Wear.
It’s hard to say how much energy Google is going to put into Wear OS in the coming week, but in the meantime, it’s getting some solid Assistant updates. The pairing of the two offerings is a no brainer, of course. Siri’s proven an important driver for Apple Watch, and a workaround for the whole small screen issue.
Google added its own Assistant to Android Wear last year, and is continuing to refine the experience with some key updates. At the top of the list is smart suggestions, which offers followup questions based on context. Ask Google what the weather is, and it will offer up followups for additional days’ forecasts.
Assistant’s wrist worn counterpart can also offer up voice answers through a pair of connected headhones. The update, which is rolling out over the next week or so will also bring Actions to the wearable OS, meaning much more more third-party control. Now users can, say, preheat an LG smart oven from the comfort of their own wrist.
There’s nothing really earth shattering here, but it’s nice to see Google continuing to give Wear OS a little love ahead of I/O. The operating system has failed to make much headway as the wearable category has seemingly plateaued for everyone who isn’t Apple at this point. Hopefully the company will have even more to show off on that front next week.
Source: TechCrunch
A report from the New York City Comptroller’s office asserts that New York residents are paying hundreds of millions in extra rent linked to the effects of Airbnb . Naturally, the company bitterly rejects these findings.
The report, which you can read here, is fairly straightforward. It looks at hundreds of neighborhoods and their various demographics and characteristics, along with how much their rents rose over the last ten years or so. It finds that when controlling for other variables, Airbnb contributes to a part of the rise on its own:
We find that as the share of units listed on Airbnb goes up by one percentage point, rental rates in the neighborhood go up by 1.58 percent, after controlling for neighborhood level demographic and economic changes. The result is statistically significant at the 1-percent level.
By the researchers’ calculations, the total cost of these increases across the city amounted to about $616 million. That came from running their numbers with Airbnb rentals set to zero instead of the actual tens of thousands of listings and seeing what rents would be in that alternative universe.
The amounts of rent increases and the number of Airbnb listings are tightly and reliably correlated, the Comptroller’s office explained. They were careful to control for other factors, for instance a neighborhood becoming trendy or new housing changing the supply. The hypothesis is that Airbnb listings, contrary to the company’s assertions, do in face reduce housing supply, which has a knock-on effect on rent in remaining rentals.
The increases, the report and its accompanying press release say, are concentrated in midtown and lower Manhattan, where 20 percent of the rent increases were attributed to Airbnb effects. The effect was much weaker in the outer boroughs, as you might expect, where density is lower and fewer listings are available.
Airbnb, of course, calls it a pack of lies and takes the opportunity to pontificate a bit (which, to be fair, Comptroller Stringer did too):
Unfortunately, this report is wrong on the facts, falsely asserting that middle class New Yorkers who share their space are responsible for the rising cost of housing in New York… Pandering to the powerful by attacking middle class families won’t do a thing to make New York more affordable. It’s time to stop the scapegoating and work with us on a solution.
Its criticisms are a mix of reasonable objections and straw men. It rightly points out, for instance, that Airbnb hosts are most frequently just renting out a room a few nights a month for some extra income, which logically should improve affordability, not harm it. Then there’s the idea that Airbnb units tend to pop up in fashionable areas, which are inherently more likely to see rents increase.
Some of Airbnb’s gripes are less reasonable, however.
“The notion that less than 1 percent of housing stock — much of which is only occasionally shared with short-term renters — is the sole source of New York’s housing affordability challenge is simply not credible,” the company writes. That’s true — which is probably why the report say anything like that.
“We never blamed the whole increase in housing costs on one factor – we quite clearly said that Airbnb was just one factor and explained that it’s 9.2% of the increase,” wrote Tyrone Stevens, the Comptroller’s press secretary, in an email to TechCrunch.
Airbnb also criticizes using 2009 as the starting year for its data, saying the financial crisis changed the whole housing market. Then it cites a report showing that a one bedroom in Williamsburg cost the same in 2018 as it did in 2011.
“We picked 2009 as our base year because that was the year prior to Airbnb’s presence in NYC, and it made sense to measure the full impact of the rise of Airbnb. But the choice of base year is utterly irrelevant to measuring the contribution of Airbnb to rent increases,” Stevens wrote. “And randomly picking an industry report on 1-bedroom apartments in one neighborhood over a different time period doesn’t refute a citywide analysis.”
The fact that rents are leveling out lately doesn’t hold much water, either — arguably that might have occurred sooner but for Airbnb’s alleged contribution to their increases in the first place.
Ultimately the difference comes down to whether or not Airbnb effectively removes housing from the market. The company swears up and down that isn’t the case, and cites user numbers to support that position. The city says there’s little other possible explanation for the close correlation between listings in certain neighborhoods and the specific rent increases it sees in them.
Both, however, seem to agree that the lack of regulation puts everyone at risk. Hopefully that common ground will lead to a fruitful collaboration on new rules in the future.
Source: TechCrunch
