February, 2016

Yelp Agrees to License Its Data to Sprinklr, All the Better for Marketers to Understand Their Consumers

Yelp SprinklrLogohas agreed to license data and reviews to Sprinklr, a company that helps marketers track what consumers say about them on digital platforms.

Marketers such as McDonald’s or Olive Garden, for example, use Sprinklr to see what customers are saying about them in a variety of venues, such as YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, WeChat and more, all on a location basis. Other Sprinklr clients include Microsoft, Samsung, Nike and Havas.

The addition of Yelp’s extensive data should deepen the offering to marketers, ideally helping them understand what customers like and why they come back in a more precise way.

Source: AdAge

Imogen Heap Wants to Use Blockchain Technology to Revolutionize the Music Industry

The singer’s experiment with “Tiny Human” is the precursor to an entire music eco-system she’s building called “Mycelia,” named after a thread of underground fungus that grows for miles.

Aside from enabling faster, direct payments for artists, Heap wants to create a free platform where musicians have control over the data created by their songs as they circulate among fans and other musicians, including the song’s credits, terms of usage dictated by the artist, where the song is played and when, and any transactions.

This information is tracked using blockchain technology, a method of recording digital transactions first used for Bitcoin.

Source: Quartz

What Happens If SoundCloud Bites the Dust?

SoundCloud’s disappearance would create a powerful ripple effect across the world of recorded music. The most immediate consequence would be the loss of a massive chunk of the world’s independent music available online.

And though there are other sites, most notably Bandcamp, that let anyone upload their music instantly for no fee, they neither have the user base nor the social media aspect that SoundCloud has to develop fans and sales. In fact, many SoundCloud users employ them in tandem, using Bandcamp as a store to sell collections of music, rather than a place to share their latest tracks one-by-one.

Where Bandcamp is the independent music store du jour, SoundCloud is its promoter, employed by musicians to drive awareness and sales.

Source: Digital Trends

Aligning Incentives to Reduce Online Piracy

Last week, the movie industry, as represented by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), announced an agreement with Donuts, operator of the .MOVIE, .THEATRE and .COMPANY domain names, among others, “to help ensure that websites using Donuts-operated top-level domains (TLDs) are not engaged in large-scale piracy.” This agreement is significant in two respects.

First, it aims at perhaps the most important target in terms of combating online copyright infringement: domain names engaged in large-scale piracy. And, second, it illustrates the potential for the increased competition that has developed over the last few years among new entrants into the domain name space to yield innovative new services.

Source: TheHill

Dwolla is Back, But Focused on Blockchain, Not Bitcoin

After a series of mishaps working with bitcoin startups – including the infamous, now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt Gox, Dwolla is once again hoping to work as the connector between the emerging technology and traditional financial worlds.

The alternative payment network has been quiet about its foray in the blockchain space, but Ben Milne, Dwolla‘s founder and CEO, says the company is working closely with startups building solutions for tracking assets on the blockchain.

As assets are sent from one blockchain to another or from one business to another, there will have to be a real-world payment in fiat currency to settle that exchange so people can pay their mortgages and purchase other things that can’t be bought with a cryptocurrency or digital assets, Milne contends.

Source: CoinDesk

Kamcord Now Lets Broadcasters Make Money On Its Mobile Game Streaming App

Kamcord, the Y Combinator startup that wants to do to mobile what streaming service Twitch has done to console and PC gaming, has rolled out an important update after it began allowing its most prominent broadcasters to make money on its service.

Twitch, which streamers more video to users per month than even YouTube, grew into a beast that Amazon bought for just shy of $1 billion. The e-commerce firm had to beat off competition from Google, which is working to develop its own game-streaming service, too. While both are focused on desktop PC and console gamers, Kamcord is fixing its gaze on mobile, and mobile only.

Source: TechCrunch

Digital Asset in Blockchain Tie-ups with Accenture, PwC, Broadridge

Dindexigital Asset Holdings LLC, a start-up specializing in the blockchain technology for the financial services industry, announced on Wednesday that it has entered into business relationships with Accenture, Broadridge and PricewaterhouseCoopers to ensure faster adoption of its product.

“These alliances will accelerate innovation, drive growth and broaden our reach in different segments across the world,” said Blythe Masters, chief executive officer at Digital Asset holdings and a former JP Morgan investment banker.

The partnerships show how the financial services industry is exploring the potential of the blockchain. In 2015, there was an explosion of interest in the bitcoin technology as a way to solve inefficiencies in financial markets. 

Source: Reuters

TuneCore Pays Artists $142 Million in 2015

IndepenTUNE-COREdent artists on TuneCore earned over $142 million in 2015, a 7% increase from 2014. TuneCore artists also earned $36.8 million from digital streams and downloads alone in Q4 2015.Publishing revenue for TuneCore artists was up 47% in 2015 and sync revenue up 57%, with placements in major feature films and network TV shows.

Since its inception in 2006, TuneCore artists have earned more than $648 million collectively.

Source: Music Week

Bitcoin and the Future of User Monetizable Data

big_data_analytics_thinkstock_470971869-100439197-primary.idgeWeb searches, page visits, online purchases, tweets, SMS messages, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, GPS coordinates – this is the data that makes up our digital lives.

For the past decade consumers have sacrificed their privacy, building giant banks of data for companies without any upside exposure to the value that they have created. Thanks to the Bitcoin Protocol and the 21 Bitcoin Computer this no longer has to be the case.

Billions of photos are shared every day by hundreds of millions of people using smartphones. Between the rapid development of high quality camera phones and the decreased cost for cloud storage, sharing photos from all around the world has become effectively free.

Building a library of stock photos once required an army of photographers working around the globe; now this naturally occurs over social networks such as Instagram.

Source: Bitcoin Magazine

SourceAudio Announces Launch of “SourceAudio Detect”

12652SourceAudio, a prominent B2B technology platform for music publishers, labels, broadcasters, production companies and creative marketing agencies, has announced the launch of its newest service, “SourceAudio Detect.”

SourceAudio Detect uses a unique, robust and inaudible digital identity (watermark) that is redundantly embedded directly into a piece of audio itself.

It is different from other fingerprinting-based monitoring solutions in that there is never any guesswork or doubt about the track identity because a truly unique code is woven into the fabric of each file that travels with it indefinitely.

That code will only reference the true identity given to the track by its owner or authorized licensor.

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