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Monday, January 20, 2014
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Joffrey clap smallThe Internets are ablaze this morning after comments from HBO’s CEO about users sharing their HBO Go accounts. According to most reports out there today, the company couldn’t care less who you share your account with. Share your account with everyone! Free love forever! Hurray!


The catch: that’s… not quite what he’s saying.


Here’s the relevant clip from the BuzzFeed interview:


Now, he is saying that HBO doesn’t see account sharing as a problem for their business model. But if you listen to the entire video, it becomes quite clear that there’s a silent “…for now” at the end of each sentence.


The key bit (emphasis added):



Pleper: To us, it’s a terrific marketing vehicle for the next generation of viewers, and to us, it is actually not material at all to business growth.


BuzzFeed: So the strategy is you ignore it now, with the hopes that they’ll subscribe later…


Pleper: It’s not that we’re ignoring it, and we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing. I’m simply telling you: it’s not a fundamental problem, and the externality of it is that it presents the brand to more and more people, and gives them an opportunity hopefully to become addicted to it. What we’re in the business of doing is building addicts, of building video addicts. The way we do that is by exposing our product, our brand, our shows, to more and more people.



Translation: it’s not a problem… until we decide it’s a problem. Then we flip the switch (“we’re looking at different ways to affect password sharing”) to make password sharing more challenging, and everyone we’ve gotten hooked (“what we’re in the business of doing is building addicts”) coughs up the cash for their own account.


Hey, kid — the first one’s free!


Is there anything wrong, or evil, with this strategy? Not really. In fact, it’s pretty damned smart. It’s like an indefinitely long free trial in disguise. With HBO currently set-up to be sold only as a premium add-on to a cable bill that’s generally already pretty massive, convincing someone to get their their own account is a pretty huge hurdle. If the alternative is people pirating HBO’s shows, HBO might as well get those people comfortable with the convenience of going through the official channels.


Just don’t expect it to last forever. They’re not “building addicts” for nothing.


2:11 PM

The Internets are ablaze this morning after comments from HBO’s CEO about users sharing their HBO Go accounts. According to most reports out...

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The wife of Shashi Tharoor, an Indian minister and member of parliament, was found dead in a luxury hotel in New Delhi days after exposing her husband's alleged infidelity via Twitter. The cause of death is not known, but a forensic expert reportedly dubbed it a "sudden, unnatural death." Private messages between Tharoor and a Pakistani journalist popped up on Tharoor's Twitter account on Wednesday. He has more than 2 million followers, so people noticed.


12:39 PM

The wife of Shashi Tharoor, an Indian minister and member of parliament, was found dead in a luxury hotel in New Delhi days after exposing...

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Bitcoin

Screen Shot 2014-01-20 at 10.56.07 AM


As Bitcoin trading and use spreads through medium-sized countries, local exchanges, wallets and processors are popping up left and right.


South Korea’s Korbit is one of the latest and it’s picking up $400,000 in funding from angels including Tim Draper, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, SV Angel’s David Lee and SecondMarket CEO Barry Silbert, who created a Bitcoin Opportunity Fund. Also participating are Pietro Dova of XG Ventures, Michael Yang, co-founder of mySimon, and Jay Eum, co-founder of Translink Capital.


Interestingly enough, Korea’s government Ministry of Science helped broker contact between the startup and its angels. They had organized a pitch event in Silicon Valley where Draper was the judge.


The company, which is already profitable, does about $300,000 in trading volume per day with a 0.6 percent fee on buys and sells. They have about 20,000 registered users, and recently launched real-time processing for deposits and withdrawals. Although they are currently an exchange, they plan to launch wallets eventually.


Right now, like many other countries, the South Korean government doesn’t recognize Bitcoin as a currency. But CEO Tony Lyu says the government seems to be taking a “wait-and-see” approach otherwise. It’s not clear yet if gaming platforms, search portals and other big consumer destinations on the web and mobile in South Korea will be able to charge in Bitcoin.







11:24 AM

As Bitcoin trading and use spreads through medium-sized countries, local exchanges, wallets and processors are popping up left and right. S...

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wobl

I have an iPhone, and like most adult humans I imagine, I use that as my alarm clock in place of one of those quaint old-fashioned pieces of dedicated hardware we used to use. But it’s not always ideal: you can’t just smash a button to get it to stop trying to wake you up, for instance. The wobL, a new Kickstarter project launching today, hopes to fix that.


As its name implies, the wobL wobbles, and therein lies the key to its functionality. It’s designed to be used with a companion alarm clock app for iPhone, which allows a user to activate a snooze mode simply through motion. The idea is that you reach over and simply tap the phone or the stand, resulting in a rocking motion which triggers snooze and gives you a free extra few minutes to catch some Z’s.


Of course, this presents some problems: it’s so easy to trigger wobL’s snooze mode that you may manage to rock yourself into never waking up at all. You’d admittedly have to be really dedicated to staying under those covers, but if you’re in Toronto this week, say, and it’s -30 degrees out, you have some pretty good motivation.


wobl


Wobble does make it easier to hit snooze instead of accidentally turning off an alarm altogether, so it’s got that going for it. It’s also mechanically simple, and yet allows for you to keep your phone plugged in and charging at night. The app is iOS-only for now, but the stand itself is designed to work not only with all iPhone models, all iPod touches and cases, but also with Android smartphones.


The wobL team is looking to ship its device by October of next year, and early backers can get one for just $25. This is the first project from Third Prime studios, but the team behind it has ample experience building consumer products for other companies, and its relatively simple hardware design means it should stand a good chance of seeing the light of day should it reach its $29,000 funding goal.







9:39 AM

I have an iPhone, and like most adult humans I imagine, I use that as my alarm clock in place of one of those quaint old-fashioned pieces o...

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baboom

Kim Dotcom, of Megaupload fame (or rather, infamy) and file-sharing service Mega, has today unveiled his latest project by offering a sneak peek of his new music service Baboom, previously known as Megabox. The site is scheduled to open its doors in late 2014, but this “soft launch” serves as a way for users to check out the service in advance, while also sampling Dotcom’s own album, Good Times.


The album, which is already on Google Play and iTunes, is available both for streaming and download on Baboom in MP3, FLAC, and WAV formats. In addition, the accompanying artist profile page features things like photos, videos, interviews, social updates and more. Users can follow an artist’s Twitter account with a click of a button, too. Meanwhile, Baboom’s navigation is available in a simple sidebar on the right, which will soon let you access Search functions, your music library, plus Activity and Jukebox pages, when the service becomes publicly available later this year.


What’s interesting about Baboom, or at least Dotcom’s Europop album featured on the site, is that it’s being offered both as a free download and paid. For paid downloads, the site points users to official music marketplaces, including iTunes, Amazon and Bandcamp.


As Dotcom explains in the video posted next to his own album, “my idea is that artists should make their music available for free, and fans should only pay for it if they really like it.”


“So I’m going to lead by example today,” he adds, encouraging users to make his album number one to prove to that this model can work.


It’s not an entirely crazy idea to release free downloads – after all, the appeal of today’s radio-like streaming services is not necessarily their fancy personalization algorithms, it’s the ability to listen to music you like for free. Services like SoundCloud have also prospered because they’ve allowed a place for lesser-known or upcoming artists to feature their work and grow a fan base. But many of today’s on-demand services, like leading Baboom competitor Spotify, have to some extent struggled with aspects surrounding music discovery, too heavily focusing on the social graph instead of an individual’s own musical tastes. (After all, your Facebook friends don’t necessarily like what you like, nor do you necessarily care what they play.)


That being said, Baboom may be hard-pressed to compete head-on with the established services and platforms in the space, but by making an appeal to forward-thinking artists who have a better understanding of the shifting landscape in the music industry, there’s a chance that Baboom could end up looking more like a modern-day MySpace.


MySpace, for those of you who only recall it vaguely as some pre-cursor to Facebook, originally took off because of its focus on music discovery, and being known as a platform where artists could connect directly with their fans. They could host profile pages, let MySpace users listen to tracks for free, and, fans could in turn, optionally post their favorite songs to their own profiles. Baboom feels familiar, almost like the way MySpace would look had it grown with the changing times instead of exiting to News Corp, and later becoming something of a joke. It may not grow into a social network of its own, but it’s easy to see how, if artists choose to embrace the platform, it could serve those same urges to freely sample music while learning what you like, then buy the albums belonging to your favorites.


You can check out Baboom for yourself, and sign up to be alerted when it launches.







7:09 AM

Kim Dotcom, of Megaupload fame (or rather, infamy ) and file-sharing service Mega , has today unveiled his latest project by offering a snea...

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Nest CEO Tony Fadell was at DLD in Munich today, giving his first on-stage interview since his company was acquired by Google in a massive $3.2 billion deal last week. Fadell and Nest had already made clear that the acquisition wouldn’t change how Nest treats user data, but he went a step further today, assuring users (via TNW) if there were to be any changes in the privacy policy under Google, they’d be opt-in and made fully transparent to users.


Fadell is clearly seeking to reassure users who think that as part of the Nest deal, Google will be able to harvest data gathered by the thermostats to help power its efforts to compile a more complete profile of its users for the purposes of advertising and monetization. Fadell already spelled out that there would be no change in the current privacy policy for Nest, which mandates that info only be used to improve Nest products and services and not shared with anyone else.


Later, however, Fadell admitted that the policy was subject to change. Google has frequently altered its privacy policy and user agreements to give it greater access to and use of user information. A good recent example is when Google announced it would be using Google+ user profile pictures in ads unless people opted out of that program, hence Fadell’s emphasis on the opt-in nature of any data sharing arrangement between Google and its new subsidiary Nest.


The comments from Fadell today might reassure some users, but they’re also a pretty clear indication that Nest will eventually be changing its user policy, and that part of that change will be some kind of dialog that will ask if Google can user your data, in the same way that you’re prompted to do so when you sign in to Maps and other products. Transparency around the changes means only that they’ll spell out what’s happening, which is actually only what they’d be required to do in order not to cause a massive user furor.


Google and Nest have the potential to do great things together for users and consumers, but don’t expect that to happen without users giving up some more of their precious data to the search giant. All that remains to be seen is how that will happen, and what people get in exchange for that access.







5:39 AM

Nest CEO Tony Fadell was at DLD in Munich today, giving his first on-stage interview since his company was acquired by Google in a massive $...

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IBM is putting a massive amount of resources into Watson, which has the capability to dramatically improve the quality of our decisions. I thought it would be interesting to emulate how it might think when tied to a topical subject. As the U.S. approaches its next election circus, two candidates have jumped to the top as both frontrunners and targets. Given how accurate predictions have been in the past at this phase of the election process, it's likely that one or both of these folks won't even make it to the primaries, let alone get elected.


5:09 AM

IBM is putting a massive amount of resources into Watson, which has the capability to dramatically improve the quality of our decisions. I...

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