30 minutes a year ago Alex Talks to Billion-Dollar Business CEO Janice Bryant Howroyd Janice Bryant Howroyd’s company started in the front of a rug shop with just a phone, a fax machine, and a lot of hustle. 40 years later, that company is a huge multinational serving some of the biggest Fortune 500 companies in the world. This may just be me venting, but when I hear the Spotify 'Watch this short video to receive 30 minutes of ad-free music', I expect to not hear ads for 30 minutes. I started listening at roughly 10:45, heard the first ad to receive ad-free music, and not even 15 minutes later there's another ad about ad free music. 31,828 reviews for Web.com, 4.4 stars: 'Web.com's offerings are dismal compared to other site hosting services. Now for the really bad part - if you want to terminate your account you have to call some toll-free number where no one ever answers. Instead, you hear wait time announcements in which the expected wait time fluctuates wildly! Wait time should get shorter and shorter, not jump around.
While Spotify has allowed mobile users to access music free for a while now, doing so means you have to put up with the same audio ads as free users on the desktop. The good news is that Spotify is finally giving us an alternative to constant audio ads after every few tracks by rolling out a new video ad option.
Simply put, Spotify Free users will soon be able to opt in to watch a brand-sponsored 15-to-30-second video advertisement and will subsequently be rewarded with 30 minutes of uninterrupted music. For those that would rather put up with one longer video ad in exchange for a longer period of ad-free listening, this could be a welcome change. The only thing better would be if Spotify removed the “shuffle-only” restriction from the mobile app in favor of a free experience that’s more akin to the desktop app.
What do you think, willing to watch videos in exchange for longer periods of ad-free listening, or are you not bothered by short audio ads?
Spotify is having a great debut on the public-market, Google’s machine learning software can now identify ramen by shop, and a medical supply drone will be making its debut in countries like the U.S. soon after a lot of success in Rwanda.
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From LinkedIn – Spotify made its debut on the New York Stock Market yesterday, and you won’t find anyone over at the music streaming service complaining about how things turned out. Despite an initial reference price of $132 a share, trades opened at $165.90. That means that the company value is $29.5 billion, which is nearly four times more than its last valuation in 2015. Currently, Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming service with 159 million ad-supported free listeners, and 70 million paying users as of this past January. The company was founded in Sweden in 2006, and is available in 61 countries.
From Google Trends – Google’s machine learning software can now identify which shop a picture of ramen is from. Data scientist Kenji Doi used Google’s AutoML Vision to identify every menu item from a Tokyo-based chain of 41 ramen shops called Ramen Jiro. He gathered 1,170 photos from each shop to create a dataset of 48,000 ramen photos for the Google software. Then after the 24 hours that it took to train the data, the model that was created could predict which shop a picture of ramen from any of the 41 ramen shops was from with a 95 per cent accuracy. Talk about a creative use of this technology.
Zipline’s new drone can deliver medical supplies at 79 miles per hour from technology
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And from Reddit – A startup called Zipline has been using drone technology to deliver medical supplies in Rwanda, and with its latest drone, the Zip 2, the company plans on expanding to new markets in 2018, including the U.S. Zipline was founded in 2011 to create and use drones for social good by engineers from SpaceX, Boeing, Google, and Willow Garage. The Zip 2 will be capable of flying at speeds up to 79 miles per hour, or about 125 kilometers per hour, carrying 3.85 pounds of cargo, and in Rwanda, that means the Zip 2 can deliver a unit of blood to a hospital within 15 to 30 minutes nearly anywhere in the country. And with top speeds like that, Zipline hopes to expand that type of service globally. They’ll begin their pilot program in the U.S. later this year.
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That’s what’s trending this week. Hashtag Trending is produced by IT World Canada. Today’s episode is sponsored by the IT World Canada Podcast Network. Check out our weekly podcast, Tech in Sports, for all your updates on technology within the realm of sports and health and fitness. You can find it on your podcast service of choice or as a daily version on Alexa and Google Home devices.
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