Aventus Applies the Blockchain to Ticketing

Technology

The Aventus Protocol Foundation is trying to solve issues with tickets, scalpers, and fakes by bringing them to the blockchain. Aventus describes itself as:

An open-source protocol that delivers a global standard for ticket exchange, allowing rights holders to define rules around their ticketing lifecycle to which everyone in the supply chain must adhere — from promoters, to venues, and primary / secondary agents.

You can watch a video describing the basics on YouTube.

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Arrogance Peaks in Silicon Valley

M.G. Siegler, writing on Medium:

There’s something that has been in the back of my mind for some time now. And while it pre-dates the Facebook fiasco, that situation certainly brings it to the forefront. Increasingly, it feels like people in our industry, the tech industry, are losing touch with reality.

You can see it in the tweets. You can hear it at tech conferences. Hell, you can hear it at most cafes in San Francisco on any given day. People — really smart people — saying some of the most vacuous things. Words that if they were able to take a step outside of their own heads and hear, they’d be embarrassed by.

Drafts 5 Released

Apps

The new version of one of my favorite apps, Drafts, has been released:

Drafts is a launching-off point for text – use the actions to copy it, share it, or deep link into other apps and services. Compose a tweet or message, create a file in Dropbox, send a task off to Reminders – there are hooks into tons of your favorite apps.

If I need to make a note of anything, Drafts is where I start. Once I get the text out of my head and into the app, then I can decide where it needs to go (is it a tweet, task, reminder, note, etc.). It’s changed how I think about text and notes on my phone.

Apple Music Hits 40 Million Subscribers

Apple Music has hit 40 million subscribers:

The service still has a ways to go before it surpasses Spotify, which currently has 70 million paid Premium subscribers. A report in The Wall Street Journal earlier this year suggests that Apple Music’s quicker growth rate (five percent versus Spotify’s two percent growth) could mean it surpassing the Swedish streaming service as soon as this summer, however.

Spotify and Hulu Team Up for Joint $12.99 Plan

Janko Roettgers, writing for Variety:

Hulu and Spotify unveiled a new subscription bundle for avid streaming fans Wednesday: The plan, “Spotify Premium, now with Hulu,” combines a full Spotify a la carte subscription with Hulu’s entry-level on-demand service for $12.99 per month.

Bought individually, both plans would have a combined price tag of close to $18. The new bundle is initially available only to existing Spotify Premium subscribers in the U.S., who also get a chance to try out Hulu for three months for just 99 cents.

You can sign up here.

Watch MLB TV in Picture in Picture on a Mac

Six Colors:

It’s baseball season again, and there’s some good news for people who use MLB TV to watch out-of-market games on their Mac: This is the year that Major League Baseball has finally ditched Flash or Silverlight or whatever they were previously using for desktop streaming. This is nice, because it means I can use Safari (my preferred browser) rather than Chrome (which I keep around for sites that aren’t compatible with Safari or require Flash). But there’s a great side effect: It finally gives Macs the ability to do what iPads have been able to do for a couple of years, namely pop a baseball game into Picture in Picture mode, so it floats above other windows on your screen without any browser chrome getting in the way. […] Still, I was able to enable the Picture in Picture mode by using PiPifier, an app in the Mac App Store that adds a picture-in-picture button to the Safari toolbar.

You can grab the extension here. It works great.

Cloudflare Announces Privacy-First DNS Service

Cloudflare:

Cloudflare’s mission is to help build a better Internet. We’re excited today to take another step toward that mission with the launch of 1.1.1.1 — the Internet’s fastest, privacy-first consumer DNS service. This post will talk a little about what that is and a lot about why we decided to do it.

Lucas Matney, writing at TechCrunch:

The company says that the new service will help keep some data out of ISPs’ hands and that they won’t keep data in their hands for long either. Cloudflare has pledged to both never write users’ IP addresses to disk and that they’ll purge all logs from their system after 24 hours.

You can find out how to use this service on different devices here.

Amazon’s Music Storage Shutting Down in April

amazon

Nick Statt, writing at The Verge:

We’ve known since last year that Amazon Music was planning to shut down its dedicated cloud music locker. Now, we have a date for when that process will begin. In an email to Amazon Music users, the company says uploaded songs will be removed from a user’s library on April 30th, 2018. You can however keep any music in the cloud by proactively going to your Music Settings and clicking the “Keep my songs” button.

The (Not Great) Business of Streaming Music

Pandora

Keith Nelson Jr. sat down with Pandora’s vice president of global content licensing, Elizabeth Moody, to talk about streaming services, the future of music licensing, and the inherent issues these services are seeing trying to turn a profit:

I think that it’s going to take a shift in the structure of the industry to really allow digital services like Spotify or other competitors to have a fully sustainable business. You see pure-play services like Spotify and Pandora suffering while there are companies like Amazon and Google and Apple that can use music as a loss leader for other services. […] I mean, right now, the record labels (and then the music publishers) are really taking the lion’s share of the revenue. You know, sometimes the artists or others will argue it’s getting stuck at the labels. I think it’s a more complicated problem than just saying, “Oh they’re not paying the artists.”

YouTube Will ‘Frustrate’ Some Users With Ads So They Pay for Music

YouTube

Lucas Shaw, writing for Bloomberg:

People who treat YouTube like a music service, those passively listening for long periods of time, will encounter more ads, according to Lyor Cohen, the company’s global head of music. “You’re not going to be happy after you are jamming ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and you get an ad right after that,” Cohen said in an interview at the South by Southwest music festival.

Correct, in fact I’d be so annoyed I’d go sign up for a music service like Spotify or Apple Music instead.

How Claire Evans Is Writing Women Back Into the Internet

Addie Wagenknecht interviewed Claire Evans, the author of the new book Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, for Forbes:

The easy thing is to say that Broad Band is a feminist history of the Internet. That’s what I’ve been telling people. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that it’s a history of the Internet told through women’s stories: boots-on-the-ground accounts of where the women were, how they were feeling and working, at specific, formative moments in Internet history. It emphasizes users and those who design for use, while many popular tech histories tend to zero in on the box

This book looks extremely in my wheelhouse. Can’t wait to read it.

Amazon Echo Is Randomly Laughing at People

amazon

Shannon Liao, writing at The Verge:

Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”

As noted in media reports and a trending Twitter moment, Alexa laughs without being prompted to wake. People on Twitter and Reddit reported that they thought it was an actual person laughing near them, which can be scary when you’re home alone. Many responded to the cackling sounds by unplugging their Alexa-enabled devices.

Cool. Cool. Not creepy at all.

Shazam Gets an Updated Design

Apple

MacStories:

As it turns out, Shazam has continued to be updated and support Spotify since Apple’s acquisition. In fact, there have been at least four updates to Shazam since the acquisition including one today that adds synchronized lyrics and a design refresh of the app’s results screen.

The new UI looks great. The results screen is dominated by a background image of the artist. In the foreground is a big play button, the name of the song the app recognized, and the name of the artist. If you tap on the artwork, you get an image of the artist and album in some cases, plus more details on the artist, album, song, and release date.

It looks pretty good.

Everything Easy is Hard Again

Frank Chimero, writing on his blog:

This past summer, I gave a lecture at a web conference and afterward got into a fascinating conversation with a young digital design student. It was fun to compare where we were in our careers. I had fifteen years of experience designing for web clients, she had one year, and yet some how, we were in the same situation: we enjoyed the work, but were utterly confused and overwhelmed by the rapidly increasing complexity of it all. What the hell happened?

Great post.