TechCrunch
Music App Songza Goes Ad-Free With A New Paid Service, “Club Songza” For $0.99 Per Week
Songza, the music streaming and recommendation service that has picked up some 4.8 million monthly active users with its free, ad-based service, is turning on a feature now that it hopes will convert some of its most loyal listeners into more monetizable ones. It is launching “Club Songza,” a subscription-based service that is priced at $0.99 per week for users to get an ad-free experience.
Songza has started out by sending out emails to current its 500,000 most loyal users in the U.S. and Canada — the only two markets where Songza is currently available — encouraging them to sign up. “You can now subscribe to Club Songza to go ad-free and get double the skips on Songza’s apps for iPhone, Android, Sonos, and the web,” the email says. “Only $0.99 per week. (Cheaper than a soda!)”
“We’ll be sending out more invites, and over the next few days we will have sent it out to everyone,” Elias Roman, the CEO and co-founder of Songza, told us after we contacted him to ask about the service.
Songza, which was founded by the Roman after Amazon bought his previous startup, Amie Street, also counts the e-commerce giant as an active minority shareholder.
So why the move to paid subscriptions? You may think that it’s because it’s hard to monetize ads on a user base of 4.8 million listeners, or because Songza is not able to make enough from the labels on those numbers. But Roman says otherwise. “The primary reason is user request,” he says. A lot of users have been requesting an ad-free service, he says, and they are throwing in a couple of other sweeteners: more skiping and access to more premium content. He points out that Songza’s playlists and curated by 15 very top music experts that source rare content, such as “a track on vinyl from a swap meet in Brazil.” At other times, it may be a playlist created by a famous DJ.
On the ad front, Roman says that Songza makes the pitch to brands that what they may not be getting in listener numbers they are making up for in loyalty. “We generate millions of minutes of engagement,” he says. “It’s not quantity but quality.” In May, when Songza unveiled its newest version (3.0), it noted it was seeing 65 million minutes of use on its platform per day.
Other music streaming platforms have been grappling with questions of margins on digital music and debates over royalty payments across the music ecosystem. Most recently, Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren defended claims that it was squeezing artists. Last November, we wrote about how Spotify’s profitability structure is partly based on it achieving a particular level of scale.
While I had Roman’s ear, I also asked him the ever-present, slightly selfish question I like to ask of all U.S. startups: when are we going to see this service go abroad? “There are other territories on the roadmap,” he noted. The UK is not among them, however. “We look for relatively less crowded markets and the UK doesn’t score super high in that category.”
Maker Nabs A 3D Model Of Marcus Aurelius With Google Glass
In what looks to be a first for the technology, designer and engineer Todd Blatt took 30 pictures of a bust of Marcus Aurelius with Google Glass and created a downloadable 3D model that you can grab and print.
Blatt writes:
Obviously Blatt had some prior experience with the gear and the tools required to build a 3D model but it’s fascinating that, in a few minutes, he was able to render a physical object digitally and then reprint it. These methods aren’t foolproof, but they’re very nearly so.
What does this mean for the future? Well, almost anything can be copied now, from a car to a tourist’s trinket. It also means that nothing is “safe” anymore – all it takes for IP theft of object designs to happen is a few winks with a good enough camera. Look for this to also affect the uptake of glass in the corporate world. If I were a designer I definitely wouldn’t want some weirdo coming in and snapping my objects with Glass.
You can also buy a copy of the bust here, which should give museums pause if they’re worried about losing gift shop business.
Big Labor's Anti-Immigration Rumor Machine
Editor’s note: Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Stanford Law School, Director of Research at Pratt School of Engineering at Duke University, and VP of Innovation and Research at Singularity University. He is the author of The Immigrant Exodus: Why America Is Losing the Global Race to Capture Entrepreneurial Talent, which was named a 2012 Economist Book of the Year. Follow him on Twitter @wadhwa.
The passage of immigration reform by the Senate was a big step forward. The bill is far from perfect, but goes a long way toward solving Silicon Valley’s talent shortage — and America’s immigrant exodus. But big hurdles lie ahead as anti-immigrant groups regroup. Extreme elements of the right will be fighting to close the borders while their counter parts on the left — Big Labor in particular — work to undermine high-skilled immigration.
Why are trade unions that have practically no presence in the technology industry trying to make things difficult for Silicon Valley? I really don’t know. What I do know is that Big Labor’s think tank Economic Policy Institute (EPI) is publishing one questionable “study” after another to sabotage immigration reform. It continues to grab national headlines for research that claims that there is no tech-talent shortage. As stupid as this may seem to people in the tech industry, EPI keeps repeating this — despite the fact that its evidence falls apart once respected economists review its non-peer-reviewed papers.
Facts don’t usually get in the way of politics, however.
It started with policy papers by Ron Hira, an associate professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Hira has made a career of repeating the words “H1-Bs are taking American jobs away.” He says that claims of a shortage are a ploy by Silicon Valley companies to bring wages down and to replace Americans with foreign workers (I am not kidding).
Then came Norm Matloff, a computer-science professor at UC Davis, who made the assertion that foreign students have talent lesser than, or equal to, their American peers. Therefore, skilled-foreign-worker programs are causing an “internal brain drain in the United States,” he argues.
To top it all off, Rutgers professor Hal Salzman co-authored a paper for EPI claiming that the U.S. graduates far more workers in science, engineering, technology, and mathematics (STEM) than the tech industry needs and that foreign workers are discouraging Americans from pursuing technology careers.
How did they come to these conclusions? Supposedly by analyzing salary data and speaking to their own students. As Salzman et al. write, “The effect of this large supply of guestworkers can be seen in wages in I.T., which have remained flat, and are hovering around late 1990s levels in real terms.” Matloff says, “flat wages are discouraging talented U.S. workers with STEM degrees from pursuing graduate study or even careers in the field.” Hira says “H1-B’s are taking American jobs away.”
It is easy to cherry-pick misleading data.
Jonathan Rothwell and Neil Ruiz of Brookings Institute did an objective analysis of salaries for the professions that get the most H1-B requests. They found that wage growth in these was actually stronger than the national average. They also found that H-1B workers are paid more than U.S. native-born workers with a bachelor’s degree ($76,356 versus $67,301 in 2010) and even within the same occupation and industry for workers with similar experience.
The chart here (courtesy of Harvard Business Review) looks at the salaries of 26- to 30-year-olds — the same age group as graduating foreign students. In fact, foreign workers get paid higher-than-average salaries. U.S. companies would not deal with the high political and financial costs of applying for visas if these immigrant students did if they could fill vacancies with equally qualified American workers.
EPI claims that since STEM salary data has been stagnant, there is no unmet demand for high-tech workers. Unfortunately, its analysis is based on bad data. For example, in the Salzman report, Figure I supposedly reports occupational wages for programmers from 1990 to 2011. But the CPS (their source) does not report these data before 2000, because of changes in how occupations were coded. CPS data show that almost one-fifth of contemporary computer programmers would not be classified in the older system, so wage comparisons across the periods would be inaccurate. In fact, computer-programming wages have increased in the period for which they are consistently defined.
Additionally, the claim that EPI makes about guestworkers discouraging natives from studying technology was supposedly based on surveys by the National Center for Education Statistics and “from field work conducted over the past decade” by the author. There appears to be no credible survey that validates this conclusion. The “field work” is also questionable. In emails that I exchanged with Salzman, he would not provide any further information.
Rob Atkinson of The Information Technology Innovation Foundation also debunked the many myths in the EPI research in paper titled The Real Story on Guestworkers in the High-skill U.S. Labor Market. This report refutes each substantive EPI claim to show that American students are dropping out of STEM majors at high rates; those that complete their majors are finding abundant work opportunities in their fields, and wages are growing for most IT occupations.
In any case, demand for current IT skills is extremely high, as engineering and computer majors have low unemployment rates and earn higher wages than any other field of study, according to research from Georgetown University.
The reality is that the country’s most innovative region, Silicon Valley, is starved for talent. Startups can’t find workers with the skills they need, and larger companies have to set up centers offshore for the same reasons. Big Labor and a handful of academics in their ivory towers can pontificate about how things should be. But all they will achieve if they have their way is to choke off the ability of Silicon Valley to create jobs — for them.
First Round Capital Debuts Original Content And Knowledge Hub For Startups, Review
First Round Capital has been one of the few firms who started providing compelling services for startups before the agency model became popular. For example, the firm created a Yelp-like database of business providers for its startups, which includes 1,500 ratings and reviews for over 500 service providers, including those in payroll, phones and more. First Round also launched HackPR, a platform for companies and reporters to quickly and efficiently connect on press coverage. Today, the firm is debuting another interesting service for startups, First Round Review.
First Round Review is essentially an original content hub and knowledge base for startups. The aim is for Review to become the Harvard Business Review for startups. And in the spirit of openness, Review will be open to the startup community so any entrepreneur can access this content.
In terms of the type of content, Partner Josh Kopelman explained that there was no real destination site for advice for startups. And VCs blogs cover the perspective of one VC. “The media today does a really good job of covering ‘what’ startups are doing,” he says. “But we’ve seen there is a need for content that covers the ‘how.’”
Around four months ago, the firm started thinking about how to best address the “how” part of this equation. On its blog, First Round began posting content like “How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by Almost 500% in One Year” and “The One Cost Engineers and Product Managers Don’t Consider.” First Round had internal staff and freelancers interview founders and engineers and more, and write the content.
Kopelman says the response to this content over the past four months was overwhelming, showing the need across the startup community for a hub to answer the most commonly asked questions and hurdles faced by early stage companies. Traffic to the firm;s website went up by 10x, he adds.
Having invested in over 200 companies, the firm has no shortage of entrepreneurs and founders to ask to share their thoughts. But Kopelman says they aren’t limited the scope to just portfolio companies. The goal is to include lessons and advice from the entrepreneurs who have been through some of the challenges of running and operating a startup, including the ones that First Round did not fund.
First Round Review will post about three to seven pieces of content per week, and will be bringing on a full-time contributing editor, who will be on staff to lead this content strategy. Content will range from original long-form pieces and Q&As to some guest posts.
In theory, the site is similar to Google Ventures Startup Lab’s body of content, which features videos and tutorials, by current Googlers and other technology execs, aimed at helping startups navigate things like A/B testing, holding productive meetings and more. Most of these talks are private, but Google Ventures has been posting a number of these discussions online to the public.
Andreessen Horowitz just brought on Wired Senior Editor Michael Copeland to lead the firm’s new content strategy, which could be similar to First Round’s ambitions.
Netflix Launches “Max,” A Goofy Virtual Assistant To Help With Recommendations, Available Now On PS3, iPad Next
Netflix this morning announced its own take on virtual assistants like the iPhone’s Siri, with the debut of “Max,” an on-screen guide for the Netflix app on PlayStation 3 devices which helps you find new movies or TV shows to watch. And yes, the guide does talk to you, but thankfully has yet to manifest itself in some more corporeal format, like Microsoft’s “Bob.”
Instead, Max – which Netflix says is “rumored to be the child of Siri and HAL 9000″ – will ask you a few questions about your mood or movie and TV show tastes in order to make a recommendation, while also taking into account your interests as already understood by Netflix’s algorithms.
Max also offers a game show-like experience called “The Ratings Game,” where users can pick a genre that fits your mood, and then Netflix – err, Max – runs through a few titles you might like and has you rate them on a 5-star scale.
After gaining a better understanding of your interests, Max may offer personalized suggestions after asking only one question. In an example provided by Netflix on its blog, Max asks if you prefer “monkeys” or “UFOs” to make its – err, his – recommendations. And at other times, Max will simply make a suggestion, no Q&A involved.
All the while, Max speaks to interact with you using a goofy, “I’m a game show host!,” type of voice. (You can almost imagine him saying, “no, I’m sorry, the correct answer was ‘UFO’s', it’s back to zero for you.”)
Netflix has been experimenting with Max for some time, having first been spotted last summer in the form of an app update for some PS3 owners. At the time, there was no word as to whether Netflix would be rolling out Max to the full PS3 network, or to other gaming consoles or Netflix platforms.
Today, however, Netflix seems to be making a broader commitment to this silly assistant, promising “we’ll expand his repertoire and make him available on other devices in the future, likely the iPad next.” The company tells TechCrunch that the iPad is expected for 6 months to a year from now, if Max proves successful.
In addition, the decision to launch first on the PS3 is due to the fact that it’s most popular way for people to watch Netflix on their TVs, explains Netflix. “We have tested Max already, now he’s going public to all members who use PS3,” a company spokesperson says. “Max has shown already that members who use him will watch more and stay with Netflix longer.”
Unfortunately (???), Max will only be available to U.S. users for now, and the rollout should complete by end of day.
Updated 10:30 AM ET with additional rollout details and comments from Netflix; Correction to headline (iPad next, not next week).
No comments:
Post a Comment