Month: June 2018

The right music can make a boring photo or video epic, so Instagram is equipping users with a way to add popular songs to their Stories. TechCrunch had the scoop on the music feature’s prototype in early May, and now it’s launching to iOS and Android users in 51 countries including, the U.S. Thanks to Facebook’s recent deals with record labels, users will be able to choose from thousands of songs from artists including Bruno Mars, Dua Lipa, Calvin Harris and Guns N’ Roses. The launch could make Instagram Stories more fun to post and watch in a way that copyrights won’t allow on Snapchat, while giving the app a way to compete with tween favorite Musical.ly.

And just a week after revealing its app has 1 billion monthly users, the company also announced today that Instagram Stories has 400 million daily users, up from 300 million in November and 250 million a year ago. That means Instagram Stories is growing about six times faster than Snapchat’s whole app, which only added 13 million daily users over the six months of Q4 2017 and Q1 2018 to reach 191 million.

Snapchat’s growth rate fell to its slowest pace ever last quarter amidst a despised redesign, while Instagram Stories has steadily added unique and popular features like Highlights, Superzoom and resharing of public feed posts. Instagram said last September that it had 500 million total daily users, so it’s likely that a majority of community is now hooked on the Stories format Snapchat invented.

Instagram Stories music

“Now you can add a soundtrack to your story that fits any moment and helps you express how you’re feeling,” Instagram writes. To access the new music feature, users will be able to choose a special song sticker after they shoot a photo or video. They can search for a specific song or artist, or browse by mood, genre or what’s popular. Once they select a song, they can pick the specific snippet they want to have accompany their content. Alternatively, iOS users can switch to the Music shutter mode in the Stories camera to pick a song before they capture a photo or video so they can sync up their actions to the music. That will come to Android eventually.

When friends watch a music-equipped Story, the song will post automatically. They’ll also be able to tap on the sticker to see artist and song title info, but for now these stickers won’t link out to a musician’s Instagram page or their presence on streaming services — though that would certainly be helpful. I also suggest that Instagram should create deeplinks that artists can share with their fans that automatically opens the Stories camera with that song’s sticker added.

It’s easy to imagine users lip syncing to their favorite jams, adding clashing background music for comedic effect or earnestly trying to compose something emotionally powerful. Suddenly people ‘Gramming from home will be a new way to entertain themselves and their pals.

Instagram tells me that musicians and rights holders will be compensated for the use of their songs, but wouldn’t specify how those payments would work. Facebook secured deals with all the major record labels and many independents to pave the way for this feature. Facebook has since announced that users can also add copyrighted music soundtracks to videos on their own before uploading and they wouldn’t be taken down like before. It’s also started testing a Lip Sync Live feature with a collection of chart-topping hits.

The big question will be whether the “thousands” of songs available through today’s launch will cover what most users want to hear, otherwise they might just be disappointed. With a few enhancements and a widened catalog, Instagram Music could become a powerful way for artists to go viral. All those shaky phone camera clips are going to start looking more like indie music videos you’ll watch til the end.

Source: Tech Crunch

Regardless of what you may think of Facebook as a platform, they run a massive operation, and when you reach their level of scale you have to get more creative in how you handle every aspect of your computing environment.

Engineers quickly reach the limits of human ability to track information, to the point that checking logs and analytics becomes impractical and unwieldy on a system running thousands of services. This is a perfect scenario to implement machine learning, and that is precisely what Facebook has done.

The company published a blog post today about a self-tuning system they have dubbed Spiral. This is pretty nifty, and what it does is essentially flip the idea of system tuning on its head. Instead of looking at some data and coding what you want the system to do, you teach the system the right way to do it and it does it for you, using the massive stream of data to continually teach the machine learning models how to push the systems to be ever better.

In the blog post, the Spiral team described it this way: “Instead of looking at charts and logs produced by the system to verify correct and efficient operation, engineers now express what it means for a system to operate correctly and efficiently in code. Today, rather than specify how to compute correct responses to requests, our engineers encode the means of providing feedback to a self-tuning system.”

They say that coding in this way is akin to declarative code, like using SQL statements to tell the database what you want it to do with the data, but the act of applying that concept to systems is not a simple matter.

“Spiral uses machine learning to create data-driven and reactive heuristics for resource-constrained real-time services. The system allows for much faster development and hands-free maintenance of those services, compared with the hand-coded alternative,” the Spiral team wrote in the blog post.

If you consider the sheer number of services running on Facebook, and the number of users trying to interact with those services at any given time, it required sophisticated automation, and that is what Spiral is providing.

The system takes the log data and processes it through Spiral, which is connected with just a few lines of code. It then sends commands back to the server based on the declarative coding statements written by the team. To ensure those commands are always being fine-tuned, at the same time, the data gets sent from the server to a model for further adjustment in a lovely virtuous cycle. This process can be applied locally or globally.

The tool was developed by the team operating in Boston, and is only available internally inside Facebook. It took lots of engineering to make it happen, the kind of scope that only Facebook could apply to a problem like this (mostly because Facebook is one of the few companies that would actually have a problem like this).

Source: Tech Crunch

Facebook made two announcements about ad transparency today — one around the ads purchased by any Page and another around expanding its recently announced archive of political ads.

It seems like ad transparency is a big focus today, as Twitter just launched its own Ads Transparency Center, allowing anyone to see ads bought by any account.

In terms of bringing more transparency to Facebook Pages, the company says there will be a new section in Pages allowing users to bring up general information about Pages (like recent name changes and date of creation), and another where anyone can view all the active ads the Page is currently running.

As with any ad on Facebook, you’ll be able to flag ads viewed this way if you think they violate Facebook policies, and they will then be reviewed. Speaking to journalists via videoconference, Rob Leathern, a director of product management on the Facebook advertising team, noted that this is in addition to the “proactive” reviewing, performed both by humans and artificial intelligence, that Facebook already performs on every ad.

COO Sheryl Sandberg also said that Facebook is doing more to review political ads, which is resulting in more delays before those ads appear.

“We do not like the delays in the system [but] more manual review and more checks means more delays,” she said.

Now it might not seem like Facebook is sharing a tremendous amount of information here, especially since you only see the ad itself, not additional context like targeting, money spent or past advertising. When asked about this, Sandberg acknowledged that Facebook has more to do.

“There are lots of ways we can do more,” she said. “These are the first steps.”

Sandberg also said she doesn’t expect the additional transparency to affect ad spend on Facebook. She suggested that advertisers are aware of the changes, and while some of them have expressed concerns about competitors seeing their advertising, most of them are on-board.

“I think advertisers for most part stand behind the ads they’re running,” she said. “You actually can see a lot of your competitors’ ads [already], you just have to catch them.”

Meanwhile, Facebook says it will be launching its political archive in Brazil next month start accepting registration from political advertisers in Brazil. These archives only start saving ads from the date that they launch (the one for the U.S. launched in May), but ultimately the plan is to store things for up seven years at a time.

As for why the archive will also include ads from news publishers that promote articles with political content, Sandberg said, “We decided that our goal is transparency. We are just erring on the side of being transparent.” She also noted that Facebook is now placing those ads in a separate section for “promoted news.”

Sandberg was also asked about recent leaks to Motherboard and other publications of Facebook’s training material around hate speech — specifically around how it views white supremacy and neo-Nazis. Why not just make that training material public?

Sandberg argued that Facebook has already released extensive information about its policies, and she suggested that the leaked material is often taken out of context, outdated or just represents “bad training things.”

“I don’t think any other company has come close to the transparency we’ve put out,” she said.

Source: Tech Crunch

NASA announced yesterday that its highly anticipated James Webb Space Telescope is delaying its launch — again.

It was announced in March that the mission would be delayed until 2020, which is already two years past its original launch date of October 2018. But after accepting the recommendations of an independent review board, NASA has announced that the launch has been rescheduled for early 2021.

According to the report, technical issues and human error have “greatly impacted the development schedule” and added $800 million to the already $8 billion budget approved by Congress.

For a mission that’s been deemed NASA’s “next big telescope,” it’s not surprising there’d be a few bumps in the road.

The telescope’s honeycombed structure of (literally) gold-plated mirrors will help scientists see further into the history of our universe than has ever been possible before. Following in the footsteps of the Hubble Telescope, Webb will have improved “sight” thanks to its abilities to see longer wavelengths, like infrared. By peering beyond the visible spectrum of light, there’s literally no telling what Webb might learn about the birth of the universe. And that’s kind of the reason NASA’s building it.

“The more we learn more about our universe, the more we realize that Webb is critical to answering questions we didn’t even know how to ask when the spacecraft was first designed,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, in a report yesterday.

If that’s not enough pressure, the Webb (unlike the Hubble) will be too far away from Earth to be serviceable by either manned or robotic missions. So, when Webb finally reaches its orbit and unfurls (another tricky maneuver), there’s no going back.

While this mission represents an exciting new opportunity to explore deeper into space, NASA and other federally funded space agencies aren’t the only game in town any more. Billionaires like Yuri Milner, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are taking on the challenge in the private sector and designing new methods, crafts and rockets to explore this final frontier with a little more flexibility than NASA.

In addition to the obvious technical challenges of the Webb project, NASA has also run into problems with its primary contractor, Northrop Grumman . After encountering problems earlier this year successfully installing Webb’s sun shield, Northrop Grumman was also cited in yesterday’s report for “performance challenges” on the mission’s propulsion systems.

With NASA’s growing to-do list before Webb finally launches, it might still be awhile before we get to see the universe’s baby pictures.

Source: Tech Crunch

Waymo, the former Google self-driving project that spun out to become a business under Alphabet, has hired former Netflix and Cruise Automation executive Tawni Nazario-Cranz as its chief people officer.

Nazario-Cranz will be responsible for hiring workers, shaping the company’s culture and diversity initiatives. She will report directly to Waymo CEO John Krafick. The executive comes with a long background in human resources, including a 10-year stint at Netflix, Bausch & Lomb and FedEd Kinko’s. She was most recently chief people officer at Cruise, GM’s self-driving unit, a position she held for eight months before leaving in April, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Nazario-Cranz’s hiring comes at an auspicious time for Waymo, which is poised to launch its first driverless service later this year. Waymo is already shuttling a group of approved “early riders” in self-driving vehicles without a human test driver behind the wheel in the Phoenix area. The company has also been expanding partnerships with automakers. In May, Waymo said it would order up to 62,000 self-driving minivans from Fiat Chrysler for its driverless ride-hailing service.

Waymo has also formed a strategic partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, with plans to make the new electric I-Pace part of Waymo’s driverless fleet beginning in 2020.

The burgeoning autonomous vehicle industry, which has exploded in the past two years, requires people with specific and highly sought skills. The limited pool of talent has made recruitment and retention of skilled workers a highly competitive process.

And while salary, benefits and perks can lure new talent, it’s a company’s culture that often keeps them there. Nazario-Cranz has experience here, including co-authoring Netflix’s first culture document, which Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said “may well be the most important document ever to come out of the Valley.”

Source: Tech Crunch

Amazon, by more than one account, wants to become a big competitor in advertising against the likes of Facebook and Google, but its approach to how it will do this is something of a moving target, with pieces coming and going. In the latest development, the company has quietly announced that it is retiring by the end of September an ad product called CPM Ads. CPM Ads were first launched in 2014 and represented an early foray into display advertising for Amazon, allowing smaller web publishers that were a part of the company’s Amazon Associates affiliate program to run banner and other ads on a cost-per-impression (CPM) model on their sites.

Amazon notified Associates with an alert on their dashboards today (see above) and it has also provided a note on the retirement in its help topics for affiliates. It notes that CPM Ads will be stopped on September 30, 2018, with the last payments coming by November 30, and reports on ads getting discontinued on December 31.

Amazon does not explain why it has decided to phase out CPM Ads — we have contacted the company to ask — but one reason could be because the company is either moving more publishers to other ad units and/or these have not proven to be as popular as expected. The retirement note suggests publishers consider its Unified Ad Marketplace and Native Shopping Ads, if they qualify to use them.

Amazon describes the Unified Ad Marketplace as another display ad product that brings together Amazon and supply-side platforms (which aggregate ad space from many publishers; examples include AppNexus, DoubleClick and the Rubicon Project). But it appears that it seems to be geared to larger sites, rather than smaller publishers, as CPM Ads were.

Native Shopping Ads is another Associates product, and as such it is aimed at the same publishers that were using the CPM Ads. But (as with all native ads) these don’t come in the form of banners, but as product placements either within or just below text, and are meant to be for products that are triggered by content on the page.

Amazon’s retiring of CPM Ads comes at a time when many are predicting that the company wants to take a bigger, not smaller, step into the ad world.

There have been reports that Amazon is gearing up to launch a retargeting ad product aimed to compete against the likes of Google and Criteo. Retargeted ads are based on your browsing and follow you around the web in the hopes of bringing you back eventually to buy products, in this case on Amazon. If you have spent five minutes on Amazon or another e-commerce site, and have then seen your browsing history from those sites presented back to you in the form of ads for days afterwards, then you know what retargeting is. Amazon was a big user of retargeting ads on other networks; now, it seems, it wants to run ads like this on its own network.

Others have predicted that the company is planning more search and video-related advertising formats on its own platforms; and that the company is looking to work with third parties to develop ad products for mobile and TV screens.

Amazon made some $4 billion in advertising revenues in 2017, and it is projected to make $9.5 billion this year. These are still modest numbers: as a point of comparison, Google pulled in $95 billion in 2017.

Nevertheless, Amazon remains a huge competitor to Google in other areas, and since a leadership position can sometimes seemingly evaporate overnight, Google is not sitting idly. It has been working on ways of improving its own direct shopping links in areas like search, bringing its platform (and its advertising) a little closer to how Amazon does business.

Source: Tech Crunch

Google Calendar is the latest Google app to get an update focused on improving users’ “digital wellbeing.” The company announced today it’s rolling out a new “Out of Office” feature in Google Calendar, alongside a setting for customizable working hours. The working hours signal to others when you’re unavailable, and allows Google Calendar to automatically decline meetings on your behalf outside those hours.

For starters, you’ll find there’s a new “Out of Office” calendar entry type you can select when you’re creating an event via Google Calendar on the web.

For example, if you’re scheduling the dates of your vacation, you could mark that event as “Out of Office.” If others send you meeting invites during this period, Google Calendar will decline them without your involvement.

It’s a feature users have requested for years to complement Gmail’s Vacation Responder.

Google also says it will attempt to automatically detect when event types should be denoted “Out of Office,” based on the event title.

Another new feature will allow you to better customize your working hours in Google Calendar.

Currently, you can set working hours to one interval for all days of the week, but now you’ll be able to customize your hours for each day separately. This will help people who have irregular availability — not the usual 9 to 5, so to speak.

Google Calendar will also try to infer your working hours based on your prior scheduling patterns, and may prompt you to confirm them in the app’s Settings.

The changes, while seemingly small, are part of a broader movement at Google to promote digital wellbeing across its platforms.

In recent months, the company has introduced a number of features focused on helping people better manage their time, and fight back against the addictive nature of smartphones and digital services.

For example, at its I/O developer conference in May, Google introduced new time management controls for Android users, and it has a set of screen time tools for parents to use with children via Family Link.

It even rolled out new tools to help YouTube users cut down the time they spend mindlessly watching videos.

Other services, like Gmail and Google Photos, utilize machine learning and AI to reduce the time spent in-app, by doing things like prioritizing the important mail, or automatically editing your photos.

The new Google Calendar tools are rolling out now to G Suite users, Google says. Presumably, a broader consumer release will soon follow.

Source: Tech Crunch

Lyft has raised an additional $600 million in a Series I financing round led by Fidelity Management & Research Company, pushing its post-money valuation to $15.1 billion. The company’s value has more than doubled in the past 14 months.

Senator Investment Group LP joined Fidelity in the capital raise. Fidelity has poured more than $800 million into the ride-hailing company, making it one of Lyft’s largest investors.

Lyft has spent the past 18 months aggressively expanding into new U.S. cities, as well as into Canada and pursuing its autonomous vehicle ambitions. Lyft’s plans — along with some of rival Uber’s scandalous missteps — have helped the company increase its market share in the U.S. to 35 percent. In January 2017, Lyft had just 22 percent market share in the United States.

Of course, scaling up is a costly affair. And Lyft has spent the past year seeking investor money. The ride-hailing company has raised $2.9 billion in primary capital — that includes the $600 million announced Wednesday — since April 2017.

In total, Lyft has raised $5.1 billion since its inception. Other investors from previous rounds include AllianceBernstein, Baillie Gifford, KKR, Janus CapitalG, Rakuten and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.

Source: Tech Crunch