Analytics
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Deezer now has an analytics app for podcasters
Streaming service Deezer has launched a dedicated analytics app for podcast creators, joining other podcasting platforms already offering analytics like Google Podcasts and Stitcher.
Demographic report on protests shows how much info our phones give away
Data analytics company Mobilewalla released a report detailing the race, age and gender breakdowns of individuals who participated in protests in select cities during the weekend of May 29th.
Three weeks in, Quibi has its first privacy scandal
An internet security research revealed that several popular companies have leaked personal email addresses to advertisers and trackers.
Intel is using AI to gather real-time data on coral reef health
Intel and its partners -- Accenture and the Sulubaaï Environmental Foundation -- announced CORaiL, an AI-powered project to monitor coral reefs and analyze their resiliency.
The Weather Channel brings localized COVID-19 updates to your phone
The Weather Channel and its parent company IBM (yep, who knew?) have teamed up to bring coronavirus data, maps and charts to your phone. They're importing data from sources like the World Health Organization (WHO), and including info from reliable local and state sources, so you can get a picture of how the virus is spreading near you, across the country and around the globe.
Amazon Music opens up Alexa and streaming stats to artists
Amazon is finally launching an app to help musicians better understand how their music is performing on its music streaming service. It's available starting today on iOS and Android, and through a companion website.
Tonight’s Bucks-Lakers NBA game will feature real-time data overlays
When the Milwaukee Bucks take on the Los Angeles Lakers tonight, fans will have the ability to watch the game in a way they have never seen before. On ESPN3, the sports network's online streaming service, the game will be presented with Full Court Press, an augmented broadcast designed by Second Spectrum. It will present information on screen in real time that fans would normally have to turn to to another screen to find.
Did you know these iPhone apps record your screen while you use them?
When an app says it's collecting data for technical support or analytics purposes, it seems innocuous but a report by TechCrunch and The App Analyst found a number of iOS applications that went much further without informing users. The apps mentioned, including Air Canada, Abercrombie & Fitch, Expedia, Hotels.com and others used analytics software from a company called Glassbox that embeds "session replay" tech to show them exactly what users are doing. Whatever buttons are pushed or information entered is recorded, and worse, while the feature can be configured to prevent recording of sensitive data like credit card numbers, they didn't always block it out fully. By using man-in-the-middle software to intercept data going to Glassbox's servers, The App Analyst showed how this happens in Air Canada's app, where it could screenshot credit card info and user passwords.
Spotify opens up its streaming data to music publishers
Spotify seems to be focused on building stronger relationships with musicians, having added features such as easier music uploads and allowing them to submit tracks to playlist editors for consideration. It's made overtures to songwriters as well, including with its Secret Genius program and adding songwriter and producer credits. The latest effort to foster ties with the industry is Publishing Analytics, which the company says is "the first analytics tool from a music streaming service built specifically for publishers, so they can better serve their songwriters."
LinkedIn opens up data to researchers to learn about the job market
LinkedIn will open up its data to academic researchers for the purpose of better understanding the labor market and the economy, Bloomberg reports. The company is inviting academics to submit study proposals that in some way involve analytics, economics or artificial intelligence and it will select projects early next year. If chosen, researchers will then get access to "one of the largest and most robust datasets of professional and economic networks," according to LinkedIn Chief Data Officer Igor Perisic.
Facebook accidentally sent developer reports to app testers
While Facebook is still reeling from it's Cambridge Analytica scandal, it has been trying to clean up its image as a company that plays fast and loose with your privacy. Unfortunately, there's yet another issue. According to TechCrunch, Facebook accidentally leaked analytics reports from developers to app testers.
Samsung spins out three more startups from its C-Lab incubator
Samsung's C-Lab has nurtured a few dozen creative ideas into fully fledged startups over the last couple of years, and a trio of new companies have just joined the incubator's alumni. Their products include a mini smart greenhouse, a portable directional speaker and an artificial intelligence-based user research platform.
Apple Music now offers artists detailed streaming and download info
As a musician, knowing how your songs are performing on streaming platforms is important. Spotify brought real-time stats and demographic information to a dedicated app for artists this past October, while Pandora and YouTube have had similar dashboards for a while now. Finally, Cupertino is catching up with the beta launch of Apple Music for Artists, a dashboard that lets users drill down into various statistics on song performance from now to as far back as 2015, when the Apple Music service launched.
Facebook buys CrowdTangle to help publishers track content
The name CrowdTangle may not be familiar to you, but Facebook just snatched up the company to help its publishers track how content moves around the internet. CrowdTangle's platform launched four years ago, giving companies a real-time look at content performance to gauge if posts on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social channels are effective.
Twitter blocks US spies from analyzing your tweets
There's more tension between tech firms and the US government, as Twitter has reportedly blocked spy agencies from a service that helps them root out terrorists. According to the WSJ, the social network cut off the government from Dataminr, a company that analyzes every public tweet sent. Though Twitter doesn't own the service (it has a five percent share), it does provide it with unique access to its central data line. Neither Twitter nor Dataminr have confirmed the details publicly, but unnamed intelligence officials have corroborated the story.
The Vert 2 activity tracker knows if you're making the effort
The original Vert was all about the jumping, and it was quite accurate measuring said jumping. The wearable is getting a 2016 refresh, with an expanded repertoire of metrics that not only includes the frequency of intense movements (sensors are accelerometers and gyros), but also the intensity of the movements themselves. It'll even distinguish between high and low intensity, giving you a total for both at the end. Surges of activity per minute is yet another metric on hand, and one that may prove useful as the company continues to get its wearable tech employed by the NCAA and ESPN for in-game analytics.
How Microsoft keeps 'Halo 5' multiplayer games glitch-free
Glitches and bugs can ruin even the greatest of multiplayer games (looking at you MW3 Javelin Suicide Bomb). But thanks to a pair of cutting-edge analytics tools, Halo's dev team can find and fix these coding hiccups before they become memes. Senior researcher Rob DeLine recently explained how they work. Trill is a temporal processing and in-memory analytics engine. "It's pretty much the world's fastest," DeLine said in the video below. "It's two to four magnitudes faster than the competition in terms of processing temporal data." When combined with the Tempe exploratory data-analysis web service, which allows devs to watch replays of real-time play, devs can quickly spot and solve issues based only on what (and how) the community is actively gaming.
Pandora buys analytics company to get more out of your streaming data
In order to serve up its song suggestions, Pandora collects listener data based on those thumbs up and thumbs down votes you tap in. The music streaming option announced today that it acquired Next Big Sound: an analytics company that will help turn that data into valuable marketing (read: ad) fuel. Next Big Sound offers the tools to properly break all of that user info down -- especially in regards to social media chatter -- for artists, labels and others. You may not have heard of Next Big Sound, but you may have seen its work: the company provides the stats for Billboard's charts, including the Social 50. Pandora already had its own tools for artists to examine user data, and now it joins the likes of Spotify and Apple by bringing in outside help to make its stockpile of info more useful. If you'll recall, Spotify swiped Echo Nest last year, a company that uses music analysis to power radio options for Rdio and others -- similar to Pandora's Music Genome Project.
Amazon's web services are smart enough to make predictions
You no longer have to run a tech giant (or work in a lab) to take advantage of learning computers. Amazon has launched a machine learning feature for Web Services that lets any developer use this computer intelligence to make predictions. Instead of having to sift through data yourself and spend ages fine-tuning algorithms, you let Amazon's servers comb through the info and create predictions largely on their own. This potentially saves you a ton of time, especially if you're running a small outfit that can't afford a lot of servers -- Amazon claims that it took 20 minutes to solve one problem that previously took 45 days.
Fiksu report shows staggering App Store growth
December is always a big month for Apple and, by extension, the developers on the App Store, but December 2014 was a special kind of crazy. According to a new report by analytics and marketing firm Fiksu, downloads on Apple's digital marketplace skyrocketed 44% over the year prior, marking the third consecutive month of record-breaking sales. These numbers are the side effects of record-breaking iPhone sales and an overall increase in demand for apps. Fiksu also notes that across the top 200 free apps on the App Store the daily download volume averaged out to 9.2 million for the last month of 2014. The company's cost-per-app-launch index is showing iOS remains the more expensive platform on which to launch an app -- due to competition and the investment in marketing -- but as the sales figures show, making it to a top spot is insanely lucrative.
