Weekly Roundup: Friday, 23 June, 2017
Here are some links I thought were worth sharing this week:
MEDIA
Media Companies Are Getting Sick of Facebook
This article highlights the challenges faced by content providers distributing through platforms like Facebook. They face needing to produce custom content, giving over that content to be hosted on a third party platform and the platform taking a significant cut of any advertising or subscription revenue generated.
"Creating the stories and videos can be expensive and limit publishers’ direct relationships with readers, according to executives at six news companies. They say Facebook keeps changing what kind of material it’s asking for, and the company doesn’t pay enough or turn over enough data."
"The New York Times recently pulled out of Instant Articles, as did the Guardian. Because those articles are hosted on Facebook directly instead of on the publishers’ sites, they haven’t yielded many subscriptions."
Backchannel Is Moving to WIRED
Backchannel was founded by journalist, Steven Levy in 2014 and was one of the first publications built on top of the Medium blogging platform. It was acquired by Wired owner Condé Nastin June, 2016. Now it is moving from Medium into the main wired.com site. Another example of a content provider taking back content distribution from a third party platform.
Time Warner will spend $100M on Snapchat original shows and ads
"The newly created shows will span a variety of genres, including scripted drama, daily news shows, documentaries and comedy. The shows will be similar to those already released by other networks on Snapchat, and run 3-5 minutes in a vertical format.".
AUGMENTED REALITY
Apple just created, and killed, a generation of AR businesses
Apple's introduction of ARKit will undermine existing companies developing for AR. On the up side for the rest of us app designers and developers will move up the stack to use these tools to develop better and innovative products without the need to develop (or buy in) the plumbing.
DATA SCIENCE
Inside Microsoft's AI Comeback
Interesting long form piece on Microsoft's AI efforts.
"Just as Microsoft wants to be among the very few leaders in AI research and products, it has made a place for itself in the effort to make AI good for society. In May, Nadella began his keynote to developers, usually an optimistic affair in which a CEO brags about the company’s latest advancements, with a strongly worded warning that technologists much take responsibility for building ethical software. 'I mean, if you think about it, what [George] Orwell prophesied in 1984, where technology was being used to monitor, control, dictate; or what [Aldous] Huxley imagined we may do by just distracting ourselves without any meaning or purpose. Neither of these futures is something that we want.'"
COMPANIES
Amazon
AMAZON’S NEW CUSTOMER
Some in depth analysis of last weeks Amazon purchase of Whole Foods and the possible future direction for Amazon creating a grocery supply chain service architecture, Amazon Grocery Services?