Wednesday, June 19, 2019
Facebook may abort Libra launch in India
Valtix, which develops a suite of enterprise cloud security products, raises $14M Series A from Trinity Ventures and others (Kyle Wiggers/VentureBeat)
Valtix, which develops a suite of enterprise cloud security products, raises $14M Series A from Trinity Ventures and others — There's no two ways about it: The state of cloud services security is alarming. About 24% of organizations have hosts missing high-severity patches in the public cloud …
Sources: Ajit Pai's office has withheld documents from Democratic FCC commissioners on the FCC's probe into the unauthorized sale of Americans' geolocation data (Dell Cameron/Gizmodo)
Sources: Ajit Pai's office has withheld documents from Democratic FCC commissioners on the FCC's probe into the unauthorized sale of Americans' geolocation data — Democratic commissioners at the FCC are still in the dark when it comes the agency's ongoing investigation into the unauthorized sale …
fuboTV inks Discovery deal, adds 13 more networks to its live TV streaming service
Live sports streaming service fuboTV is expanding further into non-sports content with today’s news that it’s inked a new multi-year deal with Discovery, Inc. that will bring 13 Discovery television networks to its service over the weeks ahead. The new additions will include Discovery Channel, TLC, Investigation Discovery, Animal Planet, OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network and MotorTrend — all of which will be available on fuboTV’s $54.99 per month base package.
Here, they’ll join the other Discovery-owned networks which are already live, including HGTV, Food Network, and Travel Channel. These had joined fuboTV earlier by way of its deal with Scripps Network Interactive.
Scripps, now owned by Discovery, had invested in fuboTV’s $75 million Series C last year.
The new and expanded deal with Discovery also includes an agreement to renew the five Scripps networks, fuboTV says.
In addition to the base package expansion, the $5.99 per month add-on package called fubo Extra will get several more Discovery stations as a result of the new agreement, including Science Channel, Destination America, Discovery Family, American Heroes Channel, and Discovery Life. In total, fubo Extra will now include over 30 channels.
Meanwhile, Discovery en Español and Discovery Familia will be added to fuboTV’s Spanish-language package, fubo Latino which is $24.99 per month for 20 channels, and to the Latino Plus add-on that’s $7.99 per month for 15 channels.
The deal also includes a library of on-demand Discovery content, bumping up fuboTV’s VOD collection to over 60,000 movies and TV episodes per month, the company notes.
“Today’s content agreement broadens the strategic relationship between Discovery and fuboTV that began almost two years ago with the former Scripps Networks,” said fuboTV CFO Joel Armijo, in a statement about the new agreement. “We are excited to be adding more Discovery brands alongside their lifestyle networks, which we already carry. These brands, including HGTV and Food Network, are among our top performing entertainment networks, and this agreement allows us to extend our partnership for years to come. We expect to be similarly successful with our new Discovery networks.”
While fuboTV’s core focus is still on live streaming sports content, the service has been steadily expanding its lineup to include more non-sports content over the past couple of years. In addition to the Scripps channels and the soon-to-come Discovery networks, fuboTV has also forged deals with Cheddar, CBSN, CBS Sports Network, The CW, Pop, Viacom, and others in the past couple of years.
Thanks to an investor lineup that includes 21st Century Fox, AMC Networks, Luminari Capital, Northzone, Sky and Scripps, fuboTV today carries a lot of the cable TV channels you find on other TV streaming service. It also offers a good number of local stations thanks to agreements with over 200 broadcast affiliates.
That puts it on better footing to compete with other live TV streaming services like Sling TV, PlayStation Vue, Hulu with Live TV, Philo, YouTube TV, and others. Though it’s still smaller, it has the appeal of the live sports content to draw in viewers.
As for Discovery, the fuboTV deal gives it another means of making its programming available to cord cutters. The company touts agreements with a number of the major TV streaming services, including as of April, YouTube TV.
“Our partners at fuboTV are building a unique programming service, and we are pleased to bring more of our portfolio of real-life passion brands and programs to their subscribers,” said Eric Phillips, President of Affiliate Distribution at Discovery, in a statement. “This agreement further exemplifies the viewer affinity for our beloved brands and talent, and fuboTV’s commitment to offering high-quality, world-class content to customers,” he added.
Fresno-based Bitwise Industries, which offers training for devs, says it has raised a $27M Series A, one of the largest ever by a Latinx female-led company (James Fallows/The Atlantic)
Fresno-based Bitwise Industries, which offers training for devs, says it has raised a $27M Series A, one of the largest ever by a Latinx female-led company — Four years ago, my wife, Deb, and I wrote about an ambitious and unusual tech startup called Bitwise Industries …
Sources: the UK government will announce on Thursday that an upcoming age verification requirement for porn websites will be indefinitely delayed (Sky News)
Sources: the UK government will announce on Thursday that an upcoming age verification requirement for porn websites will be indefinitely delayed — There were fears of porn users' identities and browsing habits being tracked, creating possible blackmail and online surveillance. — Created with Sketch.
Tuesday, June 18, 2019
Google Calendar Was Down for Several Hours in Global Outage
The Facebook-backed Libra Association contains no major banks in its initially announced group of partners (Mike Dudas/The Block)
The Facebook-backed Libra Association contains no major banks in its initially announced group of partners — When looking at a new money or payments system meant to replace an old one, one need only look at who is missing from the list of partners to understand what is being replaced.
In watchOS 6, many built-in apps will have their own App Store listings, letting Apple Watch users delete and redownload some currently unremovable apps (Sarah Perez/TechCrunch)
In watchOS 6, many built-in apps will have their own App Store listings, letting Apple Watch users delete and redownload some currently unremovable apps — Good news for Apple Watch owners who don't want to clutter up their Watch with unused apps. With the release of the new watchOS 6 …
How to stop your TV from snooping on you
ETtech Top 5: Mobile wallets look for KYC solution, India's EV plan splits industry & more
Microsoft and Salesforce have joined the Hyperledger blockchain consortium, an umbrella project for various business blockchains run by the Linux Foundation (Anna Baydakova/CoinDesk)
Microsoft and Salesforce have joined the Hyperledger blockchain consortium, an umbrella project for various business blockchains run by the Linux Foundation — Two of the world's largest top-10 enterprise software companies by revenue have joined the Hyperledger blockchain consortium.
Google will start attributing lyrics in its search results to their third-party providers
Earlier this week, music lyrics repository Genius accused Google of lifting lyrics and posting them on its search platform. Genius told the Wall Street Journal that this caused its site traffic to drop. Google, which initially denied wrongdoing but later said it was investigating the issue, addressed the controversy in a blog post today. The company said it will start including attribution to its third-party partners that provide lyrics in its information boxes.
When Google was first approached by the Wall Street Journal, it told the newspaper that the lyrics it displays are licensed by partners and not created by Google. But some of the lyrics (which are displayed in information boxes or cards called “Knowledge Panels” at the top of search results for songs) included Genius’ Morse code-based watermarking system. Genius said that over the past two years it repeatedly contacted Google about the issue. In one letter, sent in April, Genius told Google it was not only breaking the site’s terms of service, but also violating antitrust law—a serious allegation at a time when Google and other big tech companies are facing antitrust investigations by government regulators.
After the WSJ article was first published, Google released a statement that said it was investigating the problem and would stop working with lyric providers who are “not upholding good practices.”
In today’s blog post, Satyajeet Salgar, a group product manager at Google Search, wrote that the company pays “music publishers for the right to display lyrics, since they manage the rights to these lyrics on behalf of songwriters.” Because many music publishers license lyrics text from third-party lyric content providers, Google works with those companies.
“We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics. The lyrics you see in information boxes on Search come directly from lyrics content providers, and they are updated automatically as we receive new lyrics and corrections on a regular basis,” Salgar added.
These partners include LyricFind, which Google has had an agreement with since 2016. LyricFind’s chief executive told the WSJ that it does not source lyrics from Genius.
While Salgar’s post did not name any companies, he addressed the controversy by writing “news reports this week suggested that one of our lyrics content providers is in a dispute with a lyrics site about where their written lyrics come from. We’ve asked our partner to investigate the issue to ensure that they’re following industry best practices in their approach.”
In the future, Google will start including attribution to the company that provided the lyrics in its search results. “We will continue to take an approach that respects and compensates rights-holders, and ensures that music publishers and songwriters are paid for their work,” Salgar wrote.
Genius, which launched as Rap Genius in 2009, has been at loggerheads with Google before. In 2013, a SEO trick Rap Genius used to place itself higher in search results ran afoul of Google’s web spam team. Google retaliated by burying Rap Genius links under pages of other search results. The conflict was resolved after less than two weeks, but during that time Rap Genius’ traffic plummeted dramatically.
US warning to Indian companies: Don’t share our goods with Huawei
Xiaomi has a fraud 'warning' for these people
MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's, as the mobile chip designer bets on AI demand for growth (Cheng Ting-Fang/Nikkei Asia)
Cheng Ting-Fang / Nikkei Asia : MediaTek says it has started to use Intel Foundry's advanced chip packaging in addition to TSMC's...
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Sohee Kim / Bloomberg : South Korean authorities are investigating a data leak at e-commerce giant Coupang that exposed ~33.7M accounts; ...
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The first project we remember working on together was drawing scenes from the picture books that our mom brought with her when she immigrate...
