Wednesday, August 12, 2020
Uber may be forced to shut down California ride services over new driver ruling
Blend, which develops a SaaS platform for lenders, raises $75M Series F led by Canapi Ventures at a valuation of ~$1.7B, up more than 70% from a year earlier (CNBC)
Blend, which develops a SaaS platform for lenders, raises $75M Series F led by Canapi Ventures at a valuation of ~$1.7B, up more than 70% from a year earlier — - Digital lending start-up Blend raised $75 million in fresh funding at a valuation of almost $1.7 billion, a jump of more than 70% …
Sources: Palantir is planning to go public through a direct listing of its shares in late September (Bloomberg)
Sources: Palantir is planning to go public through a direct listing of its shares in late September — Palantir Technologies Inc. is planning to go public through a direct listing of its shares in late September, according to people familiar with the matter.
Telcos warn users to be wary of ISD charges for online meeting apps
Covid-19 pandemic may push digital pay up 37% to Rs 4,067 lakh crore by FY 2022
Realme 6i to Go on Sale in India at 12 Noon Today
Apple's pledge to go carbon neutral by 2030 relies in large part on its Taiwanese suppliers TSMC and Foxconn, which use around 90% non-renewable sources (Bloomberg)
Apple's pledge to go carbon neutral by 2030 relies in large part on its Taiwanese suppliers TSMC and Foxconn, which use around 90% non-renewable sources — - TSMC and Foxconn use more clean energy, cut carbon emissions — Apple supply chain and products to be carbon neutral by 2030
How Casey's digital transformation strategy helped it roll out contactless pizza delivery
How China’s ACRCloud detects copyrighted music in short videos
Music is front and center in the rise of TikTok and other short-video apps. It’s not just the video platforms that are harvesting the fruit of their surging popularity. Music rights holders are also prepared to extract money from the millions of songs found in snappy user-generated videos.
To detect copyrighted content, record labels and publishers summon a technology called audio fingerprinting, a tool pioneered by now Apple-owned Shazam. ACRCloud, a five-year-old startup based in Beijing and Düsseldorf, competes with the likes of Audible Magic and Nielsen-owned Gracenote to provide that service. It can quickly match a target song’s “fingerprint” or ID — key acoustic features like the tempo and tones of a piece — with a reference database of millions of tracks.
The audio fingerprint, or digital summary of an audio signal (Source: ACRCloud)
ACRCloud helps monitor copyright usage for some of the largest music labels in the West, names of which the company cannot disclose because the partnerships are confidential. The record labels apply the startup’s automated content recognition (hence its name ACRCloud) algorithms to monitor works present in radio and TV programs, user-generated content on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, or whichever service that should be paying the copyright holders.
It’s not just the publishers and labels that keep tabs on their intellectual property. For compliance purposes, broadcasters and UGC services also proactively track the music that gets played through their channels.
In the nascent short-video industry, big labels normally charge an astronomical flat fee from UGC platforms, ACRCloud co-founder Tony Li said, and the rate is often disproportionately larger than the cost of actual usage. To cut down expenses, several major Chinese short video apps recently began using ACRCloud’s acoustic algorithms to log what tunes users insert in their videos.
On the other hand, many small copyright holders and labels hardly earn any royalties because they lack a system that can automatically match music usage to royalties.
That’s where content identification can play a role. “UGC platforms use an audio fingerprinting service to generate royalty reports, making music usage more transparent to both UGC platforms and rights owners,” Li told TechCrunch.
UGC services can face huge fines if they are found plagiarizing. Earlier this year, a group of music publishers and songwriters reportedly threatened to sue TikTok over copyright infringement. It’s unsurprising to see TikTok’s parent company ByteDance doubling down on music licensing and even developing its own artists to be less dependent on big labels.
The other obvious use case of acoustic fingerprinting is song recognition, a technology pioneered by Shazam, where Li worked from 2012 to 2014 to help the company expand to China. Phone makers like Huawei, Xiaomi and Vivo have integrated ACRCloud’s music recognition technology into their devices.
Li has always been in the space of audio technology. Aside from his stint with Shazam in China, the entrepreneur also previously worked on Huawei’s ringtone business in African markets. Li has never raised outside funding for ACRCloud and has kept the team small, with only 10 employees.
Tuesday, August 11, 2020
Microsoft fixes 17 critical and two zero-day flaws, including an actively-exploited RCE flaw in IE that can compromise PCs when users visit malicious sites (Catalin Cimpanu/ZDNet)
Microsoft fixes 17 critical and two zero-day flaws, including an actively-exploited RCE flaw in IE that can compromise PCs when users visit malicious sites — Microsoft says attackers have used a Windows zero-day to spoof file signatures and another RCE in the Internet Explorer scripting engine to execute code on users' devices.
Former Pinterest COO provides a detailed account of her claims about gender discrimination and toxic workplace culture and recommendations for the company (Francoise Brougher)
Former Pinterest COO provides a detailed account of her claims about gender discrimination and toxic workplace culture and recommendations for the company — Pinterest has always been about aspiration. It is a platform for sharing beautiful images, curating galleries of an idealized world.
US Appeals Court Reverses Antitrust Ruling Against Qualcomm
Nokia Phone Maker HMD Global Secures Major Investment From Google, Others
Facebook Removed Seven Million Posts for False Coronavirus Information
Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry anti-US views are taking root worldwide (New York Times)
New York Times : Sources: the US State Department ordered embassies to push back against foreign influence campaigns, as officials worry ...
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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...
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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; ...
