#more library users means more funding means better service and more media

[j0die101]

You know someone who loves books and movies and audiobooks and wants some as a gift for the holidays? Get them a library card!!!!

Where I live a library card costs 12 (!!!) bucks a freaking year (!!!!) That's 1 buck a month! It doesn't automatically renew every year, when my year is up I have to actively go there and put the 12 bucks on the table to get a new year. If I forget to show up in time, no biggie, I can get a new 1 year subscription anytime no matter the long the break and it always is 1 year starting the date I paid the fee.

And now here is the best part: it's not just the physical media in the library. It comes with an online package, which allows me to download thousands of books and audio books onto my preferred device! (They delete after about a month, but you can always re-download them). There also is an internal website for movies and tv shows you can access with it.

I'm sure concepts, fee and amount of media vary depending on country and area, but if you don't have one yet: treat yourself, get a library card! Treat others, gift them a library card!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

In “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the internet.

Writing in the New York Times, Julia Angwin — a legendary, muckraking data journalist — breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around Jeremy’s Razors, a business that advertises itself as a “woke-free” shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy’s Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey’s, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jeremy’s has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative — for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other. In order to target ads, ad-tech companies have to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every internet user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and Google lured in end-users by offering high-quality services — Facebook showed you the things the people you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best search results it could find.

Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers. Facebook violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on mass surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding technical document, the Pagerank paper: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They, too, offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Facebook and Google weren’t just kind to advertisers — they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn’t asked to see it, displacing the friends’ posts they had asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called Jedi Blue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook’s surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of Iphone and Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies’ revenues are dwindling and advertisers’ costs are soaring, and the tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy’s might have bought an ad in Deer & Deer Hunting or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don’t want woke razors; the same is true for all products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on content and context, not on the reader’s prior behavior.

There’s no reason that ads today couldn’t return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same “real-time bidding” mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads — but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are much harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it’s hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they’re publishing and what it means.

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

Remember when Apple created an opt out button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked “yes” to “can Facebook spy on you?” were either Facebook employees, or confused):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. “A Raw Deal For Consumers,” Sumit Sharma’s new Consumer Reports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Raw-Deal-for-US-Consumers_March-2023.pdf

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

However, both the EU and the US — as well as Canada and Australia — have focused their news industry legislating on misguided “link taxes,” where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies’ content — when really, tech giants are stealing their money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/news-isnt-secret/#bid-shading

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where Bill C-18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we’re already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

As Jesse Brown and Paula Simons — a veteran reporter turned senator — discuss on the latest Canadaland podcast, the Toronto Star’s sharp and well-reported critical series on the tech giants died a swift and unexplained death immediately after the Star began receiving license fees for tech users’ links and excerpts from its reporting:

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

Meanwhile, in Australia, the proposed “news bargaining code” stampeded the tech giants into agreeing to enter into “voluntary” negotiations with the media companies, allowing Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp to claim the lion’s share of the money, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with Google Showcase, a product that makes Google more money from news content and makes news publishers more dependent on Google:

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like Senator Mike Lee’s ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms’ share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% more.

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft’s spying to boot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

Mandating competition in app stores — as the Europeans are poised to do — would kill Google and Apple’s 30% “app store tax” — the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2–5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet’s revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

Add to that an end-to-end rule for tech giants requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, so every newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by every media company or creator you followed would show up in your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

That would make it impossible for tech giants to use the sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to “boost” their content (or pay $8/month for a blue tick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The point of enshittification is that it’s bad for everyone except the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy’s Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

https://www.facebook.com/JeremysRazors/reviews

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results terrible.

A link tax is predicated on the idea that we need Big Tech to stay big, and to dribble a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don’t just keep working if Big Tech goes away — they actually hasten that demise! What’s more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

Whether you’re the New York Times or you’re an ex-Times reporter who’s quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting control and the share of income is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: freeimageslive.co.uk (modified) http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/using-mobile-phone-jpg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

[Image ID: A man's hand holds a mobile phone. Its screen displays an Instagram ad. The ad has been replaced with a slice of a vintage comic book 'small ads' page.]

[aion-rsa]

Streaming on Plex: Best Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in September

https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

This article is sponsored by Plex. You can download the Free Plex App now by clicking here!

There’s an overwhelming amount of new movies and TV shows hitting streaming services this fall. If you’re starving for new content, it’s set to be a fantastic time, but if your wallet is starving for funds, it can be pretty stressful. With studios and content providers spreading their libraries out across so many different streaming services, keeping up with all of your favorites can get expensive. Thankfully, Plex TV is here to keep you entertained without breaking the bank.

Plex is a globally available one-stop-shop streaming media service offering thousands of free movies and TV shows and hundreds of free-to-stream live TV channels, from the biggest names in entertainment, including Metro Goldwyn Mayer (MGM), Warner Bros. Domestic Television Distribution, Lionsgate, Legendary, AMC, A+E, Crackle, and Reuters. Plex is the only streaming service that lets users manage their personal media alongside a continuously growing library of free third-party entertainment spanning all genres, interests, and mediums including podcasts, music, and more. With a highly customizable interface and smart recommendations based on the media you enjoy, Plex brings its users the best media experience on the planet from any device, anywhere.

Plex releases brand new and beloved titles to its platform monthly and we’ll be here to help you identify the cream of the crop. View Plex TV now for the best free entertainment streaming and check back each month for Den of Geek Critics’ picks!

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DEN OF GEEK CRITICS’ PICKS

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

They’re the world’s most fearsome fightin’ team. They’re heroes in a half-shell and they’re green. I mean, what more do we need to say? 2014’s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is no Citizen Kane, but comic book movie fans flock to it like the four titular turtles to pizza. The film knows exactly what it is, providing cheesy one-liners, silly action, and unpretentious fun. Throwing in Will Arnett as a sidekick for April O’Neil was an inspired choice that paid dividends in laughs and whoever tapped Tony Shaloub to voice Splinter should get a pay raise. Produced by Nickelodeon Pictures, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles wasn’t only the highest grossing film in the series, but also the highest grossing Nickelodeon film of all-time. This reboot of the classic ninja team helped spawn further films, new TV series, and a renewed interest in one of the most beloved comic book properties ever. Cowabunga, dude!

Noah

This isn’t your Sunday School’s Noah. Darren Aronofsky’s adaptation of the story of the biblical figure Noah is an awe-inspiring epic that takes the bones of the famous story and infuses themes about environmentalism, self-doubt, and yes, faith. Pulling liberally from texts like the Book of Enoch, the film has far more action than just leading animals onto a boat and a storm. Shot by Matthew Libatique, the movie looks absolutely gorgeous and at times can be genuinely breath-taking, but it’s not just about the visuals. Russell Crowe stuns in the title role, but the entire ensemble is great, including a post-Potter Emma Watson and a ferocious Ray Winstone. No one expected Noah to be more akin to a thought-provoking art house film than a straight-forward epic, but that’s the sort of genius you get from Aronofsky, one of the most exciting and inventive filmmakers working today. 

Shine a Light

Even if we hadn’t just lost the immortal, suave Charlie Watts, the heartbeat of rock and roll’s longest institution, The Rolling Stones, we’d still be recommending Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light. Capturing the legendary band during their A Bigger Bang Tour in 2006, Scorsese spends a lot of the time rightfully focusing on Watts. With the camera fixated on Watts, you witness his unflappability; the way that he can make such raucous playing look so effortless. You also catch the man’s unique, jazz-influenced technique, like how he rarely hits the center of his snare, or how he changes his grip whenever he hits a cymbal. Even in their old age, the Stones are still one of the tightest, most electrifying live acts, and Shine a Light puts you right on stage with them as they barrel through one of the deepest catalogs in recorded music. It’s simply a masterful concert film.

The Virgin Suicides

Sofia Coppola likely has to deal with accusations about nepotism to this day, but anyone who saw her directorial debut The Virgin Suicides knows that Francis’ daughter would have made it as a filmmaker even without her famous last name. This haunting adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of the same name taps into the melancholy of childhood, the dreamlike haze of memory, and the mystery that lurks inside suburban homes. Coppola expertly captures the pull that an ethereal group of sisters have on the imaginative group of boys that pine for them in a way that is relatable for anyone that had an unrequited crush in high school. As a coming-of-age movie, it is one of a kind. As an exploration of trauma and grief, it is crushingly effective. The original score by the band Air only adds to its hypnagogic vibe. 

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School

Punk rock music and Roger Corman pictures are some of the core tenants that Den of Geek was founded on, so of course we’re going to recommend 1979’s Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, which features possibly the coolest band of all-time, The Ramones. Let our resident punk rock movie expert Jim Knipfel break it down for you:

“After producing so many dozens of teen rebellion films over the years, Corman finally hit the pinnacle, the ultimate teen rebellion picture, with the cartoon antics ratcheted up more than a few notches. There are so many bad jokes flying around, so many visual gags and film references packed into every scene, so many overwrought teen film clichés pushed way past absurd, it’s a film that demands multiple viewings. Even if “Riff Randall, rock ’n’ roller” (P.J. Soles) doesn’t look much like any punk chick I ever knew, I’m perfectly willing to accept it. And in historical terms, it really was this film more than the 4 albums they had out at the time that spread the word about The Ramones to mainstream America, and that’s worth something. Old as I am I still get a thrill every time the students and the Ramones blow up Vince Lombardi High, and anyone who doesn’t must be wrong in the head somehow.”

New on Plex in September:  

1000 Times Good Night 

13 

13 Assassins 

The Accidental Husband 

All Good Things 

Assassination of a High School President 

Awake 

Bent 

Bordertown 

Brain Dead 

Cold Mountain  

The Descent 

The Descent Part 2  

Even Money 

Fear City 

First Snow 

Freedom Writers  

Gray Matters  

The Jesus Rolls 

Johnny Was  

Keys to Tulsa  

The Legend of Bagger Vance  

Mad Money 

Marrowbone 

Murder on the Orient Express 

The Ninth Gate 

Nothing but the Truth  

Ordinary People 

Rememory  

Rock ‘n’ Roll High School  

Sanctuary  

Shine a Light  

Soul Survivors  

Taboo  

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles  

The TV Set  

The Virgin Suicides  

What Doesn’t Kill You  

Winter Passing  

World Trade Center  

Catch before it leaves in September: 

31 

Absolution  

Accident Man  

Aeon Flux 

After.Life 

Angel of Death 

Answer Man 

The Bang Bang Club 

Battle Royale 

Blood and Bone 

The Broken 

Cashmere Mafia  

Child 44 

Cleaner 

Cold Comes the Night 

Coming Soon 

The Connection 

Conspiracy  

The Cookout  

Critical Condition  

Dark Crimes  

The Death and Life of Bobby Z 

Death Proof 

Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star 

Downhill Racer 

Dragged Across Concrete  

The Dresser  

The Duel 

Dummy 

Flight of Fury 

Flirting with Disaster  

The Foreigner  

Goat  

Gutshot Straight  

Halloween III: Season of the Witch  

The Hard Corps  

Hesher  

High Right 

Honeymoon  

The Hunt 

I Saw the Devil 

In the Mix 

Jason and the Argonauts 

Jeff, Who Lives at Home 

Jiri Dreams of Sushi  

Joe 

Journey to the West  

Kill ‘Em All 

A Kind of Murder 

The Kite Runner 

Lake Placid 2 

Lake Placid 3 

Last Resort 

The Lazarus Project 

Misconduct 

Mr. Church 

Mutant Chronicles 

Mythica: The Godslayer 

Mythica: The Iron Clown  

Never Back Down: No Surrender 

News Radio  

Noah 

Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior  

Ong Bak: The Beginning  

The Order 

Out for a Kill 

The Outcasts  

Phantoms 

Pistol Whipped 

The Protector 

Pulse (2001) 

Reprisal  

Return to the Blue Lagoon 

The River Murders  

The Romantics 

Second in Command 

Shadow Man 

Shattered  

The Shepherd 

Southside with You 

Space Station 76 

Square Pegs 

Standoff 

Starship Troopers 2: Hero of the Federation  

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder 

Steel Dawn 

Substitute  

The Super  

SWAT: Under Siege 

The Terminal  

The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada  

Touchy Feely  

Trollhunter 

UFO 

Universal Solider: Day of Reckoning  

Vamps  

Vicky Cristina Barcelona  

Walking Tall: Lone Justice 

Warlock 

What Planet are You From?  

World’s Fastest Indian 

World’s Greatest Dad  

The Yellow Handkerchief  

Still streaming on Plex: 

2:22 

2 Days in New York 

21 Jump Street  

22 Bullets  

24 Hours to Live  

3rd Rock from the Sun 

6 Bullets  

99 Homes 

A Little Bit of Heaven 

A Walk in the Woods 

The Air I Breathe  

Alan Partridge 

ALF  

Alone in the Dark 

Amelie 

American Pastoral  

And Soon the Darkness 

Andromeda  

Are You Here 

Arthur and the Invisibles  

Awake 

Battle in Seattle 

Bernie 

Better Watch Out 

Black Death  

Blade of the Immortal 

Blitz 

The Brass Teapot 

Bronson 

The Brothers Bloom 

The Burning Plain 

But I’m a Cheerleader 

Cake  

Candy  

Catch .44 

Cell  

The Choice 

Clerks II 

Coherence  

The Collector  

Colonia  

Congo  

Cooties 

The Core 

The Cotton Club 

Crossing Lines  

Croupier  

Cube  

Cube 2 

Cube Zero 

Cyrano de Bergerac  

Death and the Maiden 

The Deep Blue Sea 

Deep Red 

Derailed 

Detachment 

The Devil’s Rejects  

Diary of the Dead 

District B13 

DOA: Dead or Alive 

Dr. T and the Women  

Eden Lake 

The Edge of Love  

The post Streaming on Plex: Best Movies and TV Shows You Can Watch for FREE in September appeared first on Den of Geek.

from Den of Geek https://ift.tt/3DV4bW5

[filmstreamingita-love-blog]

On the web Motion pictures Revolutionize the Viewing Experience.

Marketing details confirm what every single stay-at-house viewer by now suspected: The bulk of Us residents will devote time and revenue going out to a film only for a certainly buzz-worthy, genuine and certified, bona fide blockbuster-a motion picture that is completely and non-negotiably "need to-see...right now!" In a calendar year distinguished by some really wonderful "indie" and art home movies, and in a time marked by movie producers' advertising machines managing in overdrive, 2010 has created remarkably several big hits. In reality, market place developments demonstrate that the Grand Canyon between the large movies and the flops yawns ever broader. "Toy Story 3" is the season's runaway winner, but several other intensely marketed Disney choices have long gone straight to movie, comprehensive box-business office disasters. The pattern is accelerating. Most of the time, American movie audiences will wait even for Academy Award-profitable films to turn into available on DVD or by way of their on-need expert services from cable and satellite suppliers.   In case you beloved this informative article along with you wish to obtain guidance about Film Alta Definizione 2020 generously stop by our webpage. Now, with the arrival of on line flicks, visits to the multi-plex could turn into even rarer. An shame of riches on the on the net menu Though it hardly matters now that the discipline is crowded with rivals, analysts say that Netflix launched this development and has emerged as its most important beneficiary. Producing videos and hit tv courses readily available online and available as a result of Wii, Playstation, and X-Box, Netflix has driven its earnings up 34% in the last year. Much more importantly, it has revolutionized users' viewing habits, earning all of their favorites instantly available by means of a variety of products like their hand-held telephones and iPads. In addition to building films and television sequence more available, on line motion picture websites offer viewers with a staggering array of choices, and the menu looks to increase exponentially with every passing day. In addition to modern strike flicks and particular person episodes of well known tv exhibits out there almost straight away right after they air, some on the internet film web sites provide outstanding libraries of drama classics dating back again practically to the creation of videos with seem. Just as importantly, with the advent of 3D television, numerous viewers delight in much better, additional vivid, much more engrossing activities with substantially improved sound and considerably better comfort in their house theaters than they did in high-priced amphitheater presentations. "This is not an anomaly, a blip on the line, or a flash on the radar display," insists Danielle Brooks, media analyst at Patterson-Forbes Associates. "Individuals are voting with their thumbs, deciding on on the internet films around theaters by a massive margin, and preferring online viewing even over their cable and satellite options." Brooks clarifies that on the net viewing web-sites give far more decisions amongst extra brand name-new motion picture and television hits, normally at minor or no cost. "Netflix, mostly on the energy of its status, figures amongst the several solutions that would make income from person charges," claims Brooks. "Just about all the other people rely on advertising income from distributors and from producers of large-conclude video clip games-another option easily obtainable from most on-line movie internet sites. Brooks and other visionary on-line motion picture prognosticators foresee the viewing expertise progressively turning out to be extra interactive. "Producers and directors will make significant-funds motion pictures available with alternate endings or extra motion sequences, permitting consumers lead to the movies' growth," Brooks indicates. "DVD sales notify producers and studios that viewers like possessing command above the written content of their flicks, and parents in particular value getting some evaluate of command or influence around their teenager-agers' viewing."  

[anthonyguidetti]

Pluto TV: Viacom's Different Answer to Streaming

First, Some Context and History

All the major media conglomerates are beginning to reign in their content from Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon, and are bringing them to their own streaming services for maximum profits. AT&T, who owns WarnerMedia, Comcast, who owns NBCUniversal, and Disney, who also own Marvel and 21st Century Fox, have all announced that they are developing their own streaming services to house all of their valuable content available for a monthly fee. Want to watch Friends? You'll have to subscribe to AT&T's thing. Want to watch The Office? You'll also have to subscribe to Comcast's thing. They'll both probably cost around $10 a month, and you're also going to want Disney+, the home to Marvel. All of these companies are taking a non-linear subscription approach to delivering content, something that we first fell in love with when Netflix introduced their instant streaming service back when they were better known for delivering DVDs through the mail. One major conglomerate has been left out of the mix: Viacom. The parent company to Viacom is National Amusements, a company that also owns the CBS Corporation. Because Viacom and CBS operate independently, of which negotiations are constantly rumored that they are in talks to join as one, CBS runs their All Access streaming platform with just CBS content, priced at $5.99 with commercials and $9.99 commercial-free. Viacom initially chose to keep their content off streaming platforms in order to please linear cable providers from dropping their channels. This, however, is not a future-proof solution. Viacom has grown to understand the importance of staying relevant through streaming, and now embraces social networking services where they post original content, and clips from current and classic content from their library. There's more money to be made in delivering the full content, as the other conglomerates have noticed, however, Viacom has chosen to acquire a streaming platform rather than develop their own. The one they chose, however, is very different from what the other companies either have or will develop.

Enter a New Kind of Streaming Platform

Meet Pluto TV, a linear streaming platform. Founded in 2013, the platform started out as a YouTube playlist aggregator run on a schedule. The playlists were disguised as channels, complete with channel numbers, and names, with commercials and bumpers in between content. Channels were separated by genres. There was a tech genre with content from various companies, like CNET, with videos randomized. Another example from their music genre was a Weird Al channel, where Al's music videos were on a repeat cycle. The unique part about Pluto TV was the fact that, at the time, the content could be easily found elsewhere, but what was so intriguing for a person like me who is very indecisive is the fact that the content is pre-programmed like regular TV, and it never ends, in addition to being free. As years went by and their funding improved, they moved away from YouTube and into their own hosted streams. This brought more content acquisitions, like Mystery Science Theater 3000, and content from companies like Shout Factory. More news, sports, movies, and TV shows were added over time, and it grew to reach over 15 million monthly users.

Viacom's Acquisition

In January 2019, Viacom announced they had acquired Pluto TV, and in May, brought much of their content older than 18 months onto new channels named after their brands like Paramount, Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and so on. They aren't the same national feeds you can watch on cable, but they feature both content from their brands and acquired content. All of this brings further value to Pluto TV for people like myself who want to see more of the content I am familiar with on linear cable. The reason Netflix is as big as it has become is because of syndicated content like The Office and Friends, coincidentally, two shows that air on Viacom's cable channels like Comedy Central and the Paramount Network. People want to watch current content, and the Viacom content can bring in more viewers onto the platform.

Pluto TV's Positives and Negatives

One of the things I love about Pluto TV that no other streaming platform does is have a linear never-ending stream of scheduled content. Netflix, Hulu, and the rest of the streaming platforms are all on-demand only. Sure, they offer autoplay to whatever the platform believes would make sense to play next, or they autoplay the next episode. None of the platforms offer a smart playlist option, where users can either program a never-ending playlist of different shows and movies, or it develops playlists that never end like a TV channel. I'm not sure how many people are with me on this, but I like having something else choose something for me to watch. I don't always know what I want, and many times linear cable doesn't either, but I like having the option to just play a channel and the content shows up.

As far as the negatives go, there's a few.

The linear side of Pluto TV is very well done. The on-demand side, however, could use some work. There's no search function, and it doesn't work like cable, where individual channels get an on-demand feature. You either watch the show when it is scheduled, or you don't. There's a ton of movies from the Paramount library, as well as other distributors, in addition to some TV shows, but if Viacom wishes to position Pluto as their streaming platform to compete with the other conglomerates, this needs to change. Considering Viacom also jointly owns Philo with A&E Networks, AMC Networks, and Discovery, and is an over-the-top online cable provider which emphasizes on-demand content heavily over live TV, maybe they could combine these services, or perhaps develop a paid version of Pluto which is reworked to be a more traditional streaming platform. Any plans they may have in the future are irrelevant. What matters now is Pluto does not feel 100% ready for primetime in the on-demand side.

The other negative is platform instability and interface design. The app on most platforms is heavy to load, and sometimes crashes when changing the channel, or loading a menu on my Roku Ultra. Also, I'm not a big fan of the overall layout of the app, which automatically opens to a guide of the live channels. The guide format works for actual cable boxes you get a company like Comcast or DirecTV, where their remote has a large amount of buttons. With a Roku, Fire TV, or Apple TV, you generally just get arrow keys, an enter button, a back button, and a menu button. As such, I really don't think companies like Pluto, along with Sling and others, have figured out an elegant way to interact with the screen with the limited amount of buttons. Cumbersome is a word I would use for Pluto, and other streaming platforms. The app also opens right away in a channel, meaning without selecting a channel, a show is already playing, which I would like the option to turn off as the app can be slow to respond, so if something inappropriate or loud is playing, you have no way of knowing beforehand what will play. As such, it would be nice if there were an option to turn off autoplay at startup.

One last con: there's no schedule of the channels past around three or four hours, so how am I supposed to wrap my life around Pluto TV when I won't know what is on? There's a ton of great content on Pluto TV, but if I don't know it exists, I'll never find it. I'm sure this is done to prevent piracy, but it would still be nice to have some sort of schedule so I know what will be on.

Overall, I love the idea of Pluto TV, and I love that because it has the financial backing of a large conglomerate, it will continue to greatly evolve into something more competitive. Until that time comes, we have to keep in mind that because the app is free, we can excuse some usability issues as there's a lot of valuable content for the price. Because viewership is growing, I'm sure the app will get better over time, but for right now, be patient. For anyone looking to cut the cord and find a free alternative, an antenna plus Pluto TV is a great value option for consumers who prefer a linear TV platform, but are not looking to pay cable prices.

[jamesstegall]

A horrifying new AI app swaps women into porn videos with a click

The website is eye-catching for its simplicity. Against a white backdrop, a giant blue button invites visitors to upload a picture of a face. Below the button, four AI-generated faces allow you to test the service. Above it, the tag line boldly proclaims the purpose: turn anyone into a porn star by using deepfake technology to swap the person’s face into an adult video. All it requires is the picture and the push of a button.

MIT Technology Review has chosen not to name the service, which we will call Y, or use any direct quotes and screenshots of its contents, to avoid driving traffic to the site. It was discovered and brought to our attention by deepfake researcher Henry Ajder, who has been tracking the evolution and rise of synthetic media online.

For now, Y exists in relative obscurity, with a small user base actively giving the creator development feedback in online forums. But researchers have feared that an app like this would emerge, breaching an ethical line no other service has crossed before.

From the beginning, deepfakes, or AI-generated synthetic media, have primarily been used to create pornographic representations of women, who often find this psychologically devastating. The original Reddit creator who popularized the technology face-swapped female celebrities’ faces into porn videos. To this day, the research company Sensity AI estimates, between 90% and 95% of all online deepfake videos are nonconsensual porn, and around 90% of those feature women.

As the technology has advanced, numerous easy-to-use no-code tools have also emerged, allowing users to “strip” the clothes off female bodies in images. Many of these services have since been forced offline, but the code still exists in open-source repositories and has continued to resurface in new forms. The latest such site received over 6.7 million visits in August, according to the researcher Genevieve Oh, who discovered it. It has yet to be taken offline.

There have been other single-photo face-swapping apps, like ZAO or ReFace, that place users into selected scenes from mainstream movies or pop videos. But as the first dedicated pornographic face-swapping app, Y takes this to a new level. It’s “tailor-made” to create pornographic images of people without their consent, says Adam Dodge, the founder of EndTAB, a nonprofit that educates people about technology-enabled abuse. This makes it easier for the creators to improve the technology for this specific use case and entices people who otherwise wouldn’t have thought about creating deepfake porn. “Anytime you specialize like that, it creates a new corner of the internet that will draw in new users,” Dodge says.

Y is incredibly easy to use. Once a user uploads a photo of a face, the site opens up a library of porn videos. The vast majority feature women, though a small handful also feature men, mostly in gay porn. A user can then select any video to generate a preview of the face-swapped result within seconds—and pay to download the full version.

The results are far from perfect. Many of the face swaps are obviously fake, with the faces shimmering and distorting as they turn different angles. But to a casual observer, some are subtle enough to pass, and the trajectory of deepfakes has already shown how quickly they can become indistinguishable from reality. Some experts argue that the quality of the deepfake also doesn’t really matter because the psychological toll on victims can be the same either way. And many members of the public remain unaware that such technology exists, so even low-quality face swaps can be capable of fooling people.

To this day, I’ve never been successful fully in getting any of the images taken down. Forever, that will be out there. No matter what I do.

Noelle Martin, an Australian activist

Y bills itself as a safe and responsible tool for exploring sexual fantasies. The language on the site encourages users to upload their own face. But nothing prevents them from uploading other people’s faces, and comments on online forums suggest that users have already been doing just that.

The consequences for women and girls targeted by such activity can be crushing. At a psychological level, these videos can feel as violating as revenge porn—real intimate videos filmed or released without consent. “This kind of abuse—where people misrepresent your identity, name, reputation, and alter it in such violating ways—shatters you to the core,” says Noelle Martin, an Australian activist who has been targeted by a deepfake porn campaign.

And the repercussions can stay with victims for life. The images and videos are difficult to remove from the internet, and new material can be created at any time. “It affects your interpersonal relations; it affects you with getting jobs. Every single job interview you ever go for, this might be brought up. Potential romantic relationships,” Martin says. “To this day, I’ve never been successful fully in getting any of the images taken down. Forever, that will be out there. No matter what I do.”

Sometimes it’s even more complicated than revenge porn. Because the content is not real, women can doubt whether they deserve to feel traumatized and whether they should report it, says Dodge. “If somebody is wrestling with whether they’re even really a victim, it impairs their ability to recover,” he says.

Nonconsensual deepfake porn can also have economic and career impacts. Rana Ayyub, an Indian journalist who became a victim of a deepfake porn campaign, received such intense online harassment in its aftermath that she had to minimize her online presence and thus the public profile required to do her work. Helen Mort, a UK-based poet and broadcaster who previously shared her story with MIT Technology Review, said she felt pressure to do the same after discovering that photos of her had been stolen from private social media accounts to create fake nudes.

The Revenge Porn Helpline funded by the UK government recently received a case from a teacher who lost her job after deepfake pornographic images of her were circulated on social media and brought to her school’s attention, says Sophie Mortimer, who manages the service. “It’s getting worse, not better,” Dodge says. “More women are being targeted this way.”

Y’s option to create deepfake gay porn, though limited, poses an additional threat to men in countries where homosexuality is criminalized, says Ajder. This is the case in 71 jurisdictions globally, 11 of which punish the offense by death.

Ajder, who has discovered numerous deepfake porn apps in the last few years, says he has attempted to contact Y’s hosting service and force it offline. But he’s pessimistic about preventing similar tools from being created. Already, another site has popped up that seems to be attempting the same thing. He thinks banning such content from social media platforms, and perhaps even making their creation or consumption illegal, would prove a more sustainable solution. “That means that these websites are treated in the same way as dark web material,” he says. “Even if it gets driven underground, at least it puts that out of the eyes of everyday people.”

Y did not respond to multiple requests for comment at the press email listed on its site. The registration information associated with the domain is also blocked by the privacy service Withheld for Privacy. On August 17, after MIT Technology Review made a third attempt to reach the creator, the site put up a notice on its homepage saying it’s no longer available to new users. As of September 12, the notice was still there.

from MIT Technology Review https://ift.tt/3nsWUqw via IFTTT

[libraryresources]

Wikispaces: Youth Services Librarianship - Community Partnerships

[By the time you see this, Wikispaces will have shut down due to financial troubles. This transcription (July 2018) is my attempt to preserve professional knowledge for the youth library field, until such a time that a new, updated resource becomes available! c: ]

(Last revision: 2011-2013)

What are community partnerships?

A community partnership is any collaborative effort between a library and another community organization, such that an ongoing relationship develops that forms the basis for future joint projects. Libraries have been engaging in community partnerships for decades, and recent statistics demonstrate that such partnerships are relatively commonplace. A 1998 IMLS-funded study found that 77% of libraries reported collaborating with a community organization within the last two years (Partnership, n.d.). Given the ever-increasing budgetary pressures that libraries face and ever-diversifying needs of modern communities, it is reasonable to infer that if this survey were repeated today in 2013, the percentage of libraries collaborating would be even higher than 77%. Community partnerships can be an excellent method for maximizing community value with the library budget and meeting a variety of community needs.

Community partnerships usually emphasize outreach to underserved populations and mutually beneficial sharing of resources, including space, staff, and materials. Congruence of the community organization and the library's goals and values are also an important factor in deciding whether to develop a long-term partnership or not.

One of the most common partnerships is between school and public libraries (Fine, 2001). Other examples of community organizations that may be helpful partners are government agencies, service organizations, local businesses, and educational non-profits, such as museums and zoos.

Why are community partnerships important for libraries?

As mentioned above, community partnerships can be an excellent means by which to reach out to underserved populations. Residents within a library's service area might not come into contact with the library explicitly unless the library comes to them through activities by another organization.

Community partnerships also represent a great opportunity to share limited resources to create bigger and better programs for all participants. An example of this type of partnership may be a summer reading program with a theme related to a community organization, such as a zoo.

The community organization that partners with the library will learn a great deal about the values and goals of libraries and will likely pass that information and value forward to their clients. As surprising as it may be to many librarians, many community organizations may have no idea what services the library can offer them (Johnson, 2011).

For youth services librarians, in particular, the outreach opportunities afforded by community partnerships are invaluable. The concept of "meeting non-users where they are" is never more important than with youth, because they do not have their own means of transportation to the library. Furthermore, a young library user can encourage his/her entire family to become library users and advocates.

Pre-Planning your Program for your Community Partnership

A good first step is to identify what your library is looking for in a partner, especially in terms of programming. The desired characteristics in a partner for your library will vary from program to program and institution to institution. This variance means that there is no canned list or program that libraries can implement to find and create ideal partnerships. To get started with community partnerships, the library should start with an informal needs assessment, especially in terms of your program. Some questions that the library may ask are as follows:

What are your overarching program goals?

Community partnerships almost always take the form of joint programming, though general sharing of resources may follow. What kind of programming do you want or need to do? How will these programs serve the community, and how might a community partner contribute to those programs? A good place to start is the library's mission and vision. A library may also use this time to evaluate current and past programming to identify successes and areas for improvement.

For youth services librarians, involving the teen advisory group in the planning process is ideal. For the younger children, consider an informal survey of parents on their way in and out of storytime about what programs they might like to see in the future. Library staff who want even more data can consider an online survey of all library card holders. Depending on the library's time and resources, there are a variety of methods of data collection and brainstorming that can take place even before a community partner is approached.

Who is your target audience?

A major way in which community partners can help libraries is through attracting new and special populations to your library. A good way that libraries can benefit from community partners is to find community partners that have connections or influence with your target population. Look for leaders throughout the community, and be sure to build relationships with them as well as their organizations.

How will you fund your program?

Some libraries may seek out community partnerships in an attempt to fund their programming dreams. Since many businesses budget for sponsoring community events as good public relations, it may behoove the library to contact business owners and the local chamber of commerce to see what funding opportunities are available. Businesses may also be willing to get involved with library fundraising. Another creative idea is to allow local businesses to have booths at library events, with a certain percentage of sales going directly to the library.

Two more groups should be on the library's radar for program funding: national foundations and either the library friends group or the PTA, depending on whether your library is a public or a school library. National foundations often offer competitive grants for a variety of program types. Each grant has its own requirements, but in general, many foundations wish to reward innovative programming. Since community partnerships are mutually beneficial and often require creativity to execute, the library may wish to seek a community partner for creating a program and applying for grant funding. Researching grant opportunities as you develop your community program is a smart move.

Local groups that can help with funding community partnership programs are the library friends group or the PTA. Most library friends groups prioritize fundraising within their non-profit, charitable mission, so they may be able to contribute to a program, either through fundraising or at the very least promotion. As for school libraries, the parent-teacher association (PTA) may already facilitate volunteering and programming at the school, so presenting the fundraising needs for a library program to the parents and staff members may help the community partnership get started.

What space can you use for your program?

If you are trying out a new program, you will need to make sure you have adequate space to reach your goals. When deciding where to hold an event, you should consider the potential costs and benefits of using the community partner's space or a third-party rented space instead of the library. Whenever possible, your library should develop relationships with community partners with large spaces, such as theaters and event halls. Even if you do not need such a large space now, your program might grow!

Who do you need to plan and execute your program?

For an especially big program, remember that everyone is a potential volunteer! You may need staff or volunteers with special skills. Library staff should get in the habit of scanning the local media for artists, performers, and leaders with special skills that may be able to offer their time and talents to library programs. Even if they ultimately say "no," they may be able to provide contact information for other folks in their field of expertise, and they might say "yes" in the future.

Approaching a Desirable Community Partner

Here are some basic tips for approaching your desired community partner:

Do your research! Be prepared.

In addition to your program pre-planning and information about funding, you should do plenty of research on your desired community partner. Be interested and involved with their mission and goals, and consider talking to other community leaders that have worked with them before. Having colleagues or friends in common may help boost the library's visibility within that organization. Additionally, the information you gather may help reinforce whether or not this organization is the right community partner for your library.

You should also organize information about your library and program to present to the potential community partner. They will need this takeaway information to evaluate your proposal and make a confident decision.

Be clear about benefits to the community partner and your corresponding expectations.

The question that your library needs to answer for the partner organization is: what's in it for them? Most organizations need to see the potential benefits before investing their time and money. Most libraries will focus on the public relations benefit for the community organization as a key selling point.

In addition to spelling out the potential benefits, your library needs to be clear about what the community partner needs to do. How active should the community partner be in planning and organizing the program? Will they be involved with funding, promotion, or staffing the event?

Offer generously.

Sometimes, the most valuable partnerships between libraries and community organizations begin due to the library's generous offers of improved collections and services.

For example, Skokie Public Library (IL) created a new business center with the guidance of the local chamber of commerce. (Dowd, 2013). This generous outreach laid the foundation for future community investments from the library, simply because the library offered its services and space generously.

Value your community's suggestions.

Many successful partnerships have started from an idea that a patron brought the library. Be open to these ideas!

How to Work with a Community Partner

Communicate frequently and in writing

Communicate regularly through meetings to track progress and adjust course as necessary based on feedback. Be sure to listen to the partner while also setting clear goals and expectations from the library.

To settle the terms of the partnership, be sure to make a written agreement with your community partner. Details about fees and staffing are critical information to include in this agreement.

Be prepared for anything

As with any library program, create a back-up plan in case of a last-minute cancellation. Assume the best intentions of your community partner, but realize that emergencies can happen anytime. Even if you create only a bare bones back up plan, you will still be better off than with no plan at all.

Follow up with the partner

Be sure to thank the community partner in writing following the event. The community partner should be on the library's mailing list, and your library should be on theirs. Finally, if your program was successful, look for future opportunities to collaborate!

Examples of Community Partnerships/Collaborations

Detroit Public Library

A great collaboration between the Detroit Public Library (DPL), Forgotten Harvest, and the Chrysler Foundation offers free healthy snacks to school aged children who participate in the after school reading program at 20 DPL branches throughout the city. The program was conceived after a series of unrelated meetings between representatives of all three organizations. During one of these meetings it was revealed that many of the children partaking in the reading program at DPL suffered from poor attention due to lack of adequate nutrition. At which point the Chrysler Foundation—the charitable arm of the corporation—gave Forgotten Harvest—a non-profit fighting hunger and waste in the Detroit area—a grant to fund the preparation and delivery of nutritious lunches for the final sessions of the 2012 summer reading program. This pilot program was so successful that the Chrysler Foundation increased its financial support in 2013. Lunches were offered throughout the summer reading program, and snacks are being distributed for the after school reading program during the 2013-2014 academic year.

Participation in the 2013 summer reading program increased to 6,598 children—up 28% from 2012—very much in part to the lunch program. About 11,000 lunches were served over a 10-week period this past summer. With regards to the after school reading program, Forgotten Harvest estimates about 2,000 snacks per week will be distributed during the 2013-2014 school year.

This partnership is extremely important in combating an unfortunate reality for so many children while allowing them the opportunity to learn. “It is difficult for children or adults, for that matter, to concentrate and learn when they are hungry…Our partnership…provides an ideal opportunity to provide nourishing food to hungry children, which ideally will enhance their chances to learn and grow” (Peterson).

Jacksonville Public Library

A partnership between the Jacksonville Public Library (JPL) and the University of North Florida (UNF) brought about a small pilot program that enhanced literacy skills and prevented summer slide of elementary students. The eight-week standards-based literacy program was created by JPL librarian Anita Haller in collaboration with Dr. Katrina Hall from UNF. Its purpose was to provide reading assistance and build literacy skills in young children (K-5th grade) while giving hands-on experience to 27 UNF undergraduates majoring in elementary education.

Each undergraduate tutor was assigned to a group of four or five children. Then, “tutors made informal assessments and developed individualized activities based on standards in the areas of sight words, concepts of print, phonemic awareness/alphabet knowledge, comprehension, fluency, and writing” (Bayer). Parents saw results in their children’s handwriting and vocabulary, as well as in their creative writing skills.

This partnership was a first for UNF and was considered a huge success. JPL and UNF are already planning their next tutoring program.

Best Practice for Young Adult Engagement: Develop community partnerships — including strengthening ties with public schools.

See Young Adult Engagement for more information on engagement initiatives. [TN: Link to transcribed page TBA]

Fostering strong community partnerships should be a goal of any successful youth engagement initiative. Community partnerships offer opportunities for libraries to expand their reach and recruitment efforts, pool resources, increase visibility, and improve the quality and quantity of program offerings.

Urban areas may offer a wealth of partnership opportunities for libraries, while other locations may have fewer potential partners. Consider arts and cultural institutions, schools, parks and recreation departments, government agencies, nonprofit youth services groups, and existing youth services community parterships (Hirzy, 42).

To identify potential community partners, library staff should undertake a community asset mapping activity, ideally involving teen library users. Asset mapping involves identifying the assets your library has to offer, and the assets of other organizations or resources in your community. Ask teen members of your library or Teen Advisory Group to work with you in creating asset maps. Identify organizations in your community that work with youth, and then contact those organizations to learn more about what they do (Rutherford, 24). Ideally, the teens themselves could attempt to contact these organizations under a librarian’s guidance. A useful example of an asset mapping workbook suitable for young people is available here:

http://www.abcdinstitute.org/docs/Diane%20Dorfman-Mapping-Community-Assets-WorkBook(1)-1.pdf

Rutherford (2010) suggests conducting focus groups with teens to assess interests and needs and identify community trends (24). This provides insight into opportunities for collaboration with partner organizations (25).

Another useful strategy is to identify fledgling youth services organizations in your community and, if your library is equipped with meeting and/or activity rooms, offer free space to those groups. I recently implemented a successful partnership between the Richmond Public Library and Girls Rock! RVA, the local girls’ rock camp. Girls Rock! Raises the library’s profile in the community and the number of children, young adults and families using the library on weekends, as well as providing a dedicated team of 20 and 30-something volunteers to flyer the city with library materials. The library gives free space for programming, musical equipment storage, and a venue for a gear-lending program to Girls Rock!

Effective community partnerships are mutually beneficial (Hirzy 42). I also encourage you, if interested, to search for a Girls Rock Camp near you using this online resource (zoom in to find a camp nearest you) and form a community partnership with your library: http://girlsrockcampalliance.org/591-2/grca-world-map/

Consider the public schools as a major community partner. Libraries should promote their services directly to schools. If your library lacks a partnership with the local public school, try to talk to teachers directly on school staff development days (Bourke, 101). Emphasize that libraries provide opportunities for “free-choice” or self-directed learning, a complement to structured school curricula (Jones and Delahanty, 42). Partnerships between schools and libraries can “promote innovative learning collaborations” (41).

Once you have made contact with the teachers and have communicated what you have to offer to the schools, you are more likely to be allowed to address the students at schools in assemblies (Bourke 102) or even better, in individual classes. Consider offering homework help hours or expanded Summer Reading programming at the library in exchange for the opportunity to address students at assemblies and the ability to distribute flyers at schools.

Make the library available for field trips to classes or clubs at public schools. Recently at the Richmond Public Library, I hosted a group of teens belonging to the choir at local Armstrong High School. Our library has an extensive collection of sheet music, scores, CD recordings, and non-fiction books about music and musicians. Several teens checked items out, several registered for library cards, and even a few filled out paperwork to become volunteers. This field trip showcased the library as a place for these teens to pursue their passion for music, and more generally as a place for “self-directed learning that affords autonomy” (Jones and Delahanty 43). Reach out to niche interest groups of young adults through the schools, as “a significant amount” of teen learning “stems from what they are intrinsically motivated to learn on their own” (42).

Librarians are burdened with increased workloads as library funding and staffing continues to be cut nationwide. However, community partnerships can vastly increase your resources and impact for and with young adults. Howard (2011) found that, of young teens surveyed, the reason most did not attend library programs was they simply didn't know about them, and the reason they did not visit libraries was that they did not think about them (332, 335). 35% of teens said they would attend library events if they knew about them (332). Community partnerships, and a strong relationship with public schools, increase the visibility of the library in the community and among teens, increase the impact of promotional and recruitment activities, and increase resources for strong, youth-centered programming.

References

Bayer, Olga. “A Partnership for Success: The Jacksonville Public Library and University of North Florida Summer Tutoring Program.” SLJ.com. School Library Journal, 14 Oct. 2013. Web. 18 Nov. 2013.

Bourke, Carolyn. Library Youth Spaces vs. Youth Friendly Libraries: How to make the most of what you have. Aplis 23(3), September 2010, 98-102.

Bourke, C. (2007). Working With Schools, Parents and Other Community Groups. Aplis, 20(2), 67-71.

Burnette, S. (1998). Book 'em! Cops and librarians working together. American Libraries, 29, 48-50.

California Library Association. (n.d.) California Summer Reading Program: Community Partnerships. Retrieved from http://www.cla-net.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=100

Costello, J., Whalen, S., Spielberger, J., & Winje, C. (2001). Promoting Public Library Partnerships with Youth Agencies. Journal Of Youth Services In Libraries, 15(1), 8-15.

Diamant-Cohen, B., & American Library, A. (2010). Children's Services: Partnerships for Success. ALA Editions.

Dowd, N. (2013, August 5). If You Don't Have Time for Partnerships, Chances Are Your Community Won't Have Time For You. Library Journal. Retrieved from http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/08/marketing/if-you-dont-have-time-for-partnerships-chances-are-your-community-wont-have-time-for-you/

Fields, N., & Rafferty, E. (2012). Engaging Library Partners in 4-H Programming. Afterschool Matters, (15), 26-31.

Fine, J. R. (2001). From the field: reaping the benefits of partnerships. Journal Of Youth Services In Libraries, 15(1), 16-22.

Hirzy, Ellen. “Engaging Adolescents: Building Youth Participation in the Arts.” New York: The National Guild for Community Arts Education, 2011. Accessed at http://www.nationalguild.org/ngCorporate/MediaLibrary/Publications/EngagingAdolescentsGuide.pdf?ext=.pdf

Howard, Vivian. What Do Young Teens Think About the Public Library? Library Quarterly, 81(3), 2011, 321-344.

Johnson, A. (2011). Youth Matters. Reach Out through Outreach. American Libraries, 42(11/12), 48.

Jones, Kenneth R. and Delahanty, Terrence J. A Viable Venue: The Public Library as a Haven for Youth Development. Children and Libraries, Spring 2011, p. 41-44.

Library Partnerships and the Community College- Putting It on the Top of My List. (2004). Community & Junior College Libraries, 12(4), 3-6.

Partnership. (n.d.) In Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science. Retrieved from http://www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/searchODLIS.aspx

Peterson, Karyn M. “Detroit Public Library Partners to Feed Kids After School.” SLJ.com. School Library Journal, 9 Sept. 2013. Web. 24 Nov. 2013.

Rutherford, Dawn. Building Strong Community Partnerships: Sno-Isle Libraries and the Teen Project. Young Adult Library Services, Fall 2010, 23-25.

Scordato, J. (2013). Partnerships for Your Library. Voice Of Youth Advocates, 36(1), 645.

Squires, T. (2009). Library Partnerships: Making Connections between School and Public Libraries. Information Today, Inc.

Todaro, J. (2005). Community Collaborations at Work and in Practice Today: An A to Z Overview. Resource Sharing & Information Networks, 18(1/2), 137-156.

White, B. (1997). Connections: building coalitions to serve our youngest patrons. Journal Of Youth Services In Libraries, 10, 215-218.

[Tumblr transcriber: Camilla Y-B]

[un-enfant-immature]

Artlist raises $48M led by KKR for its royalty-free music, video and sound effect library

Like it or loathe it, video has proven to be the most engaging of all mediums across the web, and today a company out of Israel called Artlist — which provides royalty-free libraries of music, sound effects and even video itself to enhance video content — is announcing a significant growth round of $48 million, both to continue its expansion, and to build better technology to help navigate users to the perfect clip.

The funding is being led by KKR, with participation also from Elephant Partners, a VC out of Boston that has also backed Allbirds, Scopely and Keelvar among others. This is the first funding that Artlist has ever announced, although Elephant had backed it with a previously undisclosed amount previously. Ira Belsky, Artlist’s co-CEO who co-founded the company with Itzik Elbaz, and Eyal Raz and started as a filmmaker himself, said the company has mostly been bootstrapped since being founded in 2016. It’s not disclosing the total amount raised to date, nor its valuation except to say that it’s on the rise.

“We have been 100% cash flow positive since the day we started,” he said. “We just want to accelerate growth because there is an opportunity to cater to a wider audience.”

The market gap that Artlist is tackling is a byproduct of how the internet is used and evolving. According to a recent report from Sandvine, video accounts for just under 58% of online traffic globally, with video, social and gaming (with the latter two also being very video-heavy) together accounting for some 80% of traffic. That speaks to a huge amount of content being made available not just from premium media provides like Netflix or Disney, but popular a vast array of user-generated content on channels like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter.

While some of these may be building their own sound and video content, a large part of those, to speed up production and focus on whatever aspect of their work that they can better individualise and control, many creators turn to stock audio and video footage in their work.

Indeed, there are a number of others in this same space, including the likes of Getty, Epidemic Sound, Shutterstock, Artgrid, the platforms themselves and many others, but Belsky said that in his time as a filmmaker, he found that many of these were not quite what he was looking for himself in terms of connecting him with just the right music that he was looking for, which was part of the impetus behind building Artlist.

What’s interesting is that Covid-19 has had a double impact on that market. Not only has there been a huge boost in online video usage as more people are spending time at home and staying away from public places, but in terms of creators, Belsky notes that many of them have found it harder either to shoot certain kinds of footage, or collaborate with people create music and other sound effects, all of which has led to a surge of usage for platforms like Artlist.

Artlist’s royalty-free model means that people pay subscription fees to Artlist to use its platform — prices range between $149 and $599 per year, depending on usage and whether you are taking the music, video, sound effects or combined plans — but then nothing more for individual clips. On the other side of the marketplace, the company does not disclose how much its artists are making from the service, but the basic model is that it varies depending on how much a track is used, and generally they are very competitive. “Our artists make more from us than they do from other platforms,” Belsky said. There are no plans to switch that business model include non-royalty-free, nor outright sales of exclusive rights, he added. On royalty-free alone, the funding comes on the back of significant growth for the company in the last couple of years, with both users and amount of content both on exponential growth curves, respectively now standing at 1.1 million subscribers and 25.8 million pieces of content (mostly music at the moment, Belsky said).

While many users will incorporate one kind of media, either video or music, into a bigger video project — such as this Mercedes Benz commercial that uses Artlist audio — others looking to see how creative they can be when leaning on both, which speaks to how we might see video continue to evolve as the market matures and yet more video content gets produced:

That brings us to the company’s next steps. Belsky said that while today there are already various taxonomies for searching for just the right piece of content, the plan is to try to make that process more intuitive. Being based in Israel, the company has been tapping some interesting data science talent, and the country is well-known for producing some of the more interesting startups using AI and all of that is feeding into Artlist’s development, too.

“We want to invest in AI for personalisation,” he said. “We see ourselves in the creative tech space, a combination of content and technology. The aim is to find the best piece of music, but also the best user experience when finding it, to make it fast and intuitive.”

One experiment has involved people uploading examples of what they’d like, and Artlist searching for “matches” in its own catalogue, and there are others to come, he said. (Indeed, given what we’ve seen with the advances in semantic search, there is a potentially very interesting opportunity to start to explore how to, for example, ingest a video clip to try to match the mood of a piece of audio to it, which is not something that the company is exploring today, but could be an avenue down the line.)

Meanwhile, given Artlist’s traction and revenue growth, the opportunities and the needs of creators today are interesting enough to make this an interesting bet, despite the stiff competition.

“The growth of digital content creation – and the evolving way in which it is consumed – has generated a tremendous amount of opportunities for creators, but the process of licensing digital assets remains a significant challenge for small and large creators alike,” said Patrick Devine, a member of KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth investment team, in a statement. “What impresses us most about Artlist is the management team’s dedication to helping creators focus on what they do best and removing friction from the process of discovering and accessing content.”

[devarshruparelia]

Day 19 - On Dealing With  Non-Neutral Internet

Updated on 12/19/2017

Internet since its early days has been divided into two parts:

 Free web 

Walled web

Net neutrality going away means nothing. Internet was designed to be a collaborative space for unlimited people. An ISP or a company can wall access to certain parts but most it will remain free. Unlike, physical world it is hard to stop people from building their own nodes on internet which while being difficult. Building a server or websites (or web apps) requires some technical savvy, it is not very difficult. The barrier of entry to internet is quite low compared to other media (like books which literally require building called libraries to maintain them) or technologies like TV or Refrigerator (which even in 2017 are surprisingly not "disrupted" enough to be accessible to average families in emerging economies). One just needs a computing device (ranging from Raspberry Pi to a desktop computer). Even if net neutrality goes away the collaborative nature embedded deeply into the fabric of interweb will ensure that a part of it will always be democratic. Walled net will have to connect to these nodes since new web pages or apps with worthwhile content or utilities will keep coming emerging from free web.

A question may arise, how we as average internet users who mostly use it to consume content on web deal with the effect of anti-net neutrality regulatory changes. It is a very valid question for which I have no perfect answer. However, what I can offer is a way to be a more informed participant of internet. We need to first realise that social media is mostly useless. We don't need more web products like FB, Snap Chat or other bullshit to express ourselves. Also, if they are blocked due to regulations and lobbying, I am fine with no new emerging social ejaculatory apps becoming next big thing. It honestly is a waste of our energies. Expression in internet spaces is important which was what web pages are for. I understand people just want to communicate and be a part of community. Why not we collectively build internet as a space for that. If large ISPs block certain or all webpages or websites, we the users are powerful enough to start new ISPs and keep sharing the blocked websites.

We fear blocking of our favourite web spaces because we didn't build them. Some programmers built them and some rich capitalists decided to fund them during 2000s. Now technical complexity to participate and contribute in internet has drastically reduced. If we continue building free internet spaces in large numbers and attracting larger audience to our web spaces, it will be economically ineffective for ISPs or large corporations to have anti net neutrality regulations and the rules will slowly go away. The problem is our laziness in becoming internet literate. This allows companies to play with our freedoms and profit off it along the way.

The debate about Net Neutrality is meaningless if our actions as internet participants don’t concur with it. We have the power and potential to shape internet as we want it. If Money or regulation are tools to impose certain views on internet, then so is our expression. 

Update:

To put this update in context: On December 14th, 2017, the United States Federal Communication Commission (FCC) currently chaired by Ajit Pai voted to dismantle Net Neutrality Rules approved during Obama Administration in 2015. 

When I wrote this post, I was not serious that FCC would revert the rules considering the protest by American citizens. My country, India, was able to push back on Anti Net Neutrality through a protest. Nevertheless, here we are. I am not certain as to what the dismantling will imply. If Ajit Pai is to be believed, it is mostly that approach taken by FCC in 2015 was wrong (I don’t know enough to trust or not trust him, so this is just my observation).

Internet is heavily reliant on telecommunications infrastructure. Unfortunately in United States, Comcast and AT&T own the almost all the cables and optical fiber networks. So, even before dismantling of these regulations, the net was not neutral. With new regulations in place, it is possible that access to certain web services might get more expensive. On the contrary, it is also an opportunity for innovators to invent and provide cheaper access to internet based services. 

By and large, it is a wake-up call for United States consumers to become more aware about these regulations and understand the implications. Communications infrastructure is a very important in a democracy like US, so I hope American citizens become more aware about it and make better decisions about their futures. 

[zanytimetravelenthusiast-blog]

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[payment-providers]

New Post has been published on Payment-Providers.com

New Post has been published on https://payment-providers.com/why-libraries-are-giving-up-on-late-fees/

Why Libraries Are Giving Up On Late Fees

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It has happened to all but the most organized among us. We’re minding our own business, cleaning out a closet or reorganizing the bookshelf, when it suddenly thrusts itself upon us.

That lost library book we had almost managed to convince ourselves no longer existed. The book that became the second reason we’ve avoided going to the library since the waning days of the second Bush administration. (The first being Amazon, of course.)

At this moment, every library delinquent faces the same dilemma: return the erstwhile book, or put it back in whatever box it came from and pretend this whole unpleasant incident never happened. Weird questions start running through one’s mind: “Does the library stop trying to collect the fines at any point? Does compounding interest accrue? Can they charge a fine that exceeds the book’s replacement value? Can I be arrested for holding onto a library book for over a decade? Do I need a lawyer?”

As it turns out, library fines, generally speaking, don’t become a major financial hurdle. According to recent reports in The Wall Street Journal, the average fine is about 17 cents per day that a book is late – and are capped at $5, $10 or the cost of the books borrowed. But, as St. Paul Public Library Director Catherine Penkert told the publication, it’s not just about the money.

It’s the shame of having to face a librarian and sheepishly have to pull out a dollar bill and admit you are not able to handle the simplest possible adult responsibility.

“I didn’t even want to tell you, ‘I have fines,’” Penkert told the Journal of what she normally hears at work while collecting library fines from friends and family in the community, who usually wear a rather pained hangdog expression.

But perhaps the scourge of library fines is migrating to the past. This week, Chicago became the largest metro area to officially say no to library fines – joining St. Paul, Minnesota; Dallas, Texas; and Oakland, California – in what has become known of late as the library fee amnesty movement that has been quietly (they are libraries after, all) picking up steam in 2019.

Because libraries need customers to keep coming in – and they have been finding out in recent years that a late fee and a disapproving librarian create a very bad customer experience … but one that is pretty easily rectified.

Why Libraries Are Killing the Fines Nationwide 

In a digital world – where most of the classics can be downloaded for free, reference books are rapidly becoming a tool of antiquity and digital streaming has largely eliminated the need for a physical hub for free access to entertainment media – libraries are struggling to bring users in the door. One apparent solution, according to Curtis Rogers, a spokesman for Urban Libraries Council, is to get rid of the things that are actively driving people away.

“We’d rather have you come to the library and engage in our services,” Rogers noted.

Catherine Penkert concurred, noting that in a world where consumers have a lot of choices when it comes to reading materials – many of them free – making the library an unpleasant place to be is far from an optimal strategy.

“All the rules that we have, and the fines and the fees, they’re making libraries really hard to deal with,” she said. “Putting everybody in this spot where they’re going to be fined to death is not helpful.”

Moreover, libraries can’t back up their fines with much in the way of force. In the not-too-distant past, they have been known to play hardball – they would hand unpaid fines off to specialty collection agencies that dealt purely with library fines. Customers who didn’t cough up the money owed could actually see their credit score take a hit, and find themselves locked out of things like car loans or even mortgages, simply because an overdue book situation got way out of hand. These days, however, that is a much, much less likely occurrence, and the credit bureaus do not use library data or parking tickets to generate consumers’ scores.

Incidentally, most people don’t actually know this, according to Equifax – which means they get a lot of questions from panicked library delinquents worried they are about to be booted from mainstream credit markets.

“The topic has come up so frequently that we decided to include it among our credit myths,” said Nancy E. Bistritz-Balkan, spokeswoman for Equifax.

The specialty credit collectors for library fees still exist – but in 45 states, they are unable to put the fine data onto a credit report. And even in the states where they are allowed to do so, they usually don’t.

Unique Library, based in Indiana, is one such specialty credit firm. As a rule, they do not try to wreck library patrons’ credit – instead, they employ what they call a “gentle nudge” policy, aimed at inspiring people to either return their books and pay the fine, or just buy the book. They claim to have collected more than a billion dollars in fines and late fees for overdue materials on behalf of nearly 2,000 libraries in five countries.

Will Getting Rid of Overdue Fines Save the Library?

It is probably a lot to expect that removing overdue book fees – and the anxiety surrounding them – will utterly solve for the library’s problems in the modern world. There are plenty of people who fail to visit the library every week not because they owe money, but purely due to lack of interest and an abundance of other options.

But as avid payments peeps, we can’t help but observe that dropping the fees is often an effective method of boosting consumers’ enthusiasm, which is why it’s a method that is popping up more and more often.

Over the summer, Discover captured a lot of headlines and attention with the announcement that it was dropping the fees on all of its deposit accounts – including fees for insufficient funds and excessive withdrawals, as well as penalties for falling below minimum balances and making stop-payment requests. The elimination also extends to charges for monthly maintenance, checkbook orders or replacement debit cards.

“Helping our customers lead better financial lives is at the heart of everything we do, whether that’s removing fees, offering industry-leading rewards or consistently delivering distinctive customer experiences,” said Arijit Roy, vice president of deposits at Discover, in the release. “Removing all deposit account fees was an easy decision for us based on our commitment to offer the most rewarding banking products in the industry.”

Affirm’s Chief Product Officer Jack Chou told Karen Webster in a conversation last year that in attempting to build an honest and transparent financial company, fees were the first thing on the chopping block, because at the end of the day, they just lead to consumer confusion and anxiety. When there are hidden and built-in fees, Chou noted, the customer never really knows what they are going to pay, and thus is always just a little uncomfortable.

“The one thing we kept hearing from customers over and over again,” Chou said, “was that their trust in our brand went beyond that loan they got that one time.”

And, while the issues of a library are in many ways different from those of a POS lender or bank, one can see how the issue of trust is a common thread. The customer who doesn’t trust herself to return a library book – or the process of being fined for it – will start avoiding the library. The Wall Street Journal had story after story about people who checked out a book in their youth, got hit with a fine along with library failure shame, and then never went back to the library.

The customer who goes in and believes there is no way going to a library will end in anything but a peaceful afternoon of reading, on the other hand? They might actually make the journey – or at least not reject the possibility out of fear that they won’t be able to make eye contact with the librarian.

And at least the early data on the subject bears that out: Since St. Paul, Minnesota killed overdue fines, some branches have seen a double-digit percentage increase in circulation. Citywide, circulation is up nearly 2 percent – which may not sound like much, but it is the first increase the city has seen in 10 years.

And, it seems, patrons are not failing to return the books – or at least no more so than they were before.

——————————–

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[earlyninja]

RE: Some thoughts (and advice) for EarlyNinja

Here is our message regarding the points highlighted by Mike Bithell (http://mikebithell.tumblr.com/post/156352150437/some-thoughts-and-advice-for-earlyninja). At this point, we believe that the last thing we can do to end this witch hunt is to be blunt and give the clearest answers possible.

You’re overestimating your service’s value to a dev. 15%. Really? You advertise this as half of competitor platforms. Let’s put aside that these platforms provide clients and hardware (your roadmap lists Q4 2017 as a hopeful date for a client, which seems optimistic, and will presumably not be as feature rich as GOG or Steam at launch). On a purely marketing level, do you honestly think you can bring a game on your service even 1% of the eyeballs of such a competitor?

Steam is not a competitor. Perhaps this wasn’t clear in the Kickstater campaign page. Developers will have both (or even more) streams of revenue, as we do not impose exclusivity. Do you really think that we’re arrogant enough to come up and stand against a giant like Steam? Steam is not our competitor, it is instead a driving force to strive for better. In this light, us charging 15% for the service is not an overestimation. Why would a developer discard an additional stream of revenue (with higher overall income) when they can also prove to the gaming community that they can abide to their own milestones? There is no need for us to mention developers that have not followed their own milestones... and it’s the consumer who pay that price. 

I know, the sensei are where your value lies this is where, and I don’t wish to be rude, I worry that your team is unfamiliar with the existing games business. You’re describing someone who looks after a project and gives feedback to the team on how things are going externally. So a publisher side producer meets community manager. There’s a number of issues with that. First, experience. If I work with a publisher, I expect my producer to have experience and wisdom, having shipped a number of products. That’s an expensive person for you to hire (spoilers, you might get two for a year on this kickstarter amount, if you pay them very badly). Second, That producer is not someone I pay for, they are the publisher’s insurance on their investment in my game, and part of their running costs. Selling a producer to a game company as added value is like charging me for the plate in a restaurant: I accept that at least part of my bill goes towards crockery maintenance, but I sort of expect a plate regardless of if its being used as a selling point. 

Senseis are not figures that replace a publisher. They have never been that. They are consultants that report information, mediate the conversation between EarlyNinja and the dev and provide project management consultancy when needed. Their formation is not covered in the Kickstarter and will not be until (if) successful funding, but rest assured that Senseis will be individuals highly proficient in project management and communication (there are people that actually hire people of this sort, we include this in our “absurd” 15%). 

You’re using copyrighted materials and other people’s stuff to promote yourselves without permission you have grabbed a bunch of art from games you don’t own, and are using it in an attempt to get paid. I’d think you were being nefarious and picking on defenseless indies if I didn’t see Ubisoft IP on your mockups. That shows a lack of understanding on your part. No amount of caveats and small print about voting is going to make that legally or creatively ok. Stop it. I’ve seen devs tweeting you requests to stop using their stuff, your business will require good, trusting relationships with devs, this isn’t a good start.

We already released a blog post on this and we have nothing else to state in this regard. The only thing we can say is that all we wanted to do was to gather feedback from gamers, that’s it.

Ditto on youtubers you’re citing some pretty big names there… did you get permission? It’s considered a little rude to even use review quotes to sell a game without an OK first, but here you’re grabbing soundbites from two or three years back which on the surface look like endorsements. Youtubers are going to be a big part of your business, hell, they’re a big part of all our businesses now. Using their likenesses / avatars and logos without permission might not be a great idea.

We reported the quotes from YouTubers because they served as insipration for EarlyNinja's model. As above, we never wanted to hint that they endorse our model, rather the fact that early access is broken. 

Holding milestone payments is one of those ideas that makes a lot of sense to a fan of games who’s never made one, and I suspect is the idea this was built around. Except it doesn’t achieve the outcomes you state. Crucially, milestone payments are front loaded, because in real game dev, the most important thing in the world (besides making something awesome) is steady cash flow. Even a month with no cash coming in can kill a team *gestures to every story about a studio shut down ever*.

Here is a passage from our internal documentation:

If a developer misses the delivery of a milestone that is equal to the double of the time set for the delivery of the same or if a developer does not meet two milestones (from the previous one, taking into account time shift requests), then players will be eligible for a refund.

The communication between developer and platform (Sensei): Our Sensei will periodically try to communicate with the developers to monitor their progress with the development. If developers are unavailable to communicate and do not reach back to the Sensei in a brief period of time (we are not talking about days…but not months either), then the Sensei can choose to put the game into “Zombie” 

Games in Zombie Mode will be refundable and will be highlighted in the store for the inactivity of their developers.  The refundable state is not reversible. The refundable state is therefore not automatically triggered and users can choose to keep the game in their library even it is in refundable state.

We did not think this level of detail was necessary in the Kickstarter page (which is long enough as it is), but apparently it is. This is not ransom. This is a system build to protect the consumer in case something goes wrong with the development, and we all know that gamers were scammed by early access developers. Sorry if a few messed up the whole. This simply prevents it and the same time allows a hard-working developer to stand out from the clutter of the market (can you do this in greenlight without any marketing activity?).

The point is that an individual developing a game is also an entrepreneur. It is true that EarlyNinja’s team does not have specific background in game development, but we can boast great successes in digital and media marketing (and a very vast knowledge as gamers). For this reason, we believe one of the reasons why EA has its issues is because there is great coding knowledge but limited resources and time. And this is where management skills can come in hand.

Milestones work pre-release and in private because there is room for both parties to work together, adjusting plans, so that a game actually comes out the other end. Publishers don’t generally use milestones as ransoms, because it’s in their best interest to get a game out at the budget planned for. Your system doesn’t encourage that, you are genuinely asking a studio to hand you the power to shut down their production immediately.

We are no publishers, but we aim to work closely to developers to ensure that their product has the maximum potential at launch. How do we do this? Through the Sensei.

Have you spoken to a lawyer about the contracts? No really, this is a big one. Your milestones are going to have to be maddeningly specific if you want to cut a project off from their cash, or you’re going to have to make the contract favor you so much as to be genuinely predatory. Assuming good faith and a genuine desire to treat devs well, you’re going to have to put together some massive contracts, and each dev is going to have to get quite a bit of legal aid to parse and commit to what you’re asking for. That’s going to cost them. Good news for industry lawyers though ;) … also consider the complexity of international deals.

All of our documentation is perfectly fine from the legal standpoint and we have dev contracts ready to be signed if you are interested. EDIT: to be clear, we are referring to the contracts that we would be signed from developers in case they’d want to join EN.

Is your price going up once you have a client? So, it’s 15% right now, and I give you steam keys. A bad deal for me, but let’s say I do it.. I think you’re worth that cost. I give 15% to you. Once you have your own client, your value to me goes up, because now you’re providing all those awesome services. Willing to commit to keeping at that price point?

Steam key integration is work in progress and there’s nothing to speak about, as it does not even pertain to our current funding goal. The price charged from EN will never vary in this respect. 

None of this makes early access games better. Not even a little bit. Right now, shitty early access games are caught and mocked very, very quickly. They die on the vine because the PC community is a beautifully communicative lot. That’s good for consumers, because it’s genuinely tough to buy something without knowing it’s bad (and refunds can be sought if a game sucks.. a fact you kinda don’t mention anywhere). Projects fail or succeed quickly, and everyone moves on.

Yes, trash EA games are mocked and taken care of quite quickly, but that doesn’t mean gamers won’t be throwing their money in the toilet during their selling time. About the refund policy, EN’s refund policy is explained in the reply regarding milestones. The only way a user will ever get a full refund is when he requests it during the first 15 days from purchase. Out of curiosity... what are Steam’s refund policies?

I don’t think you’re bad people, you all look lovely in your team photo, but this idea seems riddled with misunderstandings about game production, and some ill thought out choices in terms of promotion. I’d encourage you to step back, readdress some of the core ideas that got you here, and relaunch with something badass that the development community and gamers can really get behind. Those of us who work hard to make great games (and occasionally succeed) will never shy away from a service that genuinely helps us to do so :)

Thank you for your kind words. We are looking for constructive feedback to help this project come to life. We believe in it and we’ve worked hard for it and we remain open to all suggestions. Feel free to reach out to us if you are interested in conversating with us. 

[ladystylestores]

Artlist raises $48M led by KKR for its royalty-free music, video and sound effect library – TechCrunch

Like it or loathe it, video has proven to be the most engaging of all mediums across the web, and today a company out of Israel called Artlist — which provides royalty-free libraries of music, sound effects and even video itself to enhance video content — is announcing a significant growth round of $48 million, both to continue its expansion, and to build better technology to help navigate users to the perfect clip.

The funding is being led by KKR, with participation also from Elephant Partners, a VC out of Boston that has also backed Allbirds, Scopely and Keelvar among others. This is the first funding that Artlist has ever announced, although Elephant had backed it with a previously undisclosed amount previously. Ira Belsky, Artlist’s co-CEO who co-founded the company with Itzik Elbaz, and Eyal Raz and started as a filmmaker himself, said the company has mostly been bootstrapped since being founded in 2016. It’s not disclosing the total amount raised to date, nor its valuation except to say that it’s on the rise.

“We have been 100% cash flow positive since the day we started,” he said. “We just want to accelerate growth because there is an opportunity to cater to a wider audience.”

The market gap that Artlist is tackling is a byproduct of how the internet is used and evolving. According to a recent report from Sandvine, video accounts for just under 58% of online traffic globally, with video, social and gaming (with the latter two also being very video-heavy) together accounting for some 80% of traffic. That speaks to a huge amount of content being made available not just from premium media provides like Netflix or Disney, but popular a vast array of user-generated content on channels like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter.

While some of these may be building their own sound and video content, a large part of those, to speed up production and focus on whatever aspect of their work that they can better individualise and control, many creators turn to stock audio and video footage in their work.

Indeed, there are a number of others in this same space, including the likes of Getty, Epidemic Sound, Shutterstock, Artgrid, the platforms themselves and many others, but Belsky said that in his time as a filmmaker, he found that many of these were not quite what he was looking for himself in terms of connecting him with just the right music that he was looking for, which was part of the impetus behind building Artlist.

What’s interesting is that Covid-19 has had a double impact on that market. Not only has there been a huge boost in online video usage as more people are spending time at home and staying away from public places, but in terms of creators, Belsky notes that many of them have found it harder either to shoot certain kinds of footage, or collaborate with people create music and other sound effects, all of which has led to a surge of usage for platforms like Artlist.

Artlist’s royalty-free model means that people pay subscription fees to Artlist to use its platform — prices range between $149 and $599 per year, depending on usage and whether you are taking the music, video, sound effects or combined plans — but then nothing more for individual clips. On the other side of the marketplace, the company does not disclose how much its artists are making from the service, but the basic model is that it varies depending on how much a track is used, and generally they are very competitive. “Our artists make more from us than they do from other platforms,” Belsky said. There are no plans to switch that business model include non-royalty-free, nor outright sales of exclusive rights, he added. On royalty-free alone, the funding comes on the back of significant growth for the company in the last couple of years, with both users and amount of content both on exponential growth curves, respectively now standing at 1.1 million subscribers and 25.8 million pieces of content (mostly music at the moment, Belsky said).

While many users will incorporate one kind of media, either video or music, into a bigger video project — such as this Mercedes Benz commercial that uses Artlist audio — others looking to see how creative they can be when leaning on both, which speaks to how we might see video continue to evolve as the market matures and yet more video content gets produced:

That brings us to the company’s next steps. Belsky said that while today there are already various taxonomies for searching for just the right piece of content, the plan is to try to make that process more intuitive. Being based in Israel, the company has been tapping some interesting data science talent, and the country is well-known for producing some of the more interesting startups using AI and all of that is feeding into Artlist’s development, too.

“We want to invest in AI for personalisation,” he said. “We see ourselves in the creative tech space, a combination of content and technology. The aim is to find the best piece of music, but also the best user experience when finding it, to make it fast and intuitive.”

One experiment has involved people uploading examples of what they’d like, and Artlist searching for “matches” in its own catalogue, and there are others to come, he said. (Indeed, given what we’ve seen with the advances in semantic search, there is a potentially very interesting opportunity to start to explore how to, for example, ingest a video clip to try to match the mood of a piece of audio to it, which is not something that the company is exploring today, but could be an avenue down the line.)

Meanwhile, given Artlist’s traction and revenue growth, the opportunities and the needs of creators today are interesting enough to make this an interesting bet, despite the stiff competition.

“The growth of digital content creation – and the evolving way in which it is consumed – has generated a tremendous amount of opportunities for creators, but the process of licensing digital assets remains a significant challenge for small and large creators alike,” said Patrick Devine, a member of KKR’s Next Generation Technology Growth investment team, in a statement. “What impresses us most about Artlist is the management team’s dedication to helping creators focus on what they do best and removing friction from the process of discovering and accessing content.”

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[csrgood]

Blackbaud Announces New Measures to Support Customers and Global Community in Response to COVID-19 Pandemic

 Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB), the world’s leading cloud software company powering social good, announced new measures to support its customers and the broader social economy as many organizations are thrown into crisis mode in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the COVID-19 crisis evolves around the globe, social good organizations are experiencing unprecedented challenges, and even disruptions to their operations. The need for funding, support and resources is significant as organizations work to pivot their models, activate supporters and minimize disruptions to their services and work.

When addressing Blackbaud’s global workforce this morning, president and CEO Mike Gianoni outlined a series of measures to support customers, fuel critical innovation and help employees. Among the measures outlined, Gianoni announced he would stop taking a paycheck until the business stabilizes.

“At Blackbaud, we believe the world will be a better place when good takes over,” said Gianoni. “And, that higher purpose has taken on entirely new meaning and importance during this unprecedented time. We are taking measures to ensure business continuity while remaining critically focused on the success of our customers. We want to empower them to not only survive this pandemic, but to thrive. We also want to do our part to help bring the global economy back to a powerful place. And, most importantly, we want to do our part to help save lives.”

Blackbaud is seeing the needs and impact of COVID-19 manifest in many ways for its customers depending on the organization type. Many private K–12 schools across the U.S. are benefitting from Blackbaud’s cloud solutions by being able to swiftly move classes online. Food banks are receiving record high donations through Blackbaud Merchant Services™ – up more than 500% year-over-year. Meanwhile, other nonprofits like arts and cultural organizations face entirely different challenges, which Blackbaud is working diligently to support through resources and guidance. Blackbaud is helping churches recapture weekly offering by quickly setting up virtual platforms. Blackbaud solutions support virtual events, so as organizations around the world are having to cancel important in-person events—even marathons—they’re able to quickly move fundraising aspects online and recapture revenue. For example, Blackbaud’s JustGiving platform is experiencing a rise in COVID-19-related virtual events, individual crowdfunding and direct donations from charities, individuals and celebrities. In support of this, Blackbaud’s team is working hands-on with organizations and redeploying resources to accelerate the “go live” of all COVID-19 campaigns.

Below are some of the announcements that Blackbaud made today to further support its customers.

Blackbaud to Now Offer Customers Free, Universal Access to All Recorded eLearning Resources Many social good organizations—nonprofits, higher education institutions, K–12 schools, healthcare organizations, faith communities, arts and cultural organizations, foundations and companies—are relying on software in an unprecedented way to fuel communications, fundraising and more during this crisis. To make it easier for its customers to get the training and education they need, the company announced free universal access to its entire curriculum of recorded eLearning resources through Blackbaud University. Customers can learn more here.

Blackbaud Releases More than 100 New Resources at No Cost to the Social Good Community Social good organizations are seeking best practices and advice on how to operate and pivot amidst the unforeseen challenges of COVID-19. To help arm these organizations with the knowledge and resources they seek, Blackbaud created new webinars, virtual user groups, community forums, podcasts, e-books and more over the last two weeks; making them available at no cost. Topics include change management, managing a global remote workforce, virtual fundraising, financial management, donor communications and more. Blackbaud’s resource library is being continually updated and can be accessed at Blackbaud.com/COVID-19-Resources. Additionally, Blackbaud launched job boards and a COVID-19 discussion thread as part of its Blackbaud Communities platform to help customers further connect and share best practices with each other during this time.

Blackbaud Donates to World Health Organization and UN Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund Blackbaud’s mission is to empower and connect people through technology to drive impact for social good, which is especially critical during these times. Throughout all major disasters, Blackbaud is on the frontlines with its customers and supporting the social good community globally. Blackbaud will be making a donation to the World Health Organization and the UN Foundation’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund to put technology in place to fight the spread of the virus. This technology will help track the virus and provide powerful insights into how it is spreading, ensuring patients are getting the care they need; improving the buying and shipping of essential medical supplies; and accelerating efforts to develop a vaccine.

Blackbaud Employees Empowered with New Programs and Expanded Employee Gift Matching Program Blackbaud’s employees are committed to social good professionally and personally – as evidenced by employee participation in the company’s matching gift program being consistently more than two times the national median, according to company data. To continue to empower employees’ drive to support causes they care about, Blackbaud today increased its employee matching gift program for the second time since January, bringing the increase to 30% in 2020. The company also began rolling out “virtual volunteerism” programs, which will augment the more than 100,000 hours its employees physically donate each year.

Learn more about the resources and measures that Blackbaud is taking for its customers here.

About Blackbaud Blackbaud (NASDAQ: BLKB) is the world's leading cloud software company powering social good. Serving the entire social good community—nonprofits, higher education institutions, K–12 schools, healthcare organizations, faith communities, arts and cultural organizations, foundations, companies and individual change agents—Blackbaud connects and empowers organizations to increase their impact through cloud software, services, expertise and data intelligence. The Blackbaud portfolio is tailored to the unique needs of vertical markets, with solutions for fundraising and CRM, marketing, advocacy, peer-to-peer fundraising, corporate social responsibility, school management, ticketing, grantmaking, financial management, payment processing and analytics. Serving the industry for more than three decades, Blackbaud is headquartered in Charleston, South Carolina, and has operations in the United States, Australia, Canada, Costa Rica and the United Kingdom. For more information, visit  www.blackbaud.com or follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Media Inquiries media@blackbaud.com

Forward-looking Statements Except for historical information, all of the statements, expectations, and assumptions contained in this news release are forward-looking statements that involve a number of risks and uncertainties, including statements regarding expected benefits of products and product features. Although Blackbaud attempts to be accurate in making these forward-looking statements, it is possible that future circumstances might differ from the assumptions on which such statements are based. In addition, other important factors that could cause results to differ materially include the following: general economic risks; uncertainty regarding increased business and renewals from existing customers; continued success in sales growth; management of integration of acquired companies and other risks associated with acquisitions; risks associated with successful implementation of multiple integrated software products; the ability to attract and retain key personnel; risks associated with management of growth; lengthy sales and implementation cycles, particularly in larger organization; technological changes that make our products and services less competitive; and the other risk factors set forth from time to time in the SEC filings for Blackbaud, copies of which are available free of charge at the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov or upon request from Blackbaud's investor relations department. All Blackbaud product names appearing herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Blackbaud, Inc.

source: https://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/44335-Blackbaud-Announces-New-Measures-to-Support-Customers-and-Global-Community-in-Response-to-COVID-19-Pandemic?tracking_source=rss

[warninggraphiccontent]

20 March 2020

Covid's Metamorphoses

Morning all,

I’m sure pieces have already been written about a generation that has grown up knowing only crises – political, financial, health, global – and government as crisis management. Even we millennials old enough to remember majority governments in moments of relative calm (though anything now seems calm in comparison) struggle with the dissonant discourse of horror and humour: as we send funny tweets to keep things light, we risk trivializing serious times; if we didn’t, it might be worse. It almost seems disrespectful to keep calm and carry on in a time of quarantine and crisis, but carry on we must.

Many of us will be completing a first full week of working from home (though it is not conventional working from home). It may prompt institutions, like government and parliament, to (finally) think about doing things differently. These enforced changes could change how we work and live for a long time to come. For years, I’ve known civil servants (in particular) amused by talk of artificial intelligence in government when their video conferencing software barely works. This might be the crisis that forces that tech to be taken up and improved, and make remote working the norm.

It won’t be quite as simple as that, of course. Once the current social distancing is over, we may crave being back in an office and jetting off round the world. Not everyone will want to – it may bring back uncomfortable memories. Loneliness is a risk. Not everyone can work from home. There are those jobs that can be done remotely, and those that can’t; those that have home situations that allow it, and those that don’t; those that have the tech and tools, and those that don’t. We may risk new divides.

The tech may not always be up to the promises made of it (will our digital infrastructure cope?). In our rush to embrace new tools, we may be handing over parts of our privacy to private companies. Governments may need emergency powers – but how long will they need to last? Our data is at the heart of much of these debates (and the long-term debate about how government uses our data needs to be had in public, with the public,for it to work). Do we risk replicating some of the issues of legacy IT, as we use different, walled, non-interoperable platforms – do we need a more decentralized web to be able to talk to each other? (Won’t somebody think of the knowledge and information management implications?) What does this all mean for government transparency and accountability? This brave new world requires all of us to ask new questions, about how we work, how we live and how we feel.

But, as big as many of these questions are and as challenging as the next few months will be, there are opportunities to make things better. People are innovating, on everything from choir rehearsals to public events. Community support groups are springing up on WhatsApp and elsewhere on the web. These times are what we choose to make of them.

And the future of work is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed. It’s a privilege to work with so many brilliant data, digital, open government and transparency types, many of whom are used to working in different ways and have been sharing tips on how to do so. There’s a list below – it’s not intended to be comprehensive, and I won’t be updating it (I am forever haunted by this). But I hope it’s of some use. If you do want to add to an ongoing list, let me recommend the Newspeak House Coronavirus Tech Handbook, or this remote working survival kit.

These times also provide a reminder of the importance of good communication. Some governments, news outlets and social media users are proving that by the negative. But there are those using their platforms to inform, educate and (yes) entertain. You’ll find some of those examples in the links below, as ever.

Stay safe, keep in touch, and see you next week

Gavin

Tips

How to Work From Home Without Losing Your Mind (Wired, via Alex)

18F’s best practices for making distributed teams work (18F)

How to help staff adjust to remote working (Digital Leaders)

Coronavirus threat is our chance to explore working from home (Catherine Stihler, Open Knowledge, in the Herald)

Assisted Serendipity, Random Coffee and the power of the unstructured meeting (Emily Webber)

It’s OK to… Working from home version (Nick Smith, GDS)

Video lectures etc (Alasdair Rae)

Crushing it from home (Chris Yiu)

Weeknotes #16: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Amanda Smith)

Things I am learning about leading a team that's newly entirely remote (Janet Hughes)

Sam Freedman

Alix Dunn

Liz Carolan

Mitchell Hashimoto

Max Gladstone

@LeenaVanD

Scott Lincicome

Sophia Collins

Call for tips (Emily Lakdawalla)

Data4SDGs

Tech

Coronavirus Tech Handbook (Newspeak House)

Remote working survival kit

Resources to support working, collaborating and training remotely (ODI)

Call for suggestions (Leigh Dodds)

Internet tools for civil servants: an introduction (UK Government – 'withdrawn', though maybe with more to follow)

Information Governance (NHSX)

Call for suggestions (LA Times graphics desk)

Call for suggestions (Ruth Levine)

Holding an online unconference (James Cattell)

Making video conferencing work better from a home office (Will Perrin, via Tom)

Learn how to run your next workshop – remotely (Equal Experts)

So You Want to Host a Web Meeting? (Nancy White, with Pete Cranston, Susan Stewart and Bonnie Koenig)

Practical Guide to Remote Meetings (CAST)

Remote classes on Zoom (Dr Andrew Schrock)

@digidatajen

GroupMap (via Gen)

Yap is the best new chatroom (The Verge)

Turning fringe meeting of cancelled @WorldBank Land & Poverty conference into great 2 hr web-workshop (via Tim Davies)

Although…

Today's links:

Graphic content

Viral content

Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand (Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team)

The shocking coronavirus study that rocked the UK and US* (FT)

Why outbreaks like coronavirus spread exponentially, and how to “flatten the curve” (Washington Post - free)

The most-read story ever published by the Washington Post online is a visualization (and other reasons why your organization should invest in a graphics team) (Alberto Cairo)

Coronavirus tracked: the latest figures as the pandemic spreads* (FT)

Economic confidence falls to lowest since 2008 but half think government handling the coronavirus crisis well (Ipsos MORI)

Public opinion on the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic (Ipsos MORI)

Confirmed cases vs. deaths per capita by country (Joey Schmitt)

9 charts that explain the coronavirus pandemic (Vox)

Containing coronavirus: the lessons from Asia* (FT)

COVID-19 Dashboards (Hamel Husain)

Coronavirus: Eight charts on how it has shaken economies (BBC News)

How do coronavirus containment measures vary across Europe? (The Guardian)

U.S. Lags in Coronavirus Testing After Slow Response to Outbreak* (New York Times)

Scenarios (ProPublica)

What people will do in self-isolation (The Times)

Control of the coronavirus gives China the world’s best-performing stockmarket* (The Economist)

Coronavirus country comparator (SciencesPo Medialab)

Confirmed cases (Edward Haas, via Benoit)

These Places Could Run Out of Hospital Beds as Coronavirus Spreads* (The Upshot)

Where have cases of coronavirus spread in the UK? (The Times)

We've created a map showing the concentration of employees in what we are tentatively calling at-risk sectors (Centre for Towns)

Coronavirus – latest figures (Rob Fry)

Pollution is plummeting in Italy in the wake of coronavirus, emissions data show* (Washington Post)

#dataviz and coronavirus

Data Visualization Is Crucial for Understanding and Combatting COVID-19 (Nightingale)

Explaining and simulating the coronavirus (Alberto Cairo)

Before showing any data, explain how your visualization works (Alberto Cairo)

Partnering Health and Data Expertise for COVID-19 (Data Visualization Society)

UK government

Clear objectives will help make relocating civil servants a success (Sarah for IfG)

Local government funding in England (Graham for IfG)

Cabinet committees (Ketaki and me for IfG)

New Home Office perm sec (me for IfG)

New ministers (me for IfG)

Brexit bill progress (Maddy for IfG)

Civil service staff numbers (Benoit for IfG)

Everything else

Research Output: Alternative measures of housing affordability: financial year ending 2018 (ONS - thread)

Rough sleeping statistics: How reliable are they? (Commons Library)

Food waste is responsible for 6% of global greenhouse gas emissions (Our World in Data)

Stop the Meltdown (Meltdown Flags)

Meta data

Viral content

New data, new policy: why UK's coronavirus strategy changed (The Guardian)

GOV.UK Notify is available for the public sector to use for emergency staff communications (GDS)

Testify, Notify (GDS)

Covid-19: Making data and models open is part of the fight against it – governments must act now (ODI)

Exclusive: How Singapore sends daily Whatsapp updates on coronavirus (GovInsider)

Will the Coronavirus Break the Internet? (Slate)

The Coronavirus pandemic will shape the nature of our longer term digital future (Chi Onwurah for PoliticsHome)

While everyone's installing Zoom, I'm going to plug in my landline phone for the first time ever... (Reuben Binns)

A Call for Action #data4covid19 (The GovLab)

Covid-19 requires information hygiene as well as personal hygiene (NS Tech)

Making things open is making things better (Public Digital)

Phone location data could be used to help UK coronavirus effort (The Guardian)

The government might want your phone location data to fight coronavirus. Here’s why that could be okay. (Recode)

Whenever I hear about tech companies using "aggregated anonymous location data" to do anything (including tracking pandemics)... (Olivia Solon)

Come back, AI. All is forgiven: We know we've mocked you in the past, but we need help analyzing 26,000 papers on COVID-19, coronaviruses (The Register)

Information Governance (NHSX)

Quaran-teens: Has a youth spent online prepared millennials for isolation?* (New Statesman)

Can computers ever replace the classroom? (The Guardian)

As COVID-19 pushes classes online, some students are caught in the broadband gap (The Verge)

Viral misinformation

Facts on Coronavirus (Full Fact)

Take the quiz: New coronavirus and misinformation (Full Fact)

“I’m Not An Epidemiologist But…": The Rise Of The Coronavirus Influencers (BuzzFeed)

No, The British Army Isn't Marching Through London Because Of Coronavirus (BuzzFeed)

Here's A Running List Of The Latest Hoaxes Spreading About The Coronavirus (BuzzFeed)

YouTube Is Letting Millions Of People Watch Videos Promoting Misinformation About The Coronavirus (BuzzFeed)

Boris Johnson and the media need to inject more uncertainty into the coronavirus debate* (New Statesman)

We don’t deserve our wretched media class (UnHerd)

To Fight Covid-19, Curb the Spread of Germs—and Rumors* (Wired)

How One Particular Coronavirus Myth Went Viral* (Wired)

Pandemics & Propaganda: How Chinese State Media Shapes Conversations on The Coronavirus (Stanford Cyber Policy Center)

Coronavirus: Social giants police web with AI as staff sent home (BBC News)

Facebook fumbles its response to coronavirus (The Outline)

Scientists should take lessons from economists on virus response* (FT)

Openness

So long, and thanks for all the data* (Rachel Rank for 360Giving)

This slide comes from CabinetOffice internal guidance on handling FOI requests (Martin Rosenbaum)

OGP action planning: Not a good start (Andrew Ecclestone for Transparency International)

What happened to Freedom of Information? (politics.co.uk - more from IfG here)

The value of data

Ben and Jeni Podcast (ODI and Oxford DataLab)

Are data more like oil or sunlight?* (The Economist)

Governance models for redistribution of data value (voxeu.org)

AI, etc

Algorithms that run our lives are racist and sexist. Meet the women trying to fix them (The Correspondent - and thread)

Tackling the robot bigots: how to implement Artificial Intelligence intelligently (Global Government Forum)

Scotland to get biometrics commissioner (UK Authority)

UK government

The UK’s national data strategy is still missing in action (NS Tech)

Budget 2020: Investment in science and technology needs to bring about strong data infrastructure for the UK to thrive (ODI)

Explanatory framework for adequacy discussions (DCMS)

Everything else

Service Design in Gov talk — March 2020 (Cassie Robinson)

Data trusts in 2020 (ODI)

A future where we are all 'free to be human' (Privacy International)

What Are My Photos Revealing About Me? (The Markup)

AUDITING WITH ACCOUNTABILITY: SHRINKING THE OPPORTUNITY SPACES FOR AUDIT FAILURE (University of Sheffield, Copenhagen Business School, Luminate)

Reforming Audit in the Public Interest (Luminate)

Invisible Censorship (The Intercept)

Opportunities

JOB: Senior researcher: Whitehall Monitor (IfG - we're also looking for a researcher)

JOB: Evaluation Manager to work in the Innovation Growth Lab (Nesta)

EVENT: TICTeC’s going online (mySociety)

HOW TO: Journalism + data science projects (investigate.ai)

And finally...

Viral content

Homeschooling (via Konnie Huq)

Zoom pro-tips (Kate Buckley, David Zhou)

Cattening the curve (Anne Marie Darling)

Everything else

I like this innovative use of emoji-as-flowchart (via Gretchen McCulloch)

Geolocation... (Emily Gorcenski)

The Fixed-term Parliaments Act... (me for IfG)

[magzoso-tech]

All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part IV: Healthcare, Biotech, Fintech and Nonprofits

New Post has been published on https://magzoso.com/tech/all-the-companies-from-y-combinators-w20-demo-day-part-iv-healthcare-biotech-fintech-and-nonprofits/

All the companies from Y Combinator’s W20 Demo Day, Part IV: Healthcare, Biotech, Fintech and Nonprofits

Y Combinator’s Demo Day was a bit different this time around.

As concerns grew over the spread of COVID-19, Y Combinator shifted the event format away from the two-day gathering in San Francisco we’ve gotten used to, instead opting to have its entire class debut to invited investors and media via YC’s Demo Day website.

In a bit of a surprise twist, YC also moved Demo Day forward one week citing accelerated pacing from investors. Alas, this meant switching up its plan for each company to have a recorded pitch on the Demo Day website; instead, each company pitched via slides, a few paragraphs outlining what they’re doing and the traction they’re seeing, and team bios. It’s unclear so far how this new format — in combination with the rapidly evolving investment climate — will impact this class.

As we do with each class, we’ve collected our notes on each company based on information gathered from their pitches, websites and, in some cases, our earlier coverage of them.

To make things a bit easier to read, we’ve split things up by category rather than have it be one huge wall of text. These are the healthcare, biotech, fintech and nonprofit companies. You can find the other categories (such as B2B, consumer and robotics) here.

Healthcare and Biotech

Simple Stripes: Aims to make glucose testing cheaper and more accessible by making strips that can be read by any smartphone camera, rather than requiring a dedicated glucose meter. The company says it expects to submit its strips for FDA approval in June.

nplex biosciences: A faster, cheaper way to do the protein panels required in the development of new medications. The company says it has over $4 million in letters-of-intent in the works, including one from a major pharma company.

Healthlane: An app meant to help users in Africa communicate with their doctors, make appointments and track lab results. The company says it has already reached profitability, with a retention rate of 98%.

Breathe Well-being: A 16-week program meant to help users in India with chronic conditions (such as diabetes) in their efforts to lose weight. The company offers a one-on-one diabetes coach who helps the user with tracking things like weight/meals/activity and trains them in cognitive behavioral therapy techniques meant to reduce stress. Currently seeing an $11.2K MRR.

Dropprint Genomics: “Single cell genomics” software meant to reduce the time/financial cost of analyzing individual cell activity to enable better drug discovery. They’ve signed over $1 million in LOIs in two months.

Newman’s: A digital health clinic for men in Indonesia. They’re focusing on problems that are often seen as either embarrassing (hair loss, erectile dysfunction) or are often abandoned (quitting smoking) by making doctor visits easier, cheaper and more private by way of remote consultation. Find our previous coverage of Newman’s here.

Loop Health: Loop Health says that most health insurance in India covers “only hospital stays, not doctor visits.” They’re looking to improve this by offering unlimited access to their designated Loop Health clinics, along with app-based telemedicine.

Synapsica Healthcare: An “AI reporting assistant.” Currently focusing on spinal MRIs, the company says it saves radiologists 80% of their reporting time by automatically annotating measurements and characterizing disc degeneration. The company says it’s currently in a $100K pilot program with a radiology practice tapped by 250 chiropractic clinics.

Volumetric: Volumetric makes 3D bioprinters that create vascularized human tissue. Founded by two PhDs, Volumetric sells its photoactive tissue to pharmaceutical companies and scientists. It’s using the proceeds to move toward building bioprinters and bioinks that can generate functional tissue and even organs. Find our previous coverage of Volumetric here.

Ophelia: Ophelia replaces rehab with telemedicine for America’s 3 million opioid addicts. It lets patients do teleconferenced doctor visits, get prescribed and delivered medications like Buprenorphine and Naloxone, and access therapy without the stigma. The founder started the company after a longtime girlfriend died from opioid addiction, and Ophelia has now treated 40 patients.

Lilia: Claiming that “in the future, women will freeze their eggs upon graduation,” Lilia is an egg-freezing concierge service. The startup charges $500 for concierge, and gets another $500 when somebody is placed in a clinic. Lilia says its total addressable market is $33 billion.

Equator Therapeutics: Equator Therapeutics is developing a drug to help users burn calories without exercise. Founded by a duo of PhDs and a data scientist who worked at a company developing an anti-aging drug, Equator Therapeutics is targeting people dealing with obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Altay Therapeutics: Located inside the Bayer Collaborator in San Francisco, Altay Therapeutics has developed small molecule therapies that block disease-causing DNA-binding proteins (or transcriptional regulators). The company’s initial therapies are focused on arthritis, fibrosis, ulcerative colitis and liver cancer.

Tambua Health: Tambua Health uses an “acoustic” stethoscope and proprietary software to provide advanced imaging for lung imaging without the radiation of an x-ray.

Abalone Bio: Founded by serial life sciences entrepreneurs, Abalone Bio is using libraries of yeast cells expressing billions of antibody variants to grow specific antibodies that can activate or inhibit a drug target. Using gene sequencing, machine learning and synthetic biology, the company makes recombinant protein versions of its antibodies and confirms their efficacy in human cell assays. The company’s initial targets are drugs for pain, inflammatory diseases, rare cancer and rare kidney disease.

Felix Biotechnology: Founded by the famous Yale University researcher Paul Turner, Felix Biotechnologies is developing treatments to address antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and fungi. These pathogens cause more than 2.8 million infections and 35,000 deaths in the United States alone each year, according to the company. On average, someone in the U.S. dies from an antibiotic-resistant infection every 15 minutes. Researchers have warned that more people will die from antibiotic resistance than from cancer by the year 2050.

Genecis Bioindustries: Genecis Bioindustries is turning food waste into compostable plastics. Find our previous coverage on Genecis here.

Candid Health: Candid Health has developed automated billing software for the healthcare industry that follows up with insurance companies and automatically appeals denied claims. It takes a 5% cut of each payment.

Ochre Bio: Ochre says that most donated livers are discarded — despite there being a shortage — due to them containing too much fat for a successful transplant. They’re aiming to “rejuvenate livers outside the body” by finding ways to treat them prior to transplant.

Fintech

Facio: Brazil has a banking problem. An oligarchy of five banks manage the Brazilian market, and they’re slow, have terrible customer service, high APR and don’t serve SMBs. Facio wants to keep workers from falling victim to predatory debt and instead gain financial freedom with a low-priced payroll loan to employees. It integrates with the employer, deducting loans right from their payroll.

delt.ai: Delt.ai is a digital bank that handles payments, invoicing and corporate cards for poorly served SMEs and freelancers in Mexico. The startup is targeting the $50 billion+ market of business deposits in Mexico. Think of Delt.ai is a Brex or a Mercury, but focused on Latin America.

Nexu: Like many other personal financing operations in Latin America, car financing is an expensive, low-tech, arduous process. Nexu, a financing platform for Latin American car dealerships, uses dynamic credit scoring to give car buyers an approval with a turnaround of a few seconds. The founding team met as Wharton MBA candidates.

Fondeadora: Fondeadora is joining Mexico’s saturated fintech scene, with its alternative neobanking debit card. The company offers a fully mobile digital savings account run within its app. Fondeadora says it has 65,000 users and $6.5 million monthly transactions. Albo, another Mexico-focused debit card, currently owns the market share with 200,000 monthly active customers who are spending and making transactions in its platform and $26 million in capital raised. But the banking problem in Mexico is big enough that multiple startups can thrive. Out of the 130 million population of Mexico, 45% are underbanked, meaning they lack deep financial products designed to help them compound wealth through lending and savings features.

Jenfi: Loans money to small businesses in Asia — typically about $10,000 to $100,000 — based on the business’ revenue. We wrote about Jenfi previously here.

yBANQ: A collections and reconciliation system for large B2B companies in India. The company says it has found 18 customers since launching in late January, reaching a GMV of around $18K.

ZeFi: A savings account that converts USD deposits to/from “stablecoin” cryptocurrencies behind the scenes, with ZeFi lending these funds out to borrowers to gain interest.

Grain: Grain hooks your existing debit card to a “responsible” amount of credit (currently capped at $500, and based on your income/cash low), hopefully helping those with minimal/bad credit build up their credit report over time. In the three months since launch, the company says it has signed up 1,000 customers, and expects to make around $80 per customer per year.

CrowdForce: Lets local merchants in Africa act as bank branches, serving as an intermediary on transactions when a bank is too far away. The company says it made $70K in net revenue last month, making an average of $20 per year per customer.

Stark Bank: A banking API to handle B2B transactions for tech companies in Brazil. A little over a year after launch, the company says it’s seeing $12 million in monthly gross volume.

Bamboo: An online brokerage for high-wealth individuals in Africa to buy securities from around the world. The company says it already has over 2,100 investors who have traded over $1.6 million on the platform since launching roughly five months ago, currently accounting for over $10,000 in monthly revenue.

Swipe: Pitching itself as “Brex for Africa,” Swipe gives African SMBs a credit card to help cover payroll and expenses. They onboard businesses by providing them with free expensing/billing tools, then offer credit accordingly. The company says it’s currently working with 30 companies, with $200K in credit deployed.

goDutch: A payments card for splitting costs amongst groups that often share bills, such as roommates. Focusing on India. Charges are put onto one card and deducted from each group member’s account automatically.

Paymobil: Uses stablecoin cryptocurrencies to transfer money across the globe through a Venmo-style app. The founder, Daniel Nordh, notes that he previously led consumer design at Coinbase.

Karat: Karat offers banking, loans and credit cards to influencers. By using data on their popularity to manage risk, Karat has achieved 40% APR on its loans with an average repayment time of 45 days. Thanks to its founders’ experience building influencer tools at Instagram and structuring debt at Goldman Sachs, it’s already signing up stars with over 10 million followers.

Homestead: Homestead helps home owners convert their garages into rental properties at no upfront cost. Homestead pays for all the construction, tenant search and management, and then splits the rent income with the home owner. A new California law allows the state’s 8 million garages to be rented out as living spaces, creating an enormous market opportunity. Homestead’s founders met at MIT’s graduate school of architecture and city planning, and the startup has already done $1 million in sales.

Benepass: Benepass offers a benefits card for startups and small businesses. Using the Benepass debit card, employees can pay for tax-advantaged benefits and wellness perks like flexible spending accounts, childcare, commuting, fitness and education while an app tracks their buying. Free for employers, Benepass has a 6% take rate but can save thousands on income and payroll taxes. With startups desperate to compete with tech giants for top talent, Benepass could ensure employees feel supported.

GAS POS: U.S. gas station owners are racing to upgrade outside pumps with EMV technology, a global standard for credit cards equipped with computer chips. GAS POS was founded to deliver a modern point-of-sale system that will help North America’s 180,000 gas stations comply with EMV and make transactions more secure. The company has several sources of revenue, a 3% fee on processed payments, SaaS free for equipment and an offer to customers to provide next-day funding.

YearEnd: YearEnd is building tax software for the paper rich, helping startup employees file their taxes while optimizing for their equity. The startup charges $330 per year for individual users and is hoping to sell to businesses that can add YearEnd as an employee benefit.

GIGI Benefits: India’s GIGI Benefits is looking to be the benefits provider for the nation’s gig economy workers. The business takes a page from companies like last year’s hottest Y Combinator startup, Catch, or the venture-backed Trupo, to provide things like health insurance and retirement investment accounts to gig economy workers.

Easyplan: Easyplan is the Qapital or Digit for India, allowing users to seamlessly save money for certain specific goals.

Haven: Haven is a next-gen platform for servicing home mortgages, offering more modern customer interfaces, better payment modeling for lenders and more.

WorkPay: WorkPay describes itself as “Gusto for Africa” — next-gen payroll and related services targeting small and medium businesses in the region.

Spenny: Spenny is a savings tool for Indian consumers that lets customers start banking money away by rounding up their purchases.

Kosh: Kosh is an algorithmically enhanced savings and investment platform for India, allowing those with good credit to effectively vouch for friends with limited credit to help them borrow.

Nonprofit

Potential: Potential is a nonprofit that wants to connect the formerly incarcerated to jobs and resources. The company works with detention centers and employment organizations to make a more friendly hiring environment.