Five years after its $280 million acquisition, the music service is still struggling to turn a profit for CBS, if latest efforts to tactically abandon and charge for royalty-incurring personalised radio are anything to go by. Read more »
Aereo, a TV-on-the-go service that relies on small antennas, is getting a lot of legal attention. The bigger story should be how it is using economic breakthroughs in computing to offer a new form of TV. Read more at GigaOM »
TV advertising remains healthy, but platform operators want a bigger slice of the pie. Next year, some will introduce targeted advertising to their set top boxes, promising greater granularity and more effectiveness to marketers. Read more »
A group of British researchers recently analyzed 2.5 million newspaper articles in order to prove that new data analysis techniques, such as machine learning and natural-language processing, can accurately classify media content. They hope their approach can save academicians untold hours of manual labor. Read more »
Web publishers can buy tools that let them identify and segment their readers, and then combine that information with other customer data to offer fine-grained audience options to advertisers. As the ad market gets more demanding, the tools may become essential for some – but not all. Read more »
In the fight about royalties from streaming media services like Pandora, Popular cellist Zoë Keating says she’s willing to give up the money in exchange for data. It’s an idea that’s gaining traction elsewhere, too, as more companies are paying consumers for their truly valuable data. Read more »
When the New York Times started working on its electoral calculations tool for the 2012 election, Shan Carter said at the Visualized conference Friday, they decided two things: “It shouldn’t include electoral votes or calculations.” Read more at GigaOM »
An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money. Read more »
Central Europe’s Piano Media has tried to build nationwide shared “paywalls” for dozens of news sites. Now it is acquiring a technology startup to offer news meters that can’t be defeated by deleting cookies. Read more »
A new study shows that the BBC and the New York Times have the most reach and influence on Twitter among news organizations. The findings are just a taste of what we can expect as researchers apply data-based network analysis to patterns of news consumption. Read more »
Pearson may be a giant of corporate publishing. But now it is throwing DK’s rich encyclopedic image bank and dozens of classic novels in with the content it wants developers to re-use in their own apps. Read more »
Friday marks the official launch of former ReadWriteWeb editor Marshall Kirkpatrick’s data-based discovery startup Littlebird (formerly known as Plexus Engine). The company, which aims to automate discovery and vetting of experts and influencers on any given topic, has also raised $1 million in funding. Read more at GigaOM »
Carter S. won his first-ever Kaggle competition — our own GigaOM WordPress Challenge — using a brute force method of data science he calls overkill analytics. Rather than spend untold hours perfecting complex models, Carter used simple algorithms and let powerful microprocessors do the rest. Read more »
Europe approves Universal’s bid for EMI’s music catalogue by compelling the combined entity to off-load artists including Coldplay and Gorillaz, so that is not large enough to hike prices required from new digital music services. Read more »
The ability to distribute real-time information through social networks like Twitter is a powerful thing, but a new study points out that one of the downsides of this phenomenon is the fact that much of the content that gets linked to eventually disappears. Read more at GigaOM »
News-filtering service Prismatic has just launched a new “friend following” feature. Although this may look like a social-networking copycat move, founder Brad Cross says it is all about increasing the amount of data the service has about its users so that it can make relevant recommendations. Read more at GigaOM »
Search engines are losing share of users’ clicks. Analysts say they are going to Facebook and Twitter. What does that mean for the future of search? Read more »
Announcing our initial speaker lineup for our 2nd RoadMap conference! Our focus this year: design in the age of connectedness. It is scheduled for Nov. 5th in SF. Some of our speakers include Kevin Systrom, Evan Williams, David Karp, Tony Fadell, Yves Behar and more. Read more at GigaOM »
Sling Digital is taking what it calls the Moneyball approach to Twitter ads, letting customer buy cheap keywords that still connect to the audiences they are targeting. The service analyzes users’ conversations to find out what they’re talking about and who they’re following and sharing from. Read more at GigaOM »
Satyamev Jayate, one of India’s highest-rated television shows, is using data as a means to effect meaningful change. The show’s producers are aggregating and analyzing the millions of messages they receive on controversial issues to do everything from planning future episodes to pushing for political change. Read more »
Xbox users can now browse kids titles on Netflix without stumbling across old B-movies that happen to have the same title, thanks to Netflix’s Just for Kids interface that just arrived on the game console. No kids? No worries. Your personal profile could be next. Read more »
