Jay-Z's $5 Million Samsung Deal - Business Insider

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Jay-Z

Record companies have spent more than a decade keening that free music was the subsidence in their basement and the dry rot in their rafters ? so they are unlikely to be grandstanding about the fact that one of the biggest acts in the world is giving away his new album for nothing.

Well, not entirely for nothing ? it comes with a catch. As part of a broader deal between Samsung and Roc Nation ? estimated at $20m ? a total of 1m copies of Jay-Z's new album, Magna Carta Holy Grail, were given away on Thursday at one minute past midnight (US eastern time), a full 72 hours before it officially goes on sale. The Korean mobile company has paid $5m so that the first million owners of Galaxy S III, Galaxy S4 and Galaxy Note II devices to claim the album though a free app from the Google Play store get a three-day headstart on the rest of Jay-Z's fans.

In the self-referential bubble of the music business, much has been made of the fact that, because it is free to consumers, those 1m "sales" will not count towards the charts in the US, the UK and elsewhere because of chart rules.

But at $5 a copy, Jay-Z is almost certainly getting a far higher royalty rate than he would if those sales came from download stores or the dwindling number of record shops on the high street. The album is already a banker in an age when there are, in sales terms, few superstar certainties.

The scale of the deal did, however, force the RIAA (the US equivalent of the BPI) to make significant tweaks to its gold and platinum awards programme, meaning Jay-Z will get a nice shiny sales disc to put in his downstairs toilet straight away rather than having to wait 30 days (as per the old sales certification rules). This will now cover any digital album sales that previously had to wait a month to be qualified in order to allow for "returns" (unsold, but shipped, stock) ? a throwback to the days when music was only available on physical formats. Yet within this all is a burning contradiction. The 1m album downloads are disqualified from the chart for being "free" to the consumer, but they count towards spraypainted discs in presentation frames because someone (in this case, Samsung) paid for them. Given the pre-hype and marketing spend, the album will almost certainly go to No 1 anyway on "normal" sales, so Jay-Z should win whichever way you slice it.

Beyond the cold, hard sales and revenue issues, this has revived, yet again, the debate about what it all means for investment in music and what the future of the album could be in an age of digital dislocation.

This is not quite a new form of blanket musical patronage ? that is happening instead on Kickstarter and PledgeMusic where the public has the final say and where winning projects rise like rockets (Amanda Palmer, Ginger Wildheart) and stinkers sink (Bj?rk's Android app for Biophilia, a thousand terrible bands). This is about one megabrand (Jay-Z) linking with another megabrand to create that most 1980s of business terms ? a "synergy".

The benefit for Jay-Z, apart from a guaranteed $5m, is turbocharged promotion and profile raising. But the benefits for Samsung are potentially greater. For a company that spends an estimated $4bn a year on marketing, the $20m it handed over to Jay-Z and Roc Nation is chump change. To put that in content, global record sales last year generated $16.5bn ? so Samsung throws a quarter of the gross value of the entire record business just at marketing every year.

Away from the boardroom cheers, it is not all wondrous news. For the fans, this is the diametric opposite of the Philips Red Book standard that, in the 1980s, dictated all CDs had to play on all CD players. Non-Samsung-owning fans are effectively being penalized for not having the right device and given the hard sell to upgrade, because this deal is really about atoning for the fact that Samsung's own Music Hub music service has failed to capture the public's imagination. This all says, arguably, more about Samsung trying to steal a march on the iPhone and iPad in the smartphone and tablet markets and using music to do that ? just as Apple did with the iPod in 2001 and the iTunes store in 2003.

Handing out brand new albums for free is nothing new. Prince did it with the Planet Earth album on the front of the Mail on Sunday in 2007, and Radiohead did it with the tip jar release of In Rainbows later than same year (fans could choose to pay nothing to download it). The idea of an album-as-an-app is not new either (see Bj?rk's release of Biophilia for the iPad in 2011 and Gwilym Gold's Tender Metal app in September last year). And brand partnerships long stopped being a novelty. The only thing that is really new here is the scale of the deal. It is all light years beyond Groove Armada being paid to be the "face" of Bacardi for a year.

It is proof of the continued lurch in the power balance that sees the music industry continue to dance to the tech industry's tune, like chickens on fairground hotplates. It is also a premonition of the near future of the music business where 99% of the cash on the table will be mopped up by the top 1% of acts ? the very ones who need the money the least.

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/jay-zs-5-million-samsung-deal-2013-7

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Social Media Amplifying TV Advertising - Business Insider

BI Intelligence

Research has shown that TV-watching and social media usage isn't mutually exclusive. Consumers appear to love using social media?while?they watch TV. Many discuss what they're watching, and these conversations continue long after air-time, with TV-linked chatter?accounting for a significant percentage of overall social media activity.

TV industry players and TV-focused marketers realized they could piggyback on this new consumer habit. The idea was not to compete with social media, but to use it so that televised shows, events, and ad campaigns won?more?audience and audience participation.

Social TV is how these ideas are being made tangible.

In a new report?from?BI?Intelligence,?we define what social TV is, analyze?the most important social TV trends, examine the audience for social TV, detail how social TV is forcing broadcasters and advertisers to rethink their strategies, and look at how data vendors are slicing and dicing all that TV-linked social chatter.?

Access The Full Report And Data By Signing Up For A Free Trial Today >>

Here's an overview of the rise of social TV:

• There's a lot at stake:?$350 billion was spent on TV ads globally in 2012. If social TV can help make that advertising more effective, or help social media skim some of those dollars, the opportunity is there for social TV to become a major business in its own right.
• Social TV is already here: It's already an established habit with audiences around the world, with majorities of social media users saying they routinely comment about TV shows or events.?activity has grown hand-in-hand with the mobile explosion. Smartphones and tablets have made it much more convenient for people to comment on TV, even as they watch it.?Forty percent or more of U.S. mobile audiences browsed social media on their tablets or smartphones while watching TV. For smartphone users, social media is a more popular companion activity during TV-watching than shopping.
• It can be used in many valuable ways:?There are variety of applications for social TV, including support for TV ad sales, optimizing TV ad buys, making ad buys more efficient, as a complement to audience measurement, and eventually, audience forecasting and real-time optimization. Social TV data can be like having a thousands-strong focus group at your fingertips.?Applied well, social TV can create a positive feedback loop for generating ultra-sticky TV programming and multi-screen ad campaigns.?
• All the major social media platforms are moving into the space, but Twitter is in the lead:?Twitter, Facebook and Google+ have all been used for social TV-flavored strategies. Of the three, Twitter has taken the lead, in part because so much of its data is open and public, making it easier for marketers to target TV fans.?Twitter's?newest ad product, TV ad targeting, is a clever integration of tweets, hashtags, TV advertising, and digital video.?Twitter?is pitching it to advertisers?as a way to continue telling the brand stories they tell on TV commercials, but to do so in TV audience's twitter feeds ? online and on mobile.

In full,?the?report:?

To access BI Intelligence's full reports on The Rise Of Social TV, sign up for a free trial subscription here.

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/social-media-amplifying-tv-advertising-2013-66

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PFT: Hernandez's red flags?didn't point to murder

AP

As the nonstop developments in the Aaron Hernandez murder case(s) begin to subside, it?s time to broaden the lens and address a topic that has popped up from time to time over the past two weeks.

Should the Patriots have avoided drafting Hernandez in 2010 and/or giving him a long-term, big-money contract in 2012?

Many are suggesting that the Pats screwed the proverbial pooch on this one, that they negligently brought a potential murderer to Massachusetts and, two years later, made him a multi-multi-millionaire.? But there are multi-problems with that logic.

For starters, there really was no indication that Hernandez was anything other than a kid who:? (1) liked to smoke marijuana; and (2) periodically made mischief.? As the folks at CFT pointed out on Saturday, Hernandez was indeed questioned in connection with a shooting nearly six years ago in Gainesville.? But it was perfunctory and brief.? Other Gators were questioned at the time, including safety Reggie Nelson and the Pouncey twins.

The only true red flag that attached to Hernandez from his college days came from an affinity for inhaling the fumes of a plant that, if anything, make the user less likely to commit violence or do anything other than sit around and eat Fritos.? And if there?s a link between smoking pot and murder, there would be a lot more murders.

Whatever was wrong with Hernandez, he supposedly had been rehabilitated by former Florida coach Urban Meyer, who according to the New York Times personally conducted ?daily Bible sessions? with Hernandez in order to turn him around.? Meyer presumably vouched for Hernandez to Patriots coach Bill Belichick.? Given the strong friendship between Belichick and Meyer that likely went a long way to persuading Belichick that Hernandez?s talents justified the risk.

Of course, some are now painting the picture that Hernandez entered the NFL with a pair of six-guns strapped to his side and ink on his arms that not-so-cryptically spelled out plans for his future crime sprees.? But where we these ?sources? with knowledge of supposed gang ties and other actual or perceived misdeeds or antisocial tendencies when Hernandez emerged as a fourth-round star in his second NFL season?

That would have been the obvious time for scouts, General Managers, and coaches to cover their collective asses by leaking the notion that, even though Hernandez was playing at a very high level, they avoided Hernandez in rounds one through three because he had more problems than marijuana.? But there was nothing ? not until after Hernandez was tied to a murder case and scouts and sources and some in the media all began to join in a hands-across-Whoville chorus of I told you so.

Even if Hernandez?s antics had generated real warning signs beyond marijuana, it?s impossible to connect dots from off-field misbehavior to premeditated murder.? It?s far more reasonable (or, as the case may be, far less reckless) to connect a substance-abuse problem (drugs or alcohol) to the potential for accidental death or dismemberment while driving a car.

Murderers come from all walks of life, with no way to prospectively screen for them ? unless they?ve actually killed in the past.? For every Aaron Hernandez there?s a Jovan Belcher, who generated no objective evidence to suggest that he would get into serious trouble before he repeatedly shot the mother of his young child and then killed himself in the presence of his coach and G.M.? Ditto for Rae Carruth, who orchestrated the murder of the mother of his unborn son because Carruth apparently didn?t want to pay child support.? The Chiefs and the Panthers saw neither problem coming, because there?s rarely any reason to suspect someone of having the capacity to deliberately kill someone else, regardless of the person?s history.

For the best proof of this, look no farther than O.J. Simpson.? Revered as a player, beloved as a broadcaster, and celebrated as an actor, he would have been the last man anyone would have regarded as the potential murderer of his ex-wife and a stranger who was in the worst possible place at the worst possible time.? (Simpson was acquitted in criminal court, but found legally responsible in civil court for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman.)

On one hand, this is an extreme example of how the Modified Patriot Way of buying low ? via trades, free agency, and the draft ? can go very wrong.? On the other hand, the only way to avoid blame for harboring a potential murderer is to shun any player who has generated at any time any reason to believe that he could do anything wrong as an NFL player.

Even then, there?s still a chance that a player with no red flags will be the next Jovan Belcher, Rae Carruth, or O.J. Simpson.

Source: http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2013/06/30/hernandezs-red-flags-never-pointed-to-murder/related/

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The Ephemeralnet

In the aftermath of the dot-com crash, a new era for the web began to take hold - a turning point whose seismic shift was hyped under the moniker "Web 2.0." The concept referred to the web becoming a platform, a home for services whose popularity grew through network effects, user-generated content and collaboration. Blogging, social media sites, wikis, mashups, and more reflected a changing consciousness among the Internet's denizens - one which Tim O'Reilly, whose Web 2.0 conferences helped solidify the term as a part of our everyday lexicon, once described as a "collective intelligence, turning the web into a kind of global brain."

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/bh_z03zLF8E/

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3D Galaxy Live Wallpaper

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Senior Moderator Posts: 2,878 Join Date: Jul 2008 Location: North Texas	This is the Nexus 4 forum, not the Galaxy S4.. Closed m7: 1.29.1540.17 | STOCK mako: 4.2.2 | STOCK grouper: cyanogenmod other: Chromebook | System76 | Kindle Fire | CR-48 | Revue former: maguro | crespo | passion | GT-I9100 | vision | rhodium | kaiser

Source: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=2345015&goto=newpost

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Good Reads: From algorithms, to Roman walls, to the new liberals and conservatives

This week's round-up of Good Reads include doubts about algorithms' 'all-power,' the recipe for Roman concrete, the need for a Turkish Mandela, young liberals who may be more conservative than they realize, and the usefulness of military 'land power.'

By Marshall Ingwerson,?Managing editor / June 28, 2013

Johnny Depp is one of only three actors who reliably bring a positive box office return.

Evan Agostini/Invision/AP/File

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Algorithms all-powerful?

In spite of appearances ? from the US National Security Agency searching American phone records for patterns to Google counting keywords in e-mails to decide which ads to display ? the algorithm may not conquer all.

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This is the conclusion that science reporter Tom Whipple comes around to in his article ?Slaves to the Algorithm? in the magazine Intelligent Life, a sister publication of The Economist. An algorithm is how so-called big data is crunched into something meaningful. ?If p, then q? is an algorithm, but in the age of fast computers, the ?p? can include billions of data points.

Mr. Whipple explores the work of a company, Epagogix, that forecasts the earning power of proposed movies for Hollywood studios, based on thousands of factors punched into its software. It seems to work. And has uncovered some fun facts. One is that so-called bankable movie stars are almost nonexistent. Only three actors, Epagogix has found, actually bring a positive return on investment ? Will Smith, Brad Pitt, and Johnny Depp.

But human judgment has hardly left the picture. The head of Epagogix notes that his program assumes that everything about the movie is done well ? that the dialogue is credible and the actors good (stars or not). And even so, his algorithms can?t discern if the movie is good, only if, done well, a lot of people are likely to pay to see it.

Whipple discusses another facet of algorithms. They are good at finding patterns, sometimes surprising ones, in big numbers. They are not so good at predicting the behavior of individuals. Dating sites, for example, have yet to show any scientific evidence that they can predict who will hit it off with whom.

Lost recipe for Roman concrete, cracked

Some technology just isn?t what it used to be. The Portland cement that we use to make concrete these days doesn?t have a fraction of the lasting power of the aggregate the Romans used a couple millenniums ago. According to a report by Bernhard Warner in Bloomberg Businessweek, research engineers studying 12 ancient Roman-built harbors found that the breakwaters made of Roman concrete have stood the pounding waves for 2,000 years and are still intact. Modern concrete has a working life under water of a mere 50 years. The older, stronger stuff had an added advantage: Its manufacture was relatively clean. Creating Portland cement releases a tremendous amount of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.?

Needed: a Turkish Mandela

One of the central dangers in Turkey today is of a slide into two sharply polarized camps ? the government and its conservative, religious, largely rural backers on one side and the more affluent, secular, and modernizing protesters on the other. They have come to be called ?black Turks? and ?white Turks.?

Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish-born economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been writing about the current troubles in his country of origin on his Why Nations Fail blog. He notes that Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently grouped Turks into ?black? and ?white,? putting himself among the ?black Turks.?

How do societies break out of cycles of polarization? Mr. Acemoglu consults history and finds several routes, but the most attractive is when a leader musters the vision and courage to make peace across the fault lines and show goodwill to the other side.

?So bottom line: we badly need a Turkish Mandela,? he says.

What they really mean by ?conservative??

Meanwhile, Americans may not be quite as polarized as they think they are. A series of three new studies find that young adults who call themselves liberal Democrats are overall not quite as liberal on the issues as they think they are. But young people from the rest of the political spectrum tend to bill themselves as more conservative than they are on the issues. The biggest disparity is among those who regard themselves as most conservative. Not so much, it turns out. When asked their stands on a dozen major issues from welfare to gay rights, they didn?t toe as conservative a line as they thought they did, according to the studies, which were reported first in an academic journal, and brought to us by Tom Jacobs in Pacific Standard magazine. Clearly, conservatism is the more popular brand, even when it?s not an obvious fit.

The benefits of military ?land power??

With US forces finally checking out of Afghanistan and American attention pivoting to East Asia, it?s time for some soul-searching: What?s the Army for?

Maj. Robert M. Chamberlain, writing in the Armed Forces Journal, sees future peace and prosperity in currently unfashionable land power. Terrorists who hole up in the world?s backwaters can best be pursued by special forces teams and armed drones. The Navy can protect the world?s sea lanes and global commerce. Air power can strike awesomely anywhere. But land power ? the job of the Army and Marines ? is inherently less threatening, he argues. ?Land power is the only avenue by which America can enhance regional security and stability, deter Chinese militarism and encourage Chinese commitment to the global status quo.?

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/csmonitor/globalnews/~3/c6nz-yHibak/Good-Reads-From-algorithms-to-Roman-walls-to-the-new-liberals-and-conservatives

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