Apple will pay artists more to have a spatial audio version on Apple MusicApple will pay additional royalties starting this month to artists if they have a spatial audio version on Apple Music, according to multiple reports.
The company will pay up to 10% additional royalty if an artist has all their songs in spatial audio, per a report by 9to5Mac.
The extra money doesn’t depend on users playing the spatial audio version, though.
In December, Bloomberg reported that Apple was planning to introduce incentives for artists to add songs to Apple Music that are mixed on Dolby Atmos technology.
Apple Music rivals including Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, and Deezer offer spatial offers.
The EU suspects Apple of unfairly favoring its own mobile payment tech, Apple Pay, and squeezing out the ability of rivals to develop competing contactless payment offerings on its mobile platform.
It has also committed to applying “fair, objective, transparent, and non-discriminatory” eligibility criteria to grant NFC access to third parties — which will have to conclude an ADP license agreement to gain access.
The Apple Pay competition saga dates back several years at this point.
The Apple Pay case pre-dates ex ante competition legislation the bloc has since enacted and which Apple is subject to; having been designated, in September, as a so-called “gatekeeper” under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).
And although Apple’s payment tech, Apple Pay, has not been designated a “core platform service” the iOS App Store has.
eBay has agreed to pay a $3 million fine in connection with a corporate cyberstalking campaign targeting a Massachusetts couple in 2019.
The cyberstalking campaign was conducted by several eBay employees, some of whom were executives, who targeted the couple after they posted a newsletter that was critical of the e-commerce giant.
The cyberstalking campaign involved the employees sending the couple a bloody pig mask, a fetal pig, a funeral wreath, live insects and a book on surviving the death of a spouse.
“eBay engaged in absolutely horrific, criminal conduct,” said Acting United States Attorney Joshua S. Levy in a press release.
“The company’s conduct in 2019 was wrong and reprehensible,” said eBay CEO Jamie Iannone in the press release.
The retail giant announced today the launch of “badge pay,” a new option that will initially bring Just Walk Out technology to a hospital setting.
With the launch, doctors, nurses, and other healthcare staff will be able to grab food and beverages from their hospital’s Just Walk Out store by scanning their employee badges.
The employees will also be able to look up their receipts and see their account balance in their hospital’s badge pay web portal or mobile app, Amazon explains.
At this location, Amazon worked with healthcare automation provider CBORD on the implementation of the tech at the hospital store.
The Candler Hospital’s store, meanwhile, is operated by food and nutrition provider Morrison Healthcare, which serves over 950 hospitals and healthcare systems.
What then followed, last fall, was a claim from Meta that it would be switching to a consent basis for tracking.
Facebook and Instagram users who wish to continue to get free access to the services have to “consent” to its tracking — which Meta claims is valid consent under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Withdrawing consent in the scenario Meta has devised requires users to sign up for a monthly subscription.
So noyb’s follow-up complaint targets the inherent friction in Meta charging users money to protect their privacy.
However, by then, Meta had already shifted its claimed basis to consent, meaning it could just sidestep the regulatory intervention.
Here are the eight strangest gadgets, tech and claims from CES 2024 so far.
pic.twitter.com/URh0oM79pR — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) January 9, 2024An app that lets you pay to peeNeed to go and willing to pay?
Revealed at CES 2024, Clicks Technology’s creator keyboard turns your phone into a BlackBerry-era relic for $139.
Generative AI allows you to chat with the AI Agent, and the company claims it can show you empathy.
pic.twitter.com/A2SEj2v0SG — TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) January 10, 2024A bidet you can talk toHey, Alexa?
Just a few weeks after its most recent round of layoffs, Unity is once again reducing its workforce.
Unity is the maker of a video game engine that is widely used in the video game industry.
Under the old pricing scheme, indie developers who earn less than $100,000 per year would be able to use Unity for free.
Bigger video game studios would have to pay $1,900 per user per year.
And yet, that controversy had some wide-ranging consequences as many developers lost faith in the game engine company.
Basecamp founders’ email service Hey is fighting with Apple again — this time over the rejection of its new calendar app from the App Store.
Last week, Basecamp launched an integrated calendar service with Hey, along with a new standalone app for it.
On Saturday, Hey’s co-founder David Heinemeier Hansson posted on X that Apple has rejected Hey’s standalone calendar app.
In 2020, Apple first rejected Hey’s email app because users couldn’t sign up for the service on the app.
So Hey’s calendar app should be allowed on the App Store.
The New York Times is suing OpenAI and its close collaborator (and investor), Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accuse Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” Silverman’s memoir to train their AI models.
As The Times’ complaint alludes to, generative AI models have a tendency to regurgitate training data, for example reproducing almost verbatim results from articles.
And that’s why most [lawsuits like this] will probably fail.”Some news outlets, rather than fight generative AI vendors in court, have chosen to ink licensing agreements with them.
In its complaint, The Times says that it attempted to reach a licensing arrangement with Microsoft and OpenAI in April but that talks weren’t ultimately fruitful.
Labrys is perhaps best described as Slack-meets-location-meets-payments for both military and humanitarian scenarios.
From 2015 onwards, when I founded the Techfugees non-profit, we found that both refugees and humanitarian workers almost always used WhatsApp to coordinate a response.
The Labrys platform, Axiom C2 and Axiom Communicator, allows for KYC/E verification, encrypted communications, task management, where individual users can be geo-located.
Meanwhile, Premise Data, which has raised $146 million, has a software platform for humanitarian organizations, and provides analytics about assets on the ground.
Plus, ‘dual use’ products that coordinate either civilian or military teams, is a growing market.
