Business, Spoken

As the leader in streaming music, Spotify is under attack from Apple, Google, and Amazon. The Silicon Valley giants have endless cash to support their streaming services, which require expensive payouts to artists. Apple, Google, and Amazon also control the devices many people use to play music, be they smartphones, home assistants, or smart TV accessories.

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Venture capitalist John Doerr is best known for being an early backer of Google and Amazon, among many other companies. Doerr, chair of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers, has authored "Measure What Matters," in which he details a management philosophy around setting and achieving audacious goals. In this edited excerpt, Doerr describes injecting his management techniques in Google's early days.

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Two years after Facebook learned that a university researcher had given political consultancy Cambridge Analytica personal information on millions of Facebook users, a government-mandated outside audit of Facebook’s privacy practices found nothing wrong. The April 2017 audit, by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), had been required as part of a 2011 consent decree between Facebook and the Federal Trade Commission.

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Facebook Wednesday announced changes to how it asks users for permission to collect their personal information, in order to comply with strict new European privacy rules. But critics say Facebook’s new offerings seem designed to encourage users to make few changes and share as much information as possible. The European rules, called the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, go into effect May 25th and will apply to any companies that collect or process data on individuals in the EU.

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More than a decade after the first iPhone was released, it suddenly dawned on us that we could be addicted to our smartphones. We'd certainly developed quite the habit: Almost 50 percent of people say they couldn’t live without their phones, which we check every 12 minutes and touch an average of 2,600 times a day. "Likes are “bright dings of pseudo-pleasure” that can be as empty as they are alluring.

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As public attitudes towards Silicon Valley and Big Tech continue their rapid pivot from admiration to vilification, the current occupant of the White House has sought to lead the chorus. Several weeks ago, he launched a tweet-driven crusade against Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos, accusing the company of ripping off the US Postal Service and harming Americans by not collecting more sales tax.

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During Mark Zuckerberg's over 10 hours of Congressional testimony last week, lawmakers repeatedly asked how Facebook makes money. The simple answer, which Zuckerberg dodged, is the contributions and online activities of its over two billion users, which lets marketers target their ads with razor precision.

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Woodman School is a tiny, whitewashed schoolhouse lodged in a remote clearing in Montana's Lolo National Forest. It has a total of 35 students, and in January, all of them got the same assignment: Write a letter to local lawmakers explaining why you want internet access at school. “If we had internet, we could do tests at our own school and not have to get bussed to Lolo and take tests on their computers,” scrawled one Woodman third grader on a sheet of looseleaf.

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Google’s heavy investment in artificial intelligence has helped the company’s software write music and beat humans at complex board games. What unlikely feats could be next? The company’s new head of AI says he’d like to see Google move deeper into areas such as healthcare. He also warns that the company will face some tricky ethical questions over appropriate uses for AI as it expands its use of the technology. The new AI boss at Google is Jeff Dean.

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Somewhere between my eighth and eighteenth turmeric lattes, I realized I was dangerously close to falling for TED. The annual conference, which gathers elite technologists, thought leaders, scientists, economists, futurists, visionaries, activists, physicists, poets, enthusiasts, academics, entertainers and billionaires has a binary reputation: For anyone who hasn’t been, it’s an object of easy mockery. For anyone who has, it’s a religion.

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