Slashdot Mirror

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Netflix and Amazon search for new users abroad, they are increasingly looking to India as a big market. Once crippled by poor internet infrastructure and low household income, the world's second-largest internet market has exhibited tremendous potential in the recent years. It's proving, however, to be a tough nut to crack for the American streaming leaders.

Leading the pack in the nation is Hotstar. Owned by Star India, which is controlled by Twenty-First Century Fox, Hotstar had about 70 percent of the on-demand local streaming services market earlier this year, according to estimates by research firm Jana. The three-and-a-half-year-old service has 150 million monthly active users, CEO Ajit Mohan told CNBC in an interview. Netflix, by contrast, has fewer than one million subscribers in the country, according to industry estimates. Once considered a luxury, an increasingly growing number of Indians are giving online streaming services a try. Companies have taken notice: More than 35 streaming services have launched or expanded their businesses in India in the last three and a half years, with many more planning to enter Bollywood soon. [...] Analysts say sporting events and local content are proving crucial in bringing new users to video platforms and then keeping them online, two areas where international giants are struggling. Hotstar, which offers much of its content to users at no charge (instead relying on ads to make revenue), charges $3 for its premium offering. In contrast, Netflix charges Indians about $8 a month.

Sports streaming in particular is helping local firms gain new users, the report said. You might remember Hotstar, which entered the US and Canada markets, set a new global concurrent record in late April, and now it turns out SonyLiv is getting more concurrent viewers to the FIFA World Cup in India than Fox Sports is generating on its digital platform in the US.

"Reddit has been actively luring advertisers as it attempts to take advantage of its vast audience to build its business," reports CNBC, adding that Reddit "has indicated it wants to increase advertising across the site, including more display and mobile ads and sponsored opportunities." An anonymous reader quotes their report: The 13-year-old company is now trying to expand and is making an aggressive push to get advertisers on board... [R]epresentatives from a half-dozen ad agencies told CNBC they've been pitched by Reddit within the past year about the company's plans to help brands target users. CNBC also obtained a 28-page presentation that Reddit has been sharing with advertisers...

Reddit is taking proactive steps to help clients protect their brands. In addition to its system of volunteer moderators and upvoting as a way to police content, three agencies that spoke with CNBC about Reddit said the company has discussed investing in technology like natural language bots to find questionable posts and hiring more people to monitor the threads. Reddit's ad deck has a section dedicated to "brand safety," where it explains how it places advertiser content in "white-listed" categories that are safe and has a team that watches over it. "Our dedicated account team constantly monitors Your Reddit Ad to ensure engagement is relevant and positive -- creating a 'walled garden' of conversation you can moderate or ban as needed," the slide says.
The artilce points out that Reddit is the third most-trafficked site in the U.S., but has far less ad revenue than other tech giants.

• Google: $95 billion in 2018
• Facebook: $40 billion
• Amazon: $2 billion (from advertising) in the last three months
• Twitter: $655 million in the first three months of 2018
• Reddit: Over $100 million projected for 2018

Digital Trends reports: Tesla's largest-ever Powerpack installation may be coming to Northern California. Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) applied to the California Public Utilities Commission for approval for a utility-owned 182.5 MW energy storage farm using Tesla Powerpacks at the company's energy storage site in Moss Landing... The Tesla project, however, would have an expansion capacity of 1.1 GW. The storage projects' purpose is to help keep electrical power levels even for PG&E customers. The storage facilities would feed power to the grid when consumption exceeds normal levels and during blackouts or other service interruptions.
Tesla's giant battery in Australia has already reduced grid service costs by 90%.

And speaking of power sources, long-time Slasdot reader judgecorp writes: A disused Stanley Black & Decker factory in New Britain, Hartford County.CT, will get a 20MW micro-grid powered by fuel cells, according to the first phase of a plan unveiled by the State Governor. It's a big deal because it will be the largest indoor micro-grid in the world, and will help provide a reliable power source for a data center in the old factory. Along with the other phases of the project, Governor Dannel Malloy hopes the deal will provide 3,000 jobs and lots of tax revenue.

Why do companies deploy open office layouts? A major justification is the idea that removing spatial boundaries between colleagues will generate increased collaboration and smarter collective intelligence. Cal Newport: As I learned in a fascinating new study, published earlier this week in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, there was good reason to believe that this might be true. As the study's authors, Ethan Bernstein and Stephen Turban, note" [T]he notion that propinquity, or proximity, predicts social interaction -- driving the formation of social ties and therefore information exchange and collaboration -- is one of the most robust findings in sociology."

But when researchers turned their attention to the specific impact of open offices on interaction, the results were mixed. Perhaps troubled by this inconsistency, Bernstein and Turban decided to get to the bottom of this issue. Prior studies of open offices had relied on imprecise measures such as self-reported activity logs to quantify interactions before and after a shift to an open office plan. Bernstein and Turban tried something more accurate: they had subjects wear devices around their neck that directly measured every face-to-face encounter. They also used email and IM server logs to determine exactly how much the volume of electronic interactions changed.

Here's a summary of what they found: Contrary to what's predicted by the sociological literature, the 52 participants studied spent 72% less time interacting face-to-face after the shift to an open office layout. To make these numbers concrete: In the 15 days before the office redesign, participants accumulated an average of around 5.8 hours of face-to-face interaction per person per day. After the switch to the open layout, the same participants dropped to around 1.7 hours of face-to-face interaction per day. At the same time, the shift to an open office significantly increased digital communication. After the redesign, participants sent 56% more emails (and were cc'd 41% more times), and the number of IM messages sent increased by 67%.

Victorien Erussard, an experienced ocean racer from the city of Saint-Malo in the north of France, was halfway through a dash across the Atlantic when he lost all power. Never again, he thought. "I came up with the idea to create a ship that uses different sources of energy," he says. The plan was bolstered by the pollution-happy cargo ships he saw while crossing the oceans. "These are a threat to humanity because they use heavy fuel oil." Five years on, that idea has taken physical form in the Energy Observer, a catamaran that runs on renewables. From a report: In a mission reminiscent of the Solar Impulse 2, the solar-powered plane that Bertrand Picard and Andre Borschberg flew around the world a few years back, Erussard and teammate Jerome Delafosse are planning to sail around the planet, without using any fossil fuel. Instead, they'll make the fuel they need from sea water, the wind, and the sun.

The Energy Observer started life as a racing boat but now would make a decent space battle cruiser prop in a movie. Almost every horizontal surface on the white catamaran is covered with solar panels (1,400 square feet of them in all), which curve gently to fit the aerodynamic contours. Some, on a suspended deck that extends to the sides of the vessel, are bi-facial panels, generating power from direct sunlight as well as light reflected off the water below. The rear is flanked by two vertical, egg whisk-style wind turbines, which add to the power production. Propulsion comes from two electric motors, driven by all that generated electrical energy, but it's the way that's stored that's clever. The Energy Observer uses just 106-kWh (about equivalent to a top-end Tesla) of batteries, for immediate, buffer, storage and energy demands. It stores the bulk of the excess electricity generated when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing as hydrogen gas.

Following yesterday's report from Israeli publication CTech that Apple has decided not to use an Intel 5G modem called "Sunny Peak" in future iPhones, Intel has denied part of the report -- and the publication has updated its story to remove its central claim. From a report: "Intel's 5G customer engagements and roadmap have not changed for 2018 through 2020," a spokesperson told VentureBeat. "We remain committed to our 5G plans and projects." When asked whether this meant that Apple is a customer for an Intel 5G modem, the spokesperson said only that "the Intel 5G modem part of the story is inaccurate." The updated report explains that Sunny Peak was not in fact a 5G modem, and did not -- as initially claimed -- combine 5G, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth on one chip. Rather, the unannounced component is only a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip and was expected to include support for 802.11ad WiGig Wi-Fi, but it ran into engineering issues.

Japan's computer giant Fujitsu and RIKEN, the country's largest research institute, have begun field-testing a prototype CPU for a next-generation supercomputer they believe will take the country back to the leading position in global rankings of supercomputer might. From a report: The next-generation machine, dubbed the Post-K supercomputer, follows the two collaborators' development of the 8 petaflops K supercomputer that commenced operations for RIKEN in 2012, and which has since been upgraded to 11 petaflops in application processing speed. Now the aim is to "create the world's highest performing supercomputer," with "up to one hundred times the application execution performance of the K computer," Fujitsu declared in a press release on 21 June. The plan is to install the souped-up machine at the government-affiliated RIKEN around 2021. If the partners achieve those execution speeds, that would place the Post-K machine in exascale territory (one exaflops being a billion billion floating point operations a second). To do this, they have replaced the SPARC64 VIIIfx CPU powering the K computer with the Arm8A-SVE (Scalable Vector Extension) 512-bit architecture that's been enhanced for supercomputer use, and which both Fujitsu and RIKEN had a hand in developing. The new design runs on CPUs with 48 cores plus 2 assistant cores for the computational nodes, and with 48 cores plus 4 assistant cores for the I/O and computational nodes. The system structure uses 1 CPU per node, and 384 nodes make up one rack.

UK banks have been told to explain how they would cope with a technology failure or cyber-attack. From a report: The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority have given financial firms three months to detail how they would respond if their systems failed. Some TSB customers were left unable to access online banking for more than a month following a botched systems upgrade in April. Banks could be ordered to take action if their plans are judged to be poor. The Bank of England and FCA have emphasised that senior management at banks will be held accountable for prolonged disruption to services.

Microsoft is planning to introduce a dark mode to its Outlook.com web mail service. "While the software giant introduced a temporary dark mode for Halloween last year, Microsoft has been working on a new dark mode for Outlook.com for the past few months," reports The Verge. "Microsoft has started teasing that the new dark mode will be available soon." From the report: "One reason for the delay is our insistence that we deliver the best Dark Mode of any leading email client (you'll understand when you see it, I guarantee)," explains an Outlook.com team member in a feedback post. "The sneak preview you saw last year at Halloween was a prototype that required a lot more work to be ready for prime time." Microsoft says it has redesigned the colors and code "multiple times," and it's in the final stretch of introducing the new theme in Outlook.com.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: In a drive to win the business up for grabs after the demise of Toys "R" Us, the online giant is going conventional with plans to publish a holiday toy catalog. The printed guide will be mailed to millions of U.S. households and handed out at Whole Foods Market locations, the grocery chain Amazon bought last year. The move is part of Amazon's push to incorporate traditional retailers' tools into its business model. It even looked at acquiring some Toys "R" Us locations earlier this year. That came after its $13.7 billion purchase of Whole Foods made a big splash as it pushed into brick-and-mortar retailing.

For all its woes, Toys "R" Us, which is closing all U.S. stores after failing to emerge from bankruptcy, was still a force during Christmas. Its "Big Book" toy catalog was a staple at 100 pages or so, with toymakers often starting their holiday advertising to coordinate with its arrival in late October. Even with the emergence of screen time and smartphones, kids still enjoy searching through toy catalogs -- which Walmart Inc. and Target Corp. also produce -- to make their wishlists.

MoviePass is rolling out peak pricing, its own version of surge pricing that will charge customers more to see popular movies during what the company considers "high demand" times. Quartz reports: MoviePass is a subscription movie ticket service that typically costs $9.95 a month to see up to one movie in U.S. theaters per day. The company has been hemorrhaging cash to subsidize these monthly subscriptions, which can cost less than a single movie ticket in some U.S. cities. The company is looking to raise another $1.2 billion by selling stock and debt. But if MoviePass wants to survive, it also needs to start losing less money on its subscribers, and fast. That's where peak pricing comes in. "Peak Pricing goes into effect when there's high demand for a movie or showtime," MoviePass wrote in its email. "You may be asked to pay a small additional fee depending on the level of demand." Movies currently experiencing peak pricing will be marked with a red circle containing a white lightening bolt; movies growing in demand that "could enter Peak Pricing soon" will get a gray version of the icon. MoviePass doesn't say how much the "small additional fee" will be, but we can expect it to be $2 or more. In the example MoviePass emailed to users today, the extra fee is $3.43. "Note: the actual Peak Pricing surcharge will vary based on showtime and movie title," the email adds.

The plan to replace passport check-ins with more face scans is being trialed by Quantas on passengers for select flights into the Sydney Airport starting this week. The move is an attempt to replace the "inconvenience" of relying on more traditional paper passports. TechCrunch reports: It's still very early stages in a process that isn't exactly being rolled out overnight. After all, implementing such technology for Sydney's 43 million annual passengers is pretty large undertaking, even without myriad security and privacy concerns to contend with. To start with, the technology will be utilized for select international flights, to help automate check-in, boarding, lounge access and bag drop. Moving forward, the airport also hopes to implement it for mobile check-in and customs processing. "We've worked with Qantas from the outset and are delighted to be partnering with them as we trial this technology," Sydney Airport CEO Geoff Culbert said in a statement provided to the press. "In the future, there will be no more juggling passports and bags at check-in and digging through pockets or smartphones to show your boarding pass," he added. "Your face will be your passport and your boarding pass at every step of the process."

More details have emerged about where Google intends -- or at least intended until a few weeks ago -- to take its controversial AI Duplex, which it first demonstrated to the public at its developer conference in May. The AI system is capable of making calls to local businesses to place reservations on behalf of Google Assistant users. And it does so in a voice that most people can't distinguish from that of a normal human being. This resulted in a public outcry at the implication of people in the future not knowing whether they were talking to humans or machines, which led Google to adapt the bot's introduction so it clearly explains it's not a human. The Information reports: Some big companies are in the very early stages of testing Google's technology for use in other applications, such as call centers, where it might be able to replace some of the work currently done by humans [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source], according to a person familiar with the plans. The market for cloud-based customer call center market is expected to hit more than $20.9 billion by 2022, up from around $6.8 billion last year, according to research firm MarketsandMarkets. [...] At least one potential customer, a large insurance company, is looking at ways it can use the technology, according to the person with knowledge of the project, including for call centers where the voice assistant could handle simple and repetitive customer calls while humans step in when the conversations get more complicated. But the ethical concerns that overshadowed the original presentation have slowed work on the project, this person said.

California lawmakers announced a deal Thursday to restore key protections in a widely watched bill to give Californians strong net neutrality protections. From a report: The California net neutrality bill that could impose the toughest rules in the country is being resurrected. The bill was approved in its strongest form by the California Senate, but was then gutted by the State Assembly's communications committee, which approved the bill only after eliminating provisions opposed by AT&T and cable lobbyists. Bill author Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has been negotiating with Communications Committee Chairman Miguel Santiago (D-Los Angeles) and other lawmakers since then, and announced the results today. Wiener said the agreement with Santiago and other lawmakers resulted in "legislation implementing the strongest net neutrality protections in the nation." A fact sheet distributed by Wiener's office today said the following: Under this agreement, SB 822 will contain strong net neutrality protections and prohibit blocking websites, speeding up or slowing down websites or whole classes of applications such as video, and charging websites for access to an ISP's subscribers or for fast lanes to those subscribers. ISPs will also be prohibited from circumventing these protections at the point where data enters their networks and from charging access fees to reach ISP customers. SB 822 will also ban ISPs from violating net neutrality by not counting the content and websites they own against subscribers' data caps. This kind of abusive and anti-competitive "zero rating", which leads to lower data caps for everyone, would be prohibited, while "zero-rating" plans that don't harm consumers are not banned.

Charter Communications launched its mobile broadband service on June 30, and it's throttling all video streams to DVD quality. From a report: "DVD-quality video streaming is supported. Video typically streams at 480p," Charter notes in the "Pricing & Other Info" section of its mobile sign-up page. The quality limit is similar to one just imposed by Comcast, which previously did not impose any video quality limits on its mobile service. Comcast is letting existing customers get 720p video streams "on an interim basis at no charge," and the company announced plans to charge extra for longer-term access to HD quality. But Charter hasn't announced any plans to let customers stream in HD over its mobile service, for free or otherwise. HD video "is not currently an option for Spectrum Mobile," a Charter spokesperson told Ars. Wirefly has a Spectrum Mobile review.

Netflix may be introducing a new, higher tier of service. From a report: Known as Ultra, the new tier would allow four devices to receive Ultra HD video and audio streaming simultaneously, according to Italian blog Tutto Android. Netflix currently has three subscription plans: $7.99 Basic, $10.99 Standard and $13.99 Premium. Basic allows users to watch Netflix on one screen at a time; Standard allows viewing on two screens; and Premium allows four screens. Screens can be TVs, laptops, tablets or smartphones. "We continuously test new things at Netflix and these tests typically vary in length of time," Smita Saran, a Netflix spokeswoman, said in an email. "In this case, we are testing slightly different price points and features to better understand how consumers value Netflix."

China's Xiaomi is pressing ahead with plans to enter the United States next year, saying its U.S. connections should help the consumer-focused smartphone maker skirt the political resistance met by some of its compatriot rivals. From a report: Senior Vice President Wang Xiang told Reuters on Tuesday that the U.S. market was "very attractive" and that the firm was adding engineering resources to develop versions of its handsets that are compatible with U.S. cellphone networks. "Next year we hope we can do something there," Wang said, adding talks with U.S. carriers are yet to produce concrete agreements.

Last year, Lavell Burton, 36, wanted to learn to code, but was surprised to find that many of coding bootcamps cost several thousand dollars upfront. Then he found a 30-week remote program, Lambda School, that was free to attend. The program would provide comprehensive web-engineering training, and would help with job placement. Once employed, graduates would be required to pay back a set portion of their salary under an arrangement called an income-share agreement, or ISA. The Atlantic dives into such income share agreements. From a report: The concept of ISAs has been around since at least the 1950s, when the economist Milton Friedman outlined them as a hypothetical model of repayment. Yet ISAs were rarely implemented until the past few years, as student-loan default spiked and schools sought to offer other ways to pay. In 2016, Purdue University launched an ISA tuition option aimed at families who might otherwise take out high-interest private loans or Direct PLUS loans for parents to fill the gap between federal student loans and the cost of tuition. Purdue hired Vemo Education, a for-profit startup, to help design and administer the program, which is largely backed by the university's funds. The private schools Clarkson University and Messiah College have since announced plans to follow suit, as has the United States Collegiate Athletic Association, which has partnered with Vemo to create ISA options for its roughly 80 member schools.

Among for-profit programs, in 2012, App Academy, a coding bootcamp with locations in San Francisco and New York, began offering a twelve-week program built around an ISA. Others, like the New York Code + Design Academy, which provides a range of web engineering and design courses, and Holberton School, a two-year program in San Francisco, have similar payment options. [...] The ISA-based programs have generated hype, as well as some early success stories. Yet questions remain about whether they are a good deal for students and if they make for profitable businesses in the long run. For one thing, there's little consensus around how much is fair to reap from program graduates, and for how long. Lambda School, for example, requires graduates earning at least $50,000 to pay back 17 percent of their salary for two years, with total payments capped at $30,000. The terms can vary widely among programs. Also, while it's clear how programs like Lambda School might help some people improve their prospects, many of them are so new -- Lambda School is one year old this month -- that there isn't much data about how people do once they get through the programs. That makes it difficult for prospective students to evaluate them.

A California law that went into effect July 1 is aimed at making it easier for customers to cancel their subscriptions online. From a report: The law states that customers who accept an automatic renewal or continuous service offer online must be able to cancel the service online. That could include a pre-written "termination email" provided by the company that can be sent by the consumer without the need for more information. The law means you won't have to make anymore phone calls to obscure customer service hotlines to cancel services like news subscriptions, music streaming or meal plans, for example. One person tweeted about trying to cancel a New York Times subscription on the phone and being put on hold for 15 minutes -- twice.

Xfinity Mobile customers will soon see a change to their video streams. From a report: In the coming weeks, videos streamed using cellular data will be limited to 480p resolution, a move that other carriers including T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint have implemented for certain plans in the past. Videos streamed over WiFi won't be affected by the change and Comcast says that it will offer the option to stream 720p video over cellular data for an added fee later this year. Until that plan becomes available, customers who would like to continue streaming video at 720p will be able to do so for no charge, they'll just have to call the carrier in order to set that up. Additionally, users with an unlimited plan will see their hotspot speeds capped at 600 Kbps.