Jay Z Reveals Plans for Tidal, a Streaming Music Service

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/31/business/media/jay-z-reveals-plans-for-tidal-a-streaming-music-service.html?ref=technology&_r=0

• On Monday, Jay Z, the rap star and entertainment mogul, announced his plans for Tidal, a subscription streaming service he recently bought for $56 million.
• Facing competition from Spotify, Google and other companies that will soon include Apple, Tidal will be fashioned as a home for high-fidelity audio and exclusive content.
•  Jay Z’s strategy is that a majority of the company will be owned by artists.
• The move may bring financial benefits for those involved, but it is also powerfully symbolic in a business where musicians have seldom had direct control over how their work is consumed.
• Tidal, which makes millions of songs and thousands of high-definition videos available in 31 countries, will have no free version. 
• Instead, it will have two subscription tiers defined by audio quality: $10 a month for a compressed format (the standard on most digital outlets) and $20 for CD-quality streams.
• Jay Z described his vision for Tidal as an outlet where musicians and fans “can all just camp out and listen to music,” and where artists would “always be on album cycle,” meaning in constant promotion mode.

Livestream your life with this new app

• The livestreaming app was the "SXSW sweetheart" this year, despite having only launched on February 27.
• Even people like, Jimmy Fallon is streaming his life using Meerkat.
•  Rubin decided to dedicate his entire team to work on Meerkat after the app's popularity exploded.
• Several people said it broke their record for the longest Meerkat stream they had ever watched. 
• The app branching out to work with other platforms, like Facebook or Tumblr.

Contact lens with built-in telescope could help people with blinding disease

• Scientists are developing smart contact lenses embedded with minuscule mirrors that can magnify your vision by almost three times.
• The 1.55mm-thick lenses incorporate a thin reflective telescope made of mirrors and filters; when light enters the eye it bounces off the series of mirrors and increases the perceived view of an object or person.
• It is hoped that the lens will improve the sight of people with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) -- the third leading cause of blindness globally.
• A key innovation with the lenses is the added ability to switch between magnified and regular vision through a complementary pair of glasses.
• The battery-powered glasses use LCD technology to watch the movement of the eye and a simple wink can alter their polarization and determine whether light entering is magnified or not.
•  A strategic wink will enable users to keep an eye on their periphery, such as cars approaching them as they cross a street, whilst also being able to zoom in and recognize the faces of those around them.

The evolution of hacking

• Computer hacking was once the realm of curious teenagers. It's now the arena of government spies, professional thieves and soldiers of fortune.
•  In 2012, Iran ruined 30,000 computers at Saudi oil producer Aramco.
•  North Korea's cyberattack on Sony Pictures last year.
• Computers were destroyed, executives' embarrassing emails were exposed, and the entire movie studio was thrown into chaos.
• The whole concept of "hacking" sprouted from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearly 50 years ago. 
• These new hackers were already figuring out how to alter computer software and hardware to speed it up, even as the scientists at AT&T Bell Labs were developing UNIX, one of the world's first major operating systems.
• Hacking became the art of figuring out unique solutions. It takes an insatiable curiosity about how things work; hackers wanted to make technology work better, or differently.
•  They were not inherently good or bad, just clever.

Computers that know what we want

• Instead they'll be proactive, using your history, location and other data to offer up information and execute tasks automatically, before you even ask.
• "In many instances, the machine kind of already knows what you're going to do because we're creatures of habit. If I walk into Starbucks and always order the same thing, I shouldn't have to say it," said Raj Singh, CEO of Tempo AI, an anticipatory app that plugs into your calendar. 
• It was developed at SRI International, the same place where Siri started.
• The new Tesla will start up for you in the morning before you enter the garage, using information from your calendar and past departure times to figure out when you usually leave. 
• The Nest smart thermostat uses your heating and cooling history to keep your home at an optimal temperature without wasting energy.