Shazam Is Driving $300 Million In iTunes And ... - Business Insider

It's a long time since Shazam was just that useful app to identify (or "tag") music playing in the real world. In 2013, the company has a burgeoning business based around people tagging TV shows and adverts too.

Shazam recently announced a major milestone: 300m users. That's all the people who've ever tagged something using the company's app. An impressive figure, but not one that reveals what Shazam's current active userbase is.

In an interview with The Guardian at Mobile World Congress, Shazam's executive vice president of marketing David Jones shared some more useful stats on that front, as well as on where Shazam is making its money in 2013.

Starting with the active users ? or audience, as Shazam's TV partners may see it. "We don't publish our monthly actives, but I can say that weekly actives are in the tens of millions, and monthly actives are many tens of millions," says Jones.

"20% of all iPhones in the US used Shazam last month, and in some European countries like France, Germany and the UK we're seeing closer to 30% or 40%. And we're currently adding at least 2m new users a week, and more than 3m some weeks."

It's this scale that's important to Shazam's expansion into the second-screen TV space, where apps designed to complement TV viewing like Zeebox and GetGlue are still counting their downloads in millions.

Shazam says its users are currently tagging 10m songs, shows and ads a day. They're also tapping through to buy the content they tag from download stores like iTunes and Amazon MP3 ? to the tune of a run-rate of $300m of sales a year. The vast majority is music, but TV shows, films and apps are a small but fast-growing percentage.

It's that second-screen TV business that holds the key to Shazam's future, though. Starting in the US, which accounts for 90m of those first 300m users of the company's app. Shazam creates content within its app for every programme on 160 American TV channels, serving it up when viewers tag the show.

Content? That's a mixture of episode descriptions, quizzes, tweets, cast information and playable clips of every song on the soundtrack, with links to buy song downloads, TV episodes and merchandise ? the latter through a partnership with e-commerce firm Delivery Agent.

For big events like the Super Bowl, Grammys and Oscars in the US ? and recently the Brit Awards in the UK ? Shazam builds what Jones calls "custom experiences", with polls, predictions, and video highlights for 2012's Olympic Games, with official US broadcaster NBC.

"We are going to roll out support for television programming in other countries," says Jones, although he declines to give an exact date. "The UK will be next, and then Western Europe."

The custom experiences side of Shazam's business has just been boosted by Fox Broadcasting Company's launch of an initiative called Fox Now, in partnership with a firm called Watchwith. The scheme involves providing second-screen apps companies with extra material to synchronise with shows as they air.

The idea: Fox will provide behind-the-scenes footage, interviews, interactive content and ads to a range of third-party apps. Shazam is one of four launch partners in the US, alongside Viggle, ConnecTV and NextGuide.

"We think this is going to be empowering," says Jones. "It's inclusive, fostering the development of the entire TV companion-app space, and it lets more people have access to this content. It's going to be good for creators and good for the network."

Fox's second-screen content won't be exclusive to Shazam, though. Jones is nevertheless bullish on the threats posed by these rivals and others including Zeebox and GetGlue.

"They're all struggling to get downloads. If they're getting a couple of million downloads, they're lucky. And while it's great that they're trying different things, they haven't nailed the experience: nothing has taken off," he says.

"But we've been at this a couple of years building custom experiences. We have millions of people Shazaming television every month in the US already."

How does that translate into money? Sponsorships and ad-tagging. In the former case: "We get six-figure sponsorships for single-night events, and some seven-figure sponsorships over a broader spread of time," says Jones.

In the latter case, brands pay Shazam to make their TV adverts interactive: they include a call-to-action in the ad to get people to tag it, and then Shazam provides second-screen content relating to their campaign.

The company has run more than 200 campaigns for over 140 brands, according to Jones. "The minimum price is $75k, but most cost between $75k and $200k for a campaign that runs for a couple of months," he says.

"So with 200 campaigns where we're getting paid low-six-figures on average, this is already a double-digit million business on its own. Shazam for TV advertising is going to become our primary revenue stream very quickly, and that's the way we're going to grow to being a multi-billion dollar company."

Or get bought, of course. Shazam's openness about its revenues and growth is clearly partly about drumming up interest from broadcasters and brands outside the US, but it won't hurt any long-term ambitions for the VC-backed company to find its exit.

In the meantime, Shazam is continuing to bulk up its salesforce, plot global expansion for its TV business, and steering clear of some of the pitfalls that lie in wait.

For example, Jones says Shazam won't get sucked into letting networks or advertisers target their rivals through its app ? for example, enabling Coca-Cola to pay Shazam to show its content when someone tries to tag a Pepsi ad.

The company isn't abandoning music ? it recently inked an exclusive deal with dance-music downloads store Beatport to bolster its database of electronic music, and has been building second-screen content for music videos by Ellie Goulding, Lil' Wayne and Mariah Carey / Justin Bieber, for example.

Shazam is also releasing a new version of its iPad and Android tablet apps, with an emphasis on discovery. People can see which shows and songs are being tagged most by Shazam's users around the world, and drill down by country, city and town through a map interface.

"The whole idea here is to build a better experience on your lap," says Jones, while showing off the new app, which will be released in the coming weeks. Shazam is hoping that beefing up its tablet experience will boost its longer-term ambitions to make second-screen advertising an even larger business.

"For the time being, second-screen is supporting the ads on the first screen, but there will come a time when second-screen revenues start to become significant enough that the television networks and advertising sales groups will really start to take notice," says Jones.

"While we're making a ton of money now, compared to the billions of advertising that the networks sell, it's a smaller thing. That's the opportunity."

This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/shazam-is-driving-300-million-in-itunes-and-amazon-sales-2013-2

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Review: Citizen Eco-Drive Proximity Smart Watch

This solar-powered watch syncs with your iPhone to learn the time, and it buzzes you when a new call or e-mail comes in.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/GearFactor/~3/oCoIuHvAXDo/

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First lady's anti-obesity campaign prompts change

WASHINGTON (AP) ? Wal-Mart is putting special labels on some store-brand products to help shoppers quickly spot healthier items. Millions of schoolchildren are helping themselves to vegetables from salad bars in their lunchrooms, while kids' meals at Olive Garden and Red Lobster restaurants automatically come with a side of fruit or vegetables and a glass of low-fat milk.

The changes put in place by the food industry are in response to the campaign against childhood obesity that Michelle Obama began waging three years ago. More changes are in store.

Influencing policy posed more of a challenge for the first lady, and not everyone welcomed her effort, criticizing it as a case of unwanted government intrusion.

Still, nutrition advocates and others give her credit for using her clout to help bring a range of interests to the table. They hope the increased awareness she has generated through speeches, her garden and her physical exploits will translate into further reductions in childhood obesity rates long after she leaves the White House.

About one-third of U.S. children are overweight or obese, which puts them at increased risk for any number of life-threatening illnesses, including diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease.

While there is evidence of modest declines in childhood obesity rates in some parts of the country, the changes are due largely to steps taken before the first lady launched "Let's Move" in February 2010.

With the program entering its fourth year, Mrs. Obama heads out Wednesday on a two-day promotional tour with stops in Mississippi, Illinois and Missouri. She has been talking up the program on daytime and late-night TV shows, on the radio and in public service announcements with Big Bird. She also plans discussions next week on Google and Twitter.

"We're starting to see some shifts in the trend lines and the data where we're starting to show some improvement," the first lady told SiriusXM host B. Smith in an interview broadcast Tuesday. "We've been spending a lot of time educating and re-educating families and kids on how to eat, what to eat, how much exercise to get and how to do it in a way that doesn't completely disrupt someone's life."

Larry Soler, president and chief executive of the Partnership for a Healthier America, said Mrs. Obama has "been the leader in making the case for the time is now in childhood obesity and everyone has a role to play in overcoming the problem." The nonpartisan, nonprofit partnership was created as part of "Let's Move" to work with the private sector and to hold companies accountable for changes they promised to make.

Conservatives accused Mrs. Obama of going too far and dictating what people should ? and shouldn't ? eat after she played a major behind-the-scenes role in the passage in 2010 of a child nutrition law that required schools to make foods healthier. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican Party's vice presidential nominee in 2008, once brought cookies to a school and called the first lady's efforts a "nanny state run amok."

Other leaders in the effort, such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have felt the backlash, too. Last fall, Bloomberg helped enact the nation's first rule barring restaurants, cafeterias and concession stands from selling soda and other high-calorie drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces.

Despite the criticism, broad public support exists for some of the changes the first lady and the mayor are advocating, according to a recent Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll.

More than eight in 10 of those surveyed, 84 percent, support requiring more physical activity in schools, and 83 percent favor government providing people with nutritional guidelines and information about diet and exercise. Seventy percent favor having restaurants put calorie counts on menus, and 75 percent consider overweightness and obesity a serious problem in this country, according to the Nov. 21-Dec. 14 survey by telephone of 1,011 adults.

Food industry representatives say Mrs. Obama has influenced their own efforts.

Mary Sophos of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents the country's largest food companies, including General Mills and Kellogg's, said an industry effort to label the fronts of food packages with nutritional content gained momentum after Mrs. Obama, a mother of two, attended one of their meetings in 2010 and encouraged them to do more.

"She's not trying to point fingers," Sophos said. "She's trying to get people to focus on solutions."

A move by the companies signaling willingness to work with Mrs. Obama appears to have paid off as the Obama administration eased off some of the fights it appeared ready to pick four years ago.

The Food and Drug Administration has stalled its push to mandate labeling on the front of food packages, saying it is monitoring the industry's own effort. A rule that would require calorie counts on menus has been delayed as the FDA tries to figure out whom to apply it to. Supermarkets, movie theaters and other retailers have been lobbying to be exempted.

The industry also appears to have successfully warded off a move by the Federal Trade Commission to put in place voluntary guidelines for advertising junk food to kids. Directed by Congress, the guidelines would have discouraged the marketing of certain foods that didn't meet government-devised nutritional requirements. The administration released draft guidelines in 2011 but didn't follow up after the industry said they went too far and angry House Republicans summoned an agency official to Capitol Hill to defend them.

Besides labeling its store brands, Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, also pledged to cut sodium and added sugars by 25 percent and 10 percent, respectively, by 2015, and remove industrially produced trans fats.

Leslie Dach, an executive vice president, said sodium in packaged bread has been cut by 13 percent, and added sugar in refrigerated flavored milk, popular among kids, has been cut by more than 17 percent. He said Wal-Mart shoppers have told the company that eating healthier is important to them. Giving customers what they want is also good for business.

New York reported a 5.5 percent decline in obesity rates in kindergarteners through eighth-graders between the 2006-07 and 2010-11 school years, according a report last fall by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, which studies health policy. In Philadelphia, the decline was 4.7 percent among students in grades K-12 between the 2006-07 and 2009-10 school years, the foundation said.

Declines also were reported in California and in Mississippi, where Mrs. Obama stops Wednesday.

In Philadelphia, an organization called the Food Trust has worked since 1992 to help corner stores offer fresh foods, connect schools with local farms, bring supermarkets to underserved areas and ensure that farmers' markets accept food stamps, according to Robert Wood Johnson.

New York City requires chain restaurants to post calorie information on menus. Licensed day care centers also must offer daily physical activity, limit the amount of time children spend in front of TV and computer screens, and set nutrition standards.

Both cities also made changes to improve the quality of foods and beverages available to students in public schools.

___

Online:

Let's Move: http://www.letsmove.gov

___

Follow Darlene Superville and Mary Clare Jalonick on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/dsupervilleap and http://www.twitter.com/mcjalonick

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/386c25518f464186bf7a2ac026580ce7/Article_2013-02-27-Michelle%20Obama/id-f458882bef7147f78987cb585db37037

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ObamaNation: At least $177 Million In Tax Dollars Paid For Federal Workers To Do Union Business

Many taxpayers may not realize that their tax dollars are used to pay government workers to actually conduct union business?not the work of the government.

This practice has the official name of Official Time and is defined by the Office of Personnel Management as:

Official time is time spent by Federal employees performing representational work for a bargaining unit in lieu of their regularly assigned work.

Unlike the private sector, where companies or unions pay union representatives to conduct ?union business,? our system of government unions allows union representatives who happen to be federal employees time away from their normal duties in order to conduct union business?all at taxpayer expense.

Not surprisingly, with union bosses now controlling co-determining the business of Executive Branch agencies, the amount of tax dollars used to pay federal workers to do union work has increased significantly under Barack Obama?s watch.

According to a report prepared by the Office of Personnel Management, the amount of time spent by federal workers to conduct union business has increased nearly 600,000 hours since 2007.

The Examiner?s Sean Higgins made note that, in FY 2011 (the last year recorded in the OPM report), federal government workers spent nearly 3.4 million hours performing union activities while on the job.

Since the average federal employee made over $108,000 in both salary and benefits (in 2008), or $52.15 per hour, the costs to taxpayers in FY 2011 was over $177 million for federal government workers to conduct union business. [Again, that figure is using the 2008 average compensation cost (wages and benefits) for federal government workers.]

?In many cases, ?official time? is no more than taxpayer-funded no-show jobs.? stated the National Right to Work Committee?s on its website.

The NRTWC also notes that Obama?s union-controlled National Labor Relations Board spent more than three-quarters of a million in taxpayer money to pay for ?official time?:

In the OPM Report, you can see how much federal agencies are paying for union officials to work for unions. For example, the supposedly impartial National Labor Relations Board spent $768,465.14 for union officials to work for their union not for the NLRB. [Emphasis added]

Unfortunately, now that Obama has won re-election, without the accountability of a second election looming, the well is open to all those who wish to drink from the slush fund that is the taxpayers? pockets.

Related:

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Source: http://www.redstate.com/2013/02/21/obamanation-at-least-177-million-used-to-pay-federal-workers-to-do-union-business/

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Sony announces PlayStation app for iOS and Android

DEAR ABBY: My boyfriend, "Doug" (24), and I (22) have been in a long-distance relationship for a year, but we were friends for a couple of years before that. I had never had a serious relationship before and lacked experience. Doug has not only been in two other long-term relationships, but has had sex with more than 15 women. One of them is an amateur porn actress.I knew about this, but it didn't bother me until recently. Doug had a party, and while he was drunk he told one of his buddies -- in front of me -- that he should watch a certain porn film starring his ex-girlfriend. ...

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/sony-announces-playstation-app-ios-android-013055435.html

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Senator puts drone toll at 4,700

A Predator B unmanned aircraft taxis at the Naval Air Station in Corpus Christi, Texas. (Eric Gay/AP)Just how many people have America?s drones killed? Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham has put the death toll at 4,700?the first time an American official has publicly put a figure on the impact of strikes by unmanned aerial vehicles. The South Carolina lawmaker's office said he was citing an estimate already discussed on cable television.

Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, disclosed the figure during a question and answer session on Tuesday with the Rotary Club of Easley in his home state of South Carolina. His remarks were first reported by the Easley Patch.

?We've killed 4,700,? the lawmaker said. ?Sometimes you hit innocent people, and I hate that, but we're at war, and we've taken out some very senior members of al-Qaida.?

Drone strikes, President Barack Obama?s signature tactic for killing suspected al-Qaida and other extremist fighters, have been ?very effective,? said Graham. ?It's a weapon that needs to be used.?

Amid a controversy sparked by Obama?s targeted assassination of American citizens overseas suspected of consorting with terrorists, Graham came down sharply against any judicial oversight of the drone war, calling the idea ?crazy.?

?I can't imagine, in World War [II] for Roosevelt to have gone to a bunch of judges and said, 'I need your permission before we can attack the enemy,'? Graham said.

Drone war expert Micah Zenko of the Council on Foreign Relations noted on his blog that Graham?s figure lined up with the high-end estimate by The Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

?Either Graham is a big fan of TBIJ?s work, or perhaps he inadvertently revealed the U.S. government?s body count for nonbattlefield targeted killings,? Zenko said.

Asked about the disclosure, Graham's office forwarded a clip from MSNBC in which the anchor cites the figure of 4,700 killed.

Obama's National Security Council and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not immediately say whether the lawmaker's comments amounted to an inappropriate disclosure.

Graham did not specify whether he was discussing CIA drone strikes or military drone strikes.

Obama's expanded drone war has broad popular support in the U.S., according to a poll released earlier this month by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. That survey found 56 percent support such strikes and 26 percent oppose them. At the same time, 53 percent worry about potential civilian casualties. But overseas it faces majority opposition, Pew found last year.

(Hat tip: Agence France-Presse via the London Telegraph)

US defense contractor selling unarmed Predator drones to UAE

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/drones-killed-4-700-u-senator-says-141143752--politics.html

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Facebook learn issue in SwiftKey 4 [updated]

I too have had this problem since the new flow update. I've even tried removing all previous instances of SwiftKey, including the beta; reinstalling and restarting the phone. Gmail, Twitter, and SMS personalizations work fine; facebook simply returns the less than helpful "an error has occurred".

Source: http://support.swiftkey.net/forums/116693-2-bug-reports/suggestions/3674211-facebook-learn-issue-in-swiftkey-4

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