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Recommending Music on Spotify with Deep Learning→

This summer, I’m interning at Spotify in New York City, where I’m working on content-based music recommendation using convolutional neural networks. In this post, I’ll explain my approach and show some preliminary results.

A fascinating post by Sander Dieleman explaining how he designed a deep neural network to provide music recommendations based on Spotify data. It’s a technical read, but there are Spotify player widgets to listen to songs picked up by the network, which is capable of learning specific pitches, chords, sounds, and other factors such as Chinese voices. Dieleman says that hopefully some of these audio-based recommendations will go into A/B testing soon, with a focus on recommending new music that isn’t generally picked up by traditional recommendation engines. Impressive.

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Four Years in Apple’s Ecosystem→

An interesting and well documented experiment by The Typist: a visualization of four years of purchases on the iTunes Store, and particularly the App Store. I can’t imagine the amount of effort that went into this (sifting through 90 emails, recalculating prices based on past currency conversions, etc.), but I hope I’ll have the patience to do the same someday.

The Typist makes a great point about iOS games:

So what does that mean for games? Of the 34 that I’ve purchased, only 5 games — worth $18 — are currently installed on either of my iOS devices. Of the $111.66 that I’ve spent, $93.71 worth of games are on neither of my devices. Almost 84% of the money I’ve spent on games is now in the cloud.

Does that mean I wouldn’t have bought any or most of them? Not necessarily: That would be like not going to the movies because you pay $12 for 120 minutes that you can’t “reuse”. Most forms of entertainment are ephemeral by nature.

Unlike console games, I can’t remember any old iOS game that I intentionally redownloaded to play it again like I do for, say, Nintendo or Squaresoft classics. Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it’s the nature of mobile games. Also worth considering: old iOS games that don’t work properly on current versions of the OS, that don’t have Retina assets, or that rely on third-party services no longer in existence (the last one is a problem common to console games, too).

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Pinterest Launches Messaging Feature→

In an update released yesterday on the App Store, Pinterest rolled out a messaging feature that allows people to share pins privately and have discussions around them.

Casey Newton has a good overview:

Starting today, the company is rolling out messages on Android, iOS, and the web. Like Facebook’s “chat heads,” recent messages pop up to the left of the feed as bubbles with your friends’ faces. You’ll find the others under the pin icon where notifications pop up. Just click the ‘+’ icon, type in the name of a friend on Pinterest, and you can send a pin or a standalone message. The impressive thing about Pinterest messages is that the pins you send within the app retain all the functionality of a pin you see anywhere else on the site. Anything you can do with a pin on Pinterest’s web site, you can do inside a message: pin it to a board of your own, send it to another friend, or click the ‘heart’ to add it to your list of favorites. You can even drag a pin from the site into a message.

Pinterest is the only social network that I’m genuinely excited about lately. I’ve been using Pinterest a lot in the past few months, and it strikes me as a company that knows what people want and how they really use the service. Everything about it is friendly, comfortable, and practical; the fact that I can talk about Pinterest with my “normal” friends without getting the blank stares I receive for Twitter also helps.

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Shazam for Mac: Background Song Recognition in the Menu Bar

I was surprised to hear last week that Shazam, makers of the popular music recognition app that’s going to be integrated with Siri in iOS 8, had launched a desktop app for OS X, available for free on the Mac App Store. I always associated Shazam with the portability and instant-on nature of the iPhone: you hear a song playing, you want to know what it is, you pull out Shazam and let it work its magic. That’s why I’ve never managed to get used to Shazam on the iPad and why I seldom use all the features that the company has tacked onto the app over the years: fundamentally, I see Shazam as the music recognition app for iPhone, and that’s it.

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Apple Claims to Support 629,000 European Jobs, European Developers Take 32.5% of App Store Revenues

As first noticed by 9to5 Mac, Apple has published a webpage dedicated to promoting the impact that they have had in creating or supporting 629,000 jobs in Europe (defined as EU member countries plus Norway and Switzerland). They break the numbers down a bit more, attributing 497,000 to the App Store, 132,000 to jobs directly or indirectly supported by Apple, 116,000 jobs created at other companies as a result of Apple’s growth, and 16,000 Apple employees.

Throughout our history, we have created entirely new products - and entirely new industries - by focusing on innovation. This has resulted in nearly 630,000 European jobs at Apple and at developers and businesses supported by Apple. In addition, the App Store has created hundreds of thousands of jobs that previously did not exist in the European economy, enabling developers to launch new companies and earn $6.5 billion from App Store sales worldwide.

Interestingly, they reveal that $6.5 billion in App Store revenues has been paid to European developers, given that $20 billion has been paid to developers in total, this means the share of App Store revenue taken by European developers is 32.5%. Apple has previously revealed US developers have received $9 billion, but that figure hasn’t been updated since late last year, so can’t be used to calculate an accurate share of revenues taken by US developers.

Share of App Store Revenues

Europe (32.5%) - Rest of World (67.5%)

The 1986 Apple Collection→

Update: Reader Rick Henson got in contact and let me know that he uploaded scanned copies of the entire collection, which you can view here. The other pages feature everything from Apple-branded paperclips, lapel-pins, Swiss knife, and of course, an Apple watch.

Dug up by The Trad, The Apple Collection is an amazing look at what Apple—a company often hailed for its tasteful, minimalist design—thought was awesome back in the ’80s. Namely, gaudy belts, logo-covered baseball caps, and the word “Apple” written in as many different variants of ugly lettering as the company could find. Sadly, no black turtlenecks or jeans are on display; Steve Jobs had been ousted from the company the year previous by former PepsiCo CEO John Sculley, and wouldn’t return for another 11 years. [The A.V. Club]

The Trad originally posted this back in 2011, but I only just saw it today when The A.V. Club linked to it. Suffice to say, the above image is just a taste of what you’ll get see if you view the full collection - which you’re going to do, right?

[via The A.V. Club]

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Apple, Samsung Agree to End Patent Suits Outside U.S.→

The agreement shows Apple and Samsung may be nearing a conclusion to what has been a drawn-out and occasionally nasty worldwide patent fight, which has sprouted alongside the booming market for touch-screen smartphones. Apple has accused Samsung of copying its iPhone designs, while Samsung has countered that Apple is using pieces of its wireless-transmission technology without permission. Neither has won a decisive decision and judges have repeatedly urged the two companies to reach a settlement rather than play out their dispute in court.

Today’s announcement, sent to Bloomberg and other media organizations, means that all disputes between Apple and Samsung outside the United States are being abandoned. The international disputes had been fought for years in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, the U.K., France and Italy.

“Apple and Samsung have agreed to drop all litigation between the two companies outside the United States,” the companies said in the statement. “This agreement does not involve any licensing arrangements, and the companies are continuing to pursue the existing cases in U.S. courts.”

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