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Peter Tonstad had stepped up to the role in April after previous CEO Andy Chen left the company.

Jay Z’s music-streaming company Tidal said interim Chief Executive Officer Peter Tonstad is no longer with the company, making him the second CEO to depart since April.

“Current executives in New York and Oslo will continue to lead our rapidly developing innovation and content initiatives until our new CEO is in place,” Tidal said Tuesday in a statement.

Related

• Jay Z’s music streaming service Tidal flops, dropping out of iTunes’ top 700 U.S. apps chart
• Google Inc launches free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music as Apple Music launch nears

Tonstad was appointed in mid-April when CEO Andy Chen left. Jay Z and more than a dozen fellow musicians acquired Tidal in January to give artists more control over streaming, leaping into a field that includes Spotify, Pandora Media Inc. and now Apple Music. The March relaunch of the service drew criticism from music bloggers and other performers for its emphasis on the most financially successful artists.

Artists have complained they aren’t paid enough when music is streamed – a gripe that Jay Z, whose real name is Shawn Carter, tried to address by offering higher royalties.

On Sunday, Taylor Swift sent an open letter to Apple Inc. criticizing the company for offering a 90-day free trial for its streaming service without compensating artists. Apple has since backed down and said it will pay musicians during the trial period.

Bloomberg.com

Google Inc.’s music service will now include free Web-radio stations, seeking to lure users days before Apple Inc. debuts its streaming feature.

Google Play Music, a streaming and storage service, will roll out ad-supported radio, beginning in the U.S., said Zahavah Levine, vice president of partnerships, Google Play. The new feature will provide stations based on songs that users like – or from Google’s Songza, which curates songs based on factors such as moods, activities and favorite decades.

Related

• Apple Inc’s WWDC 2015 reveals new music service, iOS 9, OS X El Capitan and more: Live coverage
• Apple agrees to pay royalties to musicians after Taylor Swift blasts tech giant in open letter
• Apple Inc wants to own music again, and everyone from Spotify to Sirius XM is a target

The Mountain View, California-based company is stepping up investments in music as it prepares for digital-song pioneer Apple to push its monthly song service to hundreds of millions of iTunes users on June 30. Already, Apple offers online radio – and is rolling out a 24-hour station “dedicated entirely to music and music culture” that will be broadcast to more than 100 countries.

Google Play Music, which has more than doubled its user base in the past year, is trying to capture more of the millions of consumers who open the application preloaded on smartphones around the world, Levine said. Many just close the program because they are initially prompted for payment.

“We think that by giving users a taste of Google Play Music, through the ad-supported tier, more users will ultimately become paying subscribers,” Levine said. “Until now, this was a lost opportunity – to bring more people into Google Play Music.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfnxgN_hztg&w=640&h=390]

The new service’s ads initially will include video and banners, Levine said, noting it will be a new revenue stream for artists.

The free version of Google Play Music is currently only available in the United States.

Managed services provider Ormuco Inc. is spreading its wings with its newly announced hybrid cloud offering, the Connected Cloud. Aimed at the middle market and the enterprise, it was developed to provide seamless migration between public and private cloud environments, and enhanced portability of workloads.

The Connected Cloud allows customers such as developers, enterprise organizations, resellers, and independent software vendors to quickly initiate a hybrid cloud environment that easily transitions from a private to a public cloud on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Related

• HP inching closer to launching The Machine computer
• Dell launches proactive support for client systems
• Citrix brings the cloud to your desktop

Montreal-based Ormuco currently has three data centers of its own in Dallas, Texas; Sunnyvale, California; and Montreal, providing geographic dispersion for full data center redundancy across North America. Expansion to other regions is planned later this year. As a member of the HP Helion Network, Ormuco also provides users of the Connected Cloud with access to workload portability through data centers managed by ecosystem members around the world.

“There are other providers that just offer cloud services for companies to consume,” noted Ormuco CEO Orlando Bayter, “but they don’t allow organizations to be service providers for their own enterprises.” Ormuco’s management portal allows CIOs to track usage and spend, and gives them the ability to charge back to departments.

Customers can manage their services from a single browser-based portal, logging in once to create or access any instance worldwide through a simple point and click interface that hides much of the complexity of navigating a cloud. Currently the company offers what Bayter refers to as the basics: compute, block and object storage, load balancing, networking, DNS, VPN as a service, Docker containers, and autoscaling. Over the next months, it plans to add more features such as database as a service featuring MySQL and MongoDB, as well as Hadoop, and a more granular permission structure.

Farther in the future is an even more ambitious scheme: Ormuco is working to enable companies to resell their own underutilized resources. The company is building technologies that would enable any organization with infrastructure that is underutilized for long periods to rent it out in a federated model. For example, said Bayter, “Imagine a university or a science lab that scales and uses its infrastructure at very particular times; the rest of the time that infrastructure is fairly underused. What if they could make money from that?”

Ormuco would verify and certify the infrastructure, allocate a performance rating that would change dynamically in step with the demands being placed on it, and advertise the offerings in its marketplace, handle usage tracking, and manage billing. To address data sovereignty concerns, customers renting cloud resources in this market would be able to choose where their data is hosted. Ormuco describes the model as “Airbnb for OpenStack clouds.”

Analyst Michelle Warren, principal at MW Research and Consulting, said, “I was quite impressed with Ormuco’s business model and its go-to-market strategy. [Bayter] seems quite focused and knowledgeable about the industry. The service – cloud bursting and leveraging existing clouds – is one that several organizations have been working on addressing over the years. He and his team, however, have figured out how to deliver it to organizations.”

“I also like his working relationship with Helion and HP,” she added. “This relationship should give him the credibility and ability to reach international clients with a solid infrastructure in place.”

NEW YORK — Facebook is now bigger than Wal-Mart, at least when it comes to its value on the stock market.

The world’s biggest online social network knocked the world’s largest retailer out of the top 10 list of the highest-valued companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index on Monday and the gap widened on Tuesday.

Related

• Why we’re not in a tech bubble
• Investors beware: Bubbling tech sector now rife with risk

Facebook Inc. was valued at US$242.7 billion as of late morning trading, its share price up more than 2 per cent at US$86.59. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., meanwhile, was valued at US$233.8 billion, its stock price down 21 US cents at US$72.58.

Facebook has been on a roll this past year, its shares up about 32 per cent in the past year compared with just 8.2 per cent for the S&P 500 index. Its quarterly results have consistently surpassed expectations.

Four Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a tiny, low-cost device that can steal encryption keys via radio waves.

Sam Barlow’s bold and experimental interactive murder mystery Her Story takes many risks, and none greater than its maker’s assumption – or perhaps faith – that players are willing to take a chance on a game composed almost entirely of live-action video clips.

I don’t know if this gamble will pay off in a commercial sense, but from the perspective of creative design and – surprisingly – player engagement it succeeds far better than I suspected it would.

The game begins without  pomp or explanation. Players are simply plopped in front of the desktop of an old police workstation. There are a few things you can click on, including a trash bin and a couple of Readme documents that explain how the computer’s only accessible application – a video database – works. You don’t know why you’re in front of this police computer, or for that matter even who you’re supposed to be beyond an “Authorized Guest” user. All you can do is start searching the database.

So that’s what I did. Queries are conducted by typing in words and clicking a search button. The only files players have access to are videos to do with a 21-year-old homicide case, and all of these videos are short clips of police interview sessions with a single woman shot over the course of a few weeks in June and July 1994.

That’s the whole game in a nutshell. Finding and watching old videos.

But it’s weirdly compelling. I didn’t get up from my computer once during the two-and-a-half hours or so it took me to reach the end of my little investigation.

The fun of the game lies almost entirely in narrative discovery. That means I can’t really get into anything you’ll see in the video clips beyond that there was a murder and that the police’s sole person of interest appears to be the thirty-something female seen in the videos.

What I can talk about, though, is the cleverness of Barlow’s design.

All of the interview clips have been transcribed, and every word the woman speaks is searchable. Hear her mention someone’s name? Type the moniker into the search box, hit enter, and you’ll call up all clips in which she utters it.

However, one of the limitations of the database is that when multiple matches are found it only queues up the first five files. To access the rest you’ll need to get more specific by adding additional words and parameters to your search, like maybe a location or a verb likely to be associated with a name.

This is the game part of the game. And it does an astonishing job of making the player feel like an honest-to-goodness sleuth.

I had a pad of paper beside me throughout on which I wrote names, places, and questions about what the woman said or how she looked. I used these notes as the basis to conduct additional searches, and was frequently rewarded with clips revealing interesting – sometimes even vital – bits of information. It was the next best thing to being in the room and questioning her myself.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaHw97l7-Lc&w=640&h=390]

This style of play may not sound particularly interactive. However, because the clips are so short – many are just five or ten seconds long – time rarely seemed to drag. I always seemed to be either jotting notes or actively absorbing information or typing something into the database.

Of course, a game like this hinges on the quality of the writing and performance(s), and while neither here are particularly Oscar-caliber both are wholly acceptable.

Barlow, who has previously written several games (including a couple of PlayStation 2-era Silent Hill games) has crafted a sly mystery loaded with themes and clues that perceptive players will be able to satisfyingly tie to the story’s many twists. Some are perhaps a little too overt due to appearing too many times and in too many forms, but I suspect the occasional repetition was Barlow’s safeguard against players inevitably failing to find some key clips through their searches.

Plus, he had to write the most pivotal scenes without using words that players might try querying right away, revealing too much too soon. Searching “I confess,” for example, returns only one result from an early interview session in which nothing of importance is truly confessed.

British actress and musician Viva Seifert, meanwhile, plays the woman we see in the video with subtle intensity. She wisely errs on the side of showing too little emotion – as opposed to hamming things up in dramatic situations – which keeps her performance believable and her character appropriately inscrutable. She’s not Streeping it by any stretch, but I was rarely drawn out of the moment by her inability to convince me she was a woman accused.

The overall presentation, meanwhile, benefits from a screen glare effect that effectively simulates the sort of crappy old monitor you might find in a small police station. It even occasionally reflects a hint of the person you’re playing between videos, when police car flashers or lights flare up elsewhere in the station in which your character is supposed to be sitting, adding one more layer to the mystery.

Admittedly, there were brief moments during which the spell was broken. It seems, for example, a bit strange that these interviews have been broken into so many tiny segments. Some are literally no more than a few seconds long and reveal nothing of importance.

And I was initially frustrated that I couldn’t scroll beyond the first five results returned in some searches – an artificial limitation likely imposed to keep us engaged in sleuthing and querying rather than searching a word like “the” and then mindlessly clicking through the scores of videos returned. (I just told myself the database was a no-frills program clearly procured government-style by going with the cheapest rather than the best bidder.)

But by and large I was quite happy to go along for and get lost in the mystery. I guarantee you’ve never played anything like Her Story before, mostly because no one else has made anything quite like it.

And after experiencing this gripping little interactive story, you may find yourself wondering why that is.

Worried that Facebook can't get your friends right in your selfies when their hair blows around? There might just be an app for that...

As companies race to position themselves in the swap of physical wallets and plastic cards for virtual ones, Canada’s largest telcos unveiled a lofty expansion to their mobile payments app Tuesday.

The launch of Suretap, co-owned by Rogers Communications Inc., BCE Inc., and Telus Corp., has been pushed back at least twice. But the launch Tuesday mean it will now be accepted on more cell phones, on more credit cards and at more merchants.

The biggest challenge in getting the expanded app — in production for the past nine months — to stand on its own was getting the slew of moving parts on the same page at the same time, said Jeppe Dorff, the president of Suretap.

When Suretap was first released last year, it was a closed wallet with limited application. It could have been used to pay for everyday purchases where contactless payments were accepted on select devices connected only to the wireless network of Rogers Communications Inc. Only two credit cards from issuer Rogers Bank and gift cards to a handful of retailers could have been installed on the digital application and used in stores.

This release broadens the carrier support for Suretap to five, adding both the main and flanker brands of BCE Inc. and Telus Corp., including Bell, Virgin, Telus and Koodo. CIBC, which also has its own mobile payments app, will offer Suretap users access to its complete credit card portfolio and more retailers such as Forever 21 and Groupon have signed on as well, bringing the total to 38 credit cards and 30 gift cards.

“It made sense to let’s say make sure there’s an application that’s good for the consumer, that the consumer can access irrespective of what carrier they’re on, or what bank they’re with, or what retailer they want to engage with,” said Dorff. “It avoids confusion and drives adoption.”

Canadians have been slow to adopt mobile payments, and the time delay between new product releases and the lack of widespread advertising campaigns to improve awareness has only stymied consumer usage.

Still, companies from an array of sectors are converging on the fast-changing space. Some of the country’s largest banks are all promising to be wherever their clients are – even if it means inking partnerships that potentially threaten their own proprietary products. Conversely, the telcos are trying to solidify their place, as technological advances are making it possible for carriers to be bypassed altogether.

The Suretap joint venture makes use of the current payments infrastructure and is pre-installed in most newly activated Rogers devices, a tactic Dorff says has made “a material difference” for adoption. The carriers can persuade new subscribers at the point-of-sale to use Suretap and educate them on how to seamlessly conduct mobile payments, giving the Big Three telcos a valuable head start against the many bank-run or other less-known third-party apps that people have to search for.

In addition to consumer-facing Suretap, rivals Rogers, Bell and Telus operate another joint venture called EnStream LP, which manages access to the infrastructure in a smartphone where sensitive card credentials are stored. Like the companies do in their other business units, this vertical integration is a play for control.

Dorff expects to make additional announcements later this year about the inclusion of debit cards, loyalty cards, digital coupons and deals as well as partnerships with other issuers and Rogers’ Fido, an obvious exclusion because it claims to target younger, tech-savvy users who are more likely to try mobile payments. But it remains to be seen whether Suretap will take hold.

“If you think about the experiences you have with the card products you have in your wallet today – those pieces of plastic – they’re good, they serve a purpose for you,” Dorff said. “But in the future, you’re going to see your balances, transaction histories and get other relevant information when you need it on-demand. It’ll be different.”
cpellegrini@nationalpost.com

The ongoing debate about whether the technology sector is in a bubble that poses big risks to investors stems in large part from what’s going on in the private market.

Private companies with valuations in excess of US$1 billion – otherwise known as ‘unicorns’ – continue to grab headlines and the attention of investors. RBC Capital Markets noted that 75 per cent of the largest venture capital investments have been raised in the past five years, helping to create 61 tech unicorns in the U.S. today.

Analyst Mark Mahaney pointed out that much of the growth is shifting to private markets as the biggest deals today would have been IPOs in the past. One estimate pegs these ‘quasi-IPOs’ as now accounting for 75 per cent of total investment dollars in the sector, versus just 40 during the 1999-2001 tech bubble.

Related

• Investors beware: Bubbling tech sector now rife with risk

“Our tracking indicates that indeed much more of the growth in Internet companies today (fundamentally and financially) is occurring in private markets,” Mahaney told clients.

Companies are simply staying private longer, with the time-to-IPO extending from 4.5 years during the tech boom to 11 years in 2014.

Not only is the bar for an IPO higher, but more non-traditional private investors are getting involved. Last year, more than three-quarters of the top 20 U.S. tech deals saw participation from non-traditional private investors, up from the low single digits in 2012.

Meanwhile, RBC noted that there were only 53 tech IPOs in 2014, which is similar to levels last seen in the 1980s.

Mahaney believes U.S. tech funding (private and IPO) looks pretty reasonable and representative of the market size and opportunity when measured as a percentage of GDP and per internet user.

“Having worked through the 99-01 bubble, we are strongly of the belief that today’s public markets bear very little resemblance – as a general rule, the total addressable markets today are much larger, the business models less risky, and the public valuations more reasonable,” he said.

So not only has the market opportunity for these companies grown, the barriers to entry for new tech players have fallen. Start-up costs involving things like equipment and systems have plunged, with much more money being spent on growth investments.

Mahaney noted that while venture capital inflows continue to rise, they are still far below the bubble peak, and most of the money being raised is going to companies whose premium valuations may be justified by their disruptive business models.

“Moat-building is cheaper today. Really deep moat-building is more expensive,” the analyst said, highlighting public names that fit this theme such as Amazon.com Inc., Facebook Inc., Google Inc., and Netflix Inc.

WATERLOO, Ont. — BlackBerry Ltd reported a slightly wider than expected adjusted loss on Tuesday, however shares in the company rose over 8 per cent as its revenue slide began to show signs of stalling and its turnaround began to slowly gain traction.

Excluding a one-time accounting gain and charges related to restructuring items, the company reported a loss of $28 million or 5 cents a share.

Analysts, on average, were expecting a loss of 3 cents a share, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S.

Before adjustments, BlackBerry had a net profit of US$68 million or 13 cents per share.

Related

• BlackBerry Ltd faces sea of skeptics Tuesday as investors brace for another ugly quarter
• Why BlackBerry Ltd is a better turnaround stock than Bombardier Inc right now
• How BlackBerry Ltd’s move to embrace Android may give it a new lease on life

Crucially for the company that is pivoting to focus on its software business, revenues in that segment more than doubled from the year ago period to $137 million in the current period.

BlackBerry’s share price has fallen about 11 per cent on the TSX since the start of the year but the stock was up in pre-market trading after the quarterly report.

BlackBerry is also scheduled to hold its annual meeting on Tuesday morning in Waterloo.

Before adjustments, BlackBerry had a net profit of $68-million or 13 cents per share.

Given enough time for the new AI system to learn what a helpful review is, fake reviews may sink to the bottom of the reviews ocean.

Google's putting up search result takedown, the US is moving toward criminalisation, and John Oliver calls culprits "malevolent gods".

Suretap to allow users to add credit card information to smartphones, which can be used to make so-called contactless purchases

Investors looking to build their portfolio with potential high-growth stocks in the recovering U.S. economy are sizing up prefabricated interior company DIRTT Environmental Solutions Ltd., which has been reporting skyrocketing sales in recent quarters

According to researchers at BAE, a recent Mac malware infestation was carried out using a security hole in a utility called MacKeeper.

The company is encouraging more creative tactics, such as distributing different versions of the same ad depending on a viewer’s interests

Taylor Swift has Apple changing its tune.

Hours after the pop superstar criticized the giant tech company in an open letter posted online, Apple announced Sunday that it will pay royalties to artists and record labels for music played during a free, three-month trial of its new streaming music service.

“When I woke up this morning and I saw Taylor’s note that she had written, it really solidified that we needed to make a change,” said Apple senior vice-president Eddy Cue in an interview with The Associated Press.

Apple had already agreed to share revenue from paid subscriptions to the new Apple Music service, which will cost $10 a month. But Swift said she would withhold her latest album from the service because Apple wasn’t planning to pay artists and labels directly for the use of their music during the free, introductory period.

<img src=”https://nationalpostcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/06/adult_internet_adresses_37142327.jpg?w=620&#8243; alt=”Evan Agostini/Invision” width=”620″ height=”465″ class=”size-large wp-image-792581″ /> Evan Agostini/Invision

“We don’t ask you for free iPhones. Please don’t ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation,” Swift wrote in an open letter posted Sunday on her Tumblr page, under the heading “To Apple, Love Taylor. ”

Apple has maintained that it negotiated revenue-sharing at rates that are slightly higher than the industry standard, to compensate for the three months that it plans to offer its streaming service without charge.

To Apple, Love Taylor taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902…

—
Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) June 21, 2015

We hear you @taylorswift13 and indie artists. Love, Apple

—
Eddy Cue (@cue) June 22, 2015

#AppleMusic will pay artist for streaming, even during customer’s free trial period

—
Eddy Cue (@cue) June 22, 2015

I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us.

—
Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) June 22, 2015

“We had factored that in,” Cue said Sunday. But he added, “We had been hearing from artists that this was going to be rough on them, so we are making this change.”

Cue declined to say how much Apple will pay in royalties for streaming during the free trial period. He said Apple will share 71.5 per cent of its revenue from paid subscriptions within the United States and 73 per cent from subscriptions outside the country, while other streaming services generally share about 70 per cent.

Some artists and independent labels had worried they would miss out on opportunities to get a financial return from new music that is released during the three-month trial. Swift said she spoke out on their behalf.

Swift wasn’t immediately available for comment on Apple’s change of heart. But she posted a reaction on Twitter late Sunday, saying “I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us.”

Cue wouldn’t comment on whether she will now make her album “1989” available on Apple Music. But he said he spoke with Swift personally on Sunday. “She was very pleased to see that we would give her a call right away and have a discussion,” he said.

Since Apple began selling digital music through its iTunes store in 2001, he added, “We’ve always loved music and have strived to make sure that artists are getting paid for their work.”

Swift had written in her letter that she found Apple’s original stance to be “shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company.”

While praising Apple for developing a paid music service that will compensate artists, she added, “We know that this incredible company has the money to pay artists, writers and producers for the 3 month trial period.”

The singer and songwriter has been outspoken on the issue of compensating musicians for streaming music. Last year, Swift pulled her catalogue of recordings from Spotify after complaining about its use of her music on the free, ad-supported version of its service.

http://taylorswift.tumblr.com/post/122071902085/to-apple-love-taylor