Music: The "Twin Towers" of the Record Biz

- from Quartz

Lyor Cohen and Jimmy Iovine.

Cohen, who’s about to take over a crucial part of YouTube’s business, and Iovine, now Apple’s music guru, by all accounts should have crashed to the ground alongside the music industry’s antiquated business model—the way the executives who ran Nokia and Blackberry have been tossed aside by the smartphone revolution. But they did the opposite. So who are these two men, and how’d they pull off the near-impossible?

Apple’s true music genius

“Pharrell even told me go with the safest bet, Jimmy Iovine offered a safety net.” (Reuters/Lucy Nicholson)

Jimmy Iovine’s name is instantly recognizable to most hardcore music fans—and not just for its oddly off-beat catchiness.

The record-producer-turned-executive began his career as a recording engineer back in the 1970s, occasionally getting to work with acts like Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith, and John Lennon. He collected enough cred to eventually found the label Interscope Records in 1990, which was about to go under until it decided to release an album by a small-time producer named Dr. Dre. Soon, Interscope would have acts like Snoop Doggy Dogg and Tupac Shakur on its books.

Along the way, the words “Jimmy Iovine” became somewhat synonymous with the music industry itself. (In 2012, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis recorded a song about record labels and artist exploitation that was literally titled “Jimmy Iovine.”)

But Iovine didn’t sit contently as the head of Interscope, watching the traditional industry’s profits crumble. In 2008, Iovine made his next big move—forming the designer headphones brand Beats with Dr. Dre, selling oversized headphones when minimal earphones were the trend.

Beats, by selling its products as trendy fashion statements, promptly took over nearly half of the entire headphone industry’s market share, and it also pushed into the online music space in 2013. Then, the company—headphones and nascent streaming service and all—was swallowed up by Apple in 2014 in its biggest-ever acquisition.

And that’s when Iovine took his most significant career leap.

Apple didn’t just snag a headphones business; the tech giant scored Iovine’s special knack for making smart bets in the business as a whole. For it was years prior—way before Beats was even put together—that Iovine had already started trying to convince Apple founder Steve Jobs to move into the relatively new field of all-you-can-eat music streaming, where players like Swedish service Spotify (but not many others) had nestled in. Said Iovine in a 2013 interview:

I was always trying to push Steve into subscription. And he wasn’t keen on it right away. [Beats co-founder] Luke Wood and I spent about three years trying to talk him into it.

Iovine’s hunch proved solid. Streaming is now the biggest revenue-driver in the US music industry, and globally, profits from digital platforms have officially overtaken physical ones for the first time. It was last summer that Apple finally took Iovine’s long-nagging advice, unveiling its own subscription streaming service Apple Music–headed, of course, by Iovine, who is now one of the company’s top executives.

Sports/tech: Keeping Watch Over Rio

-From Fast Company

When the Olympic Games begin in about 48 hours in Rio de Janeiro, billions of people are expected to watch athletes from countries around the world compete.

But also watching over the Olympic and Paralympic events will be a set of futuristic, balloon-mounted surveillance camera systems capable of monitoring a wide swath of the city in high resolution and in real-time.

Initially developed for use by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan by Fairfax, Virginia-based Logos Technologies, the technology is sold under the nameSimera, and offers live aerial views of a large area, or what the company calls "wide-area motion imagery," captured from a balloon tethered some 200 meters above the ground. The system's 13 cameras make it possible for operators to record detailed, 120-megapixel imagery of the movement of vehicles and pedestrians below in an area up to 40 square kilometers, depending on how high the balloon is deployed, and for up to three days at a time.

The Brazil sale, which includes four systems operated under an $8 million contract, marks the first export of Simera, and the first time such as system will be deployed by a non-U.S. government at a large-scale event, the company says. "Simera was built late last year and we tested it this past February and then immediately sold four of them to Brazil," says Doug Rombough, Logos’s vice president of business development.

Th

Rombough compares Simera to a live city-wide Google Maps combined with TiVo, explaining that it lets authorities not only view ground-level activities in real time but also rewind through saved images to do things like track a suspicious vehicle—for instance, one that departs a crime scene—back to its origin.

The government has announced it will deploy 47,000 security guards, 65,000 police, and 20,000 armed service personnel to patrol the Games, which have raised security concerns amid soaring crime rates in the city and a global burst in terrorist activity. Last week, Brazilian police arrested 12 people alleged to be planning an ISIS-inspired attack on the Games, which have been said to be a target discussed in jihadist chat groups.

The system evolved from technologies Logos previously supplied to the Defense Department for use in combat zones, including the Constant Hawk aircraft-mounted surveillance camera system and Kestrel, a similar balloon-mounted sensor system that’s been used in Afghanistan to monitor activity near about a dozen U.S. bases.

There, the company says the technology helped U.S. troops monitor potentially threatening activity as it evolved over days, enabling officials, for instance, to track the movement of suspicious vehicles in the vicinity of an attack. But as Logos's technology continues to evolve and become easier and cheaper to deploy in civilian scenarios, it's likely to raise more questions about the appropriate balance between security and privacy.

Over time, the company’s sensor systems have become lighter and easier to deploy: Early Constant Hawk systems weighed about 1,500 pounds, Kestrel units weighed around 150 pounds, and Simera systems just 40 pounds, expanding the range of aircraft that can carry the devices. Including the ground-based equipment necessary to control and monitor the cameras, the Simera system—which generally costs $500,000 to $900,000 per unit, depending on features— can be transported in a single vehicle and put into an operation in under three hours, according to Logos.

And as the company's systems have gotten lighter in weight and easier to deploy, the range of potential use cases has expanded. In addition to policing large events and patrolling borders and ports, the company hopes its system could prove useful in supporting humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions

Watches: The Coming Smartwatch Glut

Launching the Huawei watch

A funny thing happened on the way to the expected launch event for the Apple Watch on March 9 — a number of high-profile tech competitors have all launched competing versions of a smartwatch in just the past two weeks. And that’s in addition to all the smartwatches that already exist in the market, such as the Moto 360.

The new offering that everyone’s talking about, of course, is the Pebble Time, which has raised over $15.5 million on Kickstarter (including the first $1 million in less than one hour) to create a new smartwatch. The Pebble Time may appeal to a lower end of the smartwatch market than the Apple Watch, but there will soon be a new version that comes in beautiful gleaming steel.There’s also Huawei (Who? What?), which became the breakout star of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona with a high-end smartwatch that’s being marketed the same way the Apple Watch is — as more of a fashion accessory than a new tech device. And there’s also LG, which now has a beautiful new LG Watch Urbane, also announced this month.

Watches: Swiss time and Silicon Valley tech go all the way

Peter Stas of Frederique Constant

Coming this May, the promise of full integration between conventional Swiss form and mechanical function, with cutting edge info-delivery will be realized in a single watch (or range) when watchmaker Frederique Constant/Alpina unveils its Swiss Horological Smartwatches, now in production.

Powered by MotionX, the new Swiss Horological Smartwatches are capable of bi-directional communication with iPhone and Android apps. Discoverwatches by clicking on “read more”…

“Frédérique Constant and Alpina, the Swiss Horological Smartwatches, retain their natural classic beauty and can deliver the benefits of the quantified self, all without ever having to recharge a battery”, said Peter Stas, the co-founder and CEO of the Frédérique Constant group and continued his introduction by saying: “The Swiss Horological Smartwatch is the synthesis of high-tech innovation and traditional Swiss watch craftsmanship; it is the link (no pun intended) between modern and classic, and the bridge between Silicon Valley and Switzerland. There is no digital screen on our Swiss Horological Smartwatch. Instead, the beautiful laser cut hands on the watch dial display information in analog form.”

The MotionX patented sensor-fusion engine tracks activity and sleep patterns with high accuracy. Activity and sleep information is presented in real-time on the Swiss Horological Smartwatch using traditional analog dials. The Swiss Horological Smartwatch synchronizes automatically with applications on Apple and Androidsmartphones. On the iOS and Android apps, simple and easy-to-understand graphics highlight how much one has moved and slept during the day, week, or month.