Master Microsoft Excel with 12.5 Hours of Training for $9.99

Love them or loathe them, spreadsheets are a fact of working life. If you want to start a career in business or marketing, it’s pretty essential that you know how to crunch the numbers. The Essential Microsoft Excel Lifetime Bundle can help you master the math, with three courses and over 12.5 hours of video tutorials. You can grab the bundle now for just $9.99 at MakeUseOf Deals — keep reading for a closer look.

Essential Excel

Not everyone has a natural affinity with numbers. But that doesn’t mean you have to tear your hair out over simple spreadsheets. This bundle helps you work with Microsoft Excel, starting from square one.

The Basic Microsoft Excel course shows you how to navigate the software and customize Excel for your needs. You also discover how to create new spreadsheets, format cells, and run simple data analysis.

You learn more advanced number crunching techniques in Data Analysis In Excel. This course helps you to sort data, create charts, and use key functions.

The final course focuses specifically on PivotTable, with six hours of in-depth content. The videos show you how to sort data efficiently, using custom filters and groups.

The bundle includes lifetime access to the training, and you get a CPD-accredited certificate at the end of each course.

12.5 Hours for $9.99

Order now to get this education in Excel for just $9.99 and save over $500 on the regular price.

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VR optics could help old folks keep the world in focus

The complex optics involved with putting a screen an inch away from the eye in VR headsets could make for smartglasses that correct for vision problems. These prototype “autofocals” from Stanford researchers use depth sensing and gaze tracking to bring the world into focus when someone lacks the ability to do it on their own.

I talked with lead researcher Nitish Padmanaban at SIGGRAPH in Vancouver, where he and the others on his team were showing off the latest version of the system. It’s meant, he explained, to be a better solution to the problem of presbyopia, which is basically when your eyes refuse to focus on close-up objects. It happens to millions of people as they age, even people with otherwise excellent vision.

There are, of course, bifocals and progressive lenses that bend light in such a way as to bring such objects into focus — purely optical solutions, and cheap as well, but inflexible, and they only provide a small “viewport” through which to view the world. And there are adjustable-lens glasses as well, but must be adjusted slowly and manually with a dial on the side. What if you could make the whole lens change shape automatically, depending on the user’s need, in real time?

That’s what Padmanaban and colleagues Robert Konrad and Gordon Wetzstein are working on, and although the current prototype is obviously far too bulky and limited for actual deployment, the concept seems totally sound.

Padmanaban previously worked in VR, and mentioned what’s called the convergence-accommodation problem. Basically, the way that we see changes in real life when we move and refocus our eyes from far to near doesn’t happen properly (if at all) in VR, and that can produce pain and nausea. Having lenses that automatically adjust based on where you’re looking would be useful there — and indeed some VR developers were showing off just that only 10 feet away. But it could also apply to people who are unable to focus on nearby objects in the real world, Padmanaban thought.

This is an old prototype, but you get the idea.

It works like this. A depth sensor on the glasses collects a basic view of the scene in front of the person: a newspaper is 14 inches away, a table three feet away, the rest of the room considerably more. Then an eye-tracking system checks where the user is currently looking and cross-references that with the depth map.

Having been equipped with the specifics of the user’s vision problem, for instance that they have trouble focusing on objects closer than 20 inches away, the apparatus can then make an intelligent decision as to whether and how to adjust the lenses of the glasses.

In the case above, if the user was looking at the table or the rest of the room, the glasses will assume whatever normal correction the person requires to see — perhaps none. But if they change their gaze to focus on the paper, the glasses immediately adjust the lenses (perhaps independently per eye) to bring that object into focus in a way that doesn’t strain the person’s eyes.

The whole process of checking the gaze, depth of the selected object and adjustment of the lenses takes a total of about 150 milliseconds. That’s long enough that the user might notice it happens, but the whole process of redirecting and refocusing one’s gaze takes perhaps three or four times that long — so the changes in the device will be complete by the time the user’s eyes would normally be at rest again.

“Even with an early prototype, the Autofocals are comparable to and sometimes better than traditional correction,” reads a short summary of the research published for SIGGRAPH. “Furthermore, the ‘natural’ operation of the Autofocals makes them usable on first wear.”

The team is currently conducting tests to measure more quantitatively the improvements derived from this system, and test for any possible ill effects, glitches or other complaints. They’re a long way from commercialization, but Padmanaban suggested that some manufacturers are already looking into this type of method and despite its early stage, it’s highly promising. We can expect to hear more from them when the full paper is published.

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12 High-Quality Airbnb Alternatives for Any Budget

With tens of millions of users and countless properties to choose from, Airbnb really is incredible. But as far as vacation rental websites go, it’s not perfect. You might want to look at a few Airbnb alternatives for these reasons:

• All the properties in your budget might be booked.
• You may not find what you’re looking for.
• You might want to avoid Airbnb’s massive service fees.
• Or you might just want to support the smaller fish.

So why not try one of these Airbnb alternatives instead? These range from Airbnb’s direct competitors, to smaller vacation rental sites catering to tiny niches. Between these, you’ll definitely find what you’re looking for.

1. VRBO

Part of the HomeAway family of websites, VRBO (Vacation Rentals by Owner) is a leading Airbnb alternative focusing largely, but not exclusively, on un-hosted rentals. This means you’ll often get the whole place to yourself.

You’re guaranteed to find something of interest on VRBO rentals. After all, they have over 2 million properties in around 200 countries.

2. HomeStay

Homestay is essentially what Airbnb was way back when it first started. Instead of offering rooms and dedicated vacation rentals, HomeStay allows you to stay with a local in their own home.

Not only does this offer genuine value for money, but you get to experience an entirely different side to a location that you wouldn’t normally see while making friends in the process.

3. Tripping

Tripping.com saves you masses of time by displaying results from several Airbnb alternatives at once—but it won’t show results from Airbnb itself. You’re able to scour 12 million vacation rentals (not hotels) on sites like VRBO, Trip Advisor, and Home Away, all from a single search.

When you click on a listing you like, Tripping.com will direct you to the correct site, where you can find more information, read reviews, and make your booking.

4. HomeAway

HomeAway is one of Airbnb’s main direct competitors, offering a huge range of property rentals, from lakeside cabins to quirky studio apartments.

Like Airbnb, many of HomeAway’s properties can be booked instantly, without the need to wait for confirmation from the host. But unlike Airbnb, HomeAway’s service fee ranges from 6 to 12 percent, compared to up to 20 percent from Airbnb. This sometimes translates to slightly lower prices for guests.

5. Kid&Coe

With around 1000 properties, Kid&Coe is scarcely a replacement for Airbnb, but it does deserve a special mention. Each of these beautiful properties has been hand-picked to ensure it’s absolutely perfect for families. There will be books and toys galore, highchairs, cribs, gardens. The works.

Having a selection of child-ready houses in many of the worlds most visited cities will be a godsend to many families, and a shortcut to spending far less time hunting for a kid-friendly vacation rental.

6. 9Flats

Although originally set up as a European alternative to Airbnb, 9Flats has grown to offer vacation rentals around the world. Most of 9flats’ listings are actually hosted by the property’s owner, so you can usually gather local knowledge and recommendations directly from your host.

As an added bonus, you also have the option to pay in cash on arrival (provided that option has been activated by the host) after paying a small deposit on the site.

7. Behomm

Although it’s not a direct competitor to Airbnb, Behomm is worth a mention. This is an exclusive global exchange site for creatives who love to travel. “You stay at my home for free while I stay at yours.” If your host is up for it, you can also stay at their home for free while they’re around, too.

There’s a catch, though. To join this community you not only need to be invited, but you also need to have an absolutely stunning house (like these) to exchange. If you are lucky enough to be invited, you get to try out the service for free for the first year. After that, it’s €95 per year. To try to get invited by one of the founders, complete this form.

8. Trip Advisor Vacation Rentals

On its own, Trip Advisor is the world’s largest travel community (though there are plenty of other travel communities out there alternatives), so it was only a matter of time before the company launched its own site like Airbnb. And with close to one million properties available, you’ve got more than enough choice here.

The aim of Trip Advisor Vacation Rentals is to offer guests an alternative to hotels, where you get the additional space and amenities to feel at home. Plus, Trip Advisor integrates its rentals with the community, so you’ll receive useful information about tours, experiences, and itineraries when you book.

9. Wimdu

With 350,000 vacation properties available, Wimdu is definitely worth checking out. Bear in mind, however, that although the site’s listings are spread over 150 countries, it’s in Europe where the site really stands out, claiming to be “Europe’s biggest portal for city and holiday apartments.”

The site offers different levels of quality checks, so you can have confidence that you’re getting what you pay for. Thousands of these listings have even been checked in person. Plus, for extra piece of mind, there’s also 24/7 support on hand in case you need any assistance.

10. OneFineStay

OneFineStay is essentially a luxury Airbnb, offering “distinctive private homes and villas in over 180 destinations—with an unprecedented level of service.”

Each listing is hand-picked, described, and photographed by one of the company’s trained staff members. And before your stay, each home is prepared to exacting standard to ensure you have the best stay possible.

The criteria to be included on OneFineStay is quite simple. The property must be extraordinary. Naturally, this is a site aimed at those with a healthy budget looking for something exclusive. This means the service is that much better, with OneFineStay greeting you on arrival, and ensuring your bathroom is kept stocked up, and your sheets are always kept pristine.

11. TurnKey

TurnKey is another luxury Airbnb alternative. They provide “one-of-a-kind vacation rentals offering the experience of a fine hotel” across 50 locations in the US.

And just like with a fine hotel, TurnKey’s prices reflect what you’re getting. Each property is professionally cleaned and includes all the amenities you need. You have access to a 24/7 local team to answer any questions, or even to make house calls. And you’ll get exceptional communication from the moment you book.

12. Couchsurfing

Couchsurfing is your lifeline if you are on a tight budget or traveling solo. This is a site where local hosts open up their houses and allow travelers to stay for free. Hosts will often show you the local culture, share their lives, and do their best to help you experience the best travel ever through Couchsurfing.

This is a unique way to travel and adds a dimension to your adventures that you won’t find through any other site.

Use Caution With Vacation Rental Websites

Remember, when using sites like Airbnb, the onus is on you to communicate with the host. Before making a booking, read the reviews for the accommodation carefully. Ensure you are clear on what to expect on arrival. If the accommodation doesn’t have any reviews, proceed with care. But if it does have good reviews, chances are you’ll have an amazing time!

Which Airbnb Alternative Will You Choose?

If Airbnb just isn’t coming up trumps, or if you just want to try out an Airbnb alternative, this list should have you covered, no matter what your travel budget is.

That’ll leave you with tons more time to plan your trip and book the best value flights out there. Enjoy!

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OneDrive Now Automatically Backs Up Your Folders

Microsoft is rolling out a new feature for OneDrive for Windows 10 that should ensure you never again lose access to your important documents. Once enabled, Folder Protection automatically backs up your important folders. Those being Desktop, Documents, and Pictures.

Folder Protection for All OneDrive Users

OneDrive’s new Folder protection was previously only available to OneDrive for Business users, but it’s now being made available to all OneDrive users. All you need is a OneDrive account running on Windows 10. And it’s surprisingly easy to set up.

A Microsoft spokesperson told The Verge, “This is a new feature […] available to OneDrive users with personal accounts. It makes it easier to move content into OneDrive, have access to all your important files on all your devices, and keep more files protected with features like ransomware detection & recovery.”

How to Enable OneDrive Folder Protection

To enable the Folder Protection feature for OneDrive in Windows 10, go to the OneDrive Settings, click on Auto Save, and then click Update Folders. Next, select the folders you want to sync with OneDrive, and then click Start Protection.

Your files will now sync, and once the process has finished, you’ll be able to access them from anywhere. Now, if you switch PCs or temporarily use someone else’s computer you can access all of the files stored in your Desktop, Documents, or Pictures folders.

Microsoft Keeps On Improving OneDrive

This is a rather simple, straightforward feature that was probably well overdue. Still, when combined with OneDrive’s Files Restore feature, which is designed to help you recover from a ransomware attack, it makes OneDrive a more compelling prospect.

Whether you currently use a cloud storage service or not, you should check out our comparison of OneDrive, Google Drive, and Dropbox. And if you already have your files stored in the cloud check out these cloud storage managers designed to help keep everything organized.

Read the full article: OneDrive Now Automatically Backs Up Your Folders

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Coinbase acquires Distributed Systems to build ‘Login with Coinbase’

Coinbase wants to be Facebook Connect for crypto. The blockchain giant plans to develop ‘Login with Coinbase’ or a similar identity platform for decentralized app developers to make it much easier for users to sign up and connect their crypto wallets. To fuel that platform, today Coinbase announced it has acquired Distributed Systems, a startup founded last year that was building identity standard for dApps called the Clear Protocol.

The five-person Distributed Systems team and its technology will join Coinbase. Three of the team members will work with Coinbase’s Toshi decentralized mobile browser team, while CEO Nikhil Srinivasan and one other co-founder are forming the new decentralized identity team that will work on the ‘Login with Coinbase’ product. They’ll be building it atop the “know your customer” anti-money laundering data Coinbase has on its 20 million customers. Srinivasan tells me the goal is to figure out “How can we allow that really rich identity data to enable a new class of applications?”

Distributed Systems had raised a $1.7 million seed round last year led by Floodgate and was considering raising a $4 million to $8 million round this summer. But Srinivasan says “No one really understood what we’re building”, and it wanted a partner with KYC data. It began talking to Coinbase Ventures about an investment, but after they saw Distributed Systems’ progress and vision, “they quickly tried to move to find a way to acquire us.”

Distributed Systems began to hold acquisition talks, and the CEO tells me it was deciding between going to “Facebook, or Robinhood, or Binance or Coinbase”. Coinbase “were able to convince us they were making big bets, weaving identity across their products.” The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Coinbase’s plan to roll out the ‘Login with Coinbase’ platform is an SDK that others apps could integrate, says Srinivasan. That mimics the way Facebook colonized the web with its SDK and login buttons that splashed its brand in front of tons of new and existing users. This made turned Facebook into a fundamental identity utility beyond its social network.

Developers eager to improve conversions on their sign up flow could turn to Coinbase instead of requiring users to set up whole new accounts and deal with crypto-specific headaches of complicated keys and procedures for connecting their wallet to make payments. One prominent dApp developer told me yesterday that forcing users to set up the MetaMask browser extension for identity was the part of their signup flow where they’re losing the most people.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed this morning that it’s working on an identity SDK. When Coinbase investor Garry Tan of Initialized Capital wrote that “The main issue preventing dApp adoption is lack of native SDK so you can just download a mobile app and a clean fiat to crypto in one clean UX. Still have to download a browser plugin and transfer Eth to Metamask for now Too much friction”, Armstrong replied “On it :)”

On it :)

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) August 15, 2018

In effect, Coinbase and Distributed Systems could build a safer version of identity than we get offline. As soon as you give your social security number to someone or it gets stolen, it can be used anywhere without your consent and that leads to identity theft. Coinbase wants to build a vision of identity where you can connect to decentralized apps while retaining control. “Decentralized identity will let you prove that you own an identity, or that you have a relationship with the Social Security Administration, without making a copy of that identity” writes Coinbase’s PM for identity. “If you stretch your imagination a little further, you can imagine this applying to your photos, social media posts, and maybe one day your passport too.”

Considering Decentralized Systems and Coinbase are following the Facebook playbook, they may soon have competition from the social network. It’s spun up its own blockchain team and an identity and single sign-on platform for dApps is one of the products I think Facebook is most likely to build. But given Coinbase’s strong reputation in the blockchain industry and its massive head start in terms of registered crypto users, today’s acquisition well positions it to be how we connect our offline identity with the rising decentralized economy.

What the Facebook Crypto team could build

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Moving Beyond Translation with the Universal Transformer

Posted by Stephan Gouws, Research Scientist, Google Brain Team and Mostafa Dehghani, University of Amsterdam PhD student and Google Research Intern

Last year we released the Transformer, a new machine learning model that showed remarkable success over existing algorithms for machine translation and other language understanding tasks. Before the Transformer, most neural network based approaches to machine translation relied on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) which operate sequentially (e.g. translating words in a sentence one-after-the-other) using recurrence (i.e. the output of each step feeds into the next). While RNNs are very powerful at modeling sequences, their sequential nature means that they are quite slow to train, as longer sentences need more processing steps, and their recurrent structure also makes them notoriously difficult to train properly.

In contrast to RNN-based approaches, the Transformer used no recurrence but instead processed all words or symbols in the sequence in parallel and made use of a self-attention mechanism to incorporate context from words farther away. By processing all words in parallel and letting each word attend to other words in the sentence over multiple processing steps, the Transformer was much faster to train than recurrent models. Remarkably, it also yielded much better translation results than RNNs. However, on smaller and more structured language understanding tasks, or even simple algorithmic tasks such as copying a string (e.g. to transform an input of “abc” to “abcabc”), the Transformer does not perform very well. In contrast, models that perform well on these tasks, like the Neural GPU and Neural Turing Machine, fail on large-scale language understanding tasks like translation.

In “Universal Transformers” we extend the standard Transformer to be computationally universal (Turing complete) using a novel, efficient flavor of parallel-in-time recurrence which yields stronger results across a wider range of tasks. We built on the parallel structure of the Transformer to retain its fast training speed, but we replaced the Transformer’s fixed stack of different transformation functions with several applications of a single, parallel-in-time recurrent transformation function (i.e. the same learned transformation function is applied to all symbols in parallel over multiple processing steps, where the output of each step feeds into the next). Crucially, where an RNN processes a sequence symbol-by-symbol (left to right), the Universal Transformer processes all symbols at the same time (like the Transformer), but then refines its interpretation of every symbol in parallel over a variable number of recurrent processing steps using self-attention. This parallel-in-time recurrence mechanism is both faster than the serial recurrence used in RNNs, and also makes the Universal Transformer more powerful than the standard feedforward Transformer.

The Universal Transformer repeatedly refines a series of vector representations (shown as h₁ to h_m) for each position of the sequence in parallel, by combining information from different positions using self-attention and applying a recurrent transition function. Arrows denote dependencies between operations.

At each step, information is communicated from each symbol (e.g. word in the sentence) to all other symbols using self-attention, just like in the original Transformer. However, now the number of times this transformation is applied to each symbol (i.e. the number of recurrent steps) can either be manually set ahead of time (e.g. to some fixed number or to the input length), or it can be decided dynamically by the Universal Transformer itself. To achieve the latter, we added an adaptive computation mechanism to each position which can allocate more processing steps to symbols that are more ambiguous or require more computations.

As an intuitive example of how this could be useful, consider the sentence “I arrived at the bank after crossing the river”. In this case, more context is required to infer the most likely meaning of the word “bank” compared to the less ambiguous meaning of “I” or “river”. When we encode this sentence using the standard Transformer, the same amount of computation is applied unconditionally to each word. However, the Universal Transformer’s adaptive mechanism allows the model to spend increased computation only on the more ambiguous words, e.g. to use more steps to integrate the additional contextual information needed to disambiguate the word “bank”, while spending potentially fewer steps on less ambiguous words.

At first it might actually seem restrictive to allow the Universal Transformer to only apply a single learned function repeatedly to process its input, especially when compared to the standard Transformer which learns to apply a fixed sequence of distinct functions. But learning how to apply a single function repeatedly means the number of applications (processing steps) can now be variable, and this is the crucial difference. Beyond allowing the Universal Transformer to apply more computation to more ambiguous symbols, as explained above, it further allows the model to scale the number of function applications with the overall size of the input (more steps for longer sequences), or to decide dynamically how often to apply the function to any given part of the input based on other characteristics learned during training. This makes the Universal Transformer more powerful in a theoretical sense, as it can effectively learn to apply different transformations to different parts of the input. This is something that the standard Transformer cannot do, as it consists of fixed stacks of learned Transformation blocks applied only once.

But while increased theoretical power is desirable, we also care about empirical performance. Our experiments confirm that Universal Transformers are indeed able to learn from examples how to copy and reverse strings and how to perform integer addition much better than a Transformer or an RNN (although not quite as well as Neural GPUs). Furthermore, on a diverse set of challenging language understanding tasks the Universal Transformer generalizes significantly better and achieves a new state of the art on the bAbI linguistic reasoning task and the challenging LAMBADA language modeling task. But perhaps of most interest is that the Universal Transformer also improves translation quality by 0.9 BLEU¹ over a base Transformer with the same number of parameters, trained in the same way on the same training data. Putting things in perspective, this almost adds another 50% relative improvement on top of the previous 2.0 BLEU improvement that the original Transformer showed over earlier models when it was released last year.

The Universal Transformer thus closes the gap between practical sequence models competitive on large-scale language understanding tasks such as machine translation, and computationally universal models such as the Neural Turing Machine or the Neural GPU, which can be trained using gradient descent to perform arbitrary algorithmic tasks. We are enthusiastic about recent developments on parallel-in-time sequence models, and in addition to adding computational capacity and recurrence in processing depth, we hope that further improvements to the basic Universal Transformer presented here will help us build learning algorithms that are both more powerful, more data efficient, and that generalize beyond the current state-of-the-art.

If you’d like to try this for yourself, the code used to train and evaluate Universal Transformers can be found here in the open-source Tensor2Tensor repository.

Acknowledgements
This research was conducted by Mostafa Dehghani, Stephan Gouws, Oriol Vinyals, Jakob Uszkoreit, and Łukasz Kaiser. Additional thanks go to Ashish Vaswani, Douglas Eck, and David Dohan for their fruitful comments and inspiration.

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1 A translation quality benchmark widely used in the machine translation community, computed on the standard WMT newstest2014 English to German translation test data set.^↩

Google releases a searchable database of US political ads

In an effort to provide more transparency and deliver on a promise to Congress, Google just published an archive of political ads that have run on its platform.

Google new database, which it calls the Ad Library, is searchable through a dedicated launch page. Anyone can search for and filter ads, viewing them by candidate name or advertiser, spend, the dates the ads were live, impressions and type. For anyone looking for the biggest ad budget or the farthest reaching political ad, the ads can be sorted by spend, impressions and recency as well. Google also provided a report on the data, showing ad spend by US state, by advertiser and by top keywords.

The company added a bit of context around its other recent ad transparency efforts:

“Earlier this year, we took important steps to increase transparency in political advertising. We implemented new requirements for any advertiser purchasing election ads on Google in the U.S.—these advertisers now have to provide a government-issued ID and other key information that confirms they are a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident, as required by law. We also required that election ads incorporate a clear “paid for by” disclosure.”

The search features are pretty handy, but a few things are missing. While Google’s database does collect candidate ads in the US it does not include issue ads — broader campaigns meant to influence public thought around a specific political topic — nor does it collect state or local ads. The ads are all US-only, so elections elsewhere won’t show up in here either. Google says that it is collaborating with experts on potential tools that “capture a wider range of political ads” but it gave no timeline for that work. For now, ads that the tool does capture will be added into the library on a weekly basis.

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Spotify is falling behind on lyrics and voice

Spotify’s lack of full lyrics support and its minimal attention to voice are beginning to become problems for the streaming service. The company has been so focused on the development of its personalization technology and programming its playlists, it has overlooked key features that its competitors – including Apple, Google, and Amazon – today offer and are now capitalizing on.

For example, in the updated version of Apple Music rolling out this fall with iOS 12, users won’t just have access to lyrics in the app as before, they will also be able to perform searches by lyrics instead of only by the artist, album, or song title.

And Apple Music is actually playing catch up with Amazon on this front.

Amazon Music, which has quietly grown to become the third largest music streaming service, allows users to view the lyrics as songs play, and ties that to its Alexa voice platform. Amazon Music users with an Alexa device can also search for songs by lyrics just by saying “play the song that goes…”.

The company has been offering this capability for close to two years. While it had originally been one of Alexa’s hidden gems, today asking Alexa to pull up a song by its lyrics is considered a standard feature.

Though Google has lagged behind Apple, Spotify and Amazon in music, its clever Google Assistant is capable of search-by-lyrics, too. And as an added perk, it can also work like Shazam to identify a song that’s playing nearby.

With the rise of voice-based computing, features like asking for songs with verbal commands or querying databases of lyrics by voice are now expected features.

And where’s Spotify on this?

It has launched lyrics search only in Japan so far, and refuses to provide a timeline as to when it will make this a priority in other markets. Even tucked away in the app’s code are references to lyrics tests only in the non-U.S. markets of Thailand and Vietnam.

Spotify is testing viewing lyrics within mobile app.

For some reason, the code suggests this feature might be rolled out to Japan, Thailand and Vietnam pic.twitter.com/7fQbIZgR5k

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) June 1, 2018

Those tests have been underway since the beginning of the year, we understand from sources. But the attention being given to these tests is minimal – Spotify isn’t measuring user engagement with the lyrics feature at this point. And Spotify CEO Daniel Ek wasn’t even aware his team was working on these lyrics tests, we heard, which implies a lack of management focus on this product.

Meanwhile, competitors like Apple and Amazon have dedicated lyrics teams.

We asked Spotify multiple times if it was currently testing lyrics in the U.S. (You can see one person who claims they gained access here, for example.) But the company never responded to our questions.

Image credit: Imgur via Reddit user spalatidium

Some Spotify customers who largely listen to popular music may be confused about the lack of a full lyrics product in the app. That’s because Spotify partnered with Genius in 2016 to launch “Behind the Lyrics,” which offers lyrics and music trivia on a portion of its catalog. But you don’t see all the song’s lyrics when the music plays because they’re interrupted with facts and other background  information about the song, the lyrics’ meaning, or the artist.

That same year, Spotify also ditched its ties with Musixmatch, which had been providing its lyrics support, as the two companies could no longer come to an agreement. There was expectation from users that lyrics would return at some point – but only “Behind the Lyrics” emerged to fill the void.

Demand for a real lyrics feature remains strong, though. Users regularly post on social media and Reddit about the topic.

Hey @Spotify

Could you make it possible to show the lyrics while playing a song somehow?
Not, that i do not apreciate some trivia, but i would enjoy your App more if i could sing the text right ^^"

Thank you

— Felycitas Black (@FelycitasBlack) August 15, 2018

Remember when @spotify had a pretty good song lyrics feature but then their third party lyric provider told them to fuck off so they removed it and never bothered to replace it?

— Daria (@imhkr) August 14, 2018

guys shall we open a petition to have back the lyrics on @Spotify? #wewannasingalong

— alessia (@cheekyprofile) August 10, 2018

I miss the days when @Spotify had lyrics available for songs

— Raikar (@Raikar_tv) August 12, 2018

A request for lyrics’ return is also one of the most upvoted product ideas on Spotify’s user feedback forum. It has 9,237 “likes,” making it the second-most popular request.

(The idea has been flagged “Watch this Space,” but it’s been tagged like that for so long it’s no longer a promise of something that’s soon to come.) There is no internal solution in the works, we understand, and it’s not working on a new deal with a third-party at this time.

 

The lack of lyrics is becoming a problem in other areas, as well, now that competitors are launching search-by-lyrics features that work via voice commands.

In fact, Spotify was late, in general, to address users’ interest in voice assistance – even though a primary use case for music listening is when you’re on the go – like, in the car, out walking or jogging, at the gym, biking, etc.

It only began testing a voice search option this spring, accessible through a new in-app button. Now rolled out to mobile users on Spotify Premium, the voice search product works via a long-press on the Search button in the app. You can then ask Spotify to play music, playlists, podcasts, and videos.

But the feature is still wonky. For one thing, hiding it away as a long press-triggered option means many users probably don’t know it exists. (And the floating button that pops up when you switch to search is hard to reach.) Secondly, it doesn’t address the primary reason users want to search by voice: hands-free listening.

Meanwhile, iPhone/HomePod users can tell Siri to play music with a hands-free command; Google Assistant/Google Home users can instruct the helper to play their songs – even if they only know the lyrics. And Amazon Music’s Alexa integration is live on Echo speakers, and available hands-free in its Music app.

Even third-party music services like Pandora are tapping into the voice platforms’ capabilities to provide search by lyrics. For example, Pandora Premium launched this week on Google Assistant devices like the Google Home, and offers search-by-lyrics powered by Google Assistant.

Spotify can’t offer search-by-lyrics, much less search-by-lyrics using voice commands, because it doesn’t even have a fully functional lyrics feature.

Voice and lyrics aren’t the only challenges Spotify is facing going forward.

Spotify also lacks dedicated hardware like its own Echo or HomePod. Given the rise of voice-based computing and voice assistants, the company has the potential to cede some portion of the market as consumers end up buying into the larger ecosystems provided by the main tech players: Siri/HomePod/Apple Music vs. Google Assistant/Google Home/Google Play Music (or YouTube Music) vs. Alexa/Echo/Amazon Music (all promoted by Prime).

For now, Spotify works with partners to make sure its service performs on their platforms, but Apple isn’t playing nice in return.

Elsewhere, Spotify may play but won’t be as fully functional as the native solutions. With Spotify as the default service on Echo devices, for example, Alexa can’t always figure out commands that instruct it to play music by lyrics, activity, or mood – commands that work well with Amazon Music, of course.

Other cracks in Spotify’s dominance are starting to show, as well. 

Amazon Music has seen impressive growth, thanks to adoption in four key Prime markets, U.S., Japan, Germany and the U.K.. With now 12% of the music streaming market, it has become the dark horse that’s been largely ignored amid discussions of the Amazon vs Spotify battle. But it’s not necessarily one to count out just yet.

YouTube Music, though brand new, has managed to snag Lyor Cohen as its Global Music Head, while Spotify’s latest headlines are about losing Troy Carter.

Meanwhile, Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced during the last earnings call that Apple Music has moved ahead of Spotify in North America. He also warned against ceding too much control to algorithms, in a recent interview, making a sensible argument for maintaining music’s “spiritual role” in our lives.

“We worry about the humanity being drained out of music, about it becoming a bits-and-bytes kind of world instead of the art and craft,” Cook mused.

Apple was late to music streaming, having been so tied to its download business. But it has the luxury of time to get it right, knowing that its powerful iPhone platform offers anything it launches a built-in advantage. (And it’s poised to offer TV shows as a part of its subscription, too.)

Despite these concerns, Spotify doesn’t need to panic yet – it still has more listeners, more paying customers, and more consumer mindshare in the music streaming business. It has its popular playlists and personalization features. It has its RapCaviar. But it will need to plug its holes to keep up where the market is heading, or risk losing customers to the larger platforms in the months ahead.

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Coinbase acquires Distributed Systems to build “Login with Coinbase”

Coinbase wants to be Facebook Connect for crypto. The blockchain giant plans to develop a “login with Coinbase” identity platform for decentralized app developers to make it much easier for users to sign up and connect their crypto wallets. To fuel that platform, today Coinbase announced it has acquired Distributed Systems, a startup founded last year that was building identity standard for dApps called the Clear Protocol.

The five-person Distributed Systems team and its technology will join Coinbase. Three of the team members will work with Coinbase’s Toshi decentralized mobile browser team, while CEO Nikhil Srinivasan and one other co-founder are forming the new decentralized identity team that will work on the “Login with Coinbase” product. They’ll be building it atop the “know your customer” anti-money laundering data Coinbase has on its 20 million customers. Srinivasan tells me the goal is to figure out “How can we allow that really rich identity data to enable a new class of applications?”

Distributed Systems had raised a $1.7 million seed round last year led by Floodgate and was considering raising a $4 million to $8 million round this summer. But Srinivasan says “No one really understood what we’re building”, and it wanted a partner with KYC data. It began talking to Coinbase Ventures about an investment, but after they saw Distributed Systems’ progress and vision, “they quickly tried to move to find a way to acquire us.”

Distributed Systems began to hold acquisition talks, and the CEO tells me it was deciding between going to “Facebook, or Robinhood, or Binance or Coinbase”. Coinbase “were able to convince us they were making big bets, weaving identity across their products.” The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed.

Coinbase’s plan to roll out the “Login with Coinbase” platform is an SDK that others apps could integrate, says Srinivasan. That mimics the way Facebook colonized the web with its SDK and login buttons that splashed its brand in front of tons of new and existing users. This made turned Facebook into a fundamental identity utility beyond its social network.

Developers eager to improve conversions on their sign up flow could turn to Coinbase instead of requiring users to set up whole new accounts and deal with crypto-specific headaches of complicated keys and procedures for connecting their wallet to make payments. One prominent dApp developer told me yesterday that forcing users to set up the MetaMask browser extension for identity was the part of their signup flow where they’re losing the most people.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong confirmed this morning that it’s working on an identity SDK. When Coinbase investor Garry Tan of Initialized Capital wrote that “The main issue preventing dApp adoption is lack of native SDK so you can just download a mobile app and a clean fiat to crypto in one clean UX. Still have to download a browser plugin and transfer Eth to Metamask for now Too much friction”, Armstrong replied “On it :)”

On it :)

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) August 15, 2018

In effect, Coinbase and Distributed Systems could build a safer version of identity than we get offline. As soon as you give your social security number to someone or it gets stolen, it can be used anywhere without your consent and that leads to identity theft. Coinbase wants to build a vision of identity where you can connect to decentralized apps while retaining control. “Decentralized identity will let you prove that you own an identity, or that you have a relationship with the Social Security Administration, without making a copy of that identity” writes Coinbase’s PM for identity. “If you stretch your imagination a little further, you can imagine this applying to your photos, social media posts, and maybe one day your passport too.”

Considering Decentralized Systems and Coinbase are following the Facebook playbook, they may soon have competition from the social network. It’s spun up its own blockchain team and an identity and single sign-on platform for dApps is one of the products I think Facebook is most likely to build. But given Coinbase’s strong reputation in the blockchain industry and its massive head start in terms of registered crypto users, today’s acquisition well positions it to be how we connect our offline identity with the rising decentralized economy.

What the Facebook Crypto team could build

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Android 9 Pie (Go edition) arrives this fall

With Android Pie now available (on a handful of devices, at least), Google’s prepping the launch of its low-powered counterpart. Android 9 Pie (Go edition) — the successor to the more pithily named Android Go — will be hitting arriving on devices this fall.

Like Android Oreo (Go Edition), the latest OS is a stripped down version of its latest full operating system, designed to run on devices with 1GB of RAM. The more modest hardware requirements make it a compelling match for low-cost devices and thus a solid option for developing markets.

Among other things, it will offer faster boot times than standard Android and will free up space on the phone’s storage. There are new security features on board as well, along with a dashboard for monitoring data consumption. There are a number of updates to individual Go apps, too, including the ability to read sites’ content aloud in Google Go and navigation in Maps Go.

According to Google, the Android (Go edition) is currently available on 200 devices in more than 120 countries.

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How to Become a Blockchain Programmer and Start Making Big Bucks

We are in the early days of blockchain technology, and if you take the initiative to learn how to program on the blockchain, you stand to have a very lucrative career in the future.

The situation is not unlike the early days of the internet, where programmers who had the foresight to learn web programming, found new and growing opportunities to earn impressive incomes into the future.

What do you need to learn to position yourself for that future, and where can you get started learning?

The Potential of the Blockchain

When most people think of the “blockchain”, they immediately think of Bitcoin. However, there’s a big difference, as the following Google Trend graphs reveal.

The following is the search trend over the last two years for “bitcoin”.

This next chart is the search trend for “blockchain” over the same period.

You can see that both saw a tremendous spike in interest over the last half of 2017. After the novelty of Bitcoin’s tremendous rise in price wore off, interest in Bitcoin waned back to and slightly below the end of 2017.

Interest in the blockchain remains higher than the end of 2017 and will likely continue to rise as new innovations are built on top of it.

The difference between Bitcoin and the blockchain is significant. Bitcoin is only an initial application of blockchain technology. But the real star of the show, regardless what happens to Bitcoin, is the blockchain.

The Massive Demand for Blockchain Programmers

Blockchain technology is so new that universities haven’t quite caught up to it with their curricula. For this reason, companies seeking to develop blockchain technologies are turning to freelance developer talent.

Evidence of this was revealed in Upwork’s first quarter report in 2018. According to Upwork, the growth in demand for blockchain skills has been exponential:

“Its growth exceeded 2,000% for three quarters in a row on Upwork.com, and in Q1 it experienced more than 6,000% year-over-year growth, making it the fastest-growing skill out of more than 5,000 skills on the site.”

Gartner predicts the business “value-add” of blockchain will exceed $3.1 trillion in the next twelve years.

IBM has been on the cutting edge of blockchain development initiatives, operating various pilot projects. In early 2017, the company conducted a poll of 200 government leaders across 16 countries and found that 9 out of 10 of those leaders said they planned to invest in some aspect of blockchain use across government functions.

According to Coindesk, the surge in interest in blockchain is directly resulting in a steady growth of new jobs.

This means that pay rates for this skill are enormous. Glassdoor reports that the average salary for a principle blockchain engineer is between $138,000 to $152,000 as of May 2017.

Blockchain Programming Skills

If you’re hoping to break into this booming field, the next obvious question is what skills you need to land one of these lucrative jobs?

Your next steps depend on where you already are with your skillset. Blockchain programming isn’t a place where you can start learning. You’ll need to know a number of core computer science fundamentals—and know it well—to achieve success as a blockchain developer.

If you think about it, Bitcoin itself was programmed with C++. Ethereum uses C++ and Python. Other popular blockchain applications support Java, Python, NodeJS, and C#. All of these are core programming languages that will make you a much-desired developer throughout every tech industry, not only blockchain.

What this means is that if you’re only in high school and you have a strong interest in technology and programming for a future career, then aiming for a Computer Science degree in college is a great first step. Start learning programming skills immediately.

The progression of skill development looks something like this.

1. Learn core computer science and programming competencies
2. Focus on understanding networking and security skills
3. Understand core web technologies like HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and full stack applications
4. Start diving into learning how the blockchain works (see resources below)
5. Start developing your own blockchain programming skills through online or college based courses (see resources below).

Conceptually, it can be difficult to understand how a technology doesn’t have a specific set of programming languages you need to learn to utilize it.

But the beauty of the blockchain is that it’s more of a framework than it is an actual technology. It’s how transactions are communicated over a distributed, decentralized network rather than over a centralized one.

One of the best videos I’ve seen that really helps hammer this concept home is this YouTube video on how to build a blockchain in under 15 minutes:

You can see after watching this that it isn’t the programming language you use that matters, but the method you use to build and utilize a blockchain.

University Blockchain Learning Resources

If you already have a Computer Science degree, or you’re an experienced programmer, then you’re ready to start advancing your blockchain programming skills.

There are numerous resources available that will help you understand blockchain programming concepts, and start to develop your own blockchain applications.

If you’re going into college soon, you may see blockchain sources start showing up in the curriculum. Major universities are also now opening up special labs and project to explore blockchain applications.

• Blockchain at Berkeley
• Blockchain Lab at NYU
• Duke Blockchain Lab
• The Princeton Bitcoin and Crypocurrencies book
• Stanford Center for Blockchain Research

A clear sign that a disruptive technology is making inroads into major industries is when you see universities like these increasing research funding in those areas.

Interested in a career in blockchain technology and shopping around for a college to attend? Make sure to ask whether the school you’re considering offers courses on the topic, and whether they have research labs devoted to it as well.

Those research labs could become a great place for you to develop your own blockchain programming skills.

Blockchain Programming Online Learning

For skilled programmers looking for a career change, university resource are limited. If local universities near you don’t offer blockchain curricula, then you’re limited to using online blockchain resources.

That isn’t a terrible thing, because there are already a lot of great resources online to learn blockchain programming. There should be even more as interest and development in blockchain advances and becomes more mainstream.

The following are some of the best resources online to learn more about blockchain programming.

Online Blockchain Courses

To develop your own blockchain apps in any programming language, you’ll want to work your way through one or more courses. Most free courses are introductory. So, if you want to get to an advanced level, plan to invest money into a few really solid blockchain courses.

The following are online sites that offer some valuable courses for learning about blockchain and application development on the blockchain.

• Blockgeeks Crash Course
  This crash course is a full guide that’ll teach you the basic code to develop your own very simple blockchain application.
• Edx
  You’ll find a frequently updated list of courses to learn blockchain programming here. There are even certification programs offered by Berkeley and the Linux Foundation.
• Udemy
  This growing list of blockchain courses are mostly highly-effective courses that’ll help you go from beginner to advanced level. They’re not free, but if you want to land a blockchain developer job, these are a good investment.
• Class Central
  If your budget is tight, Class Central tracks and lists free blockchain courses across the web.
• Coursera
  This well-known resource of online courses is starting to develop a collection of blockchain courses.
• B9Lab Blockhain Academy
  This is collection of courses intended to help you develop the skills and certifications you need to launch your career as a blockchain developer.

Online Blockchain Practice

If you are a software developer and you already have all of the foundational programming skills described above, you can dive right into learning blockchain programming today. The following resources provide online platforms and environments to help you practice developing your own blockchain applications.

• IBM Blockchain for Developers
  IBM has been leading the charge in blockchain development. In early 2018, IBM and Walmart collaborated on a supply chain blockchain pilot. IBM recognizes the need for more blockchain expertise and offers an entire platform to help developers learn and practice blockchain programming. Under Learn, in the Developer section, you can sign up for a starter plan to test your own blockchain application. It isn’t free but you get $500 is starting credits.
• BitDegree Tutorial
  This introductory course will introduce you to blockchain. Specifically, you’ll learn about the programming language built by the Ethereum developers called Solidity. By learning this language and practicing it through game-development simulations like Space Doggos and CryptoZombies, you’ll become a Solidy expert in no time. This is a great place to start if you want to work toward developing smart contracts.

Since the entire blockchain development community is all about using open source software and resources, you don’t necessarily have to use any of the above platforms. You could just start using your own favorite programming language to being developing a blockchain application right now.

Blockchain programming isn’t a simple concept by any stretch of the imagination. However, if you’re already a programmer, then you have the foundation required to learn blockchain programming.

If you’re still not certain that you’re interested in this new technology, take some time to learn a little more about these decentralized apps and what they can do. If the technology described there sounds exciting to you, then a blockchain career may be in your future.

Read the full article: How to Become a Blockchain Programmer and Start Making Big Bucks

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