$ 10 Million Anchor, Music’s Secret Weapon and Upgrading Two-Factor Authentication
Here’s the news we’re talking about around the Zbra Studios water cooler. We’ve provided key bullet points from each article for the speed readers out there.
Anchor raises $10 million for podcast platform
By Katie Roof from TechCrunh
- “A quarter of Americans listen to podcasts each month, but far fewer make them.
- Anchor is a startup that is looking to change that with its app that makes it easy to record and distribute content.”
- “It’s not just a record button, Anchor also allows for users to make calls directly via the app, facilitating a podcast conversation with multiple parties. It also enables listeners to dial-in and participate.”
- “Anchor is still a while away from becoming a full-fledged business. It’s not generating revenue, yet. Mignano says that Anchor is working on a plan that would allow both the startup and its creators to make money from the content.”
How Instagram Became The Music Industry’s Secret Weapon
By John Paul Titlow from FastCompany
- “Instagram Stories and Instagram Live, the ephemeral video features launched by the company late last year, have given artists yet another tool for broadcasting their lives and interacting with fans.”
- “As artists’ audiences grow, Instagram becomes another source of useful analytics data for artists and their teams. Along with data from Spotify and other streaming services, the audience analytics tool Instagram Insights helps artists understand who their fans are—and can even help inform strategic decisions like where to route an upcoming tour by identifying where fans are clustered in the real world.”
- “Instagram’s parent company Facebook is focusing more on music, too. The social media giant hired music industry veteran Tamara Hrivnak to lead its global music strategy in early 2017, and has been posting and filling music-related jobs ever since.”
Google plans to upgrade two-factor authentication tool after high-profile hacks
By Nick Statt from The Verge
- “Google plans on upgrading its two-factor authentication tool with an improved, physical security measure aimed at protecting high-profile users from politically motivated cyberattacks…”
- “The new service, to be called Advanced Protection Program and potentially slated to launch next month, will trade out the standard authentication process for services like Gmail and Google Drive with physical USB security keys.”
- “The new physical security keys, which will require users keep them plugged in to access the additional security controls, should make it more difficult to remotely gain control of someone’s Gmail or Google Drive account.”
Nick Cotton is a project manager based out of Los Angeles, California. He’s got a background in the entertainment industry, and uses his talent at online messaging to extol the virtues of content marketing, interactive fiction and sentences measuring 280 characters or less.
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