Apple makes another move in its music streaming battle with Spotify. Adobe Creative Cloud users will now gain access to some GoPro clips. And new laws passed in China may require Google to help surveil an ethnic minority.
Trending on LinkedIn, Apple has acquired another startup in the music industry. It’s done a deal with analytics firm Asaii for under $100 million. Apple isn’t confirming the acquisition at the moment. Axios is reporting the acquisition, while TechCrunch says Apple has hired the company’s founders. Either way, Apple will want to put this analytics engine to work on discovering the best emerging artists. If it wants to beat Spotify in the music streaming market, it has to predict what songs its users will love. Asaii’s website says that its goal is “to find the next Justin Bieber, before anyone else.” Which sounds horrible to me, but I guess Apple’s taste is different from mine.
Trending on Google, Adobe and GoPro have struck a deal to work together. Thousands of GoPro video clips will be added to Adobe’s Stock marketplace, giving users of Adobe Creative Cloud more visuals to work with when editing their own videos. As you’d expect from footage shot with a GoPro camera, the video will feature first-person perspectives of dramatic landscapes. It will include aerial and underwater scenes. Terms of the deal aren’t clear, but you can bet both Adobe and GoPro stand to make money off this. A la carte pricing to licence the clips is $80 for a 1080p clip, and $200 for a 4K clip.
Trending on Reddit, China just passed new laws calling on technology firms to help in its surveillance efforts over a Muslim minority population. The laws could apply to Google and its Project Dragonfly, a censored search engine that would receive approval from the Chinese government. Article 28 of new laws passed yesterday specifically call on telecommunications operators to “put in place monitoring systems and technological prevention measures for audio, messages and communications records” that have “extremifying information.” China has used similar language to detain Uighurs in the past.