Go-Jek extends ride-hailing service to the rest of Singapore

After a limited rollout, Go-Jek said today that it will extend its ride-hailing service to all of Singapore tomorrow while continuing its beta phase. The Indonesian-based company began offering rides in Singapore at the end of November, but only for passengers riding to and from certain areas. It http://bit.ly/2Roif56 dynamic pricing there, which increases prices during peak times, a few days ago.

“We continue to welcome feedback from driver-partners and riders during this enhanced beta phase, as we work to fine-tune the app and create the best experience for our users,” the company said in a statement.

After Uber exited from Southeast Asia earlier this year by selling its local business to Grab, Go-Jek became Grab’s main rival. Uber still maintains a presence in the region, however, thanks to its 27.5 percent stake in Grab.

There is currently a waiting list for Go-Jek in Singapore, with customers of DBS/POSB being given priority.

When asked about how long new users need to wait, a Go-Jek spokesperson said in a statement that the time depends on supply and demand. “The response from the driver community since we opened pre-registration has been overwhelming with tens of thousands of drivers signing up via the pre-registration portal. While we can’t disclose figure at this moment, we are confident we can meet consumer expectations during the beta service period.”

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FCC will suspend most operations on Thursday if the shutdown continues

The Federal Communications Commission said on Monday that it will need to suspend most of its operations by the middle of Thursday if the partial government shutdown continues.

The FCC will continue “work required for the protection of life and property,” as well as work related to spectrum auctions, since those are funded by the money raised by auctioning off spectrum licenses. The Office of the Inspector General, responsible for conducting internal reviews, audits, and investigations of FCC programs and operations, will also remain open until further notice.

In a document outlining what needs to happen for an “orderly shutdown,” the FCC said suspended activities will include: “Consumer complaint and inquiry phone lines cannot be answered; consumer protection and local competition enforcement must cease; licensing services, including broadcast, wireless, and wireline, must cease; management of radio spectrum and the creation of new opportunities for competitive technologies and services for the American public must be suspended; and equipment authorizations, including those bringing new electronic devices to American consumers, cannot be provided.”

The FCC added that it will release more information on Wednesday about what will happen if it needs to suspend operations, including how it will affect electronic filing and database systems, filing deadlines, regulatory and application fee payments, and “shot clocks,” AKA the length of time allocated for approving or denying pending transactions.

The partial government shutdown continued into its 11th day as President Donald Trump refuses to back down on his demands for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing 800,000 federal employees to go without work or work without pay. House Democrats have said they are preparing to introduce bills that will put an end to the shutdown but not include funding for the wall.

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In 2018 the ticketing industry finally killed the ‘sold out’ show

Jesse Lawrence Contributor

Jesse Lawrence has been in media and tech for 20 years. Prior to TicketIQ, he worked at MediaMath and IAC. He started his career as a writer.

More posts by this contributor

• The Golden Knights, live gambling and the future of live sports attendance
• After years of chasing brokers and bots, ‘slow ticketing’ will help both artists and fans

Among the many myths that were laid low in 2018, perhaps none was as welcome to throngs of live event fans as the fantasy of the sold-out show. Indeed, as the ticket market has moved to adopt new technology the new-found transparency has had one prime victim: The Sellout.

The highest-profile debunking of the sellout in sports for 2018 came from Washington, DC.

Originally reported by the Washington Post, the Washington Redskins officially ended their decade-long season-ticket waitlist this June. Once claimed to be 200,000 fans deep, the reality of Redskins demand hadn’t been as rosy since the glory days of Riggins and Theisman. In 2018, the Redskins have been selling single game tickets like never before — even using the secondary market as a favorable point of comparison.

Other high-profile examples of this shift include the Golden State Warriors, who, despite selling out 100% of their regular season games, had hundreds of tickets available on for Game 1 of the NBA finals in the minutes before tip-off.

If the Redskins and Warriors signaled a shift away from the sellout era in sports, Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour did the same for music. Having wrapped up earlier this month, Reputation finished as the highest grossing US Tour in history, despite a flurry of articles lambasting the artist for not selling out many shows.  Ironically, it turns out that the most important factor in her record-breaking success was exactly that: not selling out.

Rather than a lack of demand, these unsold tickets for high-profile events are the result of the latest trend in the ticketing industry — making sure you have tickets to sell when fans want to buy them. Anyone that has purchased tickets on the Internet knows that the most active buying window is in the days and hours leading up to an event.

Before the Internet, while this last-minute market existed, it was contained to street corners and run by local brokers. For most of the 20th century, managing this aftermarket was a job ticket owners were comfortable outsourcing. With it’s limitless reach and real-time distribution, however, Internet-based selling changed their comfort level dramatically, by removing the ticket owner from the supply chain and costing them billions in margin. It also created a product category that became one of the worst, if not the worst, on the Internet.

If not for the universal appeal of live events, ticketing as a product would have died with Pets.com.  Instead, teams, artists and promoters became the poster children for the Internet’s power to disrupt. The response from many ticket owners was to simply to hang up a ‘Sold Out’ sign at the box office in the weeks, days and hours before the game — one that is just now starting to be taken down.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images

To understand why that happened, it’s important to recognize that when the Internet took off, teams were principally in the season-ticket business, while artists and promoters were in the record-selling business.  Selling last-minute, ‘on-demand’ tickets simply wasn’t a focus. The Internet, however, turned that secondary market niche into a product category worth $10 to $15 billion at it’s peak — two to three times the size of the primary market it was based on.

In order to compete in this always-on marketplace, ticketing technology has received billions of dollars of investment in the last decade, with the goal of making it more compatible with the Web itself. In the last two years, Ticketmaster, Seatgeek and Eventbrite have all announced ‘open platform’ models that make it as easy to sell tickets in places like Facebook and Youtube as it does in Stubhub.

In January, Ticketmaster and the NFL announced a new platform deal that, for the first time ever, allows teams and leagues to define their own distribution ecosystem.  As one of the biggest destinations for ticket buying online, sites like Stubhub and my company, TicketIQ, have become direct-to-fan distribution channels in the new ticketing marketplace.

(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

Before we singlehandedly credit technology for killing the sell out, it’s worth asking whether the decline in sellouts is simply the result of exorbitant ticket prices and increased competition for consumer attention. While there’s no question that it’s become harder to get people off of their couches for average events, the robust growth of the experience economy suggests the opposite trend.

According to a December 2017 McKinsey report, millennials spend 60% more on live experiences than GenXers — all in search of not only genuine connection, but also fresh social-media content. For the Reputation tour specifically, last-minute tickets on the secondary market were actually 35% cheaper than 1989 tour, which made buying tickets day-of the event more affordable than ever.

As for the Redskins, while their 2018 season hasn’t turned out as they’d hoped, at the box office, they’ve set themselves up for success in the years to come.  When demand spikes, whether as the result of a new stadium or a championship run, they’ll benefit directly and handsomely. As a point of reference for what kind of profit they might expect, the Financial Times reported that Taylor Swift’s per-show gross for Reputation increased by $1.4 million, including two dates in July at Fedex Field, home of the Redskins.

In “Look what you Made Me Do” the sixth song on the Reputation album, Taylor Swift sings about past “games”, “a tilted stage” and “unfair disadvantage”, for which she now seeks retribution. As a statement about her artistic and commercial stature, it’s clear she no longer wants to play nice. In addition to a jab at her artistic nemesis, Kanye West, it also reads like a farewell to the ticket market of old that has frustrated consumers for almost two decades.

Despite claims that she sold out her fans to achieve Reputation’s record-breaking success, the numbers mean that it’s a model we’ll be seeing much more of in the years to come. Regardless of how you feel about her forcing fans to Buy, Like and Watch to get their place in line for tickets, the good news for the ticket market overall is that it was her decision to make.

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This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task

Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!

This occurrence reveals a problem with computers that has existed since they were invented: they do exactly what you tell them to do.

The intention of the researchers was, as you might guess, to accelerate and improve the process of turning satellite imagery into Google’s famously accurate maps. To that end the team was working with what’s called a CycleGAN — a neural network that learns to transform images of type X and Y into one another, as efficiently yet accurately as possible, through a great deal of experimentation.

In some early results, the agent was doing well — suspiciously well. What tipped the team off was that, when the agent reconstructed aerial photographs from its street maps, there were lots of details that didn’t seem to be on the latter at all. For instance, skylights on a roof that were eliminated in the process of creating the street map would magically reappear when they asked the agent to do the reverse process:

The original map, left; the street map generated from the original, center; and the aerial map generated only from the street map. Note the presence of dots on both aerial maps not represented on the street map.

Although it is very difficult to peer into the inner workings of a neural network’s processes, the team could easily audit the data it was generating. And with a little experimentation, they found that the CycleGAN had indeed pulled a fast one.

The intention was for the agent to be able to interpret the features of either type of map and match them to the correct features of the other. But what the agent was actually being graded on (among other things) was how close an aerial map was to the original, and the clarity of the street map.

So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect.

In fact, the computer is so good at slipping these details into the street maps that it had learned to encode any aerial map into any street map! It doesn’t even have to pay attention to the “real” street map — all the data needed for reconstructing the aerial photo can be superimposed harmlessly on a completely different street map, as the researchers confirmed:

The map at right was encoded into the maps at left with no significant visual changes.

The colorful maps in (c) are a visualization of the slight differences the computer systematically introduced. You can see that they form the general shape of the aerial map, but you’d never notice it unless it was carefully highlighted and exaggerated like this.

This practice of encoding data into images isn’t new; it’s an established science called steganography, and it’s used all the time to, say, watermark images or add metadata like camera settings. But a computer creating its own steganographic method to evade having to actually learn to perform the task at hand is rather new. (Well, the research came out last year, so it isn’t new new, but it’s pretty novel.)

One could easily take this as a step in the “the machines are getting smarter” narrative, but the truth is it’s almost the opposite. The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting. This could be avoided with more stringent evaluation of the agent’s results, and no doubt the researchers went on to do that.

As always, computers do exactly what they are asked, so you have to be very specific in what you ask them. In this case the computer’s solution was an interesting one that shed light on a possible weakness of this type of neural network — that the computer, if not explicitly prevented from doing so, will essentially find a way to transmit details to itself in the interest of solving a given problem quickly and easily.

This is really just a lesson in the oldest adage in computing: PEBKAC. “Problem exists between keyboard and computer.” Or as HAL put it: “It can only be attributable to human error.”

The paper, “CycleGAN, a Master of Steganography,” was presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in 2017. Thanks to Fiora Esoterica and Reddit for bringing this old but interesting paper to my attention.

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Epic Games surprises players on New Year’s Eve

Happy New Year!

The folks over at Epic Games have a special treat in store for players hopping on Fortnite today. In celebration of New Year’s Eve all around the world, Fortnite is having an in-game live event where a massive, dropping disco ball descends on the map each hour, on the hour.

The virtual ball drop has the same affect on players as a boogie bomb, meaning that everyone playing Fortnite is collectively dancing each time the minutes on your clock read :00.

Obviously, the clock has already struck midnight and 2019 has officially begun in many parts of the world, but the in-game ball drop threw some players off guard.

2019 NEW YEAR LEAKED!?!?! pic.twitter.com/T8t81LPEOQ

— dakotaz (@dakotaz) December 31, 2018

A NEW YEARS EVENT ALREADY?

HAPPY EARLY NEW YEARS I GUESS LMAOOO pic.twitter.com/Jwmu1W1klP

— FaZe Thiefs (@Thiefs) December 31, 2018

Nick Chester, Epic’s PR spokesperson, tweeted this in response:

Woke up to learn that many Fortnite players are unaware of time zones. We’re an educational and international game.

Happy New Year to you if you’re already in 2019! https://t.co/CnqzyXfFE5

— Nick Chester (@nickchester) December 31, 2018

2018 was a huge year for Fortnite. Even beyond the turning of a new year, Epic Games has good reason to celebrate.

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Echo Wall Clock review

This was the year Amazon went all-in on the Alexa. September saw the announcement of a new Echo Dot, Show and Plus, a subwoofer, an audio input device, an auto dongle and an amplifier. That would have been plenty, but the company also started dipping its toes into the other side of things.

2018 also found Amazon experimenting in the connected device category — namely a microwave and wall clock (oh, and a singing fish, too). It’s a strange move on the face of it. After all, there are countless companies currently vying for a small slice of that mindshare.

But Amazon’s got a few key things going for it. For one, the company stands to gain from building products that exist solely to complement its Echo devices. For another, it’s able to sell products at — or close to — cost.

The Echo Wall Clock benefits quite a bit for both of these factors. It’s $30 device that’s essentially useless without an Alexa device. In fact, Alexa is required to set the time. That’s a downside in the off-chance you happen along one of these products without an Echo nearby. But it’s handy when it comes to set up.

Find a spot within 30 feet of a compatible device (Echo, Dot, Show, Plus, E Spot or Input.). Open the back. Pop in four AA batteries (included). Tell Alexa, “Set up my Echo Wall Clock.” Hold the little blue button on the back until the front light turns a kind of pulsating orange. Alexa will go to work, and when everything’s good to go, that light will turn blue.

I initially attempted to set up the device on my office Wi-Fi. Never a great idea with these sort of connected products. Large enterprise networks are a crapshoot, and the two devices were off again, on again. Assuming you’ve got a similar set-up, you’re going to want to keep the Wall Clock (and, for that matter, most Alexa devices) at home.

Once I switched to a personal network (via a MiFi), things went much more smoothly. Alexa will set the clock to your time zone. Bonus: It will automatically fall back and spring ahead when there’s a time change — certainly a leg up on most wall clocks.

There are a couple of things worth noting here, before we go any deeper. First: the Wall Clock is, for lack of a better term, cheap looking. It’s big and it’s plasticky. There’s no front glass. It is, honestly, the sort of design you’d expect from a wall clock made by Amazon. There’s no razzle dazzle here. It’s a simple-looking clock with a simple design. The upshot is it’s minimalist enough to fit in with most living rooms and kitchens.

That simplicity also extends to its feature set, which is currently mostly limited to timers. The 60 minute markers that line the edge are actually all individual LEDs. Tell Alexa to, say, “set a 10-minute timer” and 10 minute hands will light up and then individually go dark to count down the  time. Once the countdown is over, the full diameter will flash slowly until you tell Alexa to stop.

And that’s it, really. Timers and alarms. The Wall Clock is one of the first passive Alexa devices from Amazon. Your Echo is really doing all of the heavy lifting, including listening and talking. You can’t, say, ask the clock for the time or the weather, which is why you need an Echo close by. It also doesn’t emit a sound when the alarm goes off. Of course, that means a cheaper price — and much longer battery life.

The Echo Wall Clock isn’t a necessary device, but it could prove a handy one. If you cook a lot, for instance, it’s nice having a large visual reference in addition to the Echo’s built-in timers. Beyond that, however, I’m struggling to come up with too many scenarios in which it feels indispensable. And honestly, I’m not holding my breath in expectation that Amazon will be bringing more to the table here.

 

The device succeeds more as a proof of concept for the ways Alexa and compatible devices can push the boundaries of the smart home. There’s nothing particularly compelling here for most consumers — but at $30, perhaps it doesn’t have to be.

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