February 2015

Since it started 10 years ago, Pandora has come to dominate Internet radio, with more than 81 million people streaming about 1.7 billion hours of music every month. In January, Pandora delivered more audio to mobile devices in the United States than YouTube did video, according to comScore. But along the way, Pandora has antagonized the music industry by pushing for lower royalty rates, even as its payments have been criticized as unsustainable.

To repair its relationships in the music world, Pandora has created a division to work with labels and artist managers, opened its vast databanks, and begun experimenting with artist promotions. Pointing not to the royalties it pays but to the power of its information, Pandora in October introduced the Artist Marketing Platform, a free data dashboard for artists showing which of their songs are most popular, and where. Yet, Pandora has continued to push for lower royalties, leading to skepticism about the company’s intentions.

[Commentary] I am very glad to have spent time and energy advocating for women in technology. I have written more than 75 articles on this subject in global publications. But I may have made the mistake of fighting the battles of women in technology for too long. And I may have taken the accusations too personally.

Today there is a chorus of very powerful, intelligent, voices who are speaking from personal experience. The women who I have written about, who have lived the discrimination and abuse, as well as others, deserve the air time. So I am going to bow out of this debate. I am still going to be an advocate for disenfranchised minorities; I will continue to mentor women and men entrepreneurs; I will surely coach my friends who are in positions of power in corporations; and I will echo the words of great women. It gives me great hope to see women taking their rightful place alongside men in building the innovation economy and in having Silicon Valley become a true meritocracy.

[Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University]

Teens are leaving Facebook in droves for new friends like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter -- at an estimated rate of up to a million a year. It might seem like no big deal to a service that boasts over 1 billion users and counting, but teens tend to be bellwethers of trends. Early adopters of Instagram, they saw that it was more than just a cool filter for your phone before the rest of us caught up.

David Ebersman, the former chief financial officer for Facebook, argued that the reason was that Facebook was no longer the hip hangout spot on the Internet for teenagers, and there’s a simple reason for that: It’s hard to look cool when you’re hanging out with Mom and Dad. The social media service is highly popular among their Gen X and Baby Boomer parents -- who, as Bustle’s Krystin Arneson writes, “came to keep an eye on their kids, but stayed when they discovered that connecting with other adults was fun.” With widespread parental supervision on the service, many teenagers prefer the anonymity of Whisper, the iPhone era’s version of PostSecret.

With smart gadgets already flooding the market and thousands more expected in coming years, the Internet of Things is emerging amid a regulatory wilderness. The breakneck pace of this technology has far outpaced the legal system's ability to keep up with it, many experts contend. Because of legal loopholes, consumers often lack any right to control how long their data is kept, who it is shared with and what is collected about them, including such personal information as their finances, mental health, political leanings and sexual orientation.

And while ideas differ on what should be done about that, there is widespread agreement that it will be crucial to make sure the intimate details these devices gather on everyone won't be strewed willy-nilly across the Web. Neil Richards, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, believes lawmakers eventually will do more to protect the personal data captured by the growing array of smart gadgets. But he cautioned that "the scope of that protection and how long it takes to get there is absolutely up for grabs."