August 2015

Netflix is notoriously secretive when it comes to sharing audience viewing information -- be it with content providers, the media or Wall Street -- arguing that since it doesn’t have advertisers to please, ratings for its subscription streaming service are irrelevant. But now Hollywood is getting its first real peek inside the black box of online video streaming. In recent months, measurement specialist Nielsen has been scaling up a program to track viewing on Netflix and other online services like Amazon’s Prime Instant Video and Hulu. Nielsen said it is now tracking nearly 1,000 shows. Most major TV studios are receiving detailed readouts on how their own programming is performing, including the total viewers for any episode and basic demographics such as age and gender, Nielsen said.

Netflix has been dismissive of Nielsen’s efforts, noting that the company still doesn’t provide ratings for content viewed on tablets and phones and that its numbers wouldn’t include viewing of shows outside the US. Netflix does share some viewing information with select studios. Studios that do large content-licensing deals with Netflix have been able to negotiate for data such as the number of times a show has been streamed on a monthly basis and some tracking info to see how a show is retaining an audience over multiple episodes, people familiar with the matter say. But Netflix doesn’t provide demographic breakdowns or how many people watch any individual episode.

Google rebuffed the European Union’s demand that it change the way it ranks online comparison-shopping services in its search results, setting up a potentially drawn-out legal battle between the search company and a regulator empowered to levy billions of euros in fines. In a formal response to antitrust charges the EU filed spring 2015 against the California company, Google said it has argued the bloc’s antitrust regulators erred in their analysis of the fast-changing online-shopping business, misconstrued Google’s impact on rival shopping-comparison services, and failed to properly back up their legal claims.

In particular, the company argues that the EU’s charges -- detailed in a document called a Statement of Objections, or SO -- fail to take into account the fast growth of companies like Amazon.com and eBay. Google executives have said these firms pose a new competitive threat, which undermines the case that Google has harmed comparison-shopping companies like Nextag and LeGuide. Google also argues that asking it to make changes to the way it ranks comparison-shopping sites would require legal justifications the EU doesn’t have.

A major tech trade group expressed concerns with a House student privacy bill that it said would “create undue costs for our member companies" without sufficient benefit to any involved party. The legislation in question is an update of the Family Education Rights and Privacy Act, the main federal law that protects student privacy. The House version of the Student Privacy Protections Act includes provisions that require parties under the law, such as companies that provide technological tools to schools, to notify parents of data breaches. But The Internet Association said in a letter to leaders of the House Education and Workforce Committee and the bill’s sponsors that the requirements were too broad.

“As currently drafted, the data security and privacy provisions of the bill impose vague security requirements, including notice requirements triggered by a ‘breach of the security practices,’ which theoretically could include common employee errors such as failing to properly sign-in a visitor or failing to logout of a computer when going to get coffee for 5 minutes,” the group’s president, Michael Beckerman, said in the letter.

A new breed of tech-savvy farmers is emerging throughout Kenya. Sometimes called "telephone farmers", they are making use of a growing number of technologies and platforms to help them choose and manage their crops more efficiently. And mobile devices are giving a growing number of them the ability to do this while continuing to live and work in the city.

Tech giant IBM's EZ-Farm project -- currently being trialled in Kenya -- is exploring how sophisticated data analytics can help farmers keep in touch with what is really happening on their out-of-town smallholdings. Sensors strategically placed around the farm monitor water tank levels, the amount of moisture in the soil, as well as the performance of irrigation equipment. And infrared cameras measure rates of photosynthesis, which can indicate whether crops are being watered too much or too little. All this data is streamed wirelessly to the IBM Cloud and accessed by the farmer via a smartphone app.