Pharma’s digital inflection point

Pic by Charl Folscher on Unsplash

Billed as the world’s most influential technology event, this year’s CES show saw its first ever keynote from a healthcare company when Abbott CEO Robert Ford took to the stage in Las Vegas in January.

For Ford, the focus was on his company’s new range of consumer ‘biowearable’ health devices, but his appearance was also another reminder of the increasing importance of ‘digital’ in all its forms across the life sciences sector.

Alongside buzzworthy metaverse, NFT and cryptocurrency offerings, this year’s CES also saw updates in remote patient monitoring tech, mobile games for better mental health and a slew of wellness devices.

The end of the iTunes era

iTunes by Leo U @ Flickr

Apple’s confirmation last week that it would be putting iTunes out its misery was long overdue, even if the announcement did come with more caveats than a young band’s first contract.

Having tied itself up in just as many knots, iTunes has not been handed a quick release. A replacement isn’t due until Apple’s Catalina operating system (OS 10.15) arrives in the autumn, when it will come in the shape of separate applications for music, podcasts and TV.

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Spotify’s approaching, and much trailed, stock market debut that will see it next month undertake a direct listing rather than a traditional IPO has thrown some light on the streaming service’s performance to date. Such as the $1.4bn losses (on revenues of around $4.6bn) it saw in 2017, or the fact that with 159 million average monthly users the firm (whose CEO Daniel Ek is pictured above) estimates it’s twice as popular as its nearest competitor Apple Music.

Digital Music roundup: Apple buys Shazam, Spotify to go public, UMG deals struck, Goodbye Groove

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Apple has acquired Shazam in a deal worth a reported $400m. The UK company, which was already integrated with Siri, is best known for allowing users to identify music via their smartphone or computer, but it also has an AR platform and visual recognition technology.

Searching visually

It’s been quite difficult to find much to love about the latest version of Apple’s iOS.

The 24 hours it took to install iOS7  in the autumn, not to mention the diminished touchscreen responsiveness it arrived with, certainly don’t help.

Ping: say goodbye

There will surely be few people who will mourn the demise of Apple’s music social network Ping.

That the ‘walled garden’ within iTunes didn’t “gain traction”, as CEO Tim Cook put it in July, is little surprise.

It offered a poor user experience within iTunes’ familiarly clunky interface, with little reason for visiting. Bands more often than not used it as a somewhat perfunctory news feed and this, combined with Ping’s small and unenthusiastic audience, meant it felt like a slow-moving, neutered network.