There are now 50 million Spotify subscribers

Spotify has hit another milestone in less than half a year. The music streaming service adds 10 million new paying subscribers in around five months, pushing them up to having 50 million users. To put it in perspective, Spotify spent less than half a year adding around half an Apple Music. Apple’s own streaming service hit 20 million in December, adding three million subscribers in three months.

This boost in subscribers for music streaming services underscores the changing consumer habits when it comes to music. More and more people it seems would be willing to pay a fee for all-you-can-access music instead of buying per song or per album. It would seem Spotify has the advantage at the moment, if these figures are anything to go by.

Source: CNET + Spotify

A typo caused the big Amazon Web Services outage

Mistakes happen to the best of us but it seems just one tiny “human error” has caused embarrassment for Amazon. As you know, the Amazon Web Services went down this week and disrupted many internet services for hours. It seems the error had been a typo. On Tuesday morning, an employee doing routine maintenance mistakenly entered the wrong command while trying to take offline “a small number of servers.” What was typed in took down a “larger set of servers,” including those that support two S3 subsystems. These subsystems have the data storage service used by a number of web-based services.

With these two systems offline, it took with it many services including the ones Amazon uses to update its own status page. And with the system not having been completely restarted “for many years,” it also took “longer than expected” to bring them back up. Amazon acknowledges and apologizes for the mistake and promises it has taken safeguards to make sure this doesn’t happen again.

Source: Mashable

Rollout of Google Assistant starts today

Google announced at Mobile World Congress that it was bringing Google Assistant to non-Pixel devices. While they didn’t specify a timeline, it seems the wait is shorter than we think. It has started rolling out in the US for both Android Marshmallow and Nougat devices. Google even made a quick announcement on YouTube and Twitter for it. After the US rollout, Google Assistant will be coming to Canada, Australia, the UK, and German speakers in Germany. So it shouldn’t be too far off when you can install the voice-activated Assistant on your device.

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Microsoft’s Xbox Live Creators Program is now open to all game developers

With Microsoft’s latest announcement, you can be a small indie developer and have your game available on the Xbox platform without going through the company’s existing channels. The new Xbox Live Creators Program lets any developer take a retail Xbox, which also serves as a dev kit, and use that to create and self-publish a game to the Xbox marketplace. The published game needs to be a Universal Windows App, meaning it would run on any Windows 10 device. Microsoft also reserves the right to remove the game from the store if it has “harmful or inappropriate content.” It also isn’t free as developers need to shell out a one-time fee that ranges from US$20 to $100. It isn’t clear how much developers will be charged.

Aside from those conditions, you can’t enable online multiplayer or access Xbox achievements features if you aren’t part of the ID@Xbox program. What you do have access to is leaderboards and party chat features. A downside is it looks like games published this way are kept in a separate section of the Xbox Store, which could minimize exposure of the game. The program is currently in its preview stage but is expected to open up to the public soon.

Source: The Next Web + The Verge