Artificial intelligence innovation: Leading companies in mood sensing AR/VR interfaces for the medical devices industry
The medical devices industry continues to be a hotbed of innovation, with activity driven by increased need for homecare, preventative treatments, early diagnosis, reducing patient recovery times and improving outcomes, as well as a growing importance in technologies such as machine learning, augmented reality, 5G and digitalisation. In the last three years alone, there have been over 450,000 patents filed and granted in the medical devices industry. , according to GlobalData’s report on Artificial Intelligence in Medical Devices: Mood sensing AR/VR interfaces . However, not all innovations are equal and nor do they follow a constant upward trend. Instead, their evolution takes the form of an S-shaped curve that reflects their typical lifecycle from early emergence to accelerating adoption, before finally stabilising and reaching maturity. Identifying where a particular innovation is on this journey, especially those that are in the emerging and accelerating stages, is essential for understanding their current level of adoption and the likely future trajectory and impact they will have. 150+ innovations will shape the medical devices industry
According to GlobalData’s Technology Foresights, which plots the S-curve for the medical devices industry using innovation intensity models built on over 550,000 patents, there are 150+ innovation areas that will shape the future of the industry. Within the emerging innovation stage, AI-assisted radiology, motion artefact analysis, and treatment evaluation models are disruptive technologies that are in the early stages of application and should be tracked closely. MRI image smoothing, AI-assisted EHR/EMR, and AI-assisted CT imaging are some of the accelerating innovation areas, where adoption has been steadily increasing. Among maturing innovation areas are computer-assisted surgeries and 3D endoscopy, which are now well established in the industry. Innovation S-curve for artificial intelligence in the medical devices industry
Mood sensing AR/VR interfaces is a key innovation area in artificial intelligence
Mood sensing or emotion sensing augmented reality/ virtual reality (AR/VR) devices include multiple sensors such as electroencephalography (EEG) to capture neuro-signals that can be interpreted to identify behavioural and physiological responses of users. These devices could be useful in areas such as mental health treatment and pain management. GlobalData’s analysis also uncovers the companies at the forefront of each innovation area and assesses the potential reach and impact of their patenting activity across different applications and geographies. According to GlobalData, there are 30+ companies, spanning technology vendors, established medical devices companies, and up-and-coming start-ups engaged in the development and application of mood sensing AR/VR interfaces. Key players in mood sensing AR/VR interfaces – a disruptive innovation in the medical devices industry
‘Geographic reach’ refers to the number of different countries each relevant patent is registered in and reflects the breadth of geographic application intended, ranging from ‘global’ to ‘local’. Samsung Group is one of the lead patent filers in the area of mood-sensing AR/VR interfaces. Other leading patent filers in the area include Immersion, Sony Group , and Xperi Holding. In terms of application diversity, Medtronic leads the pack, followed by Xperi Holding and Life Corp. By means of geographic reach, Magic Leap held the top spot, followed by Xiami and Alphabet in the second and third spots, respectively. The use of VR and AR in mood sensing has the potential to improve pain management during certain medical procedures. VR immersive experience is known to result in patients experiencing lower levels of pain and distress. Mood-based sensing has the potential to provide feedback to surgeons during procedures carried out under local rather than general anaesthesia, and allow adjustment of the procedure as necessary. Reduced use of pharmacological anaesthetic will lead to less contraindications and better patient outcomes. Improved mood sensing is also useful for AI-enabled health bots, giving better feedback to patients to imitate so-called bedside manner and empathy. To further understand the key themes and technologies disrupting the medical devices industry, access GlobalData’s latest thematic research report on Medical Devices . Subscribe to our Newsletter

Artificial intelligence innovation: Leading companies in mood sensing AR/VR interfaces for the medical devices industry

A subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding has applied for a slew of trademarks for its now-defunct music streaming service. Xiami Music, which ceased operations in February, was once Alibaba’s main competitor for Chinese listeners. — SCMP
A subsidiary of Alibaba Group Holding has applied for a slew of trademarks for its now-defunct music streaming service, fanning speculation about whether the e-commerce giant will re-enter music streaming after Beijing forced Tencent Holdings to relinquish its exclusive licensing deals. Alibaba Singapore Holding has filed dozens of applications beginning in June for Xiami Music and Entertainment in various categories, including concert production, ticketing and music publishing, according to a search on the website of the Trademark Office of China National Intellectual Property Administration. Alibaba, which owns South China Morning Post, did not immediately reply to a request for comment. Alibaba’s moves came in tandem with Beijing’s efforts to encourage competition in the country’s music streaming market by forcing Tencent, which controls a dominating share, to give up its exclusive music rights . Xiami Music, which ceased operations in February, was once Alibaba’s main competitor for Chinese listeners against Tencent and NetEase, the number one and number two companies in terms of music streaming market share. During Beijing’s crackdown on pirated music in 2015, Xiami was forced to remove 2.2 million tracks from its platform but was slow to pursue licensing deals. It went from one of the top streaming platforms to a distant laggard with just 22.4 million monthly active users (MAU) by October last year. “We failed to satisfy the diversified needs of our users. This is our biggest regret,” Xiami said in a statement before the service was shut down. Beijing’s latest decision, however, has given the music streaming industry a fresh chance. On Saturday, China’s antitrust watchdog, the State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR), slapped Shenzhen-based Tencent with a 500,000 yuan (RM325,433) fine and ordered the company to end its exclusive music licensing deals with global record labels within 30 days. The social media and entertainment giant, however, will still be able to retain its exclusive deals with independent artists, which should last no longer than three years, as well as its partnerships on new releases. Smaller apps that shift their focus from acquiring exclusive licences back to improving user experience and supporting indie musicians may have a chance to challenge big players, said Li Qingshan, vice research director of EqualOcean consumer department, an investment research firm focusing on China. Gao Xiaosong, chairman of Alibaba’s music arm, said in April that Xiami has made a comeback by pivoting to concert production and soundtrack publishing, according to a post on his Weibo account. Following Beijing’s order to rid Tencent of exclusive copyrights, Cloud Village, operator of its closest rival in China NetEase Cloud Music, is reported to be undergoing a listing hearing at the Hong Kong stock exchange as soon as this week, according to Hong Kong media HKET on Monday. NetEase declined to comment on the report. – South China Morning Post
Article type: free

Speculation over whether Alibaba will re-enter music streaming gains traction after Tencent loses exclusive rights

Once a leader, Xiami saw its monthly active users (MAUs) fall to 22.4 million by October 2020, a tiny fraction of the 450 million for Tencent’s three music apps. Founder Wang Hao’s laid back style was reflected in Xiami’s philosophy of focusing on the music first but it may have also contributed to the decline. — SCMP
Xiami Music, the pioneering Chinese music streaming service owned by Alibaba Group Holding (which owns the Post), will close next month after management admitted it missed “crucial opportunities” in the battle with rival Tencent Music. The story of Xiami is a cautionary tale of how a new product can win the hearts and minds of users but still fail in the marketplace despite being part of a much bigger corporation with deep pockets. It also reminds many of a time when the Chinese Internet was less concerned about making money and more focused on building businesses with innovative ideas. Xiami went from one of the top streaming platforms a few years ago to a distant laggard, with monthly active users (MAU) falling to 22.4 million by October 2020, a tiny fraction compared with an MAU of more than 450 million for Tencent’s three main music apps, according to analytics firm Trustdata. “We failed to satisfy the diversified needs of our users by acquiring proprietary music content. This is our biggest regret,” Xiami said in a statement last week. When asked for further comment, Alibaba referred to Post to the statement issued by Xiami. On social media, loyal Xiami users expressed grief that their beloved music app was coming to an end. “Xiami’s closing is really affecting me emotionally,” one user commented on Xiami’s official account after the announcement was posted on Weibo, China’s equivalent to Twitter. “I will always love you,” the message added. Another user conveyed his feelings by posting a screen capture of Xiami’s user interface design, which featured a vintage-cassette tape labelled with a song by the late singer Leonard Cohen. “Such a delicate and artistic user interface will not be found elsewhere,” the user said. Humble beginnings
The original concept for Xiami was thought up by a group of music lovers in a Hangzhou coffee shop. Officially launched in 2008, it would become one of China’s earliest platforms to provide on-demand music streaming. Originally called EMUMO, for “earn music and money”, Xiami rapidly gained a reputation among Chinese fans of Western rock music. Indeed, its founder Wang Hao played in a rock band in university and today goes by the Weibo username of Pumpkins, reportedly because he is a big fan of US rock group Smashing Pumpkins. However, Wang last week shrugged off the demise of his creation. “If it’s gone, it’s gone,” he posted on Weibo in response to the outpouring of user regret over the closure. Wang and his family have since moved to Phuket, Thailand, a tourist destination popular among Chinese. His new life is far removed from the notoriously long working hours prevalent at Chinese tech companies. Two days after the announcement of Xiami’s closing, Wang posted on Weibo a photo of a telescope set up by a swimming pool, with the caption: “[I will] contemplate the stars tonight”. Wang’s laidback style was reflected in Xiami’s philosophy of focusing on the music first. It may have also contributed to the decline of the company as Wang and his founding team may not have easily adapted to Alibaba’s culture of setting aggressive goals and conducting rigorous performance-measuring, according to Will Tao, an independent consultant focused on the tech industry. “Xiami was more pure compared to other apps. It felt like a music-dedicated app, it was not that overwhelmed by pop culture,” said Hu Hu, a musician from the northern steel town of Tangshan who promoted his work on the platform. Xiami had a playlist of over 30 million songs – including Chinese and Western tracks – and more than 40,000 musicians were posting their work across 1,000 genres, some doing so for free as a way to promote their work. By 2017, Xiami led the industry in active users and user streaming time, according to information from Alibaba’s digital media and entertainment business group. In 2013, Alibaba acquired Xiami for US$20mil (RM80.94mil) but the acquisition was a double-edged sword for the startup’s founders, who stayed on under the new ownership, according to analysts. While the deal gave them access to a huge marketing machine, they were not aggressive enough in pushing for the resources needed to develop the platform. “Alibaba’s acquisition of Xiami was not aimed at expanding Xiami’s music business per se, but rather to draw more traffic and users for its e-commerce businesses,” said Zhang Yi, chief executive and analyst at iiMedia Research. “The fundamental problem for this type of business is that profits can’t cover the expenses on operations, salaries and marketing,” he said. “Many, including Spotify, still struggle to find a profitable business model.”
Strategic missteps
Others pointed to strategic missteps as reasons for Xiami’s demise. Two years after the acquisition, Alibaba hired Gao Xiaosong and Song Ke, two veterans of China’s music industry, to run Alibaba Music, which combined Xiami with another music streaming app called TTpod. Gao, a popular singer-songwriter and film director, would serve as chairman and Song, formerly with Warner Music and co-founder of Chinese pop-music label Taihe Rye Music, was to be chief executive. However, neither had much experience in product development or the Internet industry and they faced a formidable competitor in Tencent, which had expanded aggressively into music streaming. Under Gao and Song, Xiami’s strategy was to bring the entire offline music industry onto its platform, according to Li Qingshan, research director at Equalocean. “Xiami was ahead of its time,” he said. Messages sent to Wang and Gao’s Weibo accounts seeking comment were not answered at press time. However, being pure in functionality and purpose was not necessarily an advantage in a cut-throat market where barriers to entry were low and profitability was hard to come by, especially during the early days when pirated music was rampant on China’s streaming platforms. Then the central government cracked down. In 2015 Beijing introduced several policies designed to clamp down on unauthorised dissemination of copyrighted music, which was costing the local music industry 1bil yuan (RM624.07mil) in revenue losses per year, according to iiMedia Research. The move triggered a scramble among major music streaming operators to acquire exclusive music rights, which in turn resulted in lawsuits between the different platforms over alleged copyright infringement. Tencent, China’s giant in gaming and entertainment, came to the fight with blank cheques to protect its grip on music streaming, which at one time had it controlling more than 60 per cent of exclusive music copyright in the country. In 2016, Tencent folded QQ Music, Kugou and Kuwo into Tencent Music Entertainment to strengthen its hand in the fight for market share. The following year, Tencent paid about US$3.5bil (RM14.16bil) for exclusive Chinese copyright to the playlists of the world top record label Universal Music Group. It also invested heavily to acquire exclusive copyrights to songs from Sony Music and Warner Music, the world’s second and third largest record companies respectively. Several years earlier, Baidu had settled a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the same three music majors, ending years of legal battles that went all the way to the Supreme People’s Court. Baidu’s landmark case, where it agreed to pay royalties on music streamed by its users, paved the way for China’s clean up of pirated music. However, the ensuing tussle among music platforms for copyright forced China’s National Copyright Administration (NCA) to intervene in September 2017. After mediation by the NCA, Tencent, Alibaba and NetEase reached agreements to share up to 99% of their copyrighted music content. But the 1% that remained exclusive was what really mattered, according to Li from Equalocean. “One per cent of Tencent Music’s archive of 40 million copyrighted songs translates to 400,000 songs, enough to cover mainstream music fans,” he said. Losing out
Analysts believe Xiami was the ultimate loser from the policy-triggered sector upheaval, gradually ceding its market dominance to Tencent and NetEase Music, which was established by Hong Kong-listed NetEase in 2013. “The problem wasn’t lack of money,” said Tao, the tech consultant. Rather, “Xiami’s team failed to convince Alibaba’s board of the need for enough resources to win the copyright fight”. In 2016 Wang was seconded to DingTalk, Alibaba’s corporate messaging app, but he ended up leaving the company and currently does not own any of its shares, according to one of his recent Weibo posts. “I made many complaints about things inside the company when I was there,” he said in the post, which also voiced support for Alibaba in its antitrust case brought by the Chinese government. As part of Alibaba’s larger business empire, Xiami’s financials were not publicly released, making it hard to determine its health before closure. In any case, analysts said the impact of its closure on the music streaming market is minimal. “It’s more tinged with a feeling of reminiscence,” Zhang said. Pulling back
In what Zhang said was a signal that Alibaba wanted to pull back from Xiami, the company and YunFeng Capital, a venture capital firm co-founded by Alibaba founder Jack Ma, invested US$700mil (RM2.83bil) in NetEase Cloud Music in September 2019. “The strong are becoming even stronger,” Trustdata said in a report, adding that the largest platforms are increasingly encroaching into the streaming time of users on smaller platforms, pointing to future consolidation in the 14bil yuan (RM8.73bil) market. The old Xiami team will shift its focus to a new music management and distribution platform, Conch Music, and work with other platforms including Alibaba’s own Taobao marketplace and Tmall Genie, the company said in last week’s statement. While fans of the old Xiami are taking it badly, some performers who distributed their work via the service are more laid back about it, much like the founder was. Asked what he would do with his demo tapes, the steel town musician Hu Hu said he would leave them there to “disappear” along with Xiami. – South China Morning Post
Article type: metered

Music streaming platform Xiami’s demise a reflection on China’s Internet industry

South China Morning Post:
A look at the rise and fall of Xiami, Alibaba's Chinese music streaming service, which only had 22.4M MAUs by Oct. 2020 vs. 450M+ for Tencent's three music apps  —  Once a leader, Xiami saw its monthly active users (MAUs) fall to 22.4 million by October 2020, a tiny fraction of the 450 million …

A look at the rise and fall of Xiami, Alibaba's Chinese music streaming service, which only had 22.4M MAUs by Oct. 2020 vs. 450M+ for Tencent's three music apps (South China Morning Post)

Xiami Music, the pioneering Chinese music streaming service owned by Alibaba Group Holding (which owns the Post), will close next month after management admitted it missed “crucial opportunities” in the battle with rival Tencent Music.The story of Xiami is a cautionary tale of how a new product can win the hearts and minds of users but still fail in the marketplace despite being part of a much bigger corporation with deep pockets.It also reminds many of a time when the Chinese internet was less…

What the demise of music streaming platform Xiami says about China’s internet industry

MQA focuses on music technology in the entertainment industry. Its main service is products that capture and authenticate the sound of the original master recording in a file to stream. MQA primarily sells to sectors such as recorded music, video, radio, broadcast, and live streaming. The company was founded in 2015 and is based in London, United Kingdom. In April 2023, MQA filed for bankruptcy.

Chinese technology company Alibaba 's music-streaming service , Xiami , is hoping to steal a march on rivals by boosting its sound quality -- via a partnership with hi-res audio firm MQA .

Date	Round	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
1/5/2021	Dead	Dead	$XXM	0 FY undefined	2
6/5/2013	Acquired	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10
6/2/2010	Series A	Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	1/5/2021	6/5/2013	6/2/2010
Round	Dead	Acquired	Series A
Amount
Investors	Dead	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	2	10	10

First funding	Last Funding	Investor	Rounds	Board Seats	Type	Location
6/5/2013	6/5/2013	Alibaba Group	1 Acquired		Corporation	China
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Shanda Group	Subscribe to see more		Asset/Investment Management	Singapore

First funding	6/5/2013	00/00/0000
Last Funding	6/5/2013	00/00/0000
Investor	Alibaba Group	Shanda Group
Rounds	1 Acquired	Subscribe to see more
Board Seats
Type	Corporation	Asset/Investment Management
Location	China	Singapore

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