PATENT DROP: Mastercard’s golden ticket
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PATENT DROP: Mastercard’s golden ticket
Plus: Spotify’s voice AI; Airbnb tracks your clicks
Happy Monday and welcome to Patent Drop!
Today, we’re checking out a filing from Mastercard for blockchain ticketing that could tackle scalping; Spotify’s tech to add some emotion to AI voiceover; and Airbnb’s plan to figure out how likely you are to book that weekend getaway.
Let's dive in.
#1. Mastercard catches scalpers
Mastercard wants to make sure your Eras Tour tickets are legit.
The credit card company filed a patent application for a system that aims to detect and reduce ticket scalping using distributed ledgers. Essentially, Mastercard’s system uses blockchain’s immutable record to prevent “an unauthorized transaction indicative of scalping.”
This system records transactions within a blockchain ledger embedded in the merchant’s payment network (aka, the network that connects all Mastercard’s point-of-sale systems together). It takes note of two types of data: product identifiers, such as the types of item and how many were previously purchased, and consumer identification data, including cardholder name, shipping and billing address, and payment information.
If a user tries to scalp products or tickets, the system will compare the current transaction to recent historical transactions to determine a “suspicion score” for the user’s profile. If that score is above a certain threshold, the system automatically declines unauthorized transactions “without having to modify existing point of sale systems.”
While many ticketing companies have sought to limit robot scalpers using captcha technology, this doesn’t prevent a human from buying an excess number of tickets or products to resell amid increased demand. Using Mastercard’s system, however, “scalping can be tracked across multiple merchants and in cases where a nefarious actor could traditionally evade detection, due to the tying together of transaction data and scoring thereof.”
Mastercard is far from new to the blockchain. The company sought to patent a system for converting digital assets into cash using mirrored accounting, announced plans in February to allow merchants to receive and settle digital asset transactions, and is in talks with digital banks and fintechs on a digital asset credit card. This patent takes it a step past crypto, applying blockchain as a base technology to merchant capabilities.
Mastercard’s tech has a few potential upsides, said Aaron Rafferty, co-founder of StandardDAO. For one, this tackles the scalping issue that the company laid out in its patent, a problem that made headlines late last year amid the whole Ticketmaster Taylor Swift Era’s Tour debacle (and subsequent government investigation). For reference, while Ticketmaster sold tickets to Swift’s highly sought tour for between $50 and $500, secondary sales were much higher, with some listed at $22,000 on resale site Stub Hub.
With Mastercard’s system, “blockchain is kind of that power player against fraud,” said Rafferty.
“(Mastercard) may get to disrupt Ticketmaster,” said Rafferty. “The fact that Mastercard is doing this, I think, should send sirens to the incumbent ticketing players in the space today.”
But because of the permanent nature of blockchain, using it in the context of ticketing can make a ticket “become much more than that,” Rafferty said. For example, you can track user behavior, give merchants a cut of resale values, or integrate rewards for ticket holders. And because Mastercard is already ubiquitous, this tech can likely integrate seamlessly under a user’s credit card or profile, Rafferty noted.
While plenty of blockchain companies have tried to take on ticketing, none have done so with great success. Why? “One of the cons of blockchain today is ease of use,” said Rafferty. “No one wants to use it. Everyone hates it.” Mastercard’s ubiquity, however, could solve that issue.
#2. Once more, with feeling!
Spotify wants to add AI emotion to your listening experience.
The streaming company is seeking to patent a system for training and executing “text-to-speech synthesis.” Spotify’s tech takes a passage of text and converts it into audio, aiming to do so in a way that actually sounds human and portrays the intent of the text.
Here’s how it works: This system feeds text into a synthesizer that’s built with an AI prediction network configured to convert the text into speech data. Next, that speech data is fed to a neural network-based Vocoder, or another synthesizer built specifically for vocal data, which adds in speech attributes conveyed in the initial text such as emotion, intention, projection, pace and accent, when creating said speech.
Spotify said the system can create speech that can convey emotions such as anger, happiness or sadness, intentions such as sarcasm, projections like whispering or shouting, and accents like French or British. The two-model process makes it sound more “natural, realistic and human-like,” Spotify notes.
The models are trained on datasets consisting of audio samples and corresponding text that represent different speech attributes, and are trained until a “performance metric” reaches a certain threshold, a.k.a., until their output sounds real enough.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Spotify take an interest in AI voice technology. Last June, the company acquired Sonantic, an AI voice platform, for an undisclosed sum. The company said in its announcement that the acquisition would allow it to “create high-quality experiences for our users by building on our existing technical capabilities.”
“This integration will enable us to engage users in a new and even more personalized way,” Ziad Sultan, Spotify’s VP of personalization, said at the time. Since then, the company debuted an AI-powered personal DJ backed by Sonantic’s technology.
But the tech in this patent has the potential to speak more than just a few sentences in between songs. If it can effectively communicate emotion, this tech could, for example, “generate audiobooks on the fly that are really engaging and interesting,” said Jake Maymar, VP of Innovation at The Glimpse Group.
The company launched its audiobooks offering in September in the US with more than 300,000 titles, and has since expanded to several other countries. Given that the sector is growing by 20% year-over-year according to Spotify, the company may be looking to expand. Another option, Maymar noted, is that this tech could apply to its creator studio, Soundtrap. “Emotion is a really hard problem to solve,” said Maymar. “If you build it right, it's in demand.”
There are, of course, downsides to this kind of tech, said Maymar. Any AI voice simulator that can create a realistic voice opens itself up to being used for deep fakes, he said. Plus, using AI to simulate voices could spell trouble for voice actors who literally rely on their voices to make a living.
“If you can create a very realistic sounding voice that's emotional, it has some negative use cases,” he said. “But with great power (comes) great responsibility.”
#3. Airbnb’s ROI tester
Airbnb wants to know if you’re actually going to book that trip to Bali (or if you’re just daydreaming at work).
The company is seeking to patent a system for prediction of an “expected value of user conversion.” Essentially, Airbnb’s system collects “highly user-specific data” to determine if a user is planning to make a purchase, and how much that purchase could be worth.
This system aggregates a bunch of data on individual users’ activity, specifically collecting real-time data within a “set window of time,” such as account history, same-day site activity, frequency of views and past bookings. The system then feeds this data to a “predictive intent model,” which calculates the probability that a user will make a purchase at all, and a “predictive value model” which calculates how much that user will spend.
Within the intent model, a users' viewing history is taken into account the most heavily, and within the value model, data related to price and market are the most considered. The outcomes of these models can then help guide Airbnb’s “user acquisition strategies for different home sharing markets.”
Airbnb said this can help it decide where to spend its advertising money to get a better return on investment, rather than just making “guesses or inferences as to user intent” to make those decisions. “Such guesses are generally based solely on the advertiser's intuition and market knowledge, requiring human intervention and intelligence.”
Companies wanting to track your clicks has been a recurring patent theme: Walmart, eBay, Uber, Visa and plenty of others are working on similar tech to figure out where to place hyper-targeted ads that will make them the most money. Plus, as advertising grows more expensive on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok, getting the best return on investment is crucial.
In contrast to the hotel industry, the pandemic was a boon for Airbnb, posting its first-ever profit in 2022. But the company may soon face trouble in paradise… or at least trouble getting people to book a room in paradise.
Airbnb said in its Q1 earnings report that travel levels are likely to drop, as pent-up, post-pandemic demand for travel in 2022 created conditions for temporary rapid growth. A viral Twitter thread from CEO of Reventure Consulting Nick Gerli pointed to data from analytics from AllTheRooms that top cities for Airbnbs like Phoenix and Austin saw revenue per available listing drop close to 50% in May 2023, compared to the same month last year. Airbnb, however, said this wasn’t consistent with internal numbers, Bloomberg reported.
Regardless, the travel industry is still recovering from the blow dealt by the pandemic. While it’s likely not going to reach 2019 numbers this year, the sector is showing signs of life. Focusing its efforts (and advertising spend) on customers that are actually going to take the plunge and book that bungalow in Aruba or that cooking class in Italy could be part of Airbnb’s work to keep momentum going.
(P.S., if you want a breakdown of Airbnb’s, well, potential breakdown, check out TDU reporter Brian Boyle’s recent deep dive.)
Extra Drops
A few others before you go.
Apple wants to make sure you’re standing up straight. The company wants to patent a headset for “posture detection,” which, as the name implies, aims to fix slouching to “promote the user's health.”
Google wants to get your filters right. The company wants to patent for applying “stored digital makeup enhancements” to “recognized faces” in images.
Nvidia wants to scout for bumps in the road. The company is seeking to patent a system for “surface profile estimation and bump detection” for autonomous vehicles to make sure your self-driving ride is as smooth as possible.
What else is new?
Twitter has officially rebranded itself as X, reflecting Elon Musk’s vision to turn the platform into an “everything app.” (Though X.com leads to the site, branding hasn’t changed yet for many users.)
TikTok is rolling out support for text posts as Twitter – well, X – goes through some … changes. The feature allows users to essentially post text-based posts with customizable fonts, colors and sounds.
OneTrust, a privacy management startup, raised $150 million in a round led by Al Gore’s Generation Investment Management, bringing its valuation to $4.5 billion, Bloomberg reported.
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