By 2021, video will account for 82% of all Web traffic, Cisco predicts. By contrast, “Video accounted for 73 percent of traffic in 2016,” Recode reports. “Not only are people watching more online video, they’re also watching better quality video, sapping more bandwidth.”

For its fiscal year 2018, Alibaba expects revenue growth to approach 50%, the Chinese tech giant announced this week. “That figure compared with 56 percent revenue growth posted for the 2017 fiscal year ended March 31,” Reuters reports.

Taylor Swift has decided to let Spotify and other music platforms stream her full catalog. “Swift was already on Apple Music but now she’s opening up to Spotify, Amazon Music Unlimited, Amazon Prime Music, Tidal, Pandora Premium, and more," TechCrunch reports. “Swift’s songs will be available on both the free ad-supported and paid tiers of Spotify,” TC adds, citing sources.

On June 19, tech leaders are expected to gather at the White House to discuss the modernization of government services. As sources tell Bloomberg, expected attendees include Apple CEO Tim Cook, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Facebook Inc. also has been invited to send an executive to the summit, but it hasn’t yet replied to the invitation,” according to Bloomberg.

Discord -- a voice and text chat tool for gamers -- is growing like gangbusters. “San Francisco-based Discord has 45 million registered users on its platform, quadrupling from a year ago, with 9 million daily actives,” TechCrunch writes. To keep the peddle to the metal, just raised about $50 million from Index Ventures and other investors.

Now under parent company Verizon, both AOL and Yahoo are about to experience significant job cuts. Sources tell Recode that the combined cuts could approach 1,000 employees. Writes Recode: “This action is not unexpected, given that both companies have a lot of redundancies, including in human resources, finance, marketing and general administration.”

Microsoft just bought cybersecurity firm Hexadite. Setting itself apart from other firms, the Israel startup “uses AI to identify and protect against attacks,” TechCrunch notes. Regarding strategy, TC writes: “The idea is to expand Microsoft’s existing security portfolio with an infusion of new technology based around new innovations in areas like AI and machine learning.”

The Wall Street Journal wonders what happen to Siri, Apple’s voice assistant, which appears to have lost its edge over the past year or two. “Today, Apple is playing catch-up in a product category it invented, increasing worries about whether the technology giant has lost some of its innovation edge,” it writes.

As Google plans next year for its Chrome browser to block all ads from appearing on Web sites deemed to offer poor ad experiences to consumers, ad-blocking software providers don't think the new feature will affect the use of their software. The ad-blocking providers "welcome even a limited range of ad blocking from Google because it would help weed out the most intrusive ads and validate the ad-blocking business. But they don’t expect Google’s new feature to impact adoption of their own tools, largely because it doesn’t go far enough to address consumers’ frustrations with online ads or their concerns …

Speaking at the Mumbrella360 conference, Scott Hagedorn, global CEO of Hearts & Science, said the ad industry has "poisoned" programmatic "destroying its potential to be a huge force in the future of advertising, thanks to a lack of transparency that has left clients with little trust in the industry."  Hagedorn also said programmatic has divorced advertising from context, according to a Mumbrella report. Hagedorn had sharp words for the sector: "We told clients oftentimes that it was about real-time trading and there was all these people with hands on keyboards that were doing bidding and going after inventory when in …