Important Note
Tech Narratives was a subscription website, which offered expert commentary on the day's top tech news from Jan Dawson, along with various other features, for $10/month. As of Monday October 16, 2017, it will no longer be updated. An archive of past content will remain available for the time being. I've written more about this change in the post immediately below, and also here.
Tesla Announces Plans for Superchargers in Cities to Assist Urban Owners (Sep 11, 2017)
Tesla has just announced plans to add Superchargers (its rapid car chargers) in dense, urban locations in order to assist owners of its cars who live in cities and in many cases don’t have places to plug in their cars at home. Tesla’s own blog post does a good job of explaining the various charging options available today to owners both at home and away from home, but the post from Jalopnik linked below does a fantastic job of explaining the significance of the move. Essentially, if you’re an urban Tesla owner you have to explicitly go find somewhere to charge your car from time to time, which might well be inconvenient, especially because even the Superchargers take 45-50 minutes to charge the car. What Tesla is offering now is Superchargers sited in locations where those customers might already be spending time – e.g. at supermarkets, malls, or shopping or office areas within cities – so that their cars can charge while they’re busy doing other things. That potentially solves one of the biggest challenges for would-be urban owners of Tesla cars, and reinforces the challenge that still faces pretty much all of the other electric carmakers: the lack of widespread charging infrastructure. Though Tesla’s total scale in terms of car production remains tiny relative to the bigger manufacturers, the one area where it has a massive lead is in building out that infrastructure to enable charging while traveling and elsewhere, and adding Superchargers in cities will give it a further lead.
via Jalopnik
Apple’s iOS 11 GM Leaks, Exposing Details on New iPhones, Apple Watch (Sep 11, 2017)
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Amazon Shifts Original Content Efforts to High End Drama with Global Appeal (Sep 11, 2017)
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Daily Podcast Episode 53 – September 8, 2017 (Sep 8, 2017)
The daily podcast episode for September 8 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:
- The Economist’s Use of Line in Asia
- Sprint Pulls Ad Buying Back In House
- Deep Dive on Rotten Tomatoes
Target Lowers Prices on Staples to Better Compete with Amazon (Sep 8, 2017)
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Major US Wireless Carriers Band Together to Solve SMS-Based 2FA Security (Sep 8, 2017)
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Google Salary Data Shows Women Paid Less Than Men at Same Job Level (Sep 8, 2017)
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Equifax Suffers Potentially Massive Breach, Handles Fallout Terribly (Sep 8, 2017)
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Uber Under FBI Investigation Over Tool Which Infiltrated Lyft’s App (Sep 8, 2017)
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Uber Announces Plans to Electrify London Fleet by 2025, Prompted by Regulation (Sep 8, 2017)
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Snapchat Adds Content From College Newspapers With Ads for Monetization (Sep 8, 2017)
Business Insider reported a few weeks back that Snapchat was starting to approach college newspapers about contributing content to its Discover tab, and now the company has made it official. Critically, Snapchat will run ads in those Stories, which will allow the newspapers to make some money from the partnership, so this should be something of a win-win for both sides. As I mentioned in my first comment on this (linked above), Snapchat is here going in the opposite direction from Facebook, which started out college campus-based and expanded from there, but the college age audience is clearly a big part of Snapchat’s target demographic, so it makes a ton of sense to provide increased localization and more content to keep users in the app longer (and see more ads). I’m very curious, though, to see how effectively newspapers make the transition to the format required in the Discover tab – I’m guessing most of the contributors will at least be familiar with the form, but it’s very different from writing articles.
via Snap
Major US Banks to Launch Zelle, a P2P Payments App (Sep 8, 2017)
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Facebook Willing to Spend $1 Billion on Video Content by End of 2018 (Sep 8, 2017)
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Daily Podcast Episode 52 – September 7, 2017 (Sep 7, 2017)
The daily podcast episode for September 7 is up now on SoundCloud and should be syncing shortly to iTunes, Overcast, and other podcast apps. As usual, the podcast spends about one minute on each of the items covered on the site today, and also points to a few other items in the news today which I didn’t cover but which are nonetheless interesting. You can find today’s episode on SoundCloud and all episodes on iTunes, Overcast, and so on. The additional items covered are below:
- How Indian Smartphone Vendors Lost the Market to China
- BBC Making Interactive Radio Plays for Echo and Home
- Pew Survey on Social Media News Consumption
- Shady Rehab Centers Advertising on Google
Group Video Chat App Houseparty Claims 20m Users Spending 51 Minutes Per Day (Sep 7, 2017)
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Google Said to Be Close to Buying HTC’s Smartphone R&D Operation (Sep 7, 2017)
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Facebook Fact-Checking Partners Say Lack of Data Sharing Impedes Work (Sep 7, 2017)
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Lyft Partners with Drive.ai to Test Autonomous Cars in Bay Area This Year (Sep 7, 2017)
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Disney Says Streaming Service Coming in Late 2019, Will Include Lucasfilm & Marvel (Sep 7, 2017)
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Ookla Speed Tests Put T-Mobile Top for Wireless, Comcast Top for Wired Broadband (Sep 7, 2017)
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