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.

Each post below is tagged with
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  • Narratives
    • as appropriate.
    Snapchat Finally Starts Courting Influencers as Instagram Makes Gains (Aug 25, 2017)

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    Uber Reverses Course on Oakland Headquarters, Citing Cost Savings (Aug 25, 2017)

    Uber has decided not to go ahead with a big new headquarters in Oakland, across the bay from its current San Francisco base, citing the need to cut costs. This is just the latest signal that the company is taking more seriously the need to bring costs down and improve margins, following on from the abandonment of the Chinese and Russian markets and the end of its US car-leasing program. It’s not clear whether this would all have happened even if Travis Kalanick were still in charge, but it is clear that the board and broader management that’s currently running the company is taking the opportunity to whittle costs and get the company in better financial shape. Recall that it lost hundreds of millions of dollars in the second quarter even on an adjusted basis, so there’s still a long way to go, and improving the economics of the ride sharing business itself is still the key to long-term profitability, but all this helps too.

    via Business Insider


    SoftBank is Making Massive and Disruptive Investments Across Tech (Aug 25, 2017)

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    Google Issues Refunds Over Ads Served to Bots Rather than Humans (Aug 25, 2017)

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    Amazon Will Forgo Video Pilots and Commission More Series Directly (Aug 25, 2017)

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    Apple Removes Iranian Apps from App Store to Comply with US Sanctions (Aug 25, 2017)

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    Daily Podcast Episode 43 – August 24, 2017 (Aug 24, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 24 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:


    Apple Announces $1.4bn Iowa Data Center Project (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Apple Readying 4K Apple TV Box, TV App Update to Better Support Live TV (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Spotify Signs Deal with Warner Music, Paving Way for Going Public (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Tesla’s Rapid Autopilot Rollout Unnerved Some Engineers, Reports WSJ (Aug 24, 2017)

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    BlackBerry Says It’s Close to Licensing Secure Android Version to Phone Makers (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Facebook and Google Dominate Top 10 US Apps List (Aug 24, 2017)

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    ★ Amazon-Whole Foods Deal to Close Monday, Lower Prices to Follow (Aug 24, 2017)

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    ★ HTC is Exploring Strategic Options Including Sale of Vive VR Unit (Aug 24, 2017)

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    AccuWeather Removes Privacy-Infringing Technology From its iOS App (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Gartner Projects Strong Growth in Wearables, Led by Smartwatches (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Facebook and Twitter Sign Deals with New Network Stadium for Sports Video (Aug 24, 2017)

    Yesterday, Facebook announced a deal with Stadium to provide sports video content, and today Twitter made a very similar announcement. Stadium is a recently launched sports network which leverages Sinclair’s broadcasting infrastructure and streaming capabilities from Silver Chalice (a subsidiary of the Chicago White Sox organization) and in-studio talent from 120 Sports. Its sports rights are mostly for second-tier conferences, so there won’t be many high-profile games available, and essentially all the content is also available for free on Stadium’s own website and where broadcast. So there’s no exclusivity and little real value here and this is mostly about adding tonnage of live video on two platforms which are still in the early stages of that effort. The challenge in sports, of course, continues to be that the major rights are sewn up for years by big names from the TV industry, with rare exceptions like Thursday Night Football’s digital rights offering the only real opportunities to snag them in the near term. And yet sports is about the only must-have category of live TV left among these platform’s core audiences, leaving them in this awkward position of adding lots of marginal content just to check a sports box.

    via Mashable


    US Drone Market Continues to Grow Rapidly (Aug 24, 2017)

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    Daily Podcast Episode 42 – August 23, 2017 (Aug 23, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 23 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: