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.
    Uber’s Head of Developer Platform, Who Was a Kalanick Loyalist, Resigns (Aug 15, 2017)

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    Tech Giants File Amicus Brief with Supreme Court on Phone Data and Privacy (Aug 15, 2017)

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    Facebook Launches Redesigns of News Feed and Instagram Comments (Aug 15, 2017)

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    Target Acquires Grand Junction Logistics Tech, Broadens Restock Delivery Service (Aug 15, 2017)

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    Qualcomm Announces Next-Generation AR and 3D-Capable Image Signal Processor (Aug 15, 2017)

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    ★ Uber Penalized by FTC for Misrepresenting Privacy Practices (Aug 15, 2017)

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    Facebook is Testing Using Location to Serve Ads to People Who Visited Stores (Aug 15, 2017)

    Based on observations of the new method in the wild, Marketing Land says Facebook appears to be testing showing people ads on Facebook based on the physical retail stores they have recently visited, leveraging location data from the Facebook app. If people already think that being retargeted on Facebook based on shopping on other sites is creepy, this is going to blow their minds, especially because many people may not realize that Facebook is even able to track their location when they’re not actively using the app. That background location tracking is used to power some services in the app, and in the iOS privacy settings, Facebook can be set only to use location while in the app, but there doesn’t seem to be a similar option on Android, where all I can see is a single on-off location toggle per app at an OS level. None of this should surprise us, however: the name of the game in advertising is targeting, and the more available the better as far as these companies are concerned. As long as there’s some disclosure somewhere of what’s being gathered and why, and consumers have an opt-out option, they’ll feel they’re covered. But between Snapchat’s recent moves in the opposite direction and this testing by Facebook, it feels like we may be about to wade into our first real set of privacy concerns around major social networks in several years, after companies pulled back significantly a few years back following something of a backlash. Users have been like the proverbial frogs in boiling water since, with the erosion of privacy so subtle and incremental as to never present a single step big enough to warrant objections, but I suspect that may be about to change.

    via Marketing Land


    Daily Podcast Episode 35 – August 14, 2017 (Aug 14, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 14 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 Excluded from Beijing Transit Payment System Because of Closed NFC Access (Aug 14, 2017)

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    Snapchat Adds Feature Creating Seamless Multi-Perspective Videos From User Snaps (Aug 14, 2017)

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    ★ Apple is Talking to Aetna About Apple Watches for Insurance Customers (Aug 14, 2017)

    CNBC reports that Apple has recently held discussions with insurance company Aetna about providing Apple Watches on a subsidized basis to at least some of its 23 million customers. Aetna already has a program to provide Apple Watches to its employees, and both Apple and Fitbit have been talking to a variety of healthcare companies about partnerships to get wider distribution of their devices. This is the first real sign that Apple might do a deal which would be much larger in scale than anything that’s been contemplated so far. For context, Apple has likely sold just over 30 million Watches in total so far, so getting Watches to even half of Aetna’s members would be a massive boost to the business. Such a deal would likely see Apple supplying Watches at less than the usual retail price, both as a bulk discount and because the cost of acquisition would be much lower than a typical retail purchase, while Aetna would subsidize the remaining cost for its members on the basis that fitness trackers tend to improve health and fitness and therefore lower the odds of a medial issue that requires insurance coverage. The rationale there would be much the same as for insurers providing discounted gym memberships. Partnerships like this with medical providers probably have more potential than anything else to boost the addressable market for fitness-centric wearables, including the Apple Watch, because they substantially lower the cost of entry for consumers while providing strong incentives to make use of the devices. There’s obviously no guarantee any of this gets done, but it’s the kind of thing I’m sure we’ll see at least on a small scale in the near future, whether with Aetna and Apple or other pairings.

    via CNBC


    Google Acquires Smartphone Health App Maker Senosis (Aug 14, 2017)

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    Google Adds 30 Language Varieties to Voice Dictation, Cloud Speech API (Aug 14, 2017)

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    Microsoft Memo Shows Earlier Hardware Issues Which Influenced CR Survey (Aug 14, 2017)

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    ★ Netflix Hires Shonda Rhimes Away from ABC to Create New Shows (Aug 14, 2017)

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    Daily Podcast Episode 34 – August 11, 2017 (Aug 11, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 11 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:


    Facebook Quietly Tests Chinese App Waters with Moments Clone (Aug 11, 2017)

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    Facebook Acquires Tech to Add or Remove Objects in Videos (Aug 11, 2017)

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    Tencent, Baidu and Sina Under Investigation in China Over Failure to Police Content (Aug 11, 2017)

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    Toyota, Ericsson, Intel, and Others Form Consortium to Manage Car Data (Aug 11, 2017)

    Toyota, Ericsson, Intel, NTT, and other companies have formed a consortium to figure out ways to manage the massive explosion of data that will be generated by cars over the coming years. As cars become more autonomous, they will need to gather enormously more data from cameras, radar, LIDAR, and other sensors and transmit at least a subset of that data over networks to central repositories for processing and analysis. That, in turn, is going to require some big decisions about which data to process locally, what needs to be sent over the air, and how much and which data to store on an ongoing basis in both locations. Since carmakers like Toyota don’t really have much experience with that kind of thing, network infrastructure vendor Ericsson and chip vendor Intel among others are going to work together with them to figure some of this stuff out, and have left the door open for others to join their effort in future. Notably absent from this initiative are other big automotive chip vendors like Nvidia, any cloud service companies beyond Japan’s NTT, or mapping companies like HERE, and given the strong roles they’re playing or likely to play in this area, the consortium does need to add additional members (including ones who compete with the founding members) if it’s to make real headway here.

    via Toyota