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
  • Company/Division names
  • Topics
    • and
  • Narratives
    • as appropriate.
    Group of Chinese App Developers Files Antitrust Complaint Against Apple (Aug 11, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    SoundCloud Closes New Investment, Shuffles Management, Pivots Business (Aug 11, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Amazon is Reportedly Looking into Food Tech That Doesn’t Require Refrigeration (Aug 11, 2017)

    A company that owns technology for producing ready to eat meals that don’t require refrigeration says it’s been talking to Amazon about it, and that Amazon is looking into providing the food as part of its groceries offering. Because the food produced using the technology can stay on an unrefrigerated shelf for up to a year, it’d be a great fit for the more standard UPS-based delivery Amazon uses for non perishable items and wouldn’t require the much greater density of delivery infrastructure Amazon’s fresh grocery service does, and could therefore be offered much more widely. It’s a bit surprising to hear an Amazon partner (or potential partner) talk this openly about its relationship given Amazon’s general secrecy, which may yet scupper the deal. And the technology is still awaiting FDA approval, so there’s nothing imminent anyway. But it’s yet another sign that Amazon is really serious about making a bigger push in groceries, and that that push isn’t going to be restricted to just the Whole Foods footprint it’s in the process of acquiring.

    via Reuters


    Google Cancels Diversity Town Hall over Harassment and Threats (Aug 11, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Daily Podcast Episode 33 – August 10, 2017 (Aug 10, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 10 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:


    ★ Snap Reports Q2 Earnings with Slow User, ARPU Growth, Slightly Better Margins (Aug 10, 2017)

    Snap Inc reported earnings for Q2 2017 this afternoon, and it missed analyst consensus estimates pretty much across the board, with lower user growth, ARPU, and therefore revenue, as well as EPS, than expected. Snap’s user growth sequentially was 7 million, a little above its Q4 2016 number but below every other quarter’s growth for the last two years. Interestingly, in a reversal of the recent trend from Facebook, it saw better growth in North America, where its ARPU potential is much higher (currently 5x Europe and 7x Rest of World) but costs to serve are more or less the same than in its two other regions. But if user growth is going to remain slow, ARPU really has to grow rapidly, and it’s not yet seeing the kind of ramp it needs in that trajectory to justify rising expectations of its future performance. Though it saw 60% of its recent ad impressions generated through its self-serve and automated (API) platforms, the increased inventory made available through those platforms has generated lower prices per ad, so even though impressions went up quite a bit thanks to increased time spent and modest user growth, that offset it somewhat.

    Management commentary on the call was mostly focused on the new creative tools being made available to users, which have historically driven increased engagement, as well as the evolving ad platform, which is the other major component to driving ARPU up. But the evidence from the Q2 reported numbers suggests neither of these is dramatically changing the trajectory from prior quarters. There is still tons of headroom in ARPU – Facebook’s global ad ARPU is over four times Snap’s, while its North American ARPU is roughly ten times as high – but Snap is a long way from reaching that level yet, with relatively modest increases in North America in the quarter and better growth overseas. My basic thesis on Snap remains the same: it’s a platform with a slow-growing and smallish (relative to the ad giants) base of highly-engaged users heavily skewed toward particular demographics. That will continue to be attractive to those looking to reach those demographics, but will continue to fall short of the appeal of the much bigger audiences and more sophisticated ad tools available at Google and Facebook. I don’t see any of that changing soon, which means Snap is best seen as its own animal, at similar scale to Twitter (though that scale is measured differently) and with some of the same problems. In other Snap news today, Mashable’s Kerry Flynn reports that it has apparently acquired selfie drone company Zero Zero Robotics. There was no mention of this on the call, but if I heard correctly management did mention roughly $200 million in acquisition costs in the quarter, which would gel with this reporting.

    via Snap


    Samsung is Building Driver Assistance Technology for Cars to Rival Mobileye (Aug 10, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Uber Investor Benchmark Sues Kalanick over Fraud to Remove Him from Board (Aug 10, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    SoundCloud is Asking Existing Backers to Support a Rescue Deal (Aug 10, 2017)

    Despite SoundCloud’s repeated protestations that it’s not on the verge of going under, the scuttlebutt has been that it is indeed just a few months from running out of cash, and two recent new investors have been reported as potential saviors: Singapore’s Temasek Holdings and the Raine Group. SoundCloud is now reportedly communicating with existing investors and asking them to back the rescue effort by these two new backers as a last-ditch attempt to avoid having to wind down the business. Some of the numbers involved are a bit crazy – the new investment is $169.5 million at a $150 million pre-money enterprise valuation and some existing shareholders will see their liquidity preference slashed by 40%. But all this would apparently put the company on a much sounder financial footing and allow it to consider searching for a way out of its current predicament. I’m still bearish that there’s any way to really turn SoundCloud around given its history and what’s happened in the industry since it experienced its meteoric rise, and imagine the most likely long-term outcome is still an acquisition for intellectual property and possibly customer data. Update: Recode is reporting that the CEO will be replaced and kicked upstairs to the board chair role in favor of former Vimeo CEO Kerry Trainor if the deal goes through, which now seems very likely based on other reporting later in the day.

    via Axios


    Facebook Announces List of Shows Created for its New Watch Video Tab (Aug 10, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    ★ Consumer Reports Withdraws Surface Recommendations over Reliability Issues (Aug 10, 2017)

    In the second somewhat controversial decision by Consumer Reports in the past year, it has withdrawn its recommendations from several of the Microsoft Surface hardware products for reasons of projected reliability. Though it rated those products highly in its reviews and recommended both a couple of Surface Laptop and a couple of Surface Book models, a recent survey among owners of older Surface products suggested a 25% hardware fault rate within two years of purchase and that’s what led to the yanked recommendations. Last year, Consumer Reports somewhat controversially failed to recommend Apple’s new MacBook Pros over battery life issues that turned out to be caused by somewhat unusual testing conditions combined with a rogue script, something that it eventually reversed itself on, but there’s little prospect of a similar reversal here.

    Though Consumer Reports has long used reliability of past car models in projecting the same for newer models on the basis that they often share platforms and components, that approach feels flimsy when applied to consumer electronics, and especially different models from the same company, given the frequent changes in components. If past reliability took a hit from a single component and that component isn’t present in the new devices, it would be completely irrelevant, but the lack of transparency here from Consumer Reports makes it impossible to know what’s really going on. Given the small share of the total PC market Surface captures, I also wonder just how much data CR has and how representative it really is. Overall, this feels rather like Consumer Reports trying to get attention for itself much as it did with the MacBook Pro issue, where it failed to provide adequate insight into its testing process until pressed by Apple. It’s clearly bad news for Microsoft, whose Surface hardware has generally been very well reviewed in the last couple of years, though most corporate buyers won’t be checking Consumer Reports for reliability ratings and will instead go by their own experiences, which as far as I can tell have generally been fine. Consumers, on the other hand, might lean more heavily on these ratings.

    Update: Also worth noting are the overall reliability numbers for PCs, which are available within CR’s laptop ratings section: there, Microsoft comes last of all, but only by one percentage point, while it says differences of five points or less are not meaningful, and that spread covers six PC vendors including market leaders HP, Lenovo, and Dell. So it’s not that Microsoft’s reliability is massively worse than other PCs, but that there’s now enough evidence (by CR’s reckoning) to indicate it isn’t as good as it appeared to be.

    via USA Today


    Amazon Says Smartphone Sales in India are Growing Rapidly, Driving Other Sales (Aug 10, 2017)

    NDTV’s Manish Singh has an interview with the head of consumer electronics sales for Amazon in India which provides several interesting insights on trends around smartphone sales there. It seems Amazon’s sales of smartphones in India have risen dramatically in India over the past year, up 100% overall but up by far higher percentages in the smaller cities around the country. Perhaps more importantly, Amazon is finding that a smartphone is often the first purchase a customer makes through the site, but in many cases turns the customer into an Amazon convert, with many other purchases following that first positive experience. In a sense, this is the equivalent of Facebook or Google pursuing strategies to expand internet access: the efforts are designed to create new potential customers who are more likely to be loyal to Amazon, though this would be even more effective if Amazon launched its own devices, something NDTV has previously reported it was working on. The piece here also talks about Amazon’s strategy of offering the broadest possible range of devices and brands while also securing the odd exclusive including phones from OnePlus and a particular model of the iPhone. That’s an interesting strategy in a market where a majority of smartphone sales are still made in offline retail, but online is an increasingly important channel. Overall, some good insights into both Amazon’s India strategy and the Indian smartphone market. Also worth noting: this separate story from NDTV on the new Nokia 6 (from HMD Global) hitting 1 million “registrations” (effectively a soft pre-order) on Amazon’s website in India, which is running some special promotions and bundles around the phone.

    via NDTV


    FCC is Mulling Rule Change to Make Mobile Sufficient for Broadband Coverage (Aug 10, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Daily Podcast Episode 32 – August 9, 2017 (Aug 9, 2017)

    The daily podcast episode for August 9 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 Launches Watch, a New Tab for Video Including Original Content (Aug 9, 2017)

    Right after both Business Insider and Mashable posted sourced stories about it launching tomorrow, Facebook appears to have decided to take the wraps off its new video tab today instead. That this was coming was widely reported, and now we just know a few more details – the new tab in Facebook is called Watch, and will showcase lots of different kinds of videos, although the focus appears to be on personality-driven stuff of the sort that dominates the more popular YouTube channels. In general, the model here feels very YouTube-like, with a subscription model, though Facebook’s apps for TV platforms in recent months have signaled the broad structure and interface, with a combination of videos recommended or liked by friends, things you’ve saved, things that are popular on the platform, and so on. What I don’t see much of in Facebook’s announcement today is the longer form, more produced stuff that’s supposed to be coming too, probably because it’s not ready yet. There will be some other content in there too including the live MLB coverage Facebook acquired rights to a while back starting next season, but in general this is a hub for all kinds of video on Facebook, from professionally produced stuff to the stuff your friends share. Simply calling out video into its own tab, though, is going to raise its profile and thereby push people to spend more time in videos, where they’ll see ads only every few minutes, as opposed to scrolling through the News Feed, where they’ll see ads every few seconds. I’m more and more convinced that’s a risky move for Facebook, because all the anecdotal evidence I’ve seen so far suggests people are really put off by interruptive ads in Facebook videos (I certainly am too), and this whole effort could end up backfiring. That’s something I’m hoping to write about soon. Update: Variety has a listing of additional shows from professional producers which wasn’t in Facebook’s blog post.

    via Facebook


    Tesla is Working with CA and NV Regulators to Prep for Autonomous Trucks (Aug 9, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    NBCU to Shut Down Seeso Comedy Subscription Service (Aug 9, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Anker Debuts Cheaper Echo Dot Competitor Featuring Alexa (Aug 9, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    T-Mobile Launches Budget Smartphone and Offers Others on Lease Programs (Aug 9, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.


    Intel Closes Mobileye Acquisition, Plans to Deploy 100 L4 Autonomous Vehicles (Aug 9, 2017)

    This content requires a subscription to Tech Narratives. Subscribe now by clicking on this link, or read more about subscriptions here.