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.
Xiaomi Billionaire CEO Is Doubling Smartphone Bet on India – Bloomberg (Mar 31, 2017)
The first part of this article gives too much credence to Xiaomi’s CEO’s projections about its future growth, taking them as given even though Xiaomi has struggled to meet its targets for smartphone shipments and growth for the last several years. But the rest of the article is interesting for what it says about where Xiaomi’s focus will be geographically going forward. Importantly, whereas one of the biggest questions about Xiaomi in recent years has been when it would come to the US, it seems to be moving in the opposite direction, doubling down on emerging markets like India rather than pushing into more mature markets. That will limit both its overall addressable market and the average selling price of its phones, given the disposable incomes in those markets and its product focus there, so Xiaomi’s future certainly won’t look very much like the one it projected a number of years ago, as a premium Android-based alternative to the iPhone.
via Bloomberg
Snapchat Makes Stories Searchable – Mashable (Mar 31, 2017)
We’re seeing a shift among the social networks from making accessible only content shared by friends to opening up a much wider range of content from others, whether that content is exposed through recommendations, curation, or, as in this case, search. Given how much social networks have become essentially content hubs, the amount of time people spend on them today is much less about spending time with friends as spending time with content, and so the more content can be surfaced, the longer they’re likely to spend there. Snapchat is now adding search as a way for people to find Stories not shared by their own friends but which might relate to their interests, whether those are sports teams, venues, cities, or other interests (like “puppies”). That should help users both find more content but also potentially discover new accounts to follow on an ongoing basis, all of which should deepen and lengthen engagement. In some ways, this is analogous to the recent work Facebook has done with recommending videos in both its mobile and TV apps – both companies are looking beyond the social graph for ways to surface interesting content for their users. Snapchat, of course, already has its Discover tab for content created by brands and professional outlets.
via Mashable
EFF withdraws Verizon spyware claims – CNET (Mar 31, 2017)
This is an example of the hysteria we’re all being subjected to around the recent overturning of privacy rules regarding ISPs by the US Congress, and the dangerous places it can lead. The EFF, a consumer rights group particularly concerned with privacy, first wrote and then essentially entirely withdrew a post hyperventilating about a new app Verizon is testing on one obscure smartphone, once it gave Verizon a chance to respond and it provided an entirely reasonable response. In and of itself, this story isn’t that important, but it is symptomatic of a lot of the overblown rhetoric we’ve seen in the past week about carriers selling browser histories. The reality is that, because the new rules never actually went into effect, this week’s congressional action changed absolutely nothing from the status quo. And carriers no more have any intention of literally selling anyone’s browser history than Google or anyone else does – what they may do is use your browsing history to target advertising or their own products, just as Google, Facebook, and many other entities already do. Reasonable people can disagree on whether that’s a good thing or not, but it’s a fact of life for all of us already if we use these services. To pretend that what’s happened this week is the beginning of what EFF calls the privacy apocalypse is a total disservice to everyone involved, a form of crying wolf which is likely to make it much harder to get real attention onto real issues in the future.
via CNET (EFF’s withdrawn post here)
Inside Twitter’s Obsessive Quest To Ditch The Egg – Fast Company (Mar 31, 2017)
This has some of the background on why Twitter today replaced its famous egg avatar for users who haven’t chosen their own photo with an outline of a person, but the most interesting part is why Twitter is doing this now. My first reaction on reading the piece was that this just means all the negative stuff trolls do on Twitter will now be associated with these head-and-shoulder outlines rather than eggs, this move was clearly designed to take effect after Twitter had taken several actions to curb abuse and harassment on the site, such that the new avatar could potentially start life without those negative associations. The logic is certainly sound, but it feels like this happened just a little too early in this transition. A few months from now, if Twitter’s various changes have indeed curbed abuse, that would be the perfect time to make this switch, but right now there’s still little evidence of that and people’s negative associations with anonymous accounts (regardless of the avatar) are still far too fresh. Much better to have waited six months and seen results from the abuse curbs before unleashing this new blobby avatar.
via Fast Company
Verizon Said to Be Planning Online TV Package for Summer Launch – Bloomberg (Mar 30, 2017)
It feels like we’re starting to reach something of a tipping point with pay TV providers readying stripped-down streaming versions of their services, with DISH and DirecTV/AT&T already in the market, and Comcast and now Verizon said to be prepping their own versions. It sounds like Verizon’s is going to be much like what we’ve seen so far, in other words a poor substitute for traditional pay TV and most likely something focused on a subset of mostly cable channels for a much smaller monthly fee. What I’m still far more interested in is one of these services that actually offers a more classic channel lineup including broadcast networks but uses the far lower cost of delivery to price it more aggressively. For now, these services are of limited utility for those looking to move to more modern interfaces but keep many of the channels they’re used to.
via Bloomberg
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey is leaving Facebook – Recode (Mar 30, 2017)
This isn’t a huge surprise – Luckey has been very quiet at Facebook over the past year or so, and especially since he was in the news a while back for allegedly funding and/or creating some political material during last year’s presidential election. It’s also important to note that he hasn’t had a clear managerial role at Facebook/Oculus since he arrived there, with others taking on the day to day responsibility for moving the product forward. So in some ways his departure is probably a good thing for Facebook, which has seemed reticent to associate itself directly with him in recent months.
via Recode
Amazon and Walmart are in an all-out price war that is terrifying America’s biggest brands – Recode (Mar 30, 2017)
This is a fascinating article that looks at the competitive dynamics between two of the most powerful companies in retail: Amazon and Walmart. Walmart is legendary for the pressure it puts on its suppliers to conform to price expectations, but it appears that it’s going even further in demanding that those suppliers get their costs and prices down so as to allow it to compete with Amazon more effectively. Meanwhile, Amazon is pricing in a way that’s not necessarily rational or consistent with generating profits, which means that the competition between the two, while great for customers in the short term, is likely unsustainable for both the retailers and their suppliers, and something will eventually have to give. No surprise, then, that some of the CPG companies are starting to look to alternative channels, though realistically no big brand can afford to be off either of these companies shelves – in warehouses or stores – for long. This is likely to get a lot uglier before it gets any better. Meanwhile, that means that we may see more slowing of growth at Amazon along the lines for what we saw a little of in Q4 last year, while Walmart and its ilk will continue to pursue stronger growth at lower margins.
via Recode
Samsung’s DeX dock for the Galaxy S8 costs $150 and will ship in April – The Verge (Mar 30, 2017)
I actually excluded this DeX solution from my various comments on the Samsung announcements yesterday, not deliberately, but probably because it seemed like the least important thing Samsung announced and I simply forgot about it. These solutions have been around for years, and they’ve never done well, only in part because they’re clunky but mostly because the compelling use cases are pretty hard to find. Anyone who regularly travels almost certainly has a laptop they could plug into a similar setup (or use independently), while anyone who doesn’t would be unlikely to justify the investment in not just this $150 dock but also several hundred dollars’ worth of monitor, keyboard, and mouse too for occasional use. I did spend this morning with Samsung’s enterprise team and saw some impressive demos of virtual Windows desktops from Citrix and VMware running on this solution, and those are slightly more compelling than the Android hybrid this thing runs by default as a desktop experience, but the caveats all still apply. This still feels like a very niche solution which very few people are actually going to find useful.
via The Verge
Streaming Crossed 50% of Music Revenue in the US in 2016 – RIAA (Mar 30, 2017)
The RIAA just released its annual report on the financial state of the US music industry, and it appears that streaming crossed the 50% mark of recorded music revenue in 2016 for the first time, landing at 51% for the year, up from just 34% a year earlier, an increase of around $1.5 billion year on year in total streaming revenue. Apple Music was clearly part of that picture, as it grossed around $1.5 billion globally last year by my calculations, but once you spread that number across the countries where Apple operates and subtract its cut, it clearly wasn’t the only contributor to growth, with Spotify obviously another big contributor. Other things worth noting: this is really about paid streaming, which dominates overall streaming revenue, with around two thirds of the total despite far fewer users (around 25 million at the end of the year versus a likely 150 million for ad-based streaming). This streaming growth actually helped drive digital and overall revenue growth significantly higher this year after a fairly stagnant 2015 too. Also, based on my analysis of the three major music labels, streaming is still under 40% of their recorded music revenue globally, so the US is ahead of the global curve here.
via RIAA (PDF) (see also a Twitter moment I created about these numbers here)
Twitter Removes Usernames in Replies from 140-Character Limit – Mashable (Mar 30, 2017)
This has been a heck of a long time coming – Twitter first announced this change way back in May last year, but it’s taken until now to actually implement the change, supposedly because Twitter has been testing various ways of making it work, though we’ve seen essentially this version in the wild now for some time. Though this change is positive in principle, because it frees up the payload of the tweet from the signaling, allowing more of the 140 characters to be used for content, not everyone is a fan of the implementation. That’s because the indication a tweet is a reply has now been extracted from the tweet itself and put above it in the interface, which makes it harder to see that context. There was no perfect way to achieve this objective without at least some of that tradeoff, but it’s still ridiculous that it took Twitter this long to implement the change when it seems to have been working on this specific implementation for months. It’s just another sign that Twitter continues to move very slowly in evolving its core product, and that fixes for big remaining frustrations are likely to take equally long to emerge.
via Mashable
AT&T wins FirstNet network contract – RCR Wireless News (Mar 30, 2017)
This contract has been in the works for an extremely long time, and even now the award was almost derailed by a lawsuit from a losing bidder. The concept of FirstNet arose out of incidents like the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which general purpose communication networks were knocked out or overwhelmed and first responders were left without interoperable means to communicate with each other. AT&T has therefore won the contract to build a national communications network for first responders alongside the traditional mobile network it operates. That’s worth a good chunk of money up front but should also lead to a decent revenue stream over the long term too – and it had better, because AT&T is apparently going to be spending $40 billion to build and maintain the network over the next 25 years.
The Samsung Galaxy S8 voice assistant Bixby can’t recognise British accents – Business Insider (Mar 30, 2017)
This is a great example of something I wrote about on Techpinions this week, which is that here in the US we often assume technologies available to us are ubiquitous globally, but that’s actually rarely the case. In this case, it’s the Bixby assistant / interface that ships with the Samsung Galaxy S8 which not only won’t work in languages other than English and Korean but won’t offer voice services at all in the UK, where of course accents are different. (Another tidbit in this piece is that it won’t actually work in US English until May). Building voice interfaces is tough to begin with, but localizing them for different accents and languages is another massive layer of work, often made harder by the fact that voice recognition technologies are trained on single languages like US English.
via Business Insider
Chase Had Ads on 400,000 Sites. Then on Just 5,000. Same Results – The New York Times (Mar 30, 2017)
This is a great illustration of the broader fallout from the recent YouTube / Google backlash from advertisers: in this case, JP Morgan is dramatically narrowing the number and range of sites on which it will advertise, and it’s about to do the same thing with YouTube as well. In both cases, it’s taking that action itself to whitelist sites and channels rather than relying on any Google tools to do so. In other words, even if Google doesn’t choose to solve the problem by limiting ads to a smaller number of sites or YouTube channels, advertisers may go ahead and do so anyway. That’s going to be bad for the long tail of creators and sites, who may see both overall ad volumes and prices drop significantly. This isn’t nearly over, and even if Google and YouTube address some advertiser concerns, I suspect we’ll see ongoing fallout and a narrowing of where big brands advertise going forward. See also this post from music video service Vevo, which is making a pitch that its YouTube channel and videos are a safe space within the platform.
via New York Times
Microsoft touts Microsoft-customized edition of Samsung Galaxy S8 – ZDNet (Mar 30, 2017)
This is an interesting little announcement – it’s short on details, but it appears Microsoft will be selling a version of the Galaxy S8 with more of its apps pre-installed. The big downside is that this seems to be a highly manual process and the devices are only available at full price from Microsoft rather than through carrier stores and installment plans, so that’s going to dramatically limit the addressable market. But it’s interesting to see Microsoft deepening its investment in Android at a time when its own mobile devices continue to be all but irrelevant.
via ZDNet
Uber Crash Shows Human Traits in Self-Driving Software – Bloomberg (Mar 29, 2017)
I think the headline here would more appropriately read “Uber crash shows bystanders see human traits in self-driving software” because there’s no evidence that the car actually gunned a light turning yellow in this case, but that’s how witnesses perceived it. (I joked on Twitter earlier that perhaps Uber’s autonomy software had been taught the company’s values, one of which is “always be hustlin'”.) The reality is that self-driving cars are often taught to emulate human behavior rather than driving in some idealized perfect way, because that’s what makes human passengers feel comfortable and ultimately trust the technology. But I very much doubt that Uber’s cars are taught to accelerate through lights in the process of turning yellow or red. It appears that police concluded Uber’s technology was not at fault in this crash, and after a brief break over the weekend, its cars are back on the roads in the various cities where they’re operating. But given Uber’s failure rates relative to Waymo’s, and the fact that Uber cars are carrying paying customers, there’s certainly potential for a lot more crashes, some of them actually Uber’s fault.
via Bloomberg
Lyft tests Shuttle, a commuter service that’s basically a bus – Mashable (Mar 29, 2017)
Though I think we tend to think of services like Uber and Lyft as disrupting the status quo in transportation, it’s sometimes amusing to watch them instead recreate existing models, as in this case, where Lyft appears to be creating what’s essentially a bus service. Now, it’s still different in that it’s not tied to set routes, the drivers aren’t professionals or employed by any municipality as most bus services are, and the pricing is unpredictable, so there may be both pros and cons to this approach. But the more adoption of ride sharing services grows, the more they’re going to emulate existing modes of mass transportation like buses, because those continue to be the most efficient and cost effective ways to get people from A to B, especially during commuting times. Whether they end up being better than traditional mass transit in the same way as the original ride sharing services were better than traditional taxis remains to be seen.
via Mashable
Behind the Decline at China’s Tech Giant Baidu — The Information (Mar 29, 2017)
This is a fascinating piece, and well worth a read if you’re interested in the Chinese tech market. It’s a market I follow less closely, but I was struck by Baidu’s recent decline in fortunes and Alibaba’s rapid rise in the ad business when I was doing research for a recent piece on global ad revenue leaders. Baidu has always been referred to as the Chinese Google, and although that’s a horrible oversimplification, it’s hard to avoid the sense in reading this article that part of its trouble stems from pursuing many of the same areas and strategies as Google but with less success. Even the resentment among the successful search advertising employees of higher profile but non revenue generating businesses is reminiscent of the situation at Alphabet, though the latter has been reining in some of its excesses lately. Even outside the Chinese, context, though, this is a good cautionary tale on how quickly seemingly indomitable Internet companies can see their fortunes turn south.
via The Information
Spotify Debuts ‘Traffic Jams’, A Show With a Familiar Concept – Variety (Mar 29, 2017)
It’s impossible not to see this new Spotify show as, to put it charitably, inspired by Carpool Karaoke, especially given the role the standalone version will play in Apple Music. But kudos to Spotify for finding a new angle on the concept and making it distinctive. It’s also interesting to see hip hop as the focus here – where Carpool Karaoke crosses all genres, this show will be much narrower and therefore find a smaller but potentially more engaged and passionate audience. It’s important to note that hip hop has been a big part of the rise of streaming service, and Apple has heavily leant on hip hop in building its music service, especially when it comes to exclusives and Beats 1. I’m curious to see how each of these shows does on its respective service, especially given that James Corden, arguably the element that makes the original version of Carpool Karaoke work, won’t be a permanent feature in the Apple version.
via Variety
Facebook will launch group chatbots at F8 – TechCrunch (Mar 29, 2017)
This is yet another sign that Facebook feels its initial bot strategy from last year isn’t panning out (something I predicted at the time) and that it needs to try alternative approaches. It’s iterated fairly rapidly since then and added some functions to make interacting with bots easier, and it now sounds like it’s trying another different tack, allowing developers to integrate bots into group conversations. But those bots won’t be interactive AI-type creatures, but instead will provide updates on events or processes, such as sporting matches or food orders. Like earlier pivots, this seems more modest in its ambitions but also more likely to be successful. But Facebook’s direction here stands in marked contrast to Microsoft’s, which continues to work on AI-based chatbots.
via TechCrunch
Microsoft launches Ruuh, yet another AI chatbot – ZDNet (Mar 29, 2017)
It’s fascinating to watch Microsoft continue to experiment with AI chatbots after its first effort, Tay, went so badly wrong. But the company’s response to that embarrassment is a sign of the culture changes that have happened at Microsoft over the last few years, as this piece from USA Today a while back points out. Microsoft isn’t afraid of failing, picking itself up, and trying again, and that’s admirable in an area as competitively intense as AI. It’s also interesting to watch these chatbots be launched into markets outside the US with other languages and/or accents (its other recent effort in this space is based in China). There’s a long way to go until these chatbots become really useful, but Microsoft seems determined to keep trying until it gets it right, while another early proponent, Facebook, seems to be changing its strategy lately.
via ZDNet