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.
Avis Budget Group to Supply Uber Drivers With Zipcars (Feb 8, 2017)
Two alternatives to traditional car ownership come together here, as Avis/Budget provides Zipcars to Uber drivers on an hourly basis. This deal could help expand Uber’s base of potential drivers beyond those who already own a car including among those who only want to drive part time, as well as dealing with the sometimes thorny issue of insurance. The big car rental companies are each trying to figure out how they fit into these new models – Enterprise has been approaching carmakers with offers to help them manage ride sharing fleets, and now there’s this deal between another of the big names and Uber. Meanwhile, some of the big carmakers themselves have been buying or taking stakes in smaller new rental companies as a way of hedging against a future of less car ownership. Though a lot of the disruption in this space has been driven by startups coming in from outside the industry, each of the legacy players has an enormous vested interest in ensuring a strong role in the future models too.
Netflix Plans New Toys, Merchandise Based on Hit TV Shows – Bloomberg (Feb 7, 2017)
This is an interesting but totally logical move from Netflix – I just listened to Disney’s earnings call earlier this afternoon, and was reminded once again of how big a chunk of revenue the company derives from merchandising (not to mention theme parks and other businesses which piggyback off characters from its movies and TV shows). I’ve already seen smaller tie-ins like King Julien showing up on my kids’ yogurt, and it sounds like Netflix has done some more direct merchandising with Hot Topic already too. So this is a very natural evolution, but it’s interesting to see Netflix describe this as mostly about marketing rather than driving a big new revenue stream. In time, it could certainly achieve both, and that’s another helpful way to offset some of the big spending on original content.
via Bloomberg
Apple Took 92% Of Smartphone Industry Profits In Q4 (not really) – IBD (Feb 7, 2017)
Every quarter, there’s a slew of headlines on this basis, usually based on analysis from Cannacord Genuity. The big flaw in this analysis (and the reason I inserted a “not really” into the headline) is that it only looks at those players that publicly report profits from a smartphone unit, plus Apple. As the article points out, the “survey” of six “major” smartphone vendors includes the #1 and #2 but also BlackBerry and Microsoft, which each shipped well under a million smartphones last quarter. It entirely leaves out the third, fourth, and fifth largest smartphone vendors (Huawei, Oppo, and Vivo) and other big names from the top 10 like Lenovo and Xiaomi. Lenovo is publicly traded, but hasn’t reported yet (and is likely to have been unprofitable in smartphones again), but no-one really knows how profitable the others are. So the headline is misleading when it talks about “industry profits” – it’s a very narrow analysis of six vendors, only two of which are in the top 10. Now, that’s not to say that it isn’t likely that Apple captured the vast majority of profits in the smartphone market yet again – it almost certainly did, and this situation highlights both the general challenges with driving meaningful profits from consumer electronics and the specific challenges associated with competing on the basis of Android in smartphones. But this – as with the flawed quarterly market share rankings with their false precision – grates every quarter because it’s shoddy analysis.
via IBD
Apple Hires Amazon’s Fire TV Head to Run Apple TV Business – Bloomberg (Feb 7, 2017)
Two things worth noting here: firstly, this is one of a relatively small number of senior hires at Apple in recent months amid what has seemed like a larger number of departures from the upper echelons there (including one earlier today). In and of itself, the numbers don’t mean much – Apple is a massive company and many of those poaching its employees are smaller (notably Tesla) such that the balance will always be lopsided in favor of the smaller companies, where promotion opportunities will also be greater. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, this hire itself is into a hardware product role, but it frees up the guy who had been running the Apple TV product to focus on content negotiations, which is arguably where Apple really needs to be putting its investment right now. I continue to maintain that this is the year when Apple finally launches its own subscription video service – the pieces are in place with the Apple TV and the TV app it launched last fall, and the market is getting to a tipping point where an over-the-top pay TV alternative is both more feasible and more needed than ever. This move will hopefully help move Apple along in its pursuit of that goal.
via Bloomberg
Google debuts Cloud Search, a smart search engine for G Suite customers – TechCrunch (Feb 7, 2017)
The article doesn’t mention Microsoft once, but talks about Google’s consumer products several times, which makes it feel like this is rather missing the point. This is an enterprise offering and therefore goes head on against various Microsoft products and services intended to achieve similar aims (as well as those from Box and other smaller, more specialized enterprise software and service providers). Both Google and Microsoft are focusing on their AI skills as a source of differentiation in enterprise file management, by promising to help employees find the files they need. Search is, of course, a core Google skill, but it operates very differently in an enterprise file system from on the open web, and Microsoft may actually be better placed here given its long history and the massive investment many companies have made in Microsoft tools in this setting.
via TechCrunch
Apple Said to Revive Efforts to Sell Used iPhones in India – Bloomberg (Feb 7, 2017)
The Indian government shot down Apple’s previous attempt to sell refurbished phones in India, but it sounds like it’s giving it another try. That’s good, because these refurb phones are about the only way Apple is going to dramatically reduce the price of iPhones in India and break out of the niche premium market there and into the lower tiers of the market, where far more phones are sold. Between taxes and import fees, iPhones are actually typically more expensive in India than elsewhere in the world, even though what Apple really needs there is to sell cheaper phones, so re-selling used phones is the way to go. There’s still been no official confirmation from Apple of its plans to build iPhones in India, but if that really is on the table, it’s possible that Apple is using that investment as a carrot to persuade the government to allow it to pursue its other goals in India, including selling refurbished phones and opening its own retail stores. It’ll be fascinating to see if it succeeds in getting what it wants – the original reason for rejecting Apple’s earlier request was somewhat ridiculous, but the reasoning doesn’t matter as long as the government says no.
via Bloomberg
Apple exec for business sales departs – Reuters (Feb 7, 2017)
John Solomon certainly isn’t a high profile figure outside of Apple, but he’s been managing an important aspect of Apple’s overall business: enterprise sales, which make up around 10% of total revenues. His appointment was met with some raised eyebrows among the Apple faithful – a printer salesman as Apple employee? – but the key here isn’t product expertise but knowing how to navigate the enterprise procurement world, which Solomon no doubt understood well. The point is, there are lots of people that understand that world, so he shouldn’t be too hard to replace, and Apple could probably use some fresh help here in supporting their recent partnerships with IBM, Cisco, Deloitte and others with a really solid sales approach.
via Reuters
Google’s Waze App Is Morphing Into A Low-Cost Congestion Fighter Via Carpool – Forbes (Feb 7, 2017)
Although most of the attention Alphabet gets around cars is around its Waymo division, which is focused on autonomous driving, Google’s Waze group is also doing interesting things around another of the three major shifts happening in transportation: ride sharing and urban mobility. In this case, it’s not so much an Uber- or Lyft-like driver-provided service as a simple carpooling arrangement with a little compensation for the driver, but in that sense it has the potential to be more cost effective, using existing infrastructure to provide lower cost transportation and reducing congestion in the process. Google is building a ride sharing capability much more subtly and quietly than it is autonomous cars, but the former has far grater potential to make a big difference in disrupting traditional transportation in the near term.
via Forbes
Pittsburgh officials are criticizing Uber’s “one-way” relationship with the city — Quartz (Feb 7, 2017)
The remarks quoted here are very much in keeping with those reported a few weeks back (also by Quartz), but they go a lot further. For one thing, these are on the record comments from senior officials, not sourced reporting based on a public records request. It’s increasingly clear that Pittsburgh officials are fed up with Uber’s attitude as it operates in the city, and this is one of the handful of cities where Uber is supposed to be working most closely with local authorities. That’s not a great sign for Uber’s potential to have good working relationships with other cities going forward, especially as it seeks special dispensation to test autonomous vehicles. Note also this story from the Verge yesterday about Uber’s legal battle with Seattle over unionization.
via Quartz
Apple Pay most popular mobile payment service among US retailers, survey finds – NFC World (Feb 7, 2017)
This survey suggests that Apple Pay is the most popular mobile payment service among 500 top retailers surveyed by Boston Retail Partners (BRP). It beat out PayPal (which I’ve never seen at retail other than at Home Depot, but appears to be largely used by smaller entities rather than big chains), and a variety of other card network-, bank, or store-specific alternatives like Chase Pay, MasterCard PayPass, and Visa Checkout, as well as Android Pay, which was accepted by 24% versus Apple Pay’s 36%. That’s good progress for Apple Pay, but still makes it a minority option even among these larger retailers, which tallies with my own experience of trying to find places to use it – where I live, two of the nearby grocery stores take it, but our closest and default store doesn’t, Subway and one or two other fast food places take it, but most don’t, and several other places (including CVS) have NFC-enabled terminals but block Apple Pay. The progress is good, but until Apple Pay is available more often than not, I suspect many people will just never bother trying – there’s too much embarrassment around a failed payment for most people to endure the trial and error process it often entails.
via NFC World (original report in PDF here)
More than 33 Million Customers Have Used Amazon Payments to Make a Purchase (Feb 7, 2017)
Amazon put out some new numbers around its third party Payments platform today – volume nearly doubled in 2016, 33 million customers have now used it, over half those using it are Prime members, and around a third of transactions were on a mobile device. There’s good growth here for Payments, which doesn’t get much press but has made quiet but steady progress since its launch. But it’s also worth putting in context – the leader in the space, PayPal, reported 197 million active customer accounts as of the end of 2016, up from 179 million a year earlier, so Amazon may be growing but it’s way behind. Amazon, of course, has over 300 million active customer accounts itself, but most of those only use their accounts to shop on Amazon.com. All the more interesting, then, that the two companies are apparently in talks about working together in some way.
via Amazon
Apple’s “new” UAC port wasn’t made by Apple, and it isn’t new – Ars Technica (Feb 7, 2017)
An update on an item from a couple of days ago. The headline kind of says it all, but here’s just a little more detail: the “new” UAC connector Apple added to the MFi program isn’t actually new – it’s an existing connector (though Apple gave it a new name), and Apple added it to the program because licensees were asking for it. So we can all move along now.
via Ars Technica
Twitter says it’s going to start pushing more abusive tweets out of sight – Recode (Feb 7, 2017)
This is one of those times when the word “finally” seems the apt response. Twitter has denied and stalled its way around the abuse issue, and never seems to have taken it nearly seriously enough, but the promise last week that it was finally ready to start moving faster seems to be bearing at least some fruit. And as I said last week, it’s presumably not a coincidence that Twitter’s Q4 results are out on Thursday – I’m sure the company would like to defuse the abuse issue a little and focus on other things on its earnings call. The changes announced today are positive, but I see at least two flaws: firstly, there’s no real transparency over the rules used to designate tweets or replies as either unsafe or “less relevant”. I understand the desire not to spell out exactly what filters are used to avoid malefactors gaming the system, but this is likely to trigger lots of complaining when an opaque algorithm gets things wrong. Secondly, and in a bigger picture sense, this is all still about presentation and not about actually policing the platform for true abuse – so many reports of abuse and harassment have gone entirely unheeded by Twitter, and none of this will address that fundamental issue.
via Recode (Twitter’s own blog post here)
YouTube Introduces Live Mobile Video for Top Creators – Mashable (Feb 7, 2017)
Live video is already a big deal at YouTube, but streaming live video from a mobile device has been surprisingly late in YouTube’s rollout of the feature. Now, it’s finally making it available to channel owners with over 10,000 subscribers, after testing it for months with a smaller group of creators. This feels like a smart way to start, even if it’s somewhat ironic that the video platform known for user generated content will close the feature off to regular users, at least for the time being. If the quality of the early live video on YouTube is good, it could do much better than on Facebook, where most of the live video I’ve seen has been pretty poor, and feels more like spam in my feed than a useful addition. YouTube seems to be sensibly prioritizing quality over quantity here. The monetization angle is interesting – mid-roll ads are always interruptive, and YouTube appears to be focusing on paid comments, a much more unique model and one which doesn’t detract from the video itself. I’m very curious to see how much that feature gets used, though Google will never tell us how much money it makes this way.
via Mashable
Thirty Additional Companies Join Tech Amicus Brief on Immigration Ban – USA Today (Feb 7, 2017)
This is really just an addendum to yesterday’s item about the amicus brief filed by (then) 97 tech companies, as some 30 additional companies added their names to the brief yesterday afternoon. Among them were some of the Elon Musk-controlled holdouts from the initial set, Tesla and SpaceX as well as a number of smaller companies which simply don’t seem to have been looped in to the initial effort. The remaining holdouts are increasingly conspicuous by their absence, though it remains more consumer- than enterprise-focused as a group (HP did sign on later in the day, but IBM, Oracle, and other enterprise heavyweights are still missing), and the telecoms carriers and cable companies are all missing as a group too.
via TechCrunch
The Latest YouTube Stats on Audience Demographics – Google (Feb 7, 2017)
There are some interesting numbers here – not all of them are new, but the collection of them all into one place is, and some are pretty striking. Some of the key points: time spent on YouTube is rising rapidly – doubling from 2015 to 2016 among all adults, but tripling among users 55+; YouTube reaches 95% of online adults over 35 in a month; YouTube users skew slightly female and are more likely to have a college degree than the general population. To my mind, the takeaways are that YouTube has massive scale, probably broader than any other video platform or service in the US, and that it’s reaching that stage of its maturity where its growth is stronger among newer groups of users, notably older users, which mirrors what’s happened with Facebook in recent years. This is a massive scale, mature platform – the challenge is monetizing it effectively and generating a profit, something Google has seemed increasingly focused on in the last couple of years.
via Google
Vizio to Pay Fines Over Unlawful Tracking and Selling of User Data (Feb 7, 2017)
It turns out Vizio has been collecting extremely granular data on users of its smart TVs, and then matching its IP data with offline data about individuals and households (essentially everything short of actual names). And it’s done all this without making users properly aware that this was what it was doing. The data related to everything consumers watched on the TVs, whether the content came through Vizio’s own smart TV apps or merely through one of its inputs from another box or antenna. Something I’d forgotten was that Vizio filed an S-1 in preparation to go public back in 2015 – it never actually went public because Chinese player LeEco decided to acquire them (a deal due to close shortly). Aside from talking about how many TVs the company sells, the S-1 makes a big deal of of the “up to 100 billion viewing data points daily” it collects from 8 million TVs, and touts its InScape data services, which package up this data for advertisers, although it says this data is “anonymized”, which feels like an alternative fact at this point. The risk factors in the filing even mention possible regulatory threats to such data gathering, so it’s probably fair to say that Vizio shared more information with its potential investors about the data it was collecting than it did with end users. To settle the case, Vizio has to pay a total of $3.7m in fines to the FTC and the state of New Jersey (whose AG brought the suit with the FTC), discontinue the practice, and disclose it to consumers. I can’t wait to see how it manages that last point – imagine turning on your Vizio TV one day and seeing a message pop up about the fact that it’s been tracking your every pixel for the last several years. Assuming that’s done right, it could be the most damaging part of it this for Vizio, which made over $3 billion in revenue in its most recently reported financial years. Meanwhile, yet another headache for LeEco to manage.
Periscope CEO Kayvon Beykpour is now running all of Twitter’s live video products- Recode (Feb 6, 2017)
Live video is a big focus for Twitter, arguably to the exclusion of almost any other major innovation in the core product, and so it makes sense that it has a leader who reports directly to Jack Dorsey. But Twitter has always had two approaches to live video: Periscope, the original play, is a standalone app focused on user-generated content, and then there are all Twitter’s live video partnerships with existing content owners like the NFL and Bloomberg. It makes sense to start bringing these products together under a single leadership to make sure they work together effectively, but I think it’s also quite possible that we start to see Periscope integrated more into the core app and lose some of its identity as a separate product. Hopefully this will also free up Keith Coleman, who runs product at Twitter, to focus on all the other things that need fixing.
via Recode
Apple plans new smaller Ultra Accessory Connector (UAC) for Made-for-iPhone accessories – 9to5Mac (Feb 6, 2017)
This is one of those reports where we have the alleged what, but not the official why. The last big example of this was the pervasive rumors of the demise of the 3.5mm headphone jack before the iPhone 7 launched. The rumors turned out to be accurate, but none of them came with an explanation, which meant that for months we had screeds about Apple’s anti-consumer stance without any kind of input or defense from Apple, which hadn’t even announced a change yet. With that in mind, though it’s tempting to complain about yet another new connector technology from Apple (on top of USB-C in MacBooks and Lightning in almost everything else), we don’t know yet exactly what it will be used for. At some point this year, Apple will no doubt give us an explanation, and we’ll have to decide whether it’s a sign of courage, user-hostile, or something in-between. (For what it’s worth, I was pretty positive on Apple’s headphone jack transition.)
via 9to5Mac
Google makes it easier to see and share publishers’ real URLs from AMP pages – Search Engine Land (Feb 6, 2017)
One of the biggest frustrations publishers have had with Google’s AMP format is that it takes over the URL of the site where the content originates. Given that many URLs are shared in shortened form in Twitter clients and similar venues, this often means all the viewer sees is a google.com domain, which can be confusing. This tweak to the AMP settings doesn’t solve the fundamental problem that AMP pages use Google URLs, but offers a workaround of sorts allowing users to share the canonical original URL for the publication instead. That’s a start, but the domain issue and other reasons not to like AMP and other similar formats like Facebook Instant Articles remain.