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.
Google Debuts New Native AdSense Ads for Third Party Sites (Jul 6, 2017)
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Qualcomm Files New Case Against Apple and Asks ITC to Block Import of Intel iPhones (Jul 6, 2017)
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Jawbone Has Begun Liquidation Proceedings (Jul 6, 2017)
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Essential Phone Fails to Launch Within Promised 30-Day Window (Jul 6, 2017)
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Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter Reported to Seek World Cup Highlights From Fox (Jul 6, 2017)
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Instagram Beefs Up Direct Messaging Feature with Photo and Video Replies (Jul 6, 2017)
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Microsoft to Lay Off Thousands as Part of Reorganization (Jul 6, 2017)
Microsoft has now confirmed the layoffs which have been rumored for the last week or so, and which are the second part of the announcement made earlier this week regarding the restructuring of the company’s sales organization. CNBC says 3,000 jobs will go, while Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet, who I’m more inclined to trust with this stuff, says only that there will be “several thousand” cuts, with some of those losing jobs found roles elsewhere in the company. This is a relatively small round of layoffs for Microsoft given recent history, as the company’s core workforce excluding LinkedIn has fallen from a peak of around 128,000 in 2014 to just over 110,000 at the end of March already. The layoffs are likely to impact the sales team reorganized earlier this week, reflecting an ongoing shift away from legacy products towards cloud services. Over the last few years, Microsoft has been beefing up its support and consulting staff while reducing its engineering numbers considerably and keeping its overall sales and marketing staff roughly constant at around 50,000. Interestingly, Microsoft’s US/international employee split is now back at nearly 60/40, roughly where it was before the Nokia devices acquisition pushed it to about 48/52. The vast majority of the employees taken on during that period have now either been eliminated or moved to other roles in the company, though Microsoft currently has around 10,000 more core employees (and around 20,000 more including LinkedIn) than it did in mid-2013. Therefore, although this stinks for those being laid off, it’s not an enormous reorg by Microsoft standards, and mostly reflects subtler shifts in the emphasis of the sales and marketing teams and other effects from Microsoft’s ongoing move from legacy to cloud services, in what’s now become almost an annual ritual at the company.
via ZDNet
SoundCloud Cuts 40% of Staff, Closes San Francisco and London Offices (Jul 6, 2017)
SoundCloud is significantly reducing its staff and closing two of its offices in a bid to cut costs and reduce losses as one potential acquisition after another seems to fizzle. Twitter and Spotify were each reported as suitors earlier, but both ultimately moved on, and just in the last few days French music streaming service Deezer was also mulling an acquisition. I’m guessing these cuts are a sign that that deal also fell through and SoundCloud now realizes its only hope for survival is going it alone. That continues to be a really tough proposition, because SoundCloud continues to struggle to find a role for itself as a paid rather than free service. It’s become enormously popular as a free music source, but almost all the artists who start their careers on SoundCloud eventually cross over to the mainstream music industry and its more established business models, including paid streaming, which is becoming increasingly important and is driving almost all the revenue growth in the industry. SoundCloud’s failure to cross over with those artists to the paid streaming world is likely to be fatal unless salvation comes in the form of an acquisition.
via Bloomberg
Amazon and DISH Reportedly Discussing IoT or Other Wireless Partnership (Jul 6, 2017)
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Daily Podcast Episode 7 – July 5, 2017 (Jul 5, 2017)
Some of you may have noticed that I’ve started doing a daily podcast for Tech Narratives, which rounds up the day’s items from the site in brief and also highlights some other news I haven’t covered on the site. Each episode is about 10-15 minutes in length and publishes around 4pm US Pacific Time on weekdays. Here’s episode 7, the episode for July 5, 2017, which covers the news from the last couple of days including the 4th of July holiday here in the US. As always, I welcome your feedback on this or anything else on the site. You can find the podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Overcast, or other podcast apps. From now on, you’ll start to see the podcast featured in one of the items on the site each day.
Snapchat Adds New Backdrop and Voice Filter Features and External Linking (Jul 5, 2017)
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Nokia and Xiaomi Agree to Share Patents, Collaborate on Technology (Jul 5, 2017)
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Alibaba Announces $73 Voice Speaker (Jul 5, 2017)
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Volvo’s New Cars will All be Electrified from 2019 Onwards (Jul 5, 2017)
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Amazon’s Alexa Now Has 15,000 “Skills” (Apps) (Jul 5, 2017)
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Tencent Imposes Restrictions on Children’s Use of Popular Mobile Game (Jul 5, 2017)
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Apple News Reportedly Readying Ad Platform Integration for Publishers (Jul 5, 2017)
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Baidu Fleshes out its Open Platform for Autonomous Driving (Jul 5, 2017)
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Subscriptions Drove Nearly 80% of US Streaming Music Listening in H1 (Jul 5, 2017)
BuzzAngle, a company which tracks the North American music industry, has released a first-half 2017 report, with lots of numbers on music consumption patterns in the US over the past six months, and Variety here has a summary of some of the key findings. One of the most striking numbers to me is that subscription streams accounted for nearly 80% of total streaming audio plays in the first half, with ad-based streaming only driving 21% of listens. That was slightly surprising to me, because the number of ad-based streaming music users is much higher than the number of paid subscribers, so I went back and checked some earlier data from BuzzAngle in this year-end 2016 report. It appears that this balance began to shift dramatically starting in the middle of 2015, which is not coincidentally when Apple Music launched. Importantly, BuzzAngle treats streaming video plays of music (e.g. music videos on YouTube) as a separate category, so the split mentioned above only accounts for pure audio streaming such as Spotify’s free and paid tiers and their equivalents. But it’s still striking that the balance has gone from roughly 50/50 between subscription and free audio streaming at the beginning of 2015 to 80/20 in Q2 of this year. And in Q2, subscription audio streaming actually eclipsed combined ad-based audio and video streams for the first time, so it’s now the largest category even when video plays are included. It’s worth remembering that this is US data, and the US has shifted dramatically from being a streaming laggard to being a leader over the last few years, so this certainly isn’t reflective of global behavior. But it is worth noting that subscription music streaming not only provides the vast majority of revenue and profits in the US, but now also a majority of actual plays as well.
via Variety
Samsung Reportedly Working on Bixby-Powered Home Speaker (Jul 5, 2017)
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