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.

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    FuboTV Raises $55m, Adds Scripps Channels and Financing (Jun 19, 2017)

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    Twitter Launches #SeeEverySide Marketing Campaign (Jun 19, 2017)

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    Apple Poaches Two Sony TV Execs to Lead Video Programming (Jun 16, 2017)

    Apple has hired two executives who previously helped make Breaking Bad and The Crown on behalf of AMC and Netflix respectively as its new heads of video programming globally. Those two pieces of content are powerful examples of the role of original content in boosting video brands – Breaking Bad was a major plank of AMC’s push over recent years to turn itself into more than just a catalog player, and while The Crown isn’t Netflix’s most popular bit of original content, it’s very good and a sign of the kind of big-budget stuff it’s going to be making more of going forward. As such, these are fascinating hires, given that for now at least Apple is on the opposite of that process – commissioning rather than producing original video content. These hires could be a sign that change is coming, given that these two new execs have experience producing and not just commissioning video, but that’s a somewhat unusual model for original content compared with other major players like Netflix, which have still tended to farm out original content rather than lead production internally. It’s possible that they will merely become equivalents of Ted Sarandos at Netflix, using their expertise to commission and oversee outside projects, but they seem somewhat odd hires in that context. All of this, meanwhile, seems much less plausible in a continued narrow focus on video content in Apple Music, and much more as part of a broader push into video ahead of a subscription video service. Two other things worth noting: Apple put out a press release on the hires, something it does very rarely indeed, suggesting it wants to make a fuss out of this. Secondly, these two will report directly to Eddy Cue, which will set up an interesting dynamic with Jimmy Iovine, who has seemed to loom large over all of Apple’s content efforts, but especially in video, and who I’ve speculated before is a bit of a loose cannon in this area. I’m hoping these two coming on board provides some more clarity in who owns original video content at Apple.

    via WSJ


    Walmart to Acquire Online Men’s Clothing Retailer Bonobos for $310 million (Jun 16, 2017)

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    EU Reportedly Facing Possible Billion Euro Fine in First Chunk of EU Antitrust Case (Jun 16, 2017)

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    ★ Amazon Announces Intention to Buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion (Jun 16, 2017)

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    Netflix Changes its Wording about Net Neutrality (Jun 16, 2017)

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    Facebook Solicits User Feedback on How to Tackle Issues Like Censorship and Terrorism (Jun 15, 2017)

    A while back, Facebook said it would be soliciting user feedback on its policies for moderation and censorship around thorny issues like terrorism and freedom of speech, and it’s now putting a program in place to begin doing this in earnest. It has listed some of those thorny questions on its website and also launched its first debate, on terrorism, separately. On paper, getting user feedback on these issues seems a great way to absolve itself from the role of arbiter or gatekeeper of what’s allowed on Facebook – it’s also said in the past that it wants to be sensitive to local cultural norms around these things rather than having a single global policy, which seems sensible. But the most likely outcome is a range of views expressed and real division around some of these issues, which means Facebook will still have to come down on one side or the other, and will now do so explicitly going against the stated views of many of its users. This is definitely a double-edged sword. In addition, as we’ve seen from the recent FCC comment process around net neutrality, such large-scale public feedback projects are easily hijacked by groups, so Facebook will have to work hard to sift the wheat from the chaff here. On balance, I think this is a positive step, but I worry that it will be really tough for Facebook to execute on its vision here without dealing with some real challenges in implementation.

    via TechCrunch


    Apple Reported to be Working on Health Record System for iPhone (Jun 15, 2017)

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    Apple Supplier Wistron Appears to Confirm Wireless Charging in Next iPhone (Jun 15, 2017)

    This is exactly the kind of speaking out of turn that Apple suppliers absolutely know not to engage in, so it’s baffling that Wistron’s CEO would have been so careless. Wistron, of course, is the vendor Apple is using for its first foray into manufacturing in India, and this is the kind of thing that tends to jeopardize those relationships. It’s not a huge revelation – Apple joined the consortium that manages the Qi wireless charging standard which it already uses in the Apple Watch a while back. But it’s one of a number of new hardware features that are likely to make it into the next iPhones – certainly not the headline feature, but one of a checklist of features that will be used to drum up demand. On the other hand, I remain skeptical of the value of mat-based wireless charging – though there’s some appeal to just putting your phone down to have it charge, that really requires several chargers in different places around your home and/or office to be useful, and it’s actually more limiting than traditional plugged-in charging for things like making phone calls or typing on your phone, where you might want to hold it while it’s charging. I’m still most curious to see whether Apple has made any advances in this regard and how it will both approach and sell wireless charging as a feature.

    via The Verge


    Google Announces Backup and Sync Service to Back Up PC Files and Folders (Jun 15, 2017)

    To my mind, this announcement illustrates just how tough it will continue to be for standalone storage and backup companies to establish viable businesses over the long term, because their key features will continue to be embraced and absorbed by the big ecosystems. I still use Dropbox for backing up my various files and syncing them between machines, but I just know that a point will come when Google or Apple will simply build those features into their broader service offerings, and then I’ll ditch Dropbox. There’s simply very little true differentiation in this area – storage is storage, and at a certain level backup is backup. Once you get the table stakes around simplicity and universal access, it mostly comes down to trust and pricing, where the big guys are likely to have a significant edge. To get to this specific announcement from Google: it’s going to be providing an easier way to backup and sync files from your PC to Google Drive, which doesn’t require you to keep your files in a special Google Drive folder on your computer, unlike Dropbox. And although free storage maxes out at 15GB, Google will be pretty competitive beyond that on pricing.

    via The Verge


    Amazon Considered a Bid for Slack (Jun 15, 2017)

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    Facebook Publishes Research on Bots that Have Been Trained to Negotiate (Jun 14, 2017)

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    President Trump Re-Nominates Jessica Rosenworcel as FCC Commissioner (Jun 14, 2017)

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    Google Pixel Launcher User Numbers Cross 1m Mark, Suggesting 1m Pixel Sales (Jun 13, 2017)

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    Uber Board Member Resigns over Sexist Comment at Meeting about Harassment (Jun 13, 2017)

    Though I hesitate to write yet another Uber piece this week, this one is worth mentioning just because it illustrates how all the formal investigations and programs in the world can’t instantly change the individuals in a company or the culture they collectively embody. It appears that at the internal Uber meeting to announce the conclusion of the Holder investigation and how its recommendations would be rolled out, board member David Bonderman made what certainly came off as a highly sexist remark. Though he suggests the remark was misunderstood, it was almost impossibly tone deaf in the context, and he has subsequently resigned from the Uber board, which feels like the only way this could have ended once word got out. But it’s symbolic of both just how hard changing culture actually is when some biases and mindsets are so deeply ingrained, and also of how differently Uber is going to approach all these issues going forward, with much less tolerance for any missteps. That’s a good thing, and one of the few early and visible signs that things really are going to be different, though of course so far it’s only really been applied to those incidents high profile enough to capture attention from outside of Uber.

    via The New York Times


    New York Times Adopts Alphabet’s AI-Powered Content Moderation (Jun 13, 2017)

    Just a quick one here: I wrote about Alphabet company Jigsaw’s machine learning-based approach to online content moderation a while back. At the time, I said it was nice to see AI and machine learning being applied to humdrum every problems that actually needed solving, but back then this was merely a concept that Jigsaw was making available. So it’s great validation for the technology that the New York Times is actually adopting it in a modified, customized form it’s developed with Jigsaw. That should both improve comment moderation on the Times website while also giving the underlying technology a boost, presumably making other news organizations more likely to try it.

    via Poynter


    Verizon-Yahoo Deal Closes (Jun 13, 2017)

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    ★ Tim Cook Confirms Apple is Working on Autonomous Driving Systems (Jun 13, 2017)

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    Google Hires System-on-Chip Lead from Apple (Jun 13, 2017)

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