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 Makes Assistant and Home Announcements at I/O (May 17, 2017)
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Apple Debuts Series of Videos Showcasing Accessibility Features (May 17, 2017)
A few weeks back, I did an episode of the Beyond Devices Podcast on accessibility, in which I interviewed a former colleague of mine, Chris Lewis, who is registered blind. In the episode, Chris talks about how he uses an iPhone and Windows computers along with their various accessibility features and additional software to get his work as an analyst done. This week, Apple has a new set of videos out in which it showcases its accessibility features across various products, which continue to be among the best in the business. But as Chris and I discussed on the podcast, it appears Android and Samsung in particular are getting better at supporting accessibility features too, and Microsoft has also been making more fuss about this lately, although a lot of its PR around accessibility has been around custom projects created by employees and developers rather than standard features. It’s great to see all these companies taking accessibility seriously and using their technology to make a huge difference in the lives of people with vision, hearing, or other impairments. The Apple videos do a great job of conveying just how central these technologies are to the lives their subjects live. The timing is intended to coincide with Global Accessibility Awareness Day tomorrow.
via Mashable
Qualcomm Sues Apple Manufacturers Withholding Royalty Payments (May 17, 2017)
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★ Apple Makes First iPhones in India (May 17, 2017)
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Uber Partners with Transit App for Combining Ride Sharing and Public Transit (May 16, 2017)
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Amazon Debating Entry to Online Prescriptions Market (May 16, 2017)
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Report Suggests Google’s ATAP is Now More Focused on Near-Term Projects (May 16, 2017)
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Twitter Co-Founder Biz Stone Returns as Internal Culture Champion (May 16, 2017)
Twitter’s three prominent co-founders have all spent time doing other things since its founding but all three are now back at the company in one form or another (Ev Williams has been the one constant, though he shifted out of the CEO role and onto the board a few years back). The latest to return is Biz Stone, who had been running another creation of his, Jelly, for several years, only to sell it to Pinterest a few months back. It sounds like Stone’s role will be that of a sort of internal culture champion and cheerleader rather than a key decision maker, which seems to suit his talents well but means it’ll be tough for outsiders to measure his impact. One of the benefits of Jack Dorsey coming back was that he had the authority of a founder to make big changes to the product (though he spent his first year back in charge failing to do so anyway). Stone’s hiring has a similar benefit in that he has the passion of a founder for the company and clearly believes strongly in its mission and product, and so can hopefully help instill that in other employees at a time when Twitter still feels rather stuck. We’ve seen some signs of more significant change in the product at Twitter lately, especially with its many recent TV deals, but its financial picture continues to be rather bleaker.
via Recode
Apple Reportedly Updating MacBook Line at WWDC (May 16, 2017)
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Samsung Announces 5m Sales of New Galaxy S Phones in First 25 Days (May 16, 2017)
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Instagram Launches Selfie Filters (May 16, 2017)
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Amazon Starts Issuing Payments to Some Alexa Skills Developers (May 16, 2017)
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Facebook Announces Yet Another Measurement Screwup (May 16, 2017)
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Amazon Announces Alexa Notifications for Apps Coming Soon (May 16, 2017)
Amazon has announced on its developer blog for Alexa that notifications will soon be coming to the platform for Skills (apps) developers which want to proactively serve up information to users (Amazon will also use the platform to deliver updates for Amazon.com orders). This is both an interesting new opportunity for Amazon and Alexa and a potential minefield. On the one hand, every developer wants to proactively re-connect with users rather than merely passively wait for users to re-engage on their own, especially on a voice-only device where there’s no visual prompt or reminder that the app even exists. But on the other, that could lead to fairly spammy behavior from some apps akin to what we already see from some smartphone apps – notifications are a Pandora’s box of possibilities which have many legitimate uses but are also often abused and quickly get out of control. It will have to be very clear to users how they turn these notifications on and off, how many they receive and what for, and so on, something that’s going to be a little tougher to manage on a voice-only device than on a smartphone. It’ll arguably be the best fit on the Echo Show, where users can interact with and control the notifications a little more easily. Both Amazon and its developers will want to tread very carefully in rolling this out.
via Amazon
Amazon Fire TVs Announced by Westinghouse at CES Go on Sale (May 16, 2017)
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Google To Bring Assistant to iPhone, Let Users Create Photo Books (May 16, 2017)
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Apple Reported to Be Prepping Glucose Monitoring, Smart Bands for Watch (May 15, 2017)
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Snapchat Debuts Sponsored Filters For the Rear-Facing Camera (May 15, 2017)
When Facebook announced its AR strategy at F8 a few weeks back, a key component was filters for the rear-facing camera. At least in demos, those filters looked more impressive than what Snapchat had until then offered for the back camera on a phone, interacting in sophisticated ways with real-world elements in much the way Snapchat’s selfie filters do with faces. But the other big difference between Facebook and Snapchat’s approaches to filters is that for now at least Facebook treats them as an open developer platform, while at Snapchat they’re first-party only other than for advertisers. And today Snapchat announced that it will be debuting its first sponsored rear-facing filters, starting with a promotion for a teen romance movie. That’s clearly a new place for Snapchat to put ads within its interface, which will be handy as its user growth continues to be slow. But it also means that Snapchat’s rear-facing filters will continue to be a very narrow, curated experience with the occasional ad, while Facebook’s equivalent may in time offer a much richer, broader set of filters for the rear-facing camera. I would guess that Facebook will in time offer monetization options for developers too (and therefore take a cut) but for now the business models remain quite different, which means that even though from a feature perspective the two will compete, Facebook won’t be offering brands equivalent ad products to the ones Snapchat offers.
via Bloomberg
Google Announces Android Infotainment OS Deals With Audi and Volvo (May 15, 2017)
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Waymo-Uber Injunction Made Public (May 15, 2017)
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