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.
Alphabet’s Verily Launches Baseline Health Study (Apr 19, 2017)
I did a deep dive on Alphabet’s Verily subsidiary a while back for my Beyond Devices Podcast, and also wrote up some of the key themes for Techpinions subscribers here. What I discovered is that Verily, perhaps more than any other Alphabet subsidiary, has been characterized by hubris in trying to solve the world’s problems with technology. Its two most high-profile early initiatives – a glucose monitoring contact lens and a Star Trek-like “tricorder” to check patients’ vitals – both turned out to be vaporware. But at the same time, Verily is doing enough interesting work that it’s managed to secure partnerships with some big names from the traditional pharmaceutical industry (see this chart from my Techpinions piece), and is working with two big research universities on what it calls its Baseline longitudinal health study. It’s that study that’s now kicking off in earnest (and for which the watch Verily announced last week will be used), as the first 10,000 participants come in for their first set of tests and measurements. The Bloomberg article here does a good job characterizing both the current state of Verily and its return to reality after that early hubris, as well as some of the issues that still dog the tech people who run Verily when it comes to privacy and other related issues. It’s very clear that some of the people in charge have very little common sense when it comes to those issues in the healthcare realm, something that’s been a problem for Google too. And of course the biggest problem with the Baseline project is that – as a longitudinal study – it will literally take years for it to deliver meaningful results. There’s nothing wrong with ambition, especially when it comes to solving the world’s big problems, but it has to be grounded in reality and good practices, especially in the healthcare realm.
via Bloomberg
Verizon CEO Indicates It’s Open to Mergers with Several Players (Apr 19, 2017)
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Washington Post Culls Ad Tech Vendors Over Site Slowing (Apr 19, 2017)
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Xiaomi Launches Latest Flagship with Big Bezels, No Headphone Jack (Apr 19, 2017)
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Apple Makes iMovie, GarageBand, and iWork Apps for Mac and iOS Free for All Users (Apr 18, 2017)
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Facebook Creates First Social VR Product, Facebook Spaces for Oculus (Apr 18, 2017)
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Google Crushes Site Traffic By Scraping Content (Apr 18, 2017)
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★ Facebook Creates Messenger Platform 2.0 a Year After 1.0 Falls Flat (Apr 18, 2017)
Also today at F8, Facebook overhauled its Messenger Platform, which launched last year, and went as far as to call it Messenger Platform 2.0. That kind of separation from the version launched a year ago is smart, because the first round was ill thought out, with the vision for bots both too expansive and not nearly detailed enough. In the year since, Facebook has made a lot of progress, and the version of bots it now offers to developers is much more compelling and better suited to the kinds of things it will be used for. Facebook is also getting better at serving small and medium sized businesses, which continue to make up an enormous chunk of the total base of businesses in many markets. That’s important because these businesses represent the biggest future opportunity for Facebook advertising, which is already well penetrated among larger enterprises. I’m still skeptical that bots have broad appeal beyond a few specific categories, but it’s starting to look like Facebook has cracked at least some of what it will take for bots to be successful in those categories where they do make sense. And it’s less religious about bots as full-fledged experiences now, too, which means that other flavors of automated, semi-automated, and human-driven interactions can live side by side more seamlessly, which is smart.
★ Facebook Finally Gets Serious About AR with Camera Effects Platform (Apr 18, 2017)
I’m at Facebook’s F8 today and one of the two big announcements from the first day keynote is this Camera Effects Platform, which is Facebook’s first big push into AR. That’s a good thing, because Facebook has so far made its big bet on its narrower cousin, VR, through Oculus. AR has the potential to be much bigger, and Facebook getting into this space will only accelerate adoption and awareness. Sensibly, though, I don’t think any of this will be described as AR in most user-facing settings – it’ll have more user friendly names like Camera Effects, Frames, and so on. But building a platform for AR experiences including some pretty sophisticated ones means Facebook is finally serious about AR both from a first-party and developer perspective, which is a good thing. The stuff shown off on stage today looked much cleverer than what Snapchat launched this morning, and although it won’t all be available right away I suspect Facebook is actually going to be ahead here, especially when it comes to the rear-facing camera. In fact, there’s a possible scenario in which Snapchat continues to do AR better for the selfie camera, while Facebook provides better AR experiences for the outside world. More broadly, this means Facebook will now be a serious player in a field which includes not just itself an Snapchat but also Microsoft, and will soon include Magic Leap, Apple, and many others too. There are therefore big questions to ask about who will be able to attract developers and help them get a return on their investment with good monetization. I would expect to see some similar stuff from Apple at WWDC in June and possibly even more in September with new iPhone hardware too.
Tumblr Launches Social Video App With No Connection to Tumblr (Apr 18, 2017)
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Amazon Isn’t the Only Reason US Retail is Suffering (Apr 18, 2017)
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★ Samsung Galaxy S8 Reviews Say Hardware is Great, Software Not so Much (Apr 18, 2017)
The review embargo on the Samsung Galaxy S8 lifted this morning and so a slew of reviews was published. The consensus appears to be that the hardware is beautiful and generally very good, while the software is mixed at best. Which is about the least surprising sentence anyone ever wrote about a Samsung phone, but is also bad news given the extent to which Samsung emphasized software this time around. On the hardware side, reviewers seem to love the screen, the dimensions of the display versus the overall footprint, and the feel in the hand. The one knock from a hardware perspective is the fingerprint sensor, which bafflingly is high up on the back and right next to the camera, where it’s both hard to reach and easy to miss and smudge the camera lens instead. From a software perspective, the main criticisms revolve around Bixby, which is missing its voice feature in the US and seems redundant and gimmicky, but the other criticism is around face unlock. As I said when it launched, face unlock is a sop to users who miss the fingerprint unlock on the front and want a simple way to get into their phone without typing in a passcode, but Samsung arguably hasn’t done enough to make clear that it’s a pretty insecure way to actually lock a phone. As such, it’s fine for grandma but not for the corporate IT department, and Samsung needs to make that clearer, especially given that iris scanning is also present as an option. This certainly won’t be exactly the debut Samsung wanted, but the positive reception to the hardware will do a lot for it. Also worth noting: Samsung provided a review unit to the Wall Street Journal but not the New York Times, whose reporter Brian Chen has been very critical of Samsung over its customer service among other things.
via Techmeme
Pandora Opens Streaming Subscription to All (Apr 18, 2017)
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PayPal Partners with Google around Android Pay (Apr 18, 2017)
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Snapchat Introduces 3D Augmented Reality Overlays For Rear-Facing Camera (Apr 18, 2017)
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Bloomberg Confirms Existing Reports about Next iPhone (Apr 18, 2017)
Bloomberg has a report out today which basically just confirms all the existing reporting on the iPhone. Given that the Samsung Galaxy S8 goes on sale this week, this may be coming off the back of leaks from Apple itself, though the byline includes at least one reporter in Asia, suggesting there are supply chain sources too. There’s really nothing new here – the new iPhone is to come in three variants, with the high-end one getting an edge to edge OLED screen, with the glass but not the screen itself curved, and two other models similar to the existing sizes. At this point, this isn’t a surprise, but it’s good for Apple to have this news out there in the week the S8 goes on sale, because it’s been working on this shift to much smaller bezels for some time but has been beaten to the punch by several Android vendors, and needs to ensure that iPhone buyers are aware something similar is coming this fall. The big questions, which go unanswered in this piece, are about pricing and design differences between the new top-tier iPhone and the others. I continue to expect just another $100 or so price difference between the Plus model and the premium model rather than the $1000 iPhone many seem to think we’re going to get. But I’m curious to what extent the design of the two regular models evolves and how similar or different it is from the new high-end one.
via Bloomberg
Uber Exec in Charge of Pittsburgh Self-Driving Test Quits (Apr 18, 2017)
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★ Netflix Reports Q1 2017, Gains 5m Subs, Makes First Profit Internationally (Apr 17, 2017)
Note: this is my first piece of commentary on Q1 2017 earnings. The Q1 2017 tag attached to this post will eventually house all my earnings comments for this quarter, just as the Q4 2016 tag does for last quarter and the earnings tag does for all past earnings comments. Netflix is also one of the dozen or so companies for which I do quarterly slide decks as part of the Jackdaw Research Quarterly Decks Service. See here for more.
Netflix today reported its earnings for Q1 2017, and the results were mostly good, with a few possible red flags. This year, the new season of House of Cards will debut in Q2 rather than Q1, and that makes some of the year on year comparisons tough. One of the results was much weaker Q1 subscriber adds this year than a year ago in the US, worsening what’s already been a trend of slowing growth for several years. Netflix is projecting something of a recovery next quarter, however. In some ways, the biggest news was the first quarterly profit for the international business, which has neared profitability in the past but been plunged deeper into the red by market expansions every time it did so. Now that Netflix is in essentially every country it can be, that won’t be the case anymore, so although it’s projecting a return to small losses next quarter, it’s now saying it wants to be judged partly on growing revenue and margins globally over time, which is a big shift (previously it wanted to be judged on sub growth and domestic margins only).
There were a couple of mild admissions of failure: customer satisfaction in Asia, the Middle East and Africa is not what it could be, and the company’s Crouching Tiger sequel didn’t achieve its goals for original content. Marketing spend will be up at least a little in 2017, and content obligations continue to grow. The company also made clear that the big free cash flow losses caused by its investment in original content will continue for “many years”, though it also said that it will eventually throw off significant cash when it hits a “much larger revenue base”, giving I think the clearest indication yet of what a long-term project positive free cash flow will be. In the meantime, it will continue to borrow to fund that growth. Domestically, profits are growing very rapidly, and the theory continues to be that eventually the International business will reach that level of maturity too and deliver decent margins. But in the meantime, a bet on Netflix continues to be a bet on continued high growth, something which certainly isn’t guaranteed in the US and may end up being tough long term internationally too.
via Netflix Shareholder Letter (PDF)
Intel Kills its Developer Forum, its Big Annual Event (Apr 17, 2017)
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Autonomous Driving Technology is Being Trained on Simulators Including Video Games (Apr 17, 2017)
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