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 to Revamp Ad Policies After U.K., Big Brands Boycott – Bloomberg (Mar 17, 2017)
This situation in the UK doesn’t seem to be getting much attention here in the US, but it should be, because although the boycott is UK-only for now, the issues at stake aren’t UK-specific at all and could easily spread to other markets. What’s happened is that some UK companies as well as the UK government have become increasingly concerned that their ads on YouTube have been appearing next to some pretty undesirable videos featuring extremism or promoting terrorism, and Google’s tools for avoiding this don’t seem to be doing their jobs. As a result, several companies and the government have now stopped advertising on Google at all as a protest until Google fixes things. A blog post from Google makes clear just how hard it is to police the video on YouTube – 400 hours of video are uploaded every hour, and it stopped ads from showing on 300 million videos last year, which provides some sense of the scale and the impossibility of monitoring all this with human beings alone. Google is never going to be able to police the content itself at sufficient scale and with sufficient accuracy to solve the problem directly. The solution is therefore probably paring back the kinds of videos on which at least certain ads would appear – such as limiting big brand advertising to channels with long histories, large numbers of subscribers, and a good track record. However, it’s likely that many brands would choose to limit themselves to this higher quality material, which in turn would mean the long tail of videos on YouTube might go un-monetized or monetized at a much lower rate, which would have a severe impact on not just creators but YouTube’s financials. Not only could this problem spread to other markets, but Facebook will have to deal with many of the same issues as it ramps up video advertising on its platform.
via Bloomberg
Apple Plans Two More Chinese Research Hubs as iPhone Sales Slow – Bloomberg (Mar 17, 2017)
Two things worth noting here. Firstly, another big commitment by Apple to China, following its billion0-dollar investment in ride-sharing service Didi last year, with the total of these R&D center investments reaching about half a billion dollars in their own right. That signals again that Apple is very serious about continuing to be a big force in China, and is in fact increasing its investment there rather than backing down. That’s important, because in this piece as in other recent ones on Apple in China, the prevailing narrative is that Apple is losing ground there. At a basic level, of course, there’s truth to that over the past year, with declining iPhone sales, though the picture in PRC as opposed to the Greater China region Apple reports as a segment is a little less clear cut. The reality is that the “super-cycle” driven by the iPhone 6 launch led to unprecedented sales everywhere, but nowhere more than in China, and so the comedown has been that much bigger too. But Apple is positioned to start growing in China again in the coming year, and it will continue to be a crucial market for Apple.
via Bloomberg (press release in Chinese here, with Google translation here)
Uber’s autonomous cars drove 20,354 miles and had to be taken over at every mile, according to documents – Recode (Mar 16, 2017)
One of the great things about autonomous driving technology is that regulators require companies to keep track of how those cars are performing, and in the case of California that data is published annually, providing a great insight into how each company’s technology is advancing. However, occasionally, internal documents on testing emerge that provide lots of detail too, and such documents have apparently been leaked to Recode (and BuzzFeed). There’s lots of interesting data here, and it suggests progress is being made and Uber is driving lots of miles in its various cars. It’s worth comparing some of the numbers here for Uber with those reported by other companies in California by way of putting them in context: Uber says its rate of disengagements per mile is 0.8, for example, whereas Waymo’s cars in California are now at a rate of 0.2 per 1000 miles, or some 4,000 times better. Now, Waymo’s cars have been driving in the state for much longer than Uber’s, but that’s still a massive discrepancy in performance. And it’s also worse than Tesla’s rate of 182 disengagements over 550 miles driven in 2016. So it appears Uber has a long way still to go in autonomous driving, and it’s therefore remarkable that it’s already using these cars to ferry real passengers around Pittsburgh.
via Recode
Uber says trade theft case is between Otto chief and Google – USA Today (Mar 16, 2017)
This feels like something of a slime ball move on Uber’s part on two fronts: firstly, trying to move the court case with Waymo out of open court and behind closed doors; and secondly, essentially trying to push the case off its back and onto Levandowski’s. I had said previously that the course was going to be fascinating for the details it would provide about how Uber developed technologies and how it would defend against what look like fairly solid allegations, but if it gets its wish here we won’t get to see any of that. But I think it’s the attempt to make this a case about an employee rather than the company that seems particularly sleazy – if the allegations are indeed true, then Uber and not Levandowski benefited the most, and making this seem like a dispute between an employee and former employer feels like a total misrepresentation.
via USA Today
Spotify nears music deals to open path to IPO – Financial Times (Mar 16, 2017)
Spotify’s deals with the music labels have long been a barrier to achieving profitability and therefore also a major barrier to an eventual IPO, especially because many of its relationships have been operating on a very short-term basis rather than being locked in longer term. It sounds like there might finally be light at the end of the tunnel, mostly because Spotify is finally caving on perhaps the single biggest sticking point in its relationship with the labels: the differences between the paid and free versions of its service. Spotify has, in fact, steadily eroded those differences, which used to be more significant but now amount mostly to a lack of ads, while the labels have long wanted Spotify to increase the differentiation between the two as a way to push users to the paid their and therefore compensate artists at a higher rate for their music. As I argue in the Streaming is Saving Music narrative, it’s not really streaming as a whole but more narrowly paid streaming which is helping the music industry thrive at present, and so those labels have every incentive to push that tier of service. On the other hand, Spotify has used that free tier very effectively as a funnel to create eventual paid subscribers, and the labels also want Spotify to IPO so they can get a return on their investments, which is why they’re finally showing some willingness to compromise too.
via Financial Times
LG lures G6 shoppers with a free Google Home – Engadget (Mar 16, 2017)
The LG G6 is one of the first Android phones which will launch with the Google Assistant onboard, so there’s a logic to tying in the Google Home device as an add-on, though this is still a first for Google, which didn’t even bundle the Home with Pixel sales (it did bundle the Daydream View VR device with early sales, however). Promoting the Google Home as a good companion to other Android phones beyond the Pixel is important – both the installed base and future sales of those phones are going to be massively larger than the Pixel, and so most sales will go to these owners (or iPhone owners). This obviously echoes what a number of smartphone vendors have done in the past with other accessories, though usually ones more directly tied to smartphones, like smartwatches.
via Engadget
Hulu unveils new website for upcoming live TV service, shows off new UI, more – 9to5Google (Mar 16, 2017)
There’s not a ton of new detail here – Hulu briefed reporters on a lot of this back at CES, but there are a couple of new tidbits. Notably, it sounds like the DVR function will feel a lot less DVR-y and more like an online read-it-later service for video, which sounds a lot more user friendly than a lot of the cloud DVRs I’ve seen. The multiple simultaneous streams and profiles are interesting too – that makes it much more of a pay TV replacement than most of what we’ve seen. I have to say, as a cord cutter, I’m probably more excited about Hulu’s entry in this market than all the others I’ve seen. Big questions, as usual: local content and whether/where it will be available, and which channels get left out to hit the usual $30-40 price bracket.
via 9to5Google
Nvidia Partners with Bosch and Truck Maker Around Autonomy (Mar 16, 2017)
Here are two partnership announcements from Nvidia, the first a deal with automotive component maker Bosch to incorporate Nvidia chips in self-driving solutions, and the second with truck maker PACCAR for self-driving truck technology. Nvidia continues to be one of the biggest names in autonomous driving, and certainly one of the most successful chip vendors (hence Intel’s Mobileye deal). These deals come on top of lots of existing ones, but trucks are a particularly interesting area – it feels like that’s a segment of the market that could actually see real-world adoption of autonomy much sooner than cars.
via The Verge (Bosch) and Techcrunch (trucks)
YouTube makes its biggest e-sports bet with FACEIT streaming deal – Reuters (Mar 16, 2017)
E-sports are one of the few where the TV and digital rights aren’t sewn up for years to come, and so they’ve become a battleground for big digital players, with Amazon buying Twitch and YouTube now stealing one of its most high-profile, high-quality content deals. This is a big step for YouTube, which has dabbled with various bits of live sports in the past but has never had a really high-profile deal. It’s obviously not going to deliver NFL-like viewing numbers, but it’s a good test of YouTube’s commitment to live video and sports.
via Reuters
Google starts flagging offensive content in search results – USA Today (Mar 16, 2017)
Human curation feels like an interesting way to solve a problem with an algorithm, and it’s striking that Google pays 10,000 people to check its search results for quality in the first place. As I’ve said previously, the specific problem with “snippets” in search is better solved by eliminating them for obscure or poorly covered topics, but the issue with false results is certainly broader than just snippets. It sounds like this approach is helping, but it doesn’t feel very scalable.
via USA Today
Google Home is playing audio ads for Beauty and the Beast – The Verge (Mar 16, 2017)
This feels like an extremely stupid move for Google. Though Google claims this wasn’t an ad, that’s utterly disingenuous, and inserting ads this early in the Google Home lifecycle (if ever) is a huge mistake – this is just the kind of thing that will put people off buying a Google Home, especially because it fits a narrative of Google only being interested in advertising. This is a hardware product, for which users have paid a decent price, and it shouldn’t be playing ads, especially without an opt-out – there is no indication that users would hear ads in any of the marketing material. I just tried my own Google Home to see if it would play this message, but it didn’t, suggesting that Google may have stopped playing the message. If so, good, but it never should have happened in the first place, unless Google wants to kneecap its own product this early in its competition with Amazon’s Echo.
via The Verge
Swatch Takes on Google, Apple With Watch Operating System – Bloomberg (Mar 16, 2017)
It’s fascinating to think about this move in the context of the history of Swatch. Though the company incorporates much older brands, the Swatch name and brand arose in the early 1980s out of the Swiss watch industry’s previous crisis: quartz watches from Asia. Those watches caused a massive decline in the Swiss watch industry as cheap, highly accurate watches from Asia flooded the market. The Swatch brand was created to compete with these quartz watches, offering a simpler mechanical watch with cheaper materials that could compete with the new entrants, and it worked. Now, it appears Swatch wants to defend against the new crisis – smartwatches eating market share – with its own entrant, based on technology co-developed with a Swiss university that specializes in miniaturization. I may be biased, but suspect it’s easier for the tech industry to learn about watches than it is for watchmakers to get really good at technology, even with some help. I’m skeptical that this move will work out, but given how poorly Android Wear has fared, it certainly can’t hurt, and may well do better than competitor Tag Heuer’s Android strategy.
via Bloomberg
Amazon puts Alexa inside its main iPhone app – VentureBeat (Mar 16, 2017)
Alexa’s single biggest flaw today is that it’s a shut-in: for the most part, it can’t leave the house. That means competing in a broad-based way with Siri and the Google Assistant requires getting onto smartphones, and now we have Amazon putting Alexa into the Amazon shopping app on iOS. Job done? Well, no. Because just having an app on a phone doesn’t mean people will use it. And if it’s buried inside a shopping app, that’s a steep hill to climb relative to just holding down the home button to summon Siri. On the one hand, I get the logic of putting Alexa in the Amazon app – it’s an app many of the company’s most loyal users already have installed and likely use frequently, but it also means it’s going to be several clicks away. I can see some parents with kids using it to keep them quiet with jokes, but it’s hard to imagine people using an Alexa buried in a shopping app as their main assistant while away from home. Integration within the smartphone and its operating system is the key here, which will be impossible on iOS but more feasible on Android, as we’ve already seen with Huawei and Lenovo’s integration plans.
via VentureBeat
Amazon makes it cheaper to host Alexa skills on AWS – ZDNet (Mar 16, 2017)
This is clever tie-in by Amazon of two of its valuable assets: its Alexa skills engine and its AWS cloud infrastructure. It’s offering developers of Alexa voice skills a better deal on hosting through AWS as a way to remove the barriers to developing smarter and more sophisticated skills for its Echo devices (and the small number of third party devices using Alexa). Amazon has touted its number of third party skills repeatedly since launching them as a sign of Echo and Alexa’s capability, but the reality is that many of those skills are very basic, and the model is clumsy to use. If it’s able to attract better skills to the platform, those numbers will start to be more meaningful as signifiers of the platform’s capabilities.
via ZDNet
WhatsApp brings back text Status it replaced with Stories – TechCrunch (Mar 16, 2017)
My Techpinions column today argues that Facebook has recently been trying too hard to force new features on users, and needs to tone things down. That’s mostly been the case in the Facebook-branded apps, but this WhatsApp change a while back was another example of replacing something users liked with something Facebook wanted them to use. The good news here is that the backlash wasn’t nearly as bad as with last week’s My Day launch in Messenger, and the company is already rolling back the change while preserving the new feature as well. It’s interesting, though, that both My Day and this Status change in WhatsApp were essentially clones of the Snapchat Stories feature which had previously worked so well for Facebook in Instagram. This cloning has been a story for some time, but the way Facebook is now pushing it on users is starting to backfire, which is a particular shame because the Instagram version was handled so well and has performed well too.
via TechCrunch
Netflix will explore mobile-specific cuts of its original series – The Verge (Mar 16, 2017)
Like the recent choose-your-ending report, this is something Netflix is merely experimenting with rather than something it’s going to be releasing imminently. But one of the advantages of commissioning and owning original content is the freedom to do interesting things with it, including chopping it up in different ways for mobile devices. I’m not quite sure how this would work in practice – in general, it’s pretty tough to take content created for one format and make it as compelling in smaller chunks or edited down, and Netflix will likely be best served by creating content specifically for mobile, but we’ll see. It has in the past (and even recently) said that it doesn’t create content with specific screens in mind, but that mindset seems to be changing subtly.
via The Verge
Musk Goes Back to Wall Street to Bring the Model 3 to Market – Bloomberg (Mar 15, 2017)
I think it’s safe to say that Tesla’s plans for Model 3 manufacturing represent the biggest test the company and Elon Musk have faced by a long way. The ramp contemplated is so rapid and takes the company so far beyond its historical production rate that it seems almost impossible for it to meet its targets. And yet here it is raising more money to fund what’s going to be a massive capital spend in the first half of the year to prepare for that production run that’s scheduled to begin in July. In the first half of last year, the company spent around half a billion dollars on capex, and it plans to spend $2-2.5 billion in the first half of 2017, which gives some sense of just how big the leap is from anything the company has done in the past. That’s going to cause a massive cash drain, hence the new funding. Musk continues to execute extremely well on his long-term plans eventually, but hitting short-term targets continues to be his big weakness, and it feels like the Model 3 is either going to be the worst example of that flaw or the biggest possible exception to the pattern. I’m betting it’s the former.
via Bloomberg
GoPro Announces Layoffs and Cost Cuts But Reiterates Revenue Guidance for Q1 (Mar 15, 2017)
GoPro today both reiterated its revenue guidance for Q1 and announced fairly significant cost cuts including layoffs in an attempt to get back to profitability after five straight quarters of net losses. It will eliminate 270 current and planned positions, which equate to roughly 17% of its headcount at the end of Q4, and says full year operating expenses will be $582 million, which compares to $835 million in 2016 and $618 million in 2015, so a fairly significant cut. The fact that it still expects to hit the same revenue numbers makes me wonder what those people were doing that they can be so easily dismissed without impacting revenue growth. Operating expenses are weighted towards R&D and sales and marketing costs, so the cuts will likely hit hardest in those two areas, one of which would likely impact longer term sales while the other would be likelier to hit short term sales. So color me skeptical that GoPro can make these cuts and still hit its revenue numbers for the year, although investors clearly feel differently (the stock is up over 8% after hours).
via GoPro
US Charges Russian FSB Officers and Their Criminal Conspirators for Hacking Yahoo and Millions of Email Accounts (Mar 15, 2017)
The stories that broke immediately before this press conference and announcement from the US DoJ suggested only that Russian nationals were involved, but the formal announcement makes clear that these were Russian agents and not just citizen hackers. That’s a good reminder that state-sponsored attacks are among the biggest things all online service companies have to worry about in our day and age, whether the state behind the hacking is Russia, China, North Korea, or some other country. Yes, ordinary hackers will still try and occasionally succeed in breaching these systems, but state sponsorship can put massively more resourced behind a hack like this and often have more success. That, in turn, raises the bar for companies vulnerable to this kind of hacking in terms of their security defenses, but should also make users think about what information they’re entrusting to these systems.
Snapchat Discover publishers face tough challenge as platform chases TV – Digiday (Mar 15, 2017)
The Snapchat as TV thing is getting a little hackneyed, but it works because it’s increasingly true – it appears Snapchat is increasingly prioritizing video over other content in its Discover tab, and perhaps especially original video created for the platform. That could push other content (and its publishers) further down the listing of Stories within Discover, or could potentially demote all non-video content into a different area entirely. That’s not terrible news for those content partners who major in video, but would obviously be much worse for those who focus on articles and the like. My guess is that those already get much less viewership than the video stories given the setting and the audience, but it is going to push Snapchat to become much more video-oriented overall.
via Digiday