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’s featured snippets are worse than fake news – The Outline (Mar 6, 2017)
This is the second of two fake news stories this morning (the first concerned Facebook), and this one doesn’t look so good for Google. Google has long pull excerpts out of search results in order to provide what it deems to be the answers to questions, as a way to get people to what they’re looking for faster. For undisputed facts, like what time the Super Bowl starts or how old a movie star is, that’s very useful and unobjectionable. But the problem is that Google has algorithms designed to find these answers for almost any question people might ask, and in an era of fake news, some questions and the ostensible answers are driven entirely by conspiracy theories and false reporting, which means that the right answer doesn’t even appear anywhere online. So it’s snippets serve up answers exclusively from fake news and conspiracy sites, as if these were incontrovertible, lending them an air of considerable authority, and causing many users to take those answers as gospel. The simple solution here is for Google to back way off from this snippets approach and limit it to questions that are both frequently asked and also answered by a wide range of sites including reputable ones. I don’t know whether Google will take that approach, but it’s going to be very hard for it to solve the problem in any other way.
via The Outline
Facebook has started to flag fake news stories – Recode (Mar 6, 2017)
This was part of Facebook’s plan for dealing with fake news, announced back in December, so there’s no huge surprise here. But Recode picks up on several points worth noting, most importantly that because Facebook is relying on third party fact checkers, vetting fake news stories can often take quite some time, even when they come from a publication known to publish only false news stories. That’s problematic because by the time the “disputed” label is attached, many people will have seen and believed the story, and attaching it a week after it first surfaces will likely have little impact, especially on a high profile and popular story. It really feels like Facebook needs a separate label for entire fake news publications which is applied automatically to its links – that would be straightforward and far more useful, and could still be done in cooperation with fact checking organizations. But if Snopes and Politifact are going to be really useful, they have to move much faster on this stuff. Here’s hoping Facebook becomes less hesitant and pushes its partners to act more quickly, so that this tool can become really useful.
via Recode
Apple’s U.K. Suit Against Qualcomm Adds to Global Patent War – Bloomberg (Mar 4, 2017)
Just a quickie here – Apple has now sued Qualcomm in the UK too, on top of its existing suits in China and the US. There’s not a lot more detail in this article or, apparently, in the court filing itself, but the thrust of the UK case seems to be the same as in the other cases already filed.
via Bloomberg
Uber’s VP of product and growth Ed Baker has resigned – Recode (Mar 3, 2017)
My apologies if you’re getting sick of Uber news this week, but here’s yet another. This one is tough to read, because the tie to the current investigation and fallout from the Susan Fowler post is more tenuous than with Amit Singhal – there’s a brief reference to an allegation of impropriety in this report, but it’s not substantiated or detailed. And unlike Singhal, who had barely got his seat warm, Baker had been at Uber for three years and been an integral part of its growth over that time. In general, as that Information article I just linked to indicates, he’s been a very well respected member of the team at Uber, so I’m inclined not to over-emphasize the link to sexual harassment issues. It’s possible that the timing is coincidental, though it’s obviously a particular loss coming right now with everything else that’s going on.
via Recode
Silicon Valley’s dirty little secret: The way it treats women – USA Today (Mar 3, 2017)
There has been a slew of these stories lately, the main tenor of which is that Uber is unfortunately not as much of an exception as we might like to think in Silicon Valley and the tech world more broadly. This piece has both some trend data and some specifics about other individuals beyond Susan Fowler, who wrote the story about her time at Uber recently. All of this, of course, is in large part an outgrowth of the lack of diversity in tech companies and the prevailing culture among engineers more broadly. Lots to digest here and lots of work to do, well beyond Uber and its current troubles.
via USA Today
Apple looking to buy TV shows and studios – Business Insider (Mar 3, 2017)
There’s not much in this report to suggest that Apple is actually interested in buying a studio, and indeed Imagine strongly refuted reports to that effect recently after those reports surfaced. Reports that Apple wants to acquire TV shows, on the other hand, are a lot more plausible – it’s already bought or commissioned a couple for Apple Music, and I could see it doing more of this, especially if it’s finally getting serious about building its own subscription TV service. The comments in here about the confusion over who’s leading the negotiations are a bit more worrying – if they’re true. Eddy Cue obviously does oversee the overall effort here as head of Apple’s content business, but he might well delegate some of the actual negotiations to other team members, and Jimmy Iovine in particular is known to have good relationships in the content industry. Recent reports about the change of leadership over Apple TV hardware suggested that Pete Distad was going to be taking the lead on these negotiations, and his name isn’t even mentioned, so there do seem to be a lot of people involved here. Hopefully Apple is clearer on this than some of those it’s approached seem to be.
via Business Insider
General Motors’ Maven launches monthly car plan – VentureBeat (Mar 3, 2017)
I’ve argued that the big car companies are actually participating pretty actively in the three big shifts occurring in their industry at this point, rather than just sitting idly by, and GM’s Maven business is a good example of some of that engagement, albeit on a fairly small scale. This new model doesn’t seem all that compelling – at over $1000 per month (including insurance, gas, and parking) it’s a little steep for a month’s Volt rental, which would cost you a fraction of that on a longer-term basis. But at least the company is experimenting. Other Maven services are a lot more interesting, and I had an interesting conversation with some of the team at the Detroit Auto Show in January. Maven Home is designed for high-end apartment complexes, for example, where owners get access to cars on an on-demand basis through their building, and GM is also doing interesting things with both Uber and Lyft separately.
via VentureBeat
WPP CEO Sir Martin Sorrell: Amazon keeps me up worrying at night – Business Insider (Mar 3, 2017)
WPP is one of the world’s largest ad agencies, and Martin Sorrell is its CEO. As such, what he says about trends in advertising is worth listening to, and he says he worries more about Amazon than almost anything else. That’s because Amazon’s ad business is both growing fast and has the potential to displace agencies and work directly with advertisers, much as Facebook does. This story is fascinating, because it’s a great reminder that Amazon is building a decent-sized ad business largely under the radar – hardly anyone ever talks about it, but it’s becoming pretty big. This article cites eMarketer forecasts, which are about the only estimates I ever seem to see, and which suggest the ad business is getting pretty big – over a billion dollars in 2016. You may not have thought about it much, but certain searches on Amazon lead to pages literally full of ads. Given how many people now start product searches on Amazon, it’s in an enviable, Google-like position of being able to serve up ads that are directly relevant to what consumers are interested in right now. That combination of relevance and timeliness is rare – almost everyone else can manage relevance, but timeliness is much tougher. Though Amazon isn’t going to rival Google or Facebook’s scale in the near future, it’s arguably got a strong shot at becoming number three in online advertising in the near term.
via Business Insider
How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide – New York Times (Mar 3, 2017)
I think there may have been one day in the past week when there wasn’t some new negative story about Uber, and that’s just based on what I’ve written about here. The latest is reporting from the New York Times that Uber has a program called Greyball which identifies app users who may not be who they seem and serves up fake cars or otherwise obfuscates the real activity going on with drivers in the area. Although there are some legitimate reasons for Uber to do something like this – for a time, competitors were frequently ordering and canceling cars – it was deliberately used to evade law enforcement in places where Uber was breaking local laws. Its statement in the article suggests it sees nothing wrong with this behavior, but characterizes this last scenario as “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers”. One might, I suppose, make a similar argument about police running speed traps, but radar detectors are illegal in some places anyway. The legality of what Uber did here isn’t 100% clear, but it’s yet another example of Uber’s disregard for regulations and willingness to do almost anything to flout or circumvent them. On the other hand, it appears Uber’s PR department has lost the will to fight on yet another front and isn’t even disputing this story.
via New York Times
Google Announces Progress in Using Deep Learning to Detect Cancer (Mar 3, 2017)
Yet another story about using either AI or deep learning (or both) to solve a real-world problem, from Google. This time, it’s an application miles away from any of Google’s current businesses (though perhaps a little relevant to some of the Other Bets), but the point is that Google is finding a very broad set of applications for its capabilities here, which can of course be applied back to lots of things which are relevant to the core Google business (as well as providing tangible human benefits if adopted by other organizations).
via Google
Amazon plans to release new Alexa devices that can make phone calls and work as intercoms – Recode (Mar 3, 2017)
This is a slightly different spin on the WSJ article from a few weeks ago about Amazon and Google looking to add phone call capability to their home speakers. For one thing, this article suggests new hardware, rather than merely a software upgrade, though it’s not clear why, given that these devices already have all the necessary hardware elements for phone calls (speakers, microphones, and connectivity). One reason might be the intercom functionality that’s mentioned in the article too – again, if that’s audio only it wouldn’t necessarily require new hardware, but if there’s a video component, that obviously would. And that would also jive with the reports from yesterday about Amazon working on a video camera for the home. It’s increasingly feeling like Amazon is using Echo and Alexa as a Trojan horse to other things in the home, and we’re just starting to see the real potential here. That’s interesting, because in and of itself a voice speaker isn’t that threatening to other established players like Apple and Google, but if it becomes something more, that presents a more ecosystem-level threat, which is much more serious.
via Recode
As Messenger’s bots lose steam, Facebook pushes menus over chat – TechCrunch (Mar 3, 2017)
When Facebook and Microsoft first launched their respective chat bot strategies just under a year ago, I was skeptical – I argued that chat bots have very limited applicability and were ill-suited to the kind of broad app-replacement approach both companies were pushing. What we’ve seen since is a continued re-thinking of Facebook’s vision for bots, which has steadily pushed it in the direction of becoming very similar to interaction mechanisms we already have, whether in apps or mobile websites. As such, the unique value of a messenger-based interface is being eroded almost to zero, and the whole value proposition is being undermined. I don’t think this is the wrong way to go, necessarily – there will still be some interactions for which an app or site-like interface within messaging has some value – but this is further evidence that the original vision for chat bots in messaging apps was overblown. And of course that the idea that these bots would replace apps in a broad way was overblown too.
via TechCrunch
GM First to Offer Unlimited Data Option for Car Owners – DSLReports (Mar 3, 2017)
This is an interesting but not altogether unexpected step. There’s an analogy here to Amazon’s discounted Echo-only music service, which takes advantage of the same limitations to offer a lower price for something that would normally cost more. GM is now offering $20 for unlimited data, which is the same as it used to charge for 2GB of in-car WiFi data. AT&T continues to sell in-car connectivity to carmakers at a rapid rate – about a million subs per quarter – but these subs are mostly extremely basic at the outset, covering just in-car telematics for a few dollars a month. Only if subscribers actually start buying the additional features such as OnStar and this kind of in-car WiFi does AT&T start to generate a more meaningful revenue per user, so being more aggressive about the pricing, especially as AT&T reintroduces unlimited plans for its own services, makes a lot of sense. And of course since GM gets a cut, it’s strongly incentivized to sell these services too.
via DSLReports
Amazon Explains its Massive S3 Outage (Mar 2, 2017)
Amazon’s S3 service went down in part of the US on Tuesday, something I commented on at the time. But we now have an official explanation, which is that an employee attempting to debug an issue with the billing system for AWS accidentally took down more servers than he/she intended to, which in turn had a knock-on effect on several other services which manage other aspects of the S3 system (including the dashboard which reports whether the service is performing as expected). Restarting several of the servers took far longer than anyone had expected, which meant Amazon’s contingency planning turned out not to be adequate after all. It sounds like it has now put in place some protections to prevent similar things from happening in future, but once again it’s just a reminder of how vulnerable big chunks of the Internet are to an AWS outage, something we discussed in depth on this week’s Beyond Devices Podcast, recorded earlier today shortly after this announcement was made.
via Amazon
Spotify now has 50 million paid subscribers – The Verge (Mar 2, 2017)
Spotify keeps extending its lead as the leader of the paid streaming market, although it’s worth noting that not all those subscribers are created equal – see, for example, its recent partnership with the New York Times and many more and larger partnerships with mobile carriers. Those subscribers are all paying a lot less than the standard $10 per month rate Spotify charges standalone subscribers, and they likely make up an increasing proportion of the total. Still, it’s quite the achievement by Spotify to get to this milestone, especially its rate of growth over the past year or so. Next achievement to focus on: turning all that growth into profits, something that remains elusive.
via The Verge
Uber will apply for a self-driving test permit in California – TechCrunch (Mar 2, 2017)
Well, well: a rare case of Uber caving to regulators and doing as they ask. It had seemed as though Uber had given up on San Francisco and California in general when it moved its self-driving Volvos to Arizona late last year, but it now appears that it is actually going to go through the steps necessary to gain DMV approval for testing self-driving cars in California after all. This all feels like a totally unnecessary rigamarole for all concerned – Uber has likely gained nothing and lost quite a bit of trust as a result of all this, and now it’s back where it started.
via TechCrunch
Amazon is working on its own home security camera – The Verge (Mar 2, 2017)
I’ve been wondering when we’d see Amazon get deeper into the home automation business, and it looks like some sort of camera might be the answer, and fairly soon. The Echo is often described as a smart home enabler, but I’ve argued that it’s actually a fairly dumb device – it merely passes commands back and forth without knowing anything about the state of your home or being able to intelligently take any actions on its own. If Amazon had a camera (or several of them) in your home, however, it could start to know whether anyone is home or not, and do other clever things, which could enable a smarter approach to home automation in future. I’m still skeptical that the home automation market can advance much further out of the early adopter segment without a services model – that feels like the key to broader adoption, and I can’t see Amazon offering that directly, though it would be an interesting fit with its new third party home services business.
via The Verge
Wearables grew 16.9% in Q4 2016, Fitbit still first but Xiaomi is gaining – VentureBeat (Mar 2, 2017)
The numbers here look about right, but what a far cry from the forecasts of the wearables market we saw a few years back. I recently wrote a piece on the state of the wearables market, in which I argued there are really three important sub-markets within wearables: the Apple Watch in its own category, dedicated fitness trackers (in which Fitbit dominates in western markets and Xiaomi in China), and Samsung’s various devices, many of which are bundled with smartphone purchases and therefore thrive on a rather different business models from the others. These IDC numbers largely back that up with market share numbers, but also reinforce the point I made in that article about how the market has fallen short of its theoretical potential and largely stopped growing. It can still grow, but the offerings need to get much better and broader in their appeal, and to some extent we also need the technology – especially in components – to catch up with the vision here.
via VentureBeat
Apple’s Devices Lose Luster in American Classrooms – New York Times (Mar 2, 2017)
This trend has been a long time coming, with Google becoming very aggressive about getting deeper into schools in the last few years, and having quite a bit of success, while Apple has lost ground despite some good enhancements to its own education offerings, including the Swift Playgrounds app. Apple used to have an outsized share in education thanks to the simplicity of both using and managing its devices, but Chromebooks have some of the same simplicity and manageability benefits at a much lower cost, and are starting to displace products like Macs and iPads in schools. And the education market is much more important than the relatively small amount of revenue it generates in the overall context of the tech industry, because it influences the devices and services kids will continue to use as they grow up. A kid reared on Macs and iPads in school will likely continue to use them when she goes to college, but one raised on Chromebooks and Google Apps will favor those when he graduates. This battle is by no means lost for Apple, but it needs to continue to up its game if it’s to claw back some of that lost share.
via New York Times
Frustrated Snap Social Influencers Leaving For Rival Platforms – BuzzFeed (Mar 2, 2017)
The attitude reported in this piece is not new at all – the New York Times reported on this a while back, but it’s been part of Snap’s DNA from the beginning: it simply doesn’t engage with “influencers” or creatives who use the platform to promote themselves in the way other platforms do. What’s new in this BuzzFeed piece is that it claims influencers are leaving the platform for others where they’re treated better. Snap’s official comment in the article couldn’t be more blasé – it basically says it cares more about its customers and official media partners than these “creators” – but it can probably afford to be that way. The reality is that these influencers aren’t likely nearly as important on a platform that has lots of official, professionally produced content from brands and media outlets as it is on a user-generated network. Between content from friends and content from these official partners, Snapchat likely has plenty to keep users interested and engaged without having to kowtow to independent creators.
via Frustrated Snap Social Influencers Leaving For Rival Platforms – BuzzFeed News