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.
Apple will not change charging cable on iPhone 8, Ming-Chi Kuo says – CNBC (Mar 2, 2017)
This didn’t take long – Ming-Chi Kuo, who is the best-sourced Apple financial analyst out there, has debunked the report that the next iPhone will replace the Lightning port with USB-C. I said yesterday that this felt like a 50/50 report in the first place – logical as an eventual step, but not necessarily imminent, and it appears that we can now lay it to rest. Kuo does say that the other end of the cable might be USB-C, and that the new iPhones will support fast charging, something competing Android devices have had for some time.
via CNBC
Snap’s shares pop after $3.4 billion IPO – Reuters (Mar 2, 2017)
Snap’s IPO was widely expected to come today, and it ended up being a great debut for the stock, which rose 44% by the time the market closed, though it’s lost a little since and seems to be fairly volatile. As I’ve argued, the IPO itself comes at an extremely risky time for Snap and its investors, because there has been slowing growth but not enough time to see whether that growth will rebound, making future growth uncertain. The pop today wasn’t a surprise – the market has been so hungry for a major tech IPO for such a long time, and Snapchat is such a hot property, that retail investors chasing the next big thing were always going to jump in in a big way. At this point, Snapchat’s growth could still recover and it could go on to become one of the big success stories of the 2010s, or it could become another Twitter – there’s really no way to know at this point.
via Reuters
Netflix uses AI in its new codec to compress video scene by scene — Quartz (Mar 2, 2017)
This feels like a somewhat gratuitous use of AI here by Netflix – maybe this is technically AI, but it’s hard to see how it’s not just image analysis. But the broader point here is that this is an often overlooked aspect of Netflix’s differentiation: its technical capabilities in video delivery. Yes, its investments in original content and its massive and rapidly growing scale globally are huge advantages over the competition, but its content delivery networks, compression techniques, and a host of other technical capabilities are also key to making its user experience better. And this is another area where it often feels like it will take competitors a long time to catch up even if they ever decide that’s strategically important.
via Quartz
Lyft looks to raise $500M as Uber stumbles – USA Today (Mar 2, 2017)
As I mentioned in covering Lyft’s rapid expansion into new cities in the first two months of the year, taking advantage of Uber’s current struggles is smart, but it’s going to be costly. This news that Lyft is raising more money is validation of that view, but may also be a sign that it work even harder to take advantage of this window of opportunity. That’s smart – Uber is especially vulnerable with both drivers and riders at the moment, and the differentiation between the two is so limited that as long as Lyft has the capacity it could take really meaningful share.
via USA Today
Microsoft Renames Windows Holographic as Windows Mixed Reality – MSPowerUser (Mar 2, 2017)
Microsoft has apparently renamed its Windows Holographic platform as Windows Mixed Reality, which seems to be a reflection of the broadening of the platform from its original narrow AR focus to something broader, including the release of a number of VR headsets that was announced a couple of months ago. At the time, I saw that as a concession that Microsoft’s original vision wasn’t coming to fruition fast enough or at big enough scale, and that it needed to broaden its scope to encompass the areas that are hotter in the short term, notably VR. That was particularly important for its OEM partners, most of whom were never going to build a HoloLens like headset but who likely wanted to build more accessible VR gear. This name change reinforces my sense that Microsoft is realizing that it needs to think more broadly if it wants to play a serious role here in the near term, and that probably also means building more first party VR gear for Xbox among other things.
via MSPowerUser
Foursquare offers every mobile app access to your whereabouts – Mashable (Mar 1, 2017)
Foursquare is the rare example of a company whose late-stage pivot is actually working out. So many companies switch from one business model to another early in life – Twitter is a classic example – but very few start to struggle after several years of one business model only to find success with another. A few years back, a friend who was then senior at Foursquare told me that data and tools and not consumer check-ins were going to be the future of Foursquare, and in the years since the company has been executing on that vision. One of the most impressive parts of this is that Foursquare apparently has more checkins today than ever before, so the app is actually still doing well enough among a core set of users to provide a rich location database that can be used for these new developer tools. But it’s now monetizing pretty much exclusively through the developers and others that are tapping into its location data rather than through something on the consumer end.
via Mashable
Yahoo Fires General Counsel and Docks Marissa Mayer’s Bonus and Stock Award (Mar 1, 2017)
It looks like Yahoo is finally announcing the results of its independent investigation into the security breaches of the last few years, and as a result its general counsel is stepping down and CEO Marissa Mayer is losing her bonus and equity grant for the year, a decision apparently made by the board. Yahoo’s 10-K, also released today, gives a little more detail on the investigation, which was carried out by members of the board, assisted by outside counsel and a forensics expert. The investigation concluded that senior executives “did not properly comprehend or investigate, and therefore failed to act sufficiently upon, the full extent of knowledge known internally by the Company’s information security team.” That implies that it was executives and not security specialists within the company who messed up here, which explains why Mayer and general counsel Ronald Bell were punished. The paragraph on the findings is worth reading in full as it’s fairly damning about internal communication at Yahoo at the time. And yet this is all part of clearing the decks before Verizon takes over, at which point it will be hoping to put all this behind it. Not the best way for Mayer to go out, but I think that was inevitable at this point.
via Marissa Mayer (Tumblr) – see also Yahoo’s 10-K (p.46-7)
Google unveils playable ads for Android game developers and other tools – TechCrunch (Mar 1, 2017)
This feels like a clever little idea from Google – showing people ads for games in which a tiny version of the game itself is embedded, making the ad playable. It could also be part of an eventual path to Progressive Web Apps and other web-app hybrids Google is working on, just as some of these tools are already served up in search results. There are some other clever enhancements here too – it feels like app ads are far from done as a medium.
via TechCrunch
Oculus Drops Price of Rift and Controllers by $100 Each (Mar 1, 2017)
I’ve just had a little debate with myself (and with some others on Twitter) as to which site to link to for this news – lots provided essentially the same information in my Twitter feed at roughly the same time, and I was left with a choice of a site with a paywall, a site with egregious auto play videos, or a site with more superficial coverage. The news itself is interesting – Facebook/Oculus is reducing the price of both the Rift and the controller by $100 each for a total discount of $200 and a new combined price of $598, which puts it below the price for the $799 HTC Vive, but above the $399 price of the Playstation VR. The combined price of a console or PC plus headset is still lowest for Playstation by quite a distance, helping explain why the latter is selling so well, especially with a large installed base of consoles. Oculus insists it’s not reducing the price because of poor sales, and it’s been saying for months Oculus sales wouldn’t be material to Facebook’s overall business for years, so there’s some credibility to its claim that it’s just executing on a longer-term plan here. Even Sony’s nearly 1 million sales are still very small in the context of any other mainstream consumer electronics category, which is a useful reminder of VR’s relative immaturity. But lower prices will help accelerate things a bit, as well installment plans like the one HTC announced this week.
via Techmeme (alternatively, direct links to FT, USA Today, and Business Insider)
Spotify is preparing to launch a Hi-Fi music tier – The Verge (Mar 1, 2017)
Another front in the challenging streaming music differentiation war: higher-fidelity music, something Tidal and some other niche services already offer but which the big players mostly haven’t. Spotify only appears to be testing this option with customers at the moment, including a range of different prices for the upgrade ($5-10), and there’s no guarantee it launches. Obviously, higher revenue per month could expand margins, but only if Spotify doesn’t have to pay commensurately more for the content itself. And of course the portion of users who would actually pay more per month is likely to be very small as a percentage of the total.
via The Verge
Lenovo is Re-emphasizing the Motorola Brand, Doubling Down on Mods – CNET (Mar 1, 2017)
I’ve changed the headline here to reflect two key points from the article: that Lenovo has done an about face and decided to re-enshrine the Motorola brand as the main brand for its phones globally, rather than de-emphasize it as previously planned; and that the company is doubling down on its Moto Mods concept, rather than abandoning it as LG has. The branding decision is a no-brainer: it always seemed odd to take an iconic brand like Motorola and retire it in favor of the Lenovo brand, which has far less (and less positive) recognition among smartphone buyers globally. The Mods decision is an interesting one – this article has one of the first numbers I’ve seen on how well they’re selling – it sounds like roughly half of Moto Z phones are bought with at least one Mod, which is actually a pretty decent attach rate (no pun intended). But Lenovo’s latest financial results say the Z is on track for just 3 million shipments in its first year, relative to Lenovo’s 51 million total smartphone shipments in 2016, so this flagship is still a tiny fraction of its total sales. And that’s a problem, because the rest of Lenovo’s sales haven’t been going nearly as well, and those that have been are very low-end focused. That’s not a great recipe for eventual profitability in smartphones, something that’s remained elusive for Lenovo since it bought Motorola.
via CNET
Samsung’s bill to take on Apple’s Siri topped $200 million – Axios (Mar 1, 2017)
The number in the headline refers to the acquisition price of Viv, a virtual assistant startup which Samsung bought a few months back and is expected to integrate into the Samsung S8 launching later this month. To put that number in context, it’s around the same amount Apple was reported to have paid to acquire Siri, and tiny in the context of Samsung’s overall business – it generated $180 billion in revenue last year, along with $25 billion in operating profit. So Samsung can far more easily afford this investment than, say, Xiaomi can afford its comparably-sized investment in in-house chip capability. But it’s still a decent chunk of money from Samsung in a year when it also announced the much larger Harman acquisition. Far more importantly, we haven’t yet seen what Viv will do when integrated into a Samsung phone, and whether it’ll be as good as the early hype around the standalone product suggested.
via Axios
Google is Providing SDN, NFV and Other Network Technology to Carriers (Mar 1, 2017)
Google has a long history of working with carriers – after all, Android was originally presented as a partnership with carriers to create an open mobile operating system, and in the last few days it’s deepened its carrier push around the RCS technology for messaging. This announcement, though, is a bit different, because it’s pushing Google where historically only specialized network equipment and OSS/BSS vendors have gone before, deep into carrier networks to help with software defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NFV), two of the hottest buzzwords in this fairly arcane world. This is a big departure for Google, which has a somewhat contentious relationship with at least some carriers around the world, not least in Europe. But some carriers are also far more willing than others to outsource key technology to others – Bharti Airtel in India is one of those, and is one of Google’s two launch partners here, though I’m less familiar with SK Telecom’s historic stance on this issue. At a time when Alphabet’s focus overall has seemed to be narrowing, this is an interesting counter-example.
via Google
Snap, Which Calls Itself a Camera Company, Has Looked at Building Cameras (Mar 1, 2017)
It’s almost certainly not a coincidence that not one but two rumors about Snap working on additional hardware have sprouted the week of its IPO, both apparently well sourced yet conveniently vague on whether a product will actually ever be launched. This is good hype fodder for an IPO with some serious question marks over it, and yet non-specific enough that the company can afford never to release either of these two products (the Times reports a drone, while TechCrunch discusses a 360 degree camera). None of this is to say that Snap – which now calls itself a camera company and has one piece of camera hardware already in Spectacles – won’t release more camera hardware in future. In fact, I’d say it seems very likely. But when it happens, we’ll see whether that’s actually a bet that ends up moving the needle or just ends up being a novelty as Spectacles seem to have been. I’m still not convinced that Snap will ever be able to make a serious business out of hardware, its marketing genius notwithstanding.
via New York Times and TechCrunch
Uber’s self-driving unit quietly bought firm with tech at heart of Alphabet lawsuit – Reuters (Mar 1, 2017)
This is an interesting angle on the Uber-Waymo lawsuit over the alleged stealing of LiDAR technology by Anthony Levandowski – it appears Levandowski’s Otto acquired a company which specialized in LiDAR technology before it was itself acquired by Uber, providing an alternative theory for how the company was apparently able to get up to speed so quickly on the technology. One of Waymo’s key arguments in its suit was that Levandowski appeared to make unreasonably rapid progress on LiDAR following Otto’s founding, and that the only explanation was theft of ideas, designs and so on from Waymo. As an interesting side note, see also this newly-released October 2016 interview with Anthony Levandowski from Forbes, in which he somewhat bizarrely volunteers the information that he didn’t steal any IP from Google when he left. He also talks through his long history with autonomous driving technology, which raises a key point here: clearly Levandowski learned a lot about this technology over the years, and taking that knowledge with him to a new employer clearly isn’t stealing. So how does Waymo prove in court that Otto/Uber used the documents he allegedly downloaded rather than his personal knowledge (or technology from somewhere completely different) in designing LiDAR systems? If you know the best way to build a LiDAR system because you’ve done it before, are you obligated to act as if you have no idea how to do it when you move to a new employer? I’m not a lawyer, but I think some of these questions are fascinating, and are likely to be critical in this case.
via Reuters
Twitter Adds Top Commentary Tab to Live Video Experience – Mashable (Mar 1, 2017)
It looks like Twitter debuted a new Top Commentary tab in its live video screen last night for President Trump’s address to Congress. This should have been there from the beginning – the uncurated selection of tweets that has been shown against most live video since it launched on Twitter has been an unusable mess, and this new tab is a huge improvement. For the first time, this actually demonstrates the value of a curated stream of top tweets for a real-time event, something most active users of Twitter likely already grasp, but new users tuning in for a live video event don’t. Showing them the value – and power – of watching a well selected stream of tweets in real time is critical to converting them to active users of the platform. But of course Twitter should be doing this kind of real-time curation constantly for major topics across the site, especially given that it appears the feature is algorithm-driven, which means it’s much more scalable than something curated by human beings.
via Mashable
Nintendo Switch Reviews Suggest Excitement About Model, Less About Actual Performance and Games Available (Mar 1, 2017)
The review embargo for the new Nintendo Switch console seems to have lifted overnight, and the reviews that have resulted are mostly pretty mixed. There’s quite a bit of excitement for the concept and some of the execution, but every review I’ve read so far highlights hardware bugs, performance lags, frustrations with Bluetooth and cramped controllers, and especially a lack of games at launch. It appears that Nintendo mostly allowed reviewers to demo one game – a pretty good new Zelda title – and a package of mini games called 1-2-Switch which seems mostly intended to show off various game modes rather than provide hours of entertainment. As such, this seems like an in-betweener for Nintendo – neither the big hit the Wii and DS were, nor the obvious flop the Wii U was. In time, it’s possible that software updates and more games will push it over into the hit category, but it certainly doesn’t look like it’s there yet. All this is, of course, interesting in the context of Nintendo’s simultaneous push into mobile gaming through smartphones, which has also been a mixed bag so far.
via Ars Technica (lots more on Techmeme)
Twitter Provides Three More Enhancements to Dealing with Abuse and Harassment (Mar 1, 2017)
I’ve been very critical of Twitter over its poor response to abuse and harassment on the platform, so I don’t think they should get a free pass now just because they’ve finally decided to do something about it. However, kudos to them for finally acting on these issues after the years of bizarre prevarication on this point – they’ve now moving quickly, as promised (here are two other steps taken in the last few weeks). These latest changes are actually some of the best they’ve announced during this period, because they actually remove content proactively from your feed based on algorithms. This has always seemed like it would have to be a big part of the answer – human curation was never going to be able to deal with the volumes involved here. But another positive change is more feedback on abuse reports users submit, which has been largely missing from the app itself so far. There’s still a risk of false positives and Twitter definitely needs mechanisms for appeal and reinstatement where those occur, but it does finally feel like Twitter is making meaningful progress here.
via Twitter
Parents adopting Snapchat as their kids exit – Axios (Mar 1, 2017)
We’ve seen this happen so many times now with social networks that it’s a cliche at this point – as the parents arrive, the kids start leaving. That’s still an exaggeration with Snapchat at this point, and certainly the arrival of the olds isn’t the cause of the departure (technically, slower growth) among youngsters, but a maturing of the base is natural over time as Snapchat already has massive penetration among younger demographics, at least in its biggest markets. These eMarketer numbers, though, still don’t paint a picture of very rapid growth at Snap, which continues to be the biggest worry ahead of this week’s IPO.
via Axios
Roku Got Close to $400 Million Revenue in 2016 – Variety (Feb 28, 2017)
Roku has to be pretty much unique as a small standalone player which nonetheless dominates a market in which major ecosystem players also compete. Taking 48% share (per Nielsen) against a combination of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Sony, and others is quite the achievement, and it’s especially remarkable given that Roku really doesn’t have any unique features or much unique content at this point. That’s the power of being an early player and one of the most open ones in a market where some of the big ecosystem players have been later to the game and/or offered more closed systems. I’m not sure how sustainable this position will be over the longer term, and that’s why Roku has already begun pivoting to the smart TV licensing model as an alternative to the standalone set top box.
via Variety (press release here)