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.
TransferWise launches international money transfers via Facebook – Reuters (Feb 21, 2017)
This is a fascinating confluence of a couple of different things – mobile money transfers and Facebook’s bot strategy. Facebook already offers money transfers directly through Messenger, but only in the US, while it began pushing bots in Messenger early last year without much success. It appears TransferWise, a young but successful European money transfer provider, is leveraging the bot platform in Messenger to enable mobile money transfers between multiple additional countries. As far as I can tell, the bot side of things is incidental – this is really about leveraging the network that exists on Messenger for painless payments, and a bot happens to be the mechanism. In that sense, it’s very similar to the iMessage integrations for payment providers Apple offers in iOS 10 – this is mostly about adding a financial layer to existing interactions.
via Reuters
Pirate Soccer Streams Thrive on Facebook – El Pais (Feb 21, 2017)
There have been a couple of stories recently about Facebook finding ways to detect and either crack down on or monetize pirated music on the platform, but this analysis from Spanish newspaper El Pais demonstrates that music is far from the only thing being pirated regularly on Facebook. It appears that there are massively popular streams – the article cites a recent game between Barcelona and Real Madrid where one stream alone had 700,000 viewers – which go largely unchecked on Facebook. The key to their success is that users follow Pages which post links to streams hosted by other entities – because the aggregators themselves never infringe on any copyright, they can build big audiences and merely direct them at whatever streams are available. As Facebook gets ever more serious about video on the platform, it’s going to have to get better at detecting infringing live streams in real time, especially if it wants to win the trust of traditional broadcasters.
via El Pais (in Spanish)
The Key to Pandora’s Subscription Hopes: Country Music – WSJ (Feb 21, 2017)
This is a fascinating angle on Pandora’s shift to becoming an all-you-can-eat subscription music provider next month: the idea that it’s uniquely appealing to country music fans and hopes to convert many of them to $10-a-month paying subscribers. The article presents lots of interesting evidence on every point but one: that country music fans aren’t already subscribing to other services – a point it finally concedes in the penultimate paragraph. It certainly is true that other streaming services have focused on other genres, principally pop and hip-hop, and that country music fans have been a neglected bunch. But if Pandora is staking its push here on winning over this group, I suspect it’ll have a tough time making a business out it – subscription music is a scale business, and Pandora’s appeal will have to be broad to be successful.
via WSJ
Why Verizon Decided to Still Buy Yahoo After Big Data Breaches – WSJ (Feb 21, 2017)
There was some reporting around this last week, though with several different figures for the discount on the original deal price, so I decided to wait until the new agreement was official to comment on it. The $350 million discount is not actually all that significant, which likely reflects the fact that security breaches like this don’t end up having all that much long-term impact on customer satisfaction or usage. It’s interesting that the two companies will split the cost of any future fallout other than SEC and shareholder investigations and lawsuits – I would have thought Yahoo would have picked up the tab for all costs relating to the breaches, but I guess it must have balked at that. Ironically, now the big question once again becomes whether Verizon can actually craft something compelling out of these various bits of yesteryear’s Internet. Verizon is said to be aiming to go head to head with Google and Facebook, which is a real stretch when it comes to well-targeted advertising, and I’m still very skeptical that these assets combined can ever be more than a second tier player in the online advertising market.
Uber is not the only tech company that mishandles sexual harassment claims – TechCrunch (Feb 21, 2017)
Though I focused in yesterday’s bit on the Uber harassment claims on that company’s toxic corporate culture, it’s far from the only tech company with a culture that’s often unfriendly to women at best and which tolerates harassment and misogyny at worst. This TechCrunch article does a good job highlighting some other cases which were reported anonymously after the Uber news broke. If the tech industry is to become more diverse, this kind of thing has to go away, although of course until it does become more diverse, that’s a lot less likely – there’s definitely something of a catch-22 here.
via TechCrunch
Apple buys Israel’s facial recognition firm RealFace – report – The Times of Israel (Feb 20, 2017)
One of Apple’s ten $100m plus acquisitions was AuthenTec, which provided technology Apple uses in its TouchID sensor. This apparently much smaller acquisition can be seen as another security/unlock-focused acquisition, this time based on facial recognition, but the company also makes consumer-facing facial recognition apps for use with photo libraries, so I’d say this one could yet go either way in terms of how the acquired technology ends up being used.
Samsung’s reputation nosedives in the US after Galaxy Note 7 snafu – The Verge (Feb 20, 2017)
As usual, it would be great to understand in more detail the methodology behind this survey, but it’s not available. The Verge seems to have got the rankings wrong – from what I can tell, Samsung was 7th and not 3rd last year – but it’s also worth noting that Samsung’s score dropped from 80.44 to 75.17, which sounds a lot less dramatic than dropping from 3rd (or even 7th) to 49th. The fact is that there are a lot of companies clustered together between 75 and 87 points and so a small drop in the score produces a big drop in rankings. Since the survey was also conducted in November and December last year, when the Note7 debacle was still very fresh in people’s minds, I’m guessing it would score a lot better just a few months from now. Though the Verge picked up on Samsung’s drop as their headline, it’s worth noting where other tech companies sit too: Amazon is #1 (score 86.27), Apple #5 (82.07), Google #8 (82.00), Tesla #9 (81.70), Netflix #18 (79.86), and Microsoft #20 (79.29), all of which classify as either very good or excellent. It’s also worth noting that big cable companies like Comcast and Charter score in the low 60s, which qualifies as “poor”, while the major wireless carriers score 66-72 (“fair” to “good”), with T-Mobile top and Sprint bottom.
via The Verge (official release here)
Facebook is giving WhatsApp the Snapchat treatment, too – Mashable (Feb 20, 2017)
Yet another use for Facebook’s very successful cloning of Snapchat’s Stories feature in Instagram, this time coming to WhatsApp. This is also another feature-level attempt to take share from Snapchat, which again seems to be what’s finally working for Facebook, in contrast to the whole-app approach it once favored. In this case, Facebook is ditching the Stories name and instead putting this feature in the Status slot in WhatsApp, but it looks like the format is very much the same.
via Mashable
Snapchat Spectacles: Video Sunglasses Now on Sale Everywhere in U.S. – Variety (Feb 20, 2017)
I always figured Snap would put Spectacles on sale online eventually – its bot-based model was great for creating intrigue and interest early on, but clearly wasn’t great for making the glasses available to everyone who wanted them. Now that the initial excitement has long since worn off, selling whatever remaining inventory online makes sense, though I’d argue they should have started this new phase much earlier, towards the end of last year. The initial hype didn’t seem to last that long, and the New York City store had long since stopped having a regular stream of customers.
via Variety
A former Uber employee’s disturbing claims of workplace sexism reignite calls to #deleteUber – Recode (Feb 20, 2017)
On the one hand, this is an awful set of accusations regarding Uber and a culture of misogyny and damaging internal politics, and on the other I suspect most people who follow Uber won’t be surprised. The company has long been known for a bro culture which starts at the top with Travis Kalanick, and it seems to have done very little to change that culture. Corporate cultures are very powerful things, and very hard to change once established. Uber early on created a culture of intense competition both internally and externally – a culture where winning at all costs is what matters – and no matter what executives have said in formal settings since, their early actions have spoken much louder, and it appears that the culture at Uber is deeply toxic, especially for women. Travis Kalanick has predictably responded with feigned outrage, despite the fact that at the very least his direct reports were aware of the specifics here, and of course he’s directly responsible for the company culture that allows these things to happen. I’m glad an investigation will be led by Arianna Huffington, who is outside the hierarchy at Uber but on its board, and I’m very curious to see what it shows. A whitewash will go down terribly, but anything short of a serious shakeup is likely to be seen as insufficient.
via Recode (Susan Fowler’s full post here, and Kalanick’s Twitter response thread is here, while Arianna Huffington’s short tweet thread is here)
GM plans to build, test thousands of self-driving Bolts in 2018 – Reuters (Feb 18, 2017)
That’s two major carmakers who now plan to deploy their first autonomous vehicles in ride sharing fleets, with Ford already committed to rolling out its first self-driving cars in a similar scenario. This makes lots of sense – two of the biggest limitations of early AVs are going to be cost and restricted geographic use, so deploying them in ride sharing fleets where they can be limited to a narrow area and driven almost constantly creates conditions in which they can still be both effective and cost effective. I’m still skeptical that we’ll see these cars roll out in more than one or two markets in the timeframes mentioned here, and even then I think it’s quite likely they’ll require human drivers for quite some time. But all this also reinforces the sense that it will be many years until we see universally autonomous vehicles (rather than cars able to be autonomous within narrow confines), and also somewhat undermines Lyft’s claims of getting to 50% autonomous in its fleet by 2021.
via Reuters
Zuckerberg manifesto removes reference to Facebook monitoring ‘private channels’ – Business Insider (Feb 17, 2017)
Kudos to Mashable, which first noticed that one paragraph in a 6,000-word manifesto had been changed from the original to the final version (I covered the manifesto itself yesterday). And kudos, too, to Business Insider for following up with Facebook to find out why it was removed. The official explanation is that the paragraph talked too specifically about a capability Facebook hasn’t finalized yet, but it’s at least as likely that Facebook worried it would cause major privacy concerns. The paragraph in question talked about using AI to detect terrorists in private channels, which rather flies in the face of Facebook’s commitment to encryption and protecting privacy. As with much else in the letter, I think it was likely intended to be mostly aspirational rather than specific, but the original paragraph was rather tone deaf about how such an idea would be received even in such high-level terms.
via Business Insider
Apple has decided that the iPad Pro isn’t a computer after all – Fast Company (Feb 17, 2017)
I’m not quite sure about the headline here – in fact, I think the point of Apple’s new ads is that the iPad can do many of the things your computer can do but without some of the downsides. The examples cited include built-in LTE, Pencil support, lack of viruses, and portability. It still doesn’t feel like the iPad has a single clear value proposition in the same way some of Apple’s other devices do, but Apple is getting better at communicating some of the several reasons why you might want an iPad, and an iPad Pro in particular. And I’ve no doubt the wireless carriers will be delighted that two of the four ads specifically mention the optional built-in LTE.
via Fast Company (all of Apple’s new ads can be seen here)
BuzzFeed Debuts a Tool for Helping Readers See Other Perspectives (Feb 17, 2017)
This is a great idea, and I hope we’ll see a lot more of this kind of innovation around news – we need it. One of the things I’m most struck by almost daily is the different universes that I’m a part of on Twitter and Facebook – during the day, I’m surrounded by mostly very liberal perspectives among the coastal tech people I follow on Twitter, and in the evenings at weekend I spend more time on Facebook, where the people I’m connected to tend to be more conservative. But I suspect many of us inhabit mostly one or other of these worlds, or tend to shut out those perspectives which are different from our own on social media, tending to reinforce our perceptions and prejudices. Not everyone will go for this kind of experiment – some may choose to continue to see a narrower view of the world, but we could all benefit from putting ourselves in others’ shoes and seeing the news through other lenses than our own.
via BuzzFeed
SoftBank eyes Sprint, T-Mobile deals – CNBC (Feb 17, 2017)
This isn’t a huge surprise – ever since Donald Trump won the US presidential election in November, the odds of a deal involving Sprint and T-Mobile have gone way up, because the incoming administration is likely to be much friendlier to consolidation. However, that’s no guarantee that a deal will get done – last time around SoftBank was the driving force behind the deal and very keen to control the resulting entity, whereas at this point it seems a lot less committed to its US wireless adventure. At the same time, T-Mobile USA is performing much better as an investment for Deutsche Telekom, making it less likely to sell. One option would be for Deutsche Telekom to take over Sprint, but it’s far from clear that it wants to (and it would certainly be awkward regardless given TMO CEO John Legere’s constant belittling of Sprint). Then, of course, there’s the question of whether a merger is a good idea. On the one hand, scale continues to be enormously important in the market, and Sprint and T-Mobile have a big disadvantage here, but on the other T-Mobile has been pretty well anyway by itself, while Sprint has been doing far less so (or growing by sacrificing margins and revenues). And it will be very hard to argue that a merger at this point would be good for competition, even with Republicans in charge at the FTC, DoJ, and FCC.
via CNBC
Uber’s public Q&A with drivers was a disaster – The Verge (Feb 17, 2017)
Uber’s relationship with drivers has often been contentious, and it appears that even when the company is trying to “listen” to its drivers more, things often go wrong, as in this case. The big problem is that there are simply too many deep-seated frustrations and problems in Uber’s relationship with its drivers for them to be substantively addressed during such a public Q&A session, and Uber’s management should have known this. Without first establishing a level of trust and ongoing communication over a longer period of time, these occasional opportunities become venting sessions for drivers who feel like they’re not being heard, which makes them unproductive for all concerned. Uber needs to do better at really listening to its drivers regularly (something it sounds like Jeff Jones does at least try to do semi-regularly in smaller groups), but more importantly it needs to get better at actually addressing their big concerns.
via The Verge
Ford’s Dozing Engineers Side With Google in Full Autonomy Push – Bloomberg (Feb 17, 2017)
This is a really important aspect of autonomous driving that’s not talked about nearly enough. In the SAE levels system for describing autonomy in vehicles, all the layers between 0 and 5 require the driver and vehicle to work together at least to some extent, which means that even when the car has taken over a task, the driver is supposed to remain ready to take over when the car requests him or her to re-engage. The problem here is that we tend to switch off, whether deliberately or merely passively, when our focus isn’t actively required, and that means that machines have to give us an awful lot of notice when we need to take over. In practical terms, that’s often impossible, and that can actually make cars operating at levels 3-4 in particular less safe rather than safer than human drivers. That has important implications for those manufacturers which seem to be trying to work incrementally up from Level 2 to Level 4 or 5 over time, like Tesla, because there seems to be an increasing consensus that we may need to skip those middle levels entirely. And it also means, as I’ve pointed out a couple of times before, that lots of experience operating test or production vehicles at Level 2 or 3 is not nearly the same as being ready to produce a Level 4 or 5 vehicle.
via Bloomberg (we discussed this topic in depth during this episode of the Beyond Devices Podcast and this talk by Gill Pratt, head Toyota’s Research Institute, is also very illuminating on the same topic)
Samsung to Use Sony Batteries in Galaxy S8 Phone – WSJ (Feb 17, 2017)
The fallout from the Note7 recall continues: Samsung is apparently adding another battery supplier to its roster, though Sony’s capacity is so small that it will likely be by far the smallest by volume. None of this guarantees anything – the Note7 had problems because both battery suppliers produced faulty batteries and because Samsung’s design put pressure on those batteries. Given that those same two suppliers will be making most of the batteries used for the S8, and Samsung of course will still be designing it, what those three companies do differently is far more important than adding another minority battery supplier. As such, I suspect this is probably better read as an attempt by Samsung to exert some pressure on its existing suppliers by demonstrating a willingness to look elsewhere than any sort of strategy to ensure safer batteries in the S8. In that way, this is analogous to Apple’s recent move to give Intel some of its iPhone modem business. But all this also highlights the difficulties in shifting suppliers at such scale – neither Apple nor Samsung can suddenly switch suppliers at this volume, and even if they could the new vendors often underperform relative to the incumbents (as here with Sony’s batteries and also with Intel’s modems).
via WSJ
Mark Zuckerberg Pens a Personal and Facebook Manifesto (Feb 16, 2017)
Mark Zuckerberg has posted a combination personal and Facebook manifesto to the site, and has also been speaking to a variety of reporters about it over the last day or so. The manifesto is long and covers a ton of ground, some of it about the state of the world but much of it at least indirectly and often quite directly about Facebook and its role in such a world. In some ways, this builds on comments Zuckerberg made at the F8 developer conference last year, and it mostly stays at a similar high level, talking about grand ideas and issues at the 30,000 foot level rather than naming particular politicians or being more specific. To the extent that Zuckerberg is talking about how to use Facebook as a force for good in the world, this is admirable at least to a point. He clearly now both recognizes and is willing to admit to a greater extent than previously the role Facebook has played in some of the negative trends (and I believe this piece contains his first proactive use of the phrase “fake news”), and wants to help fix them, though much of his commentary on what’s going wrong spreads the blame more broadly. I’m also a little concerned that, although many of the problems Facebook creates stem from the service’s massive and increasing power over our lives, the solutions he proposes mostly seem to be about increasing Facebook’s power rather than finding ways to limit it. To some extent, that’s natural given who he is, but it suggests an ongoing unwillingness to recognize the increasing mediation of our world by big forces like Facebook and Google and the negative impact that can have. Still, it’s good to see more open communication on issues like this from a major tech leader – I’d love to see more of this kind of thing (as I wrote last summer in this piece).
via Facebook
Alphabet Scraps Plan to Blanket Globe With Internet Balloons – Bloomberg (Feb 16, 2017)
I think the framing here is exactly right – this is part of the broader crackdown at Alphabet on some of its longer-term and less financially viable projects. The new approach – targeting balloons at specific regions rather than trying to blanket the globe – always seemed like the more obvious way to go, but of course balloons are inherently hard to navigate, so I’m intrigued to know how they will manage that. Two big questions remain: firstly, whether Internet access delivered from the sky can ever be really good (see existing satellite-based Internet access, which tends to be slow and bandwidth limited), and whether Alphabet should be in the access business at all (see also yesterday’s Google Fiber item). At least it sounds like this particular project might generate revenues sooner rather than later (and eventually even profits!) but it’s still not clear that it’s going to benefit the core Google business much.
via Bloomberg (Update: there’s a bit more detail in this blog post from Google X)