October 28, 2019

The Tech Landscape #125 🏛

Rome’s Pantheon was completed, in its current form, in 125 CE. Despite being 1,894 years old it’s still the largest unreinforced concrete dome ever built.

I got my Pixel 4 this week. It arrived in a cereal box, which was fun. The face unlocking works like magic, the motion sensing is… well, I’ve yet to use it practically. But it’s a nice phone.

Assistants & Voice

Alexa now has Premium Skills for Kids, with in-Skill purchasing limited by parental controls.
developer.amazon.com/blogs/alexa/post/e3699906-f67a-488b-9406-ac265804192d/premium-experiences-now-available-for-kid-skills-in-the-us

Amazon Pay users in India can now pay bills with Alexa. It’s interesting to see the experimentation going on with digital payments in India, which removed 85% of cash notes from its economy in 2016.
techcrunch.com/2019/10/16/amazon-pay-users-in-india-can-now-pay-their-utility-mobile-and-cable-bills-with-alexa/

The BBC has launched a new interactive news service on Alexa, where users can skip stories or ask to hear more.
pressgazette.co.uk/bbc-launches-interactive-news-service-for-smart-speakers/

XR

AR effects which are associated with plastic surgery will no longer be allowed on Spark AR, the camera platform for Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. I’ve no idea what their criteria is for being associated with plastic surgery, and it seems like this might be easy to get around.
facebook.com/groups/SparkARcommunity/permalink/733132997098745/

Snap(chat) announced its vision for wearable augmented reality “in 7-10 years”, which is optimistic for how long they’ll be around but pessimistic for the timeline of AR wearables.
theverge.com/2019/10/22/20927521/snap-growth-earnings-ceo-user-ar-augmented-reality

Social

Facebook launched a trial of a News tab in selected markets in the US. The tab will include local and national news, and combine human and algorithmic curation.
newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/10/introducing-facebook-news/

WeChat announced new rules of use of its platform, including a ban on incentivised sharing and restrictions on group buying mechanics. Its largely about hobbling potential competitors.
walkthechat.com/new-wechat-regulation-on-incentivized-sharing-and-external-links/

TikTok has rebutted recent claims about Chinese control from US government, saying it doesn’t send data to China, and isn’t subject to Chinese censorship. It also says it doesn’t operate in China and has no plans to, which is odd because a recent deck leaked shows it talking about 500m active users in China.
newsroom.tiktok.com/en-us/statement-on-tiktoks-content-moderation-and-data-security-practices

Telecoms

The four big US mobile networks have partnered on an initiative to bring RCS (“SMS 2.0”) messaging to phones. The timing is interesting as Google recently started to run its own RCS servers in some European markets as it was (presumably) tired of the networks’ slow adoption of the format.
investors.sprint.com/news-and-events/press-releases/press-release-details/2019/ATT-Sprint-T-Mobile-and-Verizon-Form-Joint-Venture-to-Transform-Messaging-Experience/default.aspx

Owners of the Pixel 4 on Google’s (US-based) Fi network will get a more consistent network connection as Fi uses the Pixel 4’s dual-SIM technology to switch between networks automatically. OK, this is quite dull, but could become more common as more phones launch with dual and virtual SIM.
blog.google/products/google-fi/better-coverage-with-fis-dual-connect-technology/

Entertainment

Google is opening its first Stadia ‘games and entertainment’ studio, in Montréal. The ‘and entertainment’ bit is interesting as it points to Stadia’s future as more than a cloud gaming service. Further studios are planned.
blog.google/products/stadia/first-stadia-studio-coming-montreal/

Spotify is testing a feature where artists can pay to send new music notifications to fans. Premium users will be able to disable these notifications.
newsroom.spotify.com/2019-10-24/brand-new-music-for-you/

Android

Android’s Project Treble, a technical initiative aimed at getting Android phones updated faster, seems to be paying off as Android 9 accounted for 22.6% of all devices in August, compared to Android 8’s 14.6% at the same point last year.
android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/10/all-about-updates-more-treble.html

Android showed off new and improved developer tools at its Dev Summit, including a visual layout tool called Compose.
android-developers.googleblog.com/2019/10/android-dev-summit-2019-keynote.html

Everything Else

Google announced it has achieved ‘quantum supremacy’—that is, a quantum computer has provably achieved results considered impossible for a standard binary computer. Although a long way from consumer use, it’s an important milestone in future supercomputing.
blog.google/technology/ai/computing-takes-quantum-leap-forward/

Google Search now better understands natural queries after the introduction of a new natural language processor called BERT.
blog.google/products/search/search-language-understanding-bert/

Google released five experimental ‘digital wellbeing’ apps. Personal aside: I think ‘digital wellbeing’ is largely bunkum.
blog.google/outreach-initiatives/digital-wellbeing/digital-wellbeing-experiments/

The BBC launched a version of its international news site on the ‘dark web’ via the Tor browser, in an effort to make it available to countries which have otherwise banned it.
bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50150981

The UK’s largest test of on-road self-driving vehicles will soon begin on a route between Bromley and Croydon.
venturebeat.com/2019/10/23/u-k-research-consortium-launching-nations-largest-self-driving-trial-on-public-roads/