April 14, 2020

The Tech Landscape #148 🎧

This is issue 148 of The Tech Landscape, a weekly collection of news about consumer digital technology. Stories are selected by me, Peter Gasston, with a little insight and opinion where appropriate.

Blood 148 is a reserve in Canada inhabited by the Blood tribe of First Nations people. It’s governed from Stand Off, a town built on the site of the old Fort Stand Off, an illicit whisky trading post where traders (including John “Liver-Eating” Johnson) had a standoff with the local Marshall.

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I hope you all had a good and safe Easter weekend. There was a surprising amount of news last week, and not all of it related to you-know-what.

I’m still experimenting with new formats for going more deeply into some of the stories in this newsletter. After the recent video, this week I’m trying audio. A few people mentioned that they listened to the video in the background while they did other things, so I’ve put together a podcast episode with a (very) rough cut of something I could do more frequently. I’d love your feedback, more on the general approach than the production value or the content itself (which was kind of improvised), so please reply to this email if you listened.

🎧 The Tech Landscape #148: A Little More Detail

Also, I wrote a short thing about life after lockdown, just like everybody else has.

COVID-19 and London’s Great Fire

Assistants & Voice

Google announced the public release of its Local Home SDK, which lets Google Assistant-controlled smart home devices communicate directly with each other without relying on cloud services. It makes smart home connections faster and more private.
developers.googleblog.com/2020/04/local-home-sdk-ready-for-actions.html

Google Assistant’s Duplex, which robocalls to make appointments and bookings on a user’s behalf, is expanding to the UK, Australia, and Canada. Google hasn’t officially announced this yet, but a support page has been updated with region-specific phone numbers which the calls are made from. There’s a suggestion that Google might just be using the service to confirm opening hours with businesses, rather than a full roll out.
theverge.com/2020/4/8/21214321/google-duplex-ai-automated-calling-australia-canada-uk-expansion

Healthcare

Google Maps and Search will show virtual healthcare options in response to some queries. Consultations by phone or video were starting to bubble up before the pandemic, but now are obviously an extremely popular option.
blog.google/technology/health/virtual-care-covid-19/

DreamLab, an app made by Vodafone and Imperial College London which uses your phone’s downtime to process cancer research data, has been updated to help instead with the mission to find treatments for COVID-19. Round of applause for this one.
talkandroid.com/351500-covid-19-vodafone-dreamlab/

Games

Facebook Gaming launched Tournaments, a tool for creators to run their own gaming tournaments. The tool was originally for pro organisers but has been retooled and opened up to a wider audience to meet the increased demand for entertainment at the moment.
facebook.com/fbgaminghome/creators/tournaments

Exclusive eSports / streetwear brand 100 Thieves has made its entire product range available to players of Nintendo’s Animal Crossing. The way people express identity in online spaces is one of the things I’m super-interested in this year, because I think it’ll be more important as AR and video boost visual culture.
twitter.com/100Thieves/status/1247265315202805761

Messaging

WhatsApp will globally apply a stricter limit on forwarding messages, to help control the spread of misinformation (especially that BS 5G conspiracy theory). The limit has been applied in some markets before, but it’s now applied to everyone.
blog.whatsapp.com/Keeping-WhatsApp-Personal-and-Private

China’s three biggest mobile networks teamed up to announce “5G Messages”—or what we know as RCS, the rich replacement of SMS. Google has been trying to get this off the ground in the rest of the world, but China is an interesting case as Android use is much higher than iOS there, so it might exert pressure on Apple to support it for compatibility.
gizchina.com/2020/04/08/5g-messages-is-coming-goodbye-to-sms-mms/

Social

Pinterest continued its rapid evolution into a shopping destination with new shoppable Pins, boards, and search results. More retailers (and advertisers) should be looking at Pinterest, especially as its traffic is at an all-time high right now.
newsroom.pinterest.com/en/post/new-ways-to-shop-on-pinterest-discover-retailers-of-all-sizes

Facebook’s New Product Experimentation team has released Tuned, a ‘social network’ for couples. I don’t really see the point of this, but I guess it’s not aimed at me because I’m not in the early throes of young love.
9to5mac.com/2020/04/07/facebook-ios-chat-app-for-couples/

Video

The NHS is running a trial with Facebook to send 2,050 Portal video calling devices to hospitals, care homes, and other settings. Social distancing and isolation is extremely tough on people in vulnerable situations.
gov.uk/government/news/nhs-works-with-tech-firms-to-help-care-home-residents-and-patients-connect-with-loved-ones

Google says its Meet video calling is adding two million new users per day, as people in isolation use the business-focused tool to stay in touch with work, family, and friends.
cnet.com/news/googles-video-chat-service-adds-2-million-new-users-a-day-amid-coronavirus/

Everything Else

The latest version of the Chrome browser features support for XR and reading NFC tags. It’s about time the web became more capable of reading the world around it.
about.fb.com/news/2020/04/whatsapp-message-forward-limit/

Foursquare has merged with Factual, a similar location services provider. The new company, which will continue under the name Foursquare, says its now the #1 independent in the sector.
enterprise.foursquare.com/intersections/article/factual-joins-foursquare-to-create-clear-location-market-leader/