The Tech Landscape #157 🏖
This is issue 157 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.
157 is an 11-minute song by the singer Tom Rosenthal, in which he sings all the numbers from 1 to 157.
This week Amazon and Microsoft announced they’ll no longer supply facial recognition technology to police forces in the USA, and IBM pulled out of the market altogether. The technology is prone to abuse, but also has useful and important applications which shouldn’t be overlooked; the UK government recently published a snapshot which is worth your time to read if you’re interested in this.
Snapchat Wins The Week
Snapchat announced many new features at a very impressive Partner Summit presentation. Business details in Snap Map, more items recognised by the camera, mini programs, custom machine learning models, add the camera to your own apps, search for Lenses by voice, shared & persistent AR experiences with Local Lenses… a small part of a long list. This was genuinely an amazing keynote, giving a glimpse at the potential of AR in the future, and I’ll be picking over the ramifications of this for weeks.
snap.com/en-GB/news/post/new-ways-for-developers-to-build-with-snapchat/
XR
Google released the first full 1.0 version of Model Viewer, a tool which makes it easy to add 3D models to web pages for viewing in AR. 3D product previews are going to become much more prevalent in future, and this tool makes it very easy to add them.
twitter.com/modelviewer/status/1270752935064920064
Unity announced MARS, a tool for building mixed-reality experiences which account for the messiness of the physical world. I confess, I don’t understand all of this because I’ve never built with Unity; but it looks important.
blogs.unity3d.com/2020/06/08/introducing-unity-mars-a-first-of-its-kind-solution-for-intelligent-ar/
Social
Twitter’s Fleets, the ephemeral Stories-like messages, are now available in India. This is the biggest market yet for the experimental format.
twitter.com/kayvz/status/1270358937917743110
Twitter is testing a prompt to people who share tweets containing links to articles without first opening the article to read it. This sounds great in theory, but I wonder how it will balance being useful with being annoying.
twitter.com/TwitterSupport/status/1270783537667551233
Stat of the Week
Revenue from restaurants, hotels, and bars in the UK was down 90% from last year in April, while eCommerce was up by a third and online groceries by 84%, according to the latest retail data from the Office for National Statistics. Digital transformation accelerated by force.
twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1271377542780530688
COVID-19
Google Maps was updated with more COVID-19 related features for public transit, including showing any travel restrictions in place (such as mandatory mask use in the UK), and data which shows busy times and current use.
blog.google/products/maps/get-around-safely-these-new-google-maps-features/
AI company Sensory updated its biometrics product, TrulySecure, to combine voice and face detection to help identify people wearing masks, and its audio product, Sound ID, to recognise coughs and sneezes. Security for the COVID era.
sensory.com/finally-a-biometric-solution-that-recognizes-users-wearing-face-masks-and-doesnt-require-touch/
Everything Else
Minecraft will host a four day music festival with over 850 artists. Virtual concerts aren’t new, of course, but the scale of this—plus the $10 ticket price—says that they might just be a thing now.
inputmag.com/culture/steve-aoki-paris-hilton-top-electric-blockaloo-minecraft-festival-lineup
Google Duo made it easier to invite people to a video call by adding shareable URLs. It still requires the invitee to have the Duo app, so it’s not as useful as Meet; it was interesting to see Google recently admit about Meet and Duo, which were supposedly aimed at different markets, that “the lines have blurred”.
androidpolice.com/2020/06/08/you-can-now-invite-anyone-to-join-a-google-duo-group-video-call-with-a-simple-link/
Google is bringing some key Assistant features, such as Voice Match which recognises up to six different voices, to third-party smart speakers for the first time.
blog.google/products/assistant/bringing-google-assistant-features-all-smart-devices/
Google released the Beta version of Android 11, ahead of a likely full release in September. Major new features include a messaging centre in the notifications tray, smart home controls in the power button menu, and one-time permissions for improved privacy.
blog.google/products/android/android-11-beta/
OpenAI announced details of its commercial API for tools which understand, parse, or generate English language text. OpenAI was set up as a non-profit but recently launched its for-profit subsidiary.
openai.com/blog/openai-api/