The Tech Landscape #189 🌄
Instagram’s future, Stadia changes, and Messenger in VR: this is issue 189 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.
The Marketing Society asked me, in my capacity as Innovation Lead at a large marketing agency, to write about some trends to watch in the year ahead. Rather than write a typical trends piece, I wrote about three different areas that will drive online culture in 2021, with a shared human truth at their core: we may be apart, but we want to be apart together.
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Instagram’s Future
Instagram is currently running limited tests of a pair of features which would fundamentally change the service.
Instagram is testing a vertical swipe-through format for Stories. It would replace the horizontal carousel which, to be fair, is pretty unmanageable if you follow a lot of Stories creators.
techcrunch.com/2021/02/03/instagram-confirms-its-working-on-a-vertical-stories-feed/
Instagram is testing a block on sharing feed posts into Stories. It’s reportedly based on feedback from users that they don’t like seeing repeated content, but without a native feature for sharing content it means that feed content will have a more limited reach in future.
socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-tests-removing-the-option-to-share-feed-posts-within-stories/594255/
I think Instagram is clearly showing that the old feed of content is no longer the future of the platform, with full-screen Stories and Reels set to take precedence—driven, in no small part, by the success of TikTok. I’d lay money on an app redesign leading to the disappearance of the feed by the end of the year.
Everything Else
Gaming Google is shutting its Stadia-exclusive games studios and will focus on licensing the platform to developers and publishers. This isn’t the end of Stadia, but it’s the end of Google making exclusive first-party games for it, which means its success is now largely in the hands of others.
blog.google/products/stadia/focusing-on-stadias-future-as-a-platform-and-winding-down-sge/
Messaging Users of the Quest 2 VR headset can now chat to their friends with Messenger. It comes as part of a new software update which also adds an easier way to install experimental VR experiences that aren’t available in the Oculus Store.
oculus.com/blog/latest-oculus-quest-update-fosters-developer-creativity-with-app-lab-and-connects-people-with-messenger/
Entertainment TikTok launched an app on Android TV and Google TV. The app will be available in the UK, France, and Germany, and follows a launch on Samsung TVs at the end of last year. The move to TV broadens TikTok’s audience (and appeal to advertisers).
newsroom.tiktok.com/en-gb/tiktok-on-google-tv-and-android-tv-is-here
Health Google Fit will soon detect your heart and respiratory rates using only the smartphone camera. The detection isn’t reliable enough for medical diagnosis, but useful for wellness monitoring. It will be available on Pixel phones only at first.
blog.google/technology/health/take-pulse-health-and-wellness-your-phone/
Synthetic Media Microsoft launched Custom Neural Voice, which generates synthetic speech. Given samples of recorded speech, the service can generate a voice model which can then say anything its supplied with (Amazon is among other companies offering a similar service). Obviously the potential for abuse is high, so each request to use the service will be vetted.
blogs.microsoft.com/ai-for-business/custom-neural-voice-ga/
Browsers The latest version of the Chrome browser adds an icon for QR code generation. Tapping the icon on any web page creates a code, making it easy open the desktop content on mobile. (I’ve had this running for a couple of months and I use it regularly.)
androidpolice.com/2021/02/04/chrome-84-brings-new-dino-themed-qr-codes-to-android-and-desktops/
Search Google added source information to search results. You can tap to find out more about a website before you visit it, giving more context before you make the decision to visit an unknown site. It’s available in the US for now.
blog.google/products/search/about-search-results/
Transit ‘Millions’ of future Ford cars will run on Android from 2023. It’s part of a long-term partnership between the two companies which will include making Google’s software the core of the cars’ systems.
protocol.com/ford-google-partnership
Stats of the Week
Art buyers who use Saatchi’s AR preview tool are four times more likely to purchase. digiday.com/media/sothebys-and-saatchi-augmented-reality/
Spotify added 74 million new active users in 2020, with 30m of those paying for the service. 25% of its customers use it for podcast listening, with listening time doubling YoY in Q4.
investors.spotify.com/financials/press-release-details/2021/Spotify-Technology-S.A.-Announces-Financial-Results-for-Fourth-Quarter-2020/default.aspx
Amazon’s global sales in the last financial quarter increased 44% over the previous year. In the UK, that increase was 51%. And net sales for the full year were up 38%. Amazon has done well from the pandemic.
ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2021/Amazon.com-Announces-Fourth-Quarter-Results/
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