The Tech Landscape #191 💷
Blockchain commerce, Twitter voice DMs, and YouTube’s roadmap: this is issue 191 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.
Obviously the thing that everyone’s been talking about this week is Australia’s proposed media code, which is on the verge of becoming law, and requires large web platforms (basically Facebook and Google) to pay publishers to link to their content.
Google and News Corp reached an agreement for Google to pay ‘significant’ amounts through its News Showcase feature in Australia, while Facebook took the extreme measure of banning the sharing of all news links in the country.
The generally-held opinion in tech land is that Google shouldn’t have caved, while Facebook is probably correct in principle even if the execution was lacking. The generally-held opinion in media land is that Google did the right thing and Facebook is the greatest threat to the world that ever existed (I kid).
My take is that, no matter how low your opinion of Facebook is, or how much you value investment in news journalism, this is an objectively bad law and paying for links sets a terrible precedent. As Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales put it:
Fair compensation for an endless stream of free customers is zero.
For more detail, I recommend reading these pieces by people smarter than me: Paying for news, by Benedict Evans; and Why Google caved to Australia, and Facebook didn’t, by Casey Newton.
Anyway, on with the newsletter.
NFTs
There’s been a lot of news this week about NFTs—basically, blockchain-based tokens that can ‘prove’ ownership, creating an artificial scarcity which gives resell value to digital goods; even if someone makes a copy, it’s not the ‘original’. Some people think this is nonsense, but it’s all about perceived value, innit? A £5 note is worth £5, unless you can prove this £5 note belonged to a famous person and so has extra value to collectors.
The auctioneers Christie’s will sell a digital work from the artist Beeple. It’s the first time a traditional auction house has sold digital art, as it’s always been hard to prove authenticity; but NFTs make it possible to prove ownership and provenance.
christies.com/features/Monumental-collage-by-Beeple-is-first-purely-digital-artwork-NFT-to-come-to-auction-11510-7.aspx
The avatar service Genies sold $500k of digital goods in 10 minutes from its first NFT sale. Genies pivoted from a Bitmoji-like service to selling goods from celebrities, of which the partnership with footballer Mesut Özil is the first. All proceeds went to charity.
twitter.com/akashrnigam/status/1361494948894232576
A remaster of the famous Nyan Cat GIF by its original creator sold for 300ETH (£420k).
engadget.com/nyan-cat-auction-nft-114830079.html
About £180m in NFT transactions were made in 2020, triple the previous year. This is according to a new report by NonFungible and L’Atelier/BNP Paribas.
decrypt.co/57720/ethereum-nft-market-primed-for-explosive-growth-in-2021
Everything Else
Operating Systems
Google released the first developer preview of Android 12. This release contains new privacy and safety tools, and a focus on media including better support for modern image and video codecs and improved copy/pasting of rich media between apps. There’ll be a number of further previews with new features before the final release in a few months, with a big visual update expected.
android-developers.googleblog.com/2021/02/android-12-dp1.html
Social
Twitter rolled out voice DMs to users in Brazil, India, and Japan. People can leave audio recordings of up to 140s in each message. Lots of audio experimentation happening on Twitter; audio tweets didn’t seem to go anywhere (or at least I haven’t seen one in my feed since the day they launched), and Spaces (its Clubhouse clone) is slowly rolling out to more users. Interesting choice of markets to launch in; presumably these are countries which show most use of voice messaging on other platforms.
thenextweb.com/plugged/2021/02/17/twitter-voice-dm-india-brazil-japan-launch/
Video
YouTube announced its feature priorities for 2021. The plans include: Shorts, currently available in India, will come to the US next; video chapters will be created automatically if not defined; a new ‘applause’ feature lets viewers reward creators with micropayments; and much more shopping.
blog.youtube/inside-youtube/neal-innovation-series/
Smart Home
Amazon announced Build It, a Kickstarter-like program for testing user interest in new connected devices. Customers can pre-order devices they like the sound of, and if a sufficient level is reached, Amazon makes it. The first wave of concepts includes a sticky note printer, a nutrition scale, and a cuckoo clock—all powered by Alexa.
aboutamazon.com/news/devices/introducing-build-it
Messaging
Google Meet is gaining new features including a ‘mute all‘ button, granular moderation controls, and emoji reactions. Education subscribers will get the features first, before rolling out to Workspace users later.
blog.google/outreach-initiatives/education/google-meet-safety-and-engagement/
Social
Facebook will add information labels to posts about climate science in an effort to combat misinformation. It’s starting in the UK, and rolling out to other countries soon. The climate science information centre, which collates verified facts about climate change, is already available in the UK, US, France, and Germany, and coming to more territories soon.
about.fb.com/news/2021/02/connecting-people-with-credible-climate-change-information/
Maps
Google Maps is adding features to pay for parking and public transit systems (in the US) through the Android app. The parking payments was trialled in a few cities last year and is now spreading to 400+ more, while 80 transit agencies will be available soon.
blog.google/products/maps/more-ways-pay-parking-and-transit/
Gaming/Entertainment
Fortnite’s latest Party Royale event was a short film festival. It showed several animated shorts on a loop over a 24 hour period, with a new tie-in jumbo popcorn emote on sale to players. (I’m writing this before the event, so can’t tell you how it went.)
epicgames.com/fortnite/en-US/news/gather-for-the-short-nite-film-festival-watch-film-shorts-in-fortnites-party-royale
Gaming/Entertainment
Street Fighter is the latest entertainment franchise to make its way to Fortnite. The characters Ryu and Chun-Li are available to buy in the Item Shop.
epicgames.com/fortnite/news/round-one-street-fighters-ryu-and-chun-li-square-off-in-fortnite
Machine Learning
Google released Tensorflow 3D, a machine learning library for working with 3D scenes. It adds better scene understanding to 3D scans—for example, recognising objects from the data produced by the iPhone’s Lidar camera. It’s highly technical, but a big deal for working with 3D mapping data that’s going to be more common in the future (see below).
ai.googleblog.com/2021/02/3d-scene-understanding-with-tensorflow.html
Machine Learning
Real estate service Zillow can now create a floor plan of your house from 3D photo data. Using photogrammetry and machine learning, data uploaded from the Zillow app or 360° characters will generate an interactive floor plan and photo tour.
zillow.mediaroom.com/2021-02-17-Zillow-Launches-Next-Generation-3D-Tours
Commerce
Amazon bought Selz, a small ecommerce startup which helps brands sell online. The most obvious comparison is with Shopify, which had an incredible 2020, and this acquisition indicates that Amazon wants to fight back to make itself the first-choice for DTC ecommerce. Selz will continue to be run as a separate business—in the short term at least.
geekwire.com/2021/amazon-acquires-selz-shopify-competitor-helps-small-e-commerce-businesses/
Stat of the Week
China will be the first country in the world where a majority of retail sales happen online. 52% of sales in 2021 will be ecommerce, according to eMarketer data. Largely driven by investment in fulfilment architecture, competition between commerce and social commerce apps—and COVID-19, of course. So much to write about this; absolutely fascinating.
emarketer.com/content/global-historic-first-ecommerce-china-will-account-more-than-50-of-retail-sales
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