The Tech Landscape #196 šØāš¤
YouTube visual search, Slack messes up messaging, and me, me, me: this is issue 196 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.
Letās start with some things about ME!
I went to Kaskadeās virtual concert in Fortnite Party Royale this weekend. If you havenāt been to one, I made this short experience reel so you can get a feel for it. What I found notable watching this back is that the difference between being at a physical concert and ābeingā at a virtual concert is much larger than the difference when remembering being there.
Following on from last weekās blog post, I made a web story about Gucciās digital sneakers: Gucci Goes Digital. Let me know what you thinkāI really like web stories as a format but they take more time to prepare; if you think theyāre useful and/or interesting, however, Iāll make more.
As the conversation about NFTs hasnāt died down at all in the past few weeks, I thought I should buy one. The process was very far from straightforward; Iām OK with it not being easy to buy cryptocurrency, but once I had it, buying the art involved extra steps which werenāt at all clear about what was happening. I donāt think this technology is ready to go mainstream yet, and I canāt escape the feeling that itās just another way for speculators to get rich. Hereās another link to the post I wrote about art on the blockchain a few weeks ago.
And finally, hereās a talk I gave (for work) about the way online culture and pop culture are merging; music, film, gaming, fashion are all becoming joined up through digital channels. Itās about 30 minutes, and you might like it.
Alright, enough from me; on with the newsletter. Hope youāre well!
Top Story
YouTube is testing the use of visual search to automatically highlight products featured in videos. The products discovered will feature in recommendation lists, so users can click through to see other videos featuring that product. Every video is now a semantic object which can be searched; images are the new text. Itās not monetised (yet) but should help YouTube fight back against Amazon as the best place for product search.
9to5google.com/2021/03/22/youtube-experiment-will-auto-detect-products-in-videos-and-provide-related-content-links/
Privacy and Safety
Slack added a new feature to allow anyone to send DMs across organisationsāthen quickly removed it as its wide-open to abuse. Slack DMs have traditionally worked only in each organisationās space, but these Connect DMs would remove that barrier, making it into more of a general messaging app. However, in its first form Connect DMs also allowed people to send abusive messages to people theyād never met without even requiring acceptance first. The feature was originally announced in October 2020, so theyāve had at least six months to figure out why thatās a bad idea.
theverge.com/2021/3/24/22348743/slack-connect-dm-abuse-harassment-disable-message-invite-response
Google isnāt testing its replacement for third party cookies in the EU as it may not be compatible with GDPR and e-Privacy. Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) aggregates user data to āhideā it in a crowd, but it appears that while this may work mathematically, the legal case is less clear.
adexchanger.com/platforms/google-will-not-run-floc-origin-tests-in-europe-due-to-gdpr-concerns/
The European Data Privacy Board published its guidelines for voice assistant privacy. The EDPB is looking for comments on its guidelines, which ensure that Alexa, Siri, et al are compatible with GDPR and e-Privacy regulations.
huntonprivacyblog.com/2021/03/13/edpb-releases-guidelines-on-virtual-voice-assistants/
The Chrome browser will default to the secure HTTPS protocol when one isnāt supplied. When users enter a URL without specifying http:// or https:// the browser would previously default to the less secure but more common former; now it will default to the latter. It should make web use a little faster and safer (and if you have a website which doesnāt use HTTPS, itās time to upgrade).
blog.chromium.org/2021/03/a-safer-default-for-navigation-https.html
Everything Else
Zoom released an SDK to make it easy to embed live video in apps and websites. It moves Zoom away from being purely a video calling provider, and towards Zoom as infrastructure, where it doesnāt have that market to itself but does have a known brand and proven track record.
blog.zoom.us/bring-industry-leading-video-to-your-application-with-zooms-video-sdk/
Video
Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and more are teaming up to improve compatibility between browsers. The Compat2021 initiative will focus on improving new technologies which are implemented inconsistently across browser engines, to make life easier for developers.
web.dev/compat2021/
Browsers
Rocket League is partnering with Formula 1 and NASCAR for its next season of content. Itās not clear yet if individual racing teams will license their brands, although the trailer does show a Mustang from Ford, which introduced its F150 truck into the game as a purchasable item. The season announcement was made in Fortniteās Party Royale Island at a virtual concert by Kaskade, who has made music for Rocket League through the record label Monstercat, which licenses music to the game.
rocketleague.com/seasons/season-3/
Gaming
Niantic and Nintendo have extended their partnership to create location-based AR games. Niantic will use its expertise and knowledge from PokƩmon GO to create a new Pikmin title using its proprietary Real World platform.
nianticlabs.com/blog/nintendo-apps-partnership/?hl=en
Gaming
Burberry designed character skins for the mobile game Honor of Kings. The game is huge in China, and luxury brands are keen to tap in to young, affluent gaming audiences; Louis Vuitton designed game skins at the end of 2019.
theverge.com/2021/3/22/22340775/honor-of-kings-burberry-skin-fashion-video-games
Gaming
Twitter acquired Reshuffle, which made a tool to integrate APIs from different platforms. The team will work on Twitterās own API platform; it lost a lot of developer love when it shut down access to its APIs a few years back, but itās recently started to try to attract them back again and the Reshuffle team will help with that effort.
blog.twitter.com/developer/en_us/topics/community/2021/welcome-reshuffle-to-twitter.html
Social
Spotify redesigned its mobile, web, and desktop apps. Notable among many changes is equal placement for podcasts and musicāowned, spoken word content is more important to Spotifyās future than music is.
newsroom.spotify.com/2021-03-22/new-features-on-spotifys-home-hub-make-navigation-and-discovery-even-simpler/
Audio
Peloton acquired three companies specialising in wearables, computer vision, and voice assistants. The deals took place last year and early this year, and are presumed to be for talent and IP for new products.
bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-22/peloton-buys-wearables-ai-hardware-companies-in-deal-flurry
Healthcare
Google announced a new alliance to improve security of Android devices. The Android Ready SE alliance will certify security chips as phones take on new use cases including payment wallets, electronic passports, and digital keys.
security.googleblog.com/2021/03/announcing-android-ready-se-alliance.html
Security
Atari and Bondly announced a strategic partnership on NFTs across gaming and music. Iāve read this piece several times and Iām still not sure whatās involved, but it seems to be something about using āthe most current entertainment creatorsā to create an āAtari metaverseā.
musicbusinessworldwide.com/the-new-atari-metaverse-gaming-platform-will-let-creators-mint-and-distribute-nft-collections-to-fans/
Entertainment
Thanks for reading to the end! If youāve found this newsletter valuable, why not buy me a coffee? I appreciate every single one. Alternatively, perhaps you could consider telling a friend or colleague about this newsletter instead? Thatās just as valuable to me, honestly.