The Tech Landscape #99
In 1929 Amelia Earhart invited all 117 licensed women pilots in the US to join a new organisation for their mutual support and advancement. 99 of them attended the first meeting or expressed an interest, and so the group was named Ninety-Nines in their honour. Today it has thousands of members.
Developer conference season is almost upon us… Facebook first, Google after, Apple a few weeks after that. Here’s the last (comparatively) quiet newsletter for a little while.
Assistants & Voice
The UK’s Government Digital Service has completed work on optimising content for voice searches, making some 12,000 pieces of information available.
gov.uk/government/news/government-uses-alexa-and-google-home-to-make-services-easier-to-access
You can now command Google Assistant to ‘tell me a story’ and it will read audiobooks from Play Books, on Android and iOS.
blog.google/products/assistant/national-tell-story-day-take-page-your-assistant/
Some users of Google Assistant are being given the option of using Arabic (Egyptian or Saudi Arabian). The language support is labelled as Beta and not officially announced yet.
androidpolice.com/2019/04/23/arabic-support-comes-to-google-assistant-on-phones/
Users of the Amazon-owned Audible audiobook service can now use Alexa to get in touch with a (human) customer support agent.
theverge.com/2019/4/24/18513369/audible-amazon-alexa-customer-support-line-book-recommendations
Games
The Bitmoji for Games SDK lets you use your personalised avatar as a skin in video games. There’s something interesting emerging here about your virtual identity, I need to think a bit more about this.
bitmoji.com/games.html
Google’s Indie Games Accelerator, previously open to developers in India, Pakistan, and SE Asia, is expanding to include more of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America.
blog.google/technology/developers/indie-games-accelerator-2019/
Facebook’s f8 developer conference takes place this week, so expect plenty of news about it next week.
As part of their continuing lockdown of their APIs (after the horse has bolted), Facebook will now automatically expire any user-granted permission that hasn’t been used in 90 days.
developers.facebook.com/blog/post/v2/2019/04/25/api-updates/
Facebook & Messenger Stories now have 500m daily users apiece, a milestone they share with Instagram Stories and WhatsApp Status (Stories). Copying works.
techcrunch.com/2019/04/24/facebook-stories-500-million/
Amazon
Amazon announced another record financial quarter, with profit twice what was predicted. Its cloud service, AWS, was the single biggest contributor to revenue.
theverge.com/2019/4/25/18516507/amazon-earnings-q1-2019-worth-growth-profits-revenue
Amazon released Key for Garage, a service which lets delivery drivers leave packages in your garage if you have a compatible smart garage lock.
theverge.com/2019/4/23/18512509/amazon-key-for-garage-launches-us-delivery-drivers-prime
Everything Else
Samsung has postponed the release of its first foldable smartphone, the Galaxy Fold, after a number of severe problems were reported with review units.
bbc.co.uk/news/technology-48013395
UK advertisers spent £13.4bn on digital ads in 2018, an increase of 15% over 2017, according to the IAB. Spend on smartphone ads accounted for 51%, overtaking spend on desktop ads for the first time.
thedrum.com/news/2019/04/24/uk-digital-ad-spend-hits-134bn-buoyed-smartphone-ads
Google’s fitness tracking app, Fit, is now available for iOS. It’s fully compatible with Apple Health and Apple Watch. (I also have a suspicion that Google will launch a fitness-focussed Wear OS device later this year.)
blog.google/products/google-fit/google-fit-now-ios/
Previews of the next version of Android, Q, suggest that it will introduce a significant change by proactively and contextually suggesting different apps when you make certain actions—for example, receiving a notification containing a date might prompt you to open the calendar.
androidpolice.com/2019/04/27/android-q-teases-better-and-smarter-contextually-suggested-actions/
Google Earth’s Timelapse function, which lets you view satellite imagery of selected areas from 1984 to 2018, is now available on mobile and tablet (it’s also featured in a new BBC TV show).
blog.google/products/earth/get-lost-new-earth-timelapse-now-mobile/
Dating/connections app Bumble will roll out a computer vision-powered nudity detector to mitigate abuse on the platform.
edition.cnn.com/2019/04/24/tech/bumble-lewd-images-private-detector/