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A personal note: after 6 years working for Andreessen Horowitz in Silicon Valley, I've moved back to London to work on some new projects. 🚀
✏️ My blog posts
What's Amazon's market share? 35% or 5%? Link
🗞 News
Location privacy: the NY Times has a big story on smartphone apps and location privacy: many apps ask for your location (for example, a weather app) but then sell it on to data brokers for all sorts of purposes - it's generally at least notionally anonymous (the weather app doesn't know your name) but in practice it's possible to identify individuals ('you spend all day here, go to this school, and spend the night here'), including people at, say, the Pentagon or the CIA. This is a classic platform problem: Google and (especially) Apple are rigorous in making apps explicitly ask for this data, but a weather app does need your location. Do Apple/Google create an option for 'what city?' location rather than 'exact GPS fix?' location? Do they try to police what every developer does with data after it leaves the phone? (How?) Both of these options would obviously conflict with a lot of the competition complaints people have about Google/Apple's control over developers. Or, is this a top-down privacy regulation issue, with the entire practice being banned or limited? Would the US do that, or the EU, or both? Link
Smart home standards: most of the major companies (Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung...) involved in smart home have created a new alliance to create better local connectivity standards. I can see the case for arguing an easier out-of-the-box setup would be good, but I'd suggest the real questions are around which devices are actually useful and how many people will care (as I wrote here a while ago). Link
Dangerous fakes on Amazon Marketplace: Amazon Marketplace is having all the same problems with fraud and fakes, including dangerous ones, that eBay had in the past, but worse, because consumers generally don't understand that buying from Amazon is not the same as buying on Amazon, and yet Marketplace is now 60% of total Amazon ecommerce The underlying problem of course is that any platform that takes some segment of the real world and brings it into software will also bring in all that segment's problems. Amazon took products and so it has to deal with bad and fake products (whereas one might say that Facebook took people, and so has bad and fake people). Link
Adtech and a view into the future of tech regulation: the UK's competition agency (the CMA) is half-way through investigating Google and Facebook's market power and behaviour in the UK digital advertising market. This is an old-fashioned competition inquiry - nothing to do with privacy. The interesting thing with broader relevance is the approach: they're looking at a dozen or more different linkages within the adtech industry and doing academic economic analysis to work out whether they think each one has some unfair and (too) profitable mechanic, and then talking about very specific technical interventions on each of those different components. This is a million miles from headline-grabbing lawsuits or facile 'Break Them Up!' book titles, and it's much more the way real regulation works, especially outside the USA. This approach was applied to European mobile operators in the 2000s and resulted in lower prices and margins across the industry almost entirely by focusing on arcane internal business mechanics that no consumer had ever heard of (most obviously interconnection rates). I don't know enough about adtech to have a view on what will happen here (and it's complicated by the much more global nature of the industry), but the general take-way should be that large parts of tech are slowly becoming a regulated industry, and that means several dozen different regulators spending years poking away at the internals of your industry and creating lists of rules that get handed to your compliance department. Link
Uber and Airbnb regulation. A German court has banned Uber for not applying with taxi regulations; conversely, AirBNB won in France: it can't be forced to be regulated as an estate agent. The endless 'software eats the world' question: how far do we treat a new way of doing X in the same way as the old one? Uber is clearly a different way of doing what we previously called taxis and 'limousines' and should probably be subject to the same high-level policy objectives. (You might be able to achieve those objectives differently - you don't need a physical meter to have a guaranteed fare because GPS can do that - but the objectives might not change.) On the other hand, AirBNB is not doing the same things that a conventional real estate agent (or hotel) does 'but with an app and with GPS' - it's doing something different, and poses different questions (which might or might not require new regulation). Links: Uber, AirBNB
Age of wonders: Google's Assistant now has a live audio interpreter mode. Link
Open Twitter: Twitter is exploring a much more open, open source approach to clients, making it easier for other companies to make Twitter apps. Twitter famously killed its developer ecosystem years ago. This is an interesting challenge: on one hand, the problem for a new user, and a lot of the long tail of existing users, is that you shout into the void (you don't have enough followers to get a response for anything you say) and it's really hard to work out who to follow so that there's interesting stuff in your feed. Third-party innovation around solving that could be great. But, the other Twitter problem is toxic, unhealthy behaviour, which has a lot to do with product design choices - if you fragment and decentralise the user interface, that becomes harder to solve. If you want to fix a mechanic that's encouraging abuse, or make blocking or muting easier, how do you do that if there are 30 different clients? What if a popular client does something that makes abuse worse - do you ban it? The history of solving user interface problems though decentralised open source development is not good, to put it mildly. Link
More spy apps: Totok, an up-and-coming new messaging app, is actually run by the UAE intelligence services (most messaging and VOIP apps are banned and blocked in the UAE). Link
🔮 Reading
Long story in The Information on Facebook's hardware efforts - thousands of people now working on VR and AR, and a project for its own hardware OS led by a co-author of Windows NT (Mark Lucovsky). I am skeptical that VR is 'the next platform' (it might be a big business but it won't replace smartphones), and though AR might be that platform, we're not there yet. Link ($$$)
BBC study on deploying VR to mass audiences in local libraries. Link
Bloomberg has a story about one of Apple's blue sky projects: apparently they have a team looking at satellite data. I wouldn't get very excited about this (there are very basic law-of-physics challenges in connected a pocket device to a satellite) but it's normal for big tech companies to experiment with things like this to see what comes out, and this is a look into one such team. Link
Reuters and Facebook have created an online course, mostly aimed at journalists, for spotting and dealing with manipulated and fake content, especial ML-generated 'deep fake' images and video. Link
Amazon talks a lot abut free cash flow, but what does it really generate? Adjust for stock options and capital leases and things get pretty complicated. Link
Interesting paper on Chinese state policy towards AI. Link
Google AI chief Jeff Dean interview: Machine learning trends in 2020. Link
WSJ on how Chinese influencers sell products in live-streams. Link ($)
Fjord's 2020 Trends 2020. Always interesting ideas in these (for me especially because it's often about the stuff I don't spend time looking about). Link
Interesting long paper by François Chollet, an ML scientist at Google, on future models of artificial intelligence, how we would define it, and what we might do next. Link
The Ultimate Guide to Amazon Advertising. Link
😮 Interesting things of the week
How Do Bullets Work in Video Games? Link
Chinese criminal gangs use drones to spread swine fever. Link
The London commuter rail system had a major technical failure recently, and the agency responsible for it responded not with the usual 'sorry for the inconvenience' but by tweeting a detailed technical explanation of what went wrong. Interesting as tech but much more interesting as an approach to PR. Link
📊 Stats
Angelist analysis of early stage VC returns. Link
Netflix released some Irishman numbers: 26 million streams in the first week. Link
Morgan Stanley estimates Amazon is now delivering half of its packages itself. Link
Netflix released a breakdown of subscribers outside the USA. Link
US online grocery market share estimates. Link
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