Benedict's
Newsletter

This is a weekly newsletter of what I've seen in tech and thought was interesting. I work at Andreessen Horowitz.

See more or subscribe at www.ben-evans.com.
✏️ Blog posts

I published my big annual presentation on the state of tech - 'the end of the beginning'. Link

(This is why this is the first issue for a month). 

🗞 News

The NY Times has an extremely negative piece on how Facebook handled (or failed to handle) the fall-out from the various crises this year. Link

Facebook will shift to penalizing content as it gets closer to the line, rather than rewarding for getting more engagement. Link

Using machine learning to predict heart disease by looking at images of retinas (from February). Link

Android is discontinuing support for Bluetooth beacons. A promising idea that has never really found a market (Apple also tried). Link 

Microsoft is now selling Amazon Echos in its retail stores. Remember Cortana? Why isn't there a 'Surface hub' or something (not that it would sell, but it would fit the strategy)? Link

Google is doing a bunch of computational photography to enable the Pixel phones to do much better low-light photography. This is the future. Link

Amazon is mailing out a printed toy catalogue (in the aftermath of the disappearance of Toys R Us). Amazon has no dogma - it will push into every corner of the retail model regardless of whether it's 'supposed' to do that as a website. Link

Facebook confirmed it's working on AR glasses (as is everyone else). Link

ChromeOS linux apps will now be able to access downloads and Google Drive. This puzzles me - it invalidates half the argument for using ChromeOS in the first place. Maybe they'll add browser toolbars next. Link

Spotify wants to be a record label, sort of. Is this is a good idea? I have no idea - more and more of the important questions for Spotify and Netflix are not tech questions. Link

Google is blurring the lines between Deepmind and the rest of the company (this never made much sense to me. Did you buy it or not?). Link

Google's glucose-sensing contact lenses didn't work. Oh well. Link

Apple had its quarterly results.The numbers are not quite comparable to last year because the mix is different. They sold a lot of phones. More interesting: Apple will no longer split out unit sales of individual hardware products (oddly, despite being generally very secretive, Apple's financials have been very transparent). Link  

Snapchat's head of content, Nick Bell, is leaving. Link

🔮 Reading 

Two presentations from my colleague Andrew Chen: Investor metrics and How to build growth.  

Progress in natural language processing. Link

Mobileye's view of the state of autonomy. Link

Profile of Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer of ML. Link

The problem with all these 'smartphones make your kids zombies and no-one in Silicon Valley lets their kids have them' stories. Link

A relatively small number of autonomous cars can prevent traffic jams from forming. (AVs will drive like computers, not 'like people but without making mistakes'.) Link

FT profile of Dyson's electric car plans. Link

Nice Bytedance profile. Link

'Why do doctors hate their computers?' (All the worst dynamics of regulated enterprise technology.) Link

An ad fraud network in Android apps. Fascinating. Link

'In Amazon Go, no-one things I'm stealing'. Nice discussion of automation versus human bias. Link

The Facebook Mynanmar story continues. Link

AVC: 'pivot or fail?' Link
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The future of photography is code. Link

'You too can build your own chips'. ML and mobile mean lots and lots of people want to make their own custom chips. How hard is that, exactly? Link

Why is IoT such a mess? Link

Interesting NYT profile of the Apple News editorial team (which drives a lot of traffic to publishers, if not revenue). Link

The life of a fake news/satire site (and the difficulty of telling the difference). Link

Requests for machine learning from East African tech. Link

UK government official consultation on regulation of autonomous cars. Link

How even experienced tech pundits get confused about where autonomy really is so far. Link

😮 Cool things of the week

1965 - demonstrating a 'visual display' for a 'computer'. Link

How to hack ATMs. Link

📊 Statistics

European early stage venture statistics. Link

People are now posting 100bn messages a day across all Facebook apps (probably 5x peak global SMS), as well as 1bn 'Stories'. Link

The NY Times now has 4m subscribers, of which 3.1m are digital-only. Link

The global population without access to electricity has fallen below 1bn. Link

Fortnite is breaking streaming records, with one player getting over 1m spectators. Link

Bytedance claims 800m MAUs. yes, exactly. Link

88% of US teenagers expect their next phone to be an iPhone. Link

Deloitte 2018 mobile consumer survey. Link
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