✏️ 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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