Thursday, October 24, 2019
ETtech Top 5: Infy probe on Whistleblower plaint, startups & one-size-fits-all job policy & more
Amazon's faster shipping dents profits, more pain to come
Xiaomi plans to scale up assembly of its TV sets in India
Ahead of Project xCloud's launch, Microsoft adds mobile gaming gear, like a new smartphone-holding clip for Xbox controllers, to its Designed for Xbox program (James Shields/Xbox Wire)
Ahead of Project xCloud's launch, Microsoft adds mobile gaming gear, like a new smartphone-holding clip for Xbox controllers, to its Designed for Xbox program — As Kareem Choudhry shared last month, our vision for Project xCloud is to empower gamers to play the games they want, with the people they want, anywhere they want.
Ally, maker of enterprise goal-planning software, raises $15M Series B led by Tiger Global, its third raise of 2019 after a $3M seed round and $8M Series A (Alex Wilhelm/Crunchbase News)
Ally, maker of enterprise goal-planning software, raises $15M Series B led by Tiger Global, its third raise of 2019 after a $3M seed round and $8M Series A — In the daily blizzard of new venture rounds announced each week, it is hard to stand out. Sometimes a founder is well-known …
OnePlus 7T Pro McLaren Edition to Go on Sale Today in India via Amazon
Redmi Note 8 Pro, Redmi Note 8 to Go on Sale Today: Price in India, Offers
Why publishers shouldn’t trust Facebook News
Are we really doing this again? After the pivot to video. After Instant Articles. After news was deleted from the News Feed. Once more, Facebook dangles extra traffic, and journalism outlets leap through its hoop and into its cage.
Tomorrow, Facebook will unveil its News tab. About 200 publishers are already aboard including the Wall Street Journal and BuzzFeed News, and some will be paid. None seem to have learned the lesson of platform risk.
When you build on someone else’s land, don’t be surprised when you’re bulldozed. And really, given Facebook’s flawless track record of pulling the rug out from under publishers, no one should be surprised.
I could just re-run my 2015 piece on how “Facebook is turning publishers into ghost writers,” merely dumb content in its smart pipe. Or my 2018 piece on “how Facebook stole the news business” by retraining readers to abandon publishers’ sites and rely on its algorithmic feed.
Chronicling Facebook’s abuse of publishers
Let’s take a stroll back through time and check out Facebook’s past flip-flops on news that hurt everyone else:
-In 2007 before Facebook even got into news, it launches a developer platform with tons of free virality, leading to the build-up of companies like Zynga. Once that spam started drowning the News Feed, Facebook cut it and Zynga off, then largely abandoned gaming for half a decade as the company went mobile. Zynga never fully recovered.
-In 2011, Facebook launches the open graph platform with Social Reader apps that auto-share to friends what news articles you’re reading. Publishers like The Guardian and Washington Post race to build these apps and score viral traffic. But in 2012, Facebook changes the feed post design and prominence of social reader apps, they lost most of their users, those and other outlets shut down their apps, and Facebook largely abandons the platform
-In 2015, Facebook launches Instant Articles, hosting news content inside its app to make it load faster. But heavy-handed rules restricting advertising, subscription signup boxes, and recirculation modules lead publishers to get little out of Instant Articles. By late 2017, many publishers had largely abandoned the feature.
Decline of Instant Article use, via Columbia Journalism Review
-Also in 2015, Facebook started discussing “the shift to video,” citing 1 billion video views per day. As the News Feed algorithm prioritized video and daily views climbed to 8 billion within the year, newsrooms shifted headcount and resources from text to video. But a lawsuit later revealed Facebook already knew it was inflating view metrics by 150% to 900%. By the end of 2017 it had downranked viral videos, eliminated 50 million hours per day of viewing (over 2 minutes per user), and later pulled back on paying publishers for Live video as it largely abandoned publisher videos in favor of friend content.
-In 2018, Facebook announced it would decrease the presence of news in the News Feed from 5% to 4% while prioritizing friends and family content. Referral shrank sharply, with Google overtaking it as the top referrer, while some outlets were hit hard like Slate which lost 87% of traffic from Facebook. You’d understand if some publishers felt…largely abandoned.
Facebook referral traffic to slate plummeted 87% after a strategy change prioritized friends and family content over news
Are you sensing a trend? 
Facebook typically defends the whiplash caused by its strategic about-faces by claiming it does what’s best for users, follows data on what they want, and tries to protect them. What it leaves out is how the rest of the stakeholders are prioritized.
Aggregated to death
I used to think of Facebook as being in a bizarre love quadrangle with its users, developers and advertisers. But increasingly it feels like the company is in an abusive love/hate relationship with users, catering to their attention while exploiting their privacy. Meanwhile, it dominates the advertisers thanks to its duopoly with Google that lets it survive metrics errors, and the developers as it alters their access and reach depending on if it needs their users or is backpedaling after a data fiasco.
Only recently after severe backlash does society seem to be getting any of Facebook’s affection. And perhaps even lower in the hierarchy would be news publishers. They’re not a huge chunk of Facebook’s content or, therefore, its revenue, they’re not part of the friends and family graph at the foundation of the social network, and given how hard the press goes on Facebook relative to Apple and Google, it’s hard to see that relationship getting much worse than it already is.
That’s not to say Facebook doesn’t philosophically care about news. It invests in its Journalism Project hand-outs, literacy and its local news feature Today In. Facebook has worked diligently in the wake of Instant Article backlash to help publishers build out paywalls. Given how centrally it’s featured, Facebook’s team surely reads plenty of it. And supporting the sector could win it some kudos between scandals.
But what’s not central to Facebook’s survival will never be central to its strategy. News is not going to pay the bills, and it probably won’t cause a major change in its hallowed growth rate. Remember that Twitter, which hinges much more on news, is 1/23rd of Facebook’s market cap.
So hopefully at this point we’ve established that Facebook is not an ally of news publishers.
At best it’s a fickle fair-weather friend. And even paying out millions of dollars, which can sound like a lot in journalism land, is a tiny fraction of the $22 billion in profit it earned in 2018.
Whatever Facebook offers publishers is conditional. It’s unlikely to pay subsidies forever if the News tab doesn’t become sustainable. For newsrooms, changing game plans or reallocating resources means putting faith in Facebook it hasn’t earned.
What should publishers do? Constantly double-down on the concept of owned audience.
They should court direct traffic to their sites where they have the flexibility to point users to subscriptions or newsletters or podcasts or original reporting that’s satisfying even if it’s not as sexy in a feed.
Meet users where they are, but pull them back to where you live. Build an app users download or get them to bookmark the publisher across their devices. Develop alternative revenue sources to traffic-focused ads, such as subscriptions, events, merchandise, data and research. Pay to retain and recruit top talent with differentiated voices.
What scoops, opinions, analysis, and media can’t be ripped off or reblogged? Make that. What will stand out when stories from every outlet are stacked atop each other? Because apparently that’s the future. Don’t become generic dumb content fed through someone else’s smart pipe.
As Ben Thompson of Stratechery has proselytized, Facebook is the aggregator to which the spoils of attention and advertisers accrue as they’re sucked out of the aggregated content suppliers. To the aggregator, the suppliers are interchangeable and disposable. Publishers are essentially ghostwriters for the Facebook News destination. Becoming dependent upon the aggregator means forfeiting control of your destiny.
Surely, experimenting to become the breakout star of the News tab could pay dividends. Publishers can take what it offers if that doesn’t require uprooting their process. But with everything subject to Facebook’s shifting attitudes, it will be like publishers trying to play bocce during an earthquake.
[Featured Image: Russell Werges]
Jack Dorsey criticizes Mark Zuckerberg's free speech comments, says there wasn't any talk of reach and amplification and his Iraq War mention was not authentic (Sarah Frier/Bloomberg)
Jack Dorsey criticizes Mark Zuckerberg's free speech comments, says there wasn't any talk of reach and amplification and his Iraq War mention was not authentic — Twitter Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey called out his counterpart at Facebook Inc., saying Mark Zuckerberg has a …
Ford’s electric Mustang-inspired SUV will finally get its debut
Ford provided its first peek of a Mustang-inspired electric crossover nearly 14 months months. Now, it’s ready to show the world what “Mustang-inspired” means.
The automaker said Thursday it will debut the electric SUV on November 17 ahead of the LA Auto Show.
Not much is known about the electric SUV that is coming to market in 2020, despite dropping the occasional teaser image or hint. A new webpage launched recently, which provides few details, namely that Ford is targeting an EPA-estimated range of at least 300 miles. The look, specs and price will have to wait until at least the November 17 debut date.
What we do know is that Ford’s future (and certainly its CEO’s) is tied to the success of this shift to electrification. The Mustang-inspired SUV might not be the cornerstone to this strategy (an electric F150 probably deserves that designation), but it will be a critical piece.
Ford has historically backed hybrid technology. Back in 2016, Ford Chairman Bill Ford said at a Fortune event that he viewed plug-in hybrids as a transitional technology.
A lot has changed. Hybrids are still part of the mix. But in the past 18 months, Ford has put more emphasis on the development and production of all-electric vehicles.
In 2018, the company said it will invest $11 billion to add 16 all-electric vehicles within its global portfolio of 40 electrified vehicles through 2022.
Ford unveiled in September at the Frankfurt Motor Show a range of hybrid vehicles as part of its plan to reach sales of 1 million electrified vehicles in Europe by the end of 2022.
It also invested in electric vehicle startup Rivian and locked in a deal with Volkswagen that covers a number of areas, including autonomy (via an investment by VW in Argo AI) and collaboration on development of electric vehicles. Ford will use Volkswagen’s MEB platform to develop “at least one” fully electric car for the European market that’s designed to be produced and sold at scale.
SpaceX intends to offer Starlink satellite broadband service starting in 2020
SpaceX will look to launch its Starlink service for consumers sometime next year, SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell confirmed at a media roundtable meeting at the company’s offices in Washington during the International Astronautical Congress this week (via SpaceNews). Shotwell, who also appeared on stage at the event to share some updates around SpaceX’s recent progress across the company, told reporters present that in order to make the date, it’ll need to launch between six and eight different grouped payloads of Starlink satellites, a number that includes the batch that went up in May of this year.
All told, SpaceX has shared previously that it’ll need 24 launches in order to make the constellation global, and it also shared at that time that it intends to start with service in the Northern United States and parts of Canada beginning next year. Though 24 launches will provide full global coverage, Shotwell told media that it’ll still be doing additional launches after that in order to expand and improve coverage.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell
In fact, SpaceX recently filed paperwork to launch as many as 30,000 satellites in addition to the 12,000 it has already gotten permission to put up, for a total constellation size of up to 42,000. A SpaceX spokesperson previously described this as “taking steps to responsibility scale Starlink’s total network capacity and data density to meet the growth in users’ anticipated needs” in a statement provided to TechCrunch.
Owning and operating a global broadband satellite constellation could be a considerable revenue driver for SpaceX, and an important product pillar upon which the company can rely for recurring profit as it pursues its more ambitious programs, including eventual Mars launch services. Setting up the satellite constellation, especially at the scale intended, will definitely be a cost-intensive process on its own, but SpaceX is looking to its product developments like its Starship, which will be able to take much more cargo to orbit in terms of payload capacity, to reduce its own, and customer launch costs over time.
Shotwell also told reporters at the gathering that the company is already testing Starlink connectivity for U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory use, and while she didn’t reveal consumer pricing, did note that many in the U.S. pay $80 for service that is sub-par already, per SpaceNews.
Western Union to tap into digital payments in India
Ecom Express sees stronger revenue growth in FY19
Wednesday, October 23, 2019
Intel sues SoftBank-owned Fortress, which has acquired a patent portfolio from NXP Semiconductors, claiming Fortress engages in patent troll-like behavior (Stephen Nellis/Reuters)
Intel sues SoftBank-owned Fortress, which has acquired a patent portfolio from NXP Semiconductors, claiming Fortress engages in patent troll-like behavior — (Reuters) - Chipmaker Intel Corp has filed an antitrust lawsuit against a SoftBank Group Corp-owned investment company alleging …
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15") teardown: seems pretty repairable with an easily accessible SSD, but there's one big drawback: its battery is firmly glued down (iFixit News)
Microsoft Surface Laptop 3 (15") teardown: seems pretty repairable with an easily accessible SSD, but there's one big drawback: its battery is firmly glued down — Teardown of the Surface Laptop 3 reveals a shocking turnaround in repairability on what used to be our least-favorite laptop design.
The US' chip export rules enter a 120-day consultation period, requiring the Trump administration to consider input, potentially modify, and enforce the rules (Will Knight/Wired)
Will Knight / Wired : The US' chip export rules enter a 120-day consultation period, requiring the Trump administration to consider i...
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Jake Offenhartz / Gothamist : Since October, the NYPD has deployed a quadruped robot called Spot to a handful of crime scenes and hostage...
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Lorena O'Neil / Rolling Stone : A look at the years of warnings about AI from researchers, including several women of color, who say ...
