The Pallone-Thrune TRACED Act, a bipartisan bit of legislation that should make life harder for the villains behind robocalls, was signed into law today by the president. It’s still possible to get things done in D.C. after all! We’ve covered the TRACED Act several times previously, as robocalls are, in addition to being horribly annoying, a uniquely annoying high-tech threat. Using clever targeting and spoofing technology, scammers are placing millions of calls that at best irritate and at worst take advantage of the vulnerable. The new law won’t end that practice overnight, but it does add some useful tools to regulators’ toolboxes. Here’s how I summarized the bill’s provisions earlier this month:
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai was effusive in his praise in a statement:
The FCC is limited in what it can do, and even major fines like this $120 million one have had a negligible effect on the nefarious industry. “Like emptying the ocean with a teaspoon,” said Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel at the time. Here’s hoping the TRACED Act amounts to more than a bigger spoon. We’ll find out as regulators and the mobile industry grow into their new capabilities and begin the long process of actually applying them to the problem. It may take months or more to see any real abatement, but at least we’re taking concrete steps. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/31/traced-act-signed-into-law-putting-robocallers-on-notice/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189982752391 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com
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It’s the slowest week of the year for gadget news. Christmas is in the rearview, and it’s a few days until the new year. After that, it’s a straight shot to CES and then MWC. Meantime, best we’ve got going for us are a handful of rumors, including a peek at what Google’s next budget might could potentially possibly conceivably look like. Per renders from OnLeaks and 91Mobiles, a vision of the Pixel 4A has appeared — or, a render, rather. The handset will no doubt be an important one for Google. After all, the 3A (pictured at top) helped the company recover from some lackluster sales last year. A couple of pieces jump out at first glance. The display appears to finally buck the company’s longtime notch dependency, in favor of a hole punch camera on the front. Perhaps even more compelling, the device seems to hold the torch for the headphone jack. In 2020, that could well be a standout feature even among mid-range handsets. As the company eloquently put it around the time of the 3A’s release, “a lot of people have headphones.”
Other notable features on the forthcoming devices include the addition of the squircle phone bump on the rear, a design element borrowed from the Pixel 4. Likely the handset will stick to a single camera, instead of adopting the flagship’s truly excellent dual-camera set up. Even so, Google’s been able to accomplish some solid imaging technology with just the one sensor, courtesy of clever ML software. The display, too, will be slightly larger than its predecessor, bumping up one or two tenths of an inch. The handset is reportedly dropping around May, probably just in time for I/O 2020. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/30/google-pixel-4a-renders-include-a-headphone-jack-and-hole-punch-display/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189960806401 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com Snapchat’s most popular yet under-exploited feature is finally getting the spotlight in 2020. Starting in February with a global release, your customizable Bitmoji avatar will become the star of a full-motion cartoon series called Bitmoji TV. It’s a massive evolution for Bitmoji beyond the chat stickers and comic strip-style Stories where they were being squandered to date. Creating original in-house shows for its Discover section that can’t be copied could help Snapchat differentiate from the plethora of short-form video platforms out there ranging from YouTube to Facebook Watch to TikTok. Bitmoji TV could also up the quality of Discover, which still feels like a tabloid magazine rack full of scantly clad women, gross-out imagery, and other shocking content merely meant to catch the eye and draw a click. With Bitmoji TV, your avatar and those of your friends will appear in regularly-scheduled adventures ranging from playing the crew of Star Treky spaceship to being secret agents to falling in love with robots or becoming zombies. The trailer Snapchat released previews an animation style reminiscent of Netflix’s Big Mouth. TechCrunch asked Snap for more details, including how long episodes will be, how often they’ll be released, whether they’ll include ads, and if the company acquired anyone or brought on famous talent to produce the series. A Snap spokesperson declined to provide more details, but sent over this statement: “Bitmoji TV isn’t available in your network yet, but stay tuned for the global premiere soon!” The Snapchat Show page for Bitmoji TV notes it is coming in February 2020. Users can visit here on mobile to subscribe to Bitmoji TV so it shows up prominently on their Discover page, or turn on notifications about its new content. Snap realizes Bitmoji’s valueSnap has had a tough few years as many of its core features have been ruthlessly copied by the Facebook family of apps. Instagram Stories killed Snap’s growth for years and effectively stole the broadcast medium from its inventor. Facebook also ramped up it augmented reality selfie filters, added more ephemeral messaging features, and launched Watch as a competitor to Snapchat Discover. Two years ago I wrote that Facebook was crazy not to be competing with Bitmoji too. Six months later we were first to report Facebook Avatars was in the works, and this year they launched as Messenger chat stickers in Australia with plans for a global release in 2019 or early 2020. But Facebook’s slow movement here, Google’s half-assed entry, and Twitter’s lack of an attempt have given Snapchat’s Bitmoji a massive headstart. And now Snap is finally leveraging it. “TV” is actually a return to Bitmoji’s roots. The startup Bitstrips originally offered an app for customizing the face, hair, clothes, and more of your avatar and then creating comic strips for them to appear in. Snap acquired Bitstrips back in 2016 for just $64.2 million — a steal not far off from Facebook snatching Instagram for under a billion. The standalone Bitmoji app blew up as soon as Snapchat began offering the avatars as chat stickers. It had over 330 million downloads as of April according to Sensor Tower despite Snapchat now letting you create your avatar in its main app. Eventually, Snap began expanding Bitmoji’s uses. In 2017 Bitmoji went 3D and you could start overlaying them as augmented reality characters on your Snaps. The next year Snap improved their graphics, then launched the Snap Kit developer platform and Bitmoji Kit. This allows apps to build atop Snapchat login and use your Bitmoji as a profile pic. Soon they were appearing as Fitbit smart watch faces, alongside your Venmo transaction, and on Snapchat-sold merchandise from t-shirts to mugs. It’s part of a wise strategy to beat copycats by allowing allies to use real thing rather than building their own knock-off. That’s fueled the “Snapback” comeback which has seen Snap’s share price climb out of the gutter at $5.79 at the start of 2019 to $16.09 now. One of Snap smartest innovations was Bitmoji Stories — the ancestor to Bitmoji TV. These daily Stories let you tap frame-by-frame through short comic strip-style interactions starring your avatar. Occasionally Bitmoji Stories would include rudimentary animation, but most frames were still images with text bubbles. Bitmoji could once again drive a narrative, rather than just being a communication tool. Still, they seem underutilized. In 2019, Snapchat wised up. Bitmoji have become nearly ubiquitous amongst teens and Snapchat’s 210 million daily users. They’re the Google or Kleenex of cartoonish personalized avatars. Their goofy nature is also a perfect fit for Snapchat, and a reason they’re tough for stiffer and older tech giants to convincingly copy. In April, Snap announced its new games platform inside its messaging feature that let you play as your Bitmoji against friends’ avatars in games ranging from Mario Party ripoff Bitmoji Party to tennis, shoot-em ups, and cooking competitions. Snap injects ads into the games, making Bitmoji key to its efforts to monetize its central messaging use case. Last month it launched custom and branded clothing for Bitmoji, which could open opportunities to earn money selling premium outfits or showing off brand sponsorships. To truly take advantage of Bitmoji’s unique popularity, though, Snap needed to build longer-form experiences with the avatars at the center that . Stickers and Stories and games were fun, but none felt like must-see content. With Bitmoji TV, Snap may have found a way to get users to drag their friends into the app. Since everyone sees their own Bitmoji as the star, the cartoons could be more compelling then ones with impersonal characters you might find elsewhere around the web. But Bitmoji TV’s success will depend largely on the quality of the writing. If your avatar is constantly getting into funny, meme-worthy situations, you’ll keep coming back to watch. But Snap’s teen audience has a keen nose for inauthentic bullsh*t. If the Shows feel forced, too childish, or boring, Bitmoji TV will flop. Snap would be savvy to invest in great Hollywood talent to produce the episodes. High quality Bitmoji TV shorts could rescue Snapchat Discover from its own mediocrity. There are a few strong brands like ESPN SportsCenter on the platform, and Snap has several original Shows with over 25 million unique viewers. It’s also greenlit additional seasons of Shows like Dead Girls Detective Agency and new biopic clips from Serena Williams and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Still, a scroll through the Discover and Shows sections reveals plenty of trashy clickbait that surely scares away premium advertisers. Bitmoji TV could offer video that’s not only fun and snackable, but out of reach for competitors who don’t have a scaled avatar platform of their own. As with the recent launch of Snapchat Cameos, the company has realized that the most addictive experiences center on its users’ own faces. Snapchat turned the selfie into the future of communication. Bitmoji TV could make an animated recreation of your selfie into the future of content. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/28/bitmoji-tv-snapchat/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189932143951 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com For those following Huawei’s substantial rise over the past several years, it’ll come as no surprise that the Chinese government played an important role in fostering the hardware maker. Even so, the actual numbers behind the ascent are still a bit jaw dropping. Huawei reportedly had “access to as much as $75 billion in state support,” according to a piece published by The Wall Street Journal on Christmas Day. That massive figure is culled from poring over various forms, including grants and tax breaks. Huawei, for its part, isn’t denying any government support, but said in response that those it received were “small and non-material,” in line with the usual variety of grants awarded to tech startups and companies. Per WSJ’s accounting of public records, Huawei got around $46 billion in loans and other support, coupled with $25 billion in tax cuts used to accelerate tech advances. There’s also a billion or two here and there for things like land discounts and grants. At very least, it seems China had a vested interest in the rise of a hardware company that could go head to head with the likes of Apple and Samsung. Certainly it’s not unheard of that a government would foster some growth in the form of grants, but there’s a clear question of how much. The phone maker’s alleged close ties to its government have been a major sticking point in its swift international expansion. Such notions have raised flags in the United States, where the company has been barred from provided mobile hardware for government bodies. Many leaders have also raised concerns over use of Huawei telecom equipment, as the company looks to be a linchpin in a global 5G rollout. Due to such perception and central role in U.S./China trade tensions, it’s no surprise the company was quick to deny any such ties. Huawei has, of course, been hampered by a U.S. trade ban that has barred the use of U.S. originated hardware and software. A domestic push and patriotic ad campaign, however, have helped its sales figures in China, even as it has struggled to expand in other parts of the world. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/26/huawei-reportedly-got-by-with-a-lot-of-help-from-the-chinese-government/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189883707846 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com The second season of the Penn Badgley romantic murder drama “You” launches on Netflix today — and along with it, a new project called Cosmopolitan Watch Party. You can hit play on the Watch Party website at the same time as you hit play on each episode, kicking off an experience that runs alongside the show. Watch Party will show you content from Cosmo that’s tied to what you’re seeing on-screen, and it’s often drawn from interviews with the cast and crew. Cosmopolitan Editor in Chief Jessica Pels said her publication created Watch Party with Google News Lab, a team that collaborates with newsrooms to create new experiences as part of the larger Google News Initiative. The idea was to respond to broader shifts in TV viewing, where “binge viewing is the thing, appointment viewing is not.” She added, “As a viewer, if you don’t catch it in that moment, you feel like you’re left out of that conversation. That’s why we’re bringing the conversation to you.” Pels was hesitant about revealing too many details about Watch Party content, since so much of it is tied to the twists and turns of the new season. But as an example, she said Watch Party could reveal that Badgley described “a certain song that he listens to when he’s trying to get into the headspace of this murderer, in order to get into this scene.” Not everyone will embrace the idea of constantly looking at their phone while they watch Netflix, but Pels said Cosmopolitan’s traffic data suggests that plenty of viewers are doing it already. She also emphasized that it’s “all flat content” consisting of text and graphics, with no video or sound. “You don’t want to be annoyingly distracted from the show,” she said, describing it as “true companion content” that you can check when you want and ignore otherwise. Simon Rogers, data lead at Google News Lab, told me that Pels and her team were given access to exclusive Google Trends data for additional insight into which characters and cast members viewers were responding to. The News Lab also built a built custom content management system for Watch Party that could be used for similar experiences in the future. Not that Pels has necessarily decided what the next Watch Party will be. “I kind of want to leave ourselves open to the right partnership or the right next opportunity for how best to execute round two,” she said. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/26/cosmo-watch-party/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189883707721 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 9am Pacific, you can subscribe here. 1. Uber founder Travis Kalanick is leaving the company’s board of directors Uber founder and former CEO Travis Kalanick will officially resign from the board as of December 31, to “focus on his new business and philanthropic endeavors,” according to a company press release. Kalanick, who was forced out as Uber CEO and eventually replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi, has been in the process of selling off his considerable ownership stake in the company. In fact, it looks like Kalanick has now sold all his remaining stock. 2. Plenty of Fish app was leaking users’ hidden names and postal codes Dating app Plenty of Fish has pushed out a fix for its app after a security researcher found it was leaking information that users had set to “private” on their profiles. Before the fix, the app was silently returning users’ first names and postal ZIP codes, according to The App Analyst. 3. As DraftKings finds an exit, a reminder of what could have been DraftKings, a betting service focused on fantasy sports, will go public via a reverse merger. Not too long ago DraftKings and its erstwhile rival FanDuel were ubiquitous on television; now the two companies are fractions of what they once were. (Extra Crunch membership required.) 4. Gift Guide: 13 last-minute subscription gifts for the people you totally didn’t forget It’s too late to order things online, and brick-and-mortar stores are either closed for the week or absolutely slammed. So what can you do? Subscriptions! 5. Fyre Festival meets Mr. Bone Saw Connie Loizos looks at the controversy around the three-day-long MDL Beast Festival in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. The event, promoted by a number of celebrities and social media influencers, aimed to promote the efforts of its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (known as MBS). 6. A false start for foldables in 2019 A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category. (Extra Crunch membership required.) 7. Micro-angelo? This 3D-printed ‘David’ is just one millimeter tall 3D printing has proven itself useful in so many industries that it’s no longer necessary to show off, but some people just can’t help themselves. Case in point: this millimeter-tall rendition of Michelangelo’s famous “David” printed with copper using a newly developed technique. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/24/daily-crunch-travis-kalanick-uber-board/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189852363861 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com A year from now, this is likely to have all blown over. A year from now, the Samsung Galaxy Fold’s turbulent takeoff may well be a footnote in the largest story of foldables. For now, however, it’s an important caveat that will come up in every conversation about the nascent product category. How history remembers this particular debacle will depend on a number of different factors, the ultimate success of the category chief among them. If foldables do takeoff, the Galaxy Fold’s very public false start will be remembered as little more than a blip. There’s plenty of reasons to root for this — devices have seemingly hit the upper threshold of product footprint. If the trend toward larger screens continues, it’s going to take a clever form factor like this to accommodate that need. If foldables are relegated to the dustbin of history, however, the Fold misfire will take much of the heat. It’s clear that a trail of broken units will have little impact on Samsung’s bottom line. Two Galaxy Note 7 recalls were a testament to the hardware giant’s resilience in the public eye, after serving as a rounding error in the company’s bottom line that year. Sending some half-baked models to a handful of reviews wasn’t nearly as major of a mistake, but the category, much like the Fold itself, is in a fragile state. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/23/a-false-start-for-foldables-in-2019/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189831971331 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com Somehow during all the partisan furor of the last few days, the Senate found a moment to vote some bipartisan legislation into law — presuming, of course, it survives the president’s desk. The TRACED act pushes carriers to kill robocalls before they ring, and gives the FCC some extra juice to pursue the wicked ones perpetrating them. “We’re delighted the Senate acted quickly to pass this legislation to shutdown illegal robocalls,” wrote the bill’s co-sponsors in the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement. “We’re working hard to help the American people get real relief from these relentless and illegal calls. We look forward to the President signing this overwhelmingly bipartisan legislation into law very soon.” Unlike many things called bipartisan, this one really is. Two different versions of the bill originated in the House and Senate and were passed individually with overwhelming majorities. The pertinent committees put their heads together and created a unified version of the bill they could both live with. Amazingly, that was just last month, and now the bill is off to the White House for the Executive signature. You can read a summary of what the bill does here, but I’ll summarize further:
Overall it seems like a good bill and quite focused on this specific issue — no weird pork attached. Here’s hoping the TRACED act is signed into law quickly. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/robocall-crushing-traced-act-passes-senate-and-heads-to-oval-office/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189765544251 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus or it augmented reality glasses to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath. “We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us” says Facebook’s VP of hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.” Eye OSBy moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of its gadgets. Facebook tells TechCrunch the focus of this work is on what’s needed for AR glasses. It’s exploring all the options right now including potentially partnering with other companies or building a custom OS specifically for augmented reality. One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses. Facebook has always been sore about not owning an operating system and having to depend on the courtesy of some of its biggest rivals. Those include Apple, who’s CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly thrown jabs at Facebook and its chief Mark Zuckerberg over privacy and data collection. In a previous hedge against the power of the mobile operating systems, Facebook worked on a secret project codenamed Oxygen circa 2013 that would help it distribute Android apps from outside the Google Play store if necessary, Vox’s Kurt Wagner reported. That said, its last attempt to wrestle more control of mobile away from the OS giants in 2013 went down in flames. The Facebook phone, built with HTC hardware, ran a forked version of Android and the Facebook Home user interface. But drowning the experience in friends’ photos and Messenger chat bubbles proved wildly unpopular and both the HTC First and Facebook Home were shelved. Investing In Tomorrow TechNow Facebook is hoping to learn from past mistakes as it ramps up its hardware efforts with a new office for the AR/VR team in Burlingame, 15 miles north of the company’s headquarters. The 70,000-square-foot space is designed to house roughly 4,000 employees. Facebook tells TechCrunch the team will move there in the second half of 2020 to make use of its labs, prototype space, and testing areas. The AR/VR team will still have members at other offices across California, Washington, New York, and abroad. Interested in potentially controlling more of the hardware stack, Facebook held acquisition talks with $4.5 billion market cap semiconductor company Cirrus Logic, which makes audio chips for Apple and more, The Information reports. That deal never happened, and it’s unclear how far the talks went given tech giants constantly keep their M&A teams open to discussions. But it shows how serious Facebook is taking hardware, even if Portal and Oculus sales have been slow to date. Facebook declined to comment on the matter. That could start to change next year, though, as flagship virtual reality experiences hit the market. I got a press preview of the upcoming Medal Of Honor first-person shooter that will launch on the Oculus Quest in 2020. An hour of playing the World War 2 game flew by, and it was one of the first VR games that felt like you could enjoy it week after week rather than being just a tech demo. Medal Of Honor could prove to be the killer app that convinces gamers they have to get a Quest. Social HardwareFacebook has also been working on hardware experiences for the enterprise. Facebook Workplace video calls can now run on Portal, with its smart camera auto-zooming to keep everyone in the board room in frame or focus on the action. The Information reports Facebook is also prototyping a VR videoconferencing system that Boz has been testing with his team. Facebook tells TechCrunch that Boz hosted two internal events where he videoconferenced through VR to about 100 of his team leaders using virtual Q&A software Facebook is prototyping internally. It’s hoping to learn what would be necessary to offer VR meeting software as a product. The hardware initiatives meanwhile feed back into Facebook’s core ad business. It’s now using some data about what people do on their Oculus or Portal to target them with ads. From playing certain games to accessing kid-focused experiences to virtually teleporting to vacation destinations, there’s plenty of lucrative data for Facebook to potentially mine. Facebook tells TechCrunch that Portal currently takes data like if you log in, make calls, or use certain features to inform ad targeting. For example, it could should you ads related to video calling if you do that a lot. With Oculus, if you connect your Facebook account, then data about apps you use or events you join could be used to tune its algorithms or target ads. Facebook even wants to know what’s on our mind before we act on it. The Information reports that Facebook’s brain-computer interface hardware for controlling interfaces by employing sensors to recognize a word a user is thinking has been shrunk down. It’s gone from the size of a refridgerator to something hand-held but still far from ready for integration into a phone. Facebook tells TechCrunch it’s making progress, improving the word error rate significantly up the state-of-the-art research and expanding the dictionary of words that can be recognized. Facebook can now decode brain activity in real-time, and it’s working on an intermediary system for identifying single words as it pushes towards 100 word-per-minute brain typing. Selling Oculus headsets, Portal screens, and mind-readers might never generate the billions in profits Facebook earns from its efficient ads business. But they could ensure the social network isn’t locked out of the next waves of computing. Whether those are fully immersive like virtual reality, convenient complements to our phones like smart displays, or minimally-invasive sensors, Facebook wants them to be social. If it can bring your friends along to your new gadgets, Facebook will find some way to squeeze out revenue while keeing these devices from making us more isolated and less human. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/facebook-operating-system/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189762018611 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com When we met up with Huawei at their Shenzhen headquarters earlier this year, details on the Mate X were hazy, at best. We did have the opportunity to play around with the forthcoming handset a bit over lunch, but the unit looked largely unchanged from what we’d seen at MWC earlier in the year. Release plans, too, were vague. There was surely a bit of strategery happening behind the scenes on this one, as the company figured precisely how to tackle a post-Galaxy Fold market. At an event for French press in China this week, however, consumer CEO Richard Yu seemingly confirmed that the foldable is set for a first quarter launch in Europe next year following its November launch in China. Details aren’t clear, the device arriving in that market appears to be the already debuted version, while a new and improved version of the device is set to be announced next year. That model will have a stronger hinge and display and an updated chipset. Word is it’s set to debut at Mobile World Congress in February. That seems like as good a reason to holdout on purchasing the extremely pricey device as any. Though, it should be noted that Huawei’s first swipe at the form factor was nearly universally regarded as a step up from Samsung when it was unveiled last February. Even so, the company understandably went back to the drawing board in the wake of fallout from Samsung’s own foldable woes. from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176981 https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/19/huawei-set-to-debut-a-new-improved-mate-x/ http://www.gadgetscompared.com https://ikonografico.tumblr.com/post/189762018536 via http://www.gadgetscompared.com |
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