Year: 2018

Smart speakers have come a long way over the past few years as Amazon, Google and Apple have delivered pretty noteworthy strides in the IQs of their assistants. Where speakers haven’t advanced as much is in how they offer users choices; Google Assistant can only list out so many options before you get sick of listening, so throwing a screen onto these devices was a pretty inevitable evolution.

At CES earlier this year, Google showcased what it called Smart Displays, basically an answer to Amazon’s Echo Show. Today, Lenovo’s device, the first of the bunch, goes on sale.

The device, to be clear, pretty much just looks like an Android tablet that you plug in with Google Assistant on it. What’s interesting is how the device handles visual feedback for audio commands, giving lightweight visual context for some queries and more robust video/photo content for others. Google clearly doesn’t have all of the core tenets of its Smart Display interface philosophy hammered out, and yet for the most part this is a very pleasant product that strikes all of the right notes on design.

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The device comes in two flavors, a $249 10-inch 1080p version and a $199 8-inch 720p version. There aren’t any differences beyond the screen size, so it really depends on where you’re keeping it. I’d imagine that people who are putting something like this on their nightstand as a way-too-smart alarm clock might want the smaller version, whereas if you have a bit more room in your kitchen or living room the 10-inch version might offer some needed screen real estate. For this review I tested the 10-inch $249 variant.

While I didn’t have too many qualms with the hardware, it was much easier to pick out things that bothered me about the way Google has approached the Smart Display software. While some tasks were refreshingly thought out, like searching for and progressing through recipe instructions, others, like finding a specific YouTube video, were frustratingly difficult.

The Smart Display is fundamentally a Google Home device that can also communicate to you through visuals. It may look like a tablet with a speaker, but you will not find anything resembling a full app on the device, you will not be entering text via an onscreen keyboard and you certainly will never see a “menu” button. This is a tablet with an identity crisis, a product that can use certain functionality to communicate with you but also wants you to speak with your words and let its AI prowess do the more stringent work of  telling you what you would like.

Asking the device to “open YouTube” will take you to a screen with a list of recommended videos and… nothing else. Fair enough, everything is sparsely simple, but it’s frankly a little annoying to wander through voice commands to navigate to something right in front of you that you know you could tap toward much more quickly. This is one of the key advantages that the Smart Display holds over the Amazon Echo Show, so I just feel like they should have been a little bit more heavy-handed in porting a fuller version of the app.

The onscreen content is more often than not just an added perk; for more informational queries it can be useful to see what a person looks like if you’re asking Google who they are, and it can be useful to see a five-day weather forecast rather than having Alexa list all of the days out. For the most part, it seems less than necessary, and I rarely found myself actually looking at the screen after I had asked a question.

Google has been doing some work in stringing commands together or adding support for follow-up questions in some contexts, but with a screen that can now show you the device is still listening I wish the company just kept the mic running during certain situations. When you’re progressing through the steps of a recipe, for instance, each time you have to keep repeating “Hey Google, next!” (you can also tap an onscreen button but that’s not always ideal when deep in cooking).

Some of these features could use updates, but there are other things that Google has nailed, right out of the box. Routines are great on the Smart Display. Saying,”Hey Google, good morning,” will turn on my lights, tell me about my meetings for the day, showcase the weather and my commute and give a nice little rundown of the news. This was all possible on my display-less Google Home already, but something about doing this on the Smart Display just feels much more Jarvis-like, à la Tony Stark, and I feel like I’m living in a fairly cool future, as long as I cut off the news headlines in time.

Let’s take a closer look at the hardware, though, because Lenovo has actually built a very thoughtful product, and I must say it’s been a little bit since I’ve been wowed by consumer hardware coming from them. More often than not, Lenovo gear seems to occupy that area where it’s mostly quite good but one or two things are off and the whole thing just feels second-tier as a result. Their Smart Display, on the other hand, is beautiful and, honestly, much better-looking than any Home product that Google has shipped.

Sound-wise, this speaker is also much better than I was expecting for its small footprint. It seems louder and crisper than the standard Google Home, falling short of those metrics when compared to the pricier Max, though you are also certainly getting less speaker for your money than a comparably priced (but screen-less) product like the Sonos One. Both JBL and LG also have smart display products in the pipeline that seem to place more of an emphasis on powerful sound, but the whole boombox look that they have going just doesn’t do it for me.

There were a couple of hardware quirks with Lenovo’s Smart Display, but really nothing major. I wasn’t generally getting the greatest viewing angle from the device on my kitchen counter, so some sort of hinge on the stand would have been nice to adjust the angle of the screen. The device’s ability to be viewable in both portrait and landscape was interesting, but you can really only use it in portrait for Duo calls as Google doesn’t really seem to want the Smart Display to be used in that orientation. The touchscreen was also at times a little less responsive than I would have liked, but fared well enough by and large.

Lenovo’s Smart Display is very pretty and offers some great value as well as some interesting ideas from Google. It strangely doesn’t feel like a huge upgrade over its screen-less Google Home variants, especially because navigating videos is still a bit harder than it should be, but with pretty decent sound and a few nice visual feedback features there are some very novel ideas present even if they don’t feel entirely fleshed out.

After months of waiting, the first Google smart display is finally available. The company announced a slew of the devices back in January at CES — no doubt as a way of sticking it to Amazon. After all, the Echo Show was a novel enough device in the smart speaker world, but the hardware was always a little lacking.

Google, on the other hand, let hardware partners do the heavy lifting here, and at CES, the company announced devices from Lenovo, JBL and LG. The former was far and away the nicest looking of the bunch — and it’s the first to hit the market, running $200 for the eight-inch version and $250 for the 10-inch (including three months of YouTube Premium). The others are simply listed as “coming soon.”

Google took things a step further at I/O, handing out hardware development kits, so interested manufacturers could build their own. Expect those to start flooding the market in the not-so-distant future, if the Assistant smart speaker market is any indicator.

If you’ve spent any time with the Echo Show or Spot, you pretty much know the deal here: news, music, podcasts, recipes and the like, all with a visual element. Of course, the smart displays have one very key thing Amazon doesn’t: YouTube. Access to the video service has been a major sticking point in the battle between the two companies. After all, it’s one of the best case uses for this sort of hardware.

Letgo, the secondhand goods marketplace valued at over a billion dollars, this week announced the launch of new features aimed at helping sellers: video listings and automatic pricing suggestions that leverage image recognition and A.I. technologies. Sellers will now be able to point their smartphone camera at something they want to sell using this new feature, which letgo is calling “Reveal,” in order to find out what their item is worth. This is based on insights from letgo’s database of hundreds of millions of listings. the company says.

At launch, potential sellers will be able to use Reveal to get a general idea about what something sells for, and how high current demand is for similar items. They can then decide to sell it with just a tap, and letgo will suggest further details like title, price, and category. The feature is similar in that respect to technology competitor eBay launched in its app earlier this year – however, it required a barcode scan to do so.

However, letgo Reveal isn’t capable of differentiating different models of devices – it’s meant to give a broader idea. In a demo, for example, Reveal offers a ballpark price for things like a “camera,” “record player,” and “bike’ and gives you an ideal of how long it will take to sell them. But obviously, some items will be worth more than others – like a newer iPhone will sell for more than an older one. Reveal won’t help sellers figure out the exact pricing, but could at least get the ball rolling.

Another new feature launching this week is video listings. Now, along with item photos, sellers can choose to add videos to their listings so buyers can view the item in question from all angles.

“We’ve created a new kind of marketplace – built on intuitive technology and radical simplicity – because it should be as painless to resell something as it was to buy it in the first place,” said letgo cofounder Alec Oxenford, in a statement. “Reveal takes the guesswork out of selling secondhand, while video listings are a new way to show off whatever you want to sell when photos won’t do it justice.”

Video listings could give letgo an advantage over rivals like eBay, which suggests that sellers link to videos, as well as OfferUp, which is today ranked #3 in the Shopping category on the App Store, while letgo is #6.

The changes could attract more sellers to letgo, as it battles against these and other rivals, including Facebook’s Marketplace and Craigslist.

The company is backed by $475 million in funding from a line of investors, including Naspers, Accel, Insight Venture Partners, New Enterprise Associates, 14W, Eight Roads Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners and FJ Labs, according to Cruchbase. Investors are betting on these startups being able to finally topple Craigslist’s stranglehold on secondhand listings, but they all still have to contend with the threat of Facebook and eBay – the latter which just reported a slight miss on earnings, but a growing base of active buyers – now up to 175 million.

Today, letgo has over 75 million downloads, and has been pegged by comScore as the second-fastest growing app in the U.S.

If you’re a gig economy worker, you’ve probably settled into the reality that insurance and benefits aren’t going to be available to you. Well, not unless on-demand companies make the switch from 1099 independent contractors to W-2 employees. While that’s not changing — yet — Square’s on-demand food delivery service, Caviar, is now offering insurance protection to all of its couriers.

“We think this is a positive first step for independent contractor benefits that still gives couriers the flexibility and freedom to earn – and be covered – on their own schedule,” Caviar wrote in a blog post.

This occupational accident insurance will ensure that couriers are covered in the event any accidents happen while they’re making deliveries for Caviar. This insurance, which comes at no cost to the couriers, activates the second a courier accepts an order Caviar and ends the second its complete.

“We’ve wanted to offer a policy like this for a while,” the blog post states.

This new insurance is in part thanks to OneBeacon, an insurance company Square partnered with to create a type of insurance that is unique to gig economy workers. Caviar’s Occupational Accident insurance entails coverage up to $1 million per accident, $100,000 accidental death benefit and survivor’s benefits for dependents, and both temporary and continuous disability at 50 percent of the courier’s average weekly earnings.

“We’re including this in our standard offering because we feel that providing insurance to protect couriers while they’re actively delivering with Caviar is the right thing to do,” the blog post states.

The president’s latest Twitter target is Twitter itself. This morning, Trump took to the platform to call out the alleged “shadow banning” of Republican users. It’s the latest in long standing conservative and right-wing complaints regarding perceived unfair treatment at the hands of social media platforms.

This latest round stems, in part, from a recent Vice story highlighting Twitter’s removal of certain users — including Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel — from autofill search results.

“The notion that social media companies would suppress certain political points of view should concern every American,” McDaniel told Vice. “Twitter owes the public answers to what’s really going on.”

“We are aware that some accounts are not automatically populating in our search box and shipping a change to address this,” the company wrote in response. “I’d emphasize that our technology is based on account *behavior* not the content of Tweets.”

The company didn’t specify, however, why the change appears to be disproportionately impacting Republicans, though it it did reference a recent blog post highlighting recent policy changes.

“One important issue we’ve been working to address is what some might refer to as ‘trolls,’ ” it wrote. “To put this in context, fewer than one percent of accounts make up the majority of accounts reported for abuse, but a lot of what’s reported does not violate our rules. While still a small overall number, these accounts have a disproportionately large – and negative – impact on people’s experience on Twitter.”

In a tweet this morning, Trump promised further examination of the issue. “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans,” he wrote. “Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”

He didn’t spell out a course of action. That’s never really been his Twitter M.O. The site long served as a platform for his own venting/flame fanning, rather than outlining specific strategy. Congress has put various social media platforms in the hot seat of late, however, most notably Facebook, which found Mark Zuckerberg sitting through House and Senate hearings.

Twitter product lead Kayvon Beykpour took to the platform in an attempt to further break down Twitter policy. “To be clear, our behavioral ranking doesn’t make judgements based on political views or the substance of tweets,” he wrote. “Some accounts weren’t being auto-suggested even when people were searching for their specific name. Our usage of the behavior signals within search was causing this to happen & making search results seem inaccurate. We’re making a change today that will improve this.”

CEO Jack Dorsey echoed the comments, writing, “It suffices to say we have a lot more work to do to earn people’s trust on how we work.”

In what could be the biggest one-day drop of all time, Facebook shares opened at $174.89, down 19.6 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $217.50 (NASDAQ:FB).

When it comes to market capitalization, Facebook was worth $629.6 billion yesterday. The company is now worth $506.2. In other words, Facebook has lost $123.4 billion in value overnight.

Today’s performance isn’t due to yet another data misuse or election interfering scandal. The company has reported disappointing earnings. For the first time, Facebook’s growth is staling.

There are barely more people checking Facebook every day compared to previous quarter. Even worse, Facebook’s user base shrank in Europe. Facebook is still growing, but it’s clear that GDPR combined with a saturated market aren’t helping the company.

That’s why Facebook is trying to change the narrative. For the first time, the company shared a new “family of apps audience” metric. There are 2.5 billion people using at lease one of the company’s app — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

It’s clear that Facebook thinks Instagram and ephemeral stories represent the future of the company. But this is going to be a question mark in the coming months as it’s unclear if Instagram can generate as much money as Facebook’s main app.

Measuring Facebook’s losses

$123,400,000,000 is a big number. It’s hard to grasp how much it represents given the scale of big tech companies. As TechCrunch’s Jon Russell pointed out, bitcoin’s entire market capitalization is currently $141 billion. So it’s like nearly all bitcoins disappeared overnight.

Who would have thought Facebook could be more volatile than bitcoin?

Even if you compare it to significant tech companies, this is a huge loss. For instance, Netflix is worth $158 billion right now. Twitter’s market cap is only $33 billion. It’s like Facebook shaved off TK Twitters in market cap overnight. And I’m not even talking about Snap, which is only worth $17 billion.

Changing Facebook’s business model

Most people have been focused on Facebook’s losses for now. It’s a staggering event. But it’s now time to look at Facebook’s business model and understand what’s happening.

Facebook is an incredible success story. It became a massive business in just a few years. But the company has a dangerous business model. Thousands of employees are looking for ways to collect more data. Business teams can then sell expensive ads because they’re perfectly targeted.

And the best way to optimize those efficient ads is by making addictive products. If you spend more time looking at stories, you’re going to be exposed to more ads.

That’s why Facebook optimizes for engagement. You get outraged, you become sad, you like and you share. And Facebook makes money.

This year is a turning point for Facebook. People will look back at this moment as an inflection point in the company’s trajectory. But it’s still unclear if Facebook has the answer to its structural issues.

In what could be the biggest one-day drop of all time, Facebook shares opened at $174.89, down 19.6 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $217.50 (NASDAQ:FB).

When it comes to market capitalization, Facebook was worth $629.6 billion yesterday. The company is now worth $506.2. In other words, Facebook has lost $123.4 billion in value overnight.

Today’s performance isn’t due to yet another data misuse or election interfering scandal. The company has reported disappointing earnings. For the first time, Facebook’s growth is staling.

There are barely more people checking Facebook every day compared to previous quarter. Even worse, Facebook’s user base shrank in Europe. Facebook is still growing, but it’s clear that GDPR combined with a saturated market aren’t helping the company.

That’s why Facebook is trying to change the narrative. For the first time, the company shared a new “family of apps audience” metric. There are 2.5 billion people using at lease one of the company’s app — Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp.

It’s clear that Facebook thinks Instagram and ephemeral stories represent the future of the company. But this is going to be a question mark in the coming months as it’s unclear if Instagram can generate as much money as Facebook’s main app.

Measuring Facebook’s losses

$123,400,000,000 is a big number. It’s hard to grasp how much it represents given the scale of big tech companies. As TechCrunch’s Jon Russell pointed out, bitcoin’s entire market capitalization is currently $141 billion. So it’s like nearly all bitcoins disappeared overnight.

Who would have thought Facebook could be more volatile than bitcoin?

Even if you compare it to significant tech companies, this is a huge loss. For instance, Netflix is worth $158 billion right now. Twitter’s market cap is only $33 billion. It’s like Facebook shaved off TK Twitters in market cap overnight. And I’m not even talking about Snap, which is only worth $17 billion.

Changing Facebook’s business model

Most people have been focused on Facebook’s losses for now. It’s a staggering event. But it’s now time to look at Facebook’s business model and understand what’s happening.

Facebook is an incredible success story. It became a massive business in just a few years. But the company has a dangerous business model. Thousands of employees are looking for ways to collect more data. Business teams can then sell expensive ads because they’re perfectly targeted.

And the best way to optimize those efficient ads is by making addictive products. If you spend more time looking at stories, you’re going to be exposed to more ads.

That’s why Facebook optimizes for engagement. You get outraged, you become sad, you like and you share. And Facebook makes money.

This year is a turning point for Facebook. People will look back at this moment as an inflection point in the company’s trajectory. But it’s still unclear if Facebook has the answer to its structural issues.

Amazon today announced Alexa Cast to allow for better music control on Alexa devices. Users will be able to more easily transition from listening to through the Amazon Music app to listening to Amazon Music on an Alexa device. This is a much-needed function for Amazon’s core services.

Before Alexa Cast, it can be messy switching between listening to Amazon Music on different devices. The service does not have the same sort of controls found on other services like Spotify . It sounds like Amazon is finally building out features that will turn Amazon Music into a legit music service and Alexa Cast is a good step forward.

The service is available starting today. Users need to update their iOS and Android app to access the feature. Just like with Spotify Connect or Apple AirPlay users will need to tap on the Alexa Cast icon and select the device they want to playback the streaming music.

It’s unclear from the initial announcement if Amazon will bring this functionality to other apps or let developers use it.

Amazon today announced Alexa Cast to allow for better music control on Alexa devices. Users will be able to more easily transition from listening to through the Amazon Music app to listening to Amazon Music on an Alexa device. This is a much-needed function for Amazon’s core services.

Before Alexa Cast, it can be messy switching between listening to Amazon Music on different devices. The service does not have the same sort of controls found on other services like Spotify . It sounds like Amazon is finally building out features that will turn Amazon Music into a legit music service and Alexa Cast is a good step forward.

The service is available starting today. Users need to update their iOS and Android app to access the feature. Just like with Spotify Connect or Apple AirPlay users will need to tap on the Alexa Cast icon and select the device they want to playback the streaming music.

It’s unclear from the initial announcement if Amazon will bring this functionality to other apps or let developers use it.

TechCrunch is coming back to Berlin to talk with the best and brightest people in tech from Europe and the rest of the world. In addition to fireside chats and panels, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the coveted cup.

Grab your ticket to Disrupt Berlin before August 1st as prices will increase after that. The conference will take place on November 29-30.

We are busy collecting some of the most awesome speakers in the world, and not least among them is Aline Sara, founder of Natakallam, the innovative startup which gave refugees hope. https://natakallam.com

In the summer of 2014 Aline had just completed her masters in International Affairs at Colombia University and was looking for an affordable way to practice her Arabic—specifically, her native Lebanese regional dialect—from New York City. It was also at that time that Syrians, fleeing the violence from the brutal civil war, were pouring into Lebanon, where today, roughly 1 out of 4 people are Syrian.

Like most Syrians outside of the country, and notably the 5 million-plus who are living in neighboring countries, Syrians in Lebanon cannot easily get work permits, making their capacity to work and sustain a livelihood incredibly difficult.

Aline thought of connecting her need to access conversational Arabic to that of displaced Syrians to access an income. Thus came to life the idea of NaTakallam, pioneering the concept of leveraging the Internet economy and refugees’ language skills to provide language services to users worldwide, who, through their engagement, help support displaced persons’ livelihoods. They are now expanding to serve other nationalities and offering translation and interpretation services.