Year: 2018

As Apple gears up for its developer keynote conference tomorrow, one of its bigger announcements is likely to be new changes coming to its augmented reality platform. Since announcing ARKit last year, the tech giant has hardly been sheepish about its belief in AR’s potential.

• “I think AR is big and profound,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told CNBC.
• “I don’t think there is any sector or industry that will be untouched by AR,” he told Vogue.
• “I think AR is that big, it’s huge. I get excited because of the things that could be done that could improve a lot of lives,” he told The Independent.

Behind a lot of that talk is belief in the tech’s utility down the road, but until Apple is ready to experimenting with AR tech in core iOS features, all of the chatter around AR having plenty of utility today feels a bit half-hearted. I’ll be very interested to see if the company announces any AR integrations in iOS 12 tomorrow that add new utility or if Animojis are still about as far as they’re willing to go.

While nearly every major tech company spent 2017 opining about the potential of AR, there still doesn’t seem to be much that consumers can show for it. Google made a few interesting announcements surrounding the technology at its I/O conference last month, most fascinating was an AR walking mode being tested for Google Maps. Apple Maps is in desperate need of an upgrade and it makes sense for that to be the starting point for where its integrations begin.

AR is definitely one of Apple’s longer term investments, but it’s also one that may not see much payoff in the short term.

While Apple has been content to let many of their long-term bets iterate through awkward phases underground in the R&D labs, ARKit has been thrust onto hundreds of millions of devices while still in that odd, what-are-we-supposed-to-do-with-this stage. AR is more broadly one of those unique scenarios where everyone can imagine a potential end-case, it’s how it gets there that’s the head-scratcher and Apple seems to need developers to take on the risk of experimenting.

At Apple’s developer conference keynote tomorrow, the company seems poised to showcase new developments for its ARKit augmented reality platform. Chief on the list of expected upgrades (via Reuters) is a system of sharing coordinated point clouds between phones so that multiple users can run AR apps in a shared experience, aka AR multiplayer.

Where Apple will definitely highlight ARKit’s potential is in the gaming sector. Gaming has always been more-engaging with multi-player, but how that really looks with augmented reality is anyone’s guess. It’s been two years since Pokémon GO was released and for all of the attention that title received, it isn’t entirely clear how AR capabilities contributed to its success.

Games that integrate a multiplayer ARKit are going to have to make a lot of discoveries on their own. Playing games with friends in AR will gain a hyper-local edge but will lose much of the freedom offered by online gameplay in terms of connecting gamers seamlessly. There are countless other UX questions that will also still need to be experimented with.

Augmented reality is a truly exciting technology and Apple’s efforts to lead the pack in building developer support has built up a lot of initial enthusiasm from that crowd, but to keep that excitement Apple’s going to need to start proving out some of those use cases for users on their own and put its big bet deeper into users’ daily digital lives.

A while back, a blockchain startup approached me with their pitch, a decentralized social media application in which users can earn money by simply doing what they already do on other platforms, such posting updates, photos and videos.

I would have been intrigued had they sent me the message a couple of years ago. But not so much after observing the space for more several years.

Several blockchain applications profess to enable users to monetize various resources, whether it’s their unused storage and CPU power, or the tons of data they generate every day.

Regardless of whether they will succeed to deliver on their promises or not, these projects highlight one of the problems that haunts the centralized internet. Users are seldom rewarded for the great value they bring to platforms such as Facebook, Google and Amazon .

Blockchain applications suggest that decentralized alternatives to current services will give users the chance to collect their fair share of the revenue they generate with their participation in online ecosystems. It’s an enticing proposition since it doesn’t require users to do much more than what they’re already doing: send emails, browse websites, watch ads, keep the computer on…

But what exactly do you earn from monetizing your resources on the internet, and how accessible and reliable are your earning? Here’s what you need to know.

What can you sell?

A handful of blockchain platforms enable you to rent your unused storage, idle CPU cycles, and internet bandwidth with those who are in need. The premise is simple: You list your resources along with your payment terms on the application and get paid in the proprietary crypto-token of the application when others use them. Purchases are arranged, performed and paid peer-to-peer through smart contracts, bits of code that run on blockchain without the need for a centralized application server.

Examples include Golem and iExec, two decentralized marketplaces for computing power. Users can earn the platforms’ proprietary cryptocurrencies, GNT and RLC tokens respectively, by renting their CPU cycles to developers and users who want to run applications on the network. Golem and iExec aim to replace centralized cloud providers such as Amazon and Google, in which the service provider sets the rates and rakes in all the profits.

Storj and Filecoin are two distributed storage networks where users can earn cryptotokens for sharing their free hard drive space with the network. Both platforms are designed to provide infrastructure for various applications such as web hosting and streaming services. Gladius, a decentralized content delivery network (CDN) and DDoS mitigation solution, enables users to monetize their internet bandwidth to serve content from websites and services running on the network.

These applications provide a good opportunity to turn the hours that your computer sits idly in the home or office into a side income.

Other blockchain platforms enable you to monetize your data. An example is Datum, a decentralized marketplace for user data. Datum enables users to earn DAT tokens by choosing to share it with other organizations. Other players in the domain include Streamr, a real-time data-sharing platform geared toward the Internet of Things (IoT). With Streamr, users can earn DATAcoin tokens by sharing the data their connected devices generate with other devices that need it to carry out their functions and companies that use them for analytics and research.

Data is a huge market that is currently dominated by a few big players such as Google and Facebook. These companies hoard user data in their walled-garden silos and use them to make huge profits. Blockchain platforms give users the choice and power to claim their share of that market by giving them back the ownership of their data.

Matchpool is a decentralized social network that enables users to monetize their groups and online communities. Matchpool provides the decentralized equivalent of Facebook groups and provides tools for administrators to earn GUP tokens by setting fees on membership and access to content. And there’s Brave, the blockchain-based browser developed by the former CEO of Mozilla. Brave removes ads from websites and instead gives users the choice to earn Basic Attention Tokens (BAT) by opting to view ads.

How much do you earn?

It’s difficult to measure earnings on blockchain applications because most of them either haven’t launched yet or are in their early stages. Few of the companies I reached out to could provide stable numbers or average figures.

Also, the value of the resource you share on these platforms is often subject to supply-and-demand dynamics. For instance, iExec leaves it to the users to determine the price of their computational resources and doesn’t take any cut from their earnings. If there’s a large demand for decentralized CPU power, you’ll earn more from participating in the network.

Storj, the decentralized storage network, had the most accurate information to share. The platform provides a formula to calculate the monthly earnings of “farmers,” the users who share their free storage space with the network. Storj charges $0.015 per gigabyte of data stored and $0.05 per gigabyte downloaded, 60 percent of which goes to the farmers.

Several factors affect the final earnings, including whether the farmer nodes store primary or mirror copies of data, how long they participate in the network, and how well they perform in terms of up-time, bandwidth and response times. “If someone stored 1TB of data for the entire month, and that entire TB of data was downloaded once that month, they could potentially make $39,” said Philip Hutchins, CTO at Storj Labs. But the current average monthly payment for a Storj farmer node is around $2, according to the network data the company shared.

Storj has also launched partnerships with FileZilla, Microsoft and other companies to build decentralized apps on top of its network, which could increase demand for Storj space.

On Datum, the decentralized data market, users earn between $0.50 and $5 in DAT tokens for each promotional email they opt to open, according to Roger Haenni, the company’s CEO, though he did not share the details of how earnings are calculated. Currently the network supports monetizing email inboxes, but in the future, the company plans to provide users with the option to get paid for sharing various categories of data, such as the location data their phone collects, apps, services and websites they use, data that their smart gadgets collect and others.

That last bit sounds a bit invasive on user privacy. “This [data] is currently widely tracked by cookies from various ad networks,” explains Haenni. “However, the user is not asked to explicitly opt in to share this data nor does he get paid when this data is monetized.” Datum will give the chance to claim the money that’s already being made from their data.

The Datum network currently has 80,000 users, and since the launch of the Datum App in late December, users have collected 1.5 million DAT tokens, amounting to around $75,000.

Gladius, the decentralized CDN, doles out $0.03 in GLA tokens per gigabyte of bandwidth of data streamed through a node (however, the company’s website states that this is an estimate based on favorable market conditions). An internet connection with a 30 mbps upload speed shared with the network for eight hours a day could earn its owner around $49 per month.

What are the costs and risks?

In most cases, you’ve already paid for the resources you’ll be sharing on the blockchain, whether it’s your hard drive space, your CPU or your bandwidth (unless you’re on a metered connection, in which case sharing it would be unwise). However, you’ll have to factor in electricity costs of keeping your computer on, which varied depending on the region you live in.

Social and data-sharing platforms won’t have any extra costs, but you’ll be responsible for keeping the balance between sharing your data and preserving your privacy.

One of the real risks of earning cryptotokens is the constant price fluctuations. The value of what you earn today could double overnight—or drop by half in the same manner. This means you’ll have to choose between holding your tokens or cashing out. 

And there are always the risks of scams and failed projects that will absorb users’ funds and resources only to disappear and leave them out in the cold.

“Resource-sharing projects on top of the blockchain that allow users to control and profit from their own data will be the most profitable and successful projects in the future,” says Jared Tate, blockchain expert and the founder of DigiByte. However, Tate also notes that many of the current resource sharing platforms are PR projects that will never scale. 

“The majority of projects out there won’t be around in 5 years. Most of the projects don’t even have working software, just a white paper and some fancy graphics on a website,” Tate says. Some users evaluate projects by examining the market cap alone, which Tate believes is the absolute worst way to gauge a projects long term viability. “So many market caps are artificially inflated by developer pre-mines or deceptive coin counts,” he warns.

How do you deal with the liquidity problem?

 Another challenge users will have to overcome is what to do with the tokens they earn from monetizing their resources. For instance, if you earn Storj tokens from renting your free hard disk space, the only thing you can do with your earnings is, well, rent storage from other users, which doesn’t make sense since you already had an excess of it to begin with. 

Some platforms have multi-faceted economies that enable users to use their earned tokens for various purposes. For instance, in Flixxo, a decentralized streaming service, users can earn FLIXX tokens by sharing their free disk space and bandwidth to host content on the network. They can then use their earned tokens to consume videos published on the platform. But that is still a limited use case and might not be the problem they want to solve with their earnings.

Digital currencies and tokens have a liquidity problem. There are very few retailers and online services that accept Bitcoin as a method of payment, and even fewer that accept other cryptocurrencies. Users often must find some online exchange which matches buyers and sellers of various digital and fiat currencies. The process is slow and complicated and involves fees at different levels. 

An alternative is Bancor, a decentralized liquidity network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. Supported by its own token, BNT, Bancor enables users to convert between tokens supported on its network without the need to find a buyer or seller. So, for instance, if you’ve earned an amount of RLC tokens from renting your idle CPU time on iExec, you can instantly trade it on Bancor for, say, MANA, the token that will let you purchase VR experiences on Decentraland. 

Bancor already lists several dozen tokens on its network and plans to add more in the future.

“The aim of this mathematic liquidity solution is to allow the long tail of tokens to emerge, by allowing any user generated currency to be viable on day one without needing to achieve massive trade volume in order to be listed and thus become liquid,” says Galia Benartzi, the co-founder of Bancor. “Great tokens will still rise, bad ones will fail, but all will have a chance to try.”

New reports out of Redmond this weekend have Microsoft set to purchase the popular coding site GitHub. Bloomberg is citing “people familiar with the matter,” stating that the deal could be announced as early as tomorrow.

The new story follows similar reports late last week of discussions between the two parties. The deal certainly makes sense for Microsoft, as the software giant continues to actively court developers. As for GitHub, the company is said to have been “impressed” by Satya Nadella, who has actively courted coders and coding initiatives since taking the reins at the company, back in 2014.

“The opportunity for developers to have broad impact on all parts of society has never been greater,” Nadella told the crowd at his address during last year’s Build. “But with this opportunity comes enormous responsibility.”

Dramatic, perhaps, but acquiring GitHub would give the company access to some 27 million software developers — though not all of them are thrilled by the idea of GitHub being taken over by Microsoft.

GitHub, meanwhile, has been struggling to replace Chris Wanstrath, nearly a year after he announced plans to step down from his role as CEO. A co-founder of the service, he had returned to the top spot three years prior.

Earlier this year, meanwhile, GitHub was hit with the largest DDoS attack on record — though the site managed to come back online after 10 or so minutes.

Details of the planned deal — and what, precisely, this will mean for GitHub’s loyal community — have yet to be announced. We’ve reached out to Microsoft for comment.

Update: Microsoft’s corporate VP of communications Frank X. Shaw tells us that the company has no comment. “You know we don’t ever comment on this sort of rumor,” he said.

Global venture capital firm White Star Capital has closed a second fund of $180 million, money it plans to invest in “transatlantic” companies that need help to go international. The VC already has a presence in London, New York, and Montreal, and as part if its new fund is adding Paris and Tokyo to the list.

Oversubscribed from an initial target of $140 million, apparently, White Star says it will invest in around 20 new companies from the new fund, writing opening cheques of between $1 million and $6 million. White Star’s first fund of $70 million closed in 2015 and the VC has backed around 26 startups to date. Notably, the firm has already invested in eight companies from its second fund.

They span Seed to Series B and include fintech and insurtech companies Borrowell (Canada) and Clark (Germany), as well as “disruptive commerce” models Vention (Canada), Meero (France), and Butternut Box (U.K.). The fund has also invested in digital health companies Echo (U.K.) and Dialogue (Canada), as well as data-as-a-service company Unacast (US).

LPs in the new fund include institutional investors such as Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), Fonds de solidarité FTQ (FSTQ), the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC), Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC), Investissement Quebec, ARKEA Group, Mizuho Securities, Swen Capital Partners, Isomer Capital, Walter Financial, Clerville Investment Management, Temaris Capital, Simone Investments, and Portag3 Ventures. In addition, a number of multinational corporate groups have invested including Veolia, La Capitale, Corporate Groupe ADP, Ubisoft and Unisys Corporation through Canal Ventures.

In a call last week, White Star Capital Managing Partner and co-founder Eric Martineau-Fortin told me the VC will look to focus on three specific areas of investment. They are fintech, “disruptive commerce”, and algorithms and sensors.

Asked if most of the unbundling of various consumer financial services was now “done” and that we are now likely to see a next phase of consolidation, the VC didn’t disagree but pointed me to insurance, which is an industry still very much ripe for the picking. White Star has already made two insurtech investments and I got the impression it isn’t done yet.

The firm is also keeping an eye on how technologies like Blockchain is developing but Martineau-Fortin said he hasn’t been persuaded that the use cases were there quite yet.

More broadly, White Star’s new fund will continue to seek out companies that use data as a competitive advantage and where the fund’s “operational experience and physical presence can help companies scale internationally”.

Meanwhile, to help beef up its own global presence, White Star Capital has recruited Matthieu Lattes, who was previously a VC specialist at Rothschild, as its new Partner in Paris. In addition, Shun Nagao has joined as a Venture Partner in Tokyo, and Lylan Masterman has been promoted to Partner in the VC firm’s office in New York.

Alongside Martineau-Fortin (who tells me he is partly relocating from New York to Paris to lead the firm’s presence in France), the firm’s other personnel are Jean-Francois Marcoux (the former co-founder of mobile game publisher Ludia), and Christian Hernandez Gallardo (a former Facebook executive) who heads up White Star’s London operations.

Adds Martineau-Fortin: “Our growing team has extensive operational experience and we are passionate about supporting ambitious entrepreneurs with truly global ambitions. Internationalisation represents a huge opportunity for many high-growth companies and our global reach means we can support companies looking to scale outside of their home market. We become active partners to all the entrepreneurs we work with and the new fund will enable us to help even more companies realise their potential”.

Every year, Time magazine gets swamped with pitches from thousands of companies, all convinced their product deserves to be included in Time’s “25 Best Inventions” list. This past December, the magazine reserved its cover for a Pixar-like, 11-inch armless robot named Jibo.

Jibo — a so-called “social robot” — is just the latest example of a clear phenomenon: A new generation of exponentially more intelligent and capable robots is on the way. In fact, they’re already everywhere we look: over our heads, in our cars and operating rooms, next to us on the assembly lines, in our military, and on the last mile.

And the prospect of exponentially more robots, crunching exponentially more data, necessitates not just a lot more computing power but also an entirely new product architecture.

An article written in 2015 by a former Pentagon robotics researcher looks more prescient by the day.

That summer, Gill Pratt, who oversaw robotics technology as a manager of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), said robot capabilities had crossed a key threshold. Improvements in electric energy storage and the exponential growth of computation power and data storage, he argued, had enabled robots to learn and make decisions informed by the experiences of other robots.

His expectation back then? Robots would multiply like rabbits because they were no longer simple-minded, single-purposed machines. And as robots learn more and more, Pratt argued, more people will have uses for them.

Today, that’s exactly what we’re seeing. Demand for robotics is increasingly broad-based. Everybody seems to want them.

To get a sense of this growth, consider: In 2014, the Boston Consulting Group forecast the global market for robotics would reach $67 billion over the coming decade. Just three years later, BCG last June revised that dollar figure upward – by another $20 billion.

The DARPA horse

Dollars rise as use cases expand

Industry has for decades been a core consumer of robotics. Today, the majority of the world’s robots are still used in factories.

What’s different is that those robots are a lot smaller, more perceptive and more collaborative than their predecessors. And the flood of venture capital into the space ensures we’ll be seeing a lot more of them in our distribution centers and warehouses in coming years.

Consider that between 2016 and 2017, venture capital investments in industrial robots more than tripled, from $402 million to $1.2 billion. Five years ago, startups in this same space raised just $195 million.

Also interesting about this current robotics explosion is that companies from a wide swath of other industries, from retailers to hotels, are embracing the benefits of smarter machines. The insurance industry, for example, has begun using artificial intelligence tools like machine vision and natural language processing to handle claims.

These expanding use cases help explain why Boston Consulting Group now expects the commercial robotics market to grow to $23 billion by 2025—34 percent higher than originally predicted.

It’s consumers, though, who account for the biggest spike in demand. BCG’s projections of the consumer market’s size rose by 156 percent. Many prominent firms, including Andreessen Horowitz, Fenox Venture Capital and Sequoia, have noticed and have invested in educational and “entertainment robots.”

As we speak, there’s a fierce race to develop self-driving automotive technology. Autonomous vehicle startups raised $3 billion in 2017, more than three times the prior year’s take. Robot teachers and companions are attracting attention, too.

And we can’t forget drones. Beyond their many commercial applications, particularly in security, personal drones are an increasingly popular gadget. Chinese drone maker DJI alone has raised more than $100 million from US venture capital firms.

(Photo by Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Intelligence at the edge 

At their core, robots create a lot of data. In fact, that’s the only way they work.  And several trends in robotics will increase demand for more processors and an entirely new product architecture.

The coming wave of robots will need to hear more, see more and feel more. Each of those capabilities necessitates its own sensors, such as microphones, cameras and, to a lesser extent, touchscreen displays. And each of those requires its own processors.

Then there’s the software underlying robotic capabilities. We believe AI, computer vision, natural language processing and blockchain will be the key enabling forces here.

Robots will also have a greater need to communicate — both via the cloud, and without access to it.
After all, many, if not most, of today’s robots are only as effective as their internet connections. And we expect the growing number and sophistication of robots will place enormous strain on network bandwidth, turning smart robots into slow ones.

With all of this activity, it’s clear that the robot revolution is only just beginning.

Podcasts are television for the earbud generation.

And podcasts have been around for a surprisingly long time. If you’re one of the folks who got hooked on podcasts around 2014, when Sarah Koenig and other producers from This American Life launched the wildly popular Serial podcast, you might think that it’s a brand new medium. But podcasts — audio that’s packaged and syndicated over RSS — have been around since the early 2000s.

And although many podcasters make money, typically through sponsorships, the podcasting industry (such as it is) hasn’t received much in the way of venture funding until quite recently. 2017 was a pivotal year for venture investment in the industry.

A venture-ready industry?

In the chart below, we plot deal and dollar volume for venture rounds raised by companies that are either in Crunchbase’s  href="https://www.crunchbase.com/search/organizations/field/organizations/categories/podcast">podcast category or use the word “podcast” in their descriptions:

There’s no secret the tech industry suffers a reputation for harmfully disrupting a community. But not everyone in tech is to blame for the negative effects. In 2015 Ben Kovacs and Joel Lunenfeld founded the non-profit Guardian Gym, a buy-one give-one mixed martial arts gym/after-school program that now boasts over 300 adult members and youth mentees. Kovacs attributes the success of the gyms growth partly to Dick Costolo’s example at Twitter.

“He talked to the people, he made everyone feel important, everyone thought he was their friend,” Kovacs said. “And I realized that we needed to build a similar type culture if we wanted to be here for the next couple of decades.”

The first of its kind gym is outgrowing its current space and is in the process of securing a second location to meet the community’s needs. Kovacs plans on having a proper classroom space, nap pods, indoor/outdoor BBQ and lounge area, as well as an all-youth jiujitsu and boxing program from 5-9 p.m. that runs concurrently with the adults.

“Imagine a place a kid could go every day and essentially have everything they need to be healthy, to get their exercise out, eat nutritious meals, and of course do their homework,” said Kovacs.

You can donate to the new site on their Gofundme page.

Netflix’s revival of Arrested Development may have had a mixed reception from critics and fans, but the dysfunctional Bluth family isn’t done yet.

Five years after the premiere of the much-anticipated fourth season, Arrested Development is back for season five — or rather, the first eight episodes of the season, with more to follow later this year. On the latest episode of the Original Content podcast, we’re joined by TechCrunch’s Lucas Matney to discuss our thoughts on the show.

For many fans, this new season may feel like a return to form. Not everything works — there’s still some awkward editing and greenscreen — but it’s back to the format of the show’s classic episodes, with lots more delightful bickering between characters like Michael (Jason Bateman), George Michael (Michael Cera), Gob (Will Arnett), Maeby (Alia Shawkat) and Lucille (Jessica Walter).

Unfortunately, it’s tough to talk about the show’s quality without also acknowledging a recent group interview with The New York Times, where actor Jeffrey Tambor was asked about yelling at Walter, who apparently started crying while a number of the male cast members to seemed to defend Tambor’s behavior. They’ve since apologized, but we still wrestle with how the controversy changes our perception of the show.

We also talk about another big piece of streaming news, namely Amazon’s decision to revive The Expanse after it was canceled by Syfy.

You can listen in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You also can send us feedback directly.

For most people, the thought of a smart device sharing their intimate conversations and sending those recordings along to their acquaintances is the stuff of dystopian nightmares. And for one family in Portland, it’s a nightmare that became all too real when their Amazon Echo sent a recording of a private conversation to a random contact in their phone book.

Mercifully, the recorded conversation was fairly banal — a chat about home renovations. But as smart home technology is swiftly being integrated into our daily lives and private spaces, it’s not difficult to imagine far worse scenarios.

Smart speakers record residents’ conversations. Thermostats equipped with motion sensors track the whereabouts of each household member, and when they leave the house. Refrigerators remember grocery lists and spending habits. One thing is clear: when residents invite smart technology into their homes, they are gambling with their privacy.

Ironically, the smart home may turn out to  be the salvation of online privacy itself. Internet companies have gotten away with hoarding people’s personal data for so long in part because of what experts call “the privacy paradox”: while most people claim to care deeply about online privacy, very few of them take action to protect it. Just look at the recent furor over Facebook’s lack of data privacy protections, which resulted in the compromise of 87 million users’ personal information. Though plenty of people tweeted they would #DeleteFacebook, how many actually permanently closed their accounts? Certainly far fewer than 87 million.

While experts disagree about why this paradox exists, at least some of the problem seems rooted in the fact that online space is virtual, whereas our privacy instincts evolved in physical space. By bringing virtual privacy incursions into the physical world—particularly into the protected private space of the home—smart home technology could short-circuit that dynamic.

The internet is intangible, and so its privacy risks appear to be too. It’s one thing to know, in the back of your mind, that Facebook has the ability to comb through your private messages. But when devices in your home are recording your spoken conversations and physical movements, it’s harder to ignore the looming threat of potentially disastrous privacy violations.

If smart fridges and smart locks get people to take online privacy as seriously as physical privacy, they could do what the Equifax hack and other high-profile data breaches could not: actually get people to change their behavior. If users vote for privacy with their feet—or their wallets—they could spur a wholesale rethinking of the online economy, away from one-sided exploitation and toward greater trust and transparency.

Privacy in virtual space

In Western culture, the home has long been recognized as a protected zone; the Talmud includes prohibitions against putting in windows in a house that directly look into a neighbor’s. When a stranger peeps through our window or listens at our door, millennia-old norms tell us we should chase them away. This desire for isolation may stem from a fundamental biological need; whether you’re a human or a possum, physical withdrawal means concealment and protection from predation, making privacy an evolutionary life-or-death matter.

But websites and apps have no physical presence in our lives. A software algorithm, no matter how malicious, doesn’t have the visceral menace of an unknown face at the glass. The internet disarms us by making our interactions feel abstract, even unreal. One 2016 study posited that this sense of unreality leads to contradictory attitudes about online privacy: while people know rationally that they should be concerned about virtual incursions, they simply don’t have a strong “gut feeling” about it intuitively. And when making decisions in the moment, gut feeling often wins out.

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that online, there is less of a clear distinction between private and public space. We use social media to communicate simultaneously with hundreds or thousands of anonymous followers and with our closest friends. Email inboxes, Slack channels, and the like are more obviously “closed” spaces, but even there it’s often unclear to users which algorithms might be listening in. Even Snapchat—known for auto-deleting users’ photos, videos, and chats to protect their privacy—announced it would allow retargeted ads in fall 2017, to relatively little backlash. It’s hard to think about protecting ourselves from the stranger peeping in the window when we’re not even sure if it’s a public or private space he or she is looking into. What’s more, many users tend to imagine online “walls” that aren’t really there.

Multiple studies have shown that the mere existence of a privacy policy on a website makes users feel more secure, even though a policy in itself is no guarantee that their data won’t be sold to third parties.

“How secure are your light bulbs?”

When the internet enters the clearly private space of the home, some of that ambiguity will to disappear. It’s telling that a November 2017 survey by Deloitte found that consumers are more cautious in general about smart home devices compared to general online activities or even other categories of IoT. Forty percent of respondents said that they felt smart home technology “reveals too much about their personal lives,” while another 40 percent said they were worried about their usage being tracked. By comparison, they were less mistrustful of other IoT applications like autonomous vehicles and smart car technology, even though they have similar tracking capabilities.

And that survey only considers peoples’ reaction to fairly abstract privacy risks. The reality is that in a smart home, security vulnerabilities and data breaches can have much more dramatic real-world impacts. On his blog Charged, developer and journalist Owen Williams recently detailed his experience trying to figure out who or what kept overriding his brightness settings for his Phillips Hue smart light bulbs. It turned out that an app he’d enabled to dim his office lights at night had taken over all the bulbs hooked up to Williams’ Hue system and was keeping them at one uniform brightness.

As Williams points out, if a malicious app accomplished the same feat, it could extort money from the user by “randomly changing the brightness or color of lights until they pay.” When a cyberattack results in lights that won’t stop flashing—or doors that won’t lock, windows that won’t close, or a fridge turns itself off and melts all your ice cream—it’s logical that people’s reactions to digital privacy incursions will become that much more extreme.

Image courtesy of RamCreativ

Trust is the antidote

How can internet companies thrive in the privacy-sensitive space of the home? If privacy behavior is mostly about gut feelings, they’ll need to reinforce positive ones by winning consumers’ trust.

Trust has not historically been a major factor in the adoption of complex new technologies—research into technology acceptance models on both virtual and IOT systems shows that usability has been much more important. Even heavy users of Google and Facebook probably wouldn’t say that they trust either company very deeply.

However, a look at another internet giant, Airbnb, shows how this calculus changes when users’ homes and not just their online identities are involved. Airbnb puts trust at the core of its business model. Hosts are only willing to open their homes to strangers because the company empowers them with access to information about potential guests (which the guests themselves choose to provide), including their bio, reviews, and public Facebook profile.

By focusing on forging connections between hosts and guests, Airbnb builds community and reduces the uncertainty that pervades users’ relationships with so many internet companies. Airbnb is also relatively transparent about how it collects and analyzes user data, and often puts it to use in ways that increase users’ control over how they use the platform—for instance, to generate more accurate pricing suggestions for hosts. The result: it pushes users’ concerns about opening their homes or staying in others’ spaces out of the realm of gut feeling into that of a more considered, rational (and easy to ignore) concern.

If they want to thrive amid rising privacy concerns in the long term, manufacturers of smart home products, would be wise to take a page from Airbnb’s book. They should find ways to forge trust through absolute transparency, sharing with customers what data is being collected and how it’s being used. They should create new business models that don’t rely on collecting terabytes and terabytes of personal data, but on building trust – and even community – with customers.=

Companies should not only implement best practices for personal data encryption, storage, sharing, and deletion, but design their products around the customer’s ability to control their own data. If the development of IoT follows this path, the next 10 to 15 years won’t bring an inevitable erosion of privacy, but its renaissance.

“Despite many pronouncements that 2016 was the year of VR, a more apt word for virtual reality might be absence,” The Economist observed caustically last summer, noting that during that year forecasts of combined sales of VR hardware and software dropped from $5.1bn to $3.6bn to the harsh reality of $1.8bn. But hey, one rough holiday season does not an industry make, right? Surely in 2017 things began to —

— oh. “Shock Stat: In 2017, VR Headset Shipments For Most Top Brands Went DOWN Compared To 2016.” So much for the many predictions that VR headset shipments would grow exponentially for years. Crow appears to be the appetizer for nearly every industry dinner these days. But that was before the Oculus Go, right? Except … the Go seems to have sold at most a quarter of a million units in its first few weeks, far behind the comparably priced Nintendo Switch released months earlier, and as I write this languishes well outside the top 20 of Amazon’s “Video Games > Accessories” bestsellers.

I mean. These aren’t terrible numbers. Sony’s PlayStation VR has sold almost 3 million units! … which is to say, it’s reached almost 4% of PlayStation owners. But aren’t VR and AR supposed to be the Next Big Thing, not the Next Little Niche? And doesn’t that mean their reach is supposed to grow exponentially, not linearly?

AR is in everyone’s hands, of course, courtesy of Apple’s ARKit, Google’s ARCore, Facebook’s AR Studio, etc. But, quick, name a popular/successful AR smartphone app a) that isn’t Pokémon GO b) doesn’t involve furniture!

If I’m pointing accusatory fingers at anyone I’m pointing them at myself. I too expected VR/AR to be much further along by now. I though we’d see hit games that could only be played in VR. I thought Pokémon GO, which launched twenty-three months ago, was the harbinger of a whole new wave of AR worlds, some of which would then begin to interrelate and cross over. In the long run maybe it will still seem that way. But in the short term —

— well, I dropped by the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara this week, and my main takeaway was that the industry has essentially abandoned the consumer AR/VR space, at least for now. Everyone’s aiming at AR/VR for work now. But how many jobs are there, really, where complex information needs to be accessed in a hands-free way? How many problems can be solved by VR conferencing but not videoconferencing? Sure, they exist, and the tech can be spectacularly great for them; but, again, for now at least, we’re talking Next Little Niche.

I did see one really eye-opening thing, which led me to the sudden belief that the humble QR code will achieve its apotheosis in mixed reality:

…but what use is a bridge between two worlds when nobody bothers spending any time in one of them?

“But gaming!” you say. “I mean, immersive storytelling!” Sure. I’m super excited about that too; I’m a novelist in my spare time, after all. And that is the industry bright spot right now; “location-based VR,” i.e. “VR arcades,” are growing in number, and they seem like an obvious fit with the recent upsurge of immersive theater such as Punchdrunk‘s Sleep No More, Meow Wolf‘s House of Eternal Return, and The Latitude.

…But all the VR / mixed-reality immersive storytelling I’ve seen has been really cool for about 15 minutes max, heavy on hype and buzzwords, and basically failed at telling anything more than the crudest of stories. “Rather than storytelling, you’re storyliving,” enthused some Industrial Light & Magic folks at an event I went to a few months ago, and that sure sounds nice — but the VR ‘storyliving’ I’ve seen to date is all far, far less sophisticated than that of even my teenage Dungeons & Dragons campaigns.

I know. It’s the very early days of a new technology. It’s expensive. It’s still hardware-intensive. We’re still figuring out its best uses, and how it interacts with human physical location, and a whole new grammar of storytelling. But the Oculus Kickstarter launched almost six years ago, and I’ve seen a whole lot of VR/AR/mixed-reality demos since then, and every time, I walk away thinking: “This technology has so much potential.”

But in order to be the Next Big Thing at some point you have to actually start realizing your potential. Maybe Magic Leap will do it. (Not joking. At least, not entirely.) Otherwise, though, the disheartening truth is that, despite the low-price new standalone hardware, despite all the effort that’s gone into software and design and storytelling, I still don’t feel like we’re meaningfully closer to that than we were two years ago. Please, somebody show me I’m wrong.