Year: 2019

In addition to competing for smart speaker market share, Google and Amazon are also competing for developer mindshare in the voice app ecosystem. On this front, Amazon has soared ahead – the number of available voice skills for Alexa devices have grown to top 80,000 the company recently announced. According to a new third-party analysis from Voicebot, Google is trailing that by a wide margin with its own voice apps, called Google Assistant Actions, which total 4,253 in the U.S. as of January 2019.

For comparison, 56,750 of Amazon Alexa’s total 80,000 skills are offered in the U.S.

The report notes that the number of Google Assistant Actions have grown 2.5 times over the past year – which is slightly faster growth than seen on Amazon Alexa, whose skill count grew 2.2 times during the same period. But the total is a much smaller number, so growth percentages may not be as relevant here.

In January 2018, there were 1,719 total Google Assistant Actions in the U.S., the report said. In 2017, the number was in the low hundreds in the beginning of the year, and reached 724 by October 2017.

Voicebot also examined which categories of voice apps were popular on Google Assistant platforms.

It found that three of the eighteen categories accounted for over one-third of all Google Assistant Actions: Education & Reference; Games & Fun; and Kids & Family.

The Education category topped the list with over 15 percent of all Actions, while Games & Fun was 11.07 percent and Kids & Family was 9.29 percent.

Local and Weather were the least popular.

On Alexa, the top categories differ slightly. Though Games & Fun is popular on Google, its Alexa equivalent – Games & Trivia – is the No. 1 most popular category, accounting for 21 percent of all skills. Education was second most popular at around 14 percent.

It’s interesting that these two top drivers for voice apps are reversed on the two platforms.

That could indicate that Alexa is seen to be the more “fun” platform, or one that’s more oriented towards use by families and gaming. Amazon certainly became aware of the trend towards voice gaming, and fanned the flames by making games the first category it paid developers to work on, by way of direct payments. That likely encouraged more developers to enter the space, and subsequently helped boost the number of games – and types of gaming experiences – available for Alexa.

Voicebot’s report rightly raises the question as to whether or not the raw skill count even matters, though.

After all, many of the Alexa skills offered today are of low quality, or more experimental attempts from developers testing out the platform. Others are just fairly basic – the voice app equivalent of third-party flashlight apps for iPhone before Apple built that feature into iOS. For example, there now are handful of skills that turn on the light on Echo speakers so you can have a nightlight by way of the speaker’s blue ring.

But even if these early efforts sometimes fall short, it does matter that Alexa is the platform developers are thinking about, as it’s an indication of platform commitment and an investment on developers’ part. Google, on the other hand, is powering a lot of its Assistant’s capabilities itself, leaning heavily on its Knowledge Base to answer users’ questions, while also leveraging its ability to integrate with Google’s larger suite of apps and services, as well as its other platforms, like Android.

In time, Google Assistant may challenge Alexa further by capitalizing on geographic expansions, but for the time being, Alexa is ahead on smart speakers as well as, it now seems, on content.

 

The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi state investment company, have a closely intertwined relationship, and it’s one that the two are further cementing. According to the Financial Times, SoftBank has just committed half the capital for a new $400 million fund from Mubadala that aims to back European startups.

Industry observers might remember that Mubadala committed $15 billion to SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund as it was first being put together in 2017. Soon after, Mubadala opened a San Francisco office, as well as structured a $400 million fund designed to invest in early-stage startups to which SoftBank committed some capital.

The pact was understandable, including because Mubadala’s early-stage fund could theoretically provide SoftBank with a better idea of what’s happening at companies that are earlier in their trajectories than SoftBank typically sees. The move was also meant to better enable Mubadala to oversee the money it committed to SoftBank.

The newer fund appears to be raising questions, however. At least, the FT notes that the timing is “unusual,” given that SoftBank is currently saddled with $154 billion in gross debt. The new fund also “raises the prospect that Mubadala’s influence with the Vision Fund will only grow by allowing it to shape SoftBank’s tech investments,” as suggest by the FT’s sources.

Yet SoftBank may not have much choice but to work increasingly closely with Abu Dhabi. As the company’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, said earlier this month, the Vision Fund has spent about $50 billion of its approximately $99 billion in capital. Given the rate at which it has been investing (it just plugged nearly $1 billion into a company last week), its remaining funds might not last through 2020.

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear whether SoftBank enjoys the solid relationship that it once did with the Vision Fund’s biggest anchor investor, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which provided SoftBank with a $45 billion commitment for its current fund and that SoftBank was largely counting on to be its biggest backer in a second Vision Fund.

On October 3rd of last year, Bloomberg journalists talked with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS), and he said he planned to invest a further $45 billion in SoftBank. Yet what few knew then was that five days earlier, journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi had vanished after going into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. As questions, and concern, began to spread over MBS’s involvement in the disappearance, many business executives canceled plans to visit Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia hosted an investment conference in the middle of October. Son was among them, even as he tried hedging his bets by visiting privately with MBS in Riyadh the night before the event began.

Whether that move angered MBS remains to be seen. It also isn’t clear whether the CIA’s eventual findings that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s murder, or the unflattering attention paid to Saudi Arabia because of that murder, is impacting where SoftBank is able to invest its capital.

Son, for his part, declined to say earlier this month whether he would consider taking more money from Saudi sources — which is perhaps telling in itself.

In the meantime, it’s barreling ahead with Mubadala, which will reportedly use its new fund to write to European startups checks of between $5 million and $30 million.

As with Mubadala’s San Francisco-based team, the idea appears to be to act as a funnel for SoftBank’s Vision Fund, steering it deals that Mubadala’s team sees as the most promising in its portfolio.

Mubadala’s European venture fund will be run out of a new office in London, which is expected to open this spring. The Vision Fund is currently also headquartered in London, with another office in San Francisco and, soon, offices expected in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank and Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi state investment company, have a closely intertwined relationship, and it’s one that the two are further cementing. According to the Financial Times, SoftBank has just committed half the capital for a new $400 million fund from Mubadala that aims to back European startups.

Industry observers might remember that Mubadala committed $15 billion to SoftBank’s massive Vision Fund as it was first being put together in 2017. Soon after, Mubadala opened a San Francisco office, as well as structured a $400 million fund designed to invest in early-stage startups to which SoftBank committed some capital.

The pact was understandable, including because Mubadala’s early-stage fund could theoretically provide SoftBank with a better idea of what’s happening at companies that are earlier in their trajectories than SoftBank typically sees. The move was also meant to better enable Mubadala to oversee the money it committed to SoftBank.

The newer fund appears to be raising questions, however. At least, the FT notes that the timing is “unusual,” given that SoftBank is currently saddled with $154 billion in gross debt. The new fund also “raises the prospect that Mubadala’s influence with the Vision Fund will only grow by allowing it to shape SoftBank’s tech investments,” as suggest by the FT’s sources.

Yet SoftBank may not have much choice but to work increasingly closely with Abu Dhabi. As the company’s CEO, Masayoshi Son, said earlier this month, the Vision Fund has spent about $50 billion of its approximately $99 billion in capital. Given the rate at which it has been investing (it just plugged nearly $1 billion into a company last week), its remaining funds might not last through 2020.

Meanwhile, it isn’t clear whether SoftBank enjoys the solid relationship that it once did with the Vision Fund’s biggest anchor investor, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which provided SoftBank with a $45 billion commitment for its current fund and that SoftBank was largely counting on to be its biggest backer in a second Vision Fund.

On October 3rd of last year, Bloomberg journalists talked with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (or MBS), and he said he planned to invest a further $45 billion in SoftBank. Yet what few knew then was that five days earlier, journalist and Saudi regime critic Jamal Khashoggi had vanished after going into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. As questions, and concern, began to spread over MBS’s involvement in the disappearance, many business executives canceled plans to visit Riyadh, where Saudi Arabia hosted an investment conference in the middle of October. Son was among them, even as he tried hedging his bets by visiting privately with MBS in Riyadh the night before the event began.

Whether that move angered MBS remains to be seen. It also isn’t clear whether the CIA’s eventual findings that MBS ordered Khashoggi’s murder, or the unflattering attention paid to Saudi Arabia because of that murder, is impacting where SoftBank is able to invest its capital.

Son, for his part, declined to say earlier this month whether he would consider taking more money from Saudi sources — which is perhaps telling in itself.

In the meantime, it’s barreling ahead with Mubadala, which will reportedly use its new fund to write to European startups checks of between $5 million and $30 million.

As with Mubadala’s San Francisco-based team, the idea appears to be to act as a funnel for SoftBank’s Vision Fund, steering it deals that Mubadala’s team sees as the most promising in its portfolio.

Mubadala’s European venture fund will be run out of a new office in London, which is expected to open this spring. The Vision Fund is currently also headquartered in London, with another office in San Francisco and, soon, offices expected in Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong.

WireGuard could be the most promising VPN protocol in years. It lets you establish a connection with a VPN server that is supposed to be faster, more secure and more flexible at the same time. The developers launched a brand new app in the Mac App Store today.

WireGuard isn’t a VPN service, it’s a VPN protocol, just like OpenVPN or IPsec. The best thing about it is that it can maintain a VPN connection even if you change your Wi-Fi network, plug in an Ethernet cable or your laptop goes to sleep.

But if you want to use WireGuard for your VPN connection you need to have a VPN server that supports it, and a device that supports connecting to it. You can already download the WireGuard app on Android and iOS, but today’s release is all about macOS.

The team behind WireGuard has been working on a macOS implementation for a while. But it wasn’t as straightforward as an app. You could install WireGuard-tools using Homebrew and then establish a connection using a command line in the Terminal.

It’s much easier now, as you just have to download an app in the Mac App Store and add your server profile. The app is a drop-down menu in the menu bar. You can manage your tunnel and activate on-demand connections for some scenarios. For instance, you could choose to activate your VPN exclusively if you’re connected to the internet using Wi-Fi, and not Ethernet.

I tried the app and it’s as snappy and reliable as expected. The app leverages Apple’s standard Network Extension API to add VPN tunnels to the network panel in the settings.

If you want to try WireGuard yourself, I recommend building your own VPN server using Algo VPN. Don’t trust any VPN company that sells you a subscription or lets you access free VPN servers. A VPN company can see all your internet traffic on their own servers, which is a big security risk.

Assume that those companies analyze your browsing habits, sell them to advertisers, inject their own ads on non-secure pages or steal your identity. The worst of them can hand to authorities a ton of data about your online life.

They lie in privacy policies and often don’t even have an About page with the names of people working for those companies. They spend a ton of money buying reviews and endorsements. You should avoid VPN companies at all costs.

If you absolutely need a VPN server because you can’t trust the Wi-Fi network or you’re traveling to a country with censored websites, make sure you trust the server.

More than a year on from a child safety content moderation scandal on YouTube and it takes just a few clicks for the platform’s recommendation algorithms to redirect a search for “bikini haul” videos of adult women towards clips of scantily clad minors engaged in body contorting gymnastics or taking an ice bath or ice lolly sucking “challenge.”

A YouTube creator called Matt Watson flagged the issue in a critical Reddit post, saying he found scores of videos of kids where YouTube users are trading inappropriate comments and timestamps below the fold, denouncing the company for failing to prevent what he describes as a “soft-core pedophilia ring” from operating in plain sight on its platform.

He has also posted a YouTube video demonstrating how the platform’s recommendation algorithm pushes users into what he dubs a pedophilia “wormhole,” accusing the company of facilitating and monetizing the sexual exploitation of children.

We were easily able to replicate the YouTube algorithm’s behavior that Watson describes in a history-cleared private browser session which, after clicking on two videos of adult women in bikinis, suggested we watch a video called “sweet sixteen pool party.”

Clicking on that led YouTube’s side-bar to serve up multiple videos of prepubescent girls in its “up next” section where the algorithm tees-up related content to encourage users to keep clicking.

Videos we got recommended in this side-bar included thumbnails showing young girls demonstrating gymnastics poses, showing off their “morning routines,” or licking popsicles or ice lollies.

Watson said it was easy for him to find videos containing inappropriate/predatory comments, including sexually suggestive emoji and timestamps that appear intended to highlight, shortcut and share the most compromising positions and/or moments in the videos of the minors.

We also found multiple examples of timestamps and inappropriate comments on videos of children that YouTube’s algorithm recommended we watch.

Some comments by other YouTube users denounced those making sexually suggestive remarks about the children in the videos.

Back in November 2017, several major advertisers froze spending on YouTube’s platform after an investigation by the BBC and the Times discovered similarly obscene comments on videos of children.

Earlier the same month YouTube was also criticized over low-quality content targeting kids as viewers on its platform.

The company went on to announce a number of policy changes related to kid-focused video, including saying it would aggressively police comments on videos of kids and that videos found to have inappropriate comments about the kids in them would have comments turned off altogether.

Some of the videos of young girls that YouTube recommended we watch had already had comments disabled — which suggests its AI had previously identified a large number of inappropriate comments being shared (on account of its policy of switching off comments on clips containing kids when comments are deemed “inappropriate”) — yet the videos themselves were still being suggested for viewing in a test search that originated with the phrase “bikini haul.”

Watson also says he found ads being displayed on some videos of kids containing inappropriate comments, and claims that he found links to child pornography being shared in YouTube comments too.

We were unable to verify those findings in our brief tests.

We asked YouTube why its algorithms skew toward recommending videos of minors, even when the viewer starts by watching videos of adult women, and why inappropriate comments remain a problem on videos of minors more than a year after the same issue was highlighted via investigative journalism.

The company sent us the following statement in response to our questions:

Any content — including comments — that endangers minors is abhorrent and we have clear policies prohibiting this on YouTube. We enforce these policies aggressively, reporting it to the relevant authorities, removing it from our platform and terminating accounts. We continue to invest heavily in technology, teams and partnerships with charities to tackle this issue. We have strict policies that govern where we allow ads to appear and we enforce these policies vigorously. When we find content that is in violation of our policies, we immediately stop serving ads or remove it altogether.

A spokesman for YouTube also told us it’s reviewing its policies in light of what Watson has highlighted, adding that it’s in the process of reviewing the specific videos and comments featured in his video — specifying also that some content has been taken down as a result of the review.

However, the spokesman emphasized that the majority of the videos flagged by Watson are innocent recordings of children doing everyday things. (Though of course the problem is that innocent content is being repurposed and time-sliced for abusive gratification and exploitation.)

The spokesman added that YouTube works with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to report to law enforcement accounts found making inappropriate comments about kids.

In wider discussion about the issue the spokesman told us that determining context remains a challenge for its AI moderation systems.

On the human moderation front he said the platform now has around 10,000 human reviewers tasked with assessing content flagged for review.

The volume of video content uploaded to YouTube is around 400 hours per minute, he added.

There is still very clearly a massive asymmetry around content moderation on user-generated content platforms, with AI poorly suited to plug the gap given ongoing weakness in understanding context, even as platforms’ human moderation teams remain hopelessly under-resourced and outgunned versus the scale of the task.

Another key point YouTube failed to mention is the clear tension between advertising-based business models that monetize content based on viewer engagement (such as its own), and content safety issues that need to carefully consider the substance of the content and the context in which it has been consumed.

It’s certainly not the first time YouTube’s recommendation algorithms have been called out for negative impacts. In recent years the platform has been accused of automating radicalization by pushing viewers toward extremist and even terrorist content — which led YouTube to announce another policy change in 2017 related to how it handles content created by known extremists.

The wider societal impact of algorithmic suggestions that inflate conspiracy theories and/or promote bogus, anti-factual health or scientific content have also been repeatedly raised as a concern — including on YouTube.

And only last month YouTube said it would reduce recommendations of what it dubbed “borderline content” and content that “could misinform users in harmful ways,” citing examples such as videos promoting a fake miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat, or making “blatantly false claims” about historic events such as the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York.

“While this shift will apply to less than one percent of the content on YouTube, we believe that limiting the recommendation of these types of videos will mean a better experience for the YouTube community,” it wrote then. “As always, people can still access all videos that comply with our Community Guidelines and, when relevant, these videos may appear in recommendations for channel subscribers and in search results. We think this change strikes a balance between maintaining a platform for free speech and living up to our responsibility to users.”

YouTube said that change of algorithmic recommendations around conspiracy videos would be gradual, and only initially affect recommendations on a small set of videos in the U.S.

It also noted that implementing the tweak to its recommendation engine would involve both machine learning tech and human evaluators and experts helping to train the AI systems.

“Over time, as our systems become more accurate, we’ll roll this change out to more countries. It’s just another step in an ongoing process, but it reflects our commitment and sense of responsibility to improve the recommendations experience on YouTube,” it added.

It remains to be seen whether YouTube will expand that policy shift and decide it must exercise greater responsibility in how its platform recommends and serves up videos of children for remote consumption in the future.

Political pressure may be one motivating force, with momentum building for regulation of online platforms — including calls for internet companies to face clear legal liabilities and even a legal duty care toward users vis-à-vis the content they distribute and monetize.

For example, U.K. regulators have made legislating on internet and social media safety a policy priority — with the government due to publish this winter a white paper setting out its plans for ruling platforms.

Apple has always been an evolving company. While it never really invented any product categories, it always seemed to make those product categories work better and smarter. It also found a way to make us want them, even when they were more expensive. Today, the WSJ reports, Apple is trying to find its way to a future without the iPhone at the center of its revenue model.

This shift happens as Apple reported lower revenue for the first time in years against a backdrop of flagging iPhone demand. Part of the problem is a shifting Chinese market, but it’s also due to people simply taking longer to refresh their phones. As that happens, and the price of iPhones soared to more than $1,000, there has been a decline in sales.

With iPhone sales down 15 percent, this was not a typical Apple earnings report, but it was something the company had anticipated when it announced lower Q1 guidance at the beginning of the year. If The Wall Street Journal story is accurate, Apple is already trying to take steps to move the company into its next phase, possibly as a services business.

If that’s the case, it would mark a radical departure from the company’s history in which it has redesigned various types of hardware, bucking popular design trends along the way. Back in the 1970s and 1980s when it was called Apple Computer, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak made computers with a GUI when most people were working from the DOS prompt.

In the early 2000s, Apple came out with an MP3 player called the iPod and opened a music store called iTunes. By 2006, the year before it would introduce the iPhone, Apple had sold more than 42 million units and 850 million songs. It was a combination of hardware and services that helped transform a flagging company into a powerhouse.

In 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, it knew that it would begin to eat into iPod sales, and it eventually did, but it didn’t matter because it was the next logical step forward. When it introduced the App Store in 2008, the iPhone became more than a standalone piece of hardware. It was a new kind of hardware-service model and it would generate incredible wealth for the company.

The iPad came along in 2009 and the Apple Watch five years later, in 2014. While each has done reasonably well, nothing has touched the success of the iPhone. Keep in mind that analysts estimated that Apple sold 71 million iPhones last quarter, and this was in a quarter in which sales declined. It’s hard to sell 71 million units of anything in a three-month period and have it be a down quarter.

What comes next is probably some combination of entertainment/content and making use of advancing technologies like AR/VR, driverless cars and artificial intelligence. It’s unclear which direction Apple will take in these areas, but we do know that recent hires and acquisitions point in these directions.

There has long been speculation that Apple could make a splashy acquisition in the content area. When Eddie Cue, Apple senior vice president of internet software and services was interviewed by CNN’s Dylan Buyers at South by Southwest last year, Buyers specifically asked Cue about buying a property like Netflix or Disney. He implied that it was about taking the Apple TV and combining that with a big-name content production company.

Cue indicated that the two companies were great partners for Apple TV, but he wasn’t ready to commit to anything along those lines. “Generally, in the history of Apple, we haven’t made huge acquisitions.” He went on to explain, from Apple’s perspective, it wants to figure out where the future is and to build something to get it there, rather than buying something that is working for the current state of affairs.

It’s worth noting that Apple TV has not matched the huge success of its other devices, but service revenue has been growing steadily. In the most recent earnings report, Apple reported services revenue of $10.9 billion, up 19 percent year over year. That’s still a small percentage of the overall $84.3 billion the company reported for the quarter, but it is growing.

Regardless, nobody can know if Apple can approach the success with any product that it has had with the iPhone. But it knows that in spite of its vast riches, it’s dangerous for any company to rest on its past success. So it looks ahead and hires new blood and looks for a future with less dependence on the iPhone because it knows, as the Grateful Dead once sang, “You can’t go back and you can’t stand still. If the thunder won’t get you, then the lightning will.” Apple is hoping to avoid that fate, and perhaps it is some new combination of hardware, content and services that could lead the way.

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. Stop saying, ‘We take your privacy and security seriously’

Zack Whittaker says that in his years covering cybersecurity, there’s one variation of the same lie that floats above the rest: “We take your privacy and security seriously.”

The truth is, most companies don’t care about the privacy or security of your data. They care about having to explain to their customers that their data was stolen. And when they use this line, it shows that they don’t know what to do next.

2. SeaBubbles shows off its ‘flying’ all-electric boat in Miami

We were promised flying cars but, as it turns out, “flying” boats were easier to build. And by “flying,” I mean “raising the hull of the boat out of the water with foils.”

3. Australia’s government and political parties hit by cyberattack from ‘sophisticated state actor’

PM Scott Morrison said the computer network of the country’s parliament, and those belonging to Liberal, Labor and Nationals parties, were targeted by an attack that took place a few weeks ago, according to The Sydney Morning Herald. Australia is months away from federal elections.

4. What business leaders can learn from Jeff Bezos’ leaked texts

Wickr’s Joel Wallenstrom makes the case that when corporate executives take a laissez-faire approach to digital privacy, their employees and organizations will follow suit.

5. China tells teachers to quit assigning homework through WeChat

The regional call to action follows a set of national guidelines released by the Ministry of Education in October directing teachers and schools to take more responsibilities rather than shift the load onto parents.

6. Razer is closing its game store after less than a year

The Razer Game Store launched worldwide in April 2018 with the aim of taking a slice of a business dominated by Steam. The company didn’t comment on why the store is closing, but you’d imagine that it didn’t go as well as Razer had hoped.

7. Monday podcast roundup

This week, Equity discusses Peloton’s plans for an IPO, while Original Content reviews “Russian Doll” and interviews the filmmakers behind “The Breaker Upperers.”

Netflix is no longer in the Marvel superhero business, with the cancellation of “Jessica Jones” and “The Punisher.”

The writing has been on the wall since last fall, when the streaming service canceled its other three Marvel shows — “Iron Fist,” “Luke Cage” and “Daredevil.” Plus, showrunner Melissa Rosenberg was already announced to leave “Jessica Jones” after the upcoming third season.

There have been conflicting reports about which company ultimately decided to pull the plug, but this does seem to be part of a broader corporate rift, with Disney ending its overall deal with Netflix and producing Marvel shows for its yet-to-launch streaming service.

Disney has also announced a slate of animated Marvel series on Hulu (where Disney will become the majority owner, post-Fox acquisition), following a similar structure to the Netflix shows — four separate series followed by a big crossover.

Netflix, meanwhile, just released the first season of “The Umbrella Academy,” an offbeat superhero series based on the comics by Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá.

In a statement, Netflix said:

Marvel’s The Punisher will not return for a third season on Netflix. Showrunner Steve Lightfoot, the terrific crew, and exceptional cast including star Jon Bernthal, delivered an acclaimed and compelling series for fans, and we are proud to showcase their work on Netflix for years to come.

In addition, in reviewing our Marvel programming, we have decided that the upcoming third season will also be the final season for Marvel’s Jessica Jones . We are grateful to showrunner Melissa Rosenberg, star Krysten Ritter and the entire cast and crew, for three incredible seasons of this groundbreaking series, which was recognized by the Peabody Awards among many others. We are grateful to Marvel for five years of our fruitful partnership and thank the passionate fans who have followed these series from the beginning.

Perhaps hoping to distract from Greenpeace’s latest report on its “dirty cloud, Amazon this morning announced a new environmental commitment, focused on reducing its carbon footprint. The company says it aims to reach 50 percent of all Amazon shipments with net zero carbon by 2030.

The company is calling this program “Shipment Zero.” Details on this long-term project weren’t yet available, but Amazon says it plans to share its company-wide carbon footprint “along with related goals and programs,” at a later date. That seems to indicate Amazon will offer an update on the progress of its other sustainability goals, as well.

It’s important for Amazon to be transparent on these plans, as the size of its business means its impact to the environment, energy consumption, and ultimately climate change, is significant.

The company today runs programs including Frustration Free Packaging and Ship in Own Container, and has a network of solar and wind farms, solar on its fulfillment center rooftops, investments in the circular economy, the company noted in the announcement. It said it employs over 200 scientists, engineers, and product designers who are dedicated to developing new ways to leverage Amazon’s scale for the “good of the customers and the planet.”

For example, Amazon has been able to pressure suppliers to reduce their environmental impact, with the frustration-free packaging and ship in own container programs.

But Amazon doesn’t have the cleanest environmental record, according to Greenpeace.

The organization dinged the internet giant only days ago for failing to deliver on its commitment to shifting to renewable energy. Its new report said Amazon’s data centers in Virginia are powered by only 12 percent renewable energy, compared with Facebook’s 37 percent and Microsoft’s 34 percent.

In between the lines of this morning’s news, Amazon briefly addressed the Greenpeace report.

“Amazon has a long-term goal to power our global infrastructure using 100 percent renewable energy, and we are making solid progress,” its corporate blog post read.

Amazon did, however, offer a longer statement to Windpower Engineering shortly after the report’s publication, claiming Greenpeace’s data was inaccurate. In particular, it pointed out that the report had failed to highlight AWS and Amazon’s investment in solar projects in Virginia.

Amazon says it will offer more details on Shipment Zero and its other programs later this year.

 

 

 

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo is quite reliable when it comes to Apple’s roadmap. And he shared a ton of information over the weekend in a new report obtained by 9to5mac. In 2019, you can expect a bigger MacBook Pro, a new display and upgrades to iPhones, iPads and AirPods.

Let’s start with the Mac. According to Kuo, Apple has been working on a MacBook Pro with an all-new design. It’s unclear if those future models will retain the same keyboard as many users have been complaining about the reliability of the butterfly keyboard.

But Kuo learned that there will be a bigger model with a 16-inch to 16.5-inch display. Let’s hope that Apple is going to trim down the bezels around the display.

TechCrunch already reported that Apple will release a new Mac Pro in 2019. But Kuo believes that the company is also going to release a high-end display to go with this Mac Pro. It could be a gigantic 31.6-inch display with a 6k resolution.

When it comes to iPhones, Kuo believes that Apple will release three models just like in 2018. They should retain the same screen sizes and Lightning connector. Some models may have three camera sensors on the back of the device. Face ID and wireless charging could both receive an upgrade with bilateral wireless charging.

It means that you could charge a second device using your phone, which is a great idea when you know that updated AirPods with a wireless charging case are also coming in 2019.

On the iPad front, the entry-level 9.7-inch iPad could become a 10.2-inch iPad with slimmer bezels. iPad Pro models will receive an update with faster processors.

As previously reported, a new iPad mini is still on the roadmap as well as an updated iPod touch. Finally, it sounds like the Apple Watch might only receive a minor update with ECG coming to international markets as well as a return of the ceramic option for the next version of the Apple Watch.