Smartphone shipments hit a five-year low in North America
More dismal news from the smartphone number crunchers. New figures out of Canalys put the North American smartphone market at five-year low for the first quarter of 2019. That’s…bad. But also, pretty inline with what we’ve been seeing globally. The market has stagnated, and while manufacturers aren’t in full-on panic mode, there’s certainly cause for concern.
Shipments dropped from 44.4 million down to 36.4 million, marking an 18% drop year over year for the first quarter. Canalys says it’s the steepest drop it’s recorded for the category, chalking up some of the issues to “a lackluster performance by Apple and the absence of ZTE.”
Apple is still the top of the heap, commanding 40% of the North American market with help from the sale of older discounted units. But Samsung managed to tighten the gap on the back of a successful Galaxy S10 launch. The company grew by 3% for the year, up to 29.3% of the market.
LG, Lenovo and TCL rounded out the top five, with the latter two making pretty solid market-share strides. The remainder of the market took a massive hit, however, with a 65% drop in shipments. Analysts seem confident that 5G’s imminent arrival will help give the market a boost in coming quarters, but it’s going to be hard for manufacturers to maintain that momentum.
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Instagram will let you appeal post takedowns
Instagram isn’t just pretty pictures. It now also harbors bullying, misinformation and controversial self-expression content. So today Instagram is announcing a bevvy of safety updates to protect users and give them more of a voice. Most significantly, Instagram will now let users appeal the company’s decision to take down one of their posts.
A new in-app interface (rolling out starting today) over the next few months will let users “get a second opinion on the post,” says Instagram’s head of policy, Karina Newton. A different Facebook moderator will review the post, and restore its visibility if it was wrongly removed, and they’ll inform users of their conclusion either way. Instagram always let users appeal account suspensions, but now someone can appeal a takedown if their post was mistakenly removed for nudity when they weren’t nude or hate speech that was actually friendly joshing.
Blocking vaccine misinfo hashtags
On the misinformation front, Instagram will begin blocking vaccine-related hashtag pages when content surfaced on a hashtag page features a large proportion of verifiably false content about vaccines. If there is some violating content, but under that threshold, Instagram will lock a hashtag into a “Top-only” post, where Recent posts won’t show up, to decrease visibility of problematic content. Instagram says that it will test this approach and expand it to other problematic content genres if it works. Instagram will also be surfacing educational information via a pop-up to people who search for vaccine content, similar to what it’s used in the past for self-harm and opioid content.
Instagram says now that health agencies like the Center for Disease Control and World Health Organization are confirming that VACCINES DO NOT CAUSE AUTISM, it’s comfortable declaring contradictory information as verifiably false, and it can be aggressively demoted on the platform.
The automated system scans and scores every post uploaded to Instagram, checking them against classifiers of prohibited content and what it calls “text-matching banks.” These collections of fingerprinted content it’s already banned have their text indexed and words pulled out of imagery through optical character recognition so Instagram can find posts with the same words later. It’s working on extending this technology to videos, and all the systems are being trained to spot obvious issues like threats, unwanted contact and insults, but also those causing intentional fear-of-missing-out, taunting, shaming and betrayals.
If the AI is confident a post violates policies, it’s taken down and counted as a strike against any hashtag included. If a hashtag has too high of a percentage of violating content, the hashtag will be blocked. If it had fewer strikes, it’d get locked in Top-Only mode. The change comes after stern criticism from CNN and others about how hashtag pages like #VaccinesKill still featured tons of dangerous misinformation as recently as yesterday.
Tally-based suspensions
One other new change announced this week is that Instagram will no longer determine whether to suspend an account based on the percentage of their content that violates policies, but by a tally of total violations within a certain period of time. Otherwise, Newton says, “It would disproportionately benefit those that have a large amount of posts,” because even a large number of violations would be a smaller percentage than a rare violation by someone who doesn’t post often. To prevent bad actors from gaming the system, Instagram won’t disclose the exact time frame or number of violations that trigger suspensions.
Instagram recently announced at F8 several new tests on the safety front, including a “nudge” not to post a potentially hateful comment a user has typed, “away mode” for taking a break from Instagram without deleting your account and a way to “manage interactions” so you can ban people from taking certain actions like commenting on your content or DMing you without blocking them entirely.
The announcements come as Instagram has solidified its central place in youth culture. That means it has intense responsibility to protect its user base from bullying, hate speech, graphic content, drugs, misinformation and extremism. “We work really closely with subject matter experts, raise issues that might be playing out differently on Instagram than Facebook, and we identify gaps where we need to change how our policies are operationalized or our policies are changed,” says Newton.
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Docpack offers a simple, enterprise-friendly way to share documents
Docpack is offering businesses a simple way to share their documents — particularly with customers at large enterprises that may block services like Dropbox or Google Drive.
Founder and CEO Rurik Bradbury said he encountered this issue while serving as the head of conversational strategy at LivePerson (he’s also been an executive and/or co-founder at Trustev and Unison Technologies, and he operates the beloved Prof Jeff Jarvis parody account). Many of the largest companies that LivePerson was working with just wouldn’t accept file-sharing links, so “we had to print out things and FedEx things” — and in at least one case, ship Android tablets pre-loaded with documents.
Apparently this is a broader issue, with research suggesting that services like Box, Dropbox and Google Drive remain among the most blacklisted apps by enterprise IT departments.
In particular, Bradbury said companies are worried about “full, two-way file sharing,” so he found a way around it by “building these microsites for each company,” where someone could download documents. From the IT perspective, they are just regular websites, with no capabilities for employees to share documents back, so they stayed off the blacklists.
The problem with microsites, however, is that they’re “not scalable.” So with Docpack, Bradbury aims to make it quick and easy to create them for a wide range of clients. He compared his approach to website builders like Wix and Squarespace, “Where you can make a website even if you’re not technical.”
Similarly, it should only take Docpack users a few clicks to create a new microsite, add customized branding and upload documents. These documents can be protected with security that limits access to users with a specific company email domain, and the publisher can also track which documents are actually getting downloaded.
Docpack has raised less than $500,000 in funding from Asian accelerator Zeroth, Trustev founder Pat Phelan and other individuals.
The startup’s standard plan costs $10 per seat. Bradbury suggested that the service could be useful across sales, business development and marketing: “There’s a huge amount of business transacted via document-sharing.” He also suggested that PR professionals and journalists could use it to share documents, and he’s offering free accounts for credentialed journalists.
As for competition from the big file-sharing services, Bradbury suggested that as they try to accommodate enterprise needs, they’re creating “a product that’s stretched out, that was not really designed at all for cross-company sharing.”
“This is a big enough space … that it deserves its own thing,” he added.
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Samsung’s CEO says Galaxy Fold launch news is arriving soon
Samsung has been understandably silent about the Galaxy Fold for the last couple of weeks. The company’s been reassessing issues with the foldable’s display after initially chalking up problems with review units to small sample sizes and user error. It’s tough to say how difficult and expensive a fix will be, but this surely isn’t the sort of press it was hoping for with its first-to-market device.
CEO DJ Koh is finally ready to talk about the Fold — or at least offer news that there will soon be news. The exec told The Korea Herald that Samsung, “has reviewed the defect caused from substances (that entered the device), and we will reach a conclusion in a couple of days (on the launch).”
What Koh appears to be referring to specifically are the gaps in the fold mechanism that allowed material to get behind the display, damaging it when pressure was applied to the touchscreen.
From the sound of things, Samsung is hoping to have an update on timing at some point this week or early next, at the latest. Koh added, “We will not be too late,” which the paper took to be a suggestion that the Fold will begin shipping earlier than expected.
Samsung no doubt is hoping to have it out sooner than later, but the Note debacle’s two recalls should serve as a reminder that these things ought not be rushed.
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Fortnite Season 9 adds two locations and wind transport, but is mostly just new virtual items
It’s that time again. Parents across the world are doling out $15 to Epic Games after the developer released Season 9, the latest update for its hit game Fortnite that’s particularly popular among kids and young adults.
Fortnite is estimated to have more than 250 million players, and it has proven to be a major money-spinner for Epic thanks to sales of seasonal Battle Passes, skins and virtual items for avatars. That’s very much the focus for Season 9, which dropped today and is really about the cosmetics, with the latest Battle Pass unlocking more than 100 rewards, including a range of new skins and characters.
Season 9 is an upgrade that’ll keep existing gamers locked into Fortnite through evolution — there are no radical changes to excite new or less-active players.
In terms of gameplay, Fortnite has added two new locations. Neo Tilted replaces Tilted Towers, which was destroyed by a volcano eruption last week, then there’s Mega Mall, which is an upgrade on Retail Row. Epic has added “Slipstreams,” which are turbines that power a wind-based transport system for getting across the map quickly, and potentially adding an interesting new combat angle.
There’s also a new “Fortbytes,” which is essentially a hidden item challenge. Gamers who bought a Battle Pass can collect a series of 100 collectible computer chips that are scattered across the map. There are an initial 18 released, with a new arrival each day — those who collect them all can unlock rewards and “secrets.”
There’s just one new gun on offer, the combat shotgun, which doesn’t seem particularly impressive, while grenades have returned. A large number of weapons have been removed — or “vaulted” in Epic parlance — and they include clingers, pump shotgun, poison dart trap, scoped revolver, suppressed assault rifle, thermal assault rifle and balloons.
That’s about the sum of the new update, although Fortnite does now include three new limited time games: three-person squad “trios,” a “solid gold” mode that uses legendary weapons and “one shot,” a sniper-only battle set in a low-gravity environment.
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Tencent’s new alternative to PUBG is already topping the revenue chart
In a move clearly driven by economic interests and an urgency to meet stringent regulations, the world’s largest games publisher Tencent pulled its mobile version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds on Wednesday and launched a new title called Game for Peace (the literal translation of its Chinese name 和平精英 is ‘peace elites’) on the same day.
As of this writing, Game for Peace is the most downloaded free game and top-grossing game in Apple’s China App Store, according to data from Sensor Tower data. That’s early evidence that the new title is on course to stimulate Tencent’s softening gaming revenues following a prolonged licensing freeze in China. Indeed, analysts at China Renaissance estimated that Game for Peace could generate up to $1.48 billion in annual revenue for Tencent.
Tencent licensed PUBG from South Korea’s Krafton, previously known as Bluehole, in 2017 and subsequently released a test version of the game for China’s mobile users.
Game for Peace is available only to users above the age of 16, a decision that came amid society’s growing concerns over video games’ impact on children’s mental and physical health. Tencent has recently pledged to do more ‘good’ with its technology, and the new game release appears to be a practice of that.
Tencent told Reuters the two titles are from “very different genres.” Well, many signs attest to the fact that Game for Peace is intended as a substitute for PUBG Mobile, which never received the green light from Beijing to monetize because it’s deemed too gory. Game for Peace received the license to sell in-game items on April 9.
For one, PUBG users were directed to download Game for Peace in a notice announcing its closure. People’s gaming history and achievement were transferred to the new game, and players and industry analysts have pointed out the striking resemblance between the two.
“It’s basically the same game with some tweaks,” said a Guangzhou-based PUBG player who has been playing the title since its launching, adding that the adjustment to tone down violence “doesn’t really harm the gamer experience.”
“Just ignore those details,” suggested the user.
For instance, characters who are shot don’t bleed in Game for Peace. A muzzle flash replaces gore as bloody scenes no longer pass the muster. And when people are dying, they kneel, surrender their loot box, and wave goodbye. Very civil. Very friendly.
“It’s what we call changing skin [for a game],” a Shenzhen-based mobile game studio founder said to TechCrunch. “The gameplay stays largely intact.”
Other PUBG users are less sanguine about the transition. “I don’t think this is the correct decision from the regulators. Getting oversensitive in the approval process will prevent Chinese games from growing big and strong,” wrote one contributor with more than 135 thousand followers on Zhihu, the Chinese equivalent of Quora.
But such compromise is increasingly inevitable as Chinese authorities reinforce rules around what people can consume online, not just in games but also through news readers, video platforms, and even music streaming services. Content creators must be able to decipher regulators’ directives, some of which are straightforward as “the name of the game should not contain words other than simplified Chinese.” Others requirements are more obscure, like “no violation of core socialist’s values,” a set of 12 moral principles — including prosperity, democracy, civility, and harmony — that are propagated by the Chinese Communist Party in recent years.
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What Pixel 3a tells us about the state of the smartphone — and Google
Announced yesterday at Google’s opening I/O keynote, the Pixel 3a arrives at a tenuous time for the smartphone industry. Sales figures have stagnated for most of the major players in the industry — a phenomenon from which Google certainly isn’t immune.
CEO Sundar Pichai discussed exactly that on the company’s Q1 earnings call last week. “While the first quarter results reflect pressure in the premium smartphone industry,” he explained, “we are pleased with the ongoing momentum of Assistant-enabled Home devices, particularly the Home Hub and Mini devices, and look forward to our May 7 announcement at I/O from our hardware team.”
That last bit was a clear reference to the arrival of the new budget tier of Google’s flagship offering. The 3a is a clear push to address one of the biggest drivers of slowing smartphone sales. With a starting price of $399, it’s a fraction of the price of top handsets from competitors like Apple and Samsung.
There’s been a fairly rapid creep in flagship prices in recent years. Handsets starting at north of $1,000 hardly warrant a second glance anymore, while many forthcoming foldables are hovering around double that.
As Google VP of Product Management Mario Queiroz told me ahead of launch, “The smartphone market has started to flatten. We think one of the reasons is because, you know, the premium segment of the market is a very large segment, but premium phones have gotten more and more expensive, you know, three, four years ago, you could buy a premium phone for $500.”
Inflated prices have certainly made device purchases more burdensome for buyers. That, coupled with a relative lack of compelling new features has gone a ways toward slowing down upgrade cycles, hurting sales in the process.
I’ve enjoyed my early hands-on time with the 3a — more to come on that later. It’s important to note the different factors that have allowed Google to get to this stage. A key driver is, of course, Google’s purchase of massive R&D resources from HTC. That result of HTC’s dip into sub-replacement level hardware manufacturer has resulted in the ability to develop hardware in house, on the relatively cheap at a new campus in Taipei.
Also important is Google’s ongoing quest to further uncouple the importance of hardware from smartphone upgrades. The company’s big investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence particularly are driving many of the innovations best demonstrated on the imaging side of things. Devin captured this sentiment in this piece written in the wake of the iPhone XS announcement.
Notably, the Pixel 3a has essentially the same camera hardware as the pricier 3. Google cut some corners here, but that wasn’t one. There are still and will continue to be some limitations to what the 3a is able to do, based on processing power, but the line between what the two devices can do is already pretty blurry when it comes to taking photos.
There’s another factor that’s been looming over Pixel sales in all of this — but for several reasons, Pichai wasn’t ready to discuss it on the call. For years, the line has been hampered by carrier exclusivity, something that feels like it ought to be relegated to the smartphone past.
Certainly that sort of arrangement makes sense for young companies like OnePlus or Palm, which are looking for a way into a market, while seeking to maintain manageable growth. But Google certainly has the resources to grow outside of a single carrier deal. And the fact of the matter (as Huawei has discovered the hard way) is that carrier distribution and contracts as still key drivers of smartphone distribution here in the States, even as most manufacturers also offer unlocked devices. I suspect those upfront costs are enough to make many consumers do a double take — even though we all know in our hearts the contract is ultimately where they get you.
Thankfully, Google announced that it will be making the Pixel 3 and 3a available on a lot more carriers, starting this week. That move ought to have a marked impact on the Pixel’s sales figures going forward. The addition of Sprint and T-Mobile among others means a lot more retail shelf space and ad dollars across the U.S. Devices are a harder sell when your average consumer has to go out of their way to find them — not to mention the difficulty of convincing users to switch carriers for a new device.
I’d caution against using Q2 results as a direct measure of the 3a’s appeal and Google’s move toward a six-month device release cycle. At this early stage it’s too early to uncouple that from new customers who are coming on board courtesy of those carrier additions. Even so, the device is an interesting litmus test for the current state of the smartphone, right down to the return of the headphone jack.
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#1 app YOLO Q&A is the Snapchat platform’s 1st hit
There’s a new teen app sensation. Anonymous question-asking app YOLO has rocketed to the #1 US app position just a week after launching thanks to Snapchat. Built on top of the Snap Kit platform, YOLO uses Snapchat for login and Bitmoji profile pics to let you add an “ask me anything” sticker to your Snapchat Story. Friends can swipe up to open YOLO on iOS and send an anonymous question there that you then answer through another sticker posted to your Story. One source says “EVERYONE at my high school is using it right now.” And what’s crazy is that YOLO’s inventor tells me the whole thing was an accident.
If you’re getting deja vu, you might be thinking of Sarahah. That app blew up in late 2017 by letting you attach a link from your Snapchat Story to your Sarahah profile where people could ask you anonymous questions…until it was kicked off of iOS and Android in early 2018 for facilitating bullying. Or maybe you’re thinking of how polling app Polly let Snapchat friends ask you anything before there was Snap Kit.
Now the question is whether YOLO’s warning during signup that it has “no tolerance for objectionable content or abusive users” or its in-app flagging and blocking features will protect it from teen misuse or Apple and Google’s wrath.
YOLO’s anonymous question app built on Snap Kit is now the #1 US app
YOLO’s rise highlights just how curious teens are and how desperate they can be for honest feedback or anonymous gossip. Given the prompt via Snapchat to say something to friends without having to take responsibility, kids are flocking to download YOLO. Since they don’t have to create a new profile or pic thanks to Snap Kit importing their account and Bitmoji, and can use Snapchat’s ubiquity amongst teens to distribute their question and answers, YOLO is super easy to join. That pushed it to the #1 US app according to App Annie.
YOLO creator Gregoire Henrion
But as with Sarahah, Secret, YikYak, and other anonymous apps before it, YOLO is vulnerable to being used to spread hate speech and bullying. Given school-age kids can get in trouble for insulting someone in the hallway, they’re quick to torment peers though apps, especially if they piggyback on one everyone already uses.
Now Yolo’s developer, a startup called Popshow, is desperately trying to keep the app’s servers from melting and add new features so teens stick around. There was no publicly available info about who started Popshow, even in its trademark and incorporation filings. But after some digging, a source revealed that Popshow and YOLO were started by Gregoire Henrion, former co-founder and CEO of music video making app Mindie.
“It was not supposed to be a success. It was just for us to learn” Henrion tells me in his first interview about his startup. “Let’s just put it on the App Store and see how people behave. It went 100% viral. It’s crazy. Even we didn’t believe our eyes when we saw that [it went to #1].”
Henrion’s previous startup Mindie had let you share soundtracked video clips to your Snapchat story. It raised $1.2 million from Lowercase, SV Angel, Dave Morin, Troy Carter and more. But in 2015 it got blocked from Snapchat for being a security risk since it required users to provide their Snap username and password. YOLO actually takes advantage of Snapchat’s Snap Kit platform that was designed specifically to eliminate the need for Mindie’s sketchy integrations. Mindie missed its opportunity to become Musical.ly, which was later bought and merged into global phenomenon TikTok. Mindie eventually got acquired by Justin Bieber-backed selfie app and content production collective Shots in 2016.
By 2017, Henrion and Mindie co-founder Clément Raffenoux were back building a new startup. They raised a small pre-seed round from SV Angel, Shrug Captial, Product Hunt’s Ryan Hoover, and some angel investors and experimented with the Popshow video reactions app. Then the pair decided to explore the anonymous app space. But rather than being completely anonymous and public, YOLO lets users privately review questions, decide which they want to answer and who to share that content with via Snapchat, and include a selfie when they share so respondents know there’s a real person on the other side. “We feel that anonymity can unlock super good behaviors. We think we’re more empathic, more human than other anonymous apps before us” Henrion explains.
The result was “1000X what we expected” Henrion beams. And he insists the growth is totally organic. “We tried some shitty things just to try them, but they don’t work” including replying from Popshow’s account to thousands of people who tweeted ‘I miss Vine’. “I don’t believe in fake growth anymore. We just literally put it in the store, people typed YOLO into search, and the loop was so effective that the product caught on.”
YOLO lets you ask for anonymous questions via your Snapchat Story, receive them on YOLO, and then post the answers back to Snapchat
The challenge will be maintaining YOLO’s momentum. Another anonymous Q&A app called TBH raced to the #1 app spot in September 2017, got acquired by Facebook 3 weeks later, but fell out of the top 500 apps by the end of November before being shut down last year. Teens are extremely fickle. If they deem YOLO “over”, get bored due to a lack of new features, are overwhelemed by harassment, or a new fad arises, it could crash out of the charts. Henrion says his team is scrambling to evolve YOLO into something more expansive without losing simplicity, while developing automated tools to weed out bullies.
There’s also the threat of Snapchat just building similar anonymous Q&A functionality into its own app. But that’s the risk of building atop any platform that otherwise massively reduces an app’s development and marketing costs. This will become a powerful case study that will surely draw tons of developers to Snapchat’s platform. With so much of YOLO powered by Snap Kit, and it all just being an experiment, Henrion won’t lose much if his app dies and he moves on to the next idea.
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RedCircle’s latest feature makes it easy to tip podcast creators
A group of former Uber employees unveiled their podcasting startup RedCircle last week, and now they’re already launching new features — specifically the ability for listeners to make small tip payments to podcasters.
RedCircle has created a web-based podcast player of its own, but CEO Michael Kadin (previously an engineering manager at Uber) said the mission isn’t to compete with other podcast apps. Instead the team aims to create the tools podcasters need to build a real business.
In fact, RedCircle is already offering some of those tools — like hosting and analytics — for free, and it also launched a cross-promotion marketplace where those podcasters can team up to try to grow each others’ audiences.
As for the new tipping feature, it appears as a button on the RedCircle player, allowing users to pay $2, $5 or a custom amount with just a few clicks (you’ll also need to enter your credit card info, of course). The startup can also automatically insert a tipping link into a podcast’s show notes, so listeners will find out about it regardless of the player they use.
Co-founder Jeremy Lermitte (a former Uber product manager) added that tipping provides a way for fans to compensate a podcaster for an episode they particularly enjoyed without making the long-term commitment of, say, signing up for a Patreon subscription.
“This allows you to engage at your own pace,” Lermitte said.
Podcasters can and do accept one-time payments via PayPal or Venmo, but Kadin said RedCircle offers more data about who’s making the payments, while also providing a 1099 form for taxes and “all the other things you want to turn this into a real thing, versus something casual.”
“The first thing podcasters say they need is to grow their audience,” he added. “The second thing is to make money from it. Now we’re working on both of those problems. Just give us another week and a half and we’ll make even more progress.”
RedCircle has raised a $1.5 million seed round led by Roy Bahat at Bloomberg Beta .
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Slack to live-stream pitch to shareholders on Monday ahead of direct listing
Slack, the ubiquitous workplace messaging tool, will make its pitch to prospective shareholders on Monday at an invite-only event in New York City, the company confirmed in a blog post on Wednesday. Slack stock is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange as soon as next month.
Slack, which is pursuing a direct listing, will live stream Monday’s Investor Day on its website.
An alternative to an initial public offering, direct listings allow businesses to forgo issuing new shares and instead sell directly to the market existing shares held by insiders, employees and investors. Slack, like Spotify, has been able to bypass the traditional roadshow process expected of an IPO-ready business, as well as some of the exorbitant Wall Street fees.
Spotify, if you remember, similarly live streamed an event that is typically for investors eyes only. If Slack’s event is anything like the music streaming giant’s, Slack co-founder and chief executive officer Stewart Butterfield will speak to the company’s greater mission alongside several other executives.
Slack unveiled documents for a public listing two weeks ago. In its SEC filing, the company disclosed a net loss of $138.9 million and revenue of $400.6 million in the fiscal year ending January 31, 2019. That’s compared to a loss of $140.1 million on revenue of $220.5 million for the year before.
Additionally, the company said it reached 10 million daily active users earlier this year across more than 600,000 organizations.
Slack has previously raised a total of $1.2 billion in funding from investors, including Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Social Capital, SoftBank, Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins.
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