Patreon acquires Kit to let creators bundle merch in subscriptions

If content creators want to sell pricier monthly content subscriptions, offering stickers, pins, signed photos, or t-shirts can convince fans to pay a higher fee and keep them loyal with a physical connection. That’s why patronage platform Patreon just acquired Kit, a startup building a merchandise logistics backend so creators don’t have to fiddle with spreadsheets and stuff envelopes themselves.

“Over 60 percent of today of Patreon creators either want to or are already delivering some kind of physical merchandise” says Patreon’s VP of Product, Wyatt Jenkins. Together, they could help Patreon creators develop merch items that fans subscribe to get ahold of, potentially shelling out for $10 or $20 per month tiers rather than basic $1 or $5 online content-only tiers.

The deal could also help Patreon stay ahead of YouTube and Facebook, which are encroaching on its subscription patronage model. Patreon now has 2 million patrons backing 100,000 creators. It paid out $350 million over its first 5 years through 2017, and expects to send creators another $300 million in 2018, while taking a 5 percent cut.

Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. 90 percent of Kit team, mostly product and engineering talent, will join San Francisco-based Patreon though they’ll stay put in NYC as a satellite office the rest of the year. Kit had raised $2.5 million from Social Capital, Expa, #Angels, Precursor, and Stanford’s StartX, as well as angels like Ellen Pao and Slack’s April Underwood.

“When we think about merch, it’s never been fully about the thing — the sticker or the t-shirt — there’s this relationship. This human-to-human connection” says Kit co-founder and CEO Camille Hearst.

Kit was in the process of pivoting towards merchandise logistics and raising a Series A when it began talks with Patreon, leading to the acquisition. The startup was originally built as a way for social media stars and online celebrities to earn affilliate marketing fees by recommending products to fans through Kit, which took a cut of the referral dollars. Some creators showing off their “Kit” of camera equipment, sportswear, or caffeination supplies were earning tens of thousands of dollars.

“We were at a stage where everything was going in the right direction. We had seen strong growth in monthly active users and how much creators were making” Hearst says, noting Kit had reached $15 million in gross merchandise value. “It just seemed like we would be able to accelerate what we were doing by joining with Patreon. Merch is very transaction focused compared with a subscription.” Hearst explains, touting the high lifetime value of recurring payments over one-off purchases. “You can help creators earn a lot more money if you use merch to sell subscriptions.”

The pre-Kit Patreon team

The plan at Patreon is to build out a new open merchandise provider platform. Creators will be able to choose between a variety of merch partners ranging from those that turn their existing logo into physical goods to those that will design items based on merely vague ideas from the star. But in the meantime, Kit won’t be shutting down or ditching its affilliate program because “we don’t want to turn off any revenue streams” that creators depend on, Hearst promises.

“Right now creators have to choose between different merch partners” without collective bargaining power or enoug data to know what works, says Jenkins. “We can have set pricing for all those merch partners that will be lower than they can get on their own”, while alleviating creators from having to juggle spreadsheets of who gets what and mailing it all themselves.

The plan for Patreon to monetize merch is a little less clear, though Jenkins says “We’re going to grow the pie and we want a piece of the growth.” The idea is that using Patreon’s merchandise platform will incur extra fees beyond the skimpy 5 percent it earns on subscriptions. If adding a merch item significantly boosts the subscriber number for a certain tier, Patreon will take a TBD cut.

“We want creators to make a living. That’s not a side hustle. You have to make more money year over year, You have to be able to do things like buy a house or get healthcare” Jenkins concludes. “All the other platforms are ‘give us your content and we’ll give you a little side change’. That kind of led us down the mech path. Creators are were begging for merch.”

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Europe’s top court takes a broad view of privacy responsibilities around platforms

An interesting ruling by Europe’s top court could have some major implications for data mining tech giants like Facebook and Google, along with anyone who administers pages that allow platforms to collect and process their visitors’ personal data — such as a Facebook fan page or even potentially a site running Google Analytics.

Passing judgement on a series of legal questions referred to it, the CJEU has held that the administrator of a fan page on Facebook is jointly responsible with Facebook for the processing of the data of visitors to the page — aligning with the the Advocate General’s opinion to the court, which we covered back in October.

In practical terms the ruling means tech giants could face more challenges from European data protection authorities. While anyone piggybacking on or plugging into platform services in Europe shouldn’t imagine they can just pass responsibility to the platforms for ensuring they are compliant with privacy rules.

The CJEU deems both parties to be responsible (aka, ‘data controllers’ in the legal jargon), though the court also emphasizes that “the existence of joint responsibility does not necessarily imply equal responsibility of the various operators involved in the processing of personal data”, adding: “On the contrary, those operators may be involved at different stages of that processing of personal data and to different degrees, so that the level of responsibility of each of them must be assessed with regard to all the relevant circumstances of the particular case.”

Gist of Wirtschaftsakademie final judgement
– if you attract users to a service (e.g. FB fan page)
– that tracks them
– and you use (aggregate) results from the tracking
you are a data controller, *even* if you never held or saw anything that could be considered personal data.

— Michael Veale (@mikarv) June 5, 2018

The original case dates back to 2011, when a German education and training company with a fan page on Facebook was ordered by a local data protection authority to deactivate the page because neither it nor Facebook had informed users their personal data was being collected. The education company challenged the DPA’s order and, after much legal back and forth, questions were referred to Europe’s top court for a preliminary ruling.

“The fact that an administrator of a fan page uses the platform provided by Facebook in order to benefit from the associated services cannot exempt it from compliance with its obligations concerning the protection of personal data,” the court writes today, handing down its judgement.

“It must be emphasised, moreover, that fan pages hosted on Facebook can also be visited by persons who are not Facebook users and so do not have a user account on that social network. In that case, the fan page administrator’s responsibility for the processing of the personal data of those persons appears to be even greater, as the mere consultation of the home page by visitors automatically starts the processing of their personal data.

“In those circumstances, the recognition of joint responsibility of the operator of the social network and the administrator of a fan page hosted on that network in relation to the processing of the personal data of visitors to that page contributes to ensuring more complete protection of the rights of persons visiting a fan page, in accordance with the requirements of Directive 95/46.”

Facebook unsurprisingly expressed disappointment at the CJEU’s decision when contacted for a response.

“We are disappointed by this ruling. Businesses of all sizes across Europe use internet services like Facebook to reach new customers and grow,” a spokesperson told us via emailed statement. “While there will be no immediate impact on the people and businesses who use Facebook services, we will work to help our partners understand its implications. We are compliant with applicable European law and as part of our preparations for GDPR, we have further improved our privacy policies, controls and tools to make them clearer.”

The company’s go-to legal strategy to defend against data protection challenges in Europe has been to claim it’s only bound by the jurisdiction of the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, given its international HQ is based in Ireland. So it’s essentially relied upon a cosy relationship with a local, pro-business DPA to shield it from complaints filed in other less friendly European jurisdictions.

But as we wrote last fall that strategy looks to be on borrowed time, as courts in Member States are increasing showing a willingness to assert jurisdiction over tech giants whose digital services freely cross EU borders and are entirely capable of impacting citizens’ rights everywhere.

“I do think it is becoming harder and harder for any tech company to evade the law,” Jef Ausloos, a researcher at the Centre for IT and IP Law in Belgium, tells us. “We see it in almost every CJEU ruling since GoogleSpain (delisting/rtbf) — the Court wants to ensure complete and effective protection.”

“From now onwards you can go through fan pages (that are in same jurisdiction and/or in a jurisdiction with strong DPA) by proxy to attack Facebook — regardless of one-stop-shop — so great for user-empowerment,” he adds.

“(Co-)responsibilising fan-pages will put massive pressure on Facebook but also Google-Analytics, for example, to enable better control to fan page-administrators and data subjects.”

While today’s CJEU ruling could pave the way for more enforcement of EU data protection rules at a Member State level, there are some caveats as the judgement relates to the bloc’s prior Data Protection Directive — which has now been replaced with an updated privacy framework, in the form of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

And Facebook is clearly attempting to promote a self-serving interpretation of GDPR that seeks to concentrate jurisdictional elements around a lead data protection authority — under the regulation’s so-called ‘one-stop shop’ principle. So once again it’s trying to lean towards only having to be answerable to the Irish DPA.

However that looks like wishful thinking. The GDPR’s OSS mechanism was not intended to limit the participation of other DPAs where complaints cross Member State borders — but rather to allow for co-ordination between multiple agencies.

And, well, Europe’s top court is making its view on the local competence of data watchdogs increasingly clear…

Another radical & ground-breaking yet somewhat unsurprising #CJEU decision which will limit One Stop Shop: Local DPA competent even if main EU establishment elsewhere in . https://t.co/zAd3jmBfIG

— Eduardo Ustaran (@EUstaran) June 5, 2018

“[The CJEU ruling] continues the trend set in Google Spain that challenges can be brought across the Union,” agrees Michael Veale, a technology policy researcher at University College London. “However that aspect of the case is specifically about interpretation of the Data Protection Directive.

“The GDPR has a separate system to deal with cross-border processing, with mechanisms present such as the EDPB [European Data Protection Board], and voting systems for particular types of co-ordinated action, and the idea that a ‘lead supervisory authority’ can act but not control an entire process. Now we will see how fragmented that will end up as in practice.”

Playing down the potential impact of the ruling, Facebook — somewhat ironically — points to GDPR’s tightening of rules around the consent basis for processing persona data, meaning there’s more onus on data handlers to clearly and cleanly communicate choices to users, at least assuming consent is the legal basis they’re relying on to process people’s data.

So, in theory, that means any entities handling EU citizens’ personal data should already be thinking far more carefully about their responsibilities vis-a-vis users’ personal data — more than was perhaps the case all the way back in 2011 (when the penalties for ignoring Europe’s privacy rules were all too easily ignored).

The GDPR’s biggest change to the EU’s privacy regime is not so much new rules as an increase in the maximum penalties for data protection violations, giving enforcement the teeth that have always been lacking and thereby concentrating minds on compliance.

Though the irony here comes because in Facebook’s own case it’s already facing legal challenges to the consent flows it’s designed for GDPR — with early complaints filed against the eponymous Facebook platform and two other Facebook-owned services, Instagram and WhatsApp, alleging they are subverting the rules by coercing consent from users. (Another early consent-related complaint has also been lodged against Google’s Android.)

In terms of damage limitation as a result of the CJEU ruling, Facebook says it will work with partners and regulators in Europe to limit the potential impact on its services and on those that use them, suggesting — for example — that it could provide guidance to Page owners on how they can comply with their obligations.

At the start of this year it also announced a series of data protection workshops in Europe, set to run throughout this year, and aimed at small and medium businesses — with a stated focus on GDPR compliance.

So it’s already busy on that front — and only now likely to get busier.

But given the sheer volume of fan pages that exist on Facebook there’s no doubt the CJEU judgement greatly increases the company’s surface area for legal liabilities. (Though the ruling does not just apply to Facebook, of course.)

While the court’s backing for local DPAs’ jurisdiction sets the weather going into GDPR, and looks like a vital check against any overbearing corporate attempts to reshape the new rules to fit their own ends — at the expense of users’ fundamental rights.

The EU is in a permanent balancing exercise between harmonisation & national diversity. This is very visible in #EUdataP law. The #GDPR leans towards harmonisation. The #CJEU decisions tend to highlight Member States’ diversity. The result reflects the reality on the ground.

— Eduardo Ustaran (@EUstaran) June 5, 2018

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Scooter startup Lime is reportedly raising $250M led by Uber investor GV

It’s scooters all the way down this morning, with Lime also reportedly raising $250 million in a funding this morning after a new Delaware filing this morning indicated that competitor Bird authorized the sale of up to $200 million in shares.

GV (formerly Google Ventures) is leading this round, according to the report by Axios, as the massive land grab for a stake in the scooter wars continues to heat up — whether that’s funding or actual scooters piling up on the sidewalk. Both companies have faced pushback from some city regulators (probably on the basis of tripping over them and falling on your face), but it still means the venture community is still salivating over potentially the next major mode of metropolitan transportation. Most venture investors in the Valley argue scooters make sense for short trips throughout areas that are just too far to be considered a trek, but too close that it would be a waste of time and money to call a ride share like Uber or Lyft.

Given that Uber exposed a massive hole for easier transportation in major metropolitan areas — and potentially replacing cars in those areas — getting into the next big transportation revolution is more than tempting enough for firms like GV (which is also an investor in Uber). Lime was previously reported to be seeking up to $500 million in funding and was taking meetings with some major firms in Silicon Valley over the past few weeks. It might not get that, but a $250 million influx might be plenty to try to continue to ramp up its business and get more rides on board. Axios is reporting that Lime has told investors users have taken 4.2 million rides and each scooter gets 8 to 12 rides per day.

Still, while it’s not $500 million, there’s plenty of interest in the on-demand scooter business — challenges of keeping them charged and intact included — that Bird has authorized the sale of up to $200 million in new shares at a $1 billion valuation just months after its previous round. So it might not be surprising if this, too, ends up as kind of a rolling process where Lime eventually gets all the capital it sought.

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Scooter startup Bird has authorized sale of $200M in shares in latest funding round

Bird, the scooter startup whose scooters you might have seen fallen over on the sidewalk in a major metro area, has authorized a new $200 million round of funding that could value the startup at around $1 billion post-money, according to a certificate of incorporation filed in Delaware.

The latest Bird round has been pretty widely reported, suggesting that the company is raising $150 million at a $1 billion valuation. That, too, comes amid a big effort by competitor Lime to raise a big funding round. These documents indicate that the company has authorized the sale of those shares, though it may not fully fill out the round. The certificate of incorporation document was provided be Lagniappe Labs, creator of the Prime Unicorn Index.

The document indicates that Bird has authorized the sale of 31.5 million new shares in its financing round at a value of $6.15 per share, which if fully sold could net the startup as much as $200 million in this round. This round would value the company at just over $1 billion, a new financing round that follows up a $100 million round announced in March.

These kinds of rolling rounds are not completely uncommon. Instead of bundling everything together in a single round, startups may sometimes have a process that includes follow-on investment rounds, of which this may be a component. The last funding round in March valued the company at around $300 million.

Needless to say, scooters are a hot market right now even if they are facing a lot of friction when it comes to dealing with leaving their scooters everywhere around cities. But running startups that are hardware-focused — especially on-demand ones that have to manage a network of scooters that need to have enough of a charge to get someone from point A to point be, lest they have a bad experience and switch to an alternative, can be an expensive proposition. The hardware component itself, too, can be a tough business.

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iOS 12 will let users register another person to their Face ID

From advancements in AR to Memojis to group FaceTime, there is plenty to be excited about with iOS 12. But one of the more practical updates to Apple’s mobile operating system, coming this fall, went unmentioned during the keynote at WWDC.

According to 9to5Mac, iOS 12 will allow for two different faces to be registered to Face ID.

Up until now, Face ID has only allowed a single appearance to be registered to the iPhone X. 9to5Mac first noticed the update when combing through the iOS 12 beta, where one can find new settings for Face ID that allow users to “Set Up an Alternative Appearance.”

Here’s what the description says:

In addition to continuously learning how you look, Face ID can recognize an alternative appearance.

While that’s about as unclear as a description might be, 9to5Mac tested and confirmed the update, with the following caveat. Users who choose to register two faces to Face ID will not be able to remove that face without starting over from scratch with their own FaceID registration. In other words, if you choose to reset the alternate appearance, you’ll also have to clear out all existing data around your own face, too.

That small inconvenience aside, the ability to add a second face to Face ID makes total sense. Couples often pass their phones back and forth as a matter of practicality, and parents often let their children use their phones to play games and check out apps.

Plus, this may hint at Face ID on the next generation of iPads, which tend to be shared amongst multiple users more often than phones.

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The erosion of Web 2.0

It seems quaint to imagine now but the original vision for the web was not an information superhighway. Instead, it was a newspaper that fed us only the news we wanted. This was the central thesis brought forward in the late 1990s and prophesied by thinkers like Bill Gates – who expected a beautiful, customized “road ahead” – and Clifford Stoll who saw only snake oil. At the time, it was the most compelling use of the Internet those thinkers thought possible. This concept – that we were to be coddled by a hive brain designed to show us exactly what we needed to know when we needed to know it – continued apace until it was supplanted by the concept of User Generated Content – UGC – a related movement that tore down gatekeepers and all but destroyed propriety in the online world.

That was the arc of Web 2.0: the move from one-to-one conversations in Usenet or IRC and into the global newspaper. Further, this created a million one-to-many conversations targeted at tailor-made audiences of fans, supporters, and, more often, trolls. This change gave us what we have today: a broken prism that refracts humanity into none of the colors except black or white. UGC, that once-great idea that anyone could be as popular as a rock star, fell away to an unmonetizable free-for-all that forced brands and advertisers to rethink how they reached audiences. After all, on a UGC site it’s not a lot of fun for Procter & Gamble to have Downy Fabric Softener advertised next to someone’s racist rant against Muslims in a Starbucks.

Still the Valley took these concepts and built monetized cesspools of self-expression. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter are the biggest beneficiaries of outrage culture and the eyeballs brought in by its continuous refreshment feed their further growth. These sites are Web 2.0 at its darkest epitome, a quiver of arrows that strikes at our deepest, most cherished institutions and bleeds us of kindness and forethought.

So when advertisers faced either the direct monetization of random hate speech or the erosion of customer privacy, they choose the latter. Facebook created lookalike audiences that let advertisers sell to a certain subset of humanity on a deeply granular level, a move that delivered us the same shoe advertisement constantly, from site to site, until we were all sure we had gone mad. In the guise of saving our sanity further we invited always-on microphones into our homes that could watch our listening and browsing habits and sell to us against them. We gave up our very DNA to companies like Ancestry and 23andMe, a decision that mankind may soon regret. We shared everything with everyone in the grand hope that our evolution into homo ligarus – the networked man – would lead us to become homo deus.

This didn’t happen.

And so the pendulum swings back. The GDPR, as toothless as it is, is a wake up call to every spammer that ever slammed your email or followed you around the web. Further, Apple’s upcoming cookie control software in Safari should make those omnipresent ads disappear, forcing the advertiser to sell to an undifferentiated mob rather than a single person. This is obviously cold comfort in an era defined by both the reification of the Internet as a font for all knowledge (correct or incorrect) and the genesis of an web-based political cobra that whips back to bite its handlers with regularity. But it’s a start.

We are currently in an interstitial period of technology, a cake baked of the hearty camaraderie and “Fuck the system” punk rock Gen X but frosted with millennial pragmatism and desire for the artisanal. As we move out of the era of UGC and Web 2.0 we will see the old ways cast aside, the old models broken, and the old invasions of privacy inverted. While I won’t go as far to say that blockchain will save us all, pervasive encryption and full data control will pave the way toward true control of our personal lives as well as the beginnings of a research-based minimum income. We should be able to sell our opinions, our thoughts, and even our DNA to the highest bidder and once the rapacious Web 2.0 vultures are all shooed away, we will find ourselves in an interesting new world.

As a technoutopianist I’m sure that were are heading in the right direction. We are, however, taking turns that none of us could have imagined in the era of Clinton and the fax machine and there are still more turns to come. Luckily, however, we are coming out of our last major skid.

 

Photo by George Fitzmaurice on Unsplash

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Apple got even tougher on ad trackers at WWDC

Apple unveiled a handful of pro-privacy enhancements for its Safari web browser at its annual developer event yesterday, building on an ad tracker blocker it announced at WWDC a year ago.

The feature — which Apple dubbed ‘Intelligent Tracking Prevention’ (IPT) — places restrictions on cookies based on how frequently a user interacts with the website that dropped them. After 30 days of a site not being visited Safari purges the cookies entirely.

Since debuting IPT a major data misuse scandal has engulfed Facebook, and consumer awareness about how social platforms and data brokers track them around the web and erode their privacy by building detailed profiles to target them with ads has likely never been higher.

Apple was ahead of the pack on this issue and is now nicely positioned to surf a rising wave of concern about how web infrastructure watches what users are doing by getting even tougher on trackers.

Cupertino’s business model also of course aligns with privacy, given the company’s main money spinner is device sales. And features intended to help safeguard users’ data remain one of the clearest and most compelling points of differentiation vs rival devices running Google’s Android OS, for example.

“Safari works really hard to protect your privacy and this year it’s working even harder,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s SVP of software engineering during yesterday’s keynote.

He then took direct aim at social media giant Facebook — highlighting how social plugins such as Like buttons, and comment fields which use a Facebook login, form a core part of the tracking infrastructure that follows people as they browse across the web.

In April US lawmakers also closely questioned Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg about the information the company gleans on users via their offsite web browsing, gathered via its tracking cookies and pixels — receiving only evasive answers in return.

Facebook subsequently announced it will launch a Clear History feature, claiming this will let users purge their browsing history from Facebook. But it’s less clear whether the control will allow people to clear their data off of Facebook’s servers entirely.

The feature requires users to trust that Facebook is doing what it claims to be doing. And plenty of questions remain. So, from a consumer point of view, it’s much better to defeat or dilute tracking in the first place — which is what the clutch of features Apple announced yesterday are intended to do.

“It turns out these [like buttons and comment fields] can be used to track you whether you click on them or not. And so this year we are shutting that down,” said Federighi, drawing sustained applause and appreciative woos from the WWDC audience.

He demoed how Safari will show a pop-up asking users whether or not they want to allow the plugin to track their browsing — letting web browsers “decide to keep your information private”, as he put it.

Safari will also immediately partition cookies for domains that Apple has “determined to have tracking abilities” — removing the 24 window after a website interaction that Apple allowed in the first version of IPT.

It has also engineered a feature designed to detect when a domain is solely used as a “first party bounce tracker” — i.e. meaning it is never used as a third party content provider but tracks the user purely through navigational redirects — with Safari also purging website data in such instances.

Another pro-privacy enhancement detailed by Federighi yesterday is intended to counter browser fingerprinting techniques that are also used to track users from site to site — and which can be a way of doing so even when/if tracking cookies are cleared.

“Data companies are clever and relentless,” he said. “It turns out that when you browse the web your device can be identified by a unique set of characteristics like its configuration, its fonts you have installed, and the plugins you might have installed on a device.

“With Mojave we’re making it much harder for trackers to create a unique fingerprint. We’re presenting websites with only a simplified system configuration. We show them only built-in fonts. And legacy plugins are no longer supported so those can’t contribute to a fingerprint. And as a result your Mac will look more like everyone else’s Mac and will it be dramatically more difficult for data companies to uniquely identify your device and track you.”

In a post detailing IPT 2.0 on its WebKit developer blog, Apple security engineer John Wilander writes that Apple researchers found that cross-site trackers “help each other identify the user”.

“This is basically one tracker telling another tracker that ‘I think it’s user ABC’, at which point the second tracker tells a third tracker ‘Hey, Tracker One thinks it’s user ABC and I think it’s user XYZ’. We call this tracker collusion, and ITP 2.0 detects this behavior through a collusion graph and classifies all involved parties as trackers,” he explains, warning developers they should therefore “avoid making unnecessary redirects to domains that are likely to be classified as having tracking ability” — or else risk being mistaken for a tracker and penalized by having website data purged.

ITP 2.0 will also downgrade the referrer header of a webpage that a tracker can receive to “just the page’s origin for third party requests to domains that the system has classified as possible trackers and which have not received user interaction” (Apple specifies this is not just a visit to a site but must include an interaction such as a tap/click).

Apple gives the example of a user visiting ‘https://ift.tt/2sIGso8;, and that page loading a resource from a tracker — which prior to ITP 2.0 would have received a request containing the full referrer (which contains details of the exact product being bought and from which lots of personal information can be inferred about the user).

But under ITP 2.0, the referrer will be reduced to just “https://store.example/”. Which is a very clear privacy win.

Another welcome privacy update for Mac users that Apple announced yesterday — albeit, it’s really just playing catch-up with Windows and iOS — is expanded privacy controls in Mojave around the camera and microphone so it’s protected by default for any app you run. The user has to authorize access, much like with iOS.

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Intel teases a massive 28-core, single-socket chip that will launch later this year

Intel is feeling increasing pressure from AMD and Qualcomm and the competition will get even more intense if reports that Apple is working on its own chips to replace Intel processors in Macs are true. In an interview with Engadget last week before Computex, Intel’s client computing head Gregory Bryant said that Intel would reveal an even more powerful chip than last year’s showstopper, the 18-core, 36-thread Intel i9-7980XE.

As it turns out, Intel’s Computex keynote today in Taipei, Taiwan focused more on previewing future launches, but Bryant did reveal that later this year, the company will unveil a single-socket processor with a whooping 28-cores that will run at 5 GHz. In comparison, AMD’s Threadripper processor, one of Intel’s closest competitors, has 16-cores and 32 threads.

Bryant said the new chip will debut in the fourth quarter of this year but did not reveal pricing details (for reference, the Intel i9-7980XE is currently priced at $1,999, so it’s reasonable to assume the new chip will cost at least that).

Intel also released a new limited edition chip, the Core i7-8086K, which runs at 5.0 Ghz (a new milestone for its chips), to mark the anniversary of the first x86 processor, and will give away 8,086 of them in a sweepstake.

Other teasers included Intel’s plans for eighth-generation Core processors nicknamed Whiskey Lake, which will be made using Intel’s 14-nanometer technology and are designed for lightweight laptops that have little room for batteries or cooling fans. Another chip series, called Amber Lake, will also be made on the 14-nanometer production process and be intended for the thinnest laptops and tablets.

Intel also showcased a new iteration of the Optane solid-state drive, the 905P, which will offer up to 1.5 TB in a smaller M.2 design.

In non-chip news, Intel announced it will work with Sprint on devices from its hardware partners, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP , Lenovo and Microsoft, to run on 5G networks. They are expected to launch next year.

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ASUS’ new ZenBook Pro features a 5.5-inch touchscreen instead of a touchpad

The ASUS event today at Computex in Taipei, Taiwan had three main hooks: health, ergonomics and, most importantly, second screens. The headliner was the premium ZenBook Pro 14 and 15 (pictured above), the latest versions of ASUS’ premium notebook that feature a touchscreen where the touchpad would usually be

Meant to increase the laptops’ multitasking possibilities, the 5.5-inch ScreenPad functions as a second screen for things like messaging or apps including a calculator, a video and music player or calendar. It can also be used as a launchpad for apps on the ZenBook Pro’s main display or serve as a function command screen for Microsoft Office programs.

During his presentation, ASUS global PC and phone marketing senior director Marcel Campos said the ZenBook Pro 15 was designed with three kinds of professionals in mind: video makers, photographers and 3D designers. It has a 15.6-inch 4K UHD NanoEdge display with Delta E<2 Color Accuracy (ASUS says the Pro 15’s display has been validated by Pantone) and runs on an Intel Core i9 processor, 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and a GTX 1050 Ti graphics card. The Pro 15 is 18.9mm thick and weighs 1.88 kg. It will go on sale in mid-July starting at $2,299.

The 14-inch ASUS Zenbook Pro 14 also has a 5.5-inch ScreenPad and boosts an Intel Core i7 processor, 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and GTX 1050 MAX-Q GPU. It is 17.9 mm thick and weights in at 1.6kg.

Both of the latest Zenbook Pro models are built with a new hinge design ASUS calls ErgoLift, which props the laptop’s keyboards up at 5.5 degree angle when it is opened. ErgoLift is also built into the latest models of ASUS’ Zenbook and VivoBook series.

ASUS ZenBook S

The ZenBook S is 12.9-mm thick and weighs 1 kg and runs on an Intel Core i7 processor, with 16GB of memory, a 1TB PCIe SSD and up to 13.5 hours of battery life. It has a 4K UHD, 331ppi NanoEdge display and 2 USB-C drives. ASUS claims up to 13.5 hours of battery, which will be released on June 11 for $1,199.

ASUS VivoBook S15

The latest iterations of the VivoBook series, the 14-inch screen S14 and 15.6-inch S15, will come in 5 colors and also feature ErgoLift hinges. The S14 weights 1.4 kg and is 18-mm thick, while the S15 is 1.8 kg, 18-mm. Both have Intel Core i7-8550U or Intel Core i3-8130U processors, a NVIDIA GeForce MX150 or MX130 GPU and up to 16 GB of memory. The S15 will launch in the United States for $699 later this year.

ASUS VivoWatch

Other notable launches by ASUS include a blood pressure monitor that the company says is not a smartwatch or fitness tracker, even though it looks a lot like one. Called the ASUS VivoWatch, the wearable delivers real-time blood pressure data in 15 seconds, has a Gorilla Glass screen and ECG sensor on front of device and claims non-stop 28 day battery life.

Like last year, ASUS didn’t debut new ZenFones, though it did show off a collaboration with Intel and Microsoft called Project Precog, the main fruit of which will be a dual-screen laptop with AI-powered features that is supposed to launch next year. ASUS also held an event on Monday before the official start of Computex today, focusing on its Republic of Gamers line of PCs and peripherals. There it debuted the ROG phone, a rival to the Razer Phone for gamers, that also has a 90Hz display, meant for smoother display of animations, and a 2.96GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip. This was in addition to new gaming laptops, the Strix Scar II, which starts at $1,999, and the Strik Hero II, which will start at $1,699. Both have six-core Intel Coffee Lake Core i7-8750H or Core i5-8300H processors, 15.6-inch 144Hz 1080p “IPS-level” displays, up to 32GB of RAM, with a standard GPU of GTX 1060.

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Apple unveils a new set of ‘digital wellness’ features for better managing screen time

Apple has become the latest tech giant to prioritize digital wellbeing. At its Worldwide Developer Conference this morning, Apple announced a series of new controls that will allow iOS users to monitor how much time they spend on devices, set time limits on app usage, control the distraction of notifications, and control the device usage for their children.

The addition of these features was previously leaked by Bloomberg, but the details on how they worked wasn’t yet known.

In the upcoming version of the iOS 12 software for iPhone and iPad, Apple will include a series of features focused on digital wellness, starting with an upgraded Do Not Disturb feature that will help people who tend to look at their iPhone at night, and then find themselves distracted by the excessive notifications. With Do Not Disturb during bedtime, you can configure so your iPhone doesn’t show your notifications when you look at your phone at night, during hours you customize.

The feature will also help you at other times of the day, too  – for example, if you don’t want to be interrupted during class or a meeting.

In addition, this feature will include a new morning wakeup screen, that’s similarly bare of notifications so you are “gently eased into your day.”

In Control Center, you can configure when Do Not Disturb will end, as well.

Meanwhile, Apple is also introducing better ways to manage your notifications. Siri will even suggest to you which notifications you should turn off, based on which apps it knows you’re no longer using.

Siri can also prompt you to turn notifications off entirely or just delivery them quietly.

But even more useful, perhaps, is support for grouped notifications. That means notifications will not just be grouped by app, but also by topic and thread. You can tap into these groups and look at those from a particular app, and you can triage all those grouped notifications with a single swipe.

Another part of Apple’s digital wellbeing features includes reporting over how you spend time on your device.

This involves a weekly activity summary that shows you how you used your iPhone or iPad during the week. This full activity report will show you how much time your spending on your device and in apps, and how that breaks down per day. You can also see which apps are sending you the most notifications, so you can make better decisions about which apps’ notifications you may want to disable.

And another feature lets you set time limits for apps that take up your idle time, which you’d like to be more thoughtful about, in terms of your usage. When your time is about up, you’ll get an alert, and when the time is up, a new “Times Up” screen comes up. You can extend your time, if need be, Apple notes, but you’ll still get nudges to take a break.

Other new features are aimed at families who want to control screen time for their children.

This includes an activity report for parents about their kids’ device and app usage, and the option of creating allowances for kids.

A “Downtime” option will help kids to unplug, and parents can limit app usage by category or individual whitelisted apps. That way, parents can make sure critical apps will still work even during downtime, like the Phone app or Books.

However, during Downtime, notifications from apps aren’t displayed, and a badge appears on apps so kids know they can’t currently be used.

A Screen Time limit lets parents block off time when the device can’t be used at all, like around bedtime. This feature works with Family Sharing.

All this is configured by parents remotely from their own device, says Apple.

Apple is not the first tech company to rethink its responsibilities around device addiction.

At Google’s developer conference just a month ago, the company introduced its own set of time management tools for Android users. Its tools help users track screen time and app usage, and include new features like a “shush” mode which turns on Do Not Disturb by flipping the phone over, and a “wind down,” color reduction mode for bedtime.

In addition, other major tech companies have begun to consider digital wellbeing when updating their products.

For example, Facebook earlier in 2018 changed how its News Feed operates to reduce users’ time spent on the site in favor of wellbeing. And Facebook-owned Instagram just introduced its first time well spent feature, by informing users “you’re all caught up” when they’ve viewed all the new posts.

The idea is that people don’t know when to stop when in comes to devices and apps, and lack information and tools that can help them make decisions about how much time they want to spend on devices, versus how much time they’re actually spending.

 

The movement around digital wellbeing is a fairly recent shift for Silicon Valley, where companies until now have encouraged the design of software and apps that continually engage and addict users, without considering the psychological cost. Stress, anxiety, insomnia, distracted thoughts, inability to concentrate, emotional issues and more have been the result of these companies’ desire to keep users glued to their devices.

But now some early tech execs are pushing back.

Former Facebook president Sean Parker has openly worried about what social media was doing to kids’ brains and admitted Facebook was designed to exploit weakness in the human psyche to addict users. A former Google exec Tristan Harris launched a coalition of technologists and activists called the Center for Humane Technology, which aims to encourage the implementation of new design principles that help to put users back in control of their technology usage.

As the rumblings around digital addiction escalate, other trends are emerging as well – like the booming business for “mindfulness” apps and those that help users practice self-care, which includes putting the phone down and taking care of our other needs. Some have put this into practice in an extreme way, as of late – Simon Cowell said he actually gave up his mobile phone entirely, and feels so much happier as a result.

With its own new tools, Apple has the ability to set a new tone for the industry as a whole, given how others copy its designs – right down to the iPhone X notch. But in this case, mimicry would be a good thing.

The creation of a new culture around technology usage which stops measuring “time spent” and repeat sessions as metrics of success, would be something that ultimately benefits everyone.

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Will smart home tech make us care more about privacy?

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 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 Philips 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.

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Whither VR/AR?

“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:

That said this is kind of genius: "mixed reality backpacks" which are basically just wearable QR codes. Prediction: much-maligned QR codes, often camouflaged except to machine eyes, will become the de facto standard for meatspace-AR bridges. pic.twitter.com/iSsYqyzZoo

— Jon Evans (@rezendi) May 31, 2018

…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.

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