iOS 12 will automatically share your iPhone’s location with 911 centers

Apple this morning announced a new feature in iOS 12 which will automatically share your location with first responders when U.S. users dial 911 using their iPhone. The move is meant to address the problems with dialing emergency services from a cell phone, where outdated infrastructure has made it difficult to obtain a mobile caller’s location quickly and accurately, Apple says.

Approximately 80 percent of 911 calls come from cell phones, however, which is why it’s critical to fix this system.

In 2015, Apple launched HELO (Hybridized Emergency Location), which would estimate a caller’s location using GPS and Wi-Fi Access points. Today, Apple said it will additionally use RapidSOS’s Internet Protocol-based data pipeline to securely share this HELO location data with 911 centers, to improve the response times even further.

RapidSOS’s technology integrates with existing software installed at many 911 centers, which is how they’ll receive the data.

Apple also noted the FCC is requiring mobile operators to locate callers within 50 meters at least 80 percent of the time by 2021. Its location services exceed this requirement today, and now 911 centers will have access to the same accuracy.

In typical Apple fashion, the company stressed the new feature’s data privacy. User location data cannot be shared for non-emergency purposes, and only the 911 center will have access to the location during the call itself.

The 911 support was not announced during Apple’s software-heavy WWDC keynote earlier this month, where a number of other privacy, security and A.I.-powered features were introduced as coming later this year in iOS 12. Typically, the new version of Apple’s mobile operating system is release to the public during September, and that should hold true for iOS 12 as well.

“Communities rely on 911 centers in an emergency, and we believe they should have the best available technology at their disposal,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, in a statement about the new feature. “When every moment counts, these tools will help first responders reach our customers when they most need assistance.”

 

 

 

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After twenty years of Salesforce, what Marc Benioff got right and wrong about the cloud

Apple’s new Mac ads show that even Grimes uses dongles

Apple has launched an new advertising campaign for the Mac called “behind the Mac”. In this campaign, the company is sharing user stories of people using Mac for work, creative projects and accessibility reasons.

The Mac is a versatile platform. People use it for boring tasks, such as checking emails and browsing the web. But you can also use it for countless of other things. Apple wants to show you what you can do with a Mac beyond Word and Excel.

Apple has shared 4 videos today. The first one is a 60-second recap of the three other videos. Each standalone video is a portrait of someone who is using a Mac every day. There will be 12 portraits in total on Apple’s website.

Peter Kariuki is a developer who created an iPhone app to improve road safety in Rwanda. Bruce Hall is a photographer who is legally blind and uses photography to see more details of the outside world. And Grimes is one of the most interesting music artists out there.

There are a few interesting things to note. All three are using laptops. It’s clear that MacBooks have become the most popular computers from Apple. It doesn’t mean that Apple should abandon the iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Mini and Mac Pro. But only a fraction of Apple’s customers will buy them.

It’s also interesting to see that none of the Macs have been updated in the last twelve months. Apple has nothing new to sell on the Mac front. And it’s a bit worrying that the company is starting a new advertising campaign right now. Maybe there won’t be any Mac update for at least a few months.

And if you’re currently using a recent MacBook or MacBook Pro, you might be using stupid dongles right now to plug accessories to USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 ports. The good news is that, yes, even Grimes has to use dongles.

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Google brings offline neural machine translations for 59 languages to its Translate app

Currently, when the Google Translate apps for iOS and Android has access to the internet, its translations are far superior to those it produces when it’s offline. That’s because the offline translations are phrase-based, meaning they use an older machine translation technique than the machine learning-powered systems in the cloud that the app has access to when it’s online. But that’s changing today. Google is now rolling out offline Neural Machine Translation (NMT) support for 59 languages in the Translate apps.

Today, only a small number of users will see the updated offline translations, but it will roll out to all users within the next few weeks.

The list of supported languages consists of a wide range of languages. Because I don’t want to play favorites, here is the full list: Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bengali, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian, Creole, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jannada, Korean, Lavtian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Marathi, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese and Welsh.

In the past, running these deep learning models on a mobile device wasn’t really an option since mobile phones didn’t have the right hardware to efficiently run them. Now, thanks to both advances in hardware and software, that’s less of an issue and Google, Microsoft and others have also found ways to compress these models to a manageable size. In Google’s case, that’s about 30 to 40 megabytes per language.

It’s worth noting that Microsoft also announced a similar feature for its Translator app earlier this year. It uses a very similar technique but for the time being, it only supports about a dozen languages.

 

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Apple previews the Apple Books app replacing iBooks on iOS this fall

First previewed during WWDC, Apple has just given us another peek at the iBooks revamp (a version of which has been floating around for some time now). Apple Books is launching on iOS during the fall. The “biggest books redesign ever” features a newer, cleaner UI, with a larger focus on cover art than its predecessor.

Also new here is the inclusion of an editorial section. That’s similar to what the company’s been doing with services like Apple News and the App Store, bringing human writers in to editorially curate book picks. Audiobooks are being served up more prominently here, as well, with the addition of a devoted tab.

The new Reading Now tab, meanwhile, is pretty much what it sounds like, offering up a place to jump back into titles users are currently reading/listening to. It also houses a Want to Read wishlist and curated recommendations, based on your reading habits. The bottom is rounded out with Book Store and Library tags.

The new version presents a conscious uncoupling from iTunes, from which various multimedia offerings have been spun off over the past several years as standalones. It also represents a clear stab the Kindle. Amazon’s offering has long been the leader in digital books, and its 2008 Audible acquisition has helped make audiobooks a much more prominent part of the equation.

The new version of the app is arriving in the fall, with Book Store content available in 51 countries. The macOS version of the app is also being renamed Apple Books, for the sake of consistency.

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The largest buys of tech’s Big Five: a look at M&A deals

In startup land, the mandate is to get bought, go public or die trying.

And, as far as getting bought goes, one of tech’s Big Five could be a desirable acquirer. They have a lot of weight to throw around. Alphabet (the parent company of Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft account for a titanic amount of market value — close to $3.9 trillion at time of writing. At least, that’s according to Crunchbase News’s dashboard of notable tech stocks.

When challenged by one another, these hulking behemoths of the tech sector more often fight than flee. And when challenged by a scrappy upstart, it is likely that they will gobble up the talent, technology and business of any aspiring competitor. It’s the circle of life.

And it’s those acquisitions we’re going to look at here.

Taken together, tech’s Big Five account for a relatively small portion of the overall M&A market. The chart below shows the number of acquisitions made by members of tech’s Big Five from 2007 through 2017. (For reference, Crunchbase records thousands of acquisitions per year.)

But what the Big Five lack in quantity is made up for in size. If you’ll forgive the big-game pun, acquisitions by Big Five account for a lion’s share of big deals in dollar terms.

So, for each of the Big Five, let’s see just how big some of those deals got. We base our analysis on Crunchbase data that, whenever possible, has been cross-checked with public news sources and regulatory filings. We’ll proceed from the most valuable (in market capitalization terms) to the least.

Apple

Despite being the most valuable among the Big Five, Apple’s acquisitions are not just among the smallest of the bunch, but also the least disclosed. In other words, out of the deals listed in Crunchbase and elsewhere, most of them don’t have dollar values attached to them. This may speak to Apple’s secretiveness and its tendency to build most of its products and services in-house.

Apple’s biggest M&A deal to date was its $3 billion buyout of Beats Electronics, which is perhaps best known for its flashy wireless headphones. But it’s not the headphones that caught Apple’s eye. Rather, it was its streaming service, which Apple CEO Tim Cook told ReCode’s Peter Kafka was “the first subscription service that really got it right.”

Including the Beats deal, here are the largest M&A deals we were able to find.

Amazon

It’s hard to find a business vertical Amazon isn’t somehow involved in. Web hosting? Check. White-labeled staples like batteries and paper towels? Check. Doorbells? Check. They apparently sell books online, too.

Now, in all seriousness, Amazon’s $13.7 billion buyout of Whole Foods in June 2017 brought the online shopping giant squarely into the world of brick-and-mortar retail as well. And while the Whole Foods deal was Amazon’s biggest splurge to date, it’s certainly not alone in the company’s collection of commerce company buys. These include Amazon’s buyout of Quidsi (the parent company of Diapers.com and Soap.com, which was the first to offer the free two-day shipping for which Amazon Prime is famous), footwear and clothing retailer Zappos, and Middle Eastern e-commerce site Souq.com.

Alphabet

Of tech’s big five, Alphabet is the most acquisitive, and it makes the most corporate venture investments. It’s also the company with the most complicated corporate structure. Recall that Alphabet is the parent organization of Google, and it’s Google which has made the surpassing majority of Alphabet acquisitions.

But for all the resources Alphabet has put toward M&A, its acquisitiveness resulted in a rather mixed bag of results. Most glaring amongst its duds is its $3.2 billion buyout of Nest Labs and, relatedly, the $555 million spent on Dropcam (which would later be rebranded as part of Nest’s home security offering).

Nest reportedly failed to meet revenue expectations and seize a dominant position in the connected home market, ceding ground to incumbents like Honeywell. And there are plenty of scrappy upstarts nipping Nest’s heels in markets like home security, smart doorbells and smart locks.

This being said, then-Google’s YouTube deal is likely Alphabet’s best acquisition from an ROI perspective. Although Alphabet doesn’t break out YouTube’s revenue, some good estimates and public market comps suggest the video streaming unit could be worth a cool $100 billion.

Microsoft

Microsoft made news this week by announcing its acquisition of software version control and code hosting platform GitHub for $7.5 billion. And, at this point, it seems like Microsoft is timing announcements of its biggest deals just to dunk on Apple. Myke Hurley, a tech podcaster and the founder of Relay FM, observed on Twitter that Microsoft’s 2016 acquisition of LinkedIn and its GitHub deal were both announced on the opening day of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

Apart from cheeky timing, you will notice that Microsoft has made the largest M&A deals among tech’s Big Five.

Facebook

Of the Big Five companies in tech, Facebook’s M&A patterns seem to be the most binary. Its deals are either tiny or humongous. There isn’t much of a middle ground.

Some of Facebook’s biggest acquisitions present a case study of acquiring one’s way to nearly insurmountable market dominance. Although its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp didn’t cause much of a stir at the time, today these deals are seen as a cautionary case for current and future antitrust regulators.

On a brighter note, though, Facebook’s M&A record is also a lesson in the “buy versus build” dilemma many companies face. It’s sometimes more expedient to buy a company (and, critically, its engineering team) than to build new features from scratch. For many of the smaller deals listed here, we can see that Facebook opted to buy.

The Big Five’s acquisitions in perspective

At the very top of the tech food chain, the Big Five are in a unique position, and not just as rainmakers for VCs seeking liquidity.

Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft are some of the most powerful companies operating today, and their acquisitions tell part of the story of how they got to prominent positions in the first place.

Although some acquisitions appear to come out of the blue, it’s important to remember that one doesn’t just buy a company for the heck of it. There’s a strategic motivation for these deals at the time they’re made. And when these deals are struck, they can telegraph the company’s future plans.

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LIV is Kickstarting a beefy and bold chronograph for race lovers

LIV Watches is a crowdfunding darling with a number of Kickstarted watches under its belt. Now it’s offering a unique set of watches to backers, including the Liv Genesis GX-AC, an automatic chronograph with date. The watch runs a Sellita Caliber SW500, visible through the see-through back, and features a screw down crown and massive metal pushers.

The company prides itself on the size of its watches and this piece is no exception. The GX-AC isn’t wildly big – at 46mm it’s just a bit bigger than most Android Wear watches – and it fits nicely thanks to a rounded rubber band that hugs the top and bottom of the case. There is a small running seconds hand at nine-o’clock and registers for minutes and hours at noon and six.

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If you’ve seen automatic chronographs before you know what you’re in for – a standard movement encased in a special steel case that is designed to appeal to a certain demographic. LIV is also Kickstarting a number of other watches, including a Day-Date chronograph that is flight-inspired and a diver, so check them out. However, if you’re into this piece then you’re in for a treat. It starts at $790, far below most mechanical chronographs I’ve seen, and the workmanship and quality of this piece is quite nice.

I wore it a little over the past few weeks and found it very comfortable and easy to read. The running seconds hand is a bit small and the lume is limited to the pips and hands but as a fashion/everyday wear piece it’s excellent. If you particularly like the style – F1 racing meets Kylo Ren – then you’re probably going to like this thing and since they’ve already surpassed their goal and hit $602,000 you can expect delivery of your perk.

Again, watches like this one require a specific style and taste. The LIV is reminiscent of Alpina and Tissot in its case style and decoration and it pays homage to racing and speed. Grabbing a Swiss made watch for under $1,000 is a treat and this is a good example of the species and well worth a look.

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