Gmail on mobile gets a fresh coat of Material Design paint

Gmail on mobile will soon get a new look. Google today announced that its mobile email apps for iOS and Android are getting a redesign that is in line with the company’s recent Material Design updates to Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Docs and Site. Indeed, the new UI will look familiar to anybody who has ever used the Gmail web app, including that versions ability to select three different density styles. You’ll also see some new fonts and other visual tweaks. In terms of functionality, the mobile app is also getting a few new features that put it on par with the web version.

Like on the desktop, you can now choose between the default view, as well as a comfortable and compact style.  The default view features a generous amount of white space and the same attachment chips underneath the email preview as the web version. The comfortable view does away with those chips and the compact view removes a lot of the space between messages to show you more emails at a glance.

I’ve been testing the new app for a bit and quickly settled on the comfortable view since I never found the attachment chips all that useful in day-to-day use.

In line with Google’s Material Design guidelines, all the styles feature relatively subtle but welcome animations that don’t take a lot of time but give you a couple of extra visual cues about what’s going on as you work your way to Inbox Zero.

Google also notes that the new design makes it a bit easier to switch between accounts. I’m not sure I agree (I definitely find the implementation of this in Inbox, which is sadly going away soon, easier to use), but if you regularly use this feature, it’s still easy enough to use. The switcher is now part of the search bar, though, which is a bit confusing and took me a moment to find.

One nice addition to the mobile app is that the large red phishing and scam warning box from the web version now also appears in the mobile app.

Say goodbye to Inbox by Gmail

from Android – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HEIwIN
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Apple unveils new in-store sessions covering photography, Garage Band, health and more

Apple is launching 58 new Today at Apple sessions to beef up its in-store education offerings for people who want to explore Apple’s products. The sessions, which cover video, photography, accessibility, coding, music, health and more, are free to attend and available at all of Apple’s retail stores across the world.

For the unveiling, Apple brought a group of reporters to its Apple Park campus in Cupertino last week. Throughout the day, Apple took us through sample Today at Apple sessions across Apple’s three categories: Skills, Walks and Labs. Skills are quick, thirty-minute sessions designed to teach you new techniques, Walks are actual physical walks with certain Apple products and services and Labs are 90-minute sessions where you create a project.

“So I think of Skills, Walks, Labs almost as, you know, Spanish 1, Spanish 2, Spanish 3,” Apple SVP of Retail Angela Ahrendts told a group of reports at Apple’s spaceship campus last week. “I mean, most things have green diamond, blue diamond, red, black diamond, I mean, there’s always levels.”

When Today at Apple first launched, it was a bit more open. Now, it’s a lot more structured, Ahrendts said.

Beats, art and jump-cuts

First up, I participated in a Garage Band Skills session, where we learned how to quickly create a beat using the beat sequencer. This session is geared toward people who are new to Apple’s tech and may need an introduction to the product or the software.

That is designed to prepare you for the next level of sessions, Walks. At Apple’s campus, we did a photo walk using the iPad Pro with Pencil and digital illustration app Procreate. The task at hand was to walk around Apple’s spaceship campus, snap photos of colorful scenes, capture that color in Procreate and then use the app’s numerous drawing tools to create a portrait. Here’s my masterpiece.

Walks, Apple Senior Director Karl Heiselman said, has been the most popular type of session.

“We think the reason why they’re so popular is you can’t do them on the Internet,” he said.

Last, but not least, we did a Lab where we learned how to create jump-cuts in the Clips app.

All of these sessions are entirely free to attend. Since launching Today at Apple almost two years ago, Apple has hosted 18,000 sessions per week. Millions of people have attended the sessions, so far, but it’s hard to get a totally accurate number, Ahrendts said.

“If you sign up, we have a number but the minute the session starts around the big screen, usually three times more people, you know, kind of hover over it,” Ahrendts said.

Apple’s in-store sessions are a way for the company to build brand loyalty and differentiate itself from the likes of Google and other hardware companies. While Apple’s online store is geared toward purchasing products and receiving customer support, its retail stores are designed to be focused on people and their experiences, Ahrendts said.

“If you’re taking the time to come into a store, we’re assuming you want a much more human experience,” she said.

Today is the biggest launch of sessions to date, with Ahrendts likening the update to its in-store sessions to updates to Apple’s digital software, “but you could assume there will always continue to be updates on our store software forever.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HEItg5

Report: Apple’s video streaming service to launch this spring

Apple’s new streaming service is poised to launch this spring, according to The Information, citing three unnamed sources. Tucked away in a report about Amazon’s plans to dial down its efforts with its subscription video offering, The Information noted that Apple has been telling entertainment partners to be ready for a mid-April launch for the streaming service. But the report also said the actual launch date could be within several weeks of that time frame.

A spring launch date would fall in line with earlier reports, which said Apple’s video streaming service would launch in the first half of 2019.

Apple CEO Tim Cook also vaguely confirmed its plans in this area, when speaking with CNBC earlier this month. He said that Apple would announce “material” new additions to its line of service offerings this year. These could include the upcoming news and magazine subscription service, which is also rumored for a spring arrival, and possibly new services in the health space.

Apple has been gearing up for its streaming service for some time, acquiring rights and making deals for a number of TV shows and movies — it even just brokered its first movie deal at Sundance 2019 on Monday.

However, Apple’s original content may not be the only thing to watch on the new service.

Apple may include an Amazon Channels-like offering as a part of its video service, the new report said. This, too, has been claimed previously by both Bloomberg and CNBC.

This Amazon Channels-like model has been copied throughout the competitive streaming market because of the low overhead and the big cut Amazon and Roku take on subscription sales — around 30 percent, The Information says.

For example, Roku this week launched its own video subscriptions in The Roku Channel; Sling TV rolled out a selection of premium à la carte channels last year; and media center software maker Plex aims to do the same in 2019. Walmart had been rumored to be entering this market via Vudu, its video marketplace that’s now its key focus for competing on streaming.

Even Facebook is considering an Amazon Channels-like offering, the report said.

Apple’s decision to move forward with a spring — or possibly, even mid-April — launch date would see its service going head-to-head with Disney+, the Disney-owned Netflix competitor that will be shown off to investors on April 11.

But what’s still unclear is how Apple will be marketing and selling its streaming offering — reports have varied on this front, claiming everything from a bundle with Apple Music and news to being entirely free.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2ScHRSF

The key number to look out for when Apple drops its Q1 earnings report later today

Apple, the company formerly known by its trillion-dollar market cap, will be reporting its holiday quarter Q1 2019 earnings today and it may just have the health of the global markets riding on how the financials look.

No pressure.

Earlier this month, Apple CEO Tim Cook issued a letter to investors, slashing Q1 guidance from a range of between $89 billion and $93 billion to just $84 billion. Given that the company revised its guidance just a few weeks ago, there isn’t much of a reason to expect a major revenue miss from the company though things could still go awfully wrong if the company is pessimistic in its Q2 outlook or misses elsewhere.

Apple lowers guidance on Q1 results, cites China trade tensions

Apple’s stock price cratered nearly 10 percent when Cook’s investor letter was released, a drop that represented the worst single day plunge for the company in more than five years. The stock has mostly recovered in the weeks since, but it is recovering from a 52-week low it reached earlier this month, a nearly 40 percent decline from its all-time-high in October.

Analysts are certainly going to be scouring the numbers today to get any sort of read into the health of the company’s mobile business moving forward, but they will have less data than ever to make these judgments off of.

During the company’s last investor call, Apple slid in an announcement that they would not be reporting unit sales in subsequent quarterly earnings reports, meaning that you won’t see any flashy “Apple sold XX.X iPhones this quarter” stories floating across your timeline. For the time being, revenue numbers are all we’re working with, though Apple contends that its financial success is growing less tightly correlated with unit sales, likely a result of the widening range of price points in its device categories and a general upward trend in these products’ average selling prices.

Apple will stop sharing numbers on how many devices it’s selling

Despite the unit sales shift, a lot of analysts will be staring long and hard at a single number this quarter anyway: Greater China revenue.

In Cook’s investor letter, he detailed that “economic weakness in some emerging markets” had “turned out to have a significantly greater impact than we had projected.” India and China have been two incredibly difficult markets for Apple to crack, while the company has definitely made healthy inroads with the iPhone in China, it seems growth is slowing there with Cook going as far to say that the bulk of the company’s guidance reduction was a result of iPhone revenue declines in Greater China.

Investors are going to be left having to judge whether revenue declines are a result of weariness surrounding ongoing U.S./China trade negotiations, a general slowing in China’s economic growth rate, or whether — perhaps most frightening to investors — Apple has just begun to lost its grip to Chinese consumer tech companies. It’s obviously most likely a combination, but you can expect Apple to point to external factors wherever possible.

Q1 2019 was also the first full quarter of sales for Apple’s three newest smartphone models, the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR, so we’ll likely get our best look at how the new models are faring and whether existing users are upgrading in developed markets. Cook seemed to hedge bets in his investment letter, noting that a number of macroeconomic trends and more dialed-in factors like consumers taking advantage of Apple’s $29 battery replacement program, impacted iPhone upgrades.

The iPhone’s ability to keep plugging along in its key markets is obviously going to be pretty critical for Apple. The headlines surrounding Apple’s transition to a services company has always been predicated by the fact that iPhone revenues were still climbing, it’s just that Services revenue was climbing even faster. If there prove to be some key heat sinks for Apple in its bread-and-butter hardware verticals, it’s apparent these trends would keep some downward pressure on the stock.

We’ll see how the Cupertino consumer tech giant does when it reports earnings after the bell today, check back here to see how Apple fares.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HAIoJZ

Apple makes its first Sundance buy with coming-of-age film ‘Hala’ from Jada Pinkett Smith

Amazon made its first deal at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival on Monday, with its acquisition of the global rights to a coming-of-age drama, Hala. The film, written and directed by Minhal Baig, and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, tells the story of a 17-year old girl, Hala, raised in a conservative Muslim household, who develops feelings for a classmate that puts her at odds with her traditional upbringing.

The girl, played by Geraldine Viswanathan (Blockers), will also find herself grappling with the knowledge of secret that threatens to unravel her family, according to a description of the film’s plot.

Other cast members include love interest Jesse (Jack Kilmer, Palo Alto); mother, Eram (Purbi Joshi); father, Zahid (Azad Khan); Gabriel Luna (Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.); and Anna Chlumsky (Veep).

The movie itself is an expansion on a short film Baig made back in 2016, which was named to the 2016 Black List.

Baig herself hails from Chicago, and was chosen in 2017 as a directing mentee for Ryan Murphy’s Half Initiative – Director Mentorship Program. She previously worked as a story editor on Bojack Horseman, and as a staff writer on the Hulu comedy, Untitled Ramy Youssef Project. She also worked on several shorts, including the precursor to Hala, After Sophie, and Pretext, as well as on music videos.

Of note, during production of the new movie, an inclusion rider was applied to bring women into many department head positions, and to 75 percent of critical below-the-line roles.

The film was co-financed and sold by Endeavor Content and produced by Overbrook Entertainment. Hala producers include Clarence Hammond, Jamal Watson and Minhal Baig, and executive producers Jada Pinkett Smith, Jana Babatunde-Bey, Marsha Swinton, James Lassiter, Caleeb Pinkett, Ari Lubet and Aaron Carr.

Apple has steadily been building up a slate of content for its forthcoming streaming service, set to launch this year. However, many of its deals to date have focused on TV series, not films.

It now has a long lineup of shows, including: a reboot of Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories, a Reese Witherspoon- and Jennifer Anniston-starring series set in the world of morning TV (which just added Steve Carell), an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books, a thriller starring Octavia Spencer, another Witherspoon comedy (now minus Kristen Wiig), a Kevin Durant-inspired scripted basketball show, a documentary about extraordinary homes, a series from La La Land’s director, a series about Emily Dickinson, a new Peanuts, a comedy from the It’s Always Sunny gang, Oprah stuff, kids content from Sesame Workshop, an M. Night Shymalan thriller, a sci-fi series from Battlestar Galactica’s Ron Moore, and many more.

But Apple has also started to pick up films.

It made first feature film buy last year, with the documentary The Elephant Queen, and more recently, it did a deal for a Sophia Coppola-directed movie starring Bill Murray and Rashida Jones.

Image credit: Sundance Institute 

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2HEb9FS

Starting with data centers, Carbon Relay is slashing energy costs and emissions using AI

Taiwanese technology giant Foxconn International is backing Carbon Relay, a Boston-based startup emerging from stealth today, that’s harnessing the algorithms used by companies like Facebook and Google for artificial intelligence to curb greenhouse gas emissions in the technology industry’s own backyard — the datacenter.

Already, the computing demands of the technology industry are responsible for 3% of total energy consumption — and the addition of new technologies like Bitcoin to the mix could add another half a percent to that figure within the next few years, according to Carbon Relay’s chief executive, Matt Provo.

That’s $25 billion in spending on energy per year across the industry, Provo says.

A former Apple employee, Provo went to Harvard Business School because he knew he wanted to be an entrepreneur and start his own business — and he wanted that business to solve a meaningful problem, he said.

Variability and dynamic nature of the data center relating to thermodynamics and the makeup of  a facility or building is interesting for AI because humans can’t keep up..

“We knew what we wanted to focus on,” said Provo of himself and his two co-founders. “All three of us have an environmental sciences background as well… We were fired up about building something that was true AI that has positive value… the risk associated [with climate change] is going to hit in our lifetime we were very inspired to build a company whose technology would have an impact on that.”

Carbon Relay’s mission and founding team including Thibaut Perol and John Platt (two Harvard graduates with doctorates in applied mathematics) was able to attract some big backers.

The company has raised $6 million from industry giants like Foxconn and Boston-based angel investors including Dr. James Cash — a director on the boards of Walmart, Microsoft, GE, and State Street; Black Duck Software founder, Douglas Levin; Karim Lakhani, a director on the Mozilla Corporation board; and Paul Deninger, a director on the board of the building operations management company, Resideo (formerly Honeywell).

Provo and his team didn’t just raise the money to tackle data centers — and Foxconn’s involvement hints at the company’s broader goals. “My vision is that commercial HVAC systems or any machinery that operates in a business would not ship without our intelligence inside of it,” says Provo.

What’s more compelling is that the company’s technology works without exposing the underlying business to significant security risks, Provo says.

“In the end all we’re doing are sending these floats… these values. These values are mathematical directions for the actions that need to be taken,” he says. 

Carbon Relay is already profitable, generating $4 million in revenue last year and on track for another year of steady growth, according to Provo.

Carbon Relay offers two products: Optimize and Predict, that gather information from existing HVAC devices and then control those systems continuously and automatically with continuous decision making.

“Each data center is unique and enormously complex, requiring its own approach to managing energy use over time,” said Cash, who’s serving as the company’s chairman. “The Carbon Relay team is comprised of people who are passionate about creating a solution that will adapt to the needs of every large data center, creating a tangible and rapid impact on the way these organizations do business.”

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GcmniF

Apple disables group calling in FaceTime in response to eavesdropping bug

Apple has disabled the group calling feature within its FaceTime calling service while it works on a patch to fix a nasty bug that allows eavesdropping.

Apple’s status page shows that group calling via FaceTime is “temporarily unavailable” — that’s a stop-gap move while the company to deliver a more permanent fix to the problem this week. We were unable to set up a group call when we tried, having earlier been able to do and replicate the issue.

All being well, this fix means that users don’t need to completely disable FaceTime due to the bug, but it is understandable if some people are hesitant to switch it on again.

The vulnerability was unearthed on Monday and it is activated when a user initiates a group call but adds themselves as a participant, as we explained in our earlier post:

The bug relies on what appears to be a nasty logic screwup in FaceTime’s group call system. While we’re opting to not outline the steps here, the bug seems to trick the recipient’s phone into thinking a group call is already ongoing. A few quick taps, and FaceTime immediately trips over itself and inexplicably fires up the recipient’s microphone without them actually accepting the call.

Weirder yet: if the recipient presses the volume down button or the power button to try to silence or dismiss the call, their camera turns on as well. Though the recipient’s phone display continues showing the incoming call screen, their microphone/camera are streaming.

Apple told us and other media that it plans to issue a more permanent solution in the coming days.

“We’re aware of this issue and we have identified a fix that will be released in a software update later this week,” a spokesperson said.

It’s interesting to note that the group calling feature actually took longer than planned to arrive in iOS follow a hiccup. It was added then removed from the beta version of iOS 12 in August while it took time to roll out to all users. The feature was absent when iOS 12 shipped to all in September and, instead, it arrived with the launch of iOS 12.1 in October. Apple never provided a reason for the delay.

The bug is an embarrassing incident for Apple, which has long emphasized its focus on privacy as a business and within its products. That included a recent banner at CES which triumphantly proclaimed: “What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone.”

from iPhone – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2Bbmx6i