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Apple is seen by some as critical to the future of augmented reality, despite limited traction for ARKit so far and its absence from smartglasses (again, so far). Yet Facebook, Microsoft and others are arguably more important to where the market is today.
While there are more AR platforms than just these companies, they represent the top of the pyramid for three different types of AR roadmap. And while startup insurgents could make a huge difference, big platforms can exert disproportionate influence on the future of tech markets. Let’s see what this could mean for the future of AR.
Facebook: The messaging play
Facebook has talked about its long-term potential to launch smartglasses, but in 2020, its primary presence in the AR market is as a mobile AR platform (note: Facebook is also a VR market leader with Oculus). Although there are other ways to define them, mobile AR platforms can be thought of as three broad types:
If you’re ever felt like there just weren’t enough emoji options to express how you’re feeling, a new addition to Google’s Gboard keyboard, launching today, aims to help. Gboard for Android is introducing a feature called “Emoji Kitchen” which allows users to mash up different emoji then use them as stickers when messaging.
The stickers will work across apps, including Gmail, Messages by Google, Messenger, Snapchat, Telegram, WhatsApp, and others.
For example, you could add glasses to the various smiley emoji, add a cowboy hat to a ghost, have a robot cry tears, put a monkey face on a cactus (idk either), make the happy poop emoji express love with a heart, and so on.
To be clear, you can’t just mash up any of the thousands of emoji with any other one — it only works with those Google supports, which are mainly variations on the smileys. That’s because the emoji aren’t being mashed up in real-time through some sort of A.I. system. Instead, Google designers have created this set of mashups for Gboard, specifically.
To use the option, you first tap on any smiley emoji and Emoji Kitchen will show which mashups are available to you.
The app has been well-received by Android users, as a result — despite being years old, it’s still in a top 50 app in the Tools category and has over a billion downloads worldwide to date. It’s also now the default keyboard on some Android devices, like Google’s Pixel smartphones.
However, Google’s larger goal with Gboard is to make it compelling enough for users to keep it installed, giving the company a way to bring Google’s properties, like Search, directly to the end-user. That’s more important than ever at a time when mobile search has become bigger than desktop. Unfortunately for Google, mobile search has been much more expensive, as the company now relies on deals with mobile device makers, like Apple, to make its search engine the default.
Gboard gives Google another way to hedge its bets — by skipping the need to use a browser app to get to Google. Users can just use their keyboard instead.
Google says Emoji Kitchen rolls out today to Android users.
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Apple’s built-in voice assistant won’t help you figure out who to vote for, but it will be able to update you on different races around the U.S. during election season as well as deliver live results as votes are counted. The new feature, announced today, is part of Apple News’ 2020 election coverage, which also includes a series of curated news, resources, and data from a variety of sources, with the goal of serving users on both sides of the political spectrum.
With the added Siri integration, you’ll be able to ask the assistant both informational queries, plus those requiring real-time information.
For example, you may ask Siri something like “When are the California primaries?,” which is a more straightforward question, or “Who’s winning the New Hampshire primaries?,” which requires updated information.
Siri will speak the answers to the question in addition to presenting the information visually, which makes the feature useful from an accessibility standpoint, too.
The live results are being delivered via the Associated Press, Apple says. The company is also leveraging the AP’s real-time results in its Apple News app in order to give county-by-county results and a national map tracking candidate wins by each state primary, among other things.
As it has done in previous years, Apple’s news editorial team has added special coverage of the U.S. election to its app, by working with news partners. This year, Apple’s coverage comes from news organizations inducing ABC News, CBS News, CNN, FiveThirtyEight, Fox News, NBC News, ProPublica, Reuters, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, TIME, USA Today and others.
In Apple News, readers are able to learn about candidates and their positions, track major election moments — like the debates, conventions, and Super Tuesday — and stay on top of election news and analysis all the way through election night in the U.S. and the subsequent presidential inauguration. A partnership with ABC News announced in December will also bring video coverage, including real-time streams, into the app.
The Siri feature draws on Apple News for its answers and offers a link to “Full Coverage” in the Apple News app, if you want to learn more.
The feature appears to still be rolling out. In tests, Siri was able to answer some questions but defaulted to web results for others, as before. A staggered rollout is standard for Apple launches, however, as new features take time to reach all users.
Companies like Apple, Amazon and Google do not always disclose every acquisition they make, especially when the companies in question are little fish in the big tech pond. But in aggregate, all that M&A could pose bigger questions about how they are using their financial power and market influence in anticompetitive ways.
That idea is the subject of the latest announcement from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which today issued Special Orders to five big tech firms — Alphabet (including Google), Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft — “requiring them to provide information about prior acquisitions not reported to the antitrust agencies under the Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Act.”
The five companies will need to come clean and report on every deal they have made — whether or not the media has spilled the beans on the acquisition or not — including the terms (that is, price and other financial details), scope, structure and purpose of each transaction made between January 1, 2010 and December 31, 2019.
“The orders will help the FTC deepen its understanding of large technology firms’ acquisition activity, including how these firms report their transactions to the federal antitrust agencies, and whether large tech companies are making potentially anticompetitive acquisitions of nascent or potential competitors that fall below HSR filing thresholds and therefore do not need to be reported to the antitrust agencies,” the FTC said in a notice on the investigation.
The FTC has not ruled out whether it would retroactively do anything around any of those past acquisitions.
“It’s conceivable we could go back,” and level enforcement actions “to deal with transactions,” said FTC Chairman Joe Simons in a press call today.
But it also seems to be educating themselves. In a further statement, the FTC describes how it wants to use the information to better inform its policy, it said, and decide how to reform its policies to fit market practice in a better way.
“The FTC has a statutory right under the HSR Act to review acquisitions and mergers over a certain size before they are consummated, and the study will help the Commission consider whether additional transactions should be subject to premerger notification requirements,” it noted. “The orders will also contribute broadly to the FTC’s understanding of technology markets, and thereby support the FTC’s program of vigorous and effective enforcement to promote competition and protect consumers in digital markets.”
“Digital technology companies are a big part of the economy and our daily lives,” Simons said in a statement. “This initiative will enable the Commission to take a closer look at acquisitions in this important sector, and also to evaluate whether the federal agencies are getting adequate notice of transactions that might harm competition. This will help us continue to keep tech markets open and competitive, for the benefit of consumers.”
Essentially what it will mean is that these smaller deals will need to be reported in the same way that these big companies report larger deals. Up to now, companies do not have to report certain details about deals — or, indeed, the deals themselves — unless they have a material impact on the company, as specified by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act. (These have incidentally also been modified in the last month to set a slightly higher notification threshold.)
Some, like Apple, have even developed a special stock statement that it will issue in cases where it does come clean on a specific deal when presented with enough evidence of it having happened. “Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans,” it likes to note.
The HSR Act, as it’s known, does leave a lot of wiggle room, where acquisitions, when they are reported, can be noted in the vaguest of terms without a lot of detail as to specific purposes, so it’s not clear what kind of information we will get out of this. Nor is it known just how much of the FTC’s new orders will trickle out as public information.
But the FTC notes that what it will be requiring includes the same kinds of details that are typically requested around HSR, including “information and documents on their corporate acquisition strategies, voting and board appointment agreements, agreements to hire key personnel from other companies, and post-employment covenants not to compete. Last, the orders ask for information related to post-acquisition product development and pricing, including whether and how acquired assets were integrated and how acquired data has been treated.”
Two years after getting a $100 million commitment from 21st Century Fox to build a mobile-based live streaming platform that could compete with Twitch, the startup Caffeine has scored another coup by partnering with the biggest name in music — Drake.
With buying power of Fox (now owned by The Walt Disney Co.), a Murdoch on the board (Lachlan), and an exclusive contract with Drake, Caffeine is hoping to take its streaming service beyond gamers and sports and become the platform for live streaming entertainment of all stripes.
“The combination of the Caffeine platform with a content studio that benefits from Fox Sports’ expertise in live events and programming will help position Caffeine to deliver compelling experiences in esports, video gaming and entertainment,” said Lachlan Murdoch, in a 2018 statement. “We are excited to partner with Caffeine and build something special for fans in the growing live social streaming esports and gaming space.”
The multi-year collaboration with Drake, terms of which were not disclosed, will debut with the launch of Ultimate Rap League, a battle rap platform which was distributed on its own app as well as through YouTube.
As part of the deal Caffeine will live stream and co-produce new rap battles alongside Ultimate Rap League. It’s the first property that Drake ad Caffeine are jointly bringing to market and presages other live events and content that Drake will shepherd to production, the company said.
“I’ve always loved URL and admired what Smack and his team have been able to create, it just wasn’t accessible. It’s exciting to be in a position where I’m able to bring Caffeine to the table and help provide URL with the tools they need to elevate the viewing experience and make it more accessible to fans,” said Drake in a statement.
Drake has a history with SmackURL. He was called out to battle rap on the platform back in 2015, but declined to show.
Initially created by Troy “Smack White” Mitchell as an event series in New York’s Queens borough, home of hip-hop artists Nas, Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Mobb Deep, and A Tribe called Quest, the Ultimate Rap League boasts a roster of boosters including Busta Rhymes, Q-Tip, Joe Budden, Jay-Z, Beanie Sigel, Kid Capre, Lupe Fiasco, Mos Def and Method Man.
“We are proud to partner with Drake and support him as he brings his vision and channel to life,” said Ben Keighran, Caffeine’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. “As a platform, Caffeine gives Drake the freedom to pursue his creative ideas and we are excited about the whole slate of fresh content that he will share with his communities.”
Keighran, a former wunderkind product designer at Apple, has grounded Caffeine’s pitch in the technology that the company has developed from its Silicon Valley headquarters to stream live video. The company boasts that its streams are 15 seconds to a minute faster than other streaming platforms. In addition, the company prides itself on its moderation technologies and use of human moderators to ensure a zero-tolerance policy for bullying, hate speech and racism, the company said.
Caffeine bases its appeal to artists on a revenue share model that is more generous than other streaming platforms like Twitch or Mixer — a model based on in-app purchases and tipping.
Drake may be the biggest artist to join the Caffeine platform, but he’s far from the only one. The company’s roster of talent includes the musicians Offset and Doja Cat, athletes like JuJu Smith-Schuster, Collin Sexton, and Kyle Kuzma and gamers including Cartoonz, Ohmwrecker and Crainer.
When Ubisoft first approached “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” stars Rob McElhenney and Charlie Day about creating a new show set in the video game industry, McElhenney said they weren’t interested — at least, not initially.
“Anything that we had ever seen in the past, from a movie or television show perspective, the industry was always presented in such a negative light,” he told me. “It was the butt of the joke. The characters themselves were derided, and it was very specific to geek culture … We just had no interest in that.”
And yet McElhenney, Day and “It’s Always Sunny” writer Megan Ganz ended up creating “Mythic Quest: Raven’s Banquet,” which premieres on Apple TV+ this weekend. McElhenney explained that a visit to the Montreal offices of Ubisoft — publisher of “Assassin’s Creed”, “Prince of Persia” and other major game franchises — changed his mind.
“Once we went to Montreal and met all of the devs that worked at Ubisoft, that all work in communion to make these games, [we realized] how many different, disparate personalities there really were and how much they were all all united by their love of games,” he said.
So McElhenney decided that “this just seemed like a really interesting and new place to set those kinds of stories.” And just as he assumes most “Sunny” viewers aren’t tuning in to learn the fate of Paddy’s Pub (the Philadelphia bar run by the show’s main characters), “The approach we took was, the general audience is not going to care about the success or failure of a video game, they’re going to care about the interpersonal dynamics of the characters themselves.”
Ganz also said she didn’t know much about video game development when McElhenney first approached her about collaborating on the show, but she started to see parallels between that world and a TV writers’ room.
“Except that instead of everyone being a writer, they all have very specialized jobs that they care about, like just the writing or just the design or just the money that’s being made,” she said. “And I thought, well, that’s really fun because that presents something that’s even more complex than your typical writers’ room — you have all these sort of Greek gods that all control their very specific part of the world.”
Of course, “Mythic Quest” had a writers’ room of its own, which Ganz said was divided evenly between people with deep knowledge of the industry (like Ashly Burch, who’s done extensive voiceover work on games like “Team Fortress 2” and “Fortnite,” and who also plays a game tester on the show), and those like Ganz herself, “who maybe played casually when they were younger” but ultimately didn’t know much about that world.
“We did that because ultimately, if you come up with a script or a joke that satisfies both of those people, then you’re going to satisfy as much of the audience as you possibly can,” she said.
The goal, she added, was not “pandering to the video game community,” but rather “to be authentic and not make fun of them, but also be authentic in terms of talking about some of the toxicity that happens in the video game space, the gender dynamics that are at play.”
It wasn’t just a learning process for the writers. F. Murray Abraham (who won an Oscar for playing Salieri in “Amadeus”) plays an eccentric science fiction writer who works on the game, and he told me that when it came to video games, “I had no idea. I knew something, I was aware of it, but not the size of it, the success of it, the reach of it, my God.”
All the “Mythic Quest” writers and actors I spoke to said that their approach has evolved significantly from the original pilot script. For example, there’s McElhenney’s character Ian Grimm, the creative director of the massively multiplayer online roleplaying game that gives the show its name.
“In the first draft of the script, we made Ian a little bit more of just a straight buffoon,” McElhenney said. “We read through it and we realized it just felt false. It was missing something, that if we didn’t want this to feel like a live action cartoon — like ‘Sunny’ often does, which is by design — and we wanted these people to feel real and authentic, that we needed to believe that he really should have that position.”
The question, then was how to make him competent, but in a funny way. They went with a pilot episode where Ian and lead engineer Poppy (played by Charlotte Nicdao) end up in a passionate debate about the properties of the game’s brand new shovel. While that debate will probably seem silly to most viewers, McElhenney said it also conveys “that thing that so many people in the creative arts have, or don’t have — the ability to see the most minor detail, the reason why something is going to work, or why it might not work.”
Throughout that process, the writers also tapped Ubisoft for advice. Jason Altman, Ubisoft’s head of film and television, is an executive producer on the show, and he recalled bringing in different team members to help the writers understand everything that goes into the development process.
In addition, Ubisoft Red Storm (the studio behind the Tom Clancy game franchise) pitched in by building the game segments that we actually see on the show.
“What they created were actually small gameplay sandboxes that we could bring to set, and the actors could sit and play with them and it would actually inform their performances,” Altman said.
He acknowledged that there were challenges, like helping the “Mythic Quest” writers realize that the developers needed time to do their work — but ultimately, he said the Red Storm team had “a great time” creating something that gave the show “a real sense of authenticity.”
Ganz and McElhenney also had plenty of praise for the developers, particularly for their openness to adding silly comedic elements like ridiculous gouts of blood. McElhenney pointed to one episode that required them to create “a really believable Sieg Heil Nazi salute.”
“There’s no way they’re going to go for that, it’s going to take a follow-up phone call,” he recalled thinking. “And they were like, ‘Okay great.’ And I was like, ‘Wait, what do you mean, okay great?’ They said, ‘No, we do Nazis all the time’ — and we put this in the show — ‘because Nazis make the best villains, everybody hates Nazis.”
I was also curious about why the show focuses on the development of an ongoing MMORPG, rather than launching a new game. Altman had an answer for me: “I think it represents what’s happening within the game industry. You don’t just launch a game and forget it, the development team lives with it, you’ve got live services and live events. It’s the way games are operated right now.”
Plus, he said it reflects another aspect of development, the fact that teams “don’t just spend six months together, they spend years together, and the success that they create together binds them together.”
David Hornsby — who, like McElhenney, is both a writer, executive producer and actor on the show — told me that the writers’ understanding of show’s distribution also evolved, since Apple TV+ hadn’t launched (or even been officially announced) when “Mythic Quest” first got picked up.
“We weren’t sure if it wasn’t going to be binge-able from the start, we heard incrementally,” Hornsby said. “Apple is good at keeping secrets.”
Ultimately, they did find out that all nine episodes would drop at once, which Hornsby said led them to structure the season “like a movie — we know where we are going to be in the middle of the season, the story arcs for each of our characters.”
I also brought up Apple TV+ with McElhenney, who said the team had offers from a number of studios.
“It was scary,” he said. “And I remember we were discussing it, we were like, do we go with a known quantity? Or do we jump into the waters of mystery, because even though it’s the biggest company in the world, you don’t know if it’s going to work.”
So why choose Apple? “We just felt like, if you’re gonna bet on somebody, why not bet on a trillion dollars? They seem to have the resources and something figured out.”
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industry is as hot as ever with a record 204 billion downloads in 2019 and $120 billion in consumer spending in 2019, according to App Annie’s recently released “State of Mobile” annual report. People are now spending 3 hours and 40 minutes per day using apps, rivaling TV. Apps aren’t just a way to pass idle hours — they’re a big business. In 2019, mobile-first companies had a combined $544 billion valuation, 6.5x higher than those without a mobile focus.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you keep up with the latest news from the world of apps, delivered on a weekly basis.
This week, we look at the app making headlines for causing a disaster in Iowa, TikTok’s power to move apps up the charts, all the news from Apple’s new betas, the plan from Chinese mobile giants to take on Google Play, subscription scams, plus app trends and other news.
Headlines
Iowa’s caucus app was a disaster
A smartphone app really screwed things up in Iowa. The app, built by Shadow Inc., was designed to help the Iowa Democratic Party tabulate votes from the caucuses. But instead of helping, the app failed, causing a massive delay of almost an entire day. According to The New York Times, the app was quickly put together in just the past two months — and wasn’t properly tested.
