Friday, 20 December 2019

Apple reportedly working on satellite technology for direct wireless iPhone data transmission

Apple is said to be working on satellite technology, having hired a number of aerospace engineers to form team along with satellite and antenna designers, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report notes that this is an early-stage secret project that could still be scrapped, but that the purpose of the team and its work is to potentially develop communications satellite technology that can send and receive data directly to user devices, including the iPhone, in a bid to make it possible to connect Apple devices without the need of a third-party network.

Bloomberg says that Apple won’t necessarily be building its own satellite hardware – it could instead be developing just th re transmission devices or ground-based equipment to make use of data transmissions for orbital communications equipment. The tech could be used for actually delivering data directly to Apple devices, or it could just connect them to each other independent of a cellphone carrier data network. It could also be used to provide more accurate location services for better maps and guidance, the report says.

Apple is said to have hired both executives and engineers from the aerospace and satellite industry, including Skybox Imaging alumni Michael Trela and John Fenwick who are leading the team. These two formerly headed up Google’s satellite and spacecraft divines. New hired include former Aerospace Corporation executive Ashley Moore Williams, as well as key personnel from the wireless networking and content delivery network industries.

The idea of providing a data network from space direct to devices seems preposterous on its face – most data communications satellites require communication with ground stations that then relay information with end-point devices. But it’s not an unheard of concept, and in fact we wrote earlier this year about Ubiquitlink, a company that’s focused on building a new kinds of low-Earth orbit communications satellite constellation that can communicate directly with phones.

Ubiquitlink’s initial goals spell out what a supplemental direct satellite communication network could provide on top of regular iPhone carrier service: The startup company hopes to essentially provide global roaming with a connection level that probably isn’t anywhere near as fast as you’d get from a ground-based network, but is usable for communication at least – and not dependent on local infrastructure. It could also act as a redundant fallback that ensures no matter what your main network status, you’ll always be able to do less data-intensive operations, like texting and calling.

While there’s obviously a lot of unknowns remaining in what Apple is working on or what it will eventually amount to, if anything, it’s very interesting to consider the possibility that it could offer a level of always-on connectivity that’s bundled with iPhones and available even when your primary network is not, that offers persistent access to features like iMessage, voice calls and navigation – leaving streaming and other data-intensive applications to your standard carrier rate plan.



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Apple reportedly working on satellite technology for direct wireless iPhone data transmission

Apple is said to be working on satellite technology, having hired a number of aerospace engineers to form team along with satellite and antenna designers, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The report notes that this is an early-stage secret project that could still be scrapped, but that the purpose of the team and its work is to potentially develop communications satellite technology that can send and receive data directly to user devices, including the iPhone, in a bid to make it possible to connect Apple devices without the need of a third-party network.

Bloomberg says that Apple won’t necessarily be building its own satellite hardware – it could instead be developing just th re transmission devices or ground-based equipment to make use of data transmissions for orbital communications equipment. The tech could be used for actually delivering data directly to Apple devices, or it could just connect them to each other independent of a cellphone carrier data network. It could also be used to provide more accurate location services for better maps and guidance, the report says.

Apple is said to have hired both executives and engineers from the aerospace and satellite industry, including Skybox Imaging alumni Michael Trela and John Fenwick who are leading the team. These two formerly headed up Google’s satellite and spacecraft divines. New hired include former Aerospace Corporation executive Ashley Moore Williams, as well as key personnel from the wireless networking and content delivery network industries.

The idea of providing a data network from space direct to devices seems preposterous on its face – most data communications satellites require communication with ground stations that then relay information with end-point devices. But it’s not an unheard of concept, and in fact we wrote earlier this year about Ubiquitlink, a company that’s focused on building a new kinds of low-Earth orbit communications satellite constellation that can communicate directly with phones.

Ubiquitlink’s initial goals spell out what a supplemental direct satellite communication network could provide on top of regular iPhone carrier service: The startup company hopes to essentially provide global roaming with a connection level that probably isn’t anywhere near as fast as you’d get from a ground-based network, but is usable for communication at least – and not dependent on local infrastructure. It could also act as a redundant fallback that ensures no matter what your main network status, you’ll always be able to do less data-intensive operations, like texting and calling.

While there’s obviously a lot of unknowns remaining in what Apple is working on or what it will eventually amount to, if anything, it’s very interesting to consider the possibility that it could offer a level of always-on connectivity that’s bundled with iPhones and available even when your primary network is not, that offers persistent access to features like iMessage, voice calls and navigation – leaving streaming and other data-intensive applications to your standard carrier rate plan.



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Thursday, 19 December 2019

Anybody can now make HomeKit accessories

Apple has released an open-source version of the HomeKit Accessory Development Kit. You can now fork it on GitHub and play around with it to integrate smart home devices in the Home app and beyond.

Today’s news is related to the Connected Home over IP effort, an industry-wide effort to build an open-source standard for the internet of things. Essentially, Apple, Amazon, Google, the Zigbee Alliance and smart home manufacturers want to work together so that accessories work everywhere.

HomeKit is lagging behind, although Apple arrived early in the connected home space. A ton of accessories now work with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, but you can control very few accessories with Siri, as HomeKit adoption has been slow.

By open-sourcing HomeKit, Apple hopes that more smart home manufacturers will try to integrate HomeKit in their prototypes. Everything has been released under the Apache 2.0 license.

As Next INpact noticed, if you want to release a HomeKit-compatible accessory, you still have to work with Apple to get a certification. And of course, manufacturers that work with Apple directly could potentially access unreleased features before they’re unveiled at WWDC.

Developers have already reverse-engineered HomeKit to add HomeKit compatibility to more devices with the Homebridge project. Now let’s see if it leads to more cool projects to make it easier to control your connected objects from your iPhone, iPad and other Apple devices.



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Facebook is building an operating system so it can ditch Android

Facebook doesn’t want its hardware like Oculus and Portal to be at the mercy of Google because they rely on its Android operating system. That’s why Facebook has tasked a co-author of Microsoft’s Windows NT named Mark Lucovsky with building the social network an operating system from scratch, according the The Information’s Alex Heath.

“We really want to make sure the next generation has space for us” says Facebook’s VP of hardware Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth. “We don’t think we can trust the marketplace or competitors to ensure that’s the case. And so we’re gonna do it ourselves.”

By moving to its own OS, Facebook could have more freedom to bake social interaction — and hopefully privacy — deeper into its devices. It could also prevent a disagreement between Google and Facebook from derailing the roadmaps of Oculus, Portal, or future gadgets. We’ve asked Facebook for more details on its homegrown operating system.

One added bonus of moving to a Facebook-owned operating system? It could make it tougher to force Facebook to spin out some of its acquisitions, especially if Facebook goes with Instagram branding for its future augmented reality glasses.

Facebook Portal Lineup

Facebook has always been sore about not owning an operating system and having to depend on the courtesy of some of its biggest rivals. Those include Apple, who’s CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly thrown jabs at Facebook and its chief Mark Zuckerberg over privacy and data collection. In a previous hedge against the power of the mobile operating systems, Facebook worked on a secret project codenamed Oxygen circa 2013 that would help it distribute Android apps from outside the Google Play store if necessary, Vox’s Kurt Wagner reported.

Now Facebook is ramping up its hardware efforts with a new office for the team in Burlingame, 15 miles north of the company’s headquarters. The 70,000-square-foot space is designed to house roughly 4,000 employees.

Interested in potentially controlling more of the hardware stack, Facebook held acquisition talks with $4.5 billion market cap semiconductor company Cirrus Logic, which makes audio chips for Apple and more, The Information reports. That deal never happened, and it’s unclear how far the talks went given tech giants constantly keep their M&A teams open to discussions. But it shows how serious Facebook is taking hardware, even if Portal and Oculus sales have been slow to date.

That could start to change next year, though, as flagship virtual reality experiences hit the market. I got a press preview of the upcoming Medal Of Honor first-person shooter that will launch on the Oculus Quest in 2020. An hour of playing the World War 2 game flew by, and it was one of the first VR games that felt like you could enjoy it week after week rather than being just a tech demo. Medal Of Honor could prove to be the killer app that convinces gamers they have to get a Quest.

Facebook has also been working on hardware experiences for the enterprise. Facebook Workplace video calls can now run on Portal, with its smart camera auto-zooming to keep everyone in the board room in frame or focus on the action. The Information reports Facebook is also prototyping a VR videoconferencing system that Boz has been testing with his team.

The hardware initiatives meanwhile feed back into Facebook’s core ad business. It’s now using some data about what people do on their Oculus or Portal to target them with ads. From playing certain games to accessing kid-focused experiences to virtually teleporting to vacation destinations, there’s plenty of lucrative data for Facebook to potentially mine.

Facebook even wants to know what’s on our mind before we act on it. The Information reports that Facebook’s brain-computer interface hardware for controlling interfaces by employing sensors to recognize a word a user is thinking has been shrunk down. It’s gone from the size of a refridgerator to something hand-held but still far from ready for integration into a phone.

Selling Oculus headsets, Portal screens, and mind-readers might never generate the billions in profits Facebook earns from its efficient ads business. But they could ensure the social network isn’t locked out of the next waves of computing. Whether those are fully immersive like virtual reality, convenient complements to our phones like smart displays, or minimally-invasive sensors, Facebook wants them to be social. If it can bring your friends along to your new gadgets, Facebook will find some way to squeeze out revenue while keeing these devices from making us more isolated and less human.



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Wednesday, 18 December 2019

UK’s competition regulator asks for views on breaking up Google

The UK’s competition regulator has raised concerns about the market power of digital ad platform giants Google and Facebook in an interim report published today, opening up a consultation on a range of potential inventions — from breaking up platform giants, to limiting their ability to set self-serving defaults, and enforcing data sharing and/or feature interoperability to help rivals compete.

Breaking up Google by forcing it to separate its ad server arm from the rest of the business is one of a number of possible interventions it’s eyeing, along with enforcing choice screens for search engines and browsers that use non-monetary criteria to allocate slots — vs Google’s plan for a pay-to-play offering for EU Android users (which rivals argue does not offer relief for the antitrust abuse the European Commission sanctioned last year).

The UK regulator is also considering whether to require Facebook to interoperate specific features of its current network so they can be accessed by competitors — as a fix for what it describes as “strong network effects” which work against “new entrant and challenger social media platforms”.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched the market study in July — a couple of weeks after the UK’s data watchdog published its own damning report setting out major privacy and other concerns around programmatic advertising.

It is due to issue a final report next summer — which will set out conclusions and recommendations for interventions — and is now consulting on suggestions in its interim report, inviting contributions before February 12.

Since beginning the study the CMA says it has received several requests to open a full-blown market investigation, which means it has a statutory duty to consult on making such a reference.

Based on initial findings from the study it says there are “reasonable grounds” for suspecting serious impediments to competition in the online platforms and digital advertising market.

The report specifically flags three areas where it suspects harm — namely:

  • the open display advertising market — with a focus on “the conflicts of interest Google faces at several parts of its vertically integrated chain of intermediaries”;
  • general search and search advertising — with a focus on “Google’s market power and the barriers to expansion faced by rival search engines”;
  • social media and display advertising — with a focus on “Facebook’s market power and the lack of interoperability between Facebook and rival services”;

Other concerns raised in the report include problems flowing from a lack of transparency in the digital advertising market; and the difficulty or lack of choice for consumers to opt out of behavioral advertising.

However the regulator is not making a market investigation reference at this stage — a step which would open access to the order making powers which could be used to enforce the sorts of interventions discussed in the report. Instead, the CMA says it is favors making recommendations to government to feed into a planned “comprehensive regulatory framework” to govern the behaviour of online platforms.

Earlier this year the UK government set out a wide-ranging proposal to regulate a range of online harms. Although it remains to be seen how much of that program prime minister Boris Johnson’s newly elected Conservative government will now push ahead with.

“Although it is a finely balanced judgement, we remain of the view that a comprehensive suite of recommendations to government is currently the best way forward and are therefore consulting on not making a market investigation reference at this stage,” the CMA writes, saying it feels it has further investigation work to do and also does not wish to “cut across” the government’s plans around regulating platforms.

“The concerns we have identified regarding online platforms such as Google and Facebook are a truly global antitrust challenge facing governments and regulators. Therefore, in relation to some of the potential interventions we may consider in a market investigation, and in particular any significant structural remedies such as those involving ownership separation, we need to be pragmatic about what changes could efficiently be pursued unilaterally by the UK,” it adds, saying it will “continue to work as closely as we can with our international counterparts to develop a coordinated position on these issues in the second half of the study”.

Antitrust regulators in a number of countries have been turning their attention on platform giants in recent years — including Australia and the US.

The new European Commission has also talked tough on platform power, suggesting it will further dial up scrutiny of tech giants and seek to accelerate its own interventions where it finds competitive harms.

Responding to the CMA report in a statement, Ronan Harris, VP, Google UK and Ireland, told us:

The digital advertising industry helps British businesses of all sizes find customers in the UK and across the world, and supports the websites that people know and love with revenue and reach. We’ve built easy-to-use controls that enable people to manage their data in Google’s services — such as the ability to turn off personalised advertising and to automatically delete their search history.  We’ll continue to work constructively with the CMA and the government on these important areas so that everyone can make the most of the web.

A Facebook spokesperson also sent us this statement:

We are fully committed to engaging in the consultation process around the CMA’s preliminary report, and continuing to deliver the benefits of technology and relevant advertising to the millions of people and small businesses in the UK who use our services.

We agree with the CMA that people should have control over their data and transparency around how it is used. In fact, for every ad we show, we give people the option to find out why they are seeing that ad and an option to turn off ads from that advertiser entirely.  We also provide industry-leading tools to help people control their data, like “Off Facebook Activity”, and to transfer it to other services through our Data Transfer tools.  We look forward to further engagement with the CMA on these topics.



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Amazon, Apple, Google and Zigbee join forces for an open smart home standard

The biggest names in the connected home category are reaching across the aisle to create an open source standard. Marquee names Amazon, Apple, Google and the Zigbee Alliance are leading the charge here.

There are a number of key partners on the board, as well, including IKEA, Legrand, NXP Semiconductors, Resideo, Samsung SmartThings, Schneider Electric, Signify (nee Philips Lighting), Silicon Labs, Somfy and Wulian.

The goals certainly seem solid from the outset. The Connected Home over IP project seeks to create a connectivity standard designed the increase compatibility across companies and devices. The landscape is pretty scattered at the moment, with each player digging pretty heavily into their own standard and forcing many smaller third-party players to pick sides.

There will no doubt continue to be a degree of that, but more devices can speak to one another, that would certainly appear to be a net positive for the consumer. The aim is to make it easier for hardware makers to build devices that work with Alexa, Assistant, Siri and the like.

“The project is built around a shared belief that smart home devices should be secure, reliable, and seamless to use,” according to the joint release. “By building upon Internet Protocol (IP), the project aims to enable communication across smart home devices, mobile apps, and cloud services and to define a specific set of IP-based networking technologies for device certification.”

Security and privacy ought to be pretty high up on the list, as well. These topics are of utmost and increasing concern as we surrender more of our square footage to connected products.



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Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating with a safety screen

Make space for another dating app in your single life: Blindlee is Chatroulette for dating but with female-friendly guardrails in the form of a user-controlled video blur effect.

The idea is pretty simple: Singles are matched randomly with another user who meets some basic criteria (age, location) for a three minute ‘ice breaker’ video call. The app suggests chat topics — like ‘pineapple on pizza, yay or nay’ — to get the conversation flowing. After this, each caller chooses whether or not to match — and if both match they can continue to chat via text.

The twist is that the video call is the ‘first contact’ medium for determining whether it’s a match or not. The call also starts “100% blurred” — for obvious, ‘dick pic’ avoidance reasons.

Blindlee says female users have control of the level of blur during the call — meaning they can elect to reduce it to 75%, 50%, 25% or nothing if they like what they’re (partially) seeing and hearing. Though their interlocutor also has to agree to the reduction so neither side can unilaterally rip the screen away.

Dating apps continue to be a bright spot for experimental ideas, despite category giants like Tinder dominating with a much cloned swipe-to-match formula. Tech giant Facebook also now has its own designs on the space. But turns out there’s no fixed formula for finding love or chemistry.

All the data in the world can’t necessarily help with that problem. So a tiny, bootstrapping startup like Blindlee could absolutely hit on something inspired that Tinder or Facebook hasn’t thought of (or else feels it can’t implement across a larger user-base).

Co-founder Sacha Nasan also reckons there’s space for supplementary dating apps.

“We’re focusing on blind dating which is a subset of dating so you can say that indirectly rather than directly we are competing with the big dating apps (Tinder etc). This is more niche and is definitely a new, untried concept to the dating world,” he argues. “However the good thing about dating apps is that they are not substitutes but complements.

“Just like people may have installed Uber on their phone but also Hailo and Lyft, people have multiple datings app installed as well (to maximise their chances of finding a partner) and that is an advantage. Nonetheless we still think that we only indirectly compete with other dating apps.”

Using a blur effect to preserve privacy is not in itself entirely a new idea. For example Muzmatch, a YC-backed dating app focused on matchmaking Muslims, offers a blur feature to users not wanting to put their profile photos out there for any other user to see.

But Blindlee is targeting a more general dating demographic. Though Nasan says it does plan to expand matching filters, if/when it can grow its user-base, to include additional criteria such as religion.

“The target is anyone above 18 (for legal reasons) and from the data we see most users are under 30,” he says. “So this covers university students to young professionals. On the spectrum of dating apps where ‘left’ would be hookups apps (like Tinder used to be) and ‘right’ would be relationship app (like Hinge), we position ourself more on the right side (a relationship app).”

Blindlee is also using video as the chemistry-channeling medium to help users decide if they match or not.

This is clever because it’s still a major challenge to know if you’ll click with an Internet stranger in real life with only a digitally mediated version of the person to go on. At least live on camera there’s only so much faking that can be done — well, unless the person is a professional actor or scammer.

And while plunging into a full-bore videochat with a random might sound a bit much, a blurry teaser with conversation prompts looks fairly low risk.

The target user for Blindlee is also likely to have grown up online and with smartphones and Internet video culture. A videocall should therefore be a pretty comfortable medium of expression for these singles.

“The idea came from my experience in the app world (since the age of 14) combined with a situation where my cousin… went on a date from one of the dating apps where the man who showed up was about 15 years older. The man had used old pictures on his profile,” explains Nasan. “That’s just one story and there are plenty like these so I grew tired of the sometimes fake and superficial aspect of the online dating world. Together with my cousin’s brother [co-founder, Glenn Keller] we decided to develop Blindlee to make the process more transparent and safer but also fun.

“Blindee makes for a fun three-minute blurred video experience with a random person matching your criteria. It’s kind of like a short, pre-date ice-breaker before you potentially match and decide to meet in real life. And we put control of the blur filter in the woman’s hand to make it safer for women (but also because if the men would have control they would straight away ask to unblur it — and we have tested this!).”

The app is a free download for now but the plan is to move to a freemium model with a limit on the number of free video chats per day — charging a monthly subscription to unlock more than three daily calls.

“This will be priced cheap around £3-4/month compared to usual dating premium subscription which cost £10+ a month,” he says. “We basically look at this income as a way of paying the server bills (as every minute of video costs us).”

The London-based startup was founded in March and launched the app in October on iOS, adding an Android version earlier this month. Nasan says they’ve picked up around 5,000 registered users so far with only minimal marketing — such as dropping flyers on London university campuses.

While they’re bootstrapping the launch he says they may look to take in angel funding “as we see growth picking up”.



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