newnetland

European Tech Analysis

Why Netflix Has No Social Features

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Business Insider:

First, it’s too much effort to create your own new social network just for sharing Netflix content. That is never going to happen, so Netflix has to piggyback on an existing social network, like Facebook.

But that presents a second problem, which is that users freak out about privacy when Netflix automatically links to anything. “And what seems to be superficial stuff, but what seems to get people exercised, is the idea of some kind of automatic linkage. It’s toxic. We have experimented and explored, and it doesn’t work.”

So essentially Facebook burned people so heavily that we can’t have a social Netflix anytime soon.

“Blockstream Raises $55 Million to Build Out Bitcoin’s Blockchain”

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CoinDesk:

“What we would hate to see happen is the most robust and secure blockchain protocol getting left by the wayside if people moved on to different protocols and tech stacks that bitcoin isn’t designed for,” Hill continued, adding: “We believe there is a benefit to society to have all these blockchains be interoperable.” Bitcoin and blockchain In particular, Hill cited the recent decision by blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings to use Blockstream’s tech as part of its Open Ledger Project, an open-source blockchain initiative being overseen by the Linux Foundation, as an example how the bitcoin codebase can become more relevant for commercial applications.

This is good news.

“Shifting Video Viewing Behavior Is Forcing Publishers To Revamp Their Cross-Device Programming Strategy”

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Dan Rayburn on StreamingMediaBlog.com:

Data from Adobe has shown that tablet and smartphone viewing accounted for nearly 40 minutes of daily viewing in 2015. This growth has not come at the expense of desktop or connected devices as mobile will continue to be a major story in 2016 as it drives overall growth in video consumption. While this is good news overall, it does present a number of new challenges that will face publishers in 2016.

What this data shows is that video viewers are increasingly accessing content through multiple entry-points throughout the day. These entry points, by nature of technology and context have unique user experiences. What works on desktop, can be intrusive, clunky, and bandwidth hogging on mobile. Those 37 minutes of desktop and connected device viewing are more continuous than the hop on / hop off viewing habits of mobile.

Be everywhere or be nowhere.

Perma.cc: Permanent Records of Web Sources

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Perma.cc:

Perma.cc helps scholars, journals, courts, and others create permanent records of the web sources they cite. Perma.cc is simple, free to use, and is built and supported by libraries.

What a great project I have never heard of.

(Update: The free personal account only allows 10 links (saved websources) per month. That is rather little.)

Uber and China

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Josh Horwitz writing for Stratechery (paywall):

According to McKinsey, China’s middle class is expected to balloon from 256 million in 2013 to 357 million by 2022,according to McKinsey. That’s larger than the entire population of the US.

Moreover, this middle class wealth tends to be concentrated in China’s dense suburbs. In China, urbanization is still ongoing. The same Mckinsey report notes that an increasing number of China’s middle class — about 70% — will be located in China’s second- and third-tier cities in about six years. Car ownership rates in these cities are almost uniformly lower than ownership rates in New York City, but they likely have even worse public infrastructure and equally low taxi penetration rates than the US. Lower car ownership plus poor public infrastructure equals prime conditions for ride-sharing adoption.

To make things concrete: Uber has begun expanding aggressively in Sichuan, which has a population of 80 million people, more than the entire population of France. In November 2015, it launched in Mianyang, which is home to 5.4 million people, and a registered taxi count of 1,747. Los Angeles, meanwhile, has a population of 3.8 million people and 2,361 taxis.

There are hundreds of cities like Mianyang in China, which are small by Chinese standards but large by global standards.

(..)

While the Chinese government has eased its stance on peer-to-peer ride-hailing, it has not become more lenient towards foreign tech companies. Uber deserves more credit than it has received for playing its cards right in China. But the deck is still stacked against it.

Utterly fascinating report. Uber managed to get further in China than any other foreign tech company before by localizing operations and investments (bringing local wealth on board the Uber ship helps with lobbying). The Chinese market is a huge opportunity even for the number two in the P2P transportation sector.

The most interesting aspect: The different situation the Chinese middle class is in compared to the West might mean it will leapfrog car ownership and go straight to services and ride-sharing; like the move straight to mobile, leapfrogging the desktop.

“Facebook hints at how it could become a big player in the ride-sharing business”

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Quartz:

In a patent application published today—first surfaced by the legal technology firm ClientSide—Facebook outlines a system for setting up carpools for people attending the same event.

For now, it’s worth remembering: Many companies in the “sharing economy“—including AirBnb and Uber itself—currently use Facebook as a login and user verification system, so it’s not infeasible that Facebook could just cut out the middle man and use its own network in the future.

Sure. But they’d be a bit late to the party. (Certainly not too late, but still.)

“Tech’s ‘Frightful 5’ Will Dominate Digital Life for Foreseeable Future”

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The New York Times:

Let’s say that Alibaba, the Chinese e-commerce company, eclipses Amazon’s retail business in India — well, O.K., so then it satisfies itself with the rest of the world.

Government intervention often limits one giant in favor of another: If the European Commission decides to fight Android on antitrust grounds, Apple and Microsoft could be the beneficiaries. When the Justice Department charged Apple with orchestrating a conspiracy to raise e-book prices, who won? Amazon.

So get used to these five. Based on their stock prices this month, the giants are among the top 10 most valuable American companies of any kind. Apple, Alphabet and Microsoft are the top three; Facebook is No. 7, and Amazon is No. 9. Wall Street gives each high marks for management; and three of them — Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook — are controlled by founders who don’t have to bow to the whims of potential activist investors.

So who’s losing? Not one of them, not anytime soon.

“For the first time, more than half of China’s population is online”

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Tech in Asia:

China now has 688 million internet users, a record figure. The new data for 2015 from the state’s China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) shows that’s not the only major milestone.

For the first time ever, China has more than half of its population online – 50.3 percent of them.

Mobile web access accounted for a record high proportion of total netizens. The country’s 620 million mobile internet users in 2015 mean that 90.1 percent of all web users access it from their phones (when they’re not logging on from other devices like laptops and desktops).

Nuzzel Aims At Email

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Monday Note:

But Nuzzel is up for global domination. Seriously. According to its CEO Jonathan Abrams, the mobile application on which he built Nuzzel’s reputation is almost anecdotal. (Despite my known persistence in asking the same questions in multiple ways, he stubbornly but nicely declined to give me specifics on Nuzzel’s reach.)

In fact, Abrams’ big bet is email.

“Email is the only thing to be genuinely cross-platform”, he says. If Nuzzle were aiming at Flipboard’s user base, he’d be talking of dozens of millions people —at most. “If we wanted to go after Twitter’s audience, we would be talking about a hundred million people. With email, we are aiming at billions of customers.” Big, quiet, ambition.

Very interesting. I have been using Nuzzel since the private beta and I have never looked back.