Microsoft is launching an update to its Android launcher today that gives parents the ability to track their kids’ location. This is one out of a number of parent- and kid-focused announcements the company made today. Others include the ability to block sites in Microsoft Edge on Android and the launch of MSN Kids, a new curated news website for children.
At the core of these new features are Microsoft’s family group settings that already allowed you to do things like track a child’s activity on Windows 10 and Xbox One devices or limit screen time in general.
“As a mother to a young and curious daughter, I deeply understand the need for tools to help balance the use of technology in the home as well as out of the home,” writes Shilpa Ranganathan, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Experiences group, in today’s announcement. “It’s especially near and dear to me as leader of a team building experiences for mobile devices. We emphasize the idea of transparency as a guiding principle for these new experiences.”
The new tracking tool is rolling out with today’s update of the Microsoft Launcher for Android and will put the latest known location of your kids right in its personalized news feed.
I’m not sure how useful blocking access to sites in Edge for Android really is, but if you manage to lock your kids out from Chrome or any other pre-installed browser — and block them from downloading them — then I guess this could work.
As for MSN Kids, Microsoft notes that the site will curate information from trusted sources, including Time for Kids, Popular Science, Sports Illustrated for Kids, National Geographic, and USA TODAY. It’s worth noting that there is no sponsored content or advertising on the site.
Scout.fm wants to change the way people listen to podcasts. Instead of scouring through the over 500,000 available shows available in your current podcast app, this startup’s new curated podcast service will just ask you a few questions to find out what you like, then create a podcast station customized to you. The experience is primarily designed for use on smart speakers, like Amazon’s Alexa-powered Echo devices, but is also available as iOS and Android applications.
The company was founded just over a year ago by Cara Meverden (CEO), previously of Google, Twitter, Indiegogo, and Medium; along with Saul Carlin (President and COO), previously Head of Publisher Development at Medium, and before that, Politico; and Daniel McCartney, (CTO) previously an engineer at GrubHub, Klout and Medium.
At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.
But unlike on Medium, which helps to guide readers to topics they like, people today have to seek out new podcasts for themselves. Scout.fm wants to offer a better system, and hopefully bring more listeners to podcasts as a result.
“We want to take podcastlisteningmainstream,” she says. “Wethinkthekeytothatismakingpodcastsaseasytolistentoastheradio –andwethinkthat’sevenmorecriticallyimportant, asweenterthesmartspeakerera.”
The Scout.fm service began as a series of experiments on Alexa.
The company launched over 30 Alexa skills, including a “Game of Thones”-themed podcast radio that was popular while the show was airing on HBO. The goal was to test what worked, what topics and formats drew listeners, and gain feedback through calls-to-action to participate in user surveys.
The result is Scout.fm, a curated podcast service that’s personalized to your listening preferences – and one that improves over time.
Here’s how it works on the Alexa platform. You first launch the app by saying “Alexa, open Scout.fm.” The app will respond (using a human voice actor’s voice, not Alexa’s) by explaining briefly what Scout.fm does then asks you to choose one of three types of talk radio stations: “Daily news, brain food, or true stories.”
The first is a news station, similar to Alexa’s “Flash Briefing;” the second, “brain food,” focuses on other interesting and informative content, that’s not day-to-day news; and the last is a true crime podcast station.
The voice app will then ask you a few more questions as part of this setup process to find out what other subjects appeal to you by having you respond, on a scale of one to ten, how much of a history buff you are, or how much you’re interested in culture, like art, film and literature, for example.
On subsequent launches, the app will simply ask if you want to return to your “Brain Food” (or other selected) station. If you say no, you can try one of the other options.
However, once the setup process is over, the experience becomes very much like listening to talk radio.
A podcast will begin playing – Scout.fm favors those without ads at the very beginning – allowing you to listen as long as you’d like, or say “next” to move to the next one. Each new podcast episodes has a brief, spoken introduction that Scout.fm handwrites, so you know what’s coming up. Your listening can go on for hours, offering you a hands-free means of switching podcasts and discovering new favorites.
The app will also adjust to your preferences over time, removing those you tend to skip – much like how the thumbs down works on Pandora.
Scout.fm doesn’t include every podcast that’s out there. Instead, it’s a curated selection of a few hundred with high production values, narrative storytelling and tight editing.
“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”
For example, some of the podcasts Scout.fm includes come from The Wall St. Journal, The New York Times, ESPN, and podcast networks like Gimlet, Wondery, Parcast and others.
The same curated selection of podcasts is also available in Scout.fm’s mobile apps for iOS and Android, which work with the voice assistant on the phone. (For example, you can tap your AirPods to wake Siri then say “Next” to move between podcasts.)
“If you’re jogging, our apps are an excellent companion because you don’t have to go back to your phone and try to find a new thing to listen to,” notes Meverden.
Since Scout.fm’s launch, it has accrued 1.5 million minutes listened across its network of experimental apps ahead of today’s public debut. The Alexa user base listened for twice as long as mobile users.
Currently, the service is not generating revenue, but, in the future, the team envisions call-to-action ads that could work with the Alexa app to share more information about the products, as well as ways it could utilize the newer in-app purchase mechanisms for Alexa skills.
The company is backed by $1.4M in seed funding from Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, Advancit and #Angels.
“The Scout team’s unique insight is that podcasts, no matter how good, won’t go mainstream until it is much simpler for consumers to find and listen to the content that’s right for them,” said Charles Hudson, managing partner at Precursor Ventures, in a statement about the investment. “The fast adoption of smart speakers changes this. We can open up podcasts to an entirely new audience,” he said.
The App Store has seen over 170 billion downloads over the past decade, totaling over $130 billion in consumer spend. This data was shared this morning by app intelligence firm App Annie, which is marking the App Store’s 10th Anniversary with a look back on the store’s growth and the larger trends it’s seen. These figures aren’t the full picture, however – the App Store launched on July 10, 2008 with just 500 applications, but App Annie arrived in 2010. The historical data for this report, therefore, goes from July 2010 through December 2017.
That means the true numbers are even higher that what App Annie can confirm.
The report paints a picture of the continued growth of the App Store over the years, noting that iOS App Store revenue growth outpaces downloads, and that nearly doubled between 2015 to 2017.
iOS devices owners apparently love to spend on apps, too.
The iOS App Store only has a 30 percent share of worldwide downloads, but accounts for 66 percent of consumer spend, the report says.
But this isn’t a complete picture of the iOS vs. Android battle, as Google Play isn’t available in China. App Annie’s data is incomplete on this front as it’s not accounting for the third-party Android app stores in China.
China today plays an outsized role, as App Annie has repeatedly reported, in terms of App Store revenue, even without Google Play. In fact, the APAC region accounts for nearly 60 percent of consumer spend – a trend that began in earnest with the October 2014 release of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus in China.
But when you look back at the App Store trends to date (or, as of July 2010 – which is as far back as App Annie’s data goes), it’s the U.S. that leads by a slim margin. China has quickly caught up but the U.S. is still the top country for all-time downloads, with 40.1 billion to China’s 39.9 billion; and it has generated $36 billion in consumer spend to China’s $27.7 billion.
iPhone users are heavy app users, too, the report notes.
In several markets, users have 100 or more apps installed, including Australia, India, China, Germany, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, and France. The U.S., U.K., and Mexico come close, with 96, 90, and 89 average monthly apps installed in 2017, respectively.
Of course the numbers of apps used monthly are much smaller, but still range in the high 30’s to low 40’s, App Annie claims.
The report additionally examines the impact of games, which accounted for only 31 percent of downloads in 2017, but generated 75 percent of the revenue. The APAC regions plays a large role here as well, with 3.4 billion game downloads last year, and $19.3 billion in consumer spend.
Subscriptions, meanwhile, are a newer trend, but one that’s already boosting App Store revenues considerably, accounting for $10.6 billion in consumer spend in 2017. This is driven mainly by media streaming apps like Netflix, Pandora, and Tencent Video, for example, but Tinder makes a notable showing as one of the top five worldwide apps by revenue.
Thanks to subscriptions and other trends, App Annie predicts the worldwide iOS App Store revenue will grow 80 percent from 2017 to $75.7 billion by 2022.
And while the App Store today has over 2 million apps, it has seen over 4.5 million apps released on its store to date. Many of these have been removed by Apple or the developers in the months and years, which is why the number of live apps is so much lower.
At MWC, ZTE promised that its Tempo Go would be the first device to bring Android Oreo (Go Edition) to the States. But, well, stuff happened, and the company’s had a lot bigger things to deal with the intervening months. Alcatel, however, is on the case with the 1X.
TCL announced this morning that the budget device will be hitting Amazon some time next, priced at an extremely affordable $100, unlocked. It will also be arriving at Best Buy and Walmart soon after, no doubt taking advantage of the fact that it’s the only Android Go handset available in the U.S. for the time being.
The specs are unsurprisingly uninspiring. There’s a 960 x 480 5.3-inch screen, a MediaTek chip and 1GB or RAM. The good news, however, is that the new, lightweight version of Google’s mobile operating system is built for exactly those hardware restraints, which means you ought to get a much smoother Android experience than you would on a similarly-speced handset running the full OS.
While the operating system is well positioned to get a foothold in developing countries, Google was quick to point out that it wasn’t limiting Android Go’s availability to those parts of the world. But while a number of manufacturers have signed on, none appeared too eager to launch the handsets in the States — well, aside from ZTE, but we all know how that went.
Another Android Go devices is on the way as well, with HMD bringing the Nokia 2.1 to the States in July.
Google, more recently by way of parent company Alphabet, has been a prolific investor in startups across the globe by way of entities like GV and CapitalG. Today, it announced its newest effort in this area, specifically outside of the US. The search and Android giant is partnering with Orange Digital Ventures, the corporate venture fund of the French carrier Orange, on a new effort to find, fund, and potentially acquire startups in the EMEA region, and specifically in the areas of the internet of things, cybersecurity, cloud services, AI, fintech and connectivity solutions.
The two are not disclosing a specific fund size, nor are they talking about any financial terms in this deal at this point, except to note that the investments could potentially be made at any stage, from seed to growth, depending on the startup in question.
The two expect the first investments to be announced later this year.
“Our goal is to join forces in financing the most promising digital startups,” said Marc Rennard, the CEO of Orange Digital Ventures (ODV), said in an interview. “We will then work together to qualify them, and when a common interest is there, we will join forces to invest in them.”
To be clear, Google has confirmed to me that this is not an extension of GV or CapitalG but activity out of its corporate development arm, which also makes investments into companies when they are viewed as strategic to Google and a potential route to an acquisition. (One, slightly outsized, example of one these investments in a third party would be Google’s $1.1 billion deal to buy a part of HTC.)
“We are delighted to support Orange’s ecosystem of start-ups and innovation and to explore alongside them opportunities for co-investment in Europe, Africa and the Middle East (EMEA),” said Carlo d’Asaro Biondo, EMEA President of Google Partnerships, in a statement. “Orange’s ecosystem is consistent with Google’s know-how and our ability to accelerate the growth of start-ups. This partnership is a way to enhance our collective contribution to innovation in this region.”
Indeed, in a sense, the deal is mutually beneficial for both sides.
On the part of Google, the company has strong dealflow and outreach particularly among US startups, in keeping with it being based there, and when it comes to GV or CapitalG either in the US, Europe, or elsewhere, the efforts are not intended primarily to be strategic to Google’s own interests. But when it comes to connecting with startups in EMEA that might be useful companies for Google to work with and potentially acquire to expand its business, it may not be seeing as many of those as it wants to.
Rennard said that Orange, on the other hand, gets on average around 1,200 startups pitching it for investment each year, and that’s before you consider startups that might get introduced through other VCs it works with already like Partech.
The thinking here is that working with Google will help ODV better filter some of those opportunities to make sure that the most interesting startups with the most potential get spotted and backed, and also to help Orange and Google both get in on the best deals in what appears to be a competitive investing environment at the moment.
“Have we missed opportunities? Yes. Can we improve? Yes. Could we have invested in an Amazon or Google before they became what they are now? Yes, and maybe we should have,” said Rennard. He also admitted that Orange has found it a challenge to get in on some of the more obvious and interesting startups in EMEA.
“From time to time, it’s difficult to have a place at the table. When a startup decides to call for investors, they might cover all their needs from others, without any possibility of us entering too,” he said. “But with Google plus Orange, I think the company will think twice before rejecting us, so it may help us.”
Orange and Google have been working together for some 10 years already in other aspects of their businesses including developing and building out connectivity solutions in Africa, which has also extended into developing cheap handsets together, and this investment plan is an extension of that as well.
Orange is no stranger to trying to work closer with tech companies to bring some of their ethos, culture, and rapid customer growth to their business — which, like many large carriers, continues to bring in huge amounts of cash and strong margins, but is often based on legacy services and therefore runs the risk of shrinking, being curtailed by regulators, or simply becoming less appealing to consumers. Previously, the company also partnered with Facebook to develop an infrastructure accelerator, also focused on emerging markets.
ODV was first established back in 2015 as a $23 million fund for early stage investments, a way for Orange to gain a better foothold in Silicon Valley. The carrier has also partnered with a number of other third parties, such as ad giant Publicis, to invest in companies that could potentially serve them to bring more cutting-edge technology into their businesses.
Chinese smartphone firm Xiaomi, which is headed for IPO in Hong Kong, just announced its newest flagship smartphone and a bunch of other products at a launch event in Shenzhen today.
Xiaomi has long been accused of copying Apple, but in recent years its design seemed to develop a little more independence than before. Well, that all changes with the Mi 8, which — design-wise — is a pretty clearly focused on the iPhone X.
The Mi 8 is Xiaomi’s first phone to sport a notch. While it is true that many in the industry have copied Apple so mercilessly that the notch has practically become standardized, Xiaomi’s newest device bears more than a passing resemblance to the iPhone X.
Xiaomi’s Mi 8 on the left, versus Apple’s iPhone X on the right
Even with its naming, Xiaomi has pulled an Apple. In the same way that Apple jumped to the iPhone X (10) to mark its tenth year as a phone-maker, so Xiaomi has gone from its previous Mi 6 mode to the Mi 8 to mark its eighth anniversary as a company.
Beyond the notch, the dual reverse cameras are near-identically placed, there’s a glass panel back and aluminum side frames. On the software side, even the placement of the telcom signal, power bar and WiFi signal indicator is identical to the iPhone X. The high-end Mi 8 model also includes iOS-like Animojis and a facial unlock feature both of which were pioneered by Apple with the iPhone X.
These similarities will inevitably irk Apple and design purists, but this isn’t Xiaomi’s first rodeo. With the Mi 8 it is doing what it does best, inviting comparisons to Apple and then packing impressive technology (and a price) that will draw favorable attention from its fans and those not keen to spend $1,000 on a phone.
A Xiaomi spokesperson declined to comment when we asked if the company wanted to talk about the Mi 8’s similarity to the iPhone X.
The Mi 8 packs a 6.21-inch AMOLED screen from Samsung which, within the notch, houses a 20-megapixel selfie camera and the infrared tech that unlocks the phone by scanning the user’s face. There’s an Apple-like dual camera array that features two 12-megapixel cameras.
On a more unique note, the device is one of the first in the world to ship with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 845 chipset which gives it some pzazz and (likely impressive) speed. It also uses dual GPS, which it claims makes location data more accurate.
Xiaomi said the phone will go on sale in China 5 and 8 June with three different versions offered. International expansion dates were not announced, as is common for Xiaomi. The standard Mi 8 will cost upwards of 2699 RMB ($420) with a smaller 5.88-inch size ‘SE’ model priced from 1799 RMB, or $280.
For those wanting more, the company also announced a souped-up ‘Explorer’ version that sports a pressure-sensitive finger scanner and the iPhone X-like facial unlock feature. In addition, the rear side is see-through which promises to be quite the look.
The Mi 8 explorer addition
Xiaomi is actively expanding into Europe after expanding into Italy, France and Germany but you have to wonder whether a device like the Mi 8 could grace the U.S.. Xiaomi currently sells accessories in North America where it recently hit go on its smart home products. CEO Lei Jun said recently that it might begin selling smartphones in the U.S. before the end of this year, but you’d imagine that certain Apple-like devices won’t be on the initial launch list if the timing goes according to plan.
That’s perhaps not a huge surprise since Xiaomi’s Redmi range — priced around $150 — has generated most of its sales, particularly in expansion markets like India.
“As a mother to a young and curious daughter, I deeply understand the need for tools to help balance the use of technology in the home as well as out of the home,” writes Shilpa Ranganathan, the General Manager of Microsoft’s Mobile Experiences group, in today’s announcement. “It’s especially near and dear to me as leader of a team building experiences for mobile devices. We emphasize the idea of transparency as a guiding principle for these new experiences.”
At Medium, Meverden explains, they saw an explosion of people creating great written content; but now those publishers had begun to create great audio content, as well.
“So if we listen to something and the two co-hosts kind of go on for half an hour at the beginning, that’s not a great podcast for this format,” Meverden says. “We want shows where they’re going to get right into it. That right away limits things, but there’s still an abundance of content.”
