Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 8/20 - Fitness Trackers Ain't Dead Yet

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

Fitbit doubles down on fitness trackers, new EU regulations might be coming for web platforms, Karma is a startup selling excess food, Trip Advisor has its own fake news problem, and are women the most valuable mobile gaming consumers? Links:With Charge 3, Fitbit blurs the smartwatch line (TechCrunch)EU Weighs Regulations For Terrorist Content (Financial Times)‘Minecraft: Education Edition’ comes to iPad, as education features expand to mainstream version of game (GeekWire)Karma raises $12 million for marketplace that helps restaurants and supermarkets reduce food waste (Venture Beat)Farfetch files for IPO to trade on NYSE as FTCH; has nearly 1M active users of its luxury goods marketplace (TechCrunch)Arm Unveils Client CPU Performance Roadmap Through 2020 - Taking Intel Head On (AnAndTech)How TripAdvisor changed travel (The Guardian)Women are 79 percent more likely to spend money on mobile games (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Monday, August 20, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. Fitbit doubles down on fitness trackers.

New EU regulations might be coming for web platforms. Karma is a startup selling excess food. TripAdvisor has its own fake news problem. And are women the most valuable mobile gaming customers? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Smartwatches might get all the headlines these days, but straight fitness trackers still sell in the millions. Today, Fitbit unveiled the $150 Charge 3 core,

a fitness tracker that sort of blurs the line between smart watches and fitness trackers. The Charge 3 has a touchscreen, water resistance, expanded notifications, and the $170 special edition even comes with Fitbit pay for mobile payments. The Charge 3 has a design that looks looks pretty much just like the charge 2.

The screen is black and white, but the display is now touchscreen and supports gray scale colors. There's also 40% more active screen area. There's an updated heart rate sensor and new swim tracking. But as always, the main advantage of a dedicated fitness tracker is that the charge 3 can now go seven days on a single battery charge. Fitbit has been able to achieve that by continuing to eschew GPS. But it's the notifications which, as I say, edge this towards being more like a smartwatch. App notifications, call notifications, calendar appointments, and texts all show up. You can even accept or reject phone calls.

And there are new apps for things like alarms, timers, and weather. There's also a new sleep tracking app in beta called SleepScore. As Brian Heater notes in TechCrunch, Fitbit has been struggling in the marketplace after the deluge of smartwatch hit, but they've been trying to fix things by joining the crowd. So the Charge 3 is an interesting doubling down on its core competency. Quote, Fitbit's ability to start riding the ship can largely be credited with its dive into the smartwatch category. Ionic was a bit of a mess, to be sure, but the Versa has proven a bona fide hit. But while smartwatches represent a rare bright spot in the stagnant wearable space, fitness bands have always, and will continue to be

Fitbit's bread and butter, end quote. Pre-orders begin today from the Fitbit website and the devices start shipping in October. The Financial Times is reporting that there may be some new regulations for web companies coming soon from Europe. According to sources, the EU is drafting regulations to impose fines on social media platforms if they do not remove material flagged as terrorist content within one hour. Quote, Julian King, the EU's Commissioner for Security, told the Financial Times that Brussels had, quote, not seen enough progress on the removal of terrorist material from technology companies and would, quote, take stronger action in order to better protect our citizens. We cannot afford to relax or become complacent in the face of such a shadowy and destructive phenomenon, said Mr. King, end quote. The draft regulations would need to be approved by the European Parliament and the majority of EU member states and would mark the first time the EU would be explicitly targeting content.

until now there have been voluntary content guidelines for removing material from online platforms. Though, as many pointed out on Twitter, this might be easy to do for the big guys, the Facebooks and YouTube's of the world who have those automated filtering systems that they always tout. But would there be some sort of proportional fine structure for smaller players, like individual blogs or whatever? Such proportionality is baked into GDPR regulations, for example. Just in time for back-to-school season, Microsoft announced today that it will be bringing its Minecraft Education Edition to the iPad

for the first time starting in September. Quoting from Geekwire, the reason Microsoft added iPad support was straightforward. School districts have iPads and want students to be able to learn about STEM and other subjects with Minecraft on Apple's tablets, in addition to the Windows 10 and Mac OS devices that can already run education edition.

end quote. In case you weren't aware, Minecraft has an education edition and a whole slate of modules for education that use the Minecraft game environment for learning. For example, there's the chemistry resource pack for learning chemistry concepts. Schools pay for a license for education edition on an annual basis, but there are generous try it for free terms as well. Microsoft says the school version has 35 million licensees in 100,000. 15 countries. Karma is a food ordering app for buying and selling surplus food for more than 1,500 food outlets in London and Sweden. This is an old school style win-win-win-win example of internet innovation. Around one-third of the food produced each year, around 1.3 billion tons of it, goes wasted. That's $1 trillion of waste. Karma helps reduce food waste, earns restaurants extra.

money and unloads some of their excess inventory and gives consumers access to cheaper food. Like any other food ordering app, once you have an account on Karma, you open it up and see what's available in your area. What if you need a birthday cake today? Why not get a deal on an unsold cake that a bakery has left over from the weekend? Karma just announced a $12 million series A round, bringing total funding to $18 million. Hints are that the money will be spent on expanding to new markets, possibly the U.S. very soon, quoting from Venture Beat. Karma is part of a global trend we're seeing where companies are building businesses around the concept of cutting waste. London-based Winnow raised $7.4 million last year to help commercial

kitchens measure their food waste, while San Francisco-based full harvest raised $2 million last year to help farmers find a home for ugly fruit. Last week, Unmade, also based in London, raised $4 million for an on-demand-clothes manufacturing platform that enables brands to only produce garments that are actually sold rather than mass-producing thousands of items in advance. Karma turns would be wasted product into bargains for consumers and profit for merchants. This makes way too much sense not to exist in this world, noted Bessemer Venture Partners, Kent Bennett, who participated in the raise. Quote, beyond the product today, we think owning the communications links between customers and

their favorite local merchants could have enormous long-term value. Farfetch, the UK-based marketplace for high-end fashion and luxury goods, filed today for an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange. Various reports have the listing somewhere in the valuation range of $6 to $8 billion. For its last valuation, Farfetch raised money in 2016 at a $1.6 billion number. The F-1 that Farfetch has filed reveals that the company has close to 1 million active customers growing at 43.6% a year. That makes it, according to Farfetch, the largest marketplace for luxury goods in the world. Revenues are also growing.

In 2017, sales came in at $386 million, up 59.4% over 2016, and the company reports a $136.9 million operating profit in the first six months of this year. As TechCrunch notes, quote, Farfetch was a trailblazer in the area of building e-commerce marketplaces specifically catering to the luxury fashion and other luxury goods industries. In many cases, it was working with boutiques and fashion houses that had yet to establish any kind of online commerce profile of their own. These sellers have been cautious in their adoption of emerging commerce technologies, as Farfetch puts it. So by pulling them together, it was able to create a high-end experience that was bolstered

by its scale and reach. For the first time, Arm has announced a CPU roadmap for its CPUs that it plans to develop all the way through 2020. The announcement reaffirmed Arm's commitment to producing chips that can successfully compete with Intel's core CPUs in laptops. What was that Owen Williams was talking about last week when he was mentioning how Apple and Microsoft both were eager to dump Intel with every new security flaw. Apple, of course, is likely to produce its own CPUs for its laptops someday, but the universe of Windows laptops is enormous.

Quoting from Annand Tech, back in May, we extensively covered arms next-generation Cortex A76 CPU IP, and how it's meant to be a game changer in terms of providing one of the biggest generational performance jumps in the company's recent history. The narrative in particular focused on how the A-76 now brought real competition and viable alternatives to the X-Seption. 86 market, and in particular how it would be able to offer performance equivalent to Intel's best mobile offerings at much lower power. Arm C's always connected devices with 5G connectivity as a prime opportunity for a shift in the laptop market. Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 850 platforms were the first attempts in trying to establish this new slice for arm-based PCs. Today's roadmap now publicly discloses the code name of the next

two generations of CPU cores following the A76. Damos and Hercules. Both future cores are based on the new A76 micro architecture, and will introduce respective evolutionary refinements and incremental updates for the Austin cores. It is a bit of a long read, but I did want to point you to a piece in The Guardian, taking a look at TripAdvisor and how it's evolved. Others might get the headlines, but it turns out that TripAdvisor 2, has become entangled in the raging debates about free speech as it struggles to defend legitimate

reviewers against litigious business owners. Quote, TripAdvisor had become a tech giant, but its leadership did not quite realize that yet. The year it went public was the final year that TripAdvisor published its annual lists of the top 10 dirtiest hotels in the U.S. and Europe. A couple of months before the IPO, Kenneth Seton, owner of what had been voted, America's dirtiest hotel, filed a lawsuit against TripAdvisor for defamation, claiming $10 million in damages. The suit was tossed out in 2012 after the judge ruled that any review posted to TripAdvisor is an opinion and therefore protected under the First Amendment. Seton appealed, but the original verdict was upheld on the grounds that the use of the word dirtiest could not count as defamation as it was no more than rhetorical hyperbole.

TripAdvisor won the legal battle, but it still decided to scrub the dirtiest list from its site. We wanted to stay more on the positive side, Koffer told the New York Times, end quote. And at the same time, TripAdvisor has also had to deal with its own version of fake news and the sock puppetry that we see in stories about people buying Twitter followers or YouTube views. TripAdvisor has had to contend with a thriving marketplace of reviews for sale. Quote, all of a sudden, reviews could be purchased and exchanged on a massive scale. New businesses could hire reputation management companies to help suppress. bad reviews and promote good ones, and established businesses could pay for negative reviews of their competitors.

Review farms, the reputation economy's answer to call centers proliferated in China and Southeast Asia. These days at any given time, several hundred TripAdvisor employees are working on content moderation, about a third of those in fraud detection. Generally, people who post fake reviews do it with a motivation in mind to move the ranking up or down, said James K., TripAdvisor's senior media relations, manager. In the last three years, we've shut down 60 companies selling reviews, and there are many more that we're well aware of. Interesting report from Lyftoff, a company which studies the mobile game market. If you're a mobile game maker, you might want to start thinking about women as your target demographic.

That's because women are apparently 79% more likely to spend money on in-app purchases on mobile games than men are. quoting from a write-up on this report from The Verge. Female users purchase in-app content 16.7% of the time after installing an app, and the report encourages app developers to focus on this segment of the market in the future. The report states that although it takes 18 cents more to make an app appealing enough for a female user to install than a male user, quote, a closer examination of conversion rates reveals females are in fact the most valuable gamers, end quote. The report looked at data collected from 3,000,

350 apps between June 2017 and May 2018, showing that compared to the period between 2016 and 2017, female users in-app purchases had nearly doubled. These results and similar past studies may drive app developers to start tailoring more apps specifically for women, at least in the most popular categories for female users like puzzle games and games recommended by word of mouth. And that's all for today.

I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian M. MCC. My thanks to the TechMeme editors for finding and organizing all of the stories we talk about every day. Follow them on Twitter at TechMeme to get your headlines tweeted at you in real time. Talk to you tomorrow.