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| SaaSy Apple Apps | |
| Number | 3346 |
| Broadcast Date | AUGUST 14, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 31:09 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane |
| Guests | Patrick Beja |
The Insider reports Apple is encouraging developers to move to software as a subscription model vs one time fee payment. Nvidia takes the wraps off its new Turing GPU architecture. NASA and freelancer.com have picked a winner for Astrobee Challenge.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Tinder's Co-founders and eight other former and current executives of the dating app are suing the service's current owners Match Group and its parent company, IAC for $2 billion in damages, alleging that manipulation of the company's valuation denied them billions of dollars they were owed. The suit centers around an analysis of Tinder from 2017 by Wall Street banks to set a value for stock options received by Sean Rad, a Tinder co-founder, and other early employees. It also includes an allegation of sexual harassment against Tinder's former CEO, Greg Blatt.
- Facebook has acqui-hired the 7-person Vidpresso team. Vidpresso makes online videos more interactive with on-screen social media polling and comments, graphics and live broadcasting integrated with Facebook, YouTube, Periscope and more. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Vidpresso clients and partners will still be able to use its services.
- Twitter Lite, the data-saving version of the app, is expanding to 21 more countries, bringing the total to 45. Twitter Lite is designed to load faster on slower network connections, like 2G and 3G, and is also under 3MB in size. Last November Twitter claimed Twitter Lite led to a greater than 50% increase in tweets, and noted that 80% of its then 330 million monthly users were outside the U.S. The app is available as a free download on Google Play.
Top Stories
- Insider reports that Apple is encouraging developers to transition to a subscription, software-as-a-service model, rather than a one-time purchase fee model. Sources say Apple held an invite-only meeting in April 2017 for more than 30 developers to convince them to adopt the sub model.
- The New York Times' Stacy Crowley has an article about banks using data on HOW you use their services as a way to stop automated attacks and detect fraud. Among the behavioral biometrics that can be analyzed are mouse movements, scrolling speed, the angle you hold your phone, the finger you use to swipe and tap, how much pressure you apply and the way you type. Few companies disclose how and when the movements are tracked. Some worry that private information like medical conditions could be detected. There are no regulations governing how it is used.
- NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the company's new Turing GPU architecture in a keynote at SIGGRAPH 2018. Turing includes hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization. NVIDIA says the fastest Turing parts can cast 10 Billion rays per second, which is a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance over he unaccelerated Pascal. The Turing architecture also carries over the tensor cores from Volta, and supports a wider range of precisions such as INT8 and INT4 precisions. NVIDIA announced that the upcoming Quadro RTX 8000, RTX 6000, and RTX 5000 – will be shipping in Q4 of this year. That RT refers to Turing's RT Cores for ray tracing, which improves lighting effects in games. Coindicentally, Nvidia also released a teaser video for its Gamescom announcement next week, with hints that the RTX 2080 GPU will launch.
- MoviePass's new plan launches August 15 but some users who have canceled have received emails indicating their cancellations have been revoked. One email reads, "if you had previously requested cancellation prior to opting-in, your opt-in to the new plan will take priority and your account will not be cancelled." Many people getting that email claim they did not opt in to the new plan and some say they now can't cancel the subscription at all. MoviePass told TechCrunch, "We have fixed the bugs that were causing the issue and we have confirmed that none of our members have been opted-in or converted to the new plan without their express permission."
- NASA and freelancer.com have chosen early winners for the Astrobee Challenge series meant to crowdsource a robot arm for the Astrobee cube robot. South African grad student Nino Wunderlin produced an attachment mechanism, Filipino conceptual engineer Myrdal Manzano made a "smart" attachment system and Indian software engineer Amit Biswas, developed a simple deployment mechanism. There are nine more contests in the challenge before it wraps up in September. Astrobee is scheduled to reach the ISS sometime next year.
Talkback Tuesday
- Chris from Trondheim Norway (34 deg C warm south of Spain) chimed in on how buyers using realtors is very rare in Norway:
When browsing for a new house you use the newspaper, online ads, and such. It's always the sellers realtor that handles the paperwork together with you and your bank.
Of course, the whole buying situation is also different from other countries I have found out. Here there is almost always an "auction" where bids go back and forth and the seller must accept the highest bid. And most showings are open houses, private showings are rarer.
- Chris from Trondheim Norway (34 deg C warm south of Spain) chimed in on how buyers using realtors is very rare in Norway:
- Angel from Puerto Rico has some thoughts on faxes and HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996).
Angel's company provides electronic health record (EHR) software for medical offices, and most of the offices now are using fax services that run on the cloud and integrated directly into the EHR software. That way, the documents are included directly in the patient’s record and you only need a scanner for outgoing faxes.
That said, the Center for Medicare and Medicaid services has announced an initiative to eliminate legacy technology, including faxes.
It’s part of ensuring data portability, which was the main intent of HIPAA, and eliminate legacy technology. So faxes may be going the way of the DoDo bird sooner rather than later.
- Angel from Puerto Rico has some thoughts on faxes and HIPAA (The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996).
- Anthony Colangelo has a follow-up on the Space Force discussion from last week with a missing piece that wasn’t touched on—leadership.
- Andy in Sydney has a take on how turning off location history punishes the user to the overall android experience:
You can't even use the Google Assistant. At all. You can't even complete the setup until you turn both settings back on. Why is this necessary if I just wanna set a timer or ask for the weather? Also, you can't use a Google Home with those privacy settings off. It won't let you complete setup. I ended up creating a throwaway Google account just to use the Google Home I got free with my Pixel ... Even basic stuff like the weather widget on my Pixel's homescreen? Gone. It disappears after a while when you turn off location history.
Even though I have GPS turned on, they seemingly can't figure out my location in order to show me the local weather. They have GPS, cell tower and wifi addresses, but they need my location HISTORY to tell me the weather where I am NOW.
I'm generally a big Google/Android fan, but this is too much. And much of this is new. My Google Home and Google Assistant used to work (about a year ago) without requiring access to my web activity and location history. I used to be able to use the weather app. But they've slowly been removing features from users that have additional privacy settings enabled. Maybe they figure they make less revenue from me. So that's how they justify taking away features? I don't know but this feels very wrong to me. Seems a pretty blatant way of bullying your customers into handing over the data.
- Andy in Sydney has a take on how turning off location history punishes the user to the overall android experience:
- KV followed up echoing Sarah's sentiments that this is a ridiculously buried settings item:
It's one thing to have the options available to merely say you have (or cover your butt legally). However, a real measurement on a company's efforts of how much they value 'user choice'/privacy etc is how accessible and clearly explained their options? Are the options presented equally? Are they opt-in rather than opt-out? or do they employ 'dark patterns' such as hiding certain options behind several screens or different mediums (e.g. phone call), discolour 'undesired' options or generally make it harder for a user to actually make an well informed choice.
The youtuber 'Nerdwriter', which does a pretty good overview on some common dark patterns: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxkrdLI6e6M (There are some other good resources around the web too).
- KV followed up echoing Sarah's sentiments that this is a ridiculously buried settings item:
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SaaSy Apple Apps |
Followed by: "TenCent, You'll Be A Nickel Soon" |