Sleep Cycle Releases Apple Watch App

How a Premium News Subscription Fits Into Apple’s Larger Plans

As consumers keep their iPhones longer, the company needs to grow its services revenue.

Apple announced it was acquiring digital magazine service Texture last month, and now we know the company’s plans for the app. Dubbed the “Netflix of magazines,” Texture let readers access a library of more than 200 magazines, such as the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, and Vogue, for $9.99 per month. According to a report from Bloomberg, Apple plans to integrate Texture into Apple News, eventually transforming the app into a premium subscription offering—and growing Apple’s suite of subscription services in the process.

The new Texture-infused Apple News would fall into Apple’s growing services business. Currently, services includes things like iTunes, Apple Music, iCloud, Apple Pay, and the App Store. Apple earned $8.5 billion in revenue in this category in its latest reported quarter, a 13 percent increase over the previous year. While iPhone sales continue to be Apple’s cash cow, the services segment is catching up as our smartphone purchasing habits shift toward a longer renewal cycle. In 2017, services contributed 23 percent of Apple’s revenue growth, but by 2022, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty expects that number to leap to 56 percent. The Texture acquisition is another push toward the company’s goal of earning more than $50 billion in revenue from its services sector by 2021.

A subscription-based Apple News service isn’t instant cash for Apple, though. Apple will need to build on the successful model Texture has set up. It will also need to drive home compelling reasons for iOS device owners to subscribe to the app. The company’s previous dip into the space, Newsstand, left many iPhone owners frustrated and searching for ways to hide the icon from their home screen. Apple eventually capitulated and revamped Newsstand into what we now know as Apple News. In a way, the Texture acquisition brings this app full circle, once again giving iOS users easy access to a variety of news and magazine titles, but in a potentially more profitable form for Apple.

Texture’s model—granting access to the latest magazine titles for a monthly fee—could also work for some of Apple’s other services. With iOS 11, Apple debuted a redesigned App Storewith a heavy focus on editorial curation. The design highlights a variety of new and trending apps for iOS users to discover and download. What if Apple offered access to a handful of these rising apps each month, Humble Bundle–style? For years, this site has offered curated, discounted bundles of games, book titles, comics, and more; with the new look of the App Store, it would make sense to take advantage of that layout with this approach.

There are a variety of such avenues Apple could take to make its services even more profitable. The possibility of an Apple News subscription service underscores the need for Apple to consolidate its many services. It would make sense for the company to offer a media bundle, for example. This could include Apple Music, Apple News, and its upcoming push into television programming, rumored to be yet another subscription service. At $9.99 a pop—what’s come to be the standard rate for many standalone streaming and subscription apps—consumers may be loath to buy into all three separate services. But, for a discounted rate, access to the news, music, and TV apps might be a no-brainer.

Despite the previous accolades of the Texture app, Apple analyst Gene Munster is bearish on the success of the new Apple News model. “People pay for music, they pay for video, and most news services are ad-supported,” Munster told Bloomberg. “If Apple launches this as a similar business to Texture, they likely won’t have many subscribers.” Given the state of the social media landscape, Apple’s subscription-based news and magazine app could land at just the right time that users are willing to pay for such a service. And lumped together with other media options that people are used to paying for, Apple could find itself on its way toward transforming itself from a hardware company into a service-centric business.

This Google App Helps You Learn Mobile Coding In Fun Way

Google’s Grasshopper app is now available globally on both iOS and Android.

San Francisco: To help beginners learn coding on their smartphones, Google has launched a new learn-to-code app called Grasshopper.

Grasshopper has been created by a team of coders from Google’s workshop for experimental products – “Area 120”.

“Coding is becoming such an essential skill, and we want to make it possible for everyone to learn even when life gets busy.

“We made Grasshopper to help folks like you get into coding in a fun and easy way,” the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

“We put Grasshopper on a phone so you can turn your commute or waiting in line into a learning moment,” it added.

The Grasshopper app is now available globally on both iOS and Android.

According to Tech Crunch, the goal is to get coders proficient in the basics and core concepts, so they can take the next steps in their coding education.

Till date, “Area 120” has released innovations like “Advr” — an advertising format for virtual reality; personal stylist “Tailor”; emoji messenger “Supersonic”; a job-matching service in Bangladesh, a booking tool called “Appointments”; and the YouTube co-watching app “UpTime”.

The app offers several courses, beginning with “The Fundamentals,” where users learn how code works.

Grasshopper have two more courses where coders learn to draw shapes using the D3 library, and later create more complex functions using D3.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

As Apple and Amazon fight for a share of the smart home market, one lags behind

Smart technology developers have been understandably excited about the smart home market and its projected market size of over $40 billion by 2020. But industry leaders Amazon, Google, and Apple are increasingly turning their ambitions to a potentially more lucrative market: Integration of their branded smart devices into a home as it is being built.

A new report from The Information indicates that Amazon and its Alexa-powered platform is thrashing Apple in this technological contest.

“As Amazon and Apple race to get consumers to buy smart devices that do everything from unlock a door to turn on lights, the companies are pursuing a second line of attack: Installing the devices in homes while they are under construction,” an articlefor The Information by Aaron Tilley and Priya Anand states. “On this front, Amazon appears to have an edge.”

Why is this happening? Fundamentally, Amazon’s smart assistant Alexa is far more advanced than Apple’s Siri, largely due to the fundamental difference in the two company’s approaches. Some home developers have commented that Apple’s “walled garden” approach to device evolution makes it too finicky for more complex smart home applications and smart appliances.

“Apple is closed source about what will talk to their system, so we shied away from it,” said CR Herro, a vice president with Arizona-based Meritage Homes. “I don’t want to restrict what I think the future could be because I have no idea what it will be.”

The integrated smart home market is an enormous playing field and Amazon is certainly having more real-world success in getting builders and developers to adopt their technology. Last year, Amazon struck a deal with Lennar, one of the largest homebuilders in the country, to integrate at least two Echo devices into every new smart home, along with Alexa-powered door locks, light switches, thermostats, and more.

Other developers who are leaning toward Amazon include Shea Homes, which is installing Amazon Dot devices in its smart home offerings, as well as Brookfield Residential, which has worked with both Apple and Amazon on smart home integration but most recently chose Amazon devices for a new division in Washington, D.C.

“This is exciting now, but pretty soon, smart homes will be standard,” said Adrian Foley, chief operating officer of Brookfield, to the Los Angeles Times. “To stay ahead of the competition, we’re going to keep layering on new technology.”

For developers for whom privacy is a primary concern, Apple’s garden may provide some comfort, as it did to Brookfield Residential when it chose Apple’s platform for a 66-home California-based development called The Collection.

However, more advanced developers are leaning toward Amazon specifically because of the astounding amount of skills available to Alexa. Amazon’s deal with Lennar includes a new line of Wi-Fi Certified Smart Homes designed to meet specific standards in terms of range and eliminating dead spots. With more than 20,000 skills developed by third-party developers so far, Alexa simply offers a wider range of benefits to smart home owners.

“It’s early, but we’re excited by the customer response,” said Amazon spokesman Jonathan Richardson. “Smart home has been one of the most popular features customers are using today.”

Amazon and Best Buy team up to sell TVs, but it’s a risky move for Best Buy

Best Buy will carry TVs with Amazon software and will sell TVs on Amazon.com.

Amazon and Best Buy today announced a partnership that will see Best Buy selling smart TVs running Amazon’s Fire TV software and Alexa in its physical stores. The deal will begin with “more than 11” models of Insignia and Toshiba TVs going on sale at Best Buys this summer.

TVs are a challenge for Amazon, as consumers might be disinclined to buy a TV sight unseen. You can’t judge comparative quality from images on your computer monitor. Some things, like HDR, are not possible to experience at all without being physically present in most cases. So Amazon needs a popular retail outlet for its TVs to make progress in that market. Best Buy dedicates much of its stores’ square footage to showcasing TVs, though the lighting conditions are only suitable for assessing quality in the specialized rooms reserved for the highest-end sets.

When Amazon acquired Whole Foods, industry analysts suggested several options for other retailers that Amazon could benefit from acquiring, and Best Buy has come up in that context a few times. However, Best Buy’s partnership with Amazon indicates that Amazon doesn’t need to make an acquisition to reach consumers who need to see a TV in person before buying it.

While the companies’ public announcements only specified that Amazon Fire TV Edition TVs would be sold in Best Buy stores, a Wall Street Journal report claims that the deal reaches further, with Best Buy selling the TVs on its online store and acting as the exclusive merchant of the TVs on Amazon’s own website. This will be the first time Best Buy sells products on Amazon.

Notably, this announcement also implies that Insignia TVs (Best Buy’s house brand) may drop software from Roku in favor of Amazon’s, though Roku TVs from other manufacturers will surely still be sold.

The announcement from both companies is so aggressively framed to play down past rivalries that it almost looks like the companies are protesting another narrative. Even the joint press release is written to emphasize mutual praise and admiration between the companies. “Amazon partners with Best Buy because of its industry-leading role in bringing the latest technology to millions of customers,” says one header. “Best Buy chooses Amazon Fire TV Edition for its innovative user experience combined with the intelligence of Alexa,” says the other.

You also have your requisite CEO quotes. From Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, we have:

Amazon and Best Buy have a long history of working together, and today we take our partnership to a new level… These Fire Edition smart TVs by Insignia and Toshiba deliver beautiful visuals and all the movies and TV shows you love, with an experience that gets better every day with Alexa. We could not have a better partner in this endeavor.

And from Best Buy’s Hubert Joly:

Our goal is to enrich the lives of our customers by offering them the very best products and services, whether they come to us online, visit our stores, or invite us into their homes… Our partnership with Amazon is exciting because we believe Fire TV Edition delivers an incredible user experience and further strengthens the growing connection between home theater, home automation, and voice control.

Recode called the two companies “frenemies.” That’s apt.

Best Buy has survived Amazon’s pressure on retail outlets partly by building out its own online commerce efforts. Working closely with Amazon could threaten that progress. Further, Best Buy is forfeiting one of its chief competitive advantages—that consumers can examine products in person before purchasing them—albeit in a limited scope.

Microsoft Translator gets offline AI translations

Chances are you mostly need a translator app on your phone while you are traveling. But that’s also when you are most likely to not have any connectivity. While most translation apps still work when they are offline, they can’t use the sophisticated — and computationally intense — machine learning algorithms in the cloud that typically power them. Until now, that was also the case for the Microsoft Translator app on Amazon Fire, Android and iOS, but starting today, the app will actually run a slightly modified neural translation when offline (though iOS users may still have to wait a few days, as the update still has to be approved by Apple).

What’s interesting about this is that Microsoft  is able to do this on virtually any modern phone and that there is no need for a custom AI chip in them.

Microsoft’s Arul Menezes tells me that these new translation packs are “dramatically better” and provide far more human-like translation than the old ones, which relied on an older approach to machine translations that has now been far surpassed by machine learning-based systems. The updated language packs (which only take up about half the space of the old ones) are now available for Arabic, Chinese-Simplified, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai, with others to follow.

Menezes tells me that Microsoft first trialed these on-device neural translation with Huawei, which started including its homegrown AI co-processor in its Mate 10 and Honor 10 phones last year. Now, however, thanks to what Menezes called “a lot of careful engineering,” the team is able to run these models on phones without dedicated AI hardware, too.

A mobile platform is still somewhat limited compared to a data center, though, so the team also shrunk the models a bit, so if you’re offline, chances are you’ll still see a few more translations that aren’t quite right compared to when you’re online. Microsoft promises that the difference in quality between online and offline translation is barely noticeable, though. “The gap between the neural offline translation and the previous translation quality with our older models is huge,” said Menezes — and he wasn’t shy to compare the quality of Microsoft’s translation services to Google’s.

With this update, Microsoft is also making these offline capabilities available to other app developers on Android who want to use them in their apps (for a price, of course). These apps can now call the Microsoft Translator app in the background, get the translation and then display it to their users. If you’re offline, it’ll use the offline translations and if you are online, it’ll send the queries to the Microsoft cloud.