Developers will no longer be paid by Amazon to make Alexa apps. If we’re honest, voice-activated tubes haven’t been a huge success. CC-licensed photo by Smart Home Perfected on Flickr.
You can sign up to receive each day’s Start Up post by email. You’ll need to click a confirmation link, so no spam.
There’s another post coming this week at the Social Warming Substack on Friday at 0845 UK time. Free signup.
A selection of 9 links for you. Pardon, what? I’m @charlesarthur on Twitter. On Threads: charles_arthur. On Mastodon: https://newsie.social/@charlesarthur. Observations and links welcome.
America is sick of swiping • The Atlantic
Lora Kelley:
»
By 2017, about five years after Tinder introduced the swipe, more than a quarter of different-sex couples were meeting on apps and dating websites, according to a study led by the Stanford sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. Suddenly, saying “We met on Hinge” was as normal as saying “We met in college” or “We met through a friend.”
The share of couples meeting on apps has remained pretty consistent in the years since his 2017 study, Rosenfeld told me. But these days, the mood around dating apps has soured. As the apps seek to woo a new generation of daters, TikTok abounds with complaints about how hard it is to find a date on Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, Grindr, and all the rest. The novelty of swiping has worn off, and there hasn’t been a major innovation beyond it. As they push more paid features, the platforms themselves are facing rocky finances and stalling growth. Dating apps once looked like the foundation of American romance. Now the cracks are starting to show.
In 2022, a Pew Research Center survey found that about half of people have a positive experience with online dating, down from October 2019. With little success on the apps, a small but enthusiastic slice of singles are reaching for speed dating and matchmakers. Even the big dating apps seem aware that they are facing a crisis of public enthusiasm. A spokesperson for Hinge told me that Gen Z is its fastest-growing user segment, though the CEO of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder and Hinge, has gone on the defensive. Last week, he published an op-ed headlined “Dating apps are the best place to find love, no matter what you see on TikTok.” A spokesperson for Bumble told me that the company is “actively looking at how we can make dating fun again.”
«
The pandemic had a big, negative effect; the question is what the recovery looks like.
unique link to this extract
India’s electric rickshaws are leaving EVs in the dust • Rest of World
Ananya Bhattacharya:
»
At a small factory just north of Delhi, a welder named Ram Baran spends several hours each day training his coworkers in metal cutting, molding, and shaping bodies of three-wheeler electric vehicles.
Baran is not an engineer by education. He started working at the factory in 2017 as a helper — dusting, cleaning, and organizing items. A year later, he got the opportunity to upskill and get trained in welding by Chinese engineers. Nearly 80% of Baran’s 200 co-workers have followed a similar trajectory. “[They] taught us all the work,” Baran told Rest of World. “They taught us welding — how to put the parts and cut them. Over time, I picked up the work and got promoted. Now, our people can also teach these things.”
Each month, this upskilled team at the factory in Sonipat — 40 kilometers from New Delhi — produces bodies and chassis for nearly 5,000 three-wheeler EVs, locally known as e-rickshaws, for the New Delhi-based YC Electric, India’s second-largest manufacturer in the segment. In 2023, YC Electric alone sold over 40,600 e-rickshaws, while 82,500 electric cars were sold in the country.
Even as India awaits its first Tesla, these humble e-rickshaws made by workers like Baran are powering an EV revolution in the country. In the last decade, around 1.73 million three-wheeler EVs have been sold in India. Just last month, around 500 manufacturers — most of them homegrown — sold over 44,000 e-rickshaws, compared to less than 6,800 electric cars sold during the month.
«
MIT License text becomes viral “sad girl” piano ballad generated by AI • Ars Technica
Benj Edwards:
»
We’ve come a long way since primitive AI music generators in 2022. Today, AI tools like Suno.ai allow any series of words to become song lyrics, including inside jokes (as you’ll see below). On Wednesday, prompt engineer Riley Goodside tweeted an AI-generated song created with the prompt “sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License,” and it began to circulate widely in the AI community online.
The MIT License is a famous permissive software license created in the late 1980s, frequently used in open source projects. “My favorite part of this is ~1:25 it nails ‘WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY’ with a beautiful Imogen Heap-style glissando then immediately pronounces ‘FITNESS’ as ‘fistiff,'” Goodside wrote on X.
«
Suitable background music while you’re programming, I guess.
unique link to this extract
Fairphone’s Fairbuds are true wireless earbuds with repairable design and user-replaceable batteries • Liliputing
Brad Linder:
»
Dutch smartphone maker Fairphone has made a name for itself by building sustainable products that are meant to last a long time. That’s because the company’s phones have user-repairable designs and the company sells spare parts (and sometimes even hardware upgrades).
Last year the company expanded into the wireless audio space with the launch of premium over-ear, wireless, noise-cancelling headphones called the Fairbuds XL that also have a modular, repairable design. Now the company is doing it again, but this time smaller. The Fairbuds are a pair of true wireless earbuds featuring sustainable design elements.
…The earbuds offer up to six hours of battery life and they come with a charging case that gives you another 20 hours of use between charges. And Fairphone offers iOS and Android apps that let you adjust EQ, install firmware updates, and make other changes.
…All told, the company offers seven repairable/replaceable components for the Fairbuds:
• Earbud (left)
• Earbud (right)
• Earbud battery and silicon ring kit
• Earbud tips
• Charging case outer shell
• Charging case core
• Charging case battery«
I thought that sure, it’s all replaceable, but it’s going to cost a ton. Nope: €149. (Europe-only. Not sure if that includes the UK.)
unique link to this extract
Peloton is a media company now, with media company problems • The Verge
Victoria Song:
»
Loyal fans and a sticky product should equal piles and piles of money. Instead, Peloton’s valuation has dropped about 97% since its pandemic high. It’s managed to turn it around a bit — Peloton’s revenue has been steadily clawing its way back for the past year, even if it’s falling short of investor targets.
But it’s not rolling in cash. Some of that might be because it’s not always clear what Peloton views its product to be.
The company’s leadership maintains that hardware will always be a key part of its strategy, and to be fair, there’s a common through line when you speak to the Peloton diehards.
“It reduces friction working out and when I remember working out with Apple Fitness Plus, like, I didn’t even have a place to put my iPhone,” says Oz, a longtime Peloton user who switched from Apple’s exercise service once he moved to the suburbs. “I think when it comes to fitness, you just want the least amount of friction because you’re already kind of having a hard time wanting to do it.”
…Last year, Peloton also rebranded its app, launching three app-only subscription tiers to lure people into its ecosystem. When Lululemon decided to call it quits with the Mirror, another rival for strength, pilates, and yoga, Peloton swooped in with a five-year deal to share content between the two brands. As Lululemon parachutes out of the connected fitness business, its users will get access to Peloton classes. Along that vein, Peloton closed out 2023 by allowing some subscribers to pair the app with third-party treadmills. It kicked off 2024 by announcing it’s bringing shortform content to TikTok, with the hope of boosting the profiles of its lesser-known instructors.
For better or worse, Peloton is increasingly morphing into a streaming service. A hardware company has to figure out supply chain logistics, but shipping a workable product is 90% of the challenge. A media company has to do that and churn out high-quality content consistently. And that’s not exactly an easy thing to pull off. Keeping your audience engaged is the stuff executives lose sleep over. Peloton doesn’t want to be a media company — I mean, who can afford that in this economy? — but a lot of its problems sure look like media company problems.
«
Hardware company problems quickly transform into media company problems, because there’s no margin in hardware alone.
unique link to this extract
Americans increasingly using ChatGPT, but few trust its 2024 election information • Pew Research Center
Colleen McClain:
»
Most Americans still haven’t used the chatbot, despite the uptick since our July 2023 survey on this topic. But some groups remain far more likely to have used it than others.
Adults under 30 stand out: 43% of these young adults have used ChatGPT, up 10 percentage points since last summer. Use of the chatbot is also up slightly among those ages 30 to 49 and 50 to 64. Still, these groups remain less likely than their younger peers to have used the technology. Just 6% of Americans 65 and up have used ChatGPT.
Highly educated adults are most likely to have used ChatGPT: 37% of those with a postgraduate or other advanced degree have done so, up 8 points since July 2023. This group is more likely to have used ChatGPT than those with a bachelor’s degree only (29%), some college experience (23%) or a high school diploma or less (12%).
Since March 2023, we’ve also tracked three potential reasons Americans might use ChatGPT: for work, to learn something new or for entertainment.
…With more people using ChatGPT, we also wanted to understand whether Americans trust the information they get from it, particularly in the context of US politics.
About four-in-ten Americans (38%) don’t trust the information that comes from ChatGPT about the 2024 US presidential election – that is, they say they have not too much trust (18%) or no trust at all (20%).
A mere 2% have a great deal or quite a bit of trust, while 10% have some trust.
«
I find it bizarre that anyone would ask ChatGPT anything about current events. Clearly people haven’t been informed enough about its hallucinations.
unique link to this extract
China’s EV and solar boom is a capitalist win for communism • Bloomberg via Deccan Herald
David Fickling:
»
There’s a comforting but erroneous explanation for why your solar panels, home battery and electric car are increasingly likely to be made in China.
The economy is awash in easy money from state banks; its renewable manufacturers are undercutting rivals everywhere else in the world; ergo, China’s comparative advantage isn’t scale, cost efficiencies or innovative prowess, but the availability of cheap government subsidies.
In the EV industry “everybody has an endless supply of loans and support from the local government,” the Financial Times quoted Jörg Wuttke, former president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, as saying in a recent article.
That theory provides a compelling justification for trade restrictions. If Chinese manufacturers are only surviving thanks to a drip feed of government cash, there’s no way for overseas rivals to compete. Best, then, to use tariffs, investigations and other hurdles to exclude their products altogether, and give homegrown competitors a chance.
It’s a persuasive narrative because swathes of China’s economy really do run this way.
…To be sure, Chinese manufacturers still enjoy powerful advantages. Generous and consistent purchase support for EVs and solar panels gives owners confidence to invest aggressively, just as the same policies do in Europe and the US.
…It would be comforting if China’s success in clean tech was a result of easy credit from a communist state. In truth, though, this boom is a capitalist success story on a grand scale.
«
Essentially, pointing out that the green revolution in China is not about state funding; it’s about a big, big market.
unique link to this extract
WordPress.com owner Automattic acquires multiservice messaging app Beeper for $125m • TechCrunch
Sarah Perez:
»
WordPress.com owner Automattic is acquiring Beeper, the company behind the iMessage-on-Android solution that was referenced by the Department of Justice in its antitrust lawsuit against Apple. The deal, which was for $125m according to sources close to the matter, is Automattic’s second acquisition of a cross-platform messaging solution after buying Texts.com last October.
That acquisition made Texts.com founder Kishan Bagaria Automattic’s new head of Messaging, a role that will now be held by Beeper founder Eric Migicovsky, previously the founder of the Pebble smartwatch and a Y Combinator partner.
Reached for comment, Automattic said it has started the process of onboarding the Beeper team and is “excited about the progress made” so far but couldn’t yet share more about its organizational updates, or what Bagaria’s new title would be. However, we’re told he is staying to work on Beeper as well.
Beeper and Texts.com’s teams of 25 and 15, respectively, will join together to take the best of each company’s product and merge it into one platform, according to Migicovsky.
“[Texts.com] built an amazing app that’s more desktop-centric and iOS-centric,” he said. “So we’ll be folding the best parts of those into our app. But going forward, the Beeper brand will apply to all of the messaging efforts at Automattic,” he said…
…The deal, which closed on April 1, represents a big bet from Automattic: that the future of messaging will be open source and will work across services, instead of being tied up in proprietary platforms, like Meta’s WhatsApp or Apple’s iMessage.
«
As the story mentions, Migicovsky has his record at Pebble to lean on as well as the troublemaking at Beeper. But what on earth is Automattic’s strategy? It’s beginning to look like a sprawl: it also owns Tumblr, which isn’t making it any money. And we already have plenty of messaging services, thanks.
unique link to this extract
Amazon to stop paying developers to create apps for Alexa • Bloomberg via Yahoo
Matt Day:
»
Amazon.com Inc. will no longer pay developers to create applications for Alexa, scrapping a key element of the company’s effort to build a flourishing app store for its voice-activated digital assistant.
Amazon recently told participants of the Alexa Developer Rewards Program, which cut monthly checks to builders of popular Alexa apps, that the offering would end at the end of June.
“Developers like you have and will play a critical role in the success of Alexa and we appreciate your continued engagement,” said the notice, which was reviewed by Bloomberg. Amazon is also winding down a program that offered free credits for Alexa developers to power their programs with Amazon Web Services, according to a notice posted on a company website.
Despite losing the direct payments, developers can still monetize their efforts with in-app purchases.
Alexa, which powers Echo smart speakers and other devices, helped popularize voice assistants when it debuted almost a decade ago, letting users summon weather and news reports, play games and more.
The company has since sold millions of Alexa-powered gadgets, but the technology appears far from the cutting-edge amid an explosion in chatbots using generative artificial intelligence. Amazon is working to add more generative AI capabilities to the software.
«
Remarkable that Amazon paid developers, though I bet they’re happy to have banked the cash. Voice tubes are really looking like a dead end, aren’t they. Google removed third-party voice apps in 2022.
unique link to this extract
| • Why do social networks drive us a little mad? • Why does angry content seem to dominate what we see? • How much of a role do algorithms play in affecting what we see and do online? • What can we do about it? • Did Facebook have any inkling of what was coming in Myanmar in 2016? Read Social Warming, my latest book, and find answers – and more. |
Errata, corrigenda and ai no corrida: none notified
The Overspill: when there's more that I want to say 