Monthly Archives: January 2018

Cette importante refonte stratégique, visant au « bien-être » des utilisateurs, est une mauvaise nouvelle pour les marques et les médias. « Mark n'arrivait pas à sortir avec des filles, c'est pour cela qu'il a créé Facebook », racontait Ben Mezrich dans son livre sur Mark Zuckerberg. A l'origine, le réseau social, fondé en 2004 par le jeune prodige de l'informatique, servait uniquement aux étudiants d'Harvard à entrer en contact. Près de quinze ans plus tard, alors que le « trombinoscope » (traduction littérale de « Facebook ») compte des millions de pages de marques, de médias, de partis politiques ou d'associations, le réseau social a décidé de se recentrer sur sa fonction originelle. Facebook a annoncé ce jeudi une refonte majeure de son fil d'actualité sur lequel naviguent plus de deux milliards d'utilisateurs : la priorité sera désormais donnée aux contenus partagés par la famille et les amis. Une annonce qui a fait chuter l'action du groupe à l'ouverture de Wall Street. « Les gens vont passer moins de temps sur Facebook » Dans les prochaines semaines, ce seront les photos, vidéos et statuts publiés par les proches des membres du réseau social qui remonteront en priorité sur le fil principal. Cette refonte stratégique, la plus importante effectuée ces dernières années, entend mettre l'accent sur le bien-être des internautes.

Une bataille mondiale Le point commun des jeunes pousses du « free-floating » présentes à Paris est qu'elles ont vu le jour en Asie. Or, les plus puissantes d'entre elles disposent de moyens colossaux. Le leader mondial, Ofo, aurait levé 1 milliard de dollars en 2017 , notamment auprès des géants Alibaba (e-commerce) et Didi (VTC). Son principal concurrent chinois, Mobike - absent du marché français -, a levé 600 millions de dollars à l'été 2017 et bénéficie du soutien de Tencent (Internet). Après avoir conquis l'Asie, ces entreprises ont inondé de vélos bon marché les capitales occidentales (Londres, Washington, Berlin, etc.) ces derniers mois. A lui seul, Ofo a déjà déployé une flotte de 10 millions de bicyclettes dans 20 pays. L'objectif est d'éliminer vite la concurrence. Une stratégie payante : plusieurs rivaux aux reins moins solides ont récemment fait faillite. Mais s'ils se rêvent en « Uber du vélo », Ofo et Mobike ne sont pas encore pas rentables. Didi, actionnaire d'Ofo, pousserait d'ailleurs les deux géants à fusionner afin de stopper une bataille qui menace de finir sans vainqueur. Un scénario qui n'est pas sans rappeler celui des VTC. A défaut de gagner de l'argent avec les deux-roues, certains analystes estiment que la revente ou le partage des données pourrait être, à l'avenir, la principale source de revenus des sociétés de « free-floating ». Ofo a déjà commencé à le faire avec Alibaba. Ce n'est pas le moindre des paradoxes : l'avenir du marché du vélo-partage dans la capitale dépend sans doute moins des incivilités des Français que des mutations rapides du capitalisme chinois.

Ce mardi, c'est le député La République en Marche Sylvain Maillard qui balançait dans un tweet craindre que « la présence, pour une grande part subventionnée, de (trop?) nombreuses start-up au #CES2018 fasse oublier que le but d'une entreprise reste vendre plus chère ce qu'on produit...Pas d'obtenir des prix de beauté ! » En décembre déjà, Olivier Ezratty, qui en est à son treizième CES d'affilée, faisait part de reproches similaires. Observateur infatigable du secteur de la tech français, le consultant et blogueur publiait sur Facebook un post dans lequel il dénonçait « une palanquée de pseudo-startups exposantes au CES qui n’ont rien à y faire » et « des accompagnateurs qui font miroiter des alouettes en paillettes ». Depuis Las Vegas, l'expert français du CES, qui rédige chaque année un rapport sur l'évènement, tempère son propos : « Dans la présence française, tu as des boîtes très intéressantes, dont celle qui viennent depuis longtemps, comme Netatmo. La French Tech est très présente, mais difficile à qualifier. Pourtant, c'est devenu un passage obligé pour une boîte qui fait un produit grand public à l'échelle mondiale ». Accusée French Tech, levez-vous ! Au centre des critiques, le label French Tech. Mise en place en 2014 par Fleur Pellerin, alors ministre déléguée à l'économie numérique, la mission French Tech, qui dépend de Bercy, a vocation à « renforcer la lisibilité et la cohérence des actions publiques en faveur des startups ». Toute entreprise française oeuvrant dans le secteur technologique peut s'en réclamer, et des régions ont été labellisées depuis quatre ans, pour fédérer l'écosystème à leur niveau.

Last year, the only standout products at the Consumer Electronics Show were Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, and all the speakers it would run on. This year at CES, Google fired back. “Google definitely has a chance of defeating Amazon here, even if they had a bit of a late start,” The Verge’s Ashley Carman said on the latest episode of Too Embarrassed to Ask, citing the broad popularity of Alphabet-owned apps. “Google revoked permission for the [Amazon] Echo Show to display YouTube content and guess what? Those new Google displays that have the assistant are going to be able to play YouTube content.” Speaking with her Verge colleague Lauren Goode and Recode’s Kara Swisher, Carman acknowledged that the biggest hurdle facing the Google Assistant — and the panoply of third-party hardware it will work with — is concern about privacy. Like Alexa, the Assistant is said to only listen to what you say when you prime it with a phrase, “Hey Google,” but it’s still a microphone in your home that could listen to everything. “I don’t have any of these smart speakers in my house,” Carman said. “I used to be a cybersecurity reporter, [so] I’m a little bit weird about companies having cameras in my home. But I also use Google for everything — I use Gmail, I use Google Maps. Google has this information on us already. Whereas, if i was using Alexa, this is all a new thing for Amazon.”

IN 2015, A black software developer embarrassed Google by tweeting that the company’s Photos service had labeled photos of him with a black friend as “gorillas.” Google declared itself “appalled and genuinely sorry.” An engineer who became the public face of the clean-up operation said the label gorilla would no longer be applied to groups of images, and that Google was “working on longer-term fixes.” More than two years later, one of those fixes is erasing gorillas, and some other primates, from the service’s lexicon. The awkward workaround illustrates the difficulties Google and other tech companies face in advancing image-recognition technology, which the companies hope to use in self-driving cars, personal assistants, and other products. WIRED tested Google Photos using a collection of 40,000 images well-stocked with animals. It performed impressively at finding many creatures, including pandas and poodles. But the service reported “no results” for the search terms “gorilla,” “chimp,” “chimpanzee,” and “monkey.”

FLYING CARS WILL start filling the skies above you by 2020. So says Uber, anyway, which wants to launch air taxi trials over major cities including Dallas, Dubai, and Los Angeles. And somehow, it's not completely crazy: The technology to produce and fly battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft is on its way, and big players in aviation are starting to talk seriously about how to deploy it in the kind of system Uber would love to launch. Among them is Bell Helicopter. To show it's serious about this new sort of venture, the defense contractor best known for civilian and military vehicles showed up in Las Vegas for CES2018, along with its concept for how a flying taxi system would work. According to this vision, a egg-shaped pod (which will eventually be slung underneath rotors) will hoist you into the air. The pod includes four seats, room for luggage in the back, and large windows to take in the view. In this concept, VR goggles replace the crowds of the conference with buildings whizzing by below, including a lattice of red taillights, representing the the suckers in freeway traffic below.

Planes that had landed were stuck on the tarmac because there were no available gates. Some waited an hour, two hours, even three. An AirChina Boeing 777 that arrived from Beijing sat stranded for seven hours. Not that it will placate anyone who endured that brutal addendum to a 14-hour flight, but moving a plane into or out of a gate isn’t as simple as it seems, especially in these circumstances. First off, you need someplace safe to stash it, and by Friday night JFK’s taxiways were nearly full. If you want to move a plane stuffed with passengers, you need pilots and flight attendants aboard, who are bound by rules governing how long they can work without taking a break. And if a plane at a gate is waiting to leave, it makes sense to leave it there, rather than send the passengers back into the terminal. At least you’ve got everyone seated and in one place. Still wondering what happened? The key point to hold in mind is that, like any ballet, air travel is an exquisitely managed operation. Airlines plan their schedules months in advance, down to the minute. They obsess over turnaround times, how long it takes them to get one batch of fliers off a plane and a fresh group in their place. Canceling a flight is never a fun choice, because it means losing two planeloads of fares—one for the original journey and another for the return flight it would have made. Airlines operate with profit margins around 3 percent, which is why they charge you for everything they can think of, and weep when they lose the chance.

FROM A LAS Vegas stage today, Toyota CEO Akio Toyoda asked an audience to imagine how the future of mobility could transform Burning Man. Then he put forward his own vision: the e-Palette. Like the humble slab of wood for which it's named, this electric, self-driving vehicle is versatile by design. It could be a cargo van. Or a flexible complement to an established mass transit system. Or a pizza delivery vehicle. Or, for Burners, building a temporary city in the desert with all sorts of needs, maybe a bit of everything. “We can quickly create a mobile hub for services from medical clinics to entertainment and festivals,” Toyoda said as he shared the dais with his company’s boxy concept vehicle at CES. The e-Palette isn't really a specific vehicle, but more of a class of vehicles. It will come in at least three sizes, and the interior of any given vehicle will depend on what it's going to be used for. The idea is that no matter what, or who, you want to move, there's an e-Palette for that. And you'll never need a steering wheel or pedals. Now, renderings of futuristic vehicles crowd the annual Consumer Electronics Show like so many extra battery packs in the pockets of sweaty journalists dashing from one convention hall to the next. And we've seen plenty of autonomous rides that look like this one: in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Arlington, Texas, in Switzerland and Singapore, even Vegas itself (where one endured a crash on its first day of service).

At CES 2018, however, Google's back in a big way. Its massive installation in the convention center parking lot includes a twirling slide and a ball pit. The company wallpapered the Vegas monorail in Google Assistant ads. You can barely turn around without seeing a "Hey Google" billboard reminding you of the power of the company's voice-activated bot. The efforts feel like metaphor: Google Assistant is everywhere in Vegas because Google wants desperately for Assistant to be everywhere in your gadgets. Google even announced big news at CES for the first time in a while. It's all about Assistant, of course, Google's attempt to get its virtual helper into more places and devices. The newest new thing is a line of "Smart Displays" built by JBL, LG, Lenovo, and Sony. These are dedicated Assistant devices, much like the Google Home, except these have screens as well.