This Week In Mobile
Facial Recognition and Bias: The Price of Progress
We can remember facial recognition seeming like a sci-fi wonder. There was something alluring about the idea of machines so smart they’d know us, and tech so advanced it was like a friend. But the more sinister applications were always simmering under the surface. Even in 1990, Total Recall envisioned a world in which you …
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The Rise of Cybercrime During the Pandemic
Covid-19 has brought out the best in a lot of people. At the same time, if you’re someone who preys on the weak, this global pandemic is a banquet. If you’re anything like us you’ve seen a huge increase in phishing and scam calls since all of this began in earnest. Interestingly, so have corporations. …
Broadband Access in the Age of Covid-19
BiTE is a completely remote, distributed team. That’s not COVID-related; we’ve been that way since the day we hung out our virtual shingle. As the I-guess-we’re-in-the-second-wave-even-though-the-first-never-ended pandemic rages on, and more businesses move to remote work, we’re watching businesses struggle with the shift. And the infrastructure, too. Temporary outages are more and more common (in …
TikTok, Vine, and the Monetization of Creativity
We’ve been talking about TikTok a lot lately, and not just as an excuse to post our favorite videos (though that is certainly a nice bonus). And in a bit of accidental prescience last week we compared them to the rapidly sinking Quibi, a company whose ambition exceeded its understanding of the mobile market. TikTok, …
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Quibi and the Brave New World of Mobile Entertainment
A few weeks ago we talked about the rapid advances in streaming and entertainment since the pandemic tightened its grip. And in that piece we spent a couple paragraphs dunking on the surreally bad non-starter of an idea that is Quibi. We have fun here. The thing is, we just couldn’t imagine a platform of …
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Google opens Chromecast to all developers
Google opens Chromecast to all developers It looks like all the fears of Google initially blocking access to Chromecast were quite unfounded. As it turns out, Google did just what it said: It was tweaking the APIs during Beta but planning to open them up to apps. Now the wait is over. This makes the …
India’s Ban on TikTok and App Store Politics
TikTok, if you’re the average user, is probably nothing but a wonderland of silly videos and exceptional creativity. But it’s also a global platform with 500 million active monthly users that has risen out of nowhere to become an accidental, sociopolitical powerhouse in just three years. And it’s the center of some pretty high-test controversy. …
WWDC20: What’s New in Apple’s iOS 14
If we’re honest, we were a little worried that the very first, virtual WWDC would lose something of the excitement we’ve come to expect from years past. The steady hum of anticipatory chatter through the crowd; the warm glow of a thousand laptop screens a half-brightness in readiness for the first speaker — we thought …
