Posts from mobile

Voice Input

Smartphones have had voice input for over a decade now and yet I don’t know that many people who use voice input regularly.

I would guess that maybe 10 to 20% of smartphone users are using voice input regularly. That’s a guess based on absolutely no data other than observing friends, family, and colleagues.

However, in the last week I have started to use voice input a lot more as a result of a friend encouraging me to do it.

Also in the last week, I’ve suggested to my mom that she start using voice input on her phone and I recommended that the Gotham Gal start using voice input to text and email.

So why now?

I don’t think it is because voice input has gotten appreciably better in the last couple of years. I think it is because typing on a phone is annoying and I want to do it less.

What I have observed in the last week using voice input is that the speech-to-text recognition is almost perfect.

But I have yet to figure out how to format things the way I like with voice. For example, I don’t really know how to create new paragraphs or punctuation. I don’t know how to embed links or attach files or photos.

I like to write in a list format. I don’t know how to do that with voice.

So I have a lot to learn about speaking to my phone instead of typing on it. But I think voice input is going to stick for me because I can feel the habit starting to form.

I’m excited to start engaging with my phone in a completely different way and learning new tricks.

And I expect I’ll probably write more blog posts this way.

I wrote this one entirely by speaking to my phone.

#mobile#voice interfaces

QR Codes

QR Codes have been with us for as long as there has been a commercial Internet. They were invented in 1994 in Japan for use in the automotive industry. QR stands for “quick response” and a QR code is a barcode that can contain a lot of data and be read very quickly.

But QR codes kind of languished over the last twenty-five years, certainly in the US. They seem to be much more popular in Asia.

I think that all changed during the pandemic. In an era when stores and restaurants wanted to maintain as much social distance as possible, I saw QR codes popping up everywhere. Most of us are now very proficient scanning a QR code on our phone and getting taken to a web page.

I spent some time this morning setting up Nest Protect smoke alarms in our home. The setup process is very slick. You scan the QR code on the back of the smoke alarm and the app does the rest of the work. No more manually typing in MAC addresses or some such thing.

Now that we are all much more comfortable with QR codes, we will see them being used for more and more things. They are a very powerful way to quickly transfer information between a physical object and a phone.

#mobile

Mobile App Stores and Crypto

I have written extensively on this blog over the last decade and a half about the significant negative consequences that the two large mobile operating systems have on distribution of software. I am strongly opposed to the monopolies that Apple and Google have over mobile apps that run on iOS and Android.

I am rooting for Epic/Fortnite in their battle with Apple over the 30% tax that Apple charges developers for distribution in their app store. But more than the tax, what bothers me about these monopolies is the innovation tax they impose on the broad tech sector with their terms of service/rules.

There is no better place to see that than crypto, the next big wave in computing (after web and mobile). There are a number of reasons that decentralized crypto apps (dapps) have not gone mainstream, but certainly one of them is that the Apple and Google app stores don’t allow a number of important features that decentralized apps require.

The founder and CEO of our portfolio company Coinbase, Brian Armstrong, explained this well in a tweetstorm last week:

He ended with this tweet:

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1304490818850320384?s=20

Coinbase, Epic, and Spotify are not alone in their struggles with Apple and Google. They are simply large enough and protected enough to go public with their struggles. The truth is every developer that distributes software through these two app stores struggles with them.

In what world does it makes sense for two large and powerful companies to completely control software distribution on mobile phones? In no world does it make sense. It must stop.

#crypto#entrepreneurship#mobile

Nurx: Reimagining Healthcare

I’ve written a bit about our portfolio company Nurx since we made the investment back in 2016. Nurx is a great example of how technology is helping to reshape how healthcare is delivered.

With the Nurx mobile app, women (and men too) can find the prescription or home diagnostic test they need, connect to a doctor who can review the request and write the prescription, and get the medication or test shipped to them at home. No stigma, no wait, no travel.

What is amazing to see is the scale with which people are opting to access their healthcare this way. Nurx and their doctors are currently providing healthcare this way to over 300,000 patients a month. That turns out to be over $150mm a year of healthcare being provided by a mobile app and a network of doctors. I suspect these numbers are only the tip of the iceberg in terms of how many people will opt into this sort of relationship for their regular healthcare needs.

The Covid pandemic has certainly been a boost to all forms of telehealth and Nurx is no exception. They have seen a 75% increase in new patient requests this year. But like many things that got a boost in this pandemic, I believe many patients who adopted this approach to everyday healthcare needs will not go back to the old way when the pandemic ends. We are witnessing a sea change in the way we want to access healthcare in this moment.

Nurx accepts insurance and also offers affordable options for those who don’t have insurance. That is a reflection of Nurx’s mission to expand access and improve the quality of care while decreasing cost to the patient. Technology makes all of this possible. At USV we believe that technology can expand access and reduce the cost of healthcare at the same time and we have been investing in that theme for the last six or seven years. Nurx is a great example of our thesis in healthcare.

#hacking healthcare#mobile

Open Source Exposure Alerting Apps

The Linux Foundation announced its Linux Foundation Public Health initiative yesterday.

They are starting with two open-source exposure alerting apps called Covid Shield and Covid Green. These are two apps that use the Google Apple Exposure Notification (GAEN) infrastructure. The codebase for both apps has been open-sourced.

The Linux Foundation had this to say:

“To catalyze this open source development, Linux Foundation Public Health is building a global community of leading technology and consulting companies, public health authorities, epidemiologists and other public health specialists, privacy and security experts, and individual developers,” said Dan Kohn, LFPH general manager. “While we’re excited to launch with two very important open source projects, we think our convening function to enable collaboration to battle this pandemic may be our biggest impact.”

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/tech-leaders-and-health-authorities-from-around-the-globe-collaborate-to-combat-covid-19-301096039.html

Countries, states, public health organizations, etc can build on these open source code bases to create exposure alerting and other apps that can help with the Covid pandemic and potentially other public health issues going forward.

I quite like how this is playing out. Google and Apple have built the base level infrastructure, the open source community is coming together to build the application level code base, and governments and public health organizations can take all of that and put applications into the market.

I am hoping we will see applications built this way coming to market in the near future.

#Current Affairs#mobile#Web/Tech

Contact Tracing and Technology Conference

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, I am excited about the possibility that technology, particularly mobile computing technology, can supplement the work of manual contact tracing to keep us all safer until a permanent solution is found to this pandemic.

But there is a ton of confusion about what contact tracing is, what exposure alerting is, what the role of legacy contact tracing systems are, and what role new applications can play in this moment.

So I was thrilled that a group of organizations that operate at the intersection of public policy and tech innovation are putting on a series of online conferences on this topic.

The first one will be next Wednesday from 11am ET/8am PT until 2pm ET/11am PT and will focus on the consumer apps that are being built on top of the Google and Apple APIs. There will be demos of many of these new apps and a series of panel discussions. If you are interested in attending (attendance is unlimited), you can RSVP here.

There are four of these online events planned over the next two months (roughly every two weeks) and they will cover enterprise contact tracing applications, what is happening internationally, and more.

The organizations behind this series of online events are The COVID Tech Task Force, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, NYU’s Alliance for Public Interest Technology, TechCrunch, Betaworks Studios, and Hangar.

If you work in government and are involved in making tech decisions in this area, if you are interested in how tech can help address large scale public health issues, or if you are just curious about all of this, I hope you will attend. I plan to do that myself.

#Current Affairs#entrepreneurship#health care#mobile

Exposure Alerting

Christina Farr at CNBC has a good post that details the back story of how Apple and Google came together to implement an interoperable system and a set of APIs and SDKs to allow third parties to build exposure alerting apps on their mobile operating systems.

Like many in tech, I have been interested in exposure alerting (which we used to call digital contact tracing) since this pandemic started spreading around the world. I have always believed that these little computers we carry around with us can help solve many challenging problems and this sure feels like one of them.

But I was concerned about the need for interoperability, privacy, and security. I told everyone who I talked to about this problem in February and March that I felt like Apple and Google had to implement something in their mobile operating systems for this to work. And I was deeply concerned that would not/could not happen.

But it did. And when I heard the news, I was so pleased. Difficult times can make for interesting bedfellows.

This tweet cited in Christina’s story is great:

https://twitter.com/marcelsalathe/status/1253051812183183365?s=20

Apple and Google’s APIs are coming on May 1st and I hope to install an exposure alerting app that runs on them on my phone as soon after that as I can. I hope all of you join me in doing that.

#Current Affairs#mobile

Tech in 2020: Standing On The Shoulders Of Giants

Our friend Benedict Evans posted his annual “macro trends” deck this weekend.

You can also download the PDF here.

In the deck, Benedict poses the question “what is the next S-Curve?”

And while he doesn’t exactly answer that question, these two slides are revealing:

There is a lot more in the deck, particularly around regulatory issues in tech and it is well worth a quick skim this morning.

#mobile#regulation 2.0#VC & Technology#Web/Tech

Managing Multiple Twitter Handles

Like Mitt Romney and Kevin Durant, I manage multiple Twitter handles. Although neither is a secret handle.

I use @fredwilson for my personal tweets and I use @avc for this blog. I have done that since I joined Twitter in the spring of 2007.

The idea is to keep AVC blog discussions on @avc and leave @fredwilson for other things. That isn’t how it plays out however and on a day with a lot of discussion about AVC posts (like the last two days), I get reactions on both and engage actively on both.

Moving back and forth between Twitter handles on the Twitter mobile app is a breeze. You just add a second profile to the mobile app and you can switch back and forth in the profile view.

I have not found that to be as easy in a desktop browser and so I run two browsers, one where I am logged in on @fredwilson and the other where I am logged in on @avc. If there is a better way to do this, I would love to know what it is.

I know most people manage multiple email addresses, one for personal, another for business, and possibly a few more. I do not do that and use my main email address for everything. So I can’t explain why I don’t do the same on social media, but I don’t. And both approaches seem to work well for me.

#mobile#Web/Tech

Meet Cute

An interesting project came out of USV this year.

My partner Andy had a hunch about short form content, audio entertainment, and romantic comedy and he launched a company to explore these ideas called Meet Cute.

Meet Cute produces short (15 minute) romantic comedies that are consumed in five chapters of three minutes each and are available on your favorite audio/podcasting service.

You can check them out here:

Apple

Google

Spotify

Stitcher

SoundCloud

iHeart

Meet Cute is about delivering a little bit of heart warming entertainment in the middle of our busy lives via a medium we all have in our cars and phones. I listened to the most recent story last night on the LA Metro on my way downtown to a basketball game.

The Meet Cute team is very small but they are already producing content at a rapid pace. Three fifteen minute stories will drop this week and that pace will quicken in the new year.

The leader of the Meet Cute team is Naomi Shah who worked as an analyst at USV and helped Andy develop this idea and plan. And brand and marketing is led by my daughter Emily Wilson. These two women are very talented as is the Meet Cute entire team.

A great way to stay engaged with Meet Cute is to subscribe to the weekly Meet Cute newsletter to stay up-to-date on all things Meet Cute, including new story drops. It never fails to give me a smile when I need it the most.

#mobile#streaming audio