Posts from mobile

Although I am an avid Android fan/user, I am equally fond of Apple’s Airpods. I have used the original and V2 Airpods with great success over the last few years and can’t imagine using anything else to pair with my phone for audio.

I purchased the AirPod Pro a few weeks ago and have been using them exclusively and I am not quite sure if I want to stay with them or go back to the V2 Airpods.

I have never liked headphones with silicone tips. They create an odd feeling of pressure in the inner ear that feels strange to me. And I also don’t love noise cancellation when I am out and about, which is where I use the Airpods.

On planes and in the office, where noise cancellation is something I quite like, I use over-ear Bose headphones with noise cancellation instead of the AirPods.

I also don’t love the larger charging case, which I typically have on me while I am out and about.

And, I don’t think the Bluetooth pairing (which is how they connect to Android phones) works as reliably as the Bluetooth pairing on the V2 Airpods.

I am going to give the Airpods Pro a few more weeks before I make a final call, but I am leaning towards going back to the V2 Airpods right now.

I am curious to hear what others think about these two Airpod products. I wonder if I’m in the minority or the majority on this.

I got a new Pixel 4XL phone a week ago and it took me most of the week (it was a busy one) to migrate over to it. I wrote a bit about how I’m careful about the migration last week.

I like to upgrade to the new Pixel flagship phone every fall when Google tends to ship them. It generally means longer battery life, better camera, and some other nice things.

Last year, we got fingerprint biometrics.

This year, we got face recognition, something iOS users have had for at least a year now.

Face recognition is super nice. I already love it.

This new Pixel 4XL also has something called MotionSense which allows a user to control the phone without actually touching the screen. You wave across the phone with your hands.

For now, MotionSense only silences interruptions and skips songs on many popular music apps. Hopefully, Motionsense can be incorporated by third-party apps. If that is the case, I can see this becoming a really useful thing.

The Android UI has changed a bit on the Pixel 4XL and it has taken me a few days to get used to the new ways to get around the phone but I am quickly getting there.

I’m glad I made the upgrade even though the migration was a real effort. Many readers suggested better ways to do 2FA with easier migration. I got the message and that is on my to-do list now. Thanks.

I just started using our portfolio company DuckDuckGo’s mobile browser.

Honestly I didn’t even realize they had one until last week.

It looks like this on my phone:

And AVC looks like this in it:

I guess AVC is only a B+ when it comes to privacy. I hope to fix that and get to an A when I push the new design, hopefully next month.

If you want to start using the Duck Duck Go mobile browser, you can get it here.

I got the new Pixel 4 XL and am in the process of copying over all of my data and apps and other stuff.

Apple and Google make it so easy these days to sync a new phone with an old phone that it is easy to think you are done once the sync is over.

But that is unfortunately not the case.

The biggest “gotcha” that I worry about is moving all of my two-factor codes over from my old phone to my new phone. For that reason, I keep my old phone around for a few weeks just to make sure I’ve got it all moved over to my new phone.

And then there is the hassle of logging into all of my apps and signing into them all over again. I have and use a lot of apps on my phone so that takes me several hours over the course of a few days to do that. And that is another reason to keep my old phone around for a while to make sure I’ve got everything.

Increasingly Apple and Google and other providers want you to trade in your older phone for a discount on a new one. While that is an attractive offer, it encourages wiping and sending the old phone back.

And I don’t think that’s a smart thing to do until you are sure you’ve got everything you need off of your older phone.

This post is also live on USV.com as we announce all of our investments there with a blog post.

Eighteen months ago, I had breakfast with John Heilemann and he told me that his world, political media, was challenged in the shift from linear television (ie cable news) to real-time mobile (ie Twitter). He saw an opportunity to address that by filling the void in between them with news content that was made for real-time mobile consumption but had the journalistic integrity and production values of linear television.

I said to him “you should start a company to fill that void and you should get John Battelle to join you in starting that business.”

John did exactly that and six months later USV provided the seed capital along with True Ventures and a fantastic group of angel investors. 

Their company is called Recount Media and it has stayed largely under the radar for the last ten months as they built the team and started producing news content that promises “no bullshit, no bad faith, in five minutes or less.”

Having provided the initial funding for Twitter twelve years ago, we at USV are acutely aware that the disruption in media that it caused has been both positive and negative and that there is more work to do to make sure our society is well served by both the Fourth and Fifth estates.

We think that the work John, John and the dream team of journalists, producers, technologists, and business people are doing will make a material impact on filling the void and we are proud to be supportive investors in Recount Media.

If you want to see what Recount is all about you can download the Recount iOS app and/or sign up for their videos delivered via a daily email. You can also follow the Recount on Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube.

I remember back in the early 2000s, the direct marketing industry and the tech sector worked with Congress to craft sensible regulations for email marketing. The result was called CAN-SPAM and it was passed into law in 2003. The law has been modified to clarify certain terms and rules. While it certainly was not perfect (what is perfect?), it paved the way for a lot of progress in making email a workable medium for consumers and businesses.

There are no such rules in the location data business. Any mobile app can collect data on where you are and do what they want with it. That is not good for anyone, including the companies who are collecting that data.

Today, the CEO of our portfolio company Foursquare, which is in the location data business, wrote an op-ed asking Congress to regulate the location data industry.

In the op-ed, Jeff (Foursquare’s CEO) outlines what he thinks would be reasonable regulation. Here are the highlights:

• apps should not collect location data unless they are using it to provide value to the user
• there should be transparency to the user around what they are signing up for and how the data will be used
• there should be a “do no harm” requirement
• location data should be protected with the appropriate security

The entire op-ed is a good read and Jeff goes into a lot more detail than I did on each of these points.

I hope this leads to action in Congress and we get the right legislation as a result.

Back in June I wrote about a company we recently invested in called Helium.

Helium is creating a decentralized low power and low bandwidth wireless network for the exploding number of smart devices out in the world.

We got our hotspot yesterday and I connected it this morning and we are now providing bandwidth in Manhattan and earning Helium tokens as a result.

With the news that two-thirds of Americans favor breaking up big tech combined with the news that Liz Warren (the biggest advocate of the idea) has broken out of the pack in Iowa, I thought I would return to this topic.

I wrote about this back when Liz first put the idea forward.

I am in favor of reigning in the monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly power of the large American tech companies. I am also in favor of reigning in the power of large tech companies that are not resident in the US.

Doing one without the other is bad policy and could give large tech companies outside of the US (particularly in Asia) a competitve advantage.

A better approach, as I advocated for in my earlier post on this topic, are policies, like the European’s GDPR, that would impact all companies doing business in the US equally.

I do not love GDPR. It is overly bureaucratic and for the most part has resulted in all of us robotically opting into being cookied everywhere.

But users do have a right to online privacy. We also have a right to self sovereign identity and ownership of our data.

Apple is offering Sign In With Apple in iOS13 to help us reduce our reliance on signing in with Facebook and Google. That’s great but it just replaces one boogyman with another.

What we need is an open sign-in protocol in which users control their sign-in keys and also all of the data we create and have created over the years once we are signed in.

Government can force industry into a regime like that with regulations that dictate that tech companies of all sizes adopt such approaches.

That is what we should be doing to reduce the market power of big tech instead of breaking them up. That is because their market power comes from this single sign-on oligopoly and the data that comes with it.

Government should not dictate the design of such a protocol or any of the technology that is required to produce such a regime. The market can and will do that once the requirements are put in place. We have much of what we need already in the form of cryptography and user centric wallet infrastructure.

We just need a forcing function to get big tech to adopt these technologies, which they won’t do on their own because they will reduce their market powers. Which is exactly why we need to do this.

Today Apple is going to announce three new iPhones.

One of them should be a small form factor like the old SE.

Apple discontinued the iPhone SE at the tail end of 2018 and has stated that the next iOS update will not run on the old SE hardware.

I have a number of friends and family members who have the old SE, love the small form factor, and do not want a larger phone in their pockets, purses, and hands.

As a result, these people have been holding onto phones that have gotten a bit old and badly in need of an upgrade.

But more importantly in my view, if Apple wants to tightly control the hardware that iOS can run on (which obviously they do), then they should put a wide enough variety of hardware into the market to support their user base.

It is unlikely that any of my friends and family members are going to move to Android, where there is a wide variety of hardware form factors to choose from. The iOS lockin is very powerful.

So Apple doesn’t need to do this so much for business reasons. But I do think they should do this for other reasons.