Category: Tech

Categories
Tech

My Favorite Email Newsletters of 2017

email_newsletters

In an age of information overload, email newsletters remain an excellent way to keep abreast of topics you’re interested in without having to try to monitor the daily output of traditional media outlets, tweets from every corner of the world, various cable news shows, streaming content, Facebook posts, blogs and more.

After all, email simply comes to you, and you can benefit from experts’ curation of the most important, timely, informative, entertaining material.

Here are some of my faves:

General news and politics

  • Axios AM, by beltway insider Mike Allen. Ten things you need to know for the day. (It’s delivered in the mornings, U.S. time, so arrives in the early evening here, but is still great.)

  • Today’s Paper, from The Wall Street Journal. All the day’s most important stories, arranged by section. Yes, just like an actual newspaper!

  • Sunday New New York Times Digest, by Matt Thomas. A weekly rundown of highlights from the famously large edition.

  • The New Yorker Minute. A weekly scan of must-reads and okay-to-skips from the print magazine. Tagline: “Your secret weapon against the Three-Foot-Tall Stack Of Unread New Yorkers Sitting In Your Apartment.”

Media:

  • Reliable Sources. The day’s top media news, by CNN’s Brian Stelter. Especially helpful in these fraught times, when it can be hard to stay on top of things.

  • Morning Media. Politico’s daily “guide to the media circus.” A bit more inside baseball, with industry news like comings and goings of journalists from one outlet to another.

Tech

  • Briefing, from The Information. A daily, subscriber-only dispatch with commentary from the site’s journalists on the biggest tech news, as it happens. Highly informative.

  • Exponential View, by Azeem Azhar. A weekly, in-depth review of recent tech news, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence.

  • Asia Tech Review, by Tech Crunch’s Bangkok-based Jon Russell. A weekly round-up of what’s happening in this part of the world, broken down by country and region. If it’s big tech news in the region, you can trust Jon will be on it.

  • Login, another from Axios. This one’s penned by Ina Fried. The top tech news, every day, with a healthy sense of humor.

  • Recode Daily. Stories from the well-known tech site and other sources.

  • Mine! To get Newley’s Notes – my recent writings and five interesting tech-related stories every week – just click here and enter your address in the box.

Others

  • Longform. The week’s best deep dives.

  • Noticing. A newsletter just launched by Jason Kottke, whose blog I’ve been reading for more than 15 years. I’m confident it’s gonna be great.

Related post from 2013: Some of My Favorite Email Newsletters.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

A Browser You’ve Never Heard of Is Dethroning Google in Asia

Uc browser

That’s the headline of my newest story, out today. It begins:

JAKARTA, Indonesia—A mobile browser rarely used in the West has outflanked Google’s Chrome in some of Asia’s fastest-growing markets, giving owner Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. an advantage in the race among technology giants to capture the next generation of internet users.

Hundreds of millions of people in India, Indonesia and other emerging markets getting online for the first time are picking UC Browser, owned by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba, over ones made by U.S. rivals. Users say UC Browser works better in countries dominated by low-end smartphones and spotty mobile service.

“It’s faster, it takes up less memory, and it looks better” than Chrome, said Rizky Ari Prasetya, a 20-year-old Jakarta resident who recently ditched Chrome for UC Browser.

India and Indonesia are among the last, great untapped markets for internet users. Just 30% of India’s 1.3 billion people are online, and only 25% of Indonesia’s 260 million use the web, according to the International Telecommunication Union, a United Nations body.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
Tech

4 Factors that Explain Bitcoin’s Rise

money1

More on Bitcoin, following my recent Newley’s Notes devoted to the digital currency:

Financial advisor and author Ben Carlson has a post at his (quite enjoyable) blog, A Wealth of Common Sense, on how to explain the rise of Bitcoin. He puts it down to the following factors:

  1. Storytelling — the narrative — which may be true — is that Bitcoin represents a new kind of paradigm and none of the old rules about other asset classes apply.
  2. Technology — the block chain represents a legitimate technological leap, hence there is legitimate excitement.
  3. Decentralization — the global financial crisis has weakened our faith in institutions like big banks, and Bitcoin is basically institution-free.
  4. Resilience — Bitcoin has crashed before, but continues to rise, he says.

He concludes:

Anyone who tells you they know where this thing is heading, how to value it, where it ends, etc. is nuts. No one has a clue. This is everything you’ve ever read about the markets all wrapped into one — FOMO, supply & demand, human nature, behavioral biases, volatility, booms, busts, uncertainty about the future, etc.

Seems about right to me.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

By Me Yesterday: Google, India, and the Future of the Web

india_traffic

The story begins:

NEW DELHI—An explosion of smartphone usage in India is changing the way Alphabet Inc.’s Google sees the future of the internet.

As a mobile price war in the South Asian nation has slashed data rates to less than $5 a month for unlimited high-speed access, hundreds of millions of people are getting online for the first time and bingeing, stretching their low-end smartphones to the limit.

The Mountain View, Calif., company rolled out several apps and functions Tuesday aimed directly at these net newbies and those like them in other emerging markets.

As online activity here has increased this year, the inexpensive smartphones used by many consumers have struggled to handle the surge. To help, Google has shrunk the file size of its mobile operating system and many popular apps. Users in India are frequently offline so Google has given them the ability to do more without an internet connection. Also, they are much more likely to get around on motorcycles than in cars so Google Maps has started offering suggested routes and travel-time estimates for two-wheelers.

Click through to read the rest.

For more on the products, here’s a blog post from Google containing additional details.

Categories
Journalism Tech

By Me Today: Uber Hits Roadblocks in Southeast Asia

2017-11-28ubergrab

The story begins:

SINGAPORE—When Uber Technologies Inc. retreated from China last year after conceding a costly battle with a local rival, the ride-hailing giant vowed to devote new resources to winning other lucrative markets in Asia.

Since then, Uber has suffered setbacks in Southeast Asia, a region of 600 million people, where it has been outflanked by another local player, Grab Inc., which is gobbling up market share. Grab has expanded more rapidly, been more nimble in meeting local preferences, analysts say, and has forged better relations with regulators.

Grab has more monthly active users than Uber across six Southeast Asian countries, according to app analytics firm App Annie, while a May report from consultancy Bain found users across the region prefer Grab to Uber.

Now Uber investors and analysts believe the region may be the next to be ceded by Uber, which withdrew from Russia in July.

Click through to read the rest.

 

 

Categories
India Journalism Tech

By Me Today: India’s Ola in Talks to Raise Up to $2 Billion

traffic-671399_640.jpg

The story begins:

NEW DELHI—Uber Technologies Inc.’s rival in India, Ola, is in talks to raise as much as $2 billion, a cash injection that would provide added fuel to fight the San Francisco ride-hailing giant in the world’s second-most-populous country.

ANI Technologies Pvt.’s Ola, based in Bangalore, is in discussions to receive the funds from Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp. and possibly one or more other backers, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Ola, which launched in 2011—two years before Uber’s arrival in India—is locked in a tight battle with the U.S. firm for control of the Indian market, which could prove lucrative as millions of people join the internet economy via inexpensive smartphones.

Click through to read the rest.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

By Me Today: Google Wants a Piece of Mobile Payments in India

2017-09-18rupee

The story begins:

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is aiming for a piece of India’s booming—but increasingly crowded—mobile-payments business.

The Mountain View, Calif., tech giant on Monday launched its first-ever smartphone app that lets users transfer money to individuals and businesses in the country without the use of a credit or a debit card, a crucial factor since many here lack plastic.

Click through to read the rest.

So, to re-cap the state of play as people leapfrog from cash (over credit cards) to payments via smartphones here:

  • Paytm — which we profiled back in June — is the market leader, with more than 225 million users. There are other popular services here, as well, like Mobikwik.
  • WhatsApp, with 200 million users in India, is exploring a payments feature.
  • Hike, India’s biggest home grown app, added a payments feature a few months ago.

Watch this space.

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Our Facebook Live Video On Apple and India

Last week my colleague Eric Bellman and I conducted a live Facebook chat on Apple’s big gamble on India.

The video is embedded above and on The WSJ Facebook page here.

Eric and I discuss India’s promise as the second biggest smartphone market after China (hundreds of millions of people are getting online for the first time on low-cost smartphones), what Apple’s been doing to make strides here (assembling phones locally for the first time, working to open its own official stores, trying to boost the iOS ecosystem, etc.) and the challenges it faces (the biggest: price).

Enjoy.

And for more, see a couple of our recent stories:

Categories
India Journalism Tech

Photos: iPhones, Assembled-in-India, are Here

2017 06 26iphonetweet

I tweeted this on Friday and wanted to share it here as well: as we reported last month, the first-ever assembled-in-India iPhones are a reality.

Here’s a closer look at a couple of images of SE models I snapped at two shops recently here in New Delhi.

2017 06 26iphone

2017 06 26iphone2

For more on the wider context, see our story Thursday on Apple’s push in India. The headline: “Apple Scraps Like an Underdog in Second Biggest Mobile Market.”

Categories
India Journalism Tech

India’s WhatsApp Rival Launches Mobile Payments


That’s what I wrote about in this story today, which begins:

India’s biggest local messaging app, Hike Ltd., has beaten Facebook Inc.’s WhatsApp into the country’s booming mobile-payments business.

Hike on Tuesday launched free bank-to-bank and mobile-wallet payments for its roughly 100 million users, meaning people can quickly send money to one another via the company’s smartphone app.

“We are the first to bring payments to a messaging app in India,” Hike’s founder and chief executive, Kavin Bharti Mittal, said at an event in New Delhi.

For more on Hike, see my story from last year, when they raised $175 milion from China’s Tencent and others.