The cloud market is coming into its own during the pandemic as the novel coronavirus forced many companies to accelerate plans to move to the cloud, even while the market was beginning to mature on its own.
This week, the big three cloud infrastructure vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — all reported their earnings, and while the numbers showed that growth was beginning to slow down, revenue continued to increase at an impressive rate, surpassing $30 billion for a quarter for the first time, according to Synergy Research Group numbers.
Take one glance at Playground Global’s portfolio and a theme emerges: The firm’s investments are forward-looking, longer-term plays, a strategy that runs counter to the fast-return ethos that permeates certain Silicon Valley sectors.
The Palo Alto-based VC firm is banking on the future with investments in capital-intensive and technically complex pursuits, including robotics, autonomous driving, metallic 3D printing and infrastructure. It’s an investment strategy that isn’t for the faint of heart.
So, how does a firm that embraces futurism handle the present-day disruption of COVID-19? It looks ahead, of course.
When co-founder and CTO Peter Barrett joined TechCrunch this week for an Extra Crunch Live panel, the pandemic dominated the conversation. The executive noted that a new and common thread has emerged throughout the many discussions among Playground executives and the startups in which it has invested.
Priorities are shifting toward finding ways to be of service.
Everything feels different these days. Recent months have caused many in Silicon Valley to reconsider their investment priorities, roll up their figurative sleeves and begin the process of helping the world survive and, eventually, recover from the seemingly endless COVID-19 pandemic. Like many others, Playground finds itself at a crossroads — determining how it can be of service, while examining the ways in which a crisis like this can be addressed.
“One thing that underscores this pandemic is a realization that we need to be doing other things if we want to avoid being stuck inside for six months to a year,” Barrett said. “The biggest trend is a recognition that we need to make the investments that give us agency over our biology, and to build the tooling and infrastructure, so the parade of maladies which is behind COVID won’t have the same consequences that COVID-19 has.”
The pandemic has also driven people to reflect on what they want to do with their lives, Barrett said, suggesting that this phenomenon could influence which startups emerge from this period as well as what venture capitalists choose to invest in.
“If you’re an entrepreneur, I think a dating app looks less appealing than contributing in some way,” Barrett said, adding that entrepreneurs are looking at areas that “put us in a position where we really don’t have to be stuck inside because of a certain kilobase virus.”
Playground has a number of startups that are in position to offer some support, though, as is the nature of the firm’s tendency toward long runways. Most, however, appear better positioned to consider how we can prepare ourselves for the inevitability of some future pandemic, rather than the one we’re currently battling. Click through to read the highlights and watch a video with our entire conversation.
Playground’s portfolio is a mix of companies that are building things on a longer timescale that have the capital and patience to weather this pandemic, Barrett said.
However, in the near term, there are categories of companies that have an opportunity to be of service and grow their business.
Nearly 500 pages of evidence were made public during the House Judiciary’s marathon hearing this week on potential anti-competitive actions by Amazon, Facebook, Google and Apple. We’ve collected them here with added context and an omnibus, searchable version for anyone who’d rather not juggle four dozen documents.
The emails, chat logs and other communications listed here trickled out online as the hearings went on. Many are internal documents that were never meant to be exposed publicly — for instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg telling a colleague that “we can likely always just buy any competitive startups” shortly before acquiring Instagram in 2012.
Congressional investigators wield considerable power in compelling the release of such documents, even against the will of the companies, which would almost certainly never provide such self-incriminating information to journalists. As such, these documents contain all manner of useful information, most of it providing insight into the otherwise opaque thinking of executives as their companies made key decisions about growing their businesses — and hint at strategies traditionally employed by monopolies.
While there isn’t anything that could be called a smoking gun, these are not the only evidence the investigation collected, only those it needed to make public for this hearing. Legislators spoke of other documents and also of interviews and testimony that corroborated their allegations, or contradicted companies’ accounts of events.
While there are too many documents to discuss individually, we’ve noted some interesting exchanges we’ve come across in the files for each company. A combined, searchable mega-file of the internal documents can be found at the bottom of this post. It’s not in any particular order, so it’s best to sift through by looking for key terms, key figures and company names.
Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee
The documents contain internal communications about Amazon’s pursuit and eventual purchase of Diapers.com, which also came up in the hearing itself. Aggressive price cutting by the former forced the latter out of business, allowing it to be snapped up and integrated. In one document, we see that Amazon discusses setting up special automatic pricing rules that more aggressively undercut Diapers.com prices compared to other sellers of diapers and toys.
Another document shows that Amazon lost in the neighborhood of $200 million in a single quarter during this period, showing that it was willing to take on losses at a scale that the smaller business couldn’t possibly withstand — a classic monopolistic tactic only possible if you command a giant chunk of a market. Rep. Scanlon (D-PA) pushed Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on this at about the 2 hour 15 minute mark.
Jeff Bezos, spurred by a TechCrunch post, asks what the plan is for Diapers.com’s next play, Soap.com, and receives a summary of the existing plan, which “undercuts the core diapers business for diapers.com,” and “will slow the adoption of soap.com.” This email shows how Amazon acknowledged that it has positioned itself as “the place to sell globally,” particularly with manufacturers from China who wanted direct access to American consumers. A deck of Diapers.com metrics mentions “predatory pricing” and Amazon as very specific threats to their short- and long-term plans.
Regarding Amazon’s purchase of Ring, which might have emerged as a smart home competitor, this document shows senior management discussing being “willing to pay for market position as it’s hard to catch the leader.” Another email offers more context on Amazon’s thoughts on the acquisition of Ring (at the time referred to as Project Darwin) before it went through. Bezos himself says in this exchange that “we’re buying market position — not technology. And that market position and momentum is very valuable.”
Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee
In an email exchange from March 2012, the month before Facebook announced it would buy Instagram, Zuckerberg shares a conversation about China’s “strong culture of cloning things quickly.”
In the original conversation, sent to Facebook Product lead Chris Cox and CTO Mike Schroepfer, a high-level Facebook employee describes how they met with the founders of Chinese company RenRen who described how their own company copied apps like Voxer and Pinterest. The author comments that it’s easier for those companies to get products out quickly “since they’re copying other people” and goes on to suggest how a similar strategy could work for Facebook. Forwarding the email to Sheryl Sandberg, Zuckerberg comments “You’ll probably find this interesting and agree.”
Another set of documents captures Mark Zuckerberg’s private courtship of Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom. Tellingly, a side conversation between Systrom and a former Facebook product VP shows that the Instagram creator was concerned about Zuckerberg going into “destroy mode” if Systrom didn’t agree to sell. There’s also more insight about how Facebook saw the Instagram deal and how the company decided to keep it a separate product.
The Facebook documents also include some conversation about the WhatsApp acquisition, which it nicknames “Project Cobalt,” including the minutes from a board meeting four days before Facebook went public with its acquisition plans. “Ms. Sandberg emphasized that the high concentration of the mobile operating system market — with two providers serving the vast majority of smartphone users around the world — poses a significant strategic threat to [Facebook’s] business…” the minutes state.
Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee
Apple’s isn’t as well-known for crushing competitors as the other three companies, but it certainly likes to wring revenues out of its software partners while maintaining a tight grip on both its hardware and software. Many of the documents focus on Apple’s internal strategies responding to criticism on issues like the right-to-repair controversy and developers unhappy with the obsessive level of control Apple exercises over its products.
The Apple documents also detail how the App Store creator gives preferential treatment to some companies on the commissions it takes. In 2016 emails between Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Apple SVP Eddy Cue, Apple looks to have struck a special deal over the Amazon Prime Video app for iOS and Apple TV.
An email exchange back in 2011 also details how Apple mulled raising commissions to 40% for the first year for subscription apps. “I think we may be leaving money on the table if we just asked for about 30% of the first year of sub,” Cue wrote. This didn’t come to pass, but the correspondence does provide insight into some questions about setting its own rules that the company didn’t really have an answer to in the hearing.
Image Credits: Screenshot via House Judiciary Committee
In a confidential internal presentation from 2006, Google raises an alarm about the “orthogonal threat” posed by social networks and other websites with “high entertainment value,” like YouTube.
“… The team developed an opinion that these social networking sites will ultimately represent a threat to our search business as people will spend more time on those sites and ultimately may do most searches from the search boxes available there. They aren’t direct competitors, but they may displace us in end-user time tradeoff.”
The presentation goes on to argue that Google should “own the search box on the entertainment sites” and develop its own social networking solution so those sites don’t win out. That same year, Google announced its landmark acquisition of YouTube.
Other email chains from around the same time capture Google’s internal thinking in the run-up to buying YouTube.
“YouTube’s value to us would be a smart team and a platform we could build from (maybe enough to justify an acquisition on its own), but would we really be able to preserve their community once we start reviewing and pulling copyright or inappropriate content? If anything, that’s likely to cast a poor light on Google,” then-Google Director of Product Hunter Walk wrote, in an interesting moment foreshadowing Google’s current content moderation woes.
After floating a $200 million deal for the company and having YouTube turn up its nose, Google eventually went on to buy the now-ubiquitous video sharing platform for $1.65 billion.
You can read and search through the documents here:
House Antitrust Subcommitte… by TechCrunch on Scribd
This week, the CEOs of Facebook, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon were called before the House’s Antitrust Subcommittee to defend the vast empires they’ve built. Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg faced questions about how their business practices propelled them into the market-dominant giants they are today. They lead four of the top six most valuable public companies in existence and are widely regarded as reshaping the consumer world, both within the tech industry and beyond. Watch TechCrunch reporters Taylor Hatmaker, Devin Coldewey and Alex Wilhelm discuss what happened during the hearing and what this might mean for the future of big tech.
Una doing an amazing job of showing just how (dare I say it?) easy CSS layout has gotten. There is plenty to learn, but what you learn makes sense, and once you have, it’s quite empowering.
The demos are all together here.
Direct Link to Article — Permalink
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I’m excited to share some of the newer features in Chrome DevTools with you. There’s a brief introduction below, and then we’ll cover many of the new DevTools features. We’ll also look at what’s happening in some other browsers. I keep up with this stuff, as I create Dev Tips, the largest collection of DevTools tips you’ll find online!
It’s a good idea to find out what’s changed in DevTools because it’s constantly evolving and new features are specifically designed to help and improve our development and debugging experience.
Let’s jump into the latest and greatest. While the public stable version of Chrome does have most of these features, I’m using Chrome Canary as I like to stay on the bleeding edge.
Lighthouse is an open source tool for auditing web pages, typically around performance, SEO, accessibility and such. For a while now, Lighthouse has been bundled as part of DevTools meaning you can find it in a panel named… Lighthouse!
I really like Lighthouse because it’s one of easiest parts of DevTools to use. Click “Generate report” and you immediately get human-readable notes for your webpage, such as:
Document uses legible font sizes 100% legible text
Or:
Avoid an excessive DOM size (1,189 elements)
Almost every single audit links to developer documentation that explains how the audit may fail, and what you can do to improve it.
The best way to get started with Lighthouse is to run audits on your own websites:
Even though Lighthouse has been part of DevTools for a while now (since 2017!), it still deserves a significant mention because of the user-facing features it continues to ship, such as:
This is a subtle and, in some ways, very small feature, but it can have profound effects on how we treat web accessibility.
Here’s how it works. When you use Inspect Element — what is arguably the most common use of DevTools — you now get a tooltip with additional information on accessibility.
The reason I say this can have a profound impact is because DevTools has had accessibility features for quite some time now, but how many of us actually use them? Including this information on a commonly used feature like Inspect Element will gives it a lot more visibility and makes it a lot more accessible.
The tooltip includes:
To try this out, right-click (or Cmd + Shift + C) on an element and select Inspect to view it in DevTools.
I made a 14-minute video on Accessibility debugging with Chrome DevTools which covers some of this in more detail.
Exactly as it says on the tin, you can use Chrome DevTools to emulate vision impairments. For example, we can view a site through the lens of blurred vision.
How can you do this in DevTools? Like this:
Cmd + Shift + C).Cmd + Shift + P on Mac, Ctrl + Shift + P on Windows).We used blurred vision as an example, but DevTools has other options, including: protanopia, deuteranopia, tritanopia, and achromatopsia.
Like with any tool of this nature, it’s designed to be a complement to our (hopefully) existing accessibility skills. In other words, it’s not instructional, but rather, influential on the designs and user experiences we create.
Here are a couple of extra resources on low vision accessibility and emulation:
The Performance Panel in DevTools can sometimes look like a confusing mish-mash of shapes and colors.
This update to it is great because it does a better job surfacing meaningful performance metrics.
What we want to look at are those extra timing rectangles shown in the “Timings” in the Performance Panel recording. This highlights:
As a bonus, if you find the Largest Contentful Paint event in a Performance Panel recording, you can click on it to get additional information.
While there is a lot of golden information here, the “Related Node” is potentially the most useful item because it specifies exactly which element contributed to the LCP event.
To try this feature out:
If you want to quickly get started using DevTools to analyze performance and you’ve already tried Lighthouse, then I recommend the Performance Monitor feature. This is sort of like having WebPageTest.org right at your fingertips with things like CPU usage.
Here’s how to access it:
Cmd + Shift + P on Mac, Ctrl + Shift + P on Windows)The Performance Monitor can give you interesting metrics, however, unlike Lighthouse, it’s for you to figure out how to interpret them and take action. No suggestions are provided. It’s up to you to study that CPU usage chart and ask whether something like 90% is an acceptable level for your site (it probably isn’t).
The Performance Monitor has an interactive legend, where you can toggle metrics on and off, such as:
CSS-Tricks has already covered these features, so go and check them out!
I’m sure you noticed that I’ve been using Chrome throughout this article. It’s the browser I use personally. That said, it’s worth considering that:
In other words, keep an eye out because this is a quickly evolving space!
We covered a lot in a short amount of space!
Please check out my mailing list, Dev Tips, if you want to stay keep up with the latest updates and get over 200 web development tips! I also have a premium video course over at ModernDevTools.com. And, I tend to post loads of bonus web development resources on Twitter.
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Amazon has received approval from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch and operate a planned constellation of 3,236 internet satellites. That’s the backbone of Amazon’s Project Kuiper, an initiative to create a satellite-based broadband internet service designed to provide high-speed, low latency connections to U.S.-based households that currently don’t have great access to a high-speed connection.
Alongside the key regulatory approval, Amazon also announced that it would be committing over $10 billion in Kuiper, money that it says will generate U.S. jobs and involve not only building and testing satellites for the constellation, but also building out key ground network infrastructure that’s required in order to actually make the connectivity available to consumers.
Amazon’s Kuiper includes plans to provide backhaul service to carriers in addition to direct consumer service. Essentially, that means it’ll offer a way for carriers to offer high-speed LTE and 5G wireless connections to their customers in more areas where they don’t currently have the ground station infrastructure to do so. Amazon says this will be on offer “in the United States and around the world,” so it sounds like the plan is to first address the U.S. market and then expand the Kuiper network globally from there.
Amazon lags behind SpaceX in terms of deployment, since the latter company is actually launching satellites for its Starlink network, and looks ready to enter a beta testing program for the service this summer. The Jeff Bezos-led e-commerce giant has opened a brand new R&D facility in Redmond, Washington dedicated entirely to Kuiper development, however, and partner Blue Origin, Bezos’ space launch company, has been securing significant industry partnerships and could be ready to provide launch services for Kuiper satellites relatively soon.
It’s also unlikely that this emerging market for low Earth orbit satellites will have only one winner; provided these networks can actually live up to their promises in terms of latency, speed and quality connection, there will likely be room for multiple providers to compete on a global scale. Amazon’s $10 billion investment is also another good reason to bet it’ll be able to make this a reality – few others out there have as reliable a funding pipeline for the massive upfront infrastructure costs that come with launching a large satellite constellation.
Walmart is expanding its use of voice technology. The company announced today its taking its employee assistance voice technology dubbed “Ask Sam” and making it available to associates at over 5,000 Walmart stores nationwide. The tool allows Walmart employees to look up prices, access store maps, find products, view sales information, check email and more. In recent months, Ask Sam has also been used to access COVID-19 information, including the latest guidelines, guidance and safety videos.
Ask Sam was initially developed for use in Walmart-owned Sam’s Club stores, where it rolled out across the U.S. in 2019. Because of its use of voice tech, Ask Sam can speed up the time it takes to get to information versus typing a query on the small screen. This allows employees to better engage with customers instead of spending time on their device looking for information.
In the COVID-19 era, the tool offers another perk — it’s easier to use a voice app when you’re wearing gloves.
In addition to common functions like price lookups and product locators, Ask Sam can also help employees with printing, email or viewing staff birthdays or other events. An included Emergency Alert feature allows managers to quickly and efficiently alert all employees of emergency situations, whether that’s a lockdown order requiring them to remain in the store or an in-store emergency that requires everyone to leave the store.
The voice assistance technology was built using machine learning techniques, which means it gets smarter and more accurate over time, as it’s used. In addition, a team manually reviews the questions being asked to help find other patterns and trends the tech may have missed, like top searched items.
This is not the retailer’s first experiment in using voice technology. In addition to the Ask Sam product’s earlier launch within Sam’s Club stores, Walmart itself also partnered with Google last year on voice-ordering across Google Assistant-powered platforms, in a bid to counter Amazon’s advances with Alexa in the home. Three years ago, Walmart had worked with Google on voice-based shopping on Google Home devices before Google Express shut down.
Walmart has not said whether it would create a version of Ask Sam technology that would aim to serve retail customers. But given that the product is now capable of answering questions that customers want to know too — like where to find an item or how much it costs — it makes sense that the retailer would expand the offering in the future.
2020 has been all but normal. For businesses and brands. For innovation. For people.
The trajectory of business growth strategies, travel plans and lives have been drastically altered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a global economic downturn with supply chain and market issues, and a fight for equality in the Black Lives Matter movement — amongst all that complicated lives and businesses already.
One of the biggest stories in emerging technology is the growth of different types of voice assistants:
With so many assistants proliferating globally, voice will become a commodity like a website or an app. And that’s not a bad thing — at least in the name of progress. It will soon (read: over the next couple years) become table stakes for a business to have voice as an interaction channel for a lovable experience that users expect. Consider that feeling you get when you realize a business doesn’t have a website: It makes you question its validity and reputation for quality. Voice isn’t quite there yet, but it’s moving in that direction.
Adoption of any new technology is key. A key inhibitor of technology is often distribution, but this has not been the case with voice. Apple, Google, and Baidu have reported hundreds of millions of devices using voice, and Amazon has 200 million users. Amazon has a slightly more difficult job since they’re not in the smartphone market, which allows for greater voice assistant distribution for Apple and Google.
Image Credits: Mark Persaud
But are people using devices? Google said recently there are 500 million monthly active users of Google Assistant. Not far behind are active Apple users with 375 million. Large numbers of people are using voice assistants, not just owning them. That’s a sign of technology gaining momentum — the technology is at a price point and within digital and personal ecosystems that make it right for user adoption. The pandemic has only exacerbated the use as Edison reported between March and April — a peak time for sheltering in place across the U.S.
There are tons of smokin’ hot websites out there, with an equal or greater number of talented designers and developers who make them. The web is awesome like that and encourages that sort of creativity.
Even so, it amazes me that certain traits find their way into things. I mean, it makes sense. Many of us use the same UI frameworks and take cues from sites we admire. But every once in a while, my eye starts catching wind of the zeitgeist and commonalities that come with it.
The latest one? Blobby shapes. It’s a fun flourish that adds a little panache, especially for flat designs that need a splash of color or an interesting focal point that leads the eye from one place to anther. I’m sure you’ve seen it. I spent one week collecting screenshots of websites I came across that use it. I certainly wan’t looking for examples; they just sort of popped up in my normal browsing.
I’m sorry if it seems like I’m calling out people because that’s my intention. I actually love the concept — so much, in fact, that I’m considering it on a project! Some of the examples in that gallery are flat-out gorgeous.
After spotting these blobby shapes a number of times, I’ve started to notice some considerations to take into account when use them. Things like:
All of this has me thinking about how the websites of today will be looked at by the developers of tomorrow. Remember way back, like 15 years ago, when many sites adopted Apple’s use of reflective imagery? I probably still have some Photoshop muscle memory from replicating that effect so many times.
Skeuomorphism, bevels, animated GIF backgrounds, long shadows, heroes, gradients, bokeh backgrounds… all of these and many other visual treatments have had their day in the sun. Perhaps blobs will join that club at some point. Perhaps they’ll come back in style after that. Who knows! I just find it interesting to reflect on the things that have inspired us over the last three decades and imagine how the things we do today will be seen through the long lens of time.
It’d be awesome to see other instances of blobby shapes — share ’em if you’ve got ’em!
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Today after the bell, Apple, Alphabet, Facebook and Amazon reported their earnings results. Each bested expectations, and all but one are up sharply in after-hours trading.
Coming on the heels of a day’s worth of congressional hearings in which the four companies highlighted competition and downplayed their market position, the results are loud. The group’s collected earnings beats are especially impressive given that they came during a quarter in which the economy contracted, meaning that their combined, relative share of the U.S. economy went up sharply during the period.
Let’s chat about each to collect high-level results, and check in on Apple’s stock-split news that is sure to keep Wall Street talking for days to come.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Apple reported Q2 2020 revenue of $59.7 billion, up 11% from the year-ago period. This was ahead of expectations, with the street anticipating $52.25 billion, according to Yahoo Finance averages.
The hardware-and-software giant also reported earnings per share (GAAP, diluted) of $2.58, up 18% from the year-ago quarter. This also beat expectations, with investors expecting a slimmer $2.04, again, according to Yahoo Finance data.
And Cupertino announced that it will split its stock four for one, something that Apple said that will make its “stock more accessible to a broader base of investors.” In the age of fractional-share investing, the move feels somewhat meaningless. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, however, is price-weighted, and Apple is a component, so perhaps that has something to do with the choice.
Apple shares are up 4.7% in after-hours trading, after gaining more than a point during regular hours.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Alphabet is a slightly more complicated story, with the company actually shrinking on a year-over-year basis, though still besting expectations.
The search giant reported $38.3 billion in revenue in Q2 2020, ahead of an expected result of $37.36 billion. As Alphabet reported $38.9 billion in the year-ago quarter, Alphabet was smaller this year than the last.
The company’s earnings per share also fell, from $14.21 in the year-ago quarter to $10.13 per share (GAAP, diluted). Again, however, that was ahead of an expected result of $8.34. Shares of Alphabet are roughly flat after its report.
Why is its stock down despite beating expectations? Because shrinking is not great, and perhaps because its “Other Bets” business collection posted negative operating income of $1.12 billion in the quarter, a worse result than it recorded in Q2 2019. That’s a big expense.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Amazon had a killer quarter, including revenue of $88.9 billion, up from $63.4 billion in the year-ago quarter, and ahead of an expected result of $81.53 billion.
The company also managed to earn $10.30 per share (GAAP, diluted), far ahead of an expected result of $1.46, per Yahoo Finance figures.
The only possible mark against Amazon was that AWS, the company’s cloud computing service, only grew 29% in the quarter. That was slower than the 33% it recorded during Q1 2020, and, as CNBC notes, was dramatically slower than what Microsoft’s competing Azure product managed when it reported recently.
Still, shares of Amazon are up around 4.9% in after-hours trading, after gaining 0.6% during regular trading.
Image Credits: TechCrunch
Facebook’s quarter was a single, extended finger at those trying to nudge the social giant into shaking up its content policies. The company reported $18.7 billion in revenue, up 11% from its year-ago result of $16.9 billion. Investors had expected just $17.4 billion in top-line.
Unsurprisingly, off the back of that revenue beat, Facebook bested earnings per share expectations, reporting $1.80 in per-share profit, up nearly 100% from its year-ago result of $0.91 per share, and far ahead of an expected $1.39.
Facebook shares are up nearly 6.5% in after-hours trading, after gaining about half a point during regular trading.
Hot damn, is tech doing better than the rest of the economy as millions are out of work, and Congress can’t figure out if supporting its own population during a global pandemic and economic crisis is, you know, a good idea. These results will do precisely nothing to dampen concern that Big Tech is too big.
You know the title attribute? I can do this:
<div title="The Title">
I'm a div with a `title`
</div>And now if I’m on a device with a mouse pointer and hover the cursor over that element, I get…
Which, uh, I guess is something. I sometimes use it for things like putting an expanded date or time on an element that uses shorthand for it. It’s a tiny bit of UX helpfulness reserved exclusively for sighted mouse users.
But it’s not particularly useful, as I understand it. Ire Aderinokun dug into how it’s used for the <abbr> element (a commonly cited example) and found that it’s not-so-great alone. She suggests a JavaScript-enhanced pattern. She also mentions that JAWS has a setting for announcing titles in there, so that’s interesting (although it sounds like it’s off by default).
I honestly just don’t know how useful title is for screen readers, but it’s certainly going to be nuanced.
I did just learn something about titles though… this doesn’t work:
<!-- Incorrect usage -->
<svg title="Checkout">
</svg>If you hover over that element, you won’t get a title display. You have to do it like this:
<!-- Correct usage -->
<svg>
<title>Checkout</title>
<!-- More detail -->
<desc>A shopping cart icon with baguettes and broccoli in the cart.</desc>
</svg>Which, interestingly, Firefox 79 just started supporting.
When you use title like that, the hoverable area to reveal the title popup is the entire rectangle of the <svg>.
I was looking at all this because I got an interesting email from someone who was in a situation where the title popup only seemed to come up when hovering over the “filled in” pixels of an SVG, and not where transparent pixels were. Weird, I thought. I couldn’t replicate in my testing either.
Turns out there is a situation like this. You can apply a <title> within a <use> element, then the title only applies to those pixels that come in via the <use>.
If you remove the “white part” title, you’ll see the “black part” only comes up over the black pixels. Seems to be consistent across browsers. Just something to watch out for if that’s how you apply titles.
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While much of today’s Congressional grilling into the anti-competitive practices of the big tech giants focused on their core businesses, Amazon’s hardware also came in for close inspection during the hours-long interrogation.
It was a small but significant exchange, because it touched on the breadth of the company’s services and how dominance in one area can mean potentially anti-competitive behavior in another part of the tech giant’s business.
For Maryland’s Representative Jamie Raskin, both Amazon’s best-selling Echo and the Fire TV devices became targets thanks to recent reporting on the company’s business practices and negotiations regarding both devices.
The Echo is the company’s foray into the smart home market that’s widely seen as the next major battleground in consumer technology. It’s one of the most widely adopted pieces of Amazon’s technology and has captured about 60% of the smart home market, according to Raskin.
The congressman hammered Bezos on two points about the Echo. The first was the company’s pricing scheme, which had the Echo priced well below the cost to produce the device making it all but impossible for other tech companies to compete.
The Echo’s wide adoption has also led Amazon to engage in other anti-competitive behavior, Raskin asserted — some of which was outlined in previous questioning from Colorado Rep. Ken Buck citing a Wall Street Journal report that Amazon had used its investment unit focused on its Echo product and Alexa voice assistant to copy technology coming from small startup companies.
But beyond its appropriation of another company’s intellectual property, Amazon also used the Echo platform to promote its own products over competitors when customers used its voice services.
“Is Alexa trained to favor Amazon products?” Raskin asked.
Bezos responded that he wasn’t sure if Amazon had specifically trained the Alexa to default to Amazon services or to promote the company’s own brand of products, but that he wouldn’t be surprised. “It wouldn’t surprise me if Alexa sometimes does promote our own products,” the Amazon chief executive said.
Raskin also took Bezos to task for the company’s recent negotiations with WarnerMedia, the production studio, streaming service and network giant. Specifically, he was concerned with how negotiations around the distribution of WarnerMedia’s HBO Max service on the company’s Fire TV devices included discussions around Amazon’s access to WarnerMedia productions.
“You’re not only asking for financial terms but also for content from Warner Media,” Raskin said. “Is it fair to use your gatekeeper status role in the streaming device market to promote your position as a competitor in the video streaming market with respect to content?”
Bezos responded that the negotiations were “normal commerce,” but Raskin tried to make the case that the negotiations over access to the Fire was yet another way in which the company’s leverage in one market impacted its ability to exercise unfair advantage against a competitor in a different industry.
“You’re using your control over access to people’s living rooms essentially,” Raskin said. “You’re using that to obtain leverage in terms of getting creative content that you want. Are you essentially converting power in one domain into power in another domain where it doesn’t belong?”
The comments and line of inquiry from Raskin were part of an intense bout of questioning that seemed to hone in on the purported topic of the hearings — the anti-competitive and potentially monopolistic power wielded by four of the nation’s largest tech companies. Facebook, Apple and Alphabet were all raked over the Congressional coals in bouts of questioning, but it seemed that the most sustained criticism on anti-competitive behavior was reserved for Bezos and Amazon.
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