Daily Archives: May 22, 2021

A bipartisan data privacy bill would force all tech giants to follow Apples example in allowing users to opt out of tracking by apps and websites.

Apple recently switched on App Tracking Transparency, which lets users decide whether or not they want to be tracked by apps in order to deliver personalized ads

App Tracking Transparency requires apps to ask permission before using any method of tracking users. Apple enabled the long-promised feature in iOS 14.5, complete with a video to promote the feature to users. Following heated exchanges with Facebook on the issue, the video is pretty aggressive in advising iPhone owners to decline permission.

Our reader poll showed that the majority of readers are blocking tracking for all apps, while a minority are allowing it for favorite/trusted apps in order to boost ad revenue for those developers. Almost nobody is allowing it for all apps and thats the same for all Americans.

Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal back in 2019, Sen. Amy Klobuchar put forward a bill that would require Google, Facebook, and all other tech giants to offer the same choice that Apple users now get. The bill failed due to lack of support from Republicans, but The Verge reports that she is now trying again, and has bipartisan support.

Klobuchar (D-MN) has teamed up with a bipartisan group of senators, including Sens. John Kennedy (R-LA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), and Richard Burr (R-NC), to reintroduce the Social Media Privacy Protection and Consumer Rights Act. The privacy legislation would force websites to grant users greater control over their data and allow them to opt out of data tracking and collection.

For too long companies have profited off of Americans online data while consumers have been left in the dark, Klobuchar said in a statement toThe Verge. This legislation will protect and empower consumers by allowing them to make choices about how companies use their data and inform them of how they can protect personal information.

If passed, tech companies would also be required to use plain language for their terms, and would get 72 hours to notify users of any data breach.

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Data privacy bill would force everyone to follow Apples tracking transparency lead - 9to5Mac

Neha Gupta

To say that the relationship between publishers and technology giants has intensified in the last few days, weeks or months is putting it lightly.

Regardless of the way forward, the trends, developments and products pouring out of Silicon Valley should have publishers undivided attention, says Edward Roussel, Innovation Officer at Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal.

The five largest technology companies in the U.S.Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazoncurrently hold a combined market value of $7.5 trillion. So, how do publishers ignore that product development might, questioned Roussel, who was speaking at WAN-IFRAs virtual Digital Media India Conference 2021.

These companies are experimenting and rolling out new products right in the sweet spot of the news business. And depending on who you ask, they are in support of the industry or (unfairly) to the demise of it (hence the ongoing debate). Either way, some of these developments are moving the needle toward audience engagement, community and more.

So, just in case you missed it, here is a recap: Australia passed the News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code, that could push Facebook and Google to pay publishers, if they host their content. This code encourages tech giants and media companies to bargain payment deals, obligating Facebook and Google to invest tens of millions of dollars in local digital content.

The tech companies are changing news consumption. Five critical trends:

Brevity: As news consumption on mobile grows exponentially, each visit is for a relatively short period of time. According to Pew research, consumers now spend an average of 2.5 minutes per visit, a 10 percent decline since 2015.

How must publishers, then, create a wholesome news experience in less than 3 minutes, while serving bite-sized content?

Roussel presents data where Snapchat, on an average, estimates that they get a mere 2 seconds to grab a users attention with headlines and images, and another 80 seconds for consumers browsing the Discover tab. Likewise, according to Facebook, an average reader spends just 1 minute on a story.

We have learned, over the last 25 years, that the internet relentlessly drives productivity, said Roussel. There is an incredible amount of pressure to condense the amount of time we spend doing actions. Social media has invested greatly in adding heuristics or mental shortcuts such as arrows, hashtags and buttons to grab user attention.

Interestingly, time spent is one of the best metrics publishers use today to track loyalty, particularly among subscribers. So how do you create engaging, short content also to attract younger audiences who will pay?

Community is one way: The value of content is shifting from content to the interaction with content, with people increasingly paying for interaction with news. Companies such as Clubhouse (attracting powerful people such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg), OnlyFans (generating $2 billion a year in revenue), Patreon ($1 billion), Cameo ($100 million) and Substack ($25 million) exploded during the pandemic.

What do these services have in common and what are they telling us about the evolution of community? Roussel points out three things:

Exponential growth in audio: Publishers have begun to face the challenge of keeping consumers engaged without the written word, and peoples seemingly insatiability with audio/podcasts has caused a ripple effect on the content side.

With intense competition between Amazon, Apple and Spotify to capture the audio space and recruit top podcasters, here are a few stats:

Visual: In the era of Instagram, media has become increasingly visual. Roussel points out three categories.

Perhaps the least noticed onean explosion in data-driven graphics. For instance, six of the top read 20 New York Times stories in 2020 were data graphics driven.

Video shot on mobile phones: Mobile cameras are revolutionizing storytelling. The stories of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Christian Cooper were all at the heart of the Black Lives Matter protests that began with mobile video footage YouTube has more viewers under the age of 50 in America than all TV channels combined. That, in turn, is forming a secondary market for a new generation of mobile video media such as Brut and HouseOfHighlights.

Upgraded photo galleries: More than 1.5 billion photos are uploaded daily to Google, Facebook and Instagram.

Personalization: Hyperlocal journalism is making a comeback from applications that have embraced geolocation software, with Artificial Intelligence improving the quality of personalized content. The U.S. is seeing an explosion in hyperlocal news apps, with Citizen, Nextdoor and News Break ranking among the top 10 most used news apps, including social media.

Neha Gupta is a multimedia journalist, who writes about digital news trends, with a keen interest in revenue streams, media transformation, women in news, and technology-aided innovation for the World Association of News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

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Despite the Tech Giant Tug of War, Keep an Eye on These Five Trends - Editor And Publisher Magazine

Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the company's App Store rules during testimony Friday, claiming they protect users security.

Cook's testimony came during the Silicon Valley giants legal battle against Fortnite developer Epic Games.

Cook touted the tech giants App Store as an economic miracle and defended the policies related to the store including the up to 30 percent commission fees charged to developers at the core of Epic Gamess antitrust allegations.

The app developer is suing the company over allegations of anti-competitive behavior stemming from Apple's decision in August to kick Fortniteoff of the app store after the developer set up its own in-app payment system in an attempt to avoid Apples 30 percent commission fees.

The trial in California federal court,which concluded its third week Friday, comes at a pivotal moment when lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and abroad are taking a close look at the market power of Apple and fellow tech giants.

Cook testified that Apple has a host of competitors in the field, such as app stores on Android products and game consoles.

He defended Apples policies, including its requirement for app developers to use Apples in-app payment system, saying the company puts users interests first and is committed to protecting their data and security.

Apple does not allow third-party app stores on its iPhones. Cook said third-party stores would not be as motivated to provide a safe and secure store for users.

Epics lawyer pressed Cook on the stance, asking how he knows if a third party could not do as well as, or better than, Apple at protecting user security since they have not had the opportunity.

Its an experiment I wouldnt want to run, Cook responded.

Pressed further on if consumers who value privacy could decide to use Apples store even if there were other options they may deem better, Cook said its a hypothetical possibility.

The bench trial is set to wrap up on Monday, but Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has said her ruling will not be issued that day or the next.

"I have a very tiny team, she said earlier in the week.

The judge has also acknowledged that whatever her decision is will likely be appealed.

Washington is expected to be keeping a close eyeon the trial.

Apples app store has come under fire as lawmakers scrutinize the market power of tech giants. Last month, the Senate Judiciary antitrust subcommittee held a hearing on app store competition, featuring executives from Apple and Google.

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Tim Cook defends App Store rules during antitrust trial | TheHill - The Hill

Unfair tax regimes are costing the worlds largest economies up to Sh3.2 trillion ($32 billion) from the global big tech firms, Action Aid has said.

The money is enough to have every person in the world given two doses of Covid-19 vaccine, said the organisation, which focuses on the eradication of poverty.

Action Aid said in a statement that tech firms such as Alphabet, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon should be made to remit tax according to the profit they make in each country they operate.

Tech giants Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Alphabet have extensive market activity across the world and have racked up billions in profits during the pandemic, the statement said.

If global corporate tax systems were fair, governments could increase their tax revenue and fund better health systems to end the pandemic and start the recovery.

Action Aid said if this is done, in just one year Sh3.2 billion would be collected from the five tech firms alone.

$32 billion would cover vaccine doses only, not the full costs of the vaccine rollout. This figure merely offers a sense of the scale of resources involved in taxing big tech companies, it said.

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Some of these tech giants have, through corporate social responsibility, contributed to the fight against Covid-19, led by Microsoft founder Bill Gates through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

In the recent surge of cases in India, Microsoft through Oxfam India and Unicef crowd-funded Sh300 million to support the countrys response.

Tax revenue from tech giants with economic presence in the global south is even more crucial for much-needed investment in public services, such as healthcare and education, which have been decimated by the pandemic, said Action Aid.

Graham Kajilwa

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Action Aid says tech giants should pay more tax - The Standard

Artificial intelligence crowdsourcing provider Appen spent this week trying to answer the question that has wiped as much as $4 billion from its market valuation since August: Can the company thrive despite its reliance on US tech giants like Amazon and Facebook which account for the lions share of its revenue?

In a market update on Wednesday, Appen detailed its plans to restructure and become more customer and product-focused by actually using artificial intelligence itself. Where as it previously just provided human labour, Appen will provide a full service AI platform to help customers like Amazon identify things like different hat choices for its customers. To put it simply, we are accelerating our transformation into an AI-powered provider of AI data and solutions, said Appen chief executive Mark Brayan.

Appens overreliance on the US tech giants has triggered a $4 billion share rout since August. Credit:AP

On Thursday, the company provided details of its new products that will build new business outside of the tech giants like Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Amazon which have provided up to 80 per cent of its revenue.

This reliance triggered a share rout starting last December when Appen issued an earnings downgrade. It blamed the tech giants shift in focus away from big projects that require Appens expertise, but claimed this was a temporary blip.

This blip came despite Facebook, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all beating consensus revenue estimates in their most recent quarterly reports.

Most of Appens work relates to the tech giants advertising businesses, with its workers teaching computers to recognise basic images and speech, laying down the basic groundwork for the development of Artificial Intelligence solutions.

Appens products came into focus last week when it was forced to apologise after being hit by claims of racism in its recruitment processes after it asked job candidates about their skin colour. A spokeswoman said there was no intended racism in Appens hiring processes, practices or policies.

At the technology briefing on Thursday, Appen executives faced the big question: do the tech giants still need Appen?

We see a departure from people building their own platforms to wanting to work with a specialist provider, was the reassuring answer from Mr Brayan.

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Appen tries to answer $4b question: do its tech giant customers still need it? - Sydney Morning Herald

I just completed The Tyranny of Big Tech (Regnery 2021), by Senator Josh Hawley. Its a short but significant work that certainly will engender debate. .

The publishing of the book itself had some wrinkles. Senator Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and a former attorney general of that state, originally signed up with Simon and Schuster to get his book published. However, although Mr. Hawley condemned the January 6 riots at the Capitol, the publishing house decided to spike Mr. Hawleys book on account of the Senators objection to the certification of some state electors, something that numerous Democratic senators had done in recent elections won by GOP presidential candidates. As it happened, the book was picked up by Regnery, the conservative publishing house, and has landed on numerous bestseller lists. Nevertheless, the initial decision not to publish seems like an unfortunate example of cancel culture.

Senator Hawleys thesis is that the big tech companies are the present day successors to the monopolistic robber baron enterprise that dominated American society at the beginning of the 20th century, and very much need to be reined in. In Mr. Hawleys view, President Theodore Roosevelt tried valiantly to shut down large monopolistic companies, only to be thwarted in the end and his trust busting efforts were supplanted by an era of corporate liberalism that continues to this day. Mr. Hawleys contention is that Big Tech is in many ways the present day incarnation of the robber barons.

The strength of Mr. Hawleys book is his catalogue of numerous problems with a tech world dominated by a relatively few enormous players. He details how Big Tech uses personal information about customers to construct profiles of social media users and then steer them to make buying decisions. He describes how the tech giants have undue influence over the advertising market and have enormous political influence in Washington. He points out how algorithms set up by Big Tech have the effect of altering search engine results. He also points out that excessive time spent online can, for a variety of reasons, have negative effects on children.

As a political leader, Mr. Hawley not surprisingly spends quite a bit of time on the topic of ideological censorship by Big Tech and its squelching of news stories unfavorable to its political favorites, for example New York Post revelations about Hunter Biden. Mr. Hawley draws on information supplied by Mike Gilgan, pseudonym for a Facebook information manager, and makes the claim that the censorship is coordinated among the tech giants.

In the end, Mr. Hawley calls for a strong response to the tech giants. For example, he believes that antitrust statutes should be dusted off and that the tech giants be required to divest themselves of some of their holdings. He also favors a rethinking of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields many tech companies from liability for posted content. On a more personal level, he calls for individuals and families to wean themselves from excessive time spent online.

I do believe that Mr. Hawley gives unduly short shrift to some of the benefits of the new online technology provided by the Big Tech companies. The ability to shop online, for example, can be a major saver of effort, and indeed was a lifesaver during the pandemic. Purchasing online also allows consumers a better opportunity to compare price and quality. Being able to gather information quickly is very useful in all sorts of endeavors. Just to take an example close to my heart, I believe that ability to find and check online information that appears in this column has improved its quality over the years and made my life much easier. Social media can be overused, but it has allowed numerous people to connect with others and to maintain important business and personal relationships.

Nevertheless, Senator Hawley has produced an important and thought provoking book that is well worth reading.

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The tyranny of big tech - Garden City News

Its an if-only dream that many share, but it might never come to fruition, given the financial elements that point to only one outcome: an eventual win by Big Tech.

Consider that AT&T shares were around $38 when the company announced the deal to buy Time Warner in May of 2017. As of Thursday, the stock was around $29, and the companys market cap was $211.3 billion. Verizons stock has done a little better in that time period, going from $45 to $57 a share, and a $235.4 billion valuation.

In the same period, Netflixs share price went from $160 to $502 ($222.7 billion valuation), Amazons from $996 to $3,248 ($1.64 trillion), Apples from $38 to $127 ($2.2 trillion) and Googles from $955 to $2,303 ($1.56 trillion).

You can see where this is going,

Big Tech companies cannot make huge acquisitions of creative-content companies nowadays because of a political climate that is increasingly skeptical of their monopolistic power. But they only have to sit and wait to bleed out what are now much smaller and less powerful media companies by simply plowing more investment into content and talent.

Like all monopolies going back to oil or trains, the tech companies will just slowly starve the competition, a top media executive said to me, also noting that Mr. Stankey did not have the support or fortitude to keep going. I guess its good that he stopped banging his head against the wall, the executive said.

Or maybe not, given his problematic choice of Discovery as a partner. Its simply too small, even with a multibillion-dollar war chest to make content. Thats why I would not be surprised to see another, larger bidder for Time Warner emerge soon perhaps Comcast, which already owns NBCUniversal. While some people denounce the consolidation of media companies, there are few choices for media firms when they are facing down the tech companies.

Tech giants have more of everything. They are much more flexible with creators. They have more platforms to offer. They control all the key user data and are getting better at all kinds of media making. More important, they do not have the need to make a profit in media, since they all have other ways to make money, and they have an investor base highly tolerant of investing in growth.

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Opinion | AT&Ts Sorry Retreat From Digital Media - The New York Times

FILE PHOTO: A woman stands in front of the logo of Snap Inc on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York City, NY, U.S. March 2, 2017. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

(Reuters) - Snap Inc said Friday it will acquire WaveOptics Ltd, a British augmented reality (AR) technology company, for over $500 million.

The deal, first reported by The Verge and confirmed by a Snap spokesman, will help the owner of photo messaging app Snapchat push its way into a future where AR eyewear could be ubiquitous.

Snap, along with other tech giants like Facebook Inc and Apple Inc, are racing to build AR devices as the next technological frontier after the smartphone.

The vision behind AR eyewear is that it could allow a user to virtually see route directions in front of them, or see information about a landmark in their surroundings, for example.

Snap said it will pay half the $500 million for WaveOptics in stock at closing, and the other half will be paid in either cash or stock in two years. Snap is based in Santa Monica, California, while WaveOptics is headquartered in Oxford, England.

On Thursday, Snap unveiled a new version of its Spectacles glasses, the first to incorporate AR with two built-in cameras, two speakers and four microphones.

The new Spectacles wont be sold to the public, and will only be available to AR developers who apply to use the glasses.

Reporting by Sheila Dang; editing by Jonathan Oatis

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Snap to buy augmented reality company WaveOptics for over $500 mln - Reuters

May 20th 2021

SAN FRANCISCO

A COUPLE OF years ago Snap, the company behind Snapchat, a social-media app, came close to imitating the feature for which it was then famous: digital photos that self-destruct ten seconds after the recipient views them. Shortly after a headline-grabbing initial public offering in 2017, the firm faced a user revolt triggered by an unpopular redesign, falling rates after it started automatically auctioning ad space and an exodus of executives. Its shares dropped precipitously in value, at one point in late 2018 sinking below $5, less than a fifth of the price they fetched when the firm started trading.

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Snap has since staged one of the greatest turnarounds in tech history. When it reported its latest quarterly results in April, it pleasantly surprised analysts again, just as it has for the past few quarters. Revenue grew by 66% from a year earlier, to $770m. The number of daily users reached 280m, an addition of more than 50m over the same period. The firms share price has surged by 208% in the past 12 months, to $54. The pandemic exposed the resilience of the changes we have made, says Evan Spiegel, Snaps boss.

The comeback reveals a broader trend. While the largest Western tech companies have had a blowout first quarter, firms that fall in the category belowcall them tier-two techare growing briskly, too. And it is not just the extra digital demand generated by the pandemic that is making all boats rise, or the fact that it is easier for smaller firms to grow. Some second-tier companies are confounding sceptics who claimed it was impossible to thrive in the shadow of the industrys titans.

By any reasonable definition, the universe of biggish listed tech companies is large. In America it includes hundreds of firms. We have defined as tier-two those with a market value of no less than $20bn that were incorporated in 2000 or later. That leaves 42 firms worth a combined $2.4trn. They range from e-commerce sites and streaming services to travel firms and vendors of corporate applications.

Even before the pandemic this group had added some weight relative to GAFAM, as some now call Americas five tech behemoths (Google and its parent company Alphabet, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft). In February 2020 its joint market capitalisation amounted to 22% of GAFAMs, up from 14% three years earlier (see chart).

One reason for the increase in relative size in America is technological progress, especially the rise of cloud computing. This has allowed firms to specialise and created big markets even for seemingly obscure products and services, which can now be tailored for narrow purposes and offered globally. The investments we made back in 2017 are now paying off, says Mr Spiegel.

A good example is Twilio. The firm is largely unknown to consumers, but used by most. It provides services for text, voice and video communication to more than 200,000 other firms, from Airbnb, a home-sharing site, to Zendesk, a help-desk service. After a few years of fast growth, its annual revenue is approaching $2bn and its market capitalisation exceeds $50bn. If you are a developer, you dont have to spend a year to understand all the details. You can just plug into our systems, explains Jeff Lawson, Twilios boss, thats the idea of infrastructure-as-a-service.

The pandemic has given the second tier a further boost. At its peak it was worth 35% of the big five (although that has fallen to 29%, as investors have cooled on newish tech stocks). This pattern in America of a weightier second tier has parallels in China, where a new generation of tech darlings, including Meituan and Pinduoduo, has come of age to take on the duopoly of Alibaba and Tencent. Covid has been the great digital accelerator, says Mr Lawson.

Demand for Twilios services, for instance enabling salespeople to communicate electronically with customers, shot up when physical retailers had to move online. Many other second-tier tech firms benefited, too. Zoom, a now near-ubiquitous videoconferencing service, saw its revenue surge to $882m in the latest quarter, nearly a five-fold increase on a year earlier. Revenues of Shopify, an e-commerce platform, more than doubled. Most of the other 40 firms in our sample grew by double digits or more. Besides Snap, these include Pinterest, another social-media firm (78%), and PayPal, a provider of online payments (29%).

The techlash has helped, too. Under scrutiny from critics and regulators, GAFAM mostly shied away from big takeovers (with the notable exception of Microsoft, which recently bought Nuance, which makes speech-recognition and other software, for $16bn and was rumoured to be in talks with Pinterest). This in turn has pushed more tier-two firms to go public. Of the 42, no fewer than 13 did so in 2019 and 2020, adding about $600bn to the groups current collective market capitalisation.

The second tier have succeeded mainly by getting better at creating protected space for themselves to grow, says Mark Mahaney of Evercore ISI, an investment bank. They not only offer compelling products but have built, in geek speak, platforms, complete with an ecosystem of users and corporate partners on top.

Platforms are best thought of as a marketplace, where the operator provides some basic services that enable buyers and sellers to transact. They often exhibit strong network effects: more buyers attract more merchants, which attract more buyers and so on. Such setups also make it harder for one of the giants to ape rival products, as Microsoft has done with Slack or Apple with Spotify.

Take Snap. It was straightforward for Facebook to copy Snapchats hallmark feature, called Stories. These were just collections of pictures and videos captured within the past 24 hours. So the firm has instead recast Stories as a platform on which curated partners, such as big media companies, can offer original content. Snapchats four other main offerings are conceived as platforms, too. For example, users of Map can locate their friends and local hotspots, and Camera lets tens of thousands of developers offer digital filters for users cameras.

Several more tier-two firms have also erected robust platforms. Shopify does not compete with Amazon. We are not a retailer. We are a piece of software that powers other brands, explains Harley Finkelstein, the companys president. Instead of selling stuff for other firms, in other words, the site provides them with tools to set up their own virtual stores, from web hosting to payment, and allows third-party companies to offer additional services, including design and delivery.

Similarly, the more users and merchants PayPal and other payments firms like Square and Stripe attract, the more useful they become to everyone. Twilios corporate customers and developers of more specialised communication applications, such as call-centre software and group texting, likewise feed off each other.

Others are trying to spin up their own flywheels, as the digital virtuous circles are known. Spotify and Twitter want to fulfil this function for anyone producing digital works. The first now sees itself as a home for all sorts of audio content, from songs to podcasts. The second mainly aims to distribute all manner of written content, including tweets and newsletters. Zoom, for its part, in October introduced Zapps (later renamed Zoom Apps). These, much like the lenses on Snapchat and the applications on Twilio, are supposed to form a moat that both keeps rivals at a safe distance and creates additional demand.

Not all this platform-building will succeed. But where it does, the builders could yet catch up with GAFAM, at least if tech history is a guide.

In China Meituan and Pinduoduo, two e-commerce platforms, have overtaken Baidu to become the third- and fourth-largest internet firms in China. Only a few years ago Adobe and Salesforce, two providers of corporate applications (which are both too old to be included in our sample), were still much smaller than Oracle and SAP, leaders in business software, let alone Microsoft. Adobe and Salesforce still have lower revenues than Oracle and SAP. But they are growing faster and are now in the same league in terms of market capitalisation, currently worth $229bn and $204bn, respectively, compared with $227bn for Oracle and $168bn for SAP.

S is the most likely letter to be added to the GAFAM acronym. In its new incarnation, Snap may yet become a serious rival to Facebook. Snapchat is now arguably the closest the West has to a super-app (the model is WeChat, Tencents flagship platform). If it keeps buying biggish companies, meanwhile, Salesforce could one day pull even with Microsoft. And if it continues on its current trajectory long enough, more wares may one day be sold on Shopify than on Amazon.

Much has to go right for this to happen. One risk is that the tech sell-off of the past few weeks makes it harder for loss-making firms to raise capital, or maintain the enthusiasm of shareholders for heavy losses in the pursuit of growth. Over three-fifths of the second tier lose money. The titans will have to become less innovative, the reason Oracle and SAP have seen their lead eroded. Many of the second-tier tech firms will need to be willing to merge. And trustbusters will have to tackle GAFAMs dominance. Unless the regulatory environment really changes, this is going to be the status quo for the foreseeable future, argues Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, an investment firm.

Instead of waiting for a second-tier firm to grow into a GAFAM-sized beast, it may be more realistic to expect an ecosystem like the biological one, in which species of all sizes find their niche. Dinosaurs occasionally die out. But that happens rarely, and mostly through outside intervention.

A version of this article was published online on May 16th, 2021

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "In the shadow of giants"

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How to thrive in the shadow of giants - The Economist

Computex 2021, the yearly computing conference in Taiwan, is nearing its launch. In 2020, it was due to happen, but the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in its cancellation. The annual Taipei international information show will not be postponed or stopped this time since it will kick off online for all viewers.

We could expect many major keynotes that will arrive for the upcoming event, which involve the biggest chip manufacturers in the world, including Intel, AMD, and Nvidia.

We could potentially see other tech companies, such as Arm, Gigabyte, and Acer, in the virtual show.

Computex 2021 Will Push Through This Year

(Photo : Cherry blossomCherry blossom (@14ayakosan) from Twitter)AMD CEO presents a next-gen GPU.

It is already announced that Computex 2021 will begin on May 31 until June. For the first week of the event, we could look after the most important news, especially the keynotes from the tech giants, Intel, Nvidia, and AMD, which will share different topics concerning the field of computing.

According to AMD, the annual keynote announcement for Computex 2021 will be spearheaded by their CEO Lisa Su. At the moment, there is no single hint of what could be discussed in the event, but we could hope that Su will talk about their products that were already released over the past months.

Most importantly, we could hear more news about the Radeon RX 6600 XT. WCCTech reported that it will come with an 8GB GDDR6 Memory. This month, many pictures of the rumored high-spec GPU circulated online.

It's also possible that they are getting some teasers for AMD gaming laptops since it's been a long time since AMD spoke about the portable devices. Additionally, we could find the Threadripper 5000 to complete the line-up for the new-gen processors.

Read Also:Computex 2016: SanDisk Unveils Dual Flash Drive For USB Type-C Devices

Computing enthusiasts should pay close details to the keynotes during the first week. The one that Nvidia will impart will focus on the "The Transformational Power of Accelerated Computing, From Gaming to the Enterprise Data Center," which suggests that we could see more AI gaming.

While it's a sweet moment to see the leaked RTX 3070 Ti and the GeForce RTX 3080Ti, what's inside them could be more surprising than ever. Who knows if the company will release another new GPU under Team Green?

On top of that, expect more talk about ray tracing, DLSS, and Gy-Sync displays. The evolving trend of gaming is a runway for these features, which will be showcased soon upon the major Nvidia RTX tech launch.

Techradar reported that Intel has been on a hot start ahead of Computex 2021. For Intel fans, don't forget to breathe for more announcements about Tiger Lake-H and Rocket Lake-S.

Just like AMD and Nvidia, Intel could be the darkhorse of this year's computing event. Rumors about Intel Xe DG2 pooled the processor forums all over Reddit and the other platforms, so we could likely have a shot to see it.

Related Article: Computex 2017: AMD Ryzen Desktop PC From Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, And Lenovo Unwrapped

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Written by Joseph Henry

2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.

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Computex 2021 to Officially Start on May 31: AMD, Nvidia, and Intel Keynotes to be Expected - Tech Times