Technology

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei is now the second biggest smartphone manufacturer in the world according to new reports from IDC and Canalys, as The Verge initially spotted.

In IDClatest report, the firm says that the overall market has shrunk by 1.8 percent in Q2 2018. But the biggest surprise is that Huawei now has a 15.8 percent market share with 54.2 million smartphones shipped in Q2.

It doesn&t mean that Apple is performing poorly. The company is shipping slightly more smartphones this year compared to last year. Apple also has a slightly bigger market share with 12.1 percent of the market.

Samsung is shipping 10.4 percent less smartphones but still remains the leader with 20.9 percent market share, or 71.5 million smartphones. In other words, many Samsung buyers are now buying Huawei devices, or other Android devices.

Canalys confirms this trend with the same order — Samsung, Huawei and then Apple. But the firm also highlights that Apple suffers from seasonability compared to its competitors.

Samsung and Huawei sell many different devices and release new phones all year long. Apple usually releases new devices in September, which creates a huge spike during the last quarter of the year. Apple will likely overtake Huawei and maybe even Samsung in a couple of quarters.

Itinteresting to see that Huawei is performing so well while the company has had issues with the U.S. government. If you browse the smartphone category on Amazon, Honor devices usually appear near the top of the list — Honor is Huaweibrand for cheaper devices. The Huawei P20 Pro is also a solid device for those looking for a premium device.

Felicis Ventures, the early-stage, San Francisco-based venture firmed founded a dozen or so years ago by former Googler Aydin Senkut, has closed its sixth fund with $270 million.

ItFelicisbiggest vehicle to date (the firm closed its last fund with $200 million in 2016). Yet even bigger news for the team may be its new managing director, Victoria Treyger, who spent the last six-plus years as the chief revenue office of the online lending company Kabbage and before that, spent a couple of years as the chief marketing officer of RingCentral, the cloud phone system company.

Iteasy to understand the attraction on both sides. Treyger gives the firm greater strength when it comes to marketing and fintech know-how. According to Senkut, Treyger is also acutely interested in health-related opportunities, which, not coincidentally, is a growing area of interest for the firm.

Indeed, he argues, persuasively, Treyger was being courted aggressively from operating companies wanting to tap her experience as a C-level executive at two separate but fast-growing companies.

That Treyger decided to pursue venture capital surely speaks to an interest in the industry broadly. But Felicis seems like a particularly good fit for her, too. For one thing, Treyger &basically has an equal spot at the table,& according to Senkut. This isn&t always the case with a new hire into a venture firm, even at the most senior level.

Treyger also joins a now four-person leadership team — including Senkut, Sundeep Peechu, and Wesley Chan — that has, in the parlance of the startup world, been crushing it.

Already in 2018, the firm has seen three major exits, including whenAdyen, the Amsterdam-based payments platform, went public in June (it currently boasts a $16.3 billion market cap); when Pluralsight, the corporate learning platform, went public on the Nasdaq in May (itcurrently valued at just north of $3 billion); and when Ring, the video doorbell maker, was acquiredin March by Amazon for $1 billion.

Felicis can — and does — further brag that has enjoyed a $1 billion(ish) exit in each of the last seven years. The full list includes: Meraki (acquired for $1.2 billion by Cisco in 2012); Climate Corp (which sold in 2013 to Monsanto for roughly $930 million); Twitch (acquired for $970 million in 2014 Amazon); Shopify (it went public in 2015); Fitbit (it also went public in 2015); Cruise (it was acquired by General Motors for reportedly more than $1 billion in 2016); Dollar Shave Club (acquired for $1 billion by Unilever in 2016); and Rovio (which went public last year).

How was the firm pulled off what seem like an outsize number of hits for a small and relatively young organization Senkut says one central tenet for the firm is resiliency, meaning Felicis works to ensure that itportfolio is &anti fragile,& as described by essayist, scholar, and risk analyst Nassim Taleb, in his 2012 bookabout &things that gain from disorder.&

As it pertains to Felicis, Senkut says, &We basically want to have many uncorrelated bets — across stages, sectors and geographies — so that no matter what happens in the world, some part of our portfolio is always poised to win.&

The strategy, which has since the firm invest everywhere from Canada to Australia and in between, has certainly paid off so far.

Though early last year Felicis lost its first female general partner, Renata Quinitini, to venture peer Lux Capital (she said her interests and Luxbegan to align better over time), Felicis describes its newest fund as &oversubscribed.& Itan easy claim to believe, given the amount of money that investors are looking to park with venture firms, and the performance to date of Felicis in particular.

Still, taking on more investing capital was not a consideration, says Senkut. Asked why not, he laughs.&We know our strike zone,& he says.

Itpassive zombie feed scrolling, not active communication with friends that hurts our health, according to studies Facebook has been pointing to for the last seven months. Yet ittreating all our social networking the same with todaylaunch of its digital wellbeing screentime management dashboards for Facebook and Instagram in the US before rolling them out to everyone in the coming weeks.

Giving users a raw count of the minutesyou&ve spent in their apps each day in the last week plus your average across the week is a good start to making users more mindful. But by burying them largely out of sight, giving them no real way to compel less usage, and not distinguishing between passive and active behavior, they seem destined to be ignored while missing the point the company itself stresses.

TechCrunch scooped the designs of the two separate but identical Instagramand Facebook tools over the past few months thanks to screenshots generated from the apps& code by Jane Manchun Wong. Whatlaunching today is what we saw, with the dashboards located in Facebook&Settings& -> &Your Time On Facebook& and Instagram&Settings& -> &Your Activity&.

Beyond the daily and average minute counts, you can set a daily &limit& in minutes after which either app will send you a reminder that you&ve crossed your self-imposed threshold. But they won&t stop you from browsing and liking, or force you to dig into the settings menu to extend your limit. You&ll need the willpower to cut yourself off. The tools also let you mute push notifications (you&ll still see in-app alerts), but only for as much as 8 hours. If you want anything more permanent, you&ll have to dig into their separate push notification options menu or your phonesettings.

The announcement follows Instagram CEO Kevin Systromcomments about our original scoop, where he tweeted &Ittrue . . .We&re building tools that will help the IG community know more about the time they spend on Instagram & any time should be positive and intentional . . . Understanding how time online impacts people is important, and itthe responsibility of all companies to be honest about this. We want to be part of the solution. I take that responsibility seriously.&

Users got their first taste of Instagram trying to curtail overuse with its &You&re All Caught Up& notices that show when you&ve seen all your feed posts from the past two days. Both apps will now provide callouts to users teaching them about the new activity monitoring tools. Facebook says it has no plans to use whether you open the tools or set daily limits to target ads. It will track how people use the tools to tweak the designs, but it sounds like thatmore about what time increments to show in the Daily Reminder and Mute Notifications options than drastic strengthenings of their muscle. Facebook will quietly keep a tiny fraction of users from getting the features to measure if the launch impacts behavior.

&Itreally important for people who use Instagram and Facebook that the time they spend with us is time well spent&Ameet Ranadive, InstagramProduct Director of Well-Being, told reporters on a conference call. &There may be some tradeoff with other metrics for the company and thata tradeoff we&re willing to live with, because in the longer term we think this is important to the community and we&re willing to invest in it.&

Facebook Needs Stronger Screen Time Tools That Deter Passive Browsing

Facebook has already felt some of the brunt of that tradeoff. Itbeen trying to improve digital wellbeing by showing fewer low quality viral videos and clickbait news stories, and more from your friends since a big algorithm change in January. Thatcontributed to a flatlining of its growth in North America, and even a temporary drop of 700,000 users early this year while it also lost 1 million users in Europe this past quarter. That led to Facebookslowest user growth rates in history, triggering a 20 percent, $120 billion market cap drop in its share price. &The changes to the News Feed back in January were one step . . . giving people a sense of their time so they&re more mindful of it is the second step& saysRanadive.

The fact that Facebook is willing to put its finances on the line for digital wellbeing is a great step. Ita smart long-term business decision too. If we feel good about our overall usage, we won&t ditch the apps entirely and could keep seeing their ads for another decade. But itlikely to be changes to the Facebook and Instagram feeds that prioritize content you&ll comment on rather than look at and silently scroll past that will contribute more to healthy social networking than todaytoothless tools.

While iOS 12Screen Time and Androidnew Digital Wellbeing features both count your minutes on different apps too, theyoffer more drastic ways to enforce your own good intentions. iOS will deliver a weekly usage report to remind you the features exist. Androidis best-in-class because it grays out an appicon and requires you to open your settings to unlock an app after you exceed your daily limit.

iOS Screen Time (left) and Android Digital Wellbeing (right)

To live up to the responsibility Systrom promised, Facebook and Instagram will have to do more to actually keep us mindful of the time we spend in their apps and help us help ourselves. Let us actually lock ourselves out of the apps, turn them grayscale, fade their app icons, or persistently show our minute count onscreen once we pass our limit.Anything to make being healthy on their apps something you can&t just ignore like any other push notification.

Or follow the research and have the dashboards actually divide our sharing, commenting, and messaging time from our feed scrolling, Stories tapping, video watching, and photo stalking. The whole point is that social networking isn&t all bad, but there are behaviors that hurt. Most of us aren&t going to give up Facebook and Instagram. Even just trying to spend less time on them is difficult. But by guiding us towards the activities that interconnect us rather than isolate us, Facebook could get us to shift our time in the right direction.