The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Evans: Unsubsidized Android smartphones cost as little as $30 in rural Uganda
“But you can get an Android phone for 30 dollars today. Not 30 dollars with subsidy and contract. 30 dollars cash in a market in rural Uganda. You can buy an Android phone for that.”
Evans predicts Apple VR and cars are two to four years away.
“The two big things that are next for Apple are on the one hand VR, or potentially AR, and then on the other hand cars. But just from looking at the state of the technology, but those are both basically two, three, four years away.”
Evans: Nintendo Wii failed long-term because non-gamers bought no additional software
“The problem the Wii had was it turned out that they were selling games to people who didn't like games, and people bought it for the game that was bundled, and then never bought any more games. So we just basically, it looked like this huge success, and then i…”
Evans: Panasonic is getting out of consumer electronics
“Panasonic is getting out of consumer electronics.”
Evans predicts TVs will become secondary display screens controlled by smartphones
“For the vast majority of people, the TV will be done whilst for the smartphone. Rather than, so it won't be a box that's plugged into your TV that runs your whole digital experience.”
Evans: Bluetooth beacons enable indoor location tracking within six inches
“The interesting thing about beacons is they give you this way of digging in and actually saying, actually, you know, you can know exactly where the phone is inside the store or inside the building... We've now got this kind of latent technology, it's almost as…”
Apple acquires around a dozen startups per quarter
“And they buy a dozen startups a quarter, you know, but they spend a hundred million here and a hundred million there.”
Remaining feature phone market will convert to smart OSs in 3-4 years
“And the remaining half or thereabouts of the phone market will convert over the next three or four years to phones running smart OSs or there'll be a kind of a residue of five or 10% of people who really can't afford them.”
Evans: UK VAT tax system still runs on legacy DEC VAX hardware
“Yeah, I mean, the best example I've heard of this is that the UK VAT system, the UK value-added tech system runs on VAX, created by DEC, which I think discontinued it before many of the people listening to this podcast were born, and yet that system is still s…”
Evans: iOS and Android ship 1.5B units annually with 3B active devices
“IOS, Android, doing over one and a half billion units this year, and probably over three billion of those things in the world today.”
Evans: US online ad and e-commerce revenue grew to $350B
“Revenue in the U.S. From online advertising and from e-commerce has gone from, I think, something like fifty billion adjusted for inflation in 99 to three hundred and fifty billion now.”
Evans: Baidu Maps bids across five taxi companies inside its app
“If you go into Baidu and you want a taxi, it will show you all the cabs in your city from the five different taxi companies that are in that city, and then it will bid for all of them, and, you know, whoever, whoever gives the best response gets the thing firs…”
Evans: Big Tech annual capital expenditure reached $34 billion in 2015
“Annual capex across these companies has gone from one billion dollars in 2000 to thirty four billion dollars in 2015.”
Evans: Apple devices account for the majority of global mobile web browsing
“Apple devices have a majority of all the web browsing happening on mobile devices.”