Apple's new moat is augmented reality, and Nokia is now fully a health tech brand. Also, YouTube tries harder and Spotify dabbles in paid song placement. That and more in The Daily Crunch for June 20, 2017.

1. Apple's AR benevolence and destruction

Apple's ARKit is a tool that should make it very easy for developers to create augmented reality apps without much know-how, which is great news for the coming profundity of consumer-facing AR apps. But it's also bad news for anyone else who was developing this kind of fixed location AR as a service, like the startup that appeared on Apple's own Planet of the Apps pilot.

Still it's a great "shovel," as Matthew terms it, and there are plenty of places for devs to "dig" in order to try to strike gold with the coming AR app rush. Porting that stuff to Android will be hard as heck though.

2. Withings becomes Nokia

Withings is fully absorbed into the Nokia mothership, having ditched its pre-acquisition name in favor of the former cell phone giant's. The company's product line is also changing, with the Aura sleep tracker dying (it probably had a limited market anyway and was long in the tooth), as well as a new BMI scale and blood pressure monitor debuting. Health gadgets still seem a fixed opportunity (i.e. little potential for growth) in terms of market potential tbh.

3. Google launches a job search engine powered by AI

Google teased its AI-powered job search at I/O this year, but now it's actually launching the service. The feature makes it easy to search for jobs in their area, or for other kinds of roles depending on natural language queries. Looks like not all AI is out to steal your job – yet.

4. YouTube updates policies to avoid blocking LGBTQ videos

YouTube's content policies resulted in the blocking of some LGBTQ content, but the company has now taken steps to update its Restricted Mode policies to make sure it isn't censoring legit content, including stuff like "kissing at weddings, [and] personal accounts of difficult events." Good job, but also a great example of why algorithms aren't great at social nuance.

5. Google's Tensor2Tensor library helps with AI research

Google has open sourced yet another AI tool, this time it's Tensor2Tensor, which can help researchers quickly replicate experimental results conducted by colleagues recently in the field. It's basically a built-in library of best practices, and it's a great asset.

6. Spotify's Sponsored Songs ad unit basically puts songs in your feed

Spotify has a new ad unit that works sort of like traditional radio, highlighting songs in playlists and feeds that labels pay to promote. Just so long as I can at least opt out of that crap in my paid account, I'm fine with it.

7. Apple Music adds $99 yearly subscription plan

Sign up for a year of Apple's streaming music service, save $20. Makes sense.