Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/03 - What To Expect From CES

Episode Date: January 3, 2020

Google’s AI has a medical breakthrough, Apple raids HBO for maybe it’s biggest name, Instagram seems to be plateauing by one metric—going gangbusters in another, what to expect from CES and, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: WeWorkRemotely Links: A.I. Is Learning to Read Mammograms (NYTimes) Apple Deal Returns Former HBO Boss Richard Plepler to Spotlight (NYTimes) HERE’S WHAT’S NEXT FOR GADGETS IN 2020 (The Verge) Snapchat quietly acquired AI Factory, the company behind its new Cameos feature, for $166M (TechCrunch) Instagram User Growth in the US Will Drop to Single Digits For the First Time (eMarketer) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How to lose a monopoly: Microsoft, IBM and anti-trust (Benedict Evans) Windows: Facing the New Decade (2010–2020) (Steven Sinofsky) Ghosts in the Clouds: Inside China’s Major Corporate Hack (WSJ) 'Shattered': Inside the secret battle to save America's undercover spies in the digital age (Yahoo News) This time, for sure! Ars Technica’s 2020 Deathwatch (Ars Technica) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Friday, January 3rd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google's AI has a medical breakthrough.

Apple raids HBO for maybe its biggest name. Instagram seems to be plateauing by one metric at least, going gangbusters and another, and what to expect from CES, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Google says its AI has made significant improvements. improvements in the reading of mammograms to detect breast cancer in a research study of images from around 90,000 cases. Quote, tested on images where the diagnosis was already known, the new system performed better than radiologists. On scans from the United States, the system produced a 9.4% reduction in false negatives in which a mammogram is mistakenly read as normal and a cancer is missed.

It also provided a lowering of 5.7% in false positives, where the scan is incorrectly judged abnormal, but there is no cancer. On mammograms performed in Britain, the system also beat the radiologists, reducing false negatives by 2.7% and false positives by 1.2%. Google paid for the study and worked with researchers from Northwestern University in Chicago and two British Medical Centers, Cancer Research Imperial Center, and Royal Surrey County Hospital, end quote. Apparently around 33 million mammograms are performed each year in the U.S. And according to the New York Times, they miss about 20% of breast cancers and false positives are routinely common. Once more, I find myself covering Hollywood news because it is now major tech news, thanks to the streaming wars. Apple has signed Richard Plepler, the former CEO of HBO to a five-year deal with Apple, for his production company Eden Productions to produce films and shows exclusively for Apple TV Plus.

This is a big deal because, as the New York Times puts it, quote, Mr. Plepler, 61, was a key figure in helping make HBO into an original programming powerhouse. In the years he was in charge, the network won more than 160 Emmys, including for series like Game of Thrones, Big Little Lies, and Veep. At Apple, Mr. Plepler has had a longtime admirer in Eddie Q, the company's senior vice president. of Internet Software and Services. Mr. Q is the executive who hired Zach Van Amberg and Jamie Erlick from Sony's television studio to run Apple's entertainment division. Mr. Q and Mr. Plipler worked closely together when Apple and HBO collaborated on the streaming service HBO now in 2015, and the mix of Apple TV Plus programming reflects HBO's boutique approach, rather than the All Things to All Viewer's strategy favored by Netflix, end quote.

Mr. Plipler left HBO 10 months ago because he wasn't pleased with the new direction it was going in under its new owners, AT&T. As M.G. Siegler tweeted, it's really quite incredible that Apple TV Plus clearly wants to copy HBO, and while they stumbled out of the gate, they now have a lane where AT&T is not only seating the content high ground. They've hand-delivered the guy who built HBO to Apple, thanks to their foolishness, end quote. Leppler is widely loved by talent in the TV and movie industry who worked with HBO during his tenure. So the expectation is he will be useful in getting said talent to take a chance on Apple TV Plus. Peter Kafka tweeted that Apple actually kicked the tires in terms of acquiring HBO itself earlier this year. But hey, in the long run, isn't it probably cheaper to just hire the executives and talent directly? As we've mentioned, CES begins next week, and I'll be coming to you from there beginning Tuesday next week.

But what can we expect from CES this year? The staff of the verge has a bit of a rundown of what their thinking will be seeing. Yes, expect 5G to be everywhere, not actual 5G phone announcements that usually waits for mobile world Congress and individual company events, but expect a lot of accoutrement around 5G, prepping for the 5G reality coming this year. Also, might we see a lot more foldable stuff teased, hinted at, maybe even debuted, foldable phones, but also foldable computers. Some of that got teased last year at CES, so probably more demos will be waived around this year. But also quoting the verge, on the spec side of things, last year CES saw gaming laptops as the stars of the show,

thanks to Nvidia's comprehensive launch of its new RTSGPUs for laptops. This year, all eyes are back on the processor side of things. AMD could announce its new Risen 4,000 processors for laptops, and Intel's 10th-gen-10-nometer isolate chips are finally available, meaning that we'll likely see some big spec bumps in existing models, if not wholly new designs that take advantage of the improvements to power and battery life. While rumors aren't pointing to Tiger Lake arriving at C.E. this year, it's possible that Intel may have a surprise or two up its sleeves, end quote.

And of course, it's possible that we'll start to see some foldable or dual screen devices, assuming any laptop makers are willing to show them off at CES and not a separate launch event, end quote. While rumors aren't pointing to Tiger Lake arriving at CES this year, it's possible that Intel may have a surprise or two up its sleeves. And of course, it's possible that we'll start to see some foldable or dual screen devices, assuming any laptop makers are willing to show them off at CES and not a separate launch event, end quote. In the end, if you've ever been, CES is a lot about TVs, just walls and walls, acres and acres of TVs.

Some folks this year will be hyping 8K again, although expect very little of that to trickle down to a TV you can actually afford to buy this year. Expect every TV to announce Disney Plus support naturally, but also expect to see a TV. a lot of TVs touting how gamer-friendly they are. Thus, a lot of talk about variable refresh rates and 4K at 120 hertz. And that speaks to how the streaming wars are going to be influential at CES this year. Quibi will be giving a keynote that I'm going to try to get to cover. NBC Universal is going to be there as well. So maybe some new content deals announced and app demos.

On the gaming front, look for more cloud gaming announcements, perhaps, but looking at the vendor and attendee list, this year looks like it's going to be another big year for cars, scooters, smart home stuff, and wearables, especially headphones. It's kind of weird that cars have taken over at CES, but I guess that's where we are, right? Everything is tech now. No major reveals are expected by the automotive companies, but expect some autonomous vehicle demos. Honda, for example, is expected to reveal its augmented driving concept. Nissan is going to talk about a new electric vehicle. Hyundai is going to show off a flying car, and Daimler is giving some big, mysterious keynote Monday night. More on that, hopefully

soon, but also expect a lot from the whole mobile mobility space generally. Electric skateboards, scooters, and weird segue-like stuff, of course. Sources are telling TechCrunch that Snap has acquired the Ukraine-based computer vision startup AI factory, which helped create a cameos animated selfie video feature that Snapchat has been recently testing. The rumored acquisition price, $166 million. Quote, cameos launched last month lets you take a selfie, which is then automatically animated and inserted into a short video.

The selection of videos currently around 150 is created by Snap with the whole concept, not unlike the one underpinning deep fakes. AI-based videos that look real, but are actually things that never really happened, end quote. Snap actually has some history with AI Factory. Victor Shabarov is the founder of AI Factory, and he also founded a startup called Luxury, which made animated selfie lenses. Snap acquired Luxury in 2015, and that acquisition arguably kicked off the whole filters phenomenon in social media when it was integrated into Snapchat itself.

Quoting TechCrunch. It's not clear whether AI Factory will be developing a way to insert selfies into any video or if the feature will be tied to just specific videos offered by Snap itself or whether the videos will extend beyond the timing of a GIF. It's also not clear what else AI Factory was working on. The company's site is offline and there is very little information about the company beyond its mission to bring more AI-based imaging tools into mainstream apps and usage, end quote. somewhat related e-marketer is reporting that Instagram's user growth in the U.S. dropped to single digits this past year for the first time in Instagram's history. Quote, growth will be at 4.5% in 2020. Revised down from 5.4% and in 2021, it will be 3.2% instead of 4.1%. Contributing to Instagram's overall slower growth is the fact that older age groups are not joining the platform as quickly as anticipated. While older users will not be growing as fast, there have been larger than expected gains in U.S. users aged 25 to 34 at 11.4%. However, we don't anticipate that this group will change substantially in the coming years as increased competition from a Snapchat resurgence, and the rise of TikTok will make it harder for Instagram to maintain high growth, end quote.

But e-marketer also notes that Instagram's ad revenues continue to grow at high double-digit rates. They expect Instagram to generate 9.5.5.5.000. $4.5 billion in ad revenues in 2019 and grow 46.6% to $13.86 billion in ad revenue in 2020. Time for the weekend long read suggestions, beginning with a pairing of two somewhat similar pieces. First, Benedict Evans has a look at Microsoft, IBM, and the whole history of antitrust in tech. The title is How to Lose a Monopoly. And the thrust of it is this, quote, IBM ruled mainframes and Microsoft, ruled PCs, and when those things were the center of tech, that gave them dominance of the broader

tech industry. When the focus of tech moved away from mainframes and then PCs, IBM and then Microsoft lost that dominance. But that didn't mean they stopped being big companies. We just stopped being scared of them, end quote. And then the pairing, Steven Sinovsky has a piece up that looks at the Windows business at the start of the last decade. Remember when it looked like we were entering a post-PC era? Well, Stephen looks back at the lessons that he and Microsoft took away from the last decade, at least from a Windows perspective. Quote, as it turns out, disruption does not have to be like BlackB or Kodak, but in fact,

when there's an ecosystem and installed base in B2B, it is a long, slow process. However, it is just as certain. Windows remains one of the most amazing businesses ever, over 220 million PCs sold in 2019 alone with Windows and insanely great profit margins anchoring Microsoft. Still, the days of driving an ecosystem slash network effect shifted to planetary scale, i.e. phones, end quote. Next, a couple of postmortems on hacking. The Wall Street Journal looks back at the Cloud Hopper attack when China allegedly wholesale

hacked into major corporations globally. Based on the journal's reassessment of that hack, Cloud Hopper was bigger than anyone ever knew. Quote, the journal piece together the hack and the sweeping counteroffensive by security firms and Western governments through interviews with more than a dozen people involved in the investigation, hundreds of pages of internal company and investigative documents and technical data related to the intrusions. The journal found that Hewlett-Packard Enterprise was so overrun that the cloud company didn't see the hackers re-enter their clients' networks, even as the company gave customers the all-clear. Inside the clouds, the hackers, known as APT-10, to Western officials and researchers,

had access to a vast constellation of clients. The journal's investigation identified hundreds of firms that had relationships with breached cloud providers, including Rio Tinto, Phillips, American Airlines, Deutsche Bank, and Glaxo Smith-Kline. FBI director Christopher Ray called it the hacker's equivalent of stealing the master keys to an entire apartment complex. It's an open question whether hackers remain inside the company's networks today. The journal reviewed data provided by Security Scorecard, a cybersecurity firm, and identified thousands of IP addresses globally still reporting back to APT-10's network between April and mid-November, end quote. And this was one of the most amazing pieces I've read in a couple months.

In a separate attack, Chinese hackers allegedly broke into the computer systems of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management in the spring of 2014. They eventually made off with data on nearly 22 million former and current U.S. civil servants, as well as intelligence officials. Quote, the data breach, which included fingerprints, personnel records, and security clearance background information shook the intelligence community to its core. Among the hijacked information's other uses, Beijing had acquired a potential way to identify

large numbers of undercover spies working for the U.S. government. The fallout from the hack was intense with the CIA reportedly pulling its officers out of China. The Director of National Intelligence later denied this withdrawal. Personal data was being with. weaponized like never before. In one previously unreported incident around the time of the OPM hack, senior intelligence officials realized that the Kremlin was able to quickly identify new CIA officers in the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, likely based on the differences in pay between diplomats.

Details on past service in hardship posts, speedy promotions and other digital clues, say, for former intelligence officials, those clues they surmised could have come from access to the OPM data, possibly shared by the Chinese or some other way, say former officials, end quote. I found this piece to be so fascinating because it suggests that in this modern world of data collection and cyber espionage, is there even a place for actual spies anymore for good old James Bond undercover human assets? Or is that now, Passet? Quoting again, the familiar trope of Jason Bourne movies and John Le Car novels, where spies open secret files filled with false passports and interchangeable identities is already a relic, say former officials, swept away by technological changes so profound that they're forcing the CIA to reconsider everything from how and where it recruits officers to where it trains potential agency personnel.

Instead, the spread of new tools like facial recognition at border crossings and airports and widespread internet-connected surveillance cameras in major cities is wiping away in a matter of years carefully honed tradecraft. that took intelligence experts decades to perfect, end quote. And finally, one more old year slash new year list for you. Arsnecica has a piece up that is a 2020 death watch, i.e. companies that it says are in danger of entering the death pool this year. Some of those are obvious like Verizon Media, also known as Oath or the Yahoo slash AOL division. I think that one is pretty much nailed on as being.

dead. Same with GeoMedia, home of a bunch of media platforms like Gizmodo and the Onion, though hopefully those brands can find some way to survive, although tell that to Deadspin. But also interesting, AT&T's Direct TV, a bunch of electric scooter companies because there are probably too many of them, and Symantec possibly. But also, interestingly, they mentioned Peloton. You might have heard about that controversial ad that Peloton released before the holidays that everyone said was misogynistic. The controversy around the ad knocked $942 million off of Peloton's market cap in a single day, but it seems that Peloton has other issues as well. For one, they might have saturated their market segment, signed up most of their likely potential

customers already. And, quote, beyond the marketing kerfuffles, the company has been hemorrhaging money, making headlines with dramatic losses. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission at the end of August, Peloton reported a net loss of more than $195,000. million dollars in fiscal year 2019, up from a net loss of nearly $48 million in 2018. And losses are ongoing. In a quarterly report filed at the end of September, Peloton reported another net loss of $49.8 million. Yet those losses aren't due to disappointing revenue. The company, which was valued at over $1 billion this year, reported a gross profit of $89.8 million

from its connected fitness products alone in the last quarter. According to market watchers, the company's money troubles are due to. due to an exorbitant marketing budget, the same marketing that got the company criticized for being sexist and absurd. Based on one ballpark estimation, Peloton's marketing spending works out to about $1,100 for each of the $2,245 bikes. It sold in the last quarter, end quote. Hey, was everybody back at work today? It felt like everybody was back at work. The train was packed. The office here seemed to be well populated, but I don't know. Maybe some of you lucky-duckies squeezed an extra day out of the holidays this calendar.

No weekend bonus episode this weekend because I assumed it was going to be hard to book someone this week, assuming that everyone was still on vacation. Maybe I should have tried anyway, but it felt like everybody was going to be away. I don't know. Anyway, talk to you on Monday.