Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/07 – Google Infringed On Sonos

Episode Date: January 7, 2022

Sonos beats Google in trade court. E3 is going remote again this year. Mozilla is the latest company to suffer crypto backlash. Are foldable laptops the future? And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions, this week with a profile of the programmer behind Wordle. Sponsors: Wealthfront.com/techmeme EditorX.com Links: Google Infringed on Sonos Speaker Technology, Trade Court Rules (NYTimes) E3 shifts to online-only event because of Omicron concerns (GamesBeat) Mozilla pauses accepting crypto donations following backlash (The Verge) Asus will release a 17-inch foldable OLED laptop this year (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: CES 2022 was the best auto show in years (CNET) Can You Really Tell the Difference Between 4K and 8K? (Gizmodo) The Pixel Art Revolution Will Be Televised (Wired) Banks Tiptoe Toward Their Cloud-Based Future (NYTimes) The Danger of Leaving Weather Prediction to AI (Wired) Wordle Is a Love Story (NYTimes) 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 7th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Sonos beats Google in TradeCourt.

E3 is going remote again this year. Mozilla is the latest company to suffer crypto backlash. Our foldable laptops, the future, and of course the weekend long read suggestions this week with a profile of the programmer behind Wordle. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Sonos has beaten Google in trade court, the U.S. IT, has issued a final ruling declaring Google infringed on five Sonos AudioTech patents, and Google is now banned from importing products that violate Sonas's IP,

quoting the New York Times. The final ruling by the United States International Trade Commission, a quasi-judicial body that decides trade cases and can block the import of goods that violate patents, closes a two-year investigation into the intellectual property dispute. Sonos had asked the Trade Commission to block imports of Google products that, the speaker company says infringes on its patents. They include Google Home, smart speakers, pixel phones, and computers, and the Chromecast streaming audio device. Those items are made in China and shipped to the United States. The import ban will go into effect in 60 days. During that time, the matter will be subject to a presidential review. The final ruling upheld a commission

judge's preliminary finding in August that Google should be subject to the import ban. After that initial ruling, the full commission met to consider whether to accept or overturn that decision. The commission determined that Google had violated the Tariff Act of 1930, which aims to prevent unfair competition through actions such as the import of products that infringe on U.S. patents, trademarks, or copyrights. The commission also issued a cease and desist order against Google, end quote. This is followed by news this morning that Google is changing device setup and speaker group controls, which now require adjusting speakers individually, quoting 9 to 5, Google. Google confirmed us that the device utility app has only to be used once during the initial setup of devices that don't have the latest and presumably non-infringing firmware installed. For example, the DUA would apply to unopened speakers already sitting on store shelves today. Meanwhile, users now, quote, need to adjust each speaker individually, end quote, instead of being able to use the group volume controller that changed everything at once. Additionally, you can no longer alter the volume of a speaker group using your phone's physical volume rocker.

speaker sessions are not impacted, end quote. The Entertainment Software Association has announced that E3, 2022, will be an online only event in the summer due to COVID-19 concerns, quoting Venture Beat. Asked to clarify if there will be an online event, the ESA said it is, quote, excited about the possibilities of an online event, end quote. The ESA, a trade group led by the game industry's publishers, is evidently being cautious because of the huge burst in coronavirus infections prompted by the Omicron variant. The CES 2022 Tech Trade Show, which is taking place in Las Vegas this week, has caught a lot of

criticism for going forward with its in-person event despite the risks of being a, quote, super spreader event. While E3 is still months away and the current spike could be over by that time, the organization is in the midst of signing up companies to take exhibition space, as it often takes months for companies to pool their booths together, the big show, which in normal times draws more than 50,000 industry people and 15,000 fans in person to the Los Angeles Convention Center every June. Meanwhile, the Game Developers Conference is scheduled for in person on March 21st to March 25th. In an email, the GDC said it plans to move forward at this time, end quote. From the Tech Civil War beat, Mozilla says it is pausing,

accepting crypto donations following a widespread backlash, mostly over carbon emissions, including harsh words from co-founder of Mozilla Jamie Zawinsky, quoting the verge. Zawinsky, who stopped working for Mozilla.org in 1999, tweeted scathing criticism to a December 31st Mozilla tweet, promoting that it accepted cryptocurrency donations. Mozilla began accepting Bitcoin for donations back in 2014. Everyone involved in the project should be witheringly ashamed of this decision to partner with planet incinerating Ponzi Grifters, Zewinsky said on January 3rd, cryptocurrencies have come under significant scrutiny for their impact on the environment, and the fact that the bulk of supposed crypto wealth seems to currently be available to a limited few.

Peter Lins, who made the Gecko engine that underpins Firefox, tweeted his disapproval to Mozilla as well. What the actual F, he said. You were meant to be better than this, end quote. and it's not just them. Many quote tweets of Mozilla's December 31st post are brutal. On Thursday, Mozilla addressed the situation in a Twitter thread. Quote, last week we tweeted a reminder that Mozilla accepts cryptocurrency donations, Mozilla said. This led to an important discussion about cryptocurrency's environmental impact. Mozilla says it will be, quote, reviewing if and how our current

policy on crypto donations fits with our climate goals, and while that review is taking place, it will be pausing crypto donations. It also promised that the review will be a transparent process and that it will share regular updates. However, Mozilla isn't completely distancing itself from decentralized technologies like cryptocurrency, saying that, quote, decentralized web technology continues to be an important area for us to explore, end quote. Mozilla is just the latest company to take heat for its involvement with cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. Tesla was lambasted for its decision to accept Bitcoin as payment last year, and it reversed the policy soon after. And gaming companies have recently been heavily criticized

for their NFT efforts with the developer of the upcoming game Stalker 2 Heart of Chernobyl going so far as to entirely cancel its NFT plans in response to outcry, end quote. One more dispatch from Las Vegas this week of CES. We've discussed whether or not this is the year that foldable phones finally become a mainstream thing, but how about foldable laptops? Quoting the verge. Each year it seems that more companies are trying out devices with foldable screens. In the PC space, results for those have been mixed.

But AIS is known for doing funky things, especially funky things with screens. So it was only a matter of time before the company tried its hand at one of those, and we're finally getting a look at the first generation. Say hello to the Zenbook 17-fold OLED, a 17.3-inch laptop with a foldable OLED screen. For those seeking a more traditional offering, there's also a clamshell Zenbook 14 OLED coming later this year. The primary benefit of a foldable device, apart from the fact that it looks really freaking cool, is that it makes a larger screen easier to fit into purses and bags.

A 17-inch tablet, in particular, might be a pain for many people to carry around, no matter how thin and light it is. There are also a few more options for how you can use a foldable like this. You can unfold it and use it like a regular tablet, or you can prop it up with a kickstand, or you can fold it sideways at a 90-degree angle and use it like a miniature clamshell. That was what I enjoyed about ThinkPad X1 Fold, Lenovo's shot at this kind of thing. I liked being able to pop the device into different modes depending on what I was doing and the position I was in.

That device in clamshell mode was cramped to use due to its small screen, though it was only a 13.3 incher to begin with. The Zenbook 17-fold should theoretically solve that problem. It's a 4x3-17.3 incher when unfolded and a 3-2 12.3 incher in clamshell. That also leaves more room for a spacious keyboard. My other major complaint about the X1 fold was that the keyboard was in practically small. The Zenbook folds is bundled with a device and has 1.4 millimeters of travel. Inside, the Zenbook comes with 12th Gen Intel Core I7 U-Series processors and up to 16 gigabytes of RAM and 1 terabyte of storage. It includes ASIS Screen Expert 2 software, also on its recent dual-screen devices to help you more easily split the screen and arrange its contents. One of the the problems with thin, high-resolution devices, the fold is 2560 by 1920, is often battery life. All those pixels suck up juice, and a smaller device tends to have less room for a large brick. The X-1 fold did not last very long. However, the Zenbook 17 has a 75-watt-hour battery inside, which is fairly large for a product that's less than half an inch thick and bigger than what

comes in many 13-inch thin and light laptops. ASIS hasn't provided a battery life estimate yet, of course, but it's a promising spec. The Zenbook 17-fold OLED will be available in Q2 2022, with pricing to be announced. I imagine it'll be expensive, end quote. Time for the weekend long-read suggestions and what this first article presupposes is something I've noticed the last few years or so. It wasn't that long ago that car companies didn't have much of a presence at CES, and nowadays CES is basically the greatest car show around. Quoting CNET, It's easy to see why CES matters more to automakers, and you dear car-buying readers, every year,

the line between automotive and consumer tech tech tech tech companies outside of automotive dipping their toes into cars, or automakers content to find the most unique applications for their future vehicles. What you see here isn't just science fiction, many of the innovations outlined below may arrive at dealerships before you know it, end quote. The article then does go on to list basically every major auto company headline from this last week, so check that out for a one-stop summary. Then, one of the big draws of CES always has been just, you know, imagine walking into an entire airline hangers' worth of TVs, floor-to-ceiling screens. It's overwhelming, but in a really good way, this Gizmodo piece asked a question, though,

that you've probably asked yourself, can you really tell the difference between, a 4K and an 8K screen. They quote a bunch of scientists in the piece who say things like this, quote, let's tackle this with some technical detail. Normal visual acuity, what we often refer to as 2020 vision, corresponds to being able to resolve two dots separated by one minute of arc. What does this mean? One's thumb at arm's length is about two degrees wide, and a degree has 60 minutes. This means that if you were to draw 120 evenly spaced dots in a line across the width of your thumb, then at arm's length you would just barely be able to see the individual dots. At any greater viewing distance or with any more dots, you would be unable to tell the difference between the dotted line and a

continuous one. If we translate this calculation to a TV, it turns out that for a screen 60 inches wide, viewed from five feet away, the limit of our resolution is 4K. At this distance, we would be able to tell the difference between HD and 4K, but any increase beyond 4K to say 8K would not be noticeable. We would need to get right up close to the TV, quite an unnatural thing to do to tell apart a 4K screen from an 8K1. So unless one is planning on having a really huge screen or is planning on watching TV from very close up, 4K is plenty. A step up to 8K from 4K will likely be unnoticeable in most living room setups, end quote. Then, more pixels, but from a different angle, in my continued curiosity about the artistic aesthetic of recent technology culture, things like bit art,

Cryptopunks, and the like. Wired takes a look at how retro pixel art has taken over gaming at a time when that's really counterintuitive because half of gaming is also right now about the quest for photorealism, right? Quote, but how does a quirky pixel art game like Eastward make such an impression in an industry obsessed with horsepower and realism? These games see pixel art as more than a relic of the past. It's no longer about technical compromise and limitations, but a flourishing art form inexorably tied to video games. Over the past decade, pixel art has experienced a renaissance, thanks to the popularity of indie-developed games like Celeste and Eastward. 25 years after Sony and Nintendo tried to kill it, it's proving popular not just for its nostalgic appeal, but as a platform for modern gaming experiences.

I came of age in the 1990s when Nintendo was blowing minds with 3D adaptations of its Mario and Zelda franchises, and Sony was actively suppressing 2D pixel art games on its brand new PlayStation. Despite exceptions like Castlevania, Symphony of the Night, and Sweet Code in 2, pixel arts impressionistic relationship with the player was effectively wiped out by creative and corporate ambitions to chase hot tech. The indie game boom over the past decade has helped restore pixel arts reputation, says Christina Antoinette Neofotitsu, a pixel artist with decades of experience. Smaller teams with smaller budgets can produce a game that would command AAA budgets in the 90s, she said, end quote.

And then, have you ever wondered why for all of the talk of cloud computing going after clients and say health care or record keeping or even the military? One industry you don't hear about as the Holy Grail of cloud computing is one that you maybe would think of as the Holy Grail. Wall Street, banks, finance. This New York Times piece looks at why until now, Wall Street especially has been sort of cloud cautious. While Wall Street leaders have long acknowledged the potential of cloud computing to cut costs, they have only allowed their firms to take halting steps. Executives have been hesitant because banks are tightly regulated by governments, and any sudden changes involving consumer deposits or privacy aren't possible.

They're also concerned that computing over the internet will open the door to cyber attacks, and some firms are held back by old computer systems that are difficult to revamp or retire, making the transition more tricky. In North America, banks handle only 12% of their tasks on the cloud, but that could double in the next two years, the consulting firm Accenture says in a survey. Jamie Diamond, Chief Executive of J.P. Morgan Chase, says, the bank needs to adopt new technologies such as artificial intelligence and cloud technology, quote, as fast as possible, end quote. I had to walk the kids to school in freshly fallen snow this morning, also from Wired.

A look at how humans, at least for now, still beat algorithms when it comes to weather forecasting. Today's lightning speed predictions, the product of advanced algorithms and global data collection, appear one step away from complete automation, but they're not perfect yet. Despite the expensive models, array of advanced satellites, and megacomputers, human forecasters have a unique set of tools all their own. Experience, their ability to observe and draw connections where algorithms cannot, gives these forecasters an edge that continues to outperform the glitzy weather machines in the highest stake situations, end quote. And finally, no doubt you've seen people share it on social media. Even I have been doing so on

Twitter this week. Wordle, the little word game that could, has taken over this week. and from the New York Times, the story of the game that was created by a Brooklyn software engineer for his partner. Quote, Josh Wardle, a software engineer in Brooklyn, knew his partner loved word games, so he created a guessing game for just the two of them. As a play on his last name, he named it Wordle. On November 1st, 90 people played. On Sunday, just over two months later, more than 300,000 people played. This is not Mr. Worrell's first brush with suddenly capturing widespread attention,

formerly a software engineer for Reddit. He created two collaborative social experiments on the site called the Button and Place that each were phenomena in their own moment. But Wordle was built without a team of engineers. It was just him and his partner, Palak Shah, killing time during a pandemic. Mr. Wardle said he first created a similar prototype in 2013, but his friends were unimpressed, and he scrapped the idea. In 2020, he and Ms. Shaw, quote, really got into the New York Times Spelling Bee and the Daily Crossword, quote, so I wanted to come up with a game that she would enjoy, he said, end quote. All right, this weekend, the bonus episode is going to be our first ever fund profile episode. Yes, the first investment the ride home fund made in its life last year was to Sensel.

So this weekend, the founder of Sensel will come on to tell us what that company does. That has me so very, very excited. The idea behind these fund episodes is not to simply just, you know, talk my book, but to provide full-on entrepreneurial profiles, full-on entrepreneurial stories. Most of the companies we're investing in are seed stage companies. So just as I did with the Internet History Podcast, I'm going to basically profile these companies almost from an inspirational, historical, or just sort of startup template sort of lens.

Like, what is the big idea here? Who are the people behind it? What are the possibilities? What are the problems they're facing? You can think of these episodes as guides. and instruction manuals in the how I built this school of podcasting. When I did the Internet History podcast, I got to ask people, you know, how did you make magic happen 20 years ago?

The idea now is that I can ask them, how are you going to make magic happen today? We can profile companies at their earliest stages. And then we can all, with really privileged access and behind-the-scenes information, follow these companies across their lives, across their journeys. Imagine if I could have profiled Airbnb or Coinbase at their seed rounds when they were first getting started. Who knows? Maybe a company that world changing will be introduced to you through these episodes, which we will do every so often this year.

The idea is, even if you're not an investor in the Ride Home Fund, via these episodes, you can vicariously become a fan of these companies. Companies backed by you, the mutant podcast army. Enjoy this first profile this weekend. we'll publish last night's Twitter space next weekend. Talk to you on Monday. Oh, by the way, I don't know if you can hear this, but I tried to capture Archie the puppy snoring this morning. Take a listen.