Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/08 – An Apple/Hyundai Car?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 8th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Interesting new Applecar rumors, including how they've basically rated Tesla for talent. Alex Stamos and Chris Krebs have formed the Security Avengers.

Starting point is 00:00:49 People do seem to be jumping ship from WhatsApp. Why Roku is maybe the dark course of the streaming wars. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Hyundai has confirmed that it is in early discussions with Apple on collaborating to develop a self-driving car. But in case you're jumping ahead to Apple may be buying Hyundai or anything like that, this seems to be just a partnership right now. And also, Hyundai says Apple is talking to several car makers about a bunch of things right now.

Starting point is 00:01:25 So quoting CNBC, we understand that Apple is in discussions with a variety of global automakers, including Hyundai Motor. As the discussion is at its early stage, nothing has been decided. A representative from Hyundai Motor told CNBC's Cherry Kang. The statement followed a local report from the Korean Economic Daily that said Apple suggested the tie-up and Hyundai Motor was reviewing the terms. The report said both electric vehicle production as well as battery development were included in the proposal and that the car could potentially be released in 2027. Apple declined to comment on the report, end quote. At the exact same time, over in Bloomberg, Mark German has a piece up saying, yes, Apple is

Starting point is 00:02:10 developing an autonomous electric vehicle, but the timeline for release, his sources say, is five to seven years. Also this, quote, A key differentiator would be Apple's ability to integrate its self-driving system, a pricey initiative that has spurred the company to develop its own software, sensor hardware, and chip technologies. The goal is to let a user input their destination and be driven there with little or no other engagement, according to the people familiar with the project. Apple doesn't manufacture its own products, and it will likely take the same approach with a vehicle. It's unclear which company would assemble the car, though. In its first attempt about five years ago,

Starting point is 00:02:47 Apple worked with engineers from Magna International, a major auto industry contract manufacturer. Apple has continued to investigate building its self-driving car system for third-party car partners rather than its own vehicle, the people said, and it could ultimately again abandon its own car efforts in favor of this approach. In a sign, it has now rebooted development of a vehicle. Apple in recent months shifted an executive known for his work on vehicle interiors and exteriors to its car team. In 2019, Apple hired former Tesla engineering vice president Steve McManus, but he initially worked on projects unrelated to the car. Now McManus leads a development group with several employees focused on car interiors, fabrics, car testing, and vehicle manufacturing, people with knowledge of

Starting point is 00:03:33 the matter said. He reports to Doug Field, a former top Tesla vehicle engineer who runs the Apple Car Project Day to Day. Apple also recently hired Jonathan Seve, a vehicle engineer from BMWAG, Tesla, and Alphabet's Waymo, as a senior manager on the car project. In 2019, Apple tapped Michael Schwekooch, Tesla's former vice president in charge of drive systems, adding to a growing list of former Tesla employees working on the vehicle effort. Late in 2020, Apple also hired another former Tesla vice president, Stuart Bowers, according to a person familiar with the move. He led Tesla's self-driving technology team until mid-2019 and was an executive in residence

Starting point is 00:04:13 at Venture Capital firm Greylock Partners until July, according to his LinkedIn profile. Apple's car team is filled with dozens of other ex-Tesla hardware and self-driving car engineers. In total, Apple has several hundred engineers working on. the project, with most of them developing the self-driving car system rather than the full-fledged vehicle, end quote. Solar Winds has hired the ex-CISA director Christopher Krebs as an independent consultant to help its crisis response after the big hack, quoting the Financial Times. Mr. Krebs was in charge of the U.S. cybersecurity agency until November when he was fired via Twitter by Donald Trump for challenging claims that the U.S. presidential election had been compromised by fraud.

Starting point is 00:05:02 He will work for solar winds to coordinate the company's crisis response alongside his new business partner, Alex Stamos, a Stanford University professor and Facebook's former security chief. The pair told the Financial Times, it could take years before all of the compromised systems can be made completely secure again. Mr. Krebs said, quote, this has been a multi-year effort by one of the very best, the most sophisticated intelligence operations in the world. It was just one small part of a much larger plan that's highly sophisticated, so I would be expecting more companies that have been compromised, more techniques that were yet to find. There's so much more to be written, I think, in this chapter of Russian cyber intelligence operations, end quote.

Starting point is 00:05:44 So today I learned that Alex Damos and Chris Krebs have joined forces, Avengers style, to create I don't know, a traveling Wilburys-style cyber security supergroup? Cool. I'm going to do a popery segment here grabbing a whole bunch of TV-related stories. First up, Roku says that Roku OS powered smart TVs now hold 38% market share in the U.S. and 31% market share in Canada. We've never thought about TVs as a platform play because TVs have always been a super fragmented segment. And besides, a TV was always just a TV, right? They're interchangeable. It only mattered what you put on the TV.

Starting point is 00:06:36 The real power was, say, with your cable box. Well, no more, Roku OS has quietly created a singular platform now powering more than a third of all TVs. So what does that mean? Well, I told you, Comcast is trying to partner with Walmart to create a new smart TV platform of their own. They're clearly aware of what they've lost here in terms of the power of the cable box. I told you we got a TCL Roku powered TV recently, and I don't think we've actually turned on our cable box once since we've gotten it. Because if you want to watch a given channel, and I say channel in quotes, you kind of just go to that app on the Roku menu. No need to go to a channel guide from your cable box anymore.

Starting point is 00:07:20 But also, news that Roku has acquired the exclusive global rights to more than 75 quibby shows and will make them available free to stream in 2021 on the Roku channel is interesting. That's the thing. Roku got to where it is by being a neutral platform. Clearly, they've been deliberately shifting away from that recently. Roku is quietly building its own Netflix competitor in the Roku channel. Does this mean that they might start creating their own original content soon? Will we see them bidding on other people's libraries of content?

Starting point is 00:07:59 You could certainly see a scenario someday where certain folks might be willing or even eager to do business with someone just to build up a strong Netflix competitor, especially if this is several years down the road and certain people's streaming efforts have failed. The Roku channel could be positioned quite well in such a scenario. And then, in this universe of so many streaming options, this is, as I've said before, the startup your uncle has been pitching to you for years now, right? What if there was one single streaming subscription that gave you a la carte access to the content that hides behind this universe of streaming services. Say hello to Strum, quoting the Wall Street Journal. Strum, a streaming service co-founded by former Discovery

Starting point is 00:08:51 and Walt Disney executives, won't offer its own slate of original programming when it launches this spring. Instead, it will aim to give customers a la carte access to all content from hundreds of niche streaming services, offering users a way to stream individual shows and movies from various platforms without having to subscribe to each plan separately. Co-founder Paul Pastor said Strum would give more visibility to lesser-known services, which he said have fantastic content but have trouble being part of someone's daily habit because there is only so much money households will spend on streaming services every month. Former Disney chief executive Michael Eisner, whose Tornate Coe is Strum's main financial backer,

Starting point is 00:09:33 told the Wall Street Journal that the decision to invest was a no-brainer. quote, when I heard about this idea of an aggregation platform that would pick up smaller streaming services that don't have brand awareness, particularly like Netflix does have, I thought this was a great idea, he said. Strum declined to name any of the services whose content would be available on its platform at launch, but said it has already struck deals with nearly three dozen services, accounting for more than 20,000 TV series, movies, and shorts. Subscribers will get monthly credits that can be used toward watching shows and movies,

Starting point is 00:10:04 the company said, its co-founders who also include Lauren DeVilley, formerly of Discovery, and Eugene Liu and Thomas Wadsworth, formerly of Disney, said there would be multiple packages to choose from. A likely one, they said, would cost subscribers $9.99 a month for 100 credits, which should allow them to watch about one program a day, end quote. And finally, in this TV omnibus, I just thought this was kind of cool, so I'm going to shove it in here. TV Remote is an app that turns your iPhone into a universal remote control for your TV. Virtually any TV, let me just quote, this is from 9 to 5 Mac. TV Remote was created by Adam Foot, the same developer of the Shift keyboard for Apple Watch,

Starting point is 00:10:49 which I reviewed on 9 to 5 Mac last year. The app is quite intuitive and it brings all the main buttons into one screen so you don't have to learn how to use it. The first time you open it, the app identifies all the connected TVs in your your Wi-Fi network for quick pairing. You just have to choose your TV from the list and then authorize the app to work as a remote control. If you want to add more than one TV for use with the TV remote app, you can do so. Within just a few seconds, your TV will be paired with the app, and you can control it from your devices. There are navigation buttons to explore the interface

Starting point is 00:11:20 and menus, volume and channel controls, as well as shortcuts to media playback, mute, and access to the home screen. Tapping the three dots button reveals even more options such as subtitles, list and sleep timer. In my experience, the app works just as I expected. I have a Samsung Q-led TV, and its official remote app is pretty bad, as there's a considerable delay between tapping the buttons on the iPhone and the TV responding to the commands. With the TV remote app, everything works nearly instantly, and I don't have to wait a few seconds until the app identifies my TV, which happens every time with the Samsung app for some unknown reason. In addition to LG and Samsung TVs. The app also works with other smart TV models from Hitachi, Toshiba, Sharp, and more.

Starting point is 00:12:06 TV remote costs $3.99 on the app store, but it doesn't have any in-app purchases or subscriptions, end quote. When I did that FYI earlier this week about WhatsApp changing its terms of service, it was because I kind of had the sense that stuff like this might happen. The encrypted messaging app signal has seen a surge in popularity following the the WhatsApp privacy update that indicated WhatsApp user data was going to be shared with Facebook proper. Quoting Mac rumors. Encrypted messaging app signal faced big delays in verifying the phone numbers of new accounts on Thursday because of a sudden surge in people trying to join the platform. In messages posted from its official Twitter account, the nonprofit Signal Foundation said

Starting point is 00:12:56 verification codes were delayed across several cellular networks and that it was working through the backlog as quickly as it could. Signals' uptick in users was linked to the user policy changes at WhatsApp and also linked to tweets posted by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who recently became the world's richest person. As noted by The Verge, Musk continued a trend of criticizing Facebook with a Twitter post on Wednesday evening following the attack on the U.S. Capitol building. Musk shared a meme suggesting the founding of Facebook had ultimately led to that day's event, and followed it with a tweet suggesting his 41.5 million followers, quote, use Signal, presumably instead of Facebook-owned products like WhatsApp.

Starting point is 00:13:41 Musk's suggestion was later retweeted by Edward Snowden, another prominent Signal fan. Notably, the Signal Foundation was co-founded and funded by Brian Acton, the former WhatsApp co-founder who left the company after it was bought by Facebook in 2014. Acton later urged his Twitter followers to delete. Facebook, end quote. Time for the weekend long-rate suggestions. First up. If you haven't seen this already, I mean, what have you been doing with your time this week?

Starting point is 00:14:16 Maybe you were distracted by everything that happened this week. But Bloomberg has had a big oral history out that everyone's been reading, and it's fantastic. It looks back at the original development of the Xbox. Come for the video game history, but stay for the time capsule of the... bare-knuckle corporate politics back when Microsoft was at the height of its power. For example, when the nascent Xbox team decided that they needed to develop the platform outside of Windows, they had to go in and, you know, sell that strategic shift to Bill Gates. This is quoting from several different people, quote,

Starting point is 00:14:57 Bill is about 15 or 20 minutes late and he's pissed, and he comes in shouting and slams his fist on the table and says a bunch of things, I won't repeat. The gist of it was, you're screwing windows. Quote, Bill throws the PowerPoint deck down on the table and says, this is a fucking insult to everything I've accomplished at this company. Quote, we literally, like, needed towels to wipe the spit off our faces because Bill is screaming and yelling at us. But Bill being Bill, he's very, very angry that he's been misled, which he deserved to be. But within a half an hour, he was like, yeah, I understand.

Starting point is 00:15:31 Get out of my office, you two jerks, end quote. Next, I think we mentioned the end of the era represented by Farmville being officially shut down, but this piece from the New York Times takes a look at what Farmville begat to the startup world, i.e., Facebook may have invented growth hacking, but it was Zinga on top of the Facebook platform that really supercharged it for better and worse. quote. Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said the behaviors Farmville normalized had made it a pace car for the internet economy of the 2010s. He did not mean that as praise. The game encouraged people to draw in friends as resources to both themselves and the

Starting point is 00:16:16 service they were using, Mr. Bogos said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said. Quote, the internet itself is this bizarre of obsessive worlds where the goal is to bring you back to it in order to do the thing it offers, in order to get your attention and serve ads against it or otherwise derive value from that activity, he said, end quote. I believe we've done long reads about this before, but I just have to own up to loving to hear about how technology is revolutionizing archaeology, because I guess in the end. Some part of me just kind of wishes I had become an archaeologist. This is Ars Tecnica,

Starting point is 00:17:02 quote, archaeology is finally catching up with the so-called digital humanities, as evidenced by a February special edition of the Journal of Field Archaeology devoted entirely to discussing the myriad ways in which large-scale data sets and associated analytics are transforming the field. The papers included in the edition were originally presented during a special session of a 2019 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The data sets might be a bit smaller than those normally associated with the term big data, but this new digital data gaze is nonetheless having a profound impact on archaeological research, end quote. And finally, you know that I just love space stuff as well. We're hopefully going to have that weekend bonus episode soon,

Starting point is 00:17:49 the one that I mentioned a few weeks ago, with the former chair of the Astronaution. Department at Harvard. It's not been recorded yet, but it is on the calendar. So fingers crossed. Anyway, the final long read today is simple. The next web has a list of the six most exciting space missions that we can look forward to in 2021. So no weekend bonus episode this weekend, but as I just mentioned, we have some coming down the pike. In fact, what I do have already recorded and in my pocket that I'll share with you as soon as I can is the next office hours episode, a great sit-down with Gary Tan, the co-founder of the huge VC firm Initialized Capital. And we're going to be introducing other new types of bonus episodes in coming months and weeks.

Starting point is 00:18:50 More on that soon. Really interesting stuff coming at you this year. This show is going to expand significantly, the volume and type. of content that we'll be sharing. Still the great news roundups every weekday, still the deep dive interview episodes, but also some cool new stuff that will help you dive even deeper behind the scenes of the tech and startup industries. We've been working on this all for about six months and we'll be taking the wraps off it soon. Very exciting stuff. Can't wait to share it with you. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/08 – An Apple/Hyundai Car?

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