Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 04/10 – HUGE: Apple and Google Join Forces For Coronavirus Contact Tracing

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Amazon is creating a system to test its own employees for Coronavirus, Google creates a system to help with unemployment claims, one more attempt to keep track of the Google messaging branding mess, more evidence Zuckerberg really is jealous of Instagram, and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Tovala.com/ride Caramba.store Code: Brian50 Links: Apple, Google debut major effort to help people track if they’ve come in contact with coronavirus (Washington Post) Amazon developing coronavirus testing lab for workers (Washington Post) The pandemic is playing to almost every one of Amazon's strengths (CNN Business) Google creates online unemployment application with state of New York (CNBC) Google is rebranding Hangouts Chat as just Google Chat (The Verge) Everyone can now access their Instagram DMs on the web (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Can Airbnb Survive Coronavirus? (Citylab) Atlassian’s tools helped build today’s tech. How’s it prepping for the future? (Protocol) Zuckerberg’s Jealousy Held Back Instagram and Drove Off Founders (Bloomberg Businessweek) Was Leisure Suit Larry Really an Accomplice in Early Banking Cyberattacks? (Vice) Has Apple finally bitten off way more than it can chew? (WiredUK) Apple, Amazon, and Common Enemies (Stratechery) 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, April 10th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon is creating a system to test its own employees for coronavirus. Google creates a system to help with unemployment claims.

One more attempt to keep track of the Google messaging branding mess. More evidence, Zuckerberg really is jealous of Instagram, and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. This literally just broke, but it is potentially so huge. let me just quote real quick from the Washington Post. Apple and Google unveiled an ambitious effort Friday to help combat coronavirus, introducing new tools that could soon allow owners of smartphones to know if they have crossed paths with someone infected with the disease.

The changes the two companies will make to iPhone and Android devices could inject valuable new technological support for contact tracing. A strategy public health officials say is essential to allowing people to return to work and normal life while containing the spread of the pandemic. Apple and Google are hoping to harness Bluetooth the technology typically used to connect wireless speakers and keyboards to allow iPhones and Android devices to communicate with one another. Public health officials soon will gain greater ability to create apps that would sense other devices nearby. If a person learns they have coronavirus, they could indicate on their app they've been infected, and people whose smartphones have been in their vicinity would be notified regardless of whether their devices run on Apple's or Google's software. Apple and Google said they expect to make tools available to developers to assemble such contact

tracing apps as soon as mid-May, with further enhancements to the operating systems that would expand the systems reach to follow. The company said the technology would not track a user-specific location or reveal an infected person's identity to the tech giants or to governments worldwide, end quote. If you've been listening to the Coronavirus Morning Report podcast, then you've heard me go on and on ad nauseum about the need for a contact tracing system to enable all of us to get back to work. And I've said there, and I said on this week and tech last weekend, we do all have smartphones in our pockets. It would kind of be silly not to take advantage of the technology that

modern life has gifted us to do something like this. The fact that Google and Apple have collaborated on this is kind of insane for our purposes, where we usually cover the tech horse race. But frankly, This is what needed to happen. Google and Apple are obviously the owners of the biggest platforms in the world. So I'm super stoked by the potential of all of this. Silicon Valley might actually deliver us one huge tool that could enable us to return to some semblance of normal life while we wait on a vaccine.

If so, it'll be one of the most amazing things that Silicon Valley has ever done. Amazon has begun assembling equipment to build a medical lab in order to screen its own workers for COVID-19 and may even be working on antigen testing. Workers in at least 64 Amazon warehouses and shipping facilities thus far have tested positive for the coronavirus, quoting the Washington Post. The e-commerce giant has begun assembling the equipment needed to build a facility and said in a blog post Thursday that it hopes to start testing small numbers of our frontline employees soon. Amazon says it has started to develop incremental testing capacity,

relative to what governments might set up. Amazon also acknowledged that its effort might not be ready before the coronavirus outbreak subsides. Quote, We are not sure how far we will get in the relevant time frame, but we think it's worth trying, and we stand ready to share anything we learn with others, the company wrote. Amazon is working on antigen testing, a diagnostic test to determine whether a person is infected, as opposed to a blood test that could detect antibodies made by the immune system when a person is exposed to the virus, end quote. And if Amazon can keep its operations running smoothly, a vital prerequisite for which would be, of course, ensuring the health of its workers, an analyst at Bank of America thinks that Amazon stands to emerge from the pandemic period stronger than many of its competitors, with as much as an additional $4 billion a year in revenue alone.

Quoting CNN, the breadth of Amazon's sprawling business interests and its increasing central place in America's fragile supply chain, underscores the company's hold on consumers and its potential to solidify its dominance in the coming months. The longer this crisis goes on, the more formidable Amazon will become, according to James Bailey, a management professor at George Washington University's business school. Quote, every crisis creates a void, said Bailey, and whatever force fills that void inherits power, end quote. Thanks to its existing advantages in scale and efficiency, Amazon stands to emerge from the pandemic stronger than many of its competitors, experts say. In light of the pandemic, Amazon could pool in as much as an additional $4 billion in revenue this year,

though added costs of managing the pandemic may cut into Amazon's profits, said Bank of America in an investor note last week, end quote. And remember what I said yesterday about Cobol and the sclerotic state of especially government unemployment systems in this time of crisis? Well, Google has created an application portal to help New York State with its recent surge of unemployment. filings and says it is willing to bring a similar service to more states. Quote, since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the New York State Department of Labor's unemployment insurance filing system has faced an unprecedented increase in volume, with peak weeks seeing a 16,000 percent increase in phone calls and a 1600 percent increase in web traffic compared to a typical week, the New York Department of Labor said in a

press release on Thursday. The new Google site, which is expected to be accessible Friday morning, and is supported by Google's cloud infrastructure, should be able to handle a, quote, high volume of uses, allowing users to save incomplete applications and pick up where they left off. It can be reached via smartphones, tablets, and laptops.

Google on Thursday also launched a search feature that provides links to federal unemployment resources in the U.S., with plans to extend it to the state level. A Google spokesperson said the company is partnering with several states on service delivery issues that it hopes will include unemployment insurance processing, end quote. And yeah, more on this. Google has officially rebranded its business-focused teleconferencing app Hangouts Meet to Google Meet. And Hangouts Chat is now Google Chat, thereby leaving the Hangouts brand to live on as a consumer-only brand,

quoting the Verge. For now, Hangouts for G Suite, this is the workplace version of just the chat app will continue to exist after Google postponed its discontinuation back in August of last year. In its place is now Google Chat, once Hangouts Chat, which is more of a Slack competitor for more robust workplace productivity and messaging than it is a straightforward one-to-one messaging app like the G-chat of old. And for everyone else, your web, Gmail account, and iOS or Android device can still access the original consumer version of Hangouts for the foreseeable future, end quote. Again, I have no idea really what any of that means, and I'm paid to keep track of this stuff every day. But at this point, it's literally alphabet soup of just brand and product awareness gobbledy gook.

And by the way, that pun was almost entirely unintentional. Instagram is rolling out access to DMs on the web to everyone globally after testing this new feature since January, quoting the verge. Web DMs are especially convenient for people who use Instagram all the time like reporters, influencers, and social media managers. It's the easiest way to communicate privately on the platform, especially if someone is trying to respond to possibly hundreds of messages a day. Even for non-power users typing on a laptop keyboard is easier than typing on their phone screen, so they might be more incentivized to chat over Instagram DM if they can access their inbox through a browser. Bringing DMs to the web fits with Facebook CEO Mark Zucker

Zuckerberg's broader vision for the company's future. Zuckerberg told the New York Times last spring that private messaging, groups, and stories were the three fastest growing areas of online communication, and the company announced a year ago that it would shift towards becoming a, quote, privacy-focused communications platform with a focus on encryption. Zuckerberg also said he eventually wants to allow Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram users to message each other regardless of the platform they're using, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions as always, and first up, City Labs asks a question out loud that has been whispered about all week in certain tech circles. Can Airbnb survive the coronavirus crisis? As we've seen already this week, there are literal questions being asked about Airbnb's cash runway.

And at the same time, earlier this week, the 800-pound gorilla of the travel market suggested that it too could run out of cash. as early as the second half of 2021. I'm talking about booking.com, which released some financial numbers this week that weren't good, 85% of its business down or something like that. And that's a mature, publicly traded company. Well, Citilab looks at the Airbnb situation from all angles. And yes, we are seeing Airbnb hosts returning their properties to the long-term rental market, because they have to, you know, make long-term mortgage payments and the like. But also, quote, if the crisis stabilizes lockdowns are lifted and some travel resumes, home sharing listings in cities might not be the first to revive.

Quote, I think that in more isolated rural areas, Airbnb is likely to be pretty resilient, says Marie Hickey, head of commercial research at UK real estate consultants, Sevilleis. It could be the case that we don't see a truly sustained recovery in overseas visitors until well into 2021, and the market that will bounce back quickest may be the domestic leisure market, end quote. While people may be more wary of traveling to other countries, urbanites who have been cooped up in city homes under lockdown may well take the opportunity to travel somewhere nearby for some open space and fresh air once it is safe to do so, end quote. Sort of coronavirus-related protocol looks at what's next for Atlassian by interviewing Atlassians

Scott Farhar, who says of his company, quote, if you look at what at least, Lassian has done well over, I guess, our entire existence, we help unify teamwork. And what we're going to do is unify more types of teamwork for more types of teams. Jira, for example, people don't really work in Jira. They work in all sorts of applications as developers. They do work in their IDE and write code. If you're a designer, you're in Photoshop or InVision or Figma or one of those tools. If you're a product manager, you're writing specs largely in confluence. When companies talk about the best of breed versus a single suite, I think what we've found is that companies are after effectively a unified backbone or control panel that runs across all their products.

What we do really well is to be that backbone of how work travels around your organization, end quote. We're going to talk this weekend to the author of another new tech book on a weekend bonus episode, but also this week, Sarah Fryer's book about the saga of Instagram came out. and there's a juicy excerpt up in Bloomberg, in which I learned that, among other things, Facebook tried to buy Snapchat all over again back in 2016. But the thing that has been getting all the headlines is the continued suggestion that Mark Zuckerberg has a somewhat irrational obsession with Instagram's success vis-a-vis Facebook. Zuckerberg couldn't seem to bear the idea that Instagram might outshine Facebook.

He told Sistram, he believed Instagram's success. Stories was successful not because of its design, but because they happened to release the feature ahead of Facebook Stories. Facebook had helped Instagram long enough, he decided. In 2018, Instagram would have to start giving back. Instagram's users barely noticed Zuckerberg's first change. He ordered Systrom to build a prominent link within the Instagram app that would send his users to Facebook. Around the same time, he had his own engineers remove the prominent link to Instagram on Facebook site. Zuckerberg's willingness to expand Instagram's team had waned as well. He balked at additional engineers to facilitate the release of IGTV,

even though Instagram was on track to hit 1 billion users and 10 billion in revenue that year. He allowed Sistram and Krieger to hire 93 more employees, bringing their headcount to around 800, still far short of what they felt they needed. Instagram's co-founders were shocked. Zuckerberg granted Oculus, which was losing money, more than 600 new employees. Krueger dug up the numbers and learned that Facebook, which hired 8,000 people in 2018, had six times as many employees as Instagram when it added its billionth user. As Instagram reached one billion users, Zuckerberg directed Javier Olivan, Facebook's head of growth, to draw up a list of all the ways Instagram was supported by the Facebook app. Then he ordered the supporting tools turned off. Instagram would no longer be promoted in Facebook's news feed.

Sure enough, Instagram's growth slowed to a halt, end quote. All of that is really bizarre. As Turner Novak said on Twitter, all of that runs counter to the whole notion that a lot of us had that Facebook would really just end up being a social media holding company of a lot of constituent parts, as opposed to Facebook and a bunch of other satellite sites. Vice asks the historical question of if the notorious R-rated video game leisure suit Larry, from the 1980s, might have been at least indirectly responsible for blazing the path of early banking cyber attacks. Quote, Larry's virus spread to executable files on hard and floppy disks. Each time an infected file was run, it would increase in size.

Then on Friday the 13th, the virus would delete infected files, rendering affected applications if not the entire computer and network, inoperable. Friday the 13th, also known as the Jerusalem virus, is probably the most common of all viruses. a virus bulletin reporter wrote in 1989. I've even seen it active on a Dutch hospital database. Nurses used to play an infected copy of Leisure Suit Larry on the patient status registration system, a potentially lethal scenario, end quote. Pirated copies of Larry were found at Edwards Air Force Base and the University of Oldenburg in Germany, and in the personal files of media theorist Freda Kittler, were infected, end quote. I'm bringing this up because my

My memory is hazy on this 30 years later, but I know for a dead certainty that we for sure had bootleg copies of Leisure Suit Larry on my home computer when I was a kid. And I do remember a virus crashing our IBM PS2 Model 25 so badly around this time that we had to reinstall literally everything. Wired UK provocatively asks if Apple might have finally bitten off more than it can chew. Quote, Apple's push into new services takes the firm outside its core area of excellence, which is premium hardware. In each new market, it faces tough, established, and well-resourced competitors, which means Cook and company have little chance of repeating the usual Apple trick

of waiting until the time is right to perfect the product that is already out there, and doing it so well, it instantly destroys the competition, end quote. And Ben Thompson does what Ben Thompson does best. Analyzing, in light of that, the whole Apple letting Amazon sell via its app store without paying the usual App Store tax. And he does so with his usual aplomb. In short, Ben says, this is all about making common cause against a common enemy in these new markets, like entertainment and services, that both Amazon and Apple want to own. Quote, this is the most compelling lens with which to view Apple and Amazon's recent partnerships. Both, given their desire to be a platform for over-the-top services,

are on the same side when it comes to a potential Netflix-dominated future. Neither want that to happen. Netflix dominating means that shows are sold directly to Netflix. Channels are pointless. Apple and Amazon both, though, want channels to exist, if only so that they can sell subscriptions to them. This, by extension, is a reason why Amazon might be willing to strengthen Apple's platform even as it competes with Amazon's.

It would also be a reason for a further quid pro quo, Apple offering access to its shows on Amazon's devices. This remains to be seen. ultimately, though, I favor Netflix in the long run. Apple and Amazon's strategy both entail replacing MVPDs with a streaming alternative that preserves the existing value chain. Value chain transformation, though, inexorably alters the point of integration within the value chain.

It seems safer to bet on the company that is predicated on a completely altered future than those hoping for mere substitutes, end quote. That's all for this week. Although we do have a weekend bonus episode on Saturday tomorrow with the great Alex Kantrowitz talking about his new book, always day one, where he, as I described it, puts the five big tech companies on the couch like a psychiatrist might and teases out how and why they do what they do. Understanding their philosophies for success, yes, but also understanding their personalities and cultures, if you will. So enjoy that. Also, for next week, are there any startups? companies out there that are hiring right now. If so, get in touch at podcast at techmeem.com

and send me a list of your open positions. Because all next week, if we can, I'd like to do some classifieds at the end of shows devoted exclusively to job openings in tech. I won't charge for these unless you're super huge, like Microsoft or somebody like that. I might still charge. But anyone that has an opening for a dev job or any job really, at a startup anywhere in the country, just send it over, and I'll try to share the details at the end of shows. Anyway, as I said, if you have them, send them over, and talk to you all on Monday.