Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/08 – How Good Can an $18 Apple Watch Knock-Off Really Be?

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 Beam Ride Home for Friday, May 8th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Uber continues The Things Could Be Worse Tech Earnings Parade. Google is consolidating all of its messaging efforts under one team. This whole Reliance Geo Platform story really has me intrigued, a semi-decent $18 Apple Watch rip-off,

Starting point is 00:00:55 and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. All right, we did get Uber's earnings last night. Revenue was up 14% year over year. Gross bookings were up 8% year over year. But also, Uber reported a quarterly net loss of $2.9 billion, while at the same time in the quarter, each bookings were up 52%. But again, this is one of those will get the real numbers that really matter when Q2 is reported in about three months' time. but also Wall Street again seems to think, you know, could have been worse. Uber's stock is up 5% at the time of this writing, quoting CNBC. The net loss of $2.9 billion total includes $2.1 billion in impairment charges from

Starting point is 00:01:48 companies in which Uber has a stake, but represented Uber's biggest loss in three quarters. Gross bookings in Uber's core business segment rides fell 5% from a year ago. However, on the company's earnings call, CEO Darrakoshajee said, that the rides business was down around 80% in April from last year, but also gave reason for optimism, saying that ride volume had increased in each of the last three weeks, end quote. Indeed, the optimism that Kosovo Shahi was talking about seems to relate to the fact that ride volume bottomed out in mid-April

Starting point is 00:02:22 and has been rising slowly ever since. But another quarter of basically $3 billion in losses, and yet the stock rises. I guess that's where we are now, right? What was it? 20 million people unemployed now and the stock market is shooting up this morning. I am hearing whispers that Uber will definitely need to do a capital raise by the end of the year. They kind of don't want to fess up to this quite yet, but it looks like the National Health Service in the UK has already begun developing a second contact tracing app in parallel with that one that they developed. That flat out won't work. for what it's supposed to do. And yes, it looks like this second app is designed to integrate with the whole Google and Apple program that the NHS didn't want to play with because they wanted everything to be centralized, quoting the Guardian. The Swiss-based consultancy Zolke engineering has been hired to undertake a two-week technical spike to investigate

Starting point is 00:03:26 implementing Apple and Google's system, quote, within the existing proximity, mobile application, and platform, end quote. Zolki has already been working on the contact tracing app since March. Documents published this week show, but a new outsourcing contract first reported by the Financial Times and uncovered by public sector analyst Tussle shows that the government is now seriously considering changing how the application works to overcome problems with its initial approach. After one source told the Guardian that Downing Street was now skeptical of decisions made in the health service to create a separate app, number 10 sources played down the idea of any division.

Starting point is 00:04:02 but the Prime Minister's official spokesman left open the possibility that a change would be made telling reporters, quote, we've set out our plans for a centralized model and that's what we are taking forwards, but we will keep all options under review to make sure the app is as effective as possible, end quote. Thank you, all of you who have literally been hurling this story at me over and over again since last night. Yes, Google has decided to bring all of its messaging and communications, apps, and efforts under a single team to be led by Javier Sautero, who is currently the vice president and GM of G Suite. In that capacity, Sotero has already been overseeing Google Meet and Google Chat, but now he's also got messages, duo, and the phone app on Android under his purview,

Starting point is 00:04:59 quoting the Verge. Sotero tells me that there are no immediate plans to change or integrate any of Google's apps, so don't get your hopes up for that yet. Quote, we believe people make choices around the products that they use for specific purposes, Sautero says. Still, Google's communications apps are in dire need of a more coherent and opinionated production development, and Sultaro could very well be the right person to provide that direction. Prior to joining Google, he had a long career that included creating the much-loved Accompley email app, which Microsoft acquired and essentially turned into the main Outlook app

Starting point is 00:05:34 less than two months after signing the deal. Soltero has also moved rapidly, at least by the standards of Google's communications apps, to clean up the Hangouts branding mess, converting Hangouts video to Google Meet and Hangouts Chat to Google Chat, at least on the enterprise side. Google Meet also became free for everybody far ahead of the original schedule because of the pandemic. Cleaning up the consumer side of all that is more complicated, but Soltero says, quote, the plan continues to be to modernize hangouts towards Google Meet and Google Chat, end quote. There really is something interesting going on over in India. Remember Reliance Geo platforms, remember how Facebook paid billions of dollars for an equity

Starting point is 00:06:22 stake, the better to build out integration with WhatsApp. And then Silver Lake followed up by investing hundreds of millions of dollars in the Indian telecoms player at a premium above what Facebook had just paid. And now, private equity firm Vista Equity. Partners is investing $1.5 billion for a 2.32 stake valuing Reliance Geo at $65 billion. So to sum up in just the last few weeks, Reliance Geo has raised $8.19 billion, and it's done so in this crazy investing environment. It's also been raising a ton of interest from the biggest, deepest money pockets around. So it'll be interesting to see what Reliance Geo thinks it needs all this

Starting point is 00:07:11 money for, but also hella interesting to see what it is that has interested all of these big money bags. Again, to sum up the Reliance Geo story, here is TechCrunch. Quote, launched in the second half of 2016, Reliance Geo upended India's telecommunications industry with cut rate data plans and free voice calls. Geo platforms, a subsidiary of Reliance Industries, India's most valued firm, operates the telecom venture called Geo Infocom, that has amassed 388 million subscribers since its launch to become the nation's top telecom operator. Reliance Industries, which makes most of its profits from oil refining and petrochemicals, said on Friday that it aims to make geo-platforms, in which it has poured more than $30 billion over the years, into, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:58 a global technology leader and among the leading digital economies in the world, end quote. Among the other things that I learned in that short Reddit survey was that you tend to like segments like this one. In fact, I continue to hear that maybe a more developer-focused ride home podcast might be in order. So we're going to try to work on that. Get in touch if you know someone who might be a good host for something like that. But here you go. Hacker Earth surveyed 16,000 developers in 76 countries and found that 32% of developers picked Google's Go as the programming language they most want to learn next, followed by Python.

Starting point is 00:08:42 Quoting ZDNet. The desire for learning Goh lines up with the results of a similar survey by remote developer hiring firm HackerRank. Go is used at Google, Netflix, American Express, Salesforce, IBM, Target, Twitch, Twitter, Uber, and Dropbox. The Go Project's 2019 survey found that most developers are using the language for web development followed by database development, network programming, systems programming, and DevOps. Microsoft's Visual Studio code is the most widely used code editor among Go developers.

Starting point is 00:09:15 Other top desired languages are Kotlin, JavaScript, Bash, Shell, PowerShell, Microsoft's superset TypeScript, Scala, and R. Or is that Scala? Anyway, the top two languages that professional developers say they know are Go and JavaScript, followed by Kotlin C, Bashshell, PowerShell, Python, Swift, and Dart, end quote. Just want to squeeze this in real quick, because this really has me intrigued. Today I learned that there's an Apple Watch copycat that you can buy for just $18, and apparently it's surprisingly good, considering that's the price point.

Starting point is 00:09:59 I just saw this this morning on CNET, so I haven't really delved into it quite yet, so check it out yourself to confirm, because this kind of does sound too good to be true. The e-watch in question is called the ID 205, and this is the summary from Rick Broida at CNET, quote, here's what I liked about the ID 205. Display, big and bright and reasonably visible outdoors, battery life. Plan on about a week, depending on how you use it. Notifications. For me, this is the essential feature in smartwatch and the ID 205 does a decent job with them. You can toggle notifications for about a dozen individual apps, although Slack isn't among them. Also, simplicity. The watch itself is easy to use, as is the Very Fit Pro companion app. That app can share data with Apple Health and Strava.

Starting point is 00:10:55 And miscellaneous, it has handy features including basic music controls, a breathing exercise, a stopwatch, low power and do not disturb modes, and even a flashlight function. Here's what I didn't like, the look and feel. Like the BIP, the ID205 looks like a cheap plastic watch, which, let's be honest, it is. Also, there's no built-in GPS. Instead, it pulls data from your phone. And there are only four watch faces. These are functional and a little bit meh.

Starting point is 00:11:25 The one pictured up top is the snazziest. And it's not fully waterproof. Although the watch promises to withstand sweat and rain, it's not fully waterproof, meaning it doesn't belong in the shower or pool. That's in direct contradiction to the main product description, which says waterproof, end quote. Again, for that price, I'm thinking about maybe just trying this out only for the heck of it. Time for the weekend long read's suggestions. First up, for all the things that have gone wrong in the world lately, it's worth thinking about one huge thing that didn't go wrong, that didn't break.

Starting point is 00:12:04 This is the lead from the Atlantic piece that I want you to read, quote, here's a question that should make you shudder. What if in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the internet had buckled? What if, just as the medical care crisis started to spiral in New York, in Detroit, in New Orleans, the internet in those places had stopped working? An hour at a time, a couple of hours in the late afternoon. What if the internet had slowed to half its normal speed? What if it had worked only as well as the U.S. distribution system did for toilet paper? Or N95 masks?

Starting point is 00:12:37 Oh my God, says Avi Friedman, the CEO of, of Kentick, a company that helps big customers such as Zoom and Dropbox maximize internet performance. It would be all over, he said. Yeah, as a thought experiment, imagine that this whole pandemic had happened in 1978 or 1990 or something like that, or even, heck, 2002. I'm thinking mostly pre-internet, but even, you know, sort of immature internet. Imagine all of the things that would be different right now, if that had happened. And also read the piece to learn how that didn't happen, how the internet has actually held up more than quite well. Next, Tom Warren at the verge looks at the surge of cheaters and hackers in the world of PC gaming right now,

Starting point is 00:13:22 folks taking advantage of things like aimbots and wall hacks in games like Call of Duty Warzone and Destiny 2 sounds downright annoying to me, quote, aim bots and wall hacks are the most common forms of cheating in online shooters, allowing people who are new to a game or simply at a lower skill level to get a huge advantage over other players. Some cheats are the obvious type, where a player is flying around a map at an impossible speed or firing a gun faster than anyone else. Others like wall hacks are far less obvious and often go undetected in games for weeks or even months. There's a constant cat and mouse game between developers and communities that create and sell mods and cheats for games. Cheaters often purchase tools that act like malware, hacking and

Starting point is 00:14:06 injecting a game with a specialized code that will change how it works. These tools have gotten increasingly complex in recent years with whole underground communities and forums dedicated to ensuring aimbots and wallhacks remain undetected for monthly subscription fees. A PC Gamer Investigation back in 2014 warned that some of these cheat providers could be making millions of dollars per year and some cheat developers now claim to sell specialized tools for hundreds of dollars a month, end quote. Next, if you're excited about your iPad, finally being a real computer at long last, TechCrunch looks at how that happened, how Apple reinvented the cursor for the iPad. This is Craig Federigi from the interview in the piece, quote, Part of what I love so much about what's happened with iPadOS is the way that we've drawn from so many sources. The experience draws from our work on TVOS, from years of work on the Mac, and from the origins of the iPhone 10, and even early iPad, creating something new that feels really natural for iPad, end quote.

Starting point is 00:15:08 Just as the Apple TV interface didn't just inspire the cursor, the core design team responsible works across groups, including the Apple TV, iPadOS, and other products, end quote. Then, Instacart, of course, was in no way prepared to go from luxury service to essential service overnight, but they've done it, and Bloomberg looks at how they've done so. Quote, every day, we would see that the volume was 20% higher than the last day, Meta says. in a matter of a couple of weeks, we were already ahead of our end-of-year goals. A week later, we were ahead of our 2021 goals, and a few days after that, we were ahead of our 2022 goals. And so at a certain point, we stopped counting, end quote. The numbers looked too good to be true. They were really too true to be good. While the rest of the world was being transported into the past, quarantined at home,

Starting point is 00:16:01 venturing no further than their own neighborhoods. Instacart found itself catapulted into the future, and that future was a mess, end quote. And finally today, I'm going to end by sharing a bunch of things by and also about some of our friends of this podcast. For example, Chris Mims has a piece up looking at the 50th anniversary of LCD technology. Then Harry McCracken talks to Steven Sinovsky about Microsoft history and the memoir that Sinovsky is working on called Hardcore Software, inside the rise and fall of the PC revolution. Specifically, this piece looks at the whole story. story of concept, Melissa and the I Love You viruses. And then finally, Bloomberg has a full-on

Starting point is 00:16:45 profile up of friend of the show Eric Jackson, whose tech-focused hedge fund is up 56% this year, even amidst the market chaos. Quoting from the piece, in normal times, Jackson travels regularly to San Francisco and Silicon Valley to meet with contacts he's built up over decades after working in the tech industry himself. From 2000 to 2004, he worked at Toronto. based voice genie technologies, a voice recognition firm acquired by Alcatel for an undisclosed sum in 2006. Quote, if I start to hear the same name come up over and over again, that's usually a good sign that the company is just on the cusp of something great, Jackson said. So I'm getting behind those companies early, sticking with them, not just sort of selling out quickly, end quote.

Starting point is 00:17:31 Kudos to you, Eric. We need to get you back on for a weekend bonus episode sometime soon. Speaking of things, I kind of want to try out. Have any of you used that Remarkable E-Inc tablet? It's that sort of writing tablet, not the E-reader. It's called Remarkable. That's the name of the company. Anyway, version two is apparently coming out, and it looks incredibly interesting and sexy to me, but I want to hear if anyone else has used it regularly and actually finds it useful. one weekend bonus episode this week. It's actually an internet history episode from the archives that I did five years ago, a whole deep dive into that whole did Al Gore really invent the internet thing.

Starting point is 00:18:20 I repurposed it for that Potapalooza fundraiser thing last month, and so the file was just sitting on my desktop. So I thought, you know, why not? Here you go. A little bit of internet history for you for the weekend. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/08 – How Good Can an $18 Apple Watch Knock-Off Really Be?

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.