Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/31 - Does Amazon Want To Be A Mobile Carrier?

Episode Date: May 31, 2019

Might Amazon get into the cellular carrier game and thus make a Sprint/T-Mobile merger more palatable? Uber’s first quarterly report as a public company, what to expect from WWDC next week, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: HappyCog.com/ride Mealime.com Links: Exclusive: Amazon interested in buying Boost from T-Mobile, Sprint - sources (Reuters) Uber stock rises as net losses match expectations (CNBC) APPLE WWDC 2019: MAC PRO, IOS 13, MARZIPAN, AND WHAT ELSE TO EXPECT (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Product Breakfast Club podcast The unlikely origins of USB, the port that changed everything (Fast Company) Bing turns 10: Why it’s been more disruptive than you think (Search Engine Land) The Collapsing Crime Rates of the ’90s Might Have Been Driven by Cellphones (The Atlantic) This ID Scanner Company is Collecting Sensitive Data on Millions of Bargoers (OneZero) AT&T Has Become a New Kind of Media Giant (Fortune) The case for caseless iPhones (Vox) Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme park lands, explained (Polygon) 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 TechMeme ride home for Friday, May 31st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Might Amazon get into the cellular carrier game and thus make the Sprint T-Mobile merger more palatable? Uber's first quarterly report as a public company? What to expect from WWDC next week?

And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Remember what I was saying just yesterday about the DOJ wanting there to be four or major wireless carriers in the U.S. even after Sprint and T-Mobile merge. Well, I'm not saying this is directly related, but, quoting Reuters, Amazon is considering buying Boost, currently one of Sprint's prepaid brands, mainly because the deal would allow it to use the new T-Mobile's wireless network for at least six years, one of the sources said. New T-Mobile is the name used by T-Mobile and Sprint to refer to the new entity, that will result from their potential merger.

Amazon would also be interested in any wireless spectrum that could be divested, the source said. Amazon declined to comment. T-Mobile and Sprint did not immediately respond to requests for comment. It was not immediately clear why the largest U.S. online retailer would want the wireless network and spectrum, end quote. Yeah, I can see a ton of reasons why, because this makes a ton of sense. Amazon has wanted to get into the mobile game for a long time now. It would be very strategically useful for them to be a player there. I mean, how can you aspire to be the everything as a service company for people to manage their lives and their households and have no phone, no digital service, no nothing?

And of course, this has the added benefit of helping to solve the four major carrier problem. Clearly, Amazon would have the resources to compete with the others and the other. the field. Now, boost is tiny. The whole deal might only be $3 billion all in if Amazon were to buy it. And access to spectrum is not exactly an easy thing to get. And prepaid is a different business than postpaid. You don't really own your own destiny because you're still running things on other people's infrastructure, etc. As Trent Griffin tweeted, quote, an attractive wholesale transfer price for six years and a starter pack of radio frequencies might make a fourth mobile operator viable.

Or not, depends on the wholesale price terms and how much, what type of spectrum. Consistent with the Project Kuiper satellite constellation, though, end quote. And that last bit, I think is key. Project Kuiper, the purchase of ERO, now the potential purchase of an MVNO. Yeah, I can see a ton of angles here. Uber had its first earnings report as a public company. Uber reported Q1 revenue of $3.1 billion, which was up 20% year over year, gross bookings of $14.65 billion, up 34% year over year, but of course also a net loss of $1.01 billion, though that was in line with what analysts were expecting. And indeed, that revenue number, was at the top of the range that analysts expected, and Uber said its monthly active platform consumers grew 33% to 93 million users. And Uber was keen to talk up Uber Eats again. In the first quarter of 2019, Uber Eats saw substantial growth in adjusted net revenue

and gross bookings compared to the same quarter last year. Adjusted net revenue for the segment which measures revenue after payments to the drivers and restaurants grew 31% to 239 million. Gross bookings increased 108% to 3.07 billion. Uber CEO Darakasoshahi said on the call that Uber Eats has the potential to grow significantly and said that if the segment eventually overtakes ride sharing, quote, that would be an enormous win for us, end quote. He said Uber would consider consolidation with a competing food delivery company if it made sense, but isn't looking to that as a growth strategy at the moment, end quote. WWDC begins on Monday, so I went hunting for a wrap-up piece that could best summarize what we

might be able to expect next week, and I settled on Dieter Bone's piece in The Verge. In summary, according to Dieter, we're probably going to see a new Mac Pro and maybe that 6K Pro display that has also been rumored. Of course, Apple will outline all of the new features in iOS 13, Dieter says, expect them to really hammer on the dark mode because it saves battery life and just kind of looks cool. We might get a revamped home screen and of course there will be small updates to mail, messages, health, all the key Apple apps. But also, there's a lot of smoke around major changes to the Find My iPhone, Find My Friends app, quoting Dieter. I think the biggest changes in iOS 13 could come to the iPad. Alongside what we hope is a more capable files app,

there might also be a new way to multitask on the device. The current split screen slash slideover setup is useful, but limiting. Some kind of way to allow apps besides Safari to have multiple windows should be in the offing, though I wouldn't expect something like what you have on a regular mouse-enabled computer. Then again, there is a rumor that there will finally be some kind of mouse support, though it is likely to be buried in the accessibility settings. One thing that hasn't been rumored for the iPad is support for multiple accounts on a single device. I think it's unconscionable that Apple hasn't found a way to do this yet, outside the limited education market, since it limits the iPad's ability to be a truly shared family device.

Maybe the company will pleasantly surprise me, end quote. There will also be new watchOS updates and TVOS too, but then, And of course, it's all about Project Marzapan, the way you can take apps you've developed for, say, the iPad and just port them to the Mac. Apple is expected to roll this out for developers this year, quoting Dieter again. This year, Apple really needs to show that these apps can feel native to the Mac with better mouse support, keyboard support, and menu support, the whole suite of guidelines for what makes a good desktop app. We should also see support for multiple windows and note how that dovetails nicely with the rumors about multiple windows on the iPad, end quote. Dieter's overall summary, quoting again, I think the biggest thing to happen this year will be Apple laying out a vision for how its big screen computers will work.

Both macOS 10.15 and iOS 13 on the iPad could potentially bring major changes to how we think about and use the devices that use them. Despite Apple's protestations, to the contrary, there really has been a sense that the iPad Pro is encroaching on Mac territory, and the Mac OS platform needs to get a clearer future. Apple should provide more clarity on how it thinks about these trends this year. Although it has strenuously and repeatedly emphasized that MacOS and iOS will never merge, we do know that iPad apps are coming to the Mac in a more serious way, potentially becoming the de facto way most new Mac apps are made. At the same time, the iPad Pro needs to finally break out of its past and have a software platform that doesn't constantly feel like it has one hand tied behind its back when you're trying to do real work, end quote. Time once again for the weekend long read suggestions. Starting off with a podcast suggestion.

Haven't done one of those in a while. Product Breakfast Club is a fun podcast that looks behind the scenes at the nerdy world of product design, product innovation, product management, and product strategy, with some of the biggest names in the product world. Product designers from Basecamp, Adobe, Facebook have all come on to talk about their craft on the podcast to talk product. Have I said that word enough yet? The show is hosted by Jake Knapp, who is an ex-googler who invented the design sprint process while working on products like Gmail and hangouts, and Jonathan Courtney, who runs one of the world's best-known product design firms, AJ and Smart. It's a great show. It's a funny show. It doesn't take itself

too seriously. So if product is your bag, baby, search your podcast app for Product Breakfast Club. First for the long reads, a couple of tech history pieces. Fast Company has an oral history of the development of the one port to rule them all, USB. You think you're living a life of dongle hell now, sister, let me tell you about the old days, quote, the technology that we were replacing, like serial ports, parallel ports, the mouse and keyboard ports, they all required a fair amount of software support, and any time you installed a device, it required multiple reboots and sometimes even opening the box, says AJ Bot, who helped develop USB when at Intel. Our goal was that when you get a device, you plug it in, and it works, end quote.

And Bing is turning 10. So search engine land has a piece up that says Bing has actually been more disruptive to the search space than you'd think. Quote, after investing billions, Bing's market share is still small, but Microsoft has stayed committed to search, used it to enhance its other products, and has bigger plans ahead for its advertising business, end quote. The Atlantic asks, did the arrival of smartphones contribute to the, collapsing crime rates of the 1990s. A new research paper thinks so, pointing to smartphones to possibly explain 19 to 29% of the overall decline in homicides seen between 1990 and the year 2000. Why? Quote, the cell phones changed how drugs were dealt, Edland told me. In the 80s,

turf-based drug sales generated violence as gangs attacked and defended territory and also allowed those who controlled the block to keep profits high. The cell phone broke the link, the paper claims, between turf and selling drugs. Quote, it's not that people don't sell or do drugs anymore, Edland explained to me, but the relationship between that and violence is different, end quote. I was briefly a bartender in the early 2000s, and I can tell you I would have 100% used this. Patron scan is a device that can be placed at the entrance to a bar or not. nightclub that can verify if IDs are real or fake, and also keeps a tally of who you are,

what establishments you frequent and when, and also keeps a tally of bad customer behavior, and then shares all of that with other patron scan customers. So if I'm a bartender and you've done something so egregious that I kick you out on the curb and ban you from my establishment, I can share that with other bartenders who then might not allow you to pony up to their bar either. The company claims to have a networked list of 40,000 banned customers who may not even know they're on the naughty list until another bar refuses to serve them. Sounds useful, right? At least if you're a bartender. But like everything else, with technology, there are two edges to this particular tool. Quote, contrary to popular belief,

businesses don't have an unfettered right to refuse service to anyone, says Matt Kagle, a technology and Civil Liberties attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. When you create a confidential ban list, that's an invitation for businesses to pretextually exclude people because of who they are. In fact, the May 2018 Public Safety Report indicates that of the over 1,100 banned Sacramento patrons, more than 60% were banned for private reasons with no explanation of what rule they had violated or how they had transgressed, end quote. Good old tech. somehow you always get a little Orwellian, or maybe the right term is Kafkaesque, along with your utility, right? Next, on to the streaming wars beat.

AT&T bought Time Warner's assets so it could make its own play at an OTT streaming service. But in Fortune's profile of AT&T's prospects in this space, the company seems to be clearheaded about what it faces as it takes on Netflix and Comcast, and Disney and Apple all at the same time. This is 34-year-old John Stanky, who is tasked with making AT&T-Larner's streaming efforts work. You might remember him as the guy who raised eyebrows with his tough talk about how HBO needed to change how it did things. Quote, how many subscription streaming services can survive? I think it's someplace between 10 and 2, and it's probably on the lower side of that scale, Snanky says. good outcome for a company like ours is that there are four or five. I think we've got a position

where we can be one of those, end quote. Over at Vox, Maria Theresa Hart asks if using an iPhone without a case on it has become some sort of status symbol. The idea here is that if you don't put a case on your phone, you're basically telling the world, I don't care if it gets damaged. I'm well off enough that I'll just buy another one. No problem. Now, I don't know if I agree. If I agree with that. I've never used a case for my phone for the reasons cited actually at the beginning of this piece. The iPhone is a beautiful gadget. It costs a thousand bucks. So I'm going to spend all that money on this gorgeous piece of hardware and then throw a $30 piece of plastic around it. I cannot bring myself to do that. I'll take the risk instead.

However, this is a fair point. Quote, Quang presents another idea for where we're heading, given the wellness push to unplug, he says. Quote, the biggest luxury in the world right now is to be that person that doesn't need a phone, end quote. In this scenario, technology is something delegated to someone else. Super important people, when you go into their office, it's spotless. There's nothing on the desk except a sheet of paper and a pen, he says. The message here, I'm too important to use stuff. I just make decisions.

In other words, today's status symbol might be subtracting your phone's case, but tomorrow's might be subtracting the phone itself, end quote. And finally, Star Wars Galaxy's Edge, the immersive theme park experience, opens today at Disneyland in California and on August 29th at Disney World in Florida. Polygon has a really cool piece outlining what you can expect, if you want to get as close as humanly possible, to living the Star Wars experience for reals. Well, so far, the transition of podcast hosting providers has gone smoothly, I think. Of course, the really tricky thing, the actual feed redirect won't be happening until next week, but so far so good. The only thing that anyone has pinged me about so far was when someone tweeted me last

night that on Google Podcasts, there are apparently only three episodes visible in the feed for some reason. Any of you out there listening to the sound of my voice on Google Podcasts right now? Can you get in touch and let me know what you're seeing? Is it all systems go? Although, if there was a problem on Google Podcasts, maybe you can't hear the sound of my voice right now, so you wouldn't even know that I'm throwing up a bat signal.

Anyway, Google Podcast app users reach out if you can. There's only one weekend bonus episode this weekend, but it's a good one, a timely one, drops tomorrow, Saturday. Enjoy your weekend, everybody. Talk to you on Monday.