Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/12 - Amazon Developing A High-End Echo Speaker

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

Amazon is developing a high-end Echo speaker, the PC market’s not dead yet, Postmates is having second thoughts about going public and might shop itself around instead, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.co Lightstream.com/ride Links: Amazon Plans High-End Echo, Ramps Up Work on Alexa Home Robot (Bloomberg) Gartner: PC shipments grew 1.5% in Q2 2019 (VentureBeat) Ford-VW alliance expands to include autonomous and electric vehicles (The Verge) Postmates has explored a sale to Uber or DoorDash instead of going public (Recode) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The man who’s going to save your neighborhood grocery store (The New Food Economy) Disney Won. Now What? (BuzzFeed News) You’re Hired. Now Wear This Headset to Learn the Job. (NYTimes) New Coke Didn’t Fail. It Was Murdered. (Mother Jones) ROAD-TRIPPING WITH THE AMAZON NOMADS (The Verge) 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 Right Home for Friday, July 12th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon is developing a high-end echo speaker. The PC market's not dead yet. Postmates is having second thoughts about going public and might shop itself around instead. And of course, the weekend

long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Mark German scoop Friday, but not on the Apple front. German's little birdies are telling him that Amazon is developing a higher-end echo speaker with improved audio quality to make it more of a direct competitor to the likes of Sonos, HomePod, at all. Oh, and Amazon is apparently ramping up work on that home robot that we've been hearing rumors about. The company plans to release the new Echo by next year, according to people familiar with the product. Prototypes of the cylindrical speaker are wider than the current echo to squeeze in additional components including at least four tweeters, said the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.

The robot, previously reported by Bloomberg, has wheels and can be controlled by Alexa Voice commands, the people said. Both devices are being developed by Amazon Lab 126, a research and development arm based in Sunnyvale, California. Amazon has previously attempted to improve the Echoes sound with tweaks and offered a standalone subwilfer and device that links the speakers to a stereo. Amazon is also planning a high-fidelity version of its music service, according to music business worldwide, that should mesh better with the new Echo, end quote. As for the robot, codenamed Vesta. German says that Amazon originally planned to unveil it earlier this year, but production issues have held that back a bit. Still no word on what function the robot would actually have in the home, but apparently engineers are being pulled off of other Amazon projects to work on the Vesta. so maybe we'll be finding out soonish rather than laterish.

I'm finding it weird how the whole notion of the post-PC dream has quietly been dying a bit lately. It's not just that tablets are morphing increasingly into essentially laptops. It's not just that tablet shipments continue to decline year over year. It's also the notion that we'd be leaving PCs behind for thin, portable black slates, it just hasn't borne out in reality, right? I mean, look, the majority of computing is being done now on smartphones. I acknowledge that, and tablets are never going to go away.

I'm not saying that either. They still have their uses and specific use cases. It's just that those use cases look increasingly niche and not the future, and it was very much supposed to be the other way around. More proof, according to IDC and Q2 Global PC shipments again, grew 4.7% to 64.9 million units. Gartner saw shipments of 63 million units, so tracking 1.5% growth. So the death of the PC was greatly exaggerated, right? Well, it's still a little complicated, quoting Venture Beat. After six years of quarterly PC shipment declines,

2018 was mixed with negative, flat, and positive quarters. 2019 is shipping up similarly. Q1 was negative and Q2 is positive, just like in 2018. Gartner and IDC analysts pointed to the Windows 10 refresh in the business market as contributing to the past quarter's gain. But IDC also warned it might not last. Gartner noted that while the U.S.-China trade war had not affected the PC market, the next phase could since most laptops and tablets are currently manufactured in China, end quote. I've been wanting to do a weekend bonus episode for a while now looking at the AV and EV industry from the perspective of the incumbents from the perspective of Detroit.

If you know anyone who would be good to talk to about this, have them get in touch because stories like these are why I'm curious. Ford and Volkswagen are expanding their recent alliance to include autonomous vehicle development. VW will be investing $2.6 billion into Argo AI, the AV-Start. startup backed by Ford. Quote, VW will invest one billion in cash as well as $1.6 billion in assets that include the auto giant's Munich-based autonomous intelligent driving team, which will be absorbed by Argo. After the deal goes through, Argo's post-money valuation will be over $7 billion. In January, the two auto industry powerhouses announced they would join forces to build pickup trucks and commercial vehicles, but today's announcement is a much riskier step. It broadens

that partnership to include two technologies, autonomy and electrification, that are seen as having the potential to transform the way people get around, but also has proven to be incredibly expensive and difficult to get right. The deal also gives Argo a global reach. The company, which was founded by former Uber engineers with ties to Carnegie Mellon University's famed robotics lab, has been testing its cars with Ford's backing in Pittsburgh, Detroit, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Now it can also deploy its vehicles on European roads under VW's guidance, end quote. Recode is reporting that Postmates has held secret talks with rivals about possibly being acquired by them, which is odd because I thought Postmates was suddenly gaining market share in the delivery market space.

And also, hadn't it said it was going to do an IPO soon? Well, that could still happen too, quoting Recode, staring at a public market that has been unkind toward consumer IPOs like Lyft and Uber. Postmates in recent months has had persistent talks with many of the likeliest acquirers in the space, including DoorDash, Walmart, and Uber, which operates Uber Eats, according to multiple sources. The clearest sign that Postmates, which was expected to be the next hot consumer industry IPO, has seriously considered a sale. It has been working with Catalyst Partners, the Boutique Investment Bank,

famous for selling tech companies, people familiar with the matter told recode. Postmates is trying to keep its options open. It has also been considering following through with its much-delayed IPO or raising a private round of financing that could push its IPO even further out, the sources say. All this back and forth with potential acquirers comes amid signs that Postmates could have some trouble on Wall Street. Some analysts who met with Postmates in recent months told others in the industry that they had concerns over the company's financial footing, according to people familiar with the matter. Those concerns, however, were not shared with Postmates, its board, or its bankers directly, and so the sources say it did not affect Postmates IPO timing, end quote.

Time, as always, for the weekend Long Reads suggestions. First off today, I feel like I've made my peace with the retail apocalypse. Blockbuster videos are gone. Bookstores are imperiled. Malls are quaint anachronisms at this point. But I figured food stores, grocery stores, they've would always be with us, right? Well, now I'm not so sure after reading this great piece from the new food economy. The grocery store, as we know it, is in trouble. And yes, part of the problem is that Amazon has come for groceries at long last, but also things like Blue Apron and pre-packaged meals, and Americans eating out more than eating in, and consumer brands not needing stores anymore, consumer brands doing it for themselves by going direct to consumer. And yes, even the shopping habits

of millennials are causing a problem. It's all complicated, but it's also fascinating. Twenty years from now, can we expect there to be a grocery store in every neighborhood like we do nowadays? Maybe not. By 2025, the thinking goes, most Americans will rarely enter a grocery store. That's according to a new report called Surviving the Brave New World of Food Retailing, published by the Coca-Cola Retailing Research Council, a think tank sponsored by the soft drink giant to help retailers prepare for major changes. The report describes a retail marketplace in the throes of massive change where supermarkets, as we know them, are functionally obsolete. Disposables and non-perishables from paper towels to laundry detergent and peanut butter will replenish themselves automatically thanks to smart

home sensors that reorder when supplies are low. Online recipes from publishers like Epicurious will sync directly to digital shopping carts operated by e-tailers like Amazon. Impulse buys and last minute errands will be fulfilled via Instacard and whist over in self-driving Uber's. In other words, food, for the most part, will be controlled by a small handful of powerful tech companies. The Coca-Cola report written in consultation with a handful of influential grocery executives acknowledges that the challenges are dire. To remain relevant, it concludes, supermarkets will need to become more like tech platforms, develop a robust set of e-commerce capabilities, take a mobile-first approach, and leverage enhanced digital assets. They'll

need infrastructure for click and collect purchasing, allowing consumers to order online and pick up in a jiffy. They'll want to establish a social media presence as well as a chatbot strategy. In short, they'll need to become Amazon, and they'll need to do it all while competing with Walmart on convenience and price, end quote. This is only tech adjacent, but as we continue to monitor the streaming wars, it's become clear that the one traditional media company that seems to be best positioned to come out of the war, a winner is Disney. In fact, Disney is quietly eating all of Hollywood, especially at the box office. BuzzFeed News has a deep dive look into how Disney has maneuvered into this position of relative dominance. TLDR, Bob Eiger is a very, very good CEO, very skilled at making acquisitions. Quote, just seven years ago, Disney was at the bottom of a five-year box office slump.

Other than the reliable hits provided by Pixar and Disney's twin animation studios, the company had struggled to find a feature film strategy that worked at all. Instead, it had released a misbegotten Main Street parade of high-profile, disappointments and outright bombs, including Race to Witch Mountain, surrogates, Prince of Persia, the Sands of Time, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Tron Legacy, I Am Number Four, Mars Needs Moms, Fright Night, Real Steel, and John Carter. Then on a clear Los Angeles Day in April seven years ago, amid a blaze of flashbulbs and a small army of movie stars, The Avengers premiered.

The Cinematic Universe establishing Mega Blockbuster was the first Marvel Studios film released by Disney after the company bought Marvel Entertainment for $4.24 billion in 2009. The acquisition has so far netted Disney more than $18.2 billion in global box office grosses alone, a historic financial windfall that would buoy any studio out of the box office doldrums. But Marvel was only one facet of a larger strategy that Disney, spearheaded by CEO Robert Eiger, to rescue its box office future by buying up a confederation of film divisions with the same degree of widespread brand recognition already enjoyed by the company at large. In essence, where the rest of the film industry built a business model dependent on individual

movie franchises, Disney has built its film business by making its franchises into individual mini studios, end quote. One of my new mini-obsessions is my bullishness on augmented reality in the workplace. As I've said, any job that has a hard hat will soon have a smart visor on that hard hat. The New York Times looks at this from a different angle. It's not just on-the-job augmentation. This sort of technology can streamline on-the-job training as well. When Toby Bosca Jr. started assembling cabs for Kenworth semi-trucks last year,

he learned the ropes by observing long-time workers at the factory. But it wasn't exactly engaging and he didn't get much practice doing the job himself. It's them doing the job and you just have to watch, said Mr. Busca, 21, who works at Kenworth's plant in Chilicote. I'm not really good at sitting there watching, he says. But then his managers had him train in a new way with a high-tech headset. They gave him a Microsoft HoloLens, a device that blends digital imagery, with the real world. When he wore the headset, it overlayed digital arrows and diagrams over the parts he was looking at, helping to guide his work. With the hollow lens, it's just you and the

directions, Mr. Bosca said. He said he had picked up his first new task in about 20 minutes, end quote. And you might have seen that Coca-Cola produced 50,000 cans of new Coke, that 1980s phenomenon that has gone down in history as the greatest product failure of all time. It was all part of a Stranger Things promo tie-in. Mother Jones has a reassessment up about the whole New Coke saga, though, and it turns out the story you know of New Coke is a lie. New Coke was killed by a weird sort of conservative, in the small C sense of the word, not the political sense of the word, rebellion. Quote, far from the dud it's been made out to be, New Coke was actually delicious, or at least most people who tried it thought so. Some of its harshest critics

couldn't even taste the difference. It was done in by a complicated web of interests, a mixture of cranks and opportunists, a sugar-starved mob of pitchfork clutching Andy Rooney's, powered by the thrill of rebellion and an aggrieved sense of dispossession. At its most fundamental level, the backlash wasn't about New Coke at all. It was a revolt against the idea of change. That story should sound familiar. We're still living it. end quote. And finally today, I think I've spoken about this before in various capacities, but the Verge has another look at the people who travel around the country scooping up clearance items from big box retailers that they can then sell profitably online. Quote, Chris Anderson moves

through the target clearance racks with cool efficiency, surveying the towers of Star Wars Lego sets and Incredibles action figures sensing as if by intuition what would be profitable to sell on Amazon. Discontinued nail polish can be astonishingly lucrative, but not these colors. A dinosaur riding some sort of motorcycle? No way. But these Jurassic Park Jeeps look promising, and an Amazon app on his phone confirms that each could net a $6 profit after fees and shipping. He piles all 20 into his cart. Anderson is an Amazon nomad. Part of a small group of merchants who travel the backroads of America searching clearance aisles and dyeing chains for goods to sell on Amazon.

Some live out of RVs and vans, moving from town to town, only stopping long enough to pick the stores clean and ship their wares to Amazon's fulfillment centers, end quote. So free startup idea, why has there been no service or company that has sprung up to tell the targets of the world that the remainder items in their clearance bin can fetch a hefty price online? Like, that data is available, right? On second thought, though, never mind. Don't kill these folks' livelihood. They're doing the Lord of Capitalism's Wend. work. Their labor in the cracks of the marketplace are ironing out the market's inefficiencies, and God bless them for it. That's all for this week. Two weekend bonus episodes for you to chew on

this weekend. So enjoy those, and I don't know, that's it. Weekend, summer, go out there, enjoy it. Talk to you on Monday.