Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/25 – Amazon Announces The Luna Cloud Gaming Service

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, September 25th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from Amazon's hardware event.

Starting point is 00:00:40 New echo devices. Amazon is getting into cloud gaming with Luna. And Ring has a literal drone that will fly around inside your house for the purposes of Century Duty. Interesting acquisition from Apple continues to point to them doing something big in podcasting. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yesterday afternoon, Amazon held their annual hardware event. The only problem was they didn't stream any video so I couldn't watch along and summarize,

Starting point is 00:01:11 although that's not true. They apparently did invite some outlets to watch live, but TechMeme was not one of them. And then they also didn't give us any embargoed heads up as to what they were going to announce either, which sometimes companies will do so that we can prepare for what is being announced. So this is all by way of explaining why I'm reporting on the event today. There was simply no way to summarize what happened yesterday. I had to actually wait for people to write up what happened before I even knew what happened myself. The big news was that Amazon has gotten into the streaming gaming game. Say hello to Luna, a cloud gaming service going live in October for $5.99 a month with a special

Starting point is 00:01:50 game pad and support for Fire TV, PC, Mac, and iOS, and later for Android. Not sure why Android is coming later, but given recent news, how interesting is it that it's coming to iOS at all? I mean, haven't we been talking about how game streaming can't happen on iOS because of Apple's rules? Is this maybe another sweetheart deal where Amazon somehow gets around paying the 30% Apple Vig? Quoting in Gadget. With Luna, Amazon has discovered another way to circumvent Apple's App Store fees. Luna is a progressive web application or PWA, which means it's actually a browser-based program masquerading as a native iOS app. You'll download the PWA from the Luna website, and the resulting icon on your iPhone's home screen will function like a shortcut to Amazon's cloud gaming portal on the web.

Starting point is 00:02:40 As a PWA, Luna is not involved in the App Store at all. Luna will cost $5.99 a month, at least in early access. That price unlocks access to Luna Plus, the baseline channel that will feature a mix of games, including Resident Evil 7, Control, Tacoma, Res Infinite, Metro Exodus, the sexy, brutal, overcooked 2, and others. Not all of the titles listed up there will be available on day one, but they're all on the early access docket. Luna will have more channels with curated content, each available at an additional as-yet-unknown cost. The first confirmed channel comes from Ubisoft, which will include a broad selection of games from the publisher's catalog, plus same-day releases of upcoming titles, including Far Cry 6, Assassins Creed Vahala, and Immortals, Phoenix Rising.

Starting point is 00:03:27 Amazon is aiming to have about 100 games available during the early beta period spread between Luna Plus and the Ubisoft channel. So more than Stadia, less than GamePass, Luna Business Development Manager Lisa Schwenke said. Microsoft recently integrated XCloud into its GamePass ultimate subscription service and offers more than 150 streamable titles while Stadia has about 90, some of which are purchased individually. Amazon is targeting a resolution of 4K and 60 frames per second, though initially in early access, Luna will support up to 10. 1080p and 60 frames per second, according to Amazon, end quote. Jessica Condit at Engadget already got hands-on with the new service, and here's the deal, according to her, quote, how does it play? I spent 45 minutes with Luna on three devices, Fire TV, Mac, and iOS, while two developers looked on via an Amazon chime call and offered tips,

Starting point is 00:04:20 and in this brief testing period, Luna worked just fine. I started on Fire TV and was able to boot up the beefiest game in the store, control, in a matter of seconds. It started a bit through the opening scenes, but not enough to interrupt the cinematic flow. More often than not, gameplay was smooth, and none of the network interruptions that did appear were significant enough to break my experience. I felt like I could happily play the entire game on Fire TV, or Mac or iOS. One of Luna's standout features is its ability to seamlessly transition a game session among screens, and this bit of cloud tech functionality function perfectly. I simply stopped playing control, on Fire TV and opened a link to the game on Luna on my MacBook Pro, and it loaded precisely

Starting point is 00:05:00 where I left off, freeing up the television. The same was true for iOS. I tapped the PWA icon to open Luna and picked up my in-progress game with minimal fuss. This feature will be particularly handy considering Luna supports two simultaneous players per account, so in busy households some screen swapping will certainly be in order. All of this was made easier by Amazon's Luna Controller, which will launch in early access for $49.99. It's a basic game pad with faint braille-like texturing on the grips, built-in Alexa functionality, and low-latency software called Cloud Direct. It's similar to Google's Stadia controller technology, as explained by Amazon. The Luna controller communicates directly with the game in the cloud rather than using a screen as a waystation like Bluetooth game pads do.

Starting point is 00:05:44 This minimizes latency by 20 to 30 milliseconds, end quote. Allow me to summarize some of the other slew of 20-odd hardware announcements that were made yesterday, and then we'll come back to something else that I think was the big headline. Amazon announced redesigned spherical echo devices, including a $99 echo, a $60 echo dot with clock, and a $50 echo dot with onboard speech analysis, quoting CNBC. The new designs will be featured across four different echo speaker models. The regular echo, the cheaper and smaller echo dot, the echo dot with a bilked-in clock, and the Echo Kids Edition, which has designs like cute animal characters.

Starting point is 00:06:28 regular echo will cost $99,000, the echo dot will cost $49,000, and the echo dot with the clock will cost $59. Amazon also said the new echo speakers will have a special processor called the AZ1 neural edge processor that can help run applications and power speech recognition on the device. Amazon said this will make the speakers respond faster and more accurately to your voice, end quote. Yes, the AZ1 neural edge processor is a silicon module Amazon has developed with media tech to allow for on-device neuro speech recognition in its new echo devices. Everyone is doing their own custom silicon these days, so why should Amazon be left out? With this, Amazon says Alexa will start asking users questions to improve its conversation,

Starting point is 00:07:16 change intonation, depending on context, detect babies crying, and a whole lot more. There's also a new echo with a screen, the $250 Echo Show 10, which has a motorized base that can move the screen around, a 13 megapixel camera that keeps the user in shot, and quoting the verge. Instead of being fixed in one position, as with every prior Echo Show model, the new Echo Show 10's display is perched on a motorized base that swivels around automatically whenever you interact with the device. By using a blend of computer vision technology and echo location, the Echo Show 10 can determine where you are in the room and swivel itself around to face you so you can always get a good view of the screen.

Starting point is 00:07:58 In addition, the Echo Show 10 utilizes its motorized base and its digital panning and zooming on a new 13 megapixel camera to keep you in frame when on video calls. It's similar to how Facebook's portal auto frames your face, but Amazon's device has the added ability to pan the screen itself and doesn't have to rely on digital zoom and panning, end quote. Ring also had a bunch of new devices announced,

Starting point is 00:08:22 like a line of security cameras for cars, saying it is working with Tesla and others to integrate existing cameras into the Ring platform. Ring also announced end-to-end encryption for video feeds by the end of the year, and also announced that they will finally let Ring owners disable that controversial neighbors feature that has gotten so much negative press. But from one controversy potentially to another, Ring also announced the Always Home Cam, but calling it a camera is bearing the lead because it is actually an autonomous drone, that can fly around inside your house, keeping track of things sort of like a sentinel wood.

Starting point is 00:09:06 It's expected to cost $250 and ship sometime next year. I repeat, your own drone security guard flying around inside your house when you're not there. Or I guess when you are there, quoting the verge. The always home cam is fully autonomous, but owners can tell it what path it can take and where it can go. When you first get the device, you build a map of your home for it to follow, which allows you to ask it for specific viewpoints such as the kitchen or bedroom. The drone can be commanded to fly on demand or program to fly when a disturbance is detected by a linked ring alarm system. The charging dock blocks the camera's view and the camera only records when it is in flight. Ring says the drone

Starting point is 00:09:45 makes an audible noise when it's flying so it's obvious when footage is being recorded. Ring says the camera can be used for simple things like checking if a stove was left on or a window left open or if a door is locked when you're away from the home. It features obstacle avoidance to allow it to avoid objects in its path and its shrouded propellers prevent damage to property or hurting a pet or person that might collide with the drone, end quote. Or you could potentially use this thing to spy on your spouse. It could be used to map the inside of your home and then, I don't know, somewhere down the road, Amazon would know the name brands of the boxes inside your pantry, the better to serve you ads with or something. Or since it's a ring, maybe the video

Starting point is 00:10:29 feed could be given to law enforcement, allowing them real-time information about your location and activities inside your home. Quoting Wired. Amazon originally said the device would be included in the hundreds of video sharing partnerships Amazon has with law enforcement agencies across the U.S. The company later sent a correction and said the drone would be ineligible for this video request feature. These partnerships have been criticized by civil liberties groups and lawmakers for potentially contributing to, quote, a surveillance network that places dangerous burdens on people of color and feeds racial anxieties in local communities, as Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote in a letter to Amazon chief executive Jeff Bezos last fall. Ring has maintained that sharing

Starting point is 00:11:12 videos with the police is always the customer's choice, but the concern has been whether they've been nudged into doing so, end quote. Yeah, it doesn't come off well to me that Amazon would announce a product like this and not have thought all the way through whether or not. they will share the video from inside your home with law enforcement. Also, you might think I can just turn it on and off, and it can't be used against me, but until we see the terms of use, who's to say that this thing won't already have mapped the indoor space of your house, and then can share that with whomever it wants? And also, again, it could be used to sell you stuff since it knows, I'm going to stress this one more time, the inside of your house.

Starting point is 00:11:54 If you know the history of advertising, you'll know that most people assumed early on that advertising was merely an annoyance out in the real world. You went outside, you saw billboards and posters, and you heard announcements, and it was annoying, but you could go home and get a break from that. Radio and television were the first things to penetrate the home with advertising, but again, they were self-contained, they were boxes that you turned on and off. Social media and search advertising got inside our brains, and obviously, That's way more invasive in a way, but we need to be clear. With this, and I guess ever since we've been putting Alexa's inside our house, the whole notion

Starting point is 00:12:34 of every person's house being their castle, the whole notion of the sovereignty of your own hearth, things that have been enshrined in Western law and mental concepts going back to the Magna Carta and beyond, with things like a drone that maps the inside of your house, that concept of your home being private, is probably coming to an end, right? Apple has confirmed that it has acquired cross-platform podcast app, Scout FM, which created podcast stations for users based on listening history. Scout FM has now shut down, quoting Mark German in Bloomberg. While podcast apps, including Apple, traditionally work by letting users pick an individual podcast

Starting point is 00:13:19 to listen to, Scout FM created podcast stations on various topics. For example, if a person is interested in sports, the app would create a station that mixed together a curated selection of sports podcasts. The app determined a person's interest based on listening history, inputs of their preferences and suggestions from artificial intelligence-based software, end quote. So it sounds like they want to integrate some sort of a recommendation engine along the lines of what Spotify has been doing as it goes into podcasts. I will also note that Apple recently hired Jake Shapiro, the founder of PRX, way back in the day, and also the founder recently of the Pod Fund, which invests in individual podcasts and podcast creators. Full disclosure,

Starting point is 00:14:00 we had many discussions with Podfund when we were launching Right Home Media. So I can tell you firsthand, if Jake Shapiro left Podfund, left that project, it would only be because Apple is planning something super interesting in podcasts soon. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, it got all lost in the scrum of other news, but remember, Nvidia bought arm. And that's a pretty big deal. So two pieces about that. First, let me introduce you to Huang's Law. Some people see it as the new Moore's Law, and it might explain why Nvidia is doing what it's doing, quoting Chris Mims in the Wall Street Journal, who I believe has actually coined the term. Quote, as chipmakers have reached the limits of atomic scale circuitry and the physics of electrons,

Starting point is 00:14:51 Moore's Law has slowed, and some say it's over. But a different law, potentially no less consequential for computing's next half century has arisen. I call it Wang's Law, after Nvidia chief executive and co-founder Jensen Wang. It describes how the silicon chips that power artificial intelligence more than double in performance every two years. While the increase can be attributed to both hardware and software, its steady progress makes it a unique enabler of everything from autonomous cars, trucks, and ships to the face, voice, and object recognition in our personal gadgets. Between November 2012 and May, performance of Nvidia's chips increased 317 times for an important class of AI calculations, says Bill Daly, chief scientist and senior vice president of research

Starting point is 00:15:35 at Nvidia. On average, in other words, the performance of these chips more than doubled every year, a rate of progress that makes Moore's law pale in comparison, end quote. And then also from the journal, a portrait of Jensen Huang and his founding and stewardship of Nvidia as the company has just exploded in all sorts of ways. Quote, NVIDIA's market value has soared to $319.8 billion, surpassing Intel's valuation of $214.5 billion, even though NVIDIA had $10.92 billion in annual sales in its latest fiscal year,

Starting point is 00:16:11 compared with $71.97 billion for Intel. Invidia's bet on some of the hottest fields in tech, video gaming, and artificial intelligence have fueled investor enthusiasm, while Intel has stumbled with some of its most advanced chips. It's all a long way from 1993 when Mr. Huang dreamed up Nvidia on his 30th birthday at a Denny's in San Jose, California, with two like-minded engineers. They bet on a future where consumers demanded better computer graphics, which would require specialized high-performance hardware that wasn't available at the time, end quote. Next, each of the big tech platforms is being attacked on anti-competitive grounds in a different

Starting point is 00:16:50 way. But if Google is going to be the first to get whacked, and maybe as soon as next week, it's worth looking at one of the very specific things that Google is being scrutinized for. Mainly, it's 2007 acquisition of double-click, which is the sort of deal that antitrust experts increasingly believe should not have been allowed to happen. The New York Times looks at the history of that deal and questions if it might be one of the first things to be unwound, or at least to be proposed to be unwound. Quote, the deal turned out to be be a total game changer, a crucial piece in the larger jigsaw puzzle Google put together, said Tim Armstrong, a former Google executive who championed the acquisition. It has also turned out to

Starting point is 00:17:30 be a classic example of why a growing number of antitrust experts say lawmakers need to broadly rethink how mergers are regulated when the buyer is a tech company with strong and growing market power, end quote. Next, the Atlantic warns that disinformation campaigns used to require a lot of human effort, so they weren't that easy to pull off without a lot of resources, but soon the supply of disinformation could essentially be infinite. And guess who might get the blame for that? Quote, the ideal scenario for the modern propagandist, of course, is to have convincing personas produce original content. Generative text is the next frontier, and released in a beta version in June by the artificial intelligence research lab OpenAI, a tool called GPT3 generates

Starting point is 00:18:17 long-form articles as effortlessly as it composes tweets, and its output is often difficult to distinguish from the work of human beings. In fact, it wrote parts of this article. Tools like this won't just supercharged global propaganda operations, they will force internet platforms and average users alike to find new ways of deciding what and whom to trust, end quote. So another look at GPT3, this time with the potential downsides. And finally this week, a bit of a weekend project come Long Read, if you will. Have you noticed the explosion of people customizing their home screens with widgets now that we have iOS 14? You can really go wild with it.

Starting point is 00:18:56 Apps like Widget Smith, color widgets, and photo widget have rocketed to the top of the app store. AppTopia and Censor Tower suggests that Pinterest recently broke its daily download record, as users sought inspiration for iOS homescreen customization ideas. And so read this piece from CNBC about the phenomenon. on unquote. iPhone users like Mogus have customized widgets primarily for visual purposes, using apps like Widget Smith and Photo Widgets to display photos or inspirational text, color coordinate parts of the home screen, and make their home screen's aesthetic AF. And customization fanatics are using shortcuts to change app icons.

Starting point is 00:19:35 Although some apps do allow the user to change their icon. On MLB at bat, you can change the icon to your favorite team, for example. The shortcuts app enables users to change any icon to whatever they like. Basically, users create a shortcut that does one thing. Open up an app like Spotify, messages or Netflix. Then they can change the icon and name for that shortcut to whatever they like. Customizers are using this feature to replace all the icons on their home screen, end quote. So read that and then get to work this weekend,

Starting point is 00:20:05 customizing your own iPhone to make it aesthetic AF. I know I will be. I just downloaded the starter kit from Costomico, which is what everyone is using for Customs. icons. You can find that at Kostomico.com, C-U-S-T-O-M-I-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-O-C-E-E-N-E-E-O-C-E-E-E-L-E-E-C-E-L-E-E-L-E-E-RW-E-E-E-RW-E-E-E-E-RwwITs, beat me to explaining something, so I'm going to just let them explain it to you. You'll see. It's pretty amazing. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/25 – Amazon Announces The Luna Cloud Gaming Service

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