Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/15 - Apples Says: Vapers, No Vaping!

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

Apple takes down vaping apps from the App Store, why is Google going ahead with the Stadia launch this month? Amazon protests the JEDI decision, the TikTok juggernaut rolls on—especially in India—and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: PixelUnion.net Vistaprint.com promo code Ride50 Links: Exclusive: Apple to remove vaping apps from store (Axios) November 2019 Xbox One Update Brings Xbox Action for the Google Assistant, Gamertag Updates, Text Filters and More (XBox Wire) Microsoft to launch xCloud in 2020, with PS4 controllers and PC streaming on the way (The Verge) Google demos Stadia UI and lists several missing launch features (Engadget) Amazon cites ‘unmistakable bias’ in Microsoft’s military cloud contract win (CNBC) TikTok surpasses 1.5 billion downloads — with almost 500M in India (TNW) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: WeFail: How the doomed Masa Son-Adam Neumann relationship set WeWork on the road to disaster (Fast Company) How VCs Make Money (VCStarterKit) Superhero or Supervillain? Technology’s Role Changes Comic Books (NYTimes) AN ORAL HISTORY OF LIMEWIRE: THE LITTLE APP THAT CHANGED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY FOREVER (MelMagazine) As L.A. ports automate, some workers are cheering on the robots (LATimes) Managing Your Friendships, With Software (The Atlantic) From Instagram to Candy Crush: These are the most important apps of the decade (CNET) 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, November 15th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple takes down vaping apps from the App Store.

Why is Google going ahead with the stadia launch this month? Amazon protests the Jedi decision. The TikTok juggernaut rolls on, especially in India. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple is removing all 181 vaping-related apps from its app store, after experts have attributed a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarettes. Now, when I saw this headline, my first thought was, what do vaping-related apps

do exactly? Well, here's Axios, quote, the company has never allowed the sale of vape cartridges directly from apps, but there were apps that let people control the temperature and lighting of their vape pens, and others provided vaping-related news, social networks, and games. Apple has been headed in this direction since June when it stopped accepting new apps that promote vaping. Those who already have a vaping-related app on their iPhone will be able to continue using the app and install it on new devices, end quote. And in a statement to Axios, Apple said, quote, we take great care to curate the app store as a trusted place for customers, particularly youth to download apps. We're constantly evaluating apps and consulting the latest evidence to

determine risks to users' health and well-being. Recently, experts ranging from the CDC to the American Heart Association have attributed a variety of lung injuries and fatalities to e-cigarette and vaping products, going so far as to call the spread of these devices a public health crisis and a youth epidemic. We agree, and we've updated our App Store review guidelines to reflect that apps encouraging or facilitating the use of these products are not permissive. As of today, these apps are no longer available to download, end quote. A bunch of gaming news today, so I'm going to throw it all together in a single potpourri segment. First, Microsoft has rolled out its November 2019 Xbox update, which includes support for Google Assistant, at least in English.

With the launch of the Xbox action for the Google Assistant, you can now interact with your Xbox One in even more ways using just your voice. including the ability to turn your console on and off, launch games and apps, play and pause videos, and more from any Google Assistant and home-enabled smart speakers or devices as well as the Google Assistant apps on iOS and Android, end quote. So Google Assistant joins the Xbox skill for Alexa as a way to control your Xbox with your voice. Also, Microsoft confirmed rumored plans to launch its X-Cloud game streaming service

in the U.S. in 2020, integrating Project XCloud with Xbox GamePaths, next year and maybe bringing it to PC gaming sooner rather than later. Quoting the Verge, while Microsoft is committing to some type of launch next year, it's not ready to talk about price or exact launch dates yet. But the company is also planning to bring XCloud to Windows 10 PCs, and it sounds like PC games could be streamed here in the future.

Microsoft is only saying next year for Windows 10 support, but it's more likely we'll see it appear in the next few months than towards the end of 2020. I asked Kareem Chaudhry, the head of cloud gaming at Microsoft, about how the company will handle keyboard and mouse support for Xbox games when they're streamed via XCloud to a PC. Not many Xbox games support keyboard and mouse right now, and there's a challenge getting developers involved. Quote, what you're saying is absolutely true for Xbox game content right now, but there will be more types of content, says Chaudry. That sure sounds like Microsoft is planning to stream PC games through XCloud in the future, but Chowdry is only hinting at this future right now. Now, Microsoft isn't committing to exactly where XCloud will go from here, end quote. And finally, in a Reddit AMA, Google demoed its forthcoming Stadia gaming streaming service,

which is set to launch on November 19th, but also gave confirmation to what a lot of people had been talking about, that the service will launch without an absolute slew of promised features, quoting and gadget. So many key features will be missing when Stadia first arrives that you have to wonder why Google didn't push the launch date back a week or two. For instance, your existing Chromecast Ultra will be useless when the first Founders editions ship. Instead, only the Chromecast Ultras that ship with the controllers will have the required

firmware to play the games. Quote, we will be updating the existing CC Ultras over the air soon after launch, a Google spokesperson said. Also, MIA will be Stadia Connect, state share, and crowdplay, features that let players join other games and place content into games. The first StreamConnect game won't come until the end of the year, and state share and crowdplay games, quote, will be released next year, the spokesperson said, end quote. I've been reading some things recently where people were basically saying that Google's tradition of launching things gradually, step by step, the slow beta rollout that they

have done, you know, basically the whole time they've been around, might really come to bite them in the But with Stadia, why not just wait until you've got the full package ready to really wow people with? Remember how Amazon lost that $10 billion Jedi cloud computing defense contract to Microsoft? Well, Amazon is not taking that lying down, having just filed a protest of the Pentagon's decision, claiming unmistakable bias and errors in the process. Quote, numerous aspects of the Jedi evaluation process contain clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable. bias, and it's important that these matters be examined and rectified, Amazon told CNBC in an email. A Pentagon official said it would not speculate on potential litigation. Microsoft didn't immediately

respond to request for comment. The Pentagon announced in August that Defense Secretary Mark Esper would review the deal after President Trump said he had received complaints from companies about the process. Trump said in July that companies conveyed that the specifications of the contract favored Amazon, according to Bloomberg. end quote. Quick check in with the TikTok juggernaut. The Chinese social app has surpassed 1.5 billion downloads with almost 500 million downloads in India alone. Quote, Censor Tower says the app has been downloaded 614 million times this year, 6% more than last year's downloads at the same point.

The research firm also noted the video making app hit the mark of 655 million unique downloads last year. The only apps downloaded more than TikTok, or WhatsApp, at 707.7.4 million, and Messenger, 636.2 million. The company has been making several changes worldwide. It's testing a social commerce feature by allowing users to add URLs in their bios. Last month, TikTok also launched an e-learning program called EduTalk in India and banned political ads in the EU and the U.S., end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. I know I swore to lay off the WeWorks SoftBank fallout stories for a while, but one more. Check out Fast Company's Long Read as the first suggestion in the show notes because it focuses on the relationship between Masa San and Adam Newman specifically, psychologically almost, and the whole whirlwind that both men seemingly got caught up in.

quote, there in the back seat, Son took out an iPad and wrote out the terms for a $4.4 billion investment in the company. He drew two horizontal lines at the bottom, signed his name across one, and then handed the iPad to the then 37-year-old Newman to scribble his name on the other. Newman would keep a photo of the agreement on his phone. When Masa chose to invest in me for the first time, he only met me for 28 minutes, okay? Newman told me in January. And later in the piece, quote, had long kept a scrap of paper on which he and co-founder Miguel McKelvey had sketched out their early ideas for how the company could grow into residential real estate. We live. Banking,

we bank and beyond. We neighborhoods and we cities. Sond, meanwhile, helped Newman and his team envisioned themselves as the next Amazon, which started out peddling books and then expanded to selling everything else. By positioning we work as akin to the trillion-dollar juggernaut, Newman and Sond were creating a narrative that could, in theory. justify WeWorks skyrocketing valuation. Masa is a Jedi, Newman told me in January, and as a Jedi, he has lots of superpowers, end quote. Okay, I know that some of you listening will know all about this sort of thing, but for those

of you that don't, a newsletter called VC starter kit has a substack post that is the best short summation of the economics of being a venture capitalist of how an actual individual V-C makes his or her money that I've read in a long time. TLDR, carry is a hell of a drug, but also, quote, the catch that many people outside of venture miss is that the management fee is charged every year of the fund's life, which is usually around 10 years long. That means that a standard fund will charge 20% of the fund's total raised capital in guaranteed fees and can only use the remaining 80% to actually invest in companies. A good rule of thumb is that for every dollar in LP provides,

only about 80 to 85 cents will be invested. Every time you hear about a new fund that raises a billion dollars, keep in mind that around $200 million will go to the firm for, quote, operational expenses and compensation. Most funds are only actively making new investments for two to three years, and for the rest of the time, the fund is in maintenance mode. Do you need $200 million to operate a 20-person firm for four years and to keep the lights on to make follow-on investments for the next six years?

Not really, end quote. The New York Times has a look at how technology's role in producing comic books has evolved over the years. The relationship between a penciler who lays out the page and draws the initial images and an inker who gives proper weight to each line has also changed. It, quote, used to be a good inker was the best way to elevate a penciler's work. Nowadays, it's a good colorist, says Carl Kessel, an anchor whose work was first published in 1984. Quote, technology has reversed the order of artistic importance in comics from penciler, inker, inker, to penciler colorist anchor.

As an inker, I hate to say that, he said, but it's true. Mr. Kessel inks on paper, but he believes the biggest digital innovation is the computer's undo function. Quote, don't like that line, click, gone, end quote. Next, Napster may have gotten all the headlines, but Mel Magazine has the oral history of LimeWire, the file sharing service that really broke the back of the music industry. Soon, over 50 million users were downloading their favorite albums on a daily basis, ripping them onto a CD or transferring them over to their newly received iPod,

which could hold up to 40,000 songs. and you weren't about to buy 40,000 tracks of music. In 2005, LimeWire had as many users as iTunes did, 1.7 million, all of them illegally downloading music, which resulted in the music industry losing billions of dollars, end quote. And this story in the L.A. Times raises an interesting point. As automation comes for jobs, there are some jobs that will actually be winners, as in the case of the ports of the city of Los Angeles,

where some port workers are actually cheering on the robots. This sort of winners and losers scenario is probably going to be very common going forward. Quote, day after day, Walter Diaz, an immigrant truck driver from El Salvador, steers his 18-wheeler toward the giant port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Will it take him half an hour to pick up his cargo? Or will it be as long as seven hours? He never knows. Diaz is paid by the load, so he applauds the arrival of more waterfront robots

which promised to speed turnaround times at a port complex that handles about a third of the nation's imported goods. I'm for automation, Diaz says, 100%, 100%, end quote. But what about the thousands of international longshore and warehouse union workers who have mounted massive protests, saying the robots will replace human jobs? The ILWU members who transfer cargo from ships to trucks and direct terminal traffic, quote, don't care about the drivers. said Diaz, 41, who has serviced the ports for two decades. Quote, never. We sit in line while they take two-hour breaks.

With automation, we don't have that problem, end quote. The Atlantic looks at a slew of new startups that aim to help people manage their personal private relationships with software, much in the way that companies have done for years with, like, sales leads. There's decks, a tool to turn acquaintances into allies. Clay, an extension of your brain, purposefully built to help you remember people. Forgetting personal details, hippo helps you stay attentive and keep track of friends, family, and colleagues you care for for just $1.49 a month.

Plum contacts sends reminders to message your friends and rewards you with cartoon berries that, quote, indicate how strong your relationship is. Build the relationships you always wish you had, the uphabit site promises. There are more. When life gets busy, sometimes we need to be reminded to enjoy our most meaningful relationships, the creators of Garden, right on their website. Your relationships are secured for today. The activity completion page on rise announces once you've taken care of all your, quote, following up with folks. Network promises to make its users into better friends, mentors, siblings, salespeople, and networkers. Reminders to reach out also come with a summary of, quote, what you last chatted about.

social contact journal provides anniversary reminders and pre-written message templates, end quote. As the piece asks, if we turn our personal relationships into CRM data points, is that useful or ridiculous? And finally, look, the end of a decade has snuck up on us, so expect a slew of lists like this one for the next six weeks or so. CNET checks in with what it calls the 25 most important apps of the decade. Everything from Candy Crush to Uber to Instagram to Slack. That is all for this week. One weekend bonus episode coming at you tomorrow. Talk to you on Monday.