Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/28 - Why Horizontal Instagram Might Be Inevitable

Episode Date: December 28, 2018

Instagram briefly goes horizontal, more on how epic Fortnite has been for Epic Games this year, Larry Ellison joins Tesla’s board, the global GPS wars are joined and the last weekend longreads of the year. Links: Instagram briefly switched to a horizontal feed and people freaked out (The Verge) Epic Games, the creator of Fortnite, banked a $3 billion profit in 2018 (TechCrunch) Exclusive: Foxconn to begin assembling top-end Apple iPhones in India in 2019 - source (Reuters) Tesla Taps Ellison, HR Expert to Prove Musk Is Reined In (Bloomberg) China ramps up global coverage for domestic Beidou satellite navigation system as rival to GPS (South China Morning Post) The Betterment Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The Devchat.tv podcasts The GPS wars have begun (TechCrunch) Amazon gets into health insurance — and more 2019 health-tech predictions from top experts (CNBC) The biggest technology failures of 2018 (MIT Technology Review) Why Your Next Home Might Not Need Any Energy at All (WSJ) THE 'FUTURE BOOK' IS HERE, BUT IT'S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED (Wired) Bird Box Is the First Great Monster Movie About This Poisonous Invention (PaleoFuture/Gizmodo) 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 Ride Home for Friday, December 28th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today coming to you from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Today, Instagram briefly goes horizontal.

More on how Epic Fortnite has been for Epic Games this year. Larry Ellison joins Tesla's board of directors. The Global GPS Wars are joined and the last weekend long reads of the year. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Yesterday, Instagram briefly replaced. the vertical feed on its popular app with horizontal scrolling. Users collectively lost their ever-loving minds, and Instagram quickly rolled back the change,

saying it was just a small test that, quote, went broader than we anticipated. So you won this round, you mob of outraged Instagrammers you, but guess what? Don't think you're going to beat back this sort of change in the long term. Why? Why? Because Facebook is generally convinced that stories are the future of social media and stories potentially could be even more monetizable than feeds ever were. If you squint your eyes a bit, in essence, the change that Instagram made yesterday turned the app into one giant story instead of one unending feed. Here is what Hayam Gartenberg said yesterday in The Verge when the change was still live.

The new feed basically turns all posts into a single giant Instagram story, complete with tapping to advance, and a scrolling bar at the top to show you how far you've progressed. With the horizontal feed, each photo and each ad is given the spotlight at any given time. You can only view a single post, and the comments are much more prominent now, appearing with a flick upward. It's also much harder to quickly fly through your feed with the new layout. You can only advance a single post at a time. Another side effect of the new layout is that stories are easier to access, with the bar now always available by swiping down instead of requiring that you scroll all the way to the top of your feed, end quote. So get ready, Instagram conspiracy theorists, as at DB said on Twitter,

what if, just follow me here, what if this wasn't a small field test, and the intent was to gauge large reaction and prime, the base for the possibility of change, because ultimately that's what it did, end quote. And as Noah Malin tweeted, why kill the feed? In part, people are tired of it on Instagram and Facebook, though some of this is algorithmic overkill IMHO. Also, easier and bolder ad environment equals more money. Will that mean better user experience? Probably not, end quote. It's worth noting Mark Zuckerberg's own words from Facebook's third quarter earnings call this past October. All of the trends that we've seen suggest that in the not too distant future,

people will be sharing more into stories than they will into feeds, and that the whole market across all of the stories type of product will be bigger and a market where people are sharing more moments from their days into stories-type products than into feed-type products. And this happened very quickly. This whole trend has been newer than the trend with news feed and feeds overall, and it continues to grow incredibly quickly, end quote. Nate Higgins tweeted an interesting point, quote, I'm not even joking. This new Instagram UI discriminates against left-handed people. I can't easily use it with my dominant hand without covering up the entire screen to reach my thumb across, meaning I have to do a back-and-forth constantly to keep browsing, end quote.

and Taylor Lawrence made an excellent point that probably throws a bit of cold water on the conspiracy theories quote, I don't believe Instagram would intentionally drop such a major redesign without even a press release or a Josh Konstine exclusive, end quote. According to sources, epic games, the maker of the mega popular video game Fortnite, has earned $3 billion in profits off of Fortnite in 2018. I said $3 billion in profits. Why is this a big deal?

Well, for one thing, remember that Fortnite is a free-to-play game. That $3 billion in-profits is based entirely on micro-transactions of in-game purchases. Also, just as a fun little comparison, Amazon made $3 billion in profits in 2017. Here's another mind-boggling stat. iOS users alone were spending $1.23 million a day buying Fortnite goodies, and even more. As Stephen Sultz tweeted, quote, for context, and again, the relative scale of the video game publishing industry versus e-sports, which many new investors conflate. Three billion in profit for Fortnite this year is greater than three times the expected revenue for all of e-sports in 2018, let alone Xbox. in 2018, let alone ex-publisher revenue from that e-sports figure, end quote.

John Russell has a timely summation of the story of Epic Games, which, until recently, was best known as the developer of the Unreal Engine, third-party game development platform. Founded in 1991, Epic Games was apparently recently valued at $15 billion when it recently raised around that KKR, Kleiner Perkins, and Lightspeed all participated in. But do you know who is also benefiting from this recent Fortnite success? Tencent, the Chinese company behind the popular app WeChat. In 2012, Tencent invested $330 million to purchase 40% of Epic games. Why did Epic sell so dear back then, quoting from Russell in TechCrunch?

executives believed that Epic, as it was, was living on borrowed time. They sensed a change in the way games were headed based on diminishing returns and growing budgets for console games, the increase of live games like League of Legends, and the emerging role of smartphones, end quote. This is how Epic CEO Tim Sweeney explained it. We realized that the business really needed to change its approach quite significantly. We were seeing some of the best games in the game. the industry being built and operated as live games over time rather than big retail releases. We recognize that the ideal role for Epic in the industry is to drive that.

And so we began the transition of being a fairly narrow console developer focused on Xbox to being a multi-platform game developer and self-publisher and indie on a larger scale, end quote. Well, $3 billion in profit, again in profit, really does cost. constitute, if you ask me, a successful pivot by anyone's yardstick. When Tesla and Elon Musk settled with the SEC over that going private at 420 tweet, part of the terms of the settlement included naming two new independent directors to Tesla's board of directors. Well, we now know who those directors are.

Larry Ellison, the co-founder of Oracle, and Kathleen Wilson, Thompson, Tom. Thompson, the Global Chief Human Resources Officer of Walgreens Boots Alliance. Notable, Tesla's board of directors now has 11 members, including three women. But for our purposes, also notable is that it now has one Lawrence Joseph Ellison on board. Quoting from Bloomberg, Ellison 74 went off script during an Oracle meeting with analysts in October to announce he had been building a personal stake in Tesla and that it was his second largest holding. He criticized how the media had covered Musk, 47, whom he called a close friend.

This guy is landing rockets, Ellison said in October of Musk, who also runs space exploration technologies. You know, he's landing rockets on robot drone rafts in the ocean. And you're saying he doesn't know what he's doing? Well, who else is landing rockets? You ever land a rocket on a robot drone? Who are you? You're telling me he's an idiot? I just want to know who you are,

so I know why I should believe you as opposed to my friend Elon, end quote. I'll utter this last comment, Soto Voce. Independent directors, they said. Sources are telling Reuters that Apple will begin assembling some of its top-end iPhones in India through a local unit of Foxx. as early as 2019. This move has been rumored for some time because it actually helps solve some serious trade and tariff issues for Apple that we've discussed at length before.

Quote, widening iPhone manufacturing in India through Foxcon will allow Apple to hedge the risk of any new U.S. trade policies, said Navkandar Singh, an associate research director at International Data Corporation. Indian taxes on import of devices and components have also heightened Apple's headache in a market where it has only a 1% share by smartphone shipments. Making more phones locally will help Apple save costly duties and boost Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship drive

to make India a manufacturing hub, Singh said, end quote. China has officially rolled out global coverage for its Beidu satellite navigation system, arrival to the U.S.'s GPS system. Quoting the South China Morning Post, Ran Chengui, Director General of the China Satellite Navigation Office, briefed media on Thursday announcing completion of the global coverage of the third-generation positioning system ahead of the previous rollout target of 2020.

Beidu, the Chinese name for the seven stars that make up the Big Dipper, offers a worldwide location service with an accuracy of five meters within the Asia-Pacific region and 10 meters in other parts of the world. One of only four global navigation satellite systems along with America's global positioning system, Russia's Glonas and Europe's Galileo, it is part of the country's wider effort to become a world leader in space and related technologies

under its Made in China 2025 program. And now it's time for the final weekend Longreed Suggestions of 2018. This week brought to you by Betterment's Resource Center. great articles in Betterment's Resource Center about the future of the gig economy, how to think about retirement, and what goes into saving for your kids' education. Also buying a house and much, much more. Check it out at betterment.com slash resources. For today's podcast suggestion, I'm suggesting not just one podcast, but a whole family of them.

Devchat.tv is a collection of podcasts, blog posts, and videos dedicated to helping software developers find freedom in their work and open source contributions to make a difference in whatever they pursue. Devchat.tv has shows that cover a wide variety of technologies and technical topics as well as interpersonal skills, freelancing, and career development. For the podcasts, I would point you especially to JavaScript Jabber, Ruby Rants, and Web Security Warriors.

Look up all of those shows on your favorite podcast app or check out the whole family online at devchat.tv. First up for the long reads, given that last segment I just read about the Chinese GPS rollout, check out the tech crunch piece titled The GPS Wars Have Begone. Aside from China's Beidu system, as we said, Russia has Glonas, the EU has Galileo, but there are more coming. Japan is launching the quasi-Zenith system, partially as an economic stimulus project. India is pursuing something called IRNSS.

And should Brexit actually happen, Britain has said that it might launch its own system. Quote, in short, the world has moved from one system, GPS, to arguably seven. And while Chinese manufacturers increasingly have GPS, Glonas, and Beidu installed on one chip, that scale may only work in a country the size of China. That puts American smartphone leaders like Alphabet and particularly Apple in a bind. For Apple, which prides itself on providing one unified iPhone device worldwide, the disintegration of the monopoly around GPS presents a quandary. Does it offer a unique device for the Chinese market capable of handling Beidu,

or does it add Beidu chips to its phones worldwide and run into trouble with U.S. national security authorities? End quote. next let's do a couple of year-end wrap-ups and predictions for 2019. In CNBC, the great Christina Farr rounds up five predictions for healthcare tech in 2019. Number one, in the wake of the Apple Watch, expect a flood of wearables, especially for things like blood pressure monitoring. As baby boomers age into Medicare, expect a lot of startups to create products to fit this exploding market and reap the Medicare reimbursement rewards. also expect pharma companies to go shopping and snap up promising startups in the health care tech space, a so far underinvested space that might get a surge of interest this year, mental health care tech.

And yes, Farr says to expect Amazon to make a big, bold, serious move into health insurance in 2019. Next, the MIT Technology Review rounds up the biggest technology failures of 2018, among them. Google's perhaps abortive flirtation with a censored search product for China. Jury is still very much out on if that is in fact dead or not, if you ask me. They also name-check social media blamed ethnic cleansing incidents in places like Myanmar this year, and Jules' ill-advised social media campaigns that critics said targeted teen vapors. Next two stories that were entirely off my radar. in the Wall Street Journal, Chris Mims has an interesting piece about something called Zero Energy Homes.

Did you know that homes and commercial buildings suck up 40% of the total U.S. energy usage every year? Well, Zero Energy is a standard that can construct buildings that energy-wise are entirely self-contained. In other words, they need draw no power from the grid for heating or cooling, and the best part is, apparently the standard only adds around 10% to the overall construction cost of a building. And there are even more benefits. Quote, because net zero homes are sealed from the outside world, their interior environments are quieter, freer of pollution, and more comfortable than conventional construction.

That can make a big difference to health, especially in cities where mounting evidence shows noise and air pollution affect early childhood development and cause chronic stress. Energy savings from net zero buildings in the U.S. are negligible today, but are increasing. As of 2017, 8,547 units of net zero housing, powered entirely by solar panels or zero-ready housing, still powered mainly from the grid,

had already been built in the U.S. with an additional 38,863 in the construction, design, or planning phases, according to the Net Zero Energy Coalition and Industry Group. Growth is set to take off in 2020 when California will require all new homes be truly net zero. Commercial buildings have a deadline of 2030. The European Union has set the same 2020 goal for every new building in Europe, end quote. And a check-in with the state of the book.

Remember a few years ago when e-books were exploding in popularity, and if you looked at any of the trend lines, it seemed inevitable that e-books would eventually overtake Dead Tree books much in the same way that digital downloads and streaming supplanted the CD. Well, e-book sales have subsequently plateaued. Innovation in the e-reader space has stalled, and crowdfunding has come in to completely upend the writing and publishing end of the book equation, the explosion in newsletters, has changed what it means to make your living as a writer. And then there is the Renaissance in audiobooks.

Look for the Wired Story that explores all of this and more. It's titled, The Future of the Book is Here, but it's not what we expected. All of these links, as always, of course, in the show notes. Finally today, no spoilers, but over at Gizumoto under the Paleo Future column, Matt Novak makes a pretty compelling case that Bird Box, that movie starring Sandra Bullock and John Malkovich, that is streaming on Netflix right now, is the first great monster movie about the scourge of Social.

media. Quote, films like The Thing from Another World, 1951, invasion of the body snatchers, both 1956 and 1978, The Blob, 1958, the Day of the Triffids, 1962, and them, 1954, are ostensibly monster movies, but they're actually about the fear of communists infiltrating America, even though the movies don't talk about the Soviet Union explicitly. The monsters in those old movies were stand-ins, just as the unseen monsters of birdbockers. are stand-ins for one of our greatest fears today, the poisonous influence of social media, end quote. So, perhaps this last one is a weekend Netflix suggestion,

read the piece and watch the film. Or actually, I guess it would be better to do that vice versa to avoid spoilers. So see the film and then read the piece, and then see if you agree with Matt's assessment. That's been the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment, investment involves risk, but tech meme right home listeners can get up to one year of investment money managed free. For more information, visit betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Betterment. Outsmart average. As I said, as promised, today is perhaps the only episode that we'll ever do recording Out of Doors.

Lovely day today, 83 degrees at the time of this recording. Again, one could get used to producing podcasts this way. Quick programming note, as it was this week, next week the big holiday falls on Tuesday, so there will be no episodes Monday or Tuesday next week. Expect to hear back from me at the regular bat time and regular bat station on Wednesday, January 2nd. Though keep your eye on your feed because there might be a tiny surprise between now and then. Anyway, happy new year to all. Enjoy the festivities. Don't do anything I wouldn't do. And we'll be back to talk to you again next year. Be well, everybody.