Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 8/03 - Is Fortnite Bigger Than Google Play?

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

Fortnite snubs Google, Amazon Prime Video is coming to Comcast, Peloton raises a ton, the top ten programming languages of 2018 and, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions.  Links: Epic Games sidesteps the Play Store with Fortnite for Android launch (TechCrunch)Ready, Aim, Hire a ‘Fortnite’ Coach: Parents Enlist Videogame Tutors for Their Children (WSJ)Google Maps location sharing shows your contact's battery level (Android Police)The 2018 Top Programming Languages (IEEE Spectrum) The Betterment.com/ride Weekend Longreads:How Robot Hands Are Evolving to Do What Ours Can (NYTimes)Why the Next Silicon Valley Will Probably Be Outside the U.S. (Citylab)Masayoshi Son’s secret to running his $100 billion fund: Telling start-ups to treat each other like family (CNBC)What Happened to General Magic? (NYMag/SelectAll)Growing Up Jobs (Vanity Fair) 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, August 3rd, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Fortnite snubs Google.

Amazon Prime video is coming to Comcast. Peloton raises a ton. The top 10 programming languages of 2018 and, of course, the weekend Longreads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Why do I like to cover Fortnite so much? It's just a dumb video game, right? No, it's a cultural powerhouse, a juggernaut. I'll give you one story and one bit of color to illustrate why I think this.

First, TechCrunch is reporting that Fortnite will finally be available on Android. It came to iOS and the Nintendo Switch earlier this summer, and since Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite has a strategy of getting the game. Wherever people want to play it, it's logical that it would soon show up in the Google Play Store eventually, right, except it's not. It's not coming to the Google Play Store at all. To get Fortnite on your Android device, you go to fortnight.com and you download the Fortnite launcher,

a side launcher that will load Fortnite Battle Royale onto your Android device. Here's a whole bunch of context, so you can understand why this is such a big deal. Suriram Krishnan tweeted, Fascinating that someone actually has the brand power to go Yep, we can do this outside the Play Store, and people will still install us. Good to be the king. Shira Ovida tweeted,

companies tried to do a similar end run with the iPhone App Store too, but I think most of them gave up. Even Spotify. Dieter Bone chimed in, it's totally reasonable to expect that Fortnite could be the biggest game on Android. The biggest game on Android won't be in Google's store. How embarrassing for Google is that? Also, millions of kids will get familiar with side-loading apps without the store.

Popcorn.gif. Though, as Martin Bryant pointed out on Twitter, quote, I'm sure potential fake Fortnite download scammers are rubbing their hands with glee, end quote. And now here's the color, the kicker. The Wall Street Journal has a story up about how being good at Fortnite has become such a status symbol in teen circles that parents are now shelling out money to get their kids' Fortnite tutors, which seems insane until you remember that for years

parents have been paying for things like baseball tutors or dancing lessons, etc. And if you believe e-sports really is the next big thing, I mean, I think I read a story on here several months ago about colleges beginning to offer e-sports scholarships. Another move in the streaming video chess, board, Comcast and Amazon have reached a deal to integrate Amazon Prime Video into Xfinity's X-1 service. So later this year, Prime Video will be just another old channel option on your channel guide. Basically, no different than ESPN or NBC. Financial terms of the deal were not

disclosed, but this means that Comcast customers will soon have Prime Video, Netflix, and YouTube fully integrated into their set-top box lineups. For Comcast, this seems to be a strategic play to keep customers from hitting that old TV input button to switch to HDMI 1 or 4 or something and pop up that Roku or Apple TV box. It's a bit of, if you can't beat them, join them, because no one can become the one app for entertainment

if Comcast can keep people happy inside the Xfinity program menu, right? Here's a funding raise from a company that you've probably definitely heard of. Peloton, that sort of exercise slash video streaming slash stationary bike slash fitness class app, has raised a new $550 million financing round led by venture capital firm TCV, which values the company at $4.15 billion. And guess what? Peloton's co-founder and chief executive officer John Foley told the Wall Street Journal that while things are still a little up in the air,

and IPO sometime in 2019, quote, makes a lot of sense, end quote. Peloton is on pace to make more than $700 million in revenue this fiscal year and has more than 100% year-to-year revenue growth. Aside from great numbers like that, why are investors so hot on Peloton? TCV's founding general partner Jay Hogue, an early Netflix investor, by the way, told the Wall Street Journal, quote, we're totally convinced it's the Netflix of fitness, end quote. Ah, one app for entertainment, one app for fitness. In one sense, Apple hitting a trillion dollars in market cap yesterday was essentially a meaningless event. It's just a round number.

Sort of like the Dow hitting 25,000 for the first. time or something. It does signal good things, but in the end, it doesn't in and of itself mean anything. So I guess it's no surprise that Apple CEO Tim Cook took a moment to remind Apple employees of this in an internal memo yesterday, quote, while we have much to be proud of in this achievement, it's not the most important measure of our success. Financial returns are simply the result of Apple's innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values. Let's take this moment to thank our customers, our suppliers, and business partners, the Apple developer community, our co-workers, and all those who came before us at this remarkable

company. Google Maps appears to be rolling out a feature that will show the battery level of the phone you are using to someone else if you are actively sharing your location with that someone else. The idea here is that if suddenly you go in community, Unicado, your friend or loved one will know, oh, Brian just ran out a battery. So essentially, your mom won't freak out as much if you don't answer your phone. But as Ryan Whitwam at Android Police points out, quote, this just happens automatically and there doesn't appear to be any way to turn it off when sharing your location. So you might want to think twice before you tell someone you didn't answer their call because your battery was almost dead.

They might know the truth. The I-TripleE has released its annual ranking of the top 10 most popular programming languages for the year 2018. Python comes in at number one, followed by C++, C and Java. Quoting from the rankings report, Why is Python continuing to gain programmer Mineshare? Python is now listed as an embedded language. Previously writing for embedded applications tilted heavily towards compiled languages to avoid the overhead of evaluating code on the fly

on machines with limited processing power and memory. But while Moore's Law may be fading, it's not dead yet. Many modern microcontrollers now have more than enough power to host a Python interpreter. A nice aspect of using Python this way is that it is very handy in certain applications to play with attached hardware via an interactive prompt or dynamically reload scripts on the fly.

Growing into a new domain can only help boost Python's popularity, end quote. When you sort the IEE's rankings for trending languages, those languages that are on the rise, Google's Go is on the up, and a big mover is Scala, which was designed to be an improvement over Java. Interestingly, Java had a bit of a drop in the rankings this year, so perhaps that's because Scala is winning Java developers over. And it's time for the weekly weekend long reads. Now officially brought to you by Betterment, the financial advisor for the rest of us. Through a combination of goal-based tools, affordable management fees, and a hands-off approach to investing,

Betterment wants to help you maximize returns and minimize risk. Check them out at Betterment.com slash ride. The first long read is really. really one that you need to read. Well, on a screen, though, because it's one of those interactive g-wiz multimedia extravaganzas from the New York Times. The pieces about the different ways robots are trying to mimic the human hand and the different strategies employed by researchers to get robots to manipulate everyday objects with the same dexterity that your average two-year-old can muster. With each example of a robot hand innovation,

the Times has embedded an autoplay video so you can see the different styles of cyborg hands. The spinner, the gripper, the picker, even the bedmaker. Go all the way to the end and see the dactyl. They're getting really close, man, really, really close. Next, famous urban studies theorist and coiner of the term the creative class, Richard Florida, has a piece up in City Lab titled

Why the Next Silicon Valley will probably be outside the, U.S. It's a graph-heavy piece as you would want. So basically, if you're planning for the next decade out and you want to strategically plant your startup in an up-and-coming tech hub, check out Florida's findings. Quote, the biggest gainers in venture capital startup funding have mainly been cities outside the United States. In Europe, London, Amsterdam, and Paris, in Asia, Beijing, Shanghai, and Tokyo, and in other regions, Mumbai, Sao Paulo, Tel Aviv, and Toronto. Other cities that stand out for significant growth in startup deals are Stockholm, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Sydney, and New Delhi.

The pattern in the U.S. is decidedly mixed. East Coast hubs like New York and Boston have seen growth in startup funding, but San Francisco and other West Coast hubs, including Los Angeles and Seattle, have seen declines, end quote. Speaking of startup energy coming from outside Silicon Valley, a lot of that has to, to do with where the money comes from, of course. You know, I'm endlessly fascinated with Masayoshi Son and his seemingly bottomless amount of money that has been epically upending the VC game. CNBC has another profile up about how Son actually operates. Masasan meets with every single founder, the Vision Fund invest in in person before the deal is signed. He holds dinners every

few months with the CEOs of his investments to conduct status checks. And the message to each investment is essentially the same over and over. Scale now as quickly as possible. Here's one founder's description of the process. Quote, Masa comes in, completely casual, wearing slippers with a cup of tea, Heck said. The two proceeded to have an hour-long discussion in a large conference room. Sond pushed Heck on the microeconomics of his business and how quickly it could scale, drawing upon successes and failures of previous business ventures from Sons history. We got up and whiteboarded together, said heck. He grilled me for an hour.

He wants to go as fast as you can and be number one, end quote. There's a documentary going around called General Magic. You can see the trailer at general magicemovie.com. General Magic is the most influential company you've never heard of, largely because it failed, but before failing, It basically pioneered the entire mobile computing era as we know it today. It was co-founded by Apple Luminaries Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld. It was actually an Apple spin-off company.

Tony Fidel worked there. Andy Rubin worked there. Piero Midear worked there. John G.N. Andrea worked there. The guy who has been in the headlines lately because he's now heading Apple's machine learning and AI strategy. Don't know about General Magic. Want to learn about it. If you've been unaware all this time, New York Magazine has a comprehensive oral history called What Happened to General Magic.

Finally today, I usually try not to spoil the best bits of the long reads, but for this one, I can't resist. Lisa Brennan Jobs has a book coming out in September about her life and her relationship with her father, Steve Jobs. Vanity Fair has an excerpt of the book that is heartbreaking, frustrating, and frustrating. beautiful, all at different times and all at once. Please read this excerpt if you want to get a sense of Steve Jobs, the human being, for all his foibles. This part, though, is just too poignant not to share because I think it encapsulates sort of the emotional tone of the piece. Lisa and her father are having lunch with Bono of you two. This is more than a decade ago. Lisa is about 27. Bono asks Steve Jobs in Lisa's presence.

So was the Lisa computer named after her? Quote, there was a pause. I braced myself, prepared for his answer. My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. Yeah, it was, he said. I sat up in my chair. I thought so, Bono said.

Yep, my father said. I studied my father's face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now after all these years? Of course it was named after me, I thought then. His life seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up. That's the first time he said yes, I told Bono.

Thank you for asking. As if famous people needed other famous people around to release their secrets, end quote. That's been the betterment, Weekend Long Reads suggestions. Links are in the show notes, of course. Investing involves risk, but tech meme ride home listeners can get personalized financial advice from real live licensed financial experts to gain actionable answers and guidance about what to do with your money.

And you can get up to a year managed free by going to betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. That's all for this week. Friday music for everyone. This is moving weekend for the McCullough family. Of course, it couldn't be hotter, and it's supposed to rain all day tomorrow because, of course, it is. Hope you guys have a great weekend, and if that General Magic movie ever plays in New York City, can someone please give me a shout? I want to see that pretty desperately.

Thanks. Talk to you on Monday.