Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/04 – Some Google Workers Say Union YES!

Episode Date: January 4, 2021

Google/Alphabet workers launch an official union drive. We’ve got a date for the Galaxy Unpacked event. Microsoft wants to give Windows a good scrubbing this year. Everyone wants a piece of ShareChat. Gazelle is getting out of the trade-in business. And LG doesn’t want to give up on tv screens you can hide away when not in use. Sponsors: Fundrise.com/techmeme LinkedIn.com/ride Links: Google, Alphabet employees seek to form a union (TechCrunch) Samsung officially confirms Galaxy S21 event for January 14th (The Verge) Microsoft planning ‘sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows’ (The Verge) Google and Snap in talks to invest in India's ShareChat (TechCrunch) Trade-in site Gazelle is ending trade-ins (The Verge) Apple will let Amphetamine app stay in the App Store after wrongly telling developer it violated App Store rules (The Verge) This LG display transforms from flat to curved for immersive gaming (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 Monday, January 4th, the first day of 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google slash alphabet workers launch an official union drive.

We've got a date for the Galaxy Unpacked event. Microsoft wants to give Windows a good scrubbing this year. Everyone wants a piece of share chat. Gazelle is getting out of the trade in business and LG doesn't want to give up on TV screens you can hide away when not in use. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Earlier last year, we spent some time talking about a sort of civil war going on inside of Google. A lot of it involved activism and politics, but some of it also involved unionization movements. And the tactics management was allegedly using to, shall we say, discourage such organizing. Well, things seem to have come to a head right away in 2021 as a group of over 200 Google. and alphabet workers have announced their plan to form a union, which would be open to both full-fledged employees and contractors. They are being aided in this effort by the Communication Workers of America Union's campaign to organize digital employees. The erstwhile Union is calling itself

the Alphabet Workers Union, quoting TechCrunch. Of the roughly 227 workers who have so far signed on to support the union, they have all committed to set aside 1% of the yearly compensation to go toward union dues. The bulk of the workers who have signed on are mostly based in offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and one in Cambridge. This is historic. The first union at a major tech company by and for all tech workers, Dylan Baker, a software engineer at Google said in a statement, we will elect representatives, we will make decisions democratically, we will pay dues, and we will hire skilled organizers to ensure all workers at Google know they can work with us if they actually want to see their company reflect their values, end quote.

Efforts to unionize at Google and Alphabet come following the creation of unions at tech companies Kickstarter and glitch earlier last year. Additionally, workers at HCL Technologies, workers who contract for Google in Pittsburgh, and tech company cafeteria workers in the Bay Area formed unions last year, quote, you have an industry of workers, the new generation of workers and the industry, especially tech and games, has been growing exponentially with young people. Code CWA union organizer Wes McKaney previously told TechRunch about why we're seeing more tech companies organize. Quote, some of them make a lot of money and are working at companies

that do really bad things. I think they're at a position socially where they're like enough is enough, end quote. Mark your calendars because Samsung has officially announced its Galaxy Unpacked event, which will be held January 14th, where of course it is expected we will see the new Galaxy S-21, S-21 Plus, and S-21 Ultra flagship smartphones, quoting the Verge. There's not a lot to glean from the event teaser video you can watch at the top of this post, which appears to simply be the Galaxy S-21's camera module floating inside a translucent cube. But practically every detail of these new phones already seems to have leaked, including sharper animated gifts of what those modules should look like.

Samsung also appears to have a new tile competitor on. the way for tracking lost items and a set of Galaxy Buds Pro wireless earbuds. We wouldn't be surprised if one or both appeared alongside the new phone lineup. The tagline from the announcement, Welcome to the Everyday Epic. The event will kick off at 7 a.m. Pacific time, 10 a.m. Eastern. Also at the verge, Tom Warren says that Microsoft is intent on turning over a whole new leaf in the new year, at least when it comes to Windows. He says the company is planning what he calls, quote, a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows, end quote, quoting from his piece. That's according to a job listing posted by Microsoft recently, advertising for a software engineering

role in the Windows core user experiences team. Quote, on this team, you'll work with our key platform Surface and OEM partners to orchestrate and deliver a sweeping visual rejuvenation of Windows experiences to signal to our customers that Windows is back and ensure that Windows is considered the best user OS experience for customers, end quote. Microsoft quietly removed references to this sweeping visual rejuvenation this morning, after several Windows enthusiasts spotted the job listing over the weekend. While Microsoft has been promising visual overhauls of Windows 10 for years, thanks to its fluent design system, rumors suggest the company is planning big user interface changes for Windows that will debut later this year. Code named Sun Valley, Windows Central,

first reported on these UI changes back in October. Microsoft, Soft is planning to overhaul the start menu, file explorer, and built-in apps in Windows 10 to modernize them and make the UI more consistent. Some of the UI changes will also include updates to the sliders, buttons, and controls that are found throughout Windows and the apps that run on the OS, end quote. Interesting raise, or at least an interesting rumor about a raise, both Google and Snap are apparently in advanced talks to invest more than $200 million in Indian Twitter-like social network share chat at a greater than $1 billion valuation. So I say it's interesting because it's interesting to see two competing platforms joining forces here

and Twitter, which already invested $100 million in share chat, is also apparently sniffing around for another possible re-up investment. Given that intense interest, and since maybe you were not previously aware of share chat, Tell us more TechCrunch. Quote, ShareChats, marquee, an eponymous app caters to users

in 15 Indian languages. In an interview with TechCrunch last year, Ankush Satchewa, co-founder and chief executive of ShareChat said the app was growing exponentially

and that users were spending on average more than 30 minutes on the app each day. The app has amassed 160 million monthly active users up from 60 million from the same period last year. If the deal

goes through, it would be the first investment from Snapchat's parent company into an Indian startup. Google, on the other hand, has been on a spree as of late. The Android Maker last month invested in Daily Hunt and Inmobie's glance, both of which operate short video apps. Like the two, ShareChat also operates a short video app. It's called Moge and has amassed more than 80 million monthly active users as of September last year, the startup said at the time, and quote, India could never have dreamed of having a homegrown social media platform, had Cherchat not embarked on the impossible in 2015. ShareChat's success has given immense hope to India's startup fraternity and motivated entrepreneurs

to take audacious bets in India's internet ecosystem, said Madhukar Sindha, partner at India quotient, one of the earliest backers of ShareChat, end quote. So is this the first fallout from TikTok being banned in India? What was it, six months ago? And I should probably catch you up on a few things that happened while we were away. For example, have you ever traded in a gadget to Gazelle, one of the longest running secondhand gadget buyers in the U.S.? Lord knows I have. Well, Gazelle has announced that it will end its core trade-in program on February 1st, and apparently this is a sign of how things have changed in the

refurbish gadgetry market, quoting The Verge. Gazelle doesn't give a reason for the decision, but there are a few major trends in the U.S. mobile business that point toward a general decline in the benefits of cash trade and services. For one, many more people now than in years past lease their smartphones instead of buying them outright, a broad shift from the days when U.S. carriers offered reduced price phones in exchange for firm two-year contracts. Now, it's quite easy to pay a modest monthly fee for a phone through a program like AT&T Next Up or Apple's iPhone upgrade program with the option to trade that device in for a new one

after a designated amount of time. Unless you decide to pay off your least phone early, you can't turn around and sell it to Gazelle, and you wouldn't necessarily want to do that, as it doesn't make much financial sense. Additionally, Gazelle's early business boomed on iPhone trade-ins back when selling your phone to get the latest Apple product was a popular strategy for early adopters. Now, Apple has a robust trade-in program of its own, in addition to the leasing program, that pretty much gets you the same result, end quote. And if you miss this, here's the TLDR of the amphetamine kerfuffle. Last week, a years old and quite popular macOS app called amphetamine, announced that Apple

was going to take the app down from the app store for violating app store policies. Amphetamine is an app that lets you control when your machine does or does not go to sleep. So, you know, the name sort of makes sense. But it certainly looked like someone at Apple had suddenly decided the name suggested illegal drug connotations and wanted to take it down accordingly, quoting the verge. William C. Gustafson said in January 1st posts on Reddit and GitHub that Apple had informed him he had two weeks to, quote, remove all references to the word amphetamine and remove the pill from the icon, end quote. If he failed to do so, Gustafson wrote, Apple said it would remove the app from the app store. on January 12th. The logo features a cartoon image of a pill. Gustafson said Apple contacted him on December 29th and told him, Amphetamine, quote, appears to promote inappropriate use of controlled substances.

Specifically, your app name and icon include references to controlled substances, comma, pills, end quote. The free MacOS app has been downloaded more than 432,000 times with a 4.8 rating, Gustafin said, noting that Apple even featured amphetamine in its Mac App Store story. He said he had numerous interactions with Apple employees for updates to the app since its launch, with no one objecting to the name or logo until now. Gustafson told the Verge he got a call Saturday from Apple, granting his appeal, but he didn't have insight into how the app was flagged in the first place. I specifically asked Apple on the phone if this was a result of customer complaints,

and Apple's response was, I don't think so, he said, I found it odd that this issue came up out of nowhere. I wasn't in the middle of trying to update amphetamine or anything. just sitting at home with my kids enjoying our holiday and got the violation slash rejection email from Apple, end quote. Well, all's well that ends well. Apple has apparently agreed to leave the app up with the same name and logo. CES begins a week from today. It seems like both yesterday and a million years ago that I was in Las Vegas covering CES last year. Remember that was when Quibi had its unveiling. think that the entire Quibi saga has come and gone since that day when you'll remember

I was sort of snowed by their initial presentation. Anyway, CES is virtual this year, of course, and so we'll have to see how the news does or does not percolate this year. But the news is starting already. One of the things I know I'll miss is seeing the huge walls of TVs. For example, this LG display that can transform from a flat to curved screen, depending on if you want to game immersively or if you're just leaning back and Netflixing.

Quoting The Verge. The company has shown off similar bendable TV prototypes before, like when it demonstrated a 65-inch TV meant for use inside planes that could bend into a curve for passengers to watch movies. This model, which is being shown off at this year's virtual CES, features LG displays cinematic sound OLED technology, which vibrates the screen to produce audio. The 48-inch TV could potentially offer the immersive benefits of a curved screen while gaming without forcing you to live with a curve screen's many downsides when you just want to watch TV. In terms of specs, LG display is emphasizing the gaming capabilities of its prototype,

which can bend with a radius of up to 1,000 millimeters. It's got a high refresh rate of 120 hertz, a variable refresh rate range that goes from 40 hertz to 120 hertz, and response time of 0.1 milliseconds. It's also able to vibrate its screen to produce sound, a technique that LG display has previously shown off for its flat panels, though we imagine most gamers would probably prefer to use headphones or separate speakers. This new prototype is LG Display's latest experiment with flexible OLEDs, which have previously included a rollable TV that packs up into a compact box

when not in use, end quote. Yeah, I think we spoke about that one last year. I still think it's a good idea too. It still bothers me how much living real estate our massive TVs now take up in our rooms, even when they're mounted on walls. It seems like LG is still with me in terms of being willing to bang the drum about this. They're also apparently demoing a smart bed with a transparent OLED screen that can rise out of the bed frame for when you really want to Netflix and chill, and also a transparent restaurant or bar display that again can rise up out of sales. countertops. You know that old joke about how long you're still writing the previous year on your checks? Yeah, it's January 4th, and I'm still saying 2020 at the start of my podcast. I almost had to

re-record the intro. So I do indeed hope you all had a good and safe New Year's break. Hats off to the official Counting Crows' Twitter account, which cheekily tweeted at 12.06 a.m. on the 1st of January, quote, maybe this year will be better than the last. Kids, if you're not familiar with that song, Google Long December by the Counting Crows. Honestly, one of their least offensive songs, if you ask me, or maybe I'm being too harsh about it. My wife would certainly say that. They weren't that bad, I guess, as mid-90s grunge light bands went. Anyway, happy New Year.

Talk to you tomorrow. this year