Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/13 - Get Hyped For the Galaxy S20 Lineup!

Episode Date: January 13, 2020

Are you ready to get hyped for the Galaxy S20 cause yes, that’s the name. We’re skipping some numbers. TikTok might be cloning Snapchat’s Discover feed. Is GDPR actually doing anything and/or is it enforceable? And could Casper be a make or break test for the Unicorn ecosystem? Sponsors: LinkedIn.com/ride Metalab.co Links: Exclusive: This is the Samsung Galaxy S20+ (XDAdevelopers) TikTok explores curated content feed to lure advertisers (FT) Cookie consent tools are being used to undermine EU privacy rules, study suggests (TechCrunch) A billion medical images are exposed online, as doctors ignore warnings (TechCrunch) Casper's IPO could be a bellwether for unprofitable startups in the post-We-Work era (TechCrunch) Casper files to go public, shows you can lose money selling mattresses (TechCrunch) 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 Monday, January 13th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Are you ready to get hyped for the Galaxy S20?

Because yes, that's the name. We're skipping a bunch of numbers, apparently. TikTok might be cloning Snapchat's Discover feed. Is GDPR actually doing anything? And or is it enforceable? And might Casper be a make-or-break test for the unicorn ecosystem? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Time to get hyped, everybody, because,

leaked photos have appeared to confirm that the name of the upcoming galaxy device, the flagship Samsung device to be announced a mere few weeks from now, will be the Galaxy S20. Thereby doing what I've been saying phone makers should have done all along and move to a yearly model naming cycle, just like automakers do. And more than that, these photos confirm that the S20 will have four cameras on the back, quoting XDA developers. The pictures above were sent to me by a source who wishes to stay anonymous.

Some edits have been made to the image to protect the source, but none of the edits impact our ability to see the design of the Galaxy S20 Plus. In the image of the rear, the first thing that stands out to us is the camera setup. We can see a total of four cameras, a flash, and what looks like a microphone hole. On the right side of the phone, we can see a volume rocker and a power button. There is no Bixby button, unlike in the earlier S-10 series. The front of the display shows us very small bezels. The Infinity O display is much less curved than before.

Our source said it felt flat, almost similar to the Pixel 2XL, in fact. Samsung appears to have opted for 2.5D glass instead of their usual curved glass. The hole punch is centered and smaller than the Galaxy Note 10, just like the Galaxy S-10 and Galaxy Note 10, the Galaxy S-20 plus will come with a pre-installed screen protector. We've referred to this phone as the Galaxy S-20 plus thus far, which, if you're familiar with Samsung's S-series nomenclature, means this phone will be the highest-end model. That's actually not the case this year. This phone is expected to be in the middle of the S-20 series. It will be slightly larger than the regular Galaxy S-20, but it will lack the camera technology present.

and in the higher-end Galaxy S-20 Ultra. This particular model is rumored to come with a new 12-mepixel 1.8 micrometer main image sensor. Samsung is also throwing in an ultra-wide, telephoto, and likely macro lens. The microphone on the rear could help with Samsung's zoom-in mic feature. It could also just help improve audio quality in videos in general, which I found to be a weak point on the Galaxy Note 10, end quote. So Galaxy S20 and S20 plus and S20 Ultra, but also there should be a 5G variant or two as well, and if that's not confusing enough. Remember that at the February 11th event, we should also see a new clamshell foldable phone that rumor mongers are currently calling the Galaxy Z flip.

and certainly the photo leaks and CAD renders that have made their way to the internet so far certainly make it seem like that phone, the Z-flip, fits the square shape profile on Samsung's event invites, at least in its folded-up form factor. Sources are telling the financial times that TikTok is considering a Snapchat Discover-style curated feed, which among other things, like biting Snapchat style would also allow for TikTok to create a venue for the sorts of content that it could charge more for because it would be a curated space that brands would feel safe advertising in.

Quote, brands can run video adverts on Snap in this Discover section, paying a higher price than for ads elsewhere in the app. In its latest earnings, Snap said it had more than 100 Discover channels with a monthly audience of 10 million while time spent watching the feed rose 40% year on year. A move by TikTok to replicate this format comes as executives have been aggressively pitching to brands in the U.S. and Europe in a bid to monetize the app. The company has also been investing in high-profile recruits from rivals such as Facebook and Snap and developing tools for advertisers, which include a platform allowing businesses to buy adverts directly without going through an account manager. Blake Chandley, the head of TikTok's U.S. ads partnerships and a former Facebook executive, said in an interview last month, month that the company was also considering how to let its users shop directly from brands, end

quote. So I guess this would be copying from Snapchat and Instagram then. Quick question, though, over the last decade or so, each new social networking and chat platform has differentiated by, at least at the outset, offering different features, different user experience than the incumbents did. So what happens if in a short period of time, everybody offers all the same features, stories, discover feeds, normal feeds, in-app shopping, end-to-end encryption, disappearing messages? If suddenly everybody is exactly the same, then does the space become a commodity because the consumer can't differentiate meaningfully between the various players? Over the weekend, TechCrunch was reporting on a study that found that most cookie

consent forms serve to EU users in the wake of GDPR and the new regime over there, actually run a foul of GDPR's informed consent requirements because these sorts of consent forms do shenanigans like make use of pre-ticked boxes and hide the reject-all option and actually plenty more. The study came from researchers at MIT, UCL, and Our House University, quote, The result of our empirical survey of CMPs, which is consent management platforms, today illustrates the extent to which illegal practices prevail with vendors of CMPs turning a blind eye to, or worse, incentivizing clearly illegal configurations of their systems, the researchers argue, adding that, quote, enforcement in this area is sorely lacking, end quote.

Their findings published in a paper entitled, dark patterns after the GDPR, scraping consent pop-ups and demonstrating their influence, chime with another piece of research, TechCrunch covered back in August, which also concluded a majority of the current implementations of cookie notices offer no meaningful choice to Europe's internet users, even though EU law requires one. When consent is being relied upon as the legal basis for processing web users' personal data, the bar for valid, i.e. legal consent, that's set by the EU's general data protection regulation is clear. It must be informed, specific, and freely given, end quote.

Funny enough, though, the paper comes to the conclusion that just getting those annoying, hey, we're using cookies notifications every time you visit a web page, since that's become ubiquitous, it might actually have the effect of rendering consent sort of meaningless. Always interrupting me and asking me to make a choice makes the act of actually making that choice sort of automatic and thus sort of invalid. Or as TechCrunch puts it, quote, Cookie notices not only generate friction and frustration

for the average internet user as they try to go about their daily business online, but the current situation is creating a faux veneer of compliance atop what is actually a massive trampling of rights via what amounts to digital daylight robbery of people's data at scale, end quote. Sometimes this podcast makes me look downright clairvoyant. If you listened to Saturday's episode with Christina Farr, which I actually recorded the week before I left for CES, we discussed in passing how the bureaucracy around medical records is so intense that even if you decide you'd like a copy of your medical records to look at with

your own two eyes, you're unlikely to ever be able to get one. Paradoxically, it is far more likely that hackers will be able to see your entire health history than you ever will because, again, everything is so fubar and security is so bad and fragmented that your data is easily hackable. Well, over the weekend, story broke that more than one billion patient health images were found online, including x-rays, ultrasounds, and CT scans because they were left on unsecure. servers. Quote, it seems to get worse every day, said Dirk Schrader, who led the research at Germany-based security firm Greenbone Networks, which has been monitoring the number of exposed

servers for the past year. The problem is well documented. Greenbone found 24 million patient exams storing more than 720 million medical images in September, which first unearthed the scale of the problem, as reported by ProPublica. Two months later, the number of exposed servers had increased by more than half to 35 million patient exams, exposing 1.19 billion scans and representing a considerable violation of patient privacy. But the problem shows little sign of abating, quote, the amount of data exposed is still rising, even considering the amount of data taken offline due to our disclosures, said Schrader, end quote. As you can imagine, this is all because hundreds and thousands of hospitals, medical offices, and imaging centers all just do their own thing.

with their own software platforms and IT and security best practices. So given that, maybe there is room for someone like Google to swoop in here and clean things up, right? Well, also this weekend, the Wall Street Journal took a look at Google's health care efforts, like the controversial project Nightingale and the so-called Guardian search tool, by talking to the man heading Google's efforts. In his first extensive interview since joining the search giant last January, the head of Google Health, Dr. David Feinberg, says the tech giants push into health care is motivated more by the greater good than profits. Quote, I came here to make people healthy. I'm not here to sell them ads, Dr. Feinberg says.

Quote, Google is so good at being helpful. We want to be helpful with knowledge, success, health, and happiness, end quote. A Google spokesman sent an email saying, the health systems it works with, quote, own their data, and we can only process it according to their instructions, end quote. But as Christina and I discussed on Saturday's episode, quote, legally the information gathered by Google can be used for purposes beyond diagnosing illnesses under laws enacted during the dial-up era. U.S. federal privacy laws make it possible for health care providers with little or no input from patients to share data with certain outside companies.

That applies to partners like Google with significant presences outside of health care. The company says its intentions in health care are unconnected with its advertising business, which depends largely on data it is collected on users of its many services, including email and maps, end quote. So, all right, fine. Here is a textbook example of when we should be able to get ahead of things and enact common sense regulations and laws that will allow major tech companies like Google to pursue the good that they claim they want to do, and even the profit-making enterprises that are clearly there for the tech. for whomever gets this right, all while making sure they stop at some sort of legal waterline that you or I or your average health care patient would, in the end, find reasonable, right?

Finally today, Casper Mattress is not really a tech company, no matter what they'd have you believe, but you might have noticed that everyone was pouring over their S-1 filing over the weekend, and the reason I'm bringing that up is because whether or not this Casper IPO goes smoothly could really have an impact on the prospects for all the private unicorn companies of all stripes, including tech. I won't go into the details of the filing line by line, but here's how Derek Thompson summed it up in a tweet, quote, this appears to be Casper's business, buy mattress at $400, sell at $1,000, refund slash return rate of 20%, keep $400 on average, then spend $290 of that on ads slash marketing and 270 of that on admin like finance HR IT bottom line lose 160 bucks repeat end

quote and here's Alex Willowm in tech crunch quote while the company's gross margins aren't bad for a non-software company 49.6% in the first nine months of 2019 the firm spent over 73% of its gross profit last year on sales and marketing costs that figure indicates that casper spent heavily to generate growth, growth that came in at about 20 percent so far in 2019, as reported. That fact implies that growth will remain constrained as the firm can't afford to spend too much more on the line item, which begs the question, what's the value of a firm that is showing slowing growth, non-recurring revenue, and sticky gap losses, end quote. Again, you can make the argument that Casper is not a tech company.

So this is not an apples-to-apples comparison in terms of the companies we usually cover. And I would agree with that assessment, except I would argue that Casper might provide a test for the whole throw a bunch of IPO scale venture capital in a bottle, shake it up, and voila, something should happen, style of private investing this last decade or so, as we've been discussing recently. And a lot of true tech companies are in that sort of boat. So maybe Casper is a test case for the direct-to-consumer brands, but maybe not. I'm arguing that Casper could be a test case for the public market's appetite for any startup that has followed the VC model of the last decade, as I've described.

That has, like Casper raised, IPO-level capital, $340 million in Casper's case. That has achieved incredible growth rates, 20% in recent quarters in Casper's case. But crucially, still, after a lot of... all this time can't make money at that scale. It's all scale, scale, scale, except in the one metric that maybe counts to public markets at this point. Last year, Casper lost $93 million on revenue of $358 million. They have $64 million in the bank, which the IPO should help out with, but to what extent, if the markets don't buy the narrative? Quoting Alex again from a tech crunch extra piece. Quote, so what to do? Casper could cut its sales and marketing spend at the risk of lowering

its growth rate. If its growth did slow, the potential attractiveness of its shares could diminish. The company is only growing at 20% with huge spend now. How slowly would it grow without the outlays? The company could belt tighten to profitability by reducing its sales and marketing spend by its operating profit deficit. That would leave the former startup and current venture darling with just 43% of its sales and marketing budget. If that cut led to a commensurate decrease in its growth rate, Casper's revenue expansion would slow to just 8.6% per year while it effectively broke even, end quote. Remember Blue Apron? It was another not really a tech company company that raised tech level capital and sought tech level valuations, but at the end, there wasn't a business

there with tech or especially software level margins. It was just growth. growth, growth, growth, masquerading as a glorified mail order business with perishable goods inside it. The question is, to what degree could another blue apron-style busted public offering cause any private company going public with a buttload of private capital raised and decent growth numbers, but without profitability? Could a blue apron-style bust cause investors to paint all unicorns with a broad brush? there are a lot of high growth for real tech companies out there that fit that bill,

but there's an awful lot of tech-ish companies or tech-adjacent companies out there that fit that bill too. Yeah, so the CES plague is still whacking me pretty hard. I think I have an ear infection or something now. I can't hear out of either ear at this moment. But I'm feeling okay generally, and I think my voice is okay. I've been mainlining airborne all day and all weekend long. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow, assuming I can talk.