Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/14 - Am I Gonna Do That Egg Instagram Story?

Episode Date: January 14, 2019

Event sharing comes to stories, what this year’s CES says about where consumer tech is at the moment, and then a bunch of stories about what that means for the future in different ways, including wireless chips that suck power from the air, and the dilemma that voice assistants pose for the modern office. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Tiny.website Links: Facebook’s new Stories feature for event sharing actually sounds useful (The Verge) CES 2019: A Show Report (Learn By Shipping/@stevesi) SoundGuys: USB-C audio is dead (Android Authority) Wiliot nabs $30M from Amazon, Avery Dennison, Samsung for a chip that runs on power from ambient radio frequencies (TechCrunch) The rise of Alexa creates a dilemma for your open plan office (Wired) A Picture Of An Egg Beat Kylie Jenner For The Most Liked Instagram Of All Time (BuzzFeed News) 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 14th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today.

Event sharing comes to stories, what this year's CES says about where consumer tech is at the moment, and then a bunch of stories about what that means for the future in different ways, including wireless chips that suck power from the air, and the dilemma that voice assistants pose for the modern office. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Facebook is apparently testing a new stories feature for event sharing in iOS and Android for users in the U.S., Brazil, and Mexico. The stories will come with stickers that will reveal event details as well as toggles for marking people as interested or going to a given event right there in the story. Also, group chat in Messenger is fully integrated.

Event sharing in stories, though? Well, it actually makes sense, according to Nick Slat at the verge. As young users abandon the platform for the Hipper Instagram and the site's reputation keeps taking a hit, one key feature has remained absolutely vital, events. Facebook is still the best place to organize a calendar of social events, birthdays, concerts, and other real-world meetups, thanks to the existing social graph on Facebook, and the fact that businesses and event organizers still largely treat it as the preeminent promotion platform. For an older user like myself, the event-related features are why I'm still using Facebook beyond Messenger.

So it makes sense then that Facebook would turn to events as the next destination for its stories product. Now that CES is all wrapped up, let's do a sort of wrap-up of CES in a macro way, but also in one very specific focused way. I'm not sure how many years he's done this. I think he did it last year also, but Steven Sinovsky has posted quite a lengthy piece that he's calling a CES show report, and I think his summation is worth reading

to get a sense of what CES can tell us about where consumer tech is at the moment. For example, quoting from early on in the piece, Some years, CES feels like a deep technology show with everyone talking about something that requires hardware, new software, and a lot of work to even do something. 3D TV, Wi-Fi, home disk storage comes to mind. Some years, CES feels like attendees are overwhelmed with one specific technology, no matter which way we look. HD, 4K, Internet. Over the past couple of years, we have seen a lot of ingredients.

working to come together as products, virtual assistance, home automation sensors, to name a few. CES 2019 is a kind of year that sort of screams we're ready for the products that really work. In that spirit, CES 2019 is a year where products are close, but seem a product manager iteration away

from being a product that can reach a tipping point of customer satisfaction and utility. Products work in a thread-the-needle sort of way, but a lot of details and real life quickly cause things to become frustrating, end quote. To give you a sense of what Stephen's talking about, here's one specific example. A positive example of this are home alarm systems. In three years, these have made massive progress, and you can now put a monitored home alarm in your house in probably an hour

and pay almost nothing for hardware and one fourth the cost for monitoring. Amazing. Yet if you think this will seamlessly integrate with a bunch of other home automation, you're going to be either frustrated or will thread a tech enthusiast slash nerd needle. Progress, just not as much as promised, end quote. Other interesting observations that Sinovsky had of CES this year, he says, attendance from mainland China seemed to him very, very high. and as noted several times Google's participation was massive,

which alone says something about the direction Google seems to want to go in, by which I mean cram every Godforsaken connected device they can into your house. And this is part of what Sinovsky notes as sort of the tipping point at this year's CES. Any screen or speaker can now be a streaming media device, the universe of connectivity options, wires, HD, BMI cables and the like. Forget it. Anything can now stream media reliably. Even, as we noted, toilets can have speakers in them. So yeah, that's a new world. And in a related way, any object can now potentially be manipulated by voice. And moving just a degree away from that, any device

can now seemingly connect to any other, providing, of course, you use the same platform or the platforms play nice together. So this is indeed that sort of smart everything, universe of things, all that stuff. That's the tipping point that Stephen says we're almost at. I particularly liked this section, quote, the core question for all of these products as I walk the floor is, are the smarts in the right place? Does every device need all of the smarts? For example, does every device need a microphone and a network connection? How many cameras or microphones? Or microphones does one need in a home? When does privacy risk outweigh benefits? How many different times in a home do I log in to a streaming service and from how many devices? Where will I get the

optimal experience for any given service? And how do I even know that? End quote. One other point that Stephen made in his piece was that it seemed to him that USBC is also on the verge of becoming the truly universal connector option. The march towards USBC ubiquity seems to be close to inevitable to him. But at Android Authority, Lily Katz said that at CES, she noticed in one key area the switchover to USBC has stalled. When smartphones began ditching the tried and true headphone jack, some people switched over to wireless headphones and earbuds, of course. But everyone also assumed that for your wired needs, we'd eventually all shift over to USBC as well. But according to Katz, USBC wired headphones were virtually non-existent at CES.

And that's probably true for a number of reasons. Mainly not all USBC headphones work with all USBC ports. Quote, USB-type C headphone cables can either be active or passive or manifest as a dongle adapter. This inconsistency paired with the fact that audio accessory mode has yet to be universally supported results in a barrage of compatibility issues. Hence, why many users are unable to operate playback controls or use a headset's integrated microphone, end quote. USBC headphones are just not good enough, Katz says, and thus people are tending to abandon them in favor of USBC to headphone jack converters just to be safe, and thus manufacturers

are abandoning the whole device category. It seems that not everyone wants to jump to Bluetooth entirely the true wireless future, and so Kat says that some manufacturers might in the near future read the writing on the wall. Might the good old TRRS connector make a comeback? How long are we going to be stuck in this sort of nether realm where connectivity for personal listening,

a problem that had been solved for decades, is stuck in this weird sort of neither here nor there, sort of not quite perfect for everyone situation. Speaking of this always connected future that CES suggests, we really might be on the very cusp of, if the future is going to be everything connected, what will really help us get there will be sensors and chips in and on almost everything.

But the thing that that requires would be powering those chips and sensors. So what if we could create chips that could harness ambient energy? I am talking about super low-powered chips, chips that wouldn't need batteries or traditional wired power sources. And a startup called Wiliott is trying to give us just that future. Williott makes semiconductors that harness nanowats of electromagnetic energy from cellular Wi-Fi and Bluetooth networks to power themselves.

No wired connection. no battery required. Today, Williott announced a $30 million series B round at a $120 million post-money valuation with participation from Amazon, Samsung, Qualcomm Ventures, and others, including a, quote, retail giant, who went unnamed. Now, given the potential technology like this would have to change the game, $120 million seems like a pretty low valuation.

But that's because we're still very much at the Let's See if we can really make this work phase. Tech Crunches, Ingrid London swears that Wiliat's technology works. She's seen a demo in action, and she said it certainly looked like it worked. The current Wiliat demo chip can measure temperature, location, air pressure, and can transmit data back to the cloud. Wiliott imagines the first application would be to embed those chips into clothing. Though you can see a whole universe of applications, especially in the manufacturing environment,

But the true promise here is giving every possible thing its own identity in the coming Internet of things where things will be literally everything, from a can of Coke to a pillowcase, not just wired, powered devices. The way to do that is by, quote, tapping into the vast amount of electromagnetic energy that gets produced through existing wireless services, potentially a much bigger and readily available source in areas where wireless services already exist. And that is where Wiliat plays. Of course, this will mean that Wiliat's chips will not work in the most remote of areas where there is no connectivity at all. That is one of the challenges that the startup has yet to tackle. Another is, of course, more energy efficiency on devices themselves to operate on nanowats rather than watts of power, end quote. So the problem is they need to see if they can produce these chips at scale and at a reasonable price point to compete with existing technology like RFID.

And so that's what this money is for. Quote, this is just the tip of the iceberg, Wiliat CEO Tal Tamir said. We think many edge devices will come that will harvest radio frequency energy. But the problem is not what you harvest, but how much you need. If you get nanowats of energy and a phone consumes three to five watts when active, you can see where this has to go, end quote. If they can crack that nut, expect the next round raised will be, I would bet, significantly bigger. Weirdly, a lot of these segments today feel almost vaguely connected thematically. So back to voice assistants and smart speakers.

Google, Amazon, as I say, they want to put a lot of. assistance into everything that makes sense to put them into and then put them into your home. But they want to do this in the office as well. And that poses a bit of a problem in the modern office, the modern open office floor plan that is just so common these days might not be conducive for voice assistance. If you work in an open plan office with people all around you and not even the cubicle semi-walls of olden times surrounding you, then imagine saying anything, any non-sequitur like, hey, A-L-E-X-A, remind me to send that email to Sarah before 3 a.m. Even at a low voice, that would be distracting, right? Doesn't fly. As Wired U.K. points out, just imagine an office full of

people trying to get work done using voice assistance. Not only would it be cacophonously distracting, would it even work? Like everyone triggering everyone else's assistance or no assistance being triggered at all because the din is just too confusing? And then what about the fact that open office plans were supposed to foster collaborative work environments? Just as you'd rather ask a question of that person

at the desk next to you over Slack instead of actually talking to her, might the same sort of laziness overcome all of us because true assistant heavy workplaces would foster that sort of laziness. Quoting Eduardo Aguilar Piaez in Wired UK, if each of us has a voice assistant in our ears, we are likely to give our colleagues less attention. We will need to find ways to counter this,

most likely redesigning parts of the office as voice assistant free zones, where people can talk and socialize, end quote. Or we could just get our walls back. Every couple months, I'm tempted to do a segment about, some recent poll outlining how much people actually hate open office plans or else some study about how open office plans actually harm productivity. Maybe we're headed to that scene that was imagined in 1984 where the book 1984 by the way, where we're all at desks talking into our own personal dictaphones with maybe some sort of cone of silence or something around our heads.

You already are seeing things like cones of silence popping up in our own. offices. I've almost done segments on those as well. Or we could just get our darned walls back. Sometimes my job here is not just to give you the news and the context around the news, but just to keep you up to date, culturally literate almost, in the know. So, and I really want to stress that this last segment is not news, none of the following is news by any stretch of the imagination. But if you've been on the internet at all over the weekend, you might have heard about this. So in the interest of keeping you in the loop, this is the deal about Instagram and the egg. Over the weekend, the image of a single ordinary egg posted by the Instagram account

at World underscore record underscore egg and with the Instagram handle Egg Gang surpassed Kylie Jenner's previous record for the most liked photo on Instagram. As of Sunday morning, the photo of The egg only had 9 million likes, but then in a mere 10 hours, it roared past the image Jenner had posted announcing the birth of her daughter Stormy. That image previously held the Instagram record with more than 18 million likes. As of this morning, the image of the egg had more than 27 million likes. So this egg count, see what I did there, egg count account, only posted the egg on January 4th of this year. but it did so with the message, let's set a world record together

and get the most liked post on Instagram. So, mission accomplished. On Sunday, the account posted, It doesn't end here, though, we're only just getting started. Hashtag egg gang. Kylie Jenner took it in stride, posting a video on Instagram of her

smashing an egg on the pavement. Look, guys, I warned you, none of this is news, but if you just need to know the reference, in case this comes up in conversation in the next couple days, here are the facts as I understand them. BuzzFeed News has been all over this story, of course, and I'm just going to quote here.

BuzzFeed News reached out to the mysterious egg account, and the account holder replied that it was actually being run by Henrietta, a chicken from the British countryside. Henrietta declined a phone interview, but agreed to answer questions via email. Eugene is my egg, Henrietta, the chicken told BuzzFeed News. She said she thought the egg had really taken off because, quote, the power of the egg is strong, end quote.

Henrietta said she decided to start the account after she stopped drinking for dry January, end quote, and said she was home last Friday night when she, quote, read an article regarding the top 20 posts on Insta, Kylie Jenner topped it with 18 million, end quote. Yep, the internet. The only place where stopping drinking somehow makes things more inane and nonsensical. Remember last week when I told you about Alice Financial, that startup that I said was a win-win because it saved workers' money and it saved employers money at the same time? So it seems like one of you reached out to Alice to tell them that they were mentioned on the show and they got in touch over Twitter to thank me for the kind words and I told them what I said on the day. Thank you.

Just make tech that does good stuff in the world to make up for all the bad tech stuff I've had to report on for. for the last 10 months, and I'm more than happy to tell the world about it. And it's a timely reminder to always tell folk about this podcast. It's genuinely useful, whether you're in Silicon Valley or out of Silicon Valley, and you're genuinely some of the most lovely and engaged folk in tech. So, as I always say, let's always be building this mutant podcast army if you know someone in tech or someone who's merely tech curious, and they're not listening to the show. don't be shy spread the word talk to you tomorrow