Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/21 - Email is Back, Baby!

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

The GDPR fines begin, but the EU “link tax” might be in trouble, Uber wants self driving scooters, and why email is back, baby! (Hint: it never left.) Sponsors: Flatironschool.com/podcast Metalab.co Links: French data protection watchdog fines Google $57 million under the GDPR (TechCrunch) Copyright negotiations hit a brick wall in Council (Julia Reda) Uber is exploring autonomous bikes and scooters (TechCrunch) A POKER-PLAYING ROBOT GOES TO WORK FOR THE PENTAGON (Wired) Amazon helped 50,000 SMBs generate $500,000 in sales (Neowin) The Hot New Channel for Reaching Real People: Email (WSJ) 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 from Monday, January 21st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the GDPR fines begin, but the EU's so-called link tax might be in trouble.

Uber wants self-driving scooters and why email is back, baby. Hint, it never left. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So in what I believe is the first action of the new regulatory regime, C-N-I-L. the French data protection watchdog, has fined Google 50 million euro under GDPR for failing to provide transparent, easily accessible info in its data collection policies. Specifically, the regulators said that Google has run a foul of GDPR when users set up a new Android phone and follow Android's specific onboarding process. quoting from TechCrunch, two nonprofit organizations called None of Your Business, N.O.B and La Quadraturedunette had officially filed a complaint back in May of 2018.

NOYB originally filed a complaint against Google and Facebook, so let's see what happens to Facebook next. Under the GDPR, complaints are transferred to local data protection watchdogs, end quote. Which explains why this. landed first with the French data protection watchdog. Google has released a statement saying, quote, people expect high standards of transparency and control from us. We're deeply committed to meeting those expectations and the consent requirements of the GDPR.

We're studying the decision to determine our next steps, end quote. So if you're thinking 50 million euros, that's a drop in the bucket for Google, you're probably right. And in fact, there was news late last week that, the FTC here in this country have met to consider a record fine against Facebook in the U.S. for potentially violating a 2011 consent decree relating to user privacy. So we are talking about a separate regulatory regime and separate issues potentially leading to fines, but it is a similar question of scale because the potential fine, in the case of the FTC,

would only need to be greater than the $22.5 million fine levied against Google. in 2012 in order to be a record fine. As Tony Rahm tweeted about this, quote, you can only do what the law lets you do. The reality is the agency needs an update, end quote. But really the news here is that this is, as I said, maybe the opening salvo of the new regulatory regime coming for tech as we inch towards a new decade.

And $20 million here, 50 million euro there. To paraphrase the famous quote, pretty soon you're talking about real money. And remember, it's when remedies are not made that the escalating fines kick in that can equal up to 4% of a company's global revenue. There's another quote about being done in by a thousand cuts that you're probably familiar with. But speaking of Euro tech regulation, remember that dreaded EU copyright reform that was making its way through the European Parliament, which people feared. could be the death of memes because it includes a so-called link tax as well as upload filters. Well, it looks like that particular proposed regulation has run into some problems that might make the adoption of the reforms later this year less likely.

EU Parliament watcher Julia Reda reports, quote, a total of 11 countries voted against the compromise text proposed by the Romanian Council Presidency earlier this week. Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, and Slovenia, who already opposed a previous version of the directive, as well as Italy, Poland, Sweden, Croatia, Luxembourg, and Portugal. With the exception of Portugal and Croatia, all of these governments are known for thinking that either Article 11 or Article 13, respectively, are insufficiently protective of users' rights.

At the same time, some rightsholder groups who are supposed to benefit from the directive are also turning their backs on Article 13. This surprising turn of events does not mean the end of link tax or censorship machines, but it does make an adoption of the copyright directive before the European elections in May less likely. The Romanian Council Presidency will have the chance to come up with a new text to try to find a qualified majority. But with opposition mounting on both sides of the debate, this is going to be a difficult task indeed, end quote. Reda notes that public attention and active. against the proposed copyright reform is having an effect.

Quoting again, keeping up the pressure in the coming weeks will be more important than ever to make sure that the most dangerous elements of the new copyright proposal will be rejected, end quote. Over the weekend, Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3DR or 3D robotics, made news when he tweeted from the DIY Robocars event that Uber was getting into micromobility in an even deeper way. The company is reportedly hiring for a new micromobility robotics team to develop autonomous scooters and bikes that would be able to drive themselves to customers as well as charging points. The Telegraph also reported that Uber is hiring for a team that would bring, quote, sensing and robotics technologies and, quote, to shared bikes and scooters. Uber declined to comment, but apparently there is a Google forum live on the web for those interested in joining this team. According to Anderson, the team will be under the jump bikes umbrella as opposed to Uber's advanced technologies group, which is Uber's self-driving car division. Quoting from the online forum, the new Mobilities Team at Uber is exploring ways to improve safety, writer experience, and operational efficiency of our shared electric scooters and bicycles through the application of sensing and robotics technologies, Uber wrote.

What's the angle here? Well, remember, shared scooter and bike services are trying to get their unit. economics down to where things make profitable sense. And one part of that is getting scooters that are more durable, longer lasting, and less susceptible to vandalism, as we've discussed. But another angle is the fact that these services have to pay humans to collect the scooters and charge them. Last month, Uber announced a new generation of jump bikes with swappable batteries. So that should help. But as Megan Rose Dickie notes in TechCrunch with autonomous scooters or bikes, quote, you could envision a scenario where Uber deploys freshly charged bikes and scooters

to areas where other vehicles are low on juice. Combine that with swappable batteries. Think about Uber quickly swapping in a new battery once the vehicle makes it back to the warehouse and then immediately redeploying that bike or scooter. And Uber has itself a well-oiled machine that increases vehicle availability and improves the overall writer experience, end quote. Liberatus, which is Latin for balanced, was created by researchers at Carnegie Mellon

who were interested in AI decision-making based on game theory. Liberatus evolved into a poker-playing bot that successfully defeated four top human professional poker players at no-limit Hold'em in 2017. Its victory, the bot won $1.8 million in play money by calculating how humans would respond to its decisions was considered a landmark in AI development,

of a certain stripe. Because unlike games like chess or go, where permutations are specifically defined and all players have equal access to information about the game, because all the pieces are exposed, in no limit hold'em, the computer has to calculate

the odds of both known and unknown unknowns. Now, Liberatus has evolved into Strategy Robot, a startup founded to commercialize and apply the Liberatus bot. And to that end, Strategy Robot has signed a two-year $10 million contract with the U.S. Army's Defense Innovation Unit. Why is the Army interested in this tech? Well, it should be obvious, but in case it's not, let me quote from Wired.

Thomas Sandholm, the founder of Strategy Robot and the Carnegie Mellon professor who led the project, declines to discuss specifics of Strategy Robot's projects, which include at least one other government contract. He says it can tackle simulations that involve making decisions in a simulated physical space, such as where to place military units. The Defense Innovation Unit declined to comment on the project and the Army did not respond to requests for comment. Liberatus' poker technique suggests strategy robot might deliver military personnel some surprising recommendations. Pro poker players who took on the bot found that it flipped unnervingly between tame and hyperaggressive tactics, all the while relentlessly notching up wins as it calculated paths to victory.

It's weird because it doesn't seem that it overwhelms you, but then you look at the score and you realize what's happened, Sanholm says, end quote. Greg Allen, an adjunct fellow at Think Tank, the Center for New American Security, says the type of technology that powered Liberatus could make war gaming and simulation exercises more useful. It's still far from real, but, it's a better proxy for the real world, he says. In all the different ways we talk about Amazon's amazing and seemingly all-encompassing business prowess, it's easy to forget about Amazon's original commerce platform, especially the part of the platform that allows anyone, not just Amazon,

to sell to people. Well, Amazon has announced that it has helped more than 50,000 small and medium-sized businesses do more than half a million dollars in sales on its third-party platform last year. More than that, around 200,000 SMBs generated more than 100,000 in sales, and a smaller undisclosed number of SMBs sold one million or more on the platform in 2018, but that number grew by 20%. Quoting NeoWin, the retail giant said that more than a million businesses that use its platform, operate from the United States, and that as a whole, business on its platform operates from 130 different countries around the world. The firm also reported that SMBs in the U.S. using fulfillment by Amazon more than doubled their export sales. This contributed to

SMBs exceeding one and a half billion in sales during Prime Day in 2018, end quote. If you haven't noticed, email has been on a bit of a comeback lately. Seemingly, everyone has their own newsletter now that they want you to sign up for, whereas a few years ago you might trust everyone to just follow your tweeted links at a decade before that. You would just assume people read your blog. Now newsletters are the thing and not just for attention-hungry journalist types. They're for brands as well. In the mess of social media, email is actually apparently a way to cut through the clutter. It's a way to avoid the algorithm filtering your message. It's guaranteed delivery in an era where that's become iffy.

As a consumer, you have the unsubscribe button, which largely works, so email can be more friendly to you too. Good luck trying to unsubscribe to a Facebook message you no longer want to receive or ads that pop up in your feed. Well, Chris Mims at the Wall Street Journal noticed that email was back, and he dug into the background here, and found details that actually surprised me. For example, did you know that email is a more effective marketing medium? than social is. Quote, email still has the highest return on investment per marketing dollar spent,

according to the Data and Marketing Association. And while Facebook especially has whipsawed marketers with ever-changing rules about how to reach customers and how much Facebook will charge for the privilege, with email a company owns its own lists, end quote. Mims thinks that the fact that email is still an open standard is something we should not overlook. Quoting again, another factor is a dawning awareness that social media may not be particularly good for our mental health or our democracy, leading to a wave of users scaling back and even opting out entirely. The things that drive people to subscribe to and actually open emails are very different from the things that motivate them on social media. Email by contrast can feel healthy, says Robin Sloan, a writer

who started an email newsletter, like a blog delivered to the inbox almost 10 years ago, end quote. MIMS goes on to mention entire businesses like the skim that have been built on top of email. I've said several times on here, I think, and in various other places, one guaranteed killer app all throughout history, no matter what the medium or what the technology era or platform, is simply letting people talk to each other. Think AOL chat rooms in the dial-up era or WhatsApp and Instagram once mobile came around. So it's interesting to see that the original killer app for the,

the entire internet still has the same power it always had, and maybe new powers in interesting ways. That's all for today. There's such a thing as New York City weather Twitter, wherein whenever crazy weather hits us, we can't help telling you all about it incessantly. I'm trying to resist the urge, but it's hard not to fall into that trap. Let's just say I've lived in Detroit. I lived there for five years. And this morning was close to the coldest I've ever been, and I was just walking three blocks to the subway. Warmer tomorrow, I hope. Talk to you then.