Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 01/27 - The AI That Spotted the Wuhan Virus Early

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

Vine has a spiritual successor in Byte, the new razr might have “bumps and lumps,” your anti-virus program might be selling all your clicks, Seamless might be inventing restaurants from whole cloth, and the AI algorithm that spotted the Wuhan virus early. Sponsors: Metalab.co MintMobile.com/ride Links: Vine reboot Byte officially launches (TechCrunch) Motorola on the Razr’s folding screen: ‘bumps and lumps are normal’ (The Verge) An AI Epidemiologist Sent the First Warnings of the Wuhan Virus (Wired) YouTube signs exclusive streaming deal for Activision e-sports like Call of Duty and Overwatch (The Verge) Online mattress retailer Casper IPO to raise $182.4 million (CNBC) Leaked Documents Expose the Secretive Market for Your Web Browsing Data (Motherboard) Seamless, Grubhub deliver confusion with mistaken restaurant listings (The San Francisco Chronicle) Alex Danco Tweet Thread 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 ride home for Monday, January 27th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Vine has a spiritual successor in Byte. The new razor might have bumps and lumps. Your Antivirus program might be selling all your clicks. Seamless might be inventing restaurants

from Whole Cloth and the AI algorithm that spotted the Wuhan virus early. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Now, in theory, you've all had all weekend to hear about this and even play with it. But as this is potentially the biggest long-term news of the week, I wanted to make sure that you were at least aware of it. As we have gotten into the modern era of social networks slash messaging platforms, people have long been bemoaning the fact that Vine is not a part of it. That's because a lot of people think that Vine laid the groundwork for the modern social environment, best exemplified by TikTok. Quick history lesson here. Vine was founded in June of 2012. It allowed you to post short looping videos. And before it was even launched, it was acquired by

Twitter. By 2013, Vine was the most used mobile video sharing app in the land and the most downloaded free app in the app store. It reached 200 million active users at its height, and in 2016, Twitter shut it down. Again, given where TikTok is at the moment, lots of people have been wondering how big Vine would be today had it been allowed to live. There's a reason that Twitter until recently had a very bad reputation for products, of course. Well, over the weekend, Vine co-founder Dom Hoffman launched Byte, what can only be described as a true descendant of Vine. Bight is a short form video app on iOS and Android. Here's how TechCrunch describes it, quote, Bight lets you shoot or upload and then share.

six second videos. The tiny time limit necessitates no filler content that's denser than the maximum one-minute clips on TikTok. Bight comes equipped with standard social features like a feed, explore page, notifications, and profiles. For now, though, Bight lacks the remixability, augmented reality filters, transition effects, and other bonus features you'll find in apps like TikTok. What Hoffman hopes will differentiate Bight is an early focus on helping content creators make money, something TikTok and other micro-intertainment apps largely don't offer. The app plans to soon launch a pilot of its partner program for offering monetization options to people proving popular on Byte. When asked if Byte would offer ad revenue sharing, tipping or other options to partners, Hoffman told me that, quote,

we're looking at all of those, but we'll be starting with a revenue share plus supplementing with our own funds. We'll have more details about exactly how the pilot program will work. soon, end quote. And obviously that last part is key. There were so many influencers who got their start on Vine back in the day. So there should be a built-in nostalgia factor for Byte. And today, so many popular creators on apps like TikTok and Snapchat have been forced to pull their audiences over to YouTube or other streaming video platforms just to get paid. TikTok is rapidly working to remedy this, but could that nostalgia factor combined with an easy monetization platform give bite a leg up? Or is this a chicken and egg sort of thing? Is bite too far behind in terms of growing

audience in this modern era that it could have trouble catching up? It is, of course, way too early to even know if bite will prove popular with the type of TikToking teens. It will need in order to be successful, but watch this space. This could either be the birth of the next great platform or else the next path. As of yesterday, the new foldable Motorola Razor is available for pre-sale at a $1,499 price tag, but only as a Verizon exclusive. The Razors are supposed to ship February 6th, though it looks like shipping times are already slipping too later than that on the Verizon store. In conjunction with these pre-orders, Motorola over the weekend posted a video titled

Caring for Razor, which among other things had this disclaimer inside it. Screen is made to bend. Bumps and lumps are normal. Rutro. Bumps and lumps were the first signs that review units were about to catastrophically fail on those troublesome Galaxy Fold phones last year. Motorola seems fairly confident we won't see catastrophic failures this time around with the razor. And the folks that got their hands on the device did not report bubbles or even much of a crease, but that was just a press event hands-on. Still, quoting the verge, as with the Galaxy Fold, there are some Gremlin-esque rules to worry about. Don't get it too wet, and if you do, dry it off quickly with a soft towel, keep it away from sharp objects and close it before you put it in your pocket.

That last rule, close phone before putting in pocket or purse, is a clear sign that the company knows the screen is fragile. It also explicitly warns users to not use a screen protector. As with the Galaxy Fold, it seems likely that the adhesive on most screen protectors would be damaging to the screen, end quote. We should know in a matter of weeks whether or not people are reporting larger issues. But of course, it's also a matter of weeks until we see Samsung's Galaxy unpacked event where we're expecting to see their next generation foldable phones. Also, over the weekend, no doubt you were becoming increasingly aware of the so-called Wuhan coronavirus, if you already weren't aware. Well, what if I told you that AI was the first

possibly to sound the alarm to epidemiologists that something bad was brewing. Blue Dot is a Canadian health monitoring platform that monitors news reports and airline ticketing data to predict the spread of diseases just like this one. According to Wired, Blue Dot had noticed something was going on in Wuhan on December 31st when it first alerted its customers. It was only January 6th when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and January 9th when the World Health Organization notified the public of a possible outbreak. So Blue Dot's clever algorithms had them beat, quoting Wired.

We know that governments may not be relied upon to provide information in a timely fashion, says Cameron Khan, Blue Dot's founder and CEO. We can pick up news of possible outbreaks, little murmurs or forums or blogs, of indications of some kind of unusual event going on, end quote. Khan says the algorithm doesn't use social media postings because that data is too messy, but he does have one trick up his sleeve. Access to global airline ticketing data that can help predict where and when infected residents are headed next. It correctly predicted that the virus would jump from Wuhan to Bangkok, Seoul, Taipei, and Tokyo in the days following its initial appearance, end quote. Khan is apparently an infectious disease specialist before he was an entrepreneur who worked on the 2003 SARS epidemic. Blue Dot was launched in 2014, raised $9.4 million in venture capital and now has 30 employees, a mix of physicians and programmers, who combined to make the natural language processing and machine learning special sauce that the company uses.

Quoting Wired once again, Once the automated data sifting is complete, human analysis takes over, Kahn says. Epidemiologists check that the conclusions make sense from a scientific standpoint, and then a report is sent to government, business, and public health clients. Blue Dot's reports are then sent to public health officials in a dozen countries, including the U.S. and Canada. Also airlines and frontline hospitals where infected patients might end up. Blue Dot doesn't sell their data to the general public, but they are working on it,

Khan says, end quote. Real quick, a couple of follow-ups to some things that we've been discussing this month. First of all, yeah, the game streaming space seems like an absolute free-for-all at the moment with money flying all over the place in every direction. The Verge is reporting that YouTube has gained exclusive streaming rights to Activision Blizzard's big esports events like Overwatch League, which had been Twitch exclusives for the past two years. Quote, video game, publisher Activision Blizzard has entered into a multi-year partnership with Google that will see the Search Giants cloud platform power all of Activision Blizzard's game hosting and other technical needs. But more importantly, as part of the deal, YouTube will become the exclusive streaming

partner for all of the game publishers' big e-sports titles, including the upcoming season of the Overwatch League and the Call of Duty League, which kicks off today in Minneapolis, Minnesota, end quote. Of course, Amazon could handle your back end two, you would think, with AWS. I find it fascinating how this whole game streaming in the watching sense and game streaming in the actual playing sense, things like Stadia, are largely proxy wars for the tech giant's overall cloud computing wars. And yeah, Casper seems to have acknowledged the skepticism that people have voiced about their prospects going forward. Casper Sleep has officially moved forward with its IPO, planning to sell 9.6 million shares at between $17 to $19 a share, raising the company around $182 million.

But that would mean that at the top end of that range, Casper would be worth $768 million below the company's last private valuation of $1.1 billion that it attained last March. So Casper could be an undercorn, quoting Dan Primack in his pro-rata newsletter this morning. But, but, but, the very fact it's launching its roadshow in the face of ongoing skepticism suggests that the macro-IPO chill has thawed, or at least that bankers are willing to take the reputational risk, end quote. Avast is an antivirus program used by hundreds of millions of people. In fact, Avast claims to have more than 435 million active users per month. But an investigation by Motherboard alleges that Avast also has a subsidiary called Jumpshot, which sells internet browsing data to clients like Pepsi, Google, and Microsoft.

The documents that Motherboard got its hands on allegedly show that there is a Jumpshot product called AllClicks Feed, which can basically report on the activity of 100 million devices. And we're talking really granular levels of activity down to the device. vice level with timestamp. Quoting motherboard here. The data obtained by motherboard and PCMag includes Google searches, lookups of locations and GPS coordinates on Google Maps, people visiting companies' LinkedIn pages, particular YouTube videos, and people visiting porn websites.

It is possible to determine from the collected data what date and time the anonymized user visited U-Porn and Porn Hub. And in some cases, what search term they entered into the porn site and which specific video they watched. Although the data does not include personal information such as users' names, it still contains a wealth of specific browsing data, and experts say it could be possible to de-anonymize certain users. In a press release from July, Jumpshot claims to be, quote, the only company that unlocks WaldGarden data and seeks to, quote, provide marketers with deeper visibility into the entire online customer journey. Jumpshot has previously discussed some of its clients publicly,

but other companies mentioned in Jumpshot documents include Expedia, IBM, Intuit, which makes TurboTax, L'Oreal, and Home Depot. Employees are instructed not to talk publicly about JumpShot's relationships with these companies, end quote. So in other words, the documents suggest that Avast collects user data in the normal run of business of providing antivirus protection. Then it gives that data to its subsidiary Jumpshot, which sells products based on, that data to jumpshot clients. It seems that making money selling antivirus protection is apparently not very lucrative as a business anymore. You know what is more lucrative?

Selling user data. And any user. In fact, it seems like a lot of a vast users are on some version of a free plan. But data is data, right? The new oil, as people say, quoting again. One company that purchased the all-click's feed is New York. based marketing firm Omnicom Media Group, according to a copy of its contract with Jumpshot. Omnicom paid Jumpshot $2,075,000 for access to data in 2019, the contract shows.

It also included another product called Insight Feed for 20 different domains. The fee for data in 2020 and 2021 is listed as $2,225,000 and $2,275,000, respectively, the document adds, end quote. Let me just quote from a section of the internal jump shot documents that motherboard got their hands on. It seems like Avast is not even trying to hide what they're actually doing here. Additional data points like timestamps and geography based on IP address are collected for free in the sense that the data data, if that's an error, it's not mine, collection method automatically accounts for the fact that we need to know those things. and every click record has those elements attached. The dataset is almost like an Apache log for the entire internet for every device in the panel, end quote.

One little wrinkle here. Just last week, Avast began asking its existing free users to opt into data collection for the first time, which, if true, that's quite an oversight. So once again brings to mind the adage, if a product or service is free, then the product is actually probably you. Finally today, I saw this make the rounds on Twitter over the weekend and wondered if an actual story would come out of it. There was a tweet storm from Pim Tekemoan Vivit, owner of Michelin-rated Thai restaurant Kin Kao in San Francisco. Apparently, a customer called the restaurant

asking why his seamless delivery from Kim Kao was 45 minutes late. Takamawan Vivit, told the customer, he must be confused because Kinkau doesn't do delivery. So what are you doing on Seamless? The customer asked. Tecamoan Vivit looked up her restaurant on Seamless after she got off the phone, and sure enough, it was there, even though she had never listed it on Seameless. Not only was it there, it was offering delivery, and in fact, it was offering a full menu that Kincao doesn't even serve. Well, sure enough, the San Francisco Chronicle thought, it up and Grubhub slash Seamless offered a response, quote,

the company recently started adding other restaurants to its sites without partnership. When it finds restaurants that are in high demand, it said. In those cases, someone from the company orders the food ahead or at the restaurant and a driver is sent to pick it up, it added. Quote, Kin Cow was one of those restaurants we added to our marketplace for this initiative to include more restaurants on our platform and unfortunately re-reference the incorrect menu for this restaurant. As soon as they reached out to us expressing they'd like to be removed and flagged the incorrect menu, we honored that request. They are no longer on our marketplace,

Grubhub said, end quote. So we know that these food delivery platforms have been accused before of registering false domain names and setting up websites for restaurants with similar phone numbers even, just to gin up delivery business and maybe get the restaurants to become partners. I've actually done a segment on. that on the show. But this is something entirely new, maybe. And if it is new, it has some interesting implications picked up upon by Alex Danko in the following tweet thread, which I will quote in its entirety because I'm so fascinated by this. This is actually why I wanted to do this story in the first place, Alex's tweets. The implication is, what if you could set up a

business impersonating a restaurant? No reason why that's not possible at this point. Point. Should be noted that Alex was originally responding to Tekumwan Vivit's original tweets, quote, Interesting implication of this story, if true, which I have no reason to believe it's not. The idea of counterfeit food. Two parts to the allegation here. Number one, food delivery companies have become rife with fake landing pages and fake profiles for capturing demand. This we already know. And also, two, cloud kitchens are now actually cooking and shipping the food to customers, passing it off as if it's real. Last year, I wrote a post about this big generational trend of cooking as a service, the increasing degree to which we're outsourcing food prep at all ends of the income spectrum,

fast food, prepared food, restaurants, delivery. There are two basic components to cooking as a service. There's the fungible commodity side of it, ingredients, kitchen, labor, etc. As undifferentiated. And then there's the differentiated, branded part of it, special recipes, good reputation, high-quality cooking. If part one is fungible, and if part two is where the margin is, but the customer has

low visibility or doesn't care about the production process, then counterfeit food makes total sense. The new reality of internet food delivery makes it easy to steal IP and brand and then monetize it. This reminds me of this question from at HIPCity Reg. What would LimeWire be built around today? He's referring to the file sharing site, LimeWire from the heyday of BitTorrent and the like.

Quoting again, counterfeiting in online marketplaces is obviously not new. Amazon, etc., fight the problem constantly, but this feels a lot like illegal file sharing but for real-world goods and services. Prepared food as the new MP3 file. I'm sure you might think, I'd never fall for this. Are you sure? Like, how actually sure are you that your most recent Thai food order or whatever actually came from where you thought it did? If food can be counterfeited and enough people don't notice or care, what else? Post-script to this. If you want to learn about a system, you can uncover a lot by asking, what is the fraud that happens? How does it work? Why does it work? It's a great way to get to the heart of things, end quote.

That is all for today. My thanks to those of you who tweeted at me about the stay app. I installed the stay app, and it has solved all of my external monitor problems that I told you about. Absolutely brilliant. Thank you, hive mind. Talk to you tomorrow.