Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/03 - Is THIS the End of the BlackBerry Era?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, February 3rd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The end might truly be nigh for Blackberry this time.

Starting point is 00:00:43 Will the coronavirus mean we won't have an Apple event next month after all? Leaked video of the Galaxy Z Flip? Did Jeff Bezos succumb to Elon Musk envy? And why one of the most popular streaming services in the world is one you've probably never heard of? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. is the bell finally tolling for Blackberry. Blackberry, the company says that TCL communications will stop manufacturing Blackberry branded phones on August 31st, 2020 when its licensing deal comes to an end.

Starting point is 00:01:19 TCL is, by the way, entering the smartphone market this year under its own brand, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Announced today on Twitter, BlackBerry Mobile is shutting down sales of its current Android phones on August 31, 2020. This news comes almost two years after the last BlackBerry smartphone was announced, the BlackBerry Key 2L. BlackBerry's 15 minutes of fame in the Android market came with the reveal of the BlackBerry Key 1 in Android smartphone with a smaller display to make room for a full keyboard. That device essentially copied the design of classic Blackberry smartphones but with a more modern design and, of course, Android on board. In its announcement, BlackBerry confirms that all of its releases will continue to be supported by customer service and warranty service, until August 2022.

Starting point is 00:02:04 It's unclear how further Android updates will be handled, if at all, end quote. So is BlackBerry really, really dead this time? It's kind of hard to say. It is a well-known brand, and as these things tend to go, folks do like to come in and use an old brand to get attention for some new device. BlackBerry itself could try to launch something new. But given the lackluster sales, BlackBerrys have had in recent years, one kind of wonders if that will happen anytime soon or at all. One also wonders

Starting point is 00:02:38 what political staffers the world over will do if they no longer have Blackberries. I guess it's time for our daily coronavirus segment. As I believe we said, Apple has been closing its corporate offices and some of its stores in China due to the virus outbreak. But the big question for Apple has really been twofold. Will device production get hit? And also, will sales of devices in mainland China suffer? Well, Apple analyst Ming Chi Kuo thinks so, and he's lowered his Q1 iPhone shipment forecast by 10% to only 36 to 40 million. Quoting Mac rumors. In his research note with TF international securities seen by Mac rumors, Quo added that smartphone shipments in the Chinese market declined by 50 to 60% year over year during the Chinese New Year holiday period, possibly due to declining consumer

Starting point is 00:03:37 confidence in the country stemming from the coronavirus outbreak, end quote. Mac rumors goes on to speculate that the expected launch of the iPhone SE2 could be affected in some way as that lower cost device was supposed to go into production at the start of this month. One wonders if production is going on all cylinders at this point. On the other side of the world, Uber has suspended the accounts of 240 users in Mexico who may or may not have been driven around by two Uber drivers who may or may not have had the coronavirus at the time. So it turns out if you get driven by a suspectedly infected Uber driver, your Uber account

Starting point is 00:04:21 could be suspended in an effort to prevent you from further spreading the virus, quoting Bloomberg. The users suspended had ridden with two drivers who came into contact with a possible coronavirus case, according to a statement posted to the company's Mexican Twitter account. To date, there have been no confirmed cases of the virus in the country. We will keep users and drivers informed with respect to any update of their accounts, the company said in a statement, adding that it will work in a coordinated manner with authorities. Mexico City's health ministry confirmed that an Uber driver had carried a passenger from Los Angeles,

Starting point is 00:04:54 infected with the coronavirus based on information from U.S. authorities. The ministry said that of the suspected cases related to the passenger, hotel personnel, and from the driving company, none have developed symptoms in 10 days since contact. Cases will be monitored for 14 days, a statement added, end quote. At the time I write these words, Microsoft Teams is currently down worldwide. Teams is Microsoft's Slack competitor, and if you try to log in right now, You'll get an error message saying that the program can't connect to Microsoft's servers via HTPS. So, if you have an idea of how these things tend to work, you might be saying to yourself, I wonder if they forgot to renew a certificate.

Starting point is 00:05:42 And well, quote, we've determined that an authentication certificate has expired, causing users to have issues using the service, explains Microsoft's outage notification. We're developing a fix to apply a new certificate to the service, which will remediate. the impact, end quote. This is an embarrassing mistake for Microsoft to make for its flagship Office Hub software, especially as the company has started its own TV commercials for Teams recently. It's surprising to see Microsoft forget to renew a key certificate for teams, especially when the company develops software like System Center Operations Manager to monitor for things like certificate expiration, end quote. So, oops, I guess. IT teams everywhere. You don't have to feel

Starting point is 00:06:27 so bad about your most boneheaded scrub up today. Over the weekend, we saw what purports to be a video leak of the upcoming Galaxy Z-Flip phone. Click through to see the video, quoting the verge. The footage doesn't show a great deal more than what we've already seen in leaked photos and renders. We still can't tell whether the phone is using a new form of ultrithing glass from Samsung, for example. But if you've been wondering how the Z-flip might work out in practice, It may well be of interest. The phone does look like it might be quite a bit easier to slip into a pocket or handbag than pretty much anything else out there, except maybe Motorola's similar upcoming razor, end quote. Well, I'm going to push back on that because I'll say this.

Starting point is 00:07:15 My thinking all along about this phone was, yay, more real estate freed up in my pocket. But looking at the video, this is a wide box when closed. It's chunky. Like it's sort of an enormous thing in the palm. even when folded up. And then unfolded, I mean, that thing is enormous, way, way tall to use, especially with one hand. And the dude in the photo does seem to open it and close it one-handed, but that did not look easy at all. So, I don't know. Might Disney be sitting on another interesting hand to play in the streaming wars?

Starting point is 00:07:58 Disney will be reporting earnings tomorrow, so we might hear some interesting numbers then about things like Disney Plus subscriptions, but also these numbers from Bloomberg are eye-raising, quote, Hulu's domestic subscriptions spiked in the final two months of 2019, fueled by a package that included both Disney Plus and ESPN Plus for a total of $13 a month. Disney's bundling of the three services accounted for a significant share of Hulu sign-ups in 2019, according to Antenna Analytics, a research firm that measures subscriber data for streaming companies. The gains helped Hulu grow twice as fast as Netflix in the U.S. last year, with the service easily surpassing 30 million total subscribers, according to people with knowledge of the numbers.

Starting point is 00:08:44 In the last publicly reported numbers, Disney said Hulu had 28.5 million customers at the end of September, end quote. So might Hulu be Disney's secret weapon in the race to fully replace your TV bundle? The Disney back catalog helps with Disney Plus and ESPN. gives you sports with ESPN Plus, but Hulu can then also go a long way to replacing TV TV with a heck of a lot of the shows that you would expect to be able to watch when you just flip on the switch to, you know, veg out. The problem is that that super bundle pricing can't last forever. So the question would be how many people would stick around once Hulu is priced to stand on its own two feet. Disney has previously said that it expects Hulu to be

Starting point is 00:09:32 profitable in three to four years, and that by that point, it anticipates the service will have 60 million subscribers worldwide. Also from Bloomberg, a behind-the-scenes post-mortem of the whole HQ-2 fiasco for Amazon. According to sources, the whole HQ2 thing might have just been a case of Jeff Bezos being jealous of Elon Musk. Let me quote, the lead to the piece. quote, when Elon Musk secured $1.3 billion from Nevada in 2014 to open a gigantic battery plant, Jeff Bezos noticed. In meetings, the Amazon chief expressed envy for how Musk had pitted five Western states against one another and a bidding war for thousands of manufacturing jobs. He wondered why Amazon was okay with accepting comparatively trifling incentives. It was a theme

Starting point is 00:10:27 Bezos returned too often, according to four people, privy to his thinking. Then in 2017, an Amazon executive sent around a congratulatory email, lauding his team for landing $40 million in government incentives to build a $1.5 billion air hub in Cincinnati. The paltry sum irked Bezos, the people say, and made him even more determined to try something new, end quote. Then from later in the piece, employees with experience negotiating deals around the country anticipated problems,

Starting point is 00:10:53 but their red flags were ignored by those eager to please Bezos with a new playbook for a big win. Secretive and walled off from the rest of the company, according to people familiar with the situation, the HQ2 team members marinated in the headlines in Hoopla and persuaded themselves Amazon would be welcomed anywhere. That blinkered assumption continues to resonate today, not least among city officials across the continent, who felt manipulated by Amazon, according to people familiar with their thinking.

Starting point is 00:11:21 Meanwhile, a bipartisan group of state lawmakers is considering a non-aggression pact to halt the kind of tax incentive bidding war unleashed during the HQ2 process. quote, this entire thing was an ego exercise that blew up in Jeff Bezos's face, says one of the people, end quote. Obviously, it did not turn out well for Amazon. This is a bit of a long read, but it's worth analyzing because if true, it's interesting to see that Amazon was consciously trying to throw its weight around. And one wonders what they learned from it becoming a fiasco. Some of the behind-the-scenes details about how Amazon basically shot itself in the foot, by ignoring the intricacies of New York politics is interesting too.

Starting point is 00:12:06 Politics might be a messy and annoying game to play, but sometimes you can't win if not only do you not play the game, but if you're openly disdainful of the fact that the game even exists. Today I learned that the number two music streaming service globally behind Spotify is not Apple Music or Amazon or anyone you might think of. And actually, when I say that out loud, I'm not sure about framing it as the number two service because Lord knows there's probably some Chinese music streaming service that dwarfs everybody.

Starting point is 00:12:43 So scratch that, but go with me anyway. Let me tell you about a music streaming giant that I had never heard of before today. I'm embarrassed to say. It's called Ghana. It's the most popular music streaming service in India, which has 152 million monthly users, over half of Spotify's global user base, and double Apple Music's global count. quote, Indian consumers are flocking to Ghana, analysts say, because it has been built for them. It has a library of more than 45 million songs, mostly from India, and in more than 20 regional languages,

Starting point is 00:13:14 including auto-tuned Punjabi language pop ballads, Hindi hip-hop, and devotional tunes for the Hindu monkey god Hanuman. While some of its international rivals also boast voluminous libraries of global hits, most lack the depth of regionally specific songs from India that Ghana offers. You have to understand the consumption habits by region and even by city, Ghana chief executive Prashan Agarwal said. Ghana has an edge over international rivals because he said its teams have more local knowledge, conducting research across the country to uncover emerging artists and unlikely listening trends, end quote. It also helps that as Indian consumers come online often for the first time, music is one of the first things they do on their smartphones or whatever.

Starting point is 00:13:59 Indians listen to an average of 21 and a half hours of music a week, which is 20% higher than the global average. Ghana also seems to have a smart pricing scheme that fits the Indian market. There's the expected free version supported by advertising, but then the paid plans start at the equivalent of 17 cents per month. Spotify, by comparison, starts at the equivalent of 80 cents per month. And quoting from the piece one more time, Ghana can charge less in part because, unlike its global rivals, the service doesn't have to worry about undermining its product if it charges significantly less in India than in other markets. Ghana's mostly Indian music is also less expensive to secure the rights for, analysts say. While international players are still newcomers, Ghana is leveraging the trove of data that it is collected on users' listening preferences to recommend new tunes.

Starting point is 00:14:53 Mr. Agarwal said, that is a bonus for first-time music streaming consumers who are unfamiliar with the interface, end quote. And finally today, you might have seen this make its way around the Twitters this weekend. But in case you didn't, you know how things like Google Maps and especially ways use real-time data from users' phones to determine traffic flow, routing drivers around expected slowdowns? I think I've read stories on here before about how in places like L.A. and San Francisco, some residents of certain streets get pissed because they're normally traffic-free side streets sometimes get clogged up because everybody's driving app suddenly routes routes because there's a traffic jam on the highway or something. Well, how's this for a solution?

Starting point is 00:15:46 Quoting Android Authority. Artist Simon Weckert has posted a video on YouTube showing how he managed to hack Google Maps to create virtual traffic jams on the streets of Berlin. For his experiment, Weckert loaded 99 smartphones running Google Maps into a cart. He then had someone wheeled the cart around various streets in Berlin, including outside the Google Office. The phones apparently fooled Google Maps into thinking that there was a high concentration of users on those streets. Because the phones were in a cart, Maps was further tricked into believing that the traffic was slow moving. As a result, the navigation app started showing virtual traffic jams by turning green.

Starting point is 00:16:23 streets to red. You can watch the video to see the trick in action, end quote. Now, since Weckert is an artist, and he's also being sort of mum about the technical details about how he pulled this off. If he did indeed pull this off, there is some question as to whether or not this is just a stunt. But, if true, how's this for a business idea? Traffic jams as a service. Neighborhoods and residents who want to keep your streets from getting clogged up. Forget lawn mowing or paper routes, just pay some local kid to do something like this during daylight hours. Actually, when I lived in New York City the first time in the early 2000s, since I owned my own web business at the time and thus basically worked from home, my neighbors on the Upper West Side paid me to move their cars to the opposite side of good old West 80th Street on street cleaning days.

Starting point is 00:17:23 ever since then I've kind of wondered if dog walking can be a business in the city, why couldn't car moving be a business too? The insurance would probably be insane, but still, Manhattan blocks are long, opposite side of the street, street cleaning laws alternate days. Depending on what you charged, one person could probably handle a single block at a time every day and maybe make it worth their while. Of course, the issue would be getting everybody's car keys, but 10 years from now, when I assume that most cars can be opened via smartphone app, you could, you know, give permission to people for certain time periods. Maybe this was just an idea ahead of its time. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/03 - Is THIS the End of the BlackBerry Era?

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