Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/01 - Gmail Was the ONLY Good April Fools' Joke

Episode Date: April 1, 2019

Gmail celebrates an appropriate April Fool’s anniversary, the winners from the Lyft IPO, Mark Zuckerberg asks for regulation and food tech has delivered a meatless Whopper™. Sponsors: PaintYourLife.com: Text the word TECH to 48-48-48 Metalab.co Links: Google launches Gmail message scheduling and expands Smart Compose to more devices and languages (VentureBeat)  New Facebook tool answers the question 'Why am I seeing this post?' (TechCrunch) The biggest winners of Lyft’s $24 billion IPO (Quartz) The CEO behind 'Fortnite' says it's 'evolving beyond being a game' and explains the company's ambitious vision (Business Insider) Mark Zuckerberg: The Internet needs new rules. Let’s start in these four areas. (The Washington Post) Citizen Zuck: The making of Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (CNET) Burger King begins selling the meatless Impossible Whopper (The Verge) Subscribe to the Ad-Free Feed! 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 from Monday, April 1st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Gmail celebrates an appropriate April Fool's anniversary.

The winners from the Lyft IPO, Mark Zuckerberg asks for regulation, and Food Tech has delivered a meatless whopper. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I've made it very clear how I feel about April Fool's gags generally, and I've mentioned that Google is probably the worst offender in tech. Today, for example, they put out an Easter egg in Google Maps. You can play the game Snake there. Or in Google Calendar, you can play a game that's sort of like Space Invaders. And actually, there are several websites that are tracking and keeping a running tally of the various multiple April Fool's jokes that Google is springing today. But 15 years ago, Google had an April Fool's announcement that was one of the most monumental tech product announcements of all time.

credit due. That was Gmail. When Google announced a web-based email service with one gigabyte of free storage per user, it felt like an April Fool's joke. I can't express to you how unbelievably generous that was at the time. Compared to the other storage options available at the time, I remember not being entirely sure if it was a joke or not. And Gmail was one of the first to use Ajaxi goodness to become one of the first online

apps that felt and functioned like a native app but in a web browser. It was all sort of magical at the time, so it felt kind of unreal. To celebrate Gmail's 15th birthday today, Google launched some new bells and whistles for Gmail, including email scheduling. And if you're on Android, you're getting even more. Quoting Venture Beat. Arguably, the biggest of the new Gmail features is one that allows users to write an email and schedule it to be sent at a later time.

This will probably be particularly useful for companies as users can schedule an email to arrive during the recipient's business hours in any time zone. Interestingly, Google is also pitching this feature as part of the recent digital well-being trend that has led all the major technology companies, including Google, to introduce features that support switching off, end quote. Now, when you go to click the send button on an email in Gmail, you'll see a little up arrow next to the button. that will allow you to schedule the send. There's a few preset options, but you can also manually choose a time that you want. Now for the Android bonuses, Smart Compose is also coming to all Gmail app users on Android,

and it's now available in four new languages, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, quoting from VentureBeat again. Google is also making SmartCompose more useful by enabling it to adapt to an individual user's style. If a manager prefers a casual writing style when addressing their department, for example, Gmail will observe this and may suggest, hey, team, rather than a more formal greeting. Additionally, Smart Compose will also now suggest a subject line for an email based on the content of the message that has been written, end quote.

Facebook has announced an interesting new feature as well. Not an April Fool's Day thing at all. It's called, Why Am I Seeing This Post, a feature to help. users better understand and control what they see posted from friends, pages, and groups inside the news feed, quoting TechCrunch. Users will be able to access why am I seeing this post as a drop-down menu in the right-hand corner of posts from friends, pages, and groups in their newsfeed that displays information about how its algorithm decided to rank the post. The same menu will also include links to personalization options including see first, unfollow, news feed preferences,

and privacy shortcuts. The company's blog. blog posts said that during our research on why am I seeing this post, people told us that transparency into news feed algorithms wasn't enough without corresponding controls, end quote. If this all sounds similar to Facebook's why am I seeing this ad feature, then you've been paying attention, quoting from Facebook's blog post announcing why am I seeing this post. Quote, we're also making improvements to why am I seeing this ad, a tool we launched back in 2014. We've received valuable feedback over the years that has helped us expand the information we share with people about the ads they see, end quote.

Lyft has had a bit of a bumpy second day of trading on public markets at the time of this writing. Lyft's stock is down more than 10% approaching its original IPO price. I mean, that can happen after an IPO, a bit of settling. But I don't want to focus on that. Instead, I want to look at who made bank off of Lyft's IPO. last week. First, Lyft co-founder and CEO Logan Green's stake was worth $665 million. At the close of trading on Friday, co-founder and President John Zimmer's stake was worth $452 million. But of course, that's not all Silicon Valley looks for, of course. A larger parlor game involves figuring out

which investors made out, and for how much, quoting quotes, Japanese internet and electronics company Rakuten, Lyft's single largest shareholder, finished the day with $2.46 billion worth of Class A common stock. General Motors and Fidelity followed with $1.46 billion and $1.45 billion worth of stock, respectively. Alphabet's lift stake was worth only $924 million at the $72 IPO price, but the first day gain pushed that up to $1 billion, end quote. Also notable Andresen Horowitz's stake came in at $1.18 billion. Of course, there is a customary lockup period that insiders like these have to observe.

It will be 180 days before they can sell their shares. And as Quartz notes, quote, a lot can happen in 180 days. Meal kit company Blue Apron, for example, went public in June 2017 at $10 a share. By the time the bulk of its lockup period for pre-IPO shareholders expired, the company's stock price had tumbled nearly 60% to $4.3.3, end quote. Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney sat down with Business Insider to talk about how Epic's smash hit Fortnite is fitting in with the product that Epic used to be best known for, the Unreal Engine. Quote, the big idea, says Sweeney, is that Epic views Fortnite as sort of the ultimate expression of what the Unreal Engine is capable of. Its graphics and cross-platform support, sure, but also its ability to support large-scale online events like the massively popular marshmallow concert, which attracted 10 million players. On the other side of the coin, Sweeney says that Fortnite's creative mode, where players work together to build rather than battle, has a touch.

attracted 100 million players since it launched in December. Sweeney says that he sees this creative mode as an extension of the Unreal Engine, a version that's super easy to use for all players, end quote. So what's notable is that that's the first time numbers surrounding the creative mode have been revealed, and if they're accurate, they're super impressive. Well, actually, don't let me just say that. We're a digital ecosystem company, Sweeney said. Fortnite is the 250 million user version of the tool, which is a game and also a creative platform for 100 million people for building content,

which is an impressive number and bigger than any game engine by far, end quote. For a weekend, there sure was an unusual amount of tech news made this past weekend, so I want to quickly summarize some of it to keep you in the loop. On Saturday in an open letter published in the New Zealand Herald, Facebook CEO, Cheryl Sandberg broke Facebook's silence surrounding the recent Christchurch mass shootings. Quote, many of you have also rightly questioned how online platforms such as Facebook were used to circulate horrific videos of the attack, Sandberg wrote. We are committed to reviewing what happened and have been working closely with the New Zealand police to support their response, end quote. And in the Washington Post, Mark Zuckerberg wrote an op-ed with the title,

The Internet needs new rules. Let's start in these four areas. In essence, Zuckerberg called for government help in the following arenas. Harmful content, election integrity, privacy, and data portability. Quoting from the op-ed directly. Every day, we make decisions about what speech is harmful, what constitutes political advertising, and how to prevent sophisticated cyber attacks. These are important for keeping our community safe, but if we were starting from scratch, we wouldn't ask companies to make these judgments alone.

I believe we need a more active role for governments and regulators. By updating the rules for the Internet, we can preserve what's best about it, the freedom for people to express themselves and for entrepreneurs to build new things, while also protecting society from broader harms, end quote. So over the course of the weekend, a lot of the reactions online ranged from Greg Green. tweet, quote, this op-ed appears to run 600 words or so, but one can boil it down to just five. Please don't break us up, end quote. To Michael Arrington's quote, quote, when a large company calls for regulation, what they are really requesting are regulatory costs that serve as barriers to entry, protecting them from upstart competitors. It means nothing else ever, end quote. Harry Siegel agreed, tweeting, first, fight regulation tooth and nail.

then embrace it and try to pull the ladder up on your competitors end quote but i do find myself wondering how close taylor hayes's tweet might be to the truth quote cynical take this would shift future blame of failure away from facebook and onto government you set the wrong standards optimistic take facebook honestly hates wandering in the dark and getting hate regardless if they turn left or right the game needs rules end quote. Honestly, it's easy to be glib about Facebook and about Zuckerberg in general, but they are people at the end of the day, and they are probably a lot of people inside Facebook tired of being stuck on this current treadmill. I find myself thinking a lot about this Richard Nieva piece that was a profile of Zuckerberg from CNET early last year, quoting from the lead paragraphs. There's a story about Mark Zuckerberg visiting his hometown of Dobbs Ferry, New York. A few years ago he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, allegedly walked into Yuri's Barbershop, a four-chair parlor with a blue awning over the doorway and a neon open sign buzzing in the window.

The shop sits in a brick building at the end of Cedar Street, one of the main drags in town. Zuckerberg, who grew up in the sleepy town about 25 miles north of New York City, was supposedly visiting from California. Yuri Katiev, who claims to have been his high school barber, says he was excited to see his old regular. The 50-year-old immigrant from Uzbekistan tells me he asked Dobbs Ferry's most famous son about what else? Facebook. It's okay. People give me s over it now, Katiev says Zuckerberg told him. It's not easy to control now because it's too much, Katiev tells me Zuckerberg said. It's too big. Great story. But Zuckerberg says it's not true. Three days after telling Zuckerberg's representatives that we'd spoken to his barber, Zuckerberg says he doesn't know Katyev and never visited his barbershop. Katiev, who proudly posed for photos in his shop,

swears the visit really happened, end quote. So, possibly dubious anecdote, but for all of the tendency we have to ascribe the pivot to privacy to some sort of six-dimensional chess move on Zuckerberg's part to avoid being broken up or to skate to where the puck of social media is going, I have to believe there has to be a large degree of Facebookers just genuinely being tired of catching S for everything they do. So they're trying to change things on a fundamental level to catch less S. It really might be simple as that to a large degree. And also this weekend, in The Daily Beast, Gavin DeBecker, Jeff Bezos's security chief and investigator to the stars, said that his investigation surrounding that whole National Enquirer, Bruhaha, has concluded with high confidence that Saudi Arabia, quote, had access to Bezos's phone and gained private information, end quote, quoting directly from De Becker in the piece.

Experts with whom we consulted confirmed New York Times reports on the Saudi capability to, quote, collect vast amounts of previously inaccessible data from smartphones in the air without leaving a trace, including phone calls, texts, emails, end quote. and confirming that hacking was a key part of the Saudis, quote, extensive surveillance efforts that ultimately led to the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Some Americans will be surprised to learn that the Saudi government has been intent on harming Jeff Bezos since last October when the Post began its relentless coverage of Keshoggi's murder. The Saudi campaign against Bezos has recently been reported by CNN International, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and others, end quote. A lot of people over the weekend were speculating.

about how the phone of the richest person in the world could have been penetrated. Sharam Krishnan tweeted, quote, On Bezos's phone, the current speculation is that for such an attack to work, they probably involve a zero-day exploit plus malware, assuming iOS, by NSO or someone similar. Curious to hear the security folks here, what are other ways this could have happened, end quote. To which, former Facebook security chief, Alex St. Hamos responded, quote, there isn't enough in the story to go on, and several of the quotes are clearly from non-experts and can't be parsed. For normal people, I would say zero-day is a paranoid

fantasy and assume credential reuse or fishing. For MBS versus the world's richest man, anything is on the table. Amazon security team is highly competent, and I expect Bezos is paranoid enough not to fall for the normal traps. Wouldn't be crazy for a CEO to have a secret personal phone that isn't managed or secured, though, end quote. Finally, today, Burger King has begun selling a meatless version of the Whopper. It's called the Impossible Whopper, and it is already available at 59 Burger King locations in the St. Louis area starting today. Burger King says if the test goes as intended, it will bring the meatless burger to all 7,200 U.S. locations. Quoting from The Verge,

Despite the fact that the Impossible Whopper has 15% less fat and 90% less cholesterol than a standard whopper, Burger King Chief Marketing Officer Fernando Machado claims that neither customers nor employees can tell the difference. The meat-free burger will cost customers about $1 more than the beef version. It will still be topped with mayonnaise, making it unsuitable for vegans. The meat-free patty used in the Impossible Whopper is produced by Impossible Foods. The company's Impossible Burger is already available at White Castle. It uses an identical recipe to the other burger chain. It's based on the use of hemi, which is derived from soybean roots,

although it's been shaped to resemble Burger King's normal patties, end quote. I feel like food tech is another tech segment we've not spoken much about on this show. Impossible Foods is a startup that wants to reduce the world's dependence on animal agriculture. For healthier diets, for reasons of reducing greenhouse gases, if you've ever heard the numbers on the carbon footprint of a pound of beef agriculture. It's amazing. But also, of course, for ethical reasons. Yeah, so the other thing we missed over the weekend,

the Apple air power is no more. It is deceased. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. For a raft of life, to paraphrase Monty Python, it is an X Apple product. actually an un-Apple product because it never even came to be. And even my vain hopes of an April Fool's gag did not come to pass today. So, I don't know, y'all.

Sometimes the laws of physics can't be overcome, and they can't even be bent by any reality distortion fields. Rest in peace, Apple Airpower, we hardly knew ye. You were officially the oddest Apple product not quite launched in quite some time. Talk to you tomorrow.