Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/13 – Back To The iPhone 5 Design Future?

Episode Date: April 13, 2020

Deeper dives into that Google/Apple contact tracing project, solid rumors about the new iPhone design, the telecom industry might lose $25 billion dollars this year and international roaming charges are to blame, and an open source live streaming and video streaming app that can help you Twitch and YouTube better, without being beholden to their tools. Sponsors: Harrys.com/techmeme F5.com/ride Links: @moxie Tweet Thread How Apple and Google are tackling one of the toughest parts about tracking COVID-19 exposures (The Verge) NHS phone app holds key to lifting UK’s coronavirus lockdown (The Times (UK)) Apple Plans iPad-Like Design for Next iPhone, Smaller HomePod (Bloomberg) SoftBank Group forecasts $7-bn full-year net loss (Yahoo Finance) Son’s $2 Billion Guarantee at Risk as Virus Hits SoftBank Star (Bloomberg) Fall of the roaming empire: telecom groups face revenue loss as travel collapses (Financial Times) As YouTube Traffic Soars, YouTubers Say Pay Is Plummeting (OneZero) ‘It’s still niche’: Esports see audience surge, more tepid ad demand (Digiday) Anyone's a Celebrity Streamer With This Open Source App (Wired) 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 13th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Deeper dives into that Google-Apple-Apple-Contact tracing project. Solid rumors about the new iPhone design. The telecom industry might lose $25 billion this year and international roaming charges are to blame. And an open-source live-streaming and video streaming app that can help you Twitch and YouTube better without being beholden to their tools. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The chatter and analysis of Google and Apple stepping in to provide a technological solution for the contact tracing. That'll be necessary for the next phase of the coronavirus crisis continued all weekend.

And we got some new details from the companies about how this all will work. Apple, for example, says that the anticipated apps can include duration of proximity as a vector when deciding what actually constitutes a proximity event. thereby hopefully limiting false positives. Signal creator, Moxie Marlinspike, explained further how this all might work in practice. Quote, once a day your device derives a new key, a daily tracing key. It then uses that to derive a new proximity ID every time your device's Bluetooth address changes every 15 minutes or so, which is broadcast to nearby Bluetooth sensors.

Your device then keeps track of all proximity. IDs it sees. If someone test positive and they choose to publish their previously secret daily tracing keys, your device frequently downloads all published daily tracing keys and KDFs to see if they match recorded proximity IDs. So, first obvious caveat is that this is private, or at least not worse than BTLE, until the moment you test positive. At that point, all of your BTLE MAC addresses over the previous period become linkable. Why do they change to begin with? Because tracking is already a problem. So it takes BTLE privacy a step back. I don't see why all of the existing beacon tracking tech wouldn't incorporate this into their stacks. At that point, ad tech at a minimum probably

knows who you are, where you've been, and that you are COVID-19 positive. Second caveat is that it seems likely location data would have to be combined with what the device framework gives you. Publish keys are 16 bytes, one for each day. If moderate numbers of smartphone users are infected in any given week, that's hundreds of megabytes for all phones to download. That seems untenable. So to be usable, publish keys would likely need to be delivered in a more targeted way, which probably means location data, end quote. And as Casey Newton says, this also raises the question, quote, what are the circumstances during the pandemic where people are, one, within 30 feet of you for two, five minutes or more, that three, you don't really know? If you knew them well,

you would probably also find out that they had COVID-19, right? Some suggestions I've heard today, grocery store workers, people waiting in long lines for things like entry to grocery stores, warehouse workers, and mass transit. As cities begin to reopen, more use cases might emerge as well, but it does seem like a passive system that works to inform people in those situations about potential exposures could offer at least some level of protection. The question is whether the system ultimately generates more signal than noise, whether Bluetooth finds more true positives than false ones, end quote. The site little blue touch paper says this, quote, the real killer is likely to be the interaction between privacy and economics. If the apps are voluntary, nobody has an incentive to use them, except tinkerers and people who are,

who religiously comply with whatever the government asks. If uptake remains at 10 to 15% as we've seen in Singapore, it won't be much use and will need to hire more contact tracers instead. Apps that involve compulsions such as those for quarantine geo-fencing will face a more adversarial threat model, and the same will be true in spades for any electronic immunity certificate. There, the incentives to cheat will be extreme and we might be better off with paper serology test certificates, like the yellow fever vaccination certificates you needed for the tropics back in the good old days when you could actually go there, end quote. Nonetheless, the Times of London is reporting that NHSX, the UK Health Services Technology

arm, is working on a Bluetooth-based contact tracing app with Google and Apple at, quote, breakneck speed, end quote. Sources are telling Mark Gurman and Debbie Wu that Apple is planned. an iPad Pro-like design for the new iPhones that are slated to arrive later this fall, i.e., they're going to be all flat edges and maybe have a smaller notch at the top. Also, German and Wu think that a smaller, cheaper home pod is coming. And of course, those Apple tags we've been hearing so much about, quote, this year's successors to the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max will be joined by two lower-end models to replace the iPhone 11.

At least the two high-end devices will have flat stainless steel edges instead of the current curve design, as well as more sharply rounded corners like the iPad Pro introduced in 2018. Reminiscent of the iPhone 5 design, the new handsets will have flat screens rather than the sloping edges on current models, said the people asking not to be identified because the plans aren't public. The upcoming iPhone Pro models will include three cameras on the back, while the lower-end phones will continue to have two cameras, as with the current lineup. Apple will add the 3D LiD LiDR system that debuted with the iPad Pro in March to its top tier devices, setting the stage

for advances in augmented reality applications. The highest end new iPhone is set to have a screen slightly larger than the 6.5 inch panel on the iPhone 11 Pro Max. Apple is investigating removing the cutout at the top of the display for the selfie camera and face ID sensors in future designs, and it's likely to reduce that notch in size with this year's models. All the phones are planned to include a significant upgrade to the processor with an emphasis on speeding up artificial intelligence and AR tasks, people familiar with the devices said, end quote. SoftBank is forecasting a $7 billion net loss for the year ending March

due to, of course, coronavirus issues, but also because, of course, those losses related to WeWork are finally coming due. SoftBank overall says it is anticipating an operating loss in the neighborhood of $12.5 billion, but just as concerning, bills from some of those high-flying deals made during the pre-WeWork pre-Corona era are also coming due. For example, the founder of Oyo, that huge startup in India that was heavily backed by SoftBank, apparently borrowed $2 billion to buy Oyo shares for himself at the same time its valuation was soaring. The loans, were even personally guaranteed by Masayoshi Son.

And now, that's inevitably leading to something of a mess, quoting Bloomberg. Just nine months ago, Masayoshi Son publicly declared Ritesh Agarwal, one of the star entrepreneurs backed by his Softbank group. The Japanese billionaire boasted that Agarwal's Oyo Hotels and Homes was poised to overtake the biggest hotel chains in the world just a few years after its founding. It's unimaginable, Son said on stage at Soap. off-bank world in Tokyo. At 25, he's going to be the world's biggest hotel king, end quote. Today, Oyo is freezing operations around the world and furlowing thousands of employees as it

struggles to survive the coronavirus pandemic. Travel has slammed to a halt, leaving hotel rooms empty and losses rising, end quote. Because Agarwal was buying stock in his own company at what was once a $10 billion valuation, well, you know, things are looking a little bit different now, quoting again. Agarwal could be in trouble soon if he faces a margin call, said Justin Tang, head of Asian research at United First Partners. He might need to sell shares at a massive discount, end quote. Sahn vowed after WeWork that he wouldn't bail out any more startups, but concerns have lingered and weighed on soft bank's share price. Oyo would be complicated because Sons' personal financial interests, as a guarantor of Argoal's loans, would be somewhat different from

softbanks. The Japanese company's board may ultimately have to get involved if softbank has to determine whether or not to rescue Oyo. Quote, an indefinite furlough must mean Oyo's earnings and cash flow have deteriorated extremely, said Dasuki Sekhi, Chief Executive Officer at IB Research and Consulting in Japan, end quote. Sort of a roundup here of COVID-related impact case studies in digital media. First, analysts are saying the telecom industry could lose 25. billion dollars in revenue just this year. Why? Because it's not like we're all canceling our cell phone plans right now. However, it seems that roaming fees are a bigger component of telecom revenues than I knew. And, you know, international travel has collapsed, so there goes those revenues. And meanwhile,

YouTube viewing numbers are up, right? People tuning in from home. Everyone's streaming all day long. but some YouTube creators are reporting that they are seeing advertising rates dropping by as much as 50% even as viewership rates are indeed rising. This is from 1-0. While boredom-induced stay-at-home orders may be good for YouTube channel traffic increasing by 15% according to the New York Times, YouTubers say that the rates companies pay to advertise on their videos are dropping significantly. That means that despite increased audiences, some YouTubers are making less money. Data from the Interactive Advertising Bureau or IAB, an advertising industry body suggests that one in four media buyers and brands have paused all advertising for the first half of 2020, and a further 46% have adjusted their spending downwards. Three quarters say the coronavirus will be more damaging for the ad industry than the 2008-2009 financial crisis.

That means fewer ads for Big Macs on TV and in newspapers, but it also means advertisers are less likely to compete for the pre-roll ad. that usher you toward your next YouTube video. Digital ad spending is down by a third, according to the IAB, a slightly less painful drop than the traditional media's 39% cut, but still damaging. YouTubers are reporting anywhere from 30 to 50% declines in their CPM rates, or the amount YouTube receives for every thousand views of an advertisement served against a video. YouTube takes that money, keeps 45% for itself, and gives 55% to creators. Roberto Blake, a YouTuber who also advertises his social media consultancy business through social media ads,

says he has seen a 10% drop in his CPMs to around $20. But he says other YouTubers have it worse. Quote, people I know are going down from $8 to $5.50. I'm seeing people go down from $12 to $4, end quote. Okay, then, what about e-sports and video game streaming? Yeah, well, it turns out those industries might not be mature. enough to capitalize on what could be the moment that e-sports should be exploding. This is Dijaday. Viewership of e-sports may be booming right now, but the dramatically slowed ad market has made capitalizing on that audience difficult. Twitch, for example, racked up 1.1 billion hours watched last month, the largest amount of views in the gaming platform's nine-year history. Even esports upstarts have enjoyed bumper audiences in the absence of live professional sports,

Formula One's debut Esports Virtual Grand Prix attracted 3.2 million online viewers, which peaked at around 359,000 concurrent streams across YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook when it ran two weeks ago. Usually, audience shifts like these are catnip for advertisers. The coronavirus, however, has thrown up an unusual set of issues for them. Quote, while e-sports is more mainstream than it has ever been, it's still a big niche at this point for many of our clients, said Adam Schwartz, director of video investments for sports at Horizon Media. Most of the advertisers we're working with are taking their dollars and parking it to the side while they wait for the professional sports leagues to provide some sort of direction

on when their live sports will return before they make any decisions on how to spend that money, said Michael Newman, managing partner at Scout Sports and Entertainment, a division of Horizon Media, end quote. And finally today, in this new age of video streaming, over the weekend I learned about OBS Studio, which is an open source desktop app alternative for live streaming and video recording that not only allows you to do your own thing

without being beholden to any of the major platforms, but actually, according to Wired, has more advanced features than the tools offered by, say, Twitch or YouTube. OBS stands for Open Broadcaster Software Studio, and it's not just for live streaming. quote, Bastion Beckold teaches computer science at Jade University in Germany, and like many teachers around the world, he is producing video lessons for his students. He turned to OBS Studio to record lessons because the app makes it easy to hide and unhide parts of his screen, which enables him to show students a problem and then unveil the solution without doing any video editing, saving him time. Quote, I came into this not knowing what was possible and OBS really works well, he says.

Even a complex setup was fairly straightforward to create, end quote. OBS studio creator Hugh Jim Bailey estimates that the software is probably used by tens of millions of people based on the number who download updates. The pandemic has likely doubled interest in the tool, Bailey says, with about 320,000 unique visitors a day now coming to the OBS Studio website. That's not counting variants of OBS Studio like StreamLabs OBS, which is based on the original project's code, but developed separately. Streaming platforms, Twitch, Facebook, and YouTube include links to OBS. B.S Studio in their resources for live streamers. Bailey created OBS Studio in 2012 after years of trying to break into the video game development industry to no avail. It didn't work out, he says. The industry is way too competitive and brutal. I was 30 years old and living with my father and needed to try something new,

end quote. Bailey was a fan of Starcraft and loved watching people play the game on Twitch. He wanted to start his own StarCraft live stream but couldn't find any free open source live streaming tools. I was the sort of person who would build his own tools just for fun, he says. I thought it was a cool opportunity to do open source for the first time because I really loved open source software, end quote. Bailey developed a prototype of OBS Studio and posted it to Reddit and a StarCraft Forum. Soon, other programmers were pitching in to help develop the software, and thus OBS Studio grew alongside the live streaming movement. Today, the project brings in enough from donations and sponsorships from companies like Twitch and Facebook.

that Bailey is able to work on the software full-time. Quote, Twitch values are third-party developers and is always looking for ways to support streamer tools, a Twitch spokesperson said in a statement. We support OBS to help ensure they have support to maintain, manage the project, and work on important features, end quote. I finally caught up this weekend on that Picard show, and frankly, it wasn't as bad as I feared it would be,

or maybe I'm just hungry for some comfort food at the moment, because we watched the most recent little women over the weekend as well, and it was a friggin' masterpiece. So, so good. That might end up being comfort food for me for the rest of my life. And also, comfort food for the kids. We finally watched Spider-Man Far From Home. Here's Max's review. Mixed on walls, and he does shoot spiders and trap bad guys with his spiders,

and he suits his Pirabes to To To climb other building To stay on the building And What's Spider-Man's other name?

Um Peter Parker And who's Spider-Man's enemy Doc Ock Doc Ock? Are you the real Spider-Man? Do you have a Spider-Man outfit?

It's costume and Spider-Man Fliper's and the Spider-Man. Where's your Spider-Man mask? It's lost. And also my Spider-Man mask is lost, so we can find it another day. Yeah. All right. Say bye-bye, Max. Bye.