Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 06/17 – The 5G iPhones Might Be Both Bigger and Smaller

Episode Date: June 17, 2019

The 5G iPhones might be both bigger and smaller, both Huawei and the chip industry prepare for tough times, Genius says it caught Google red-handed, is the US making a big 5G mistake and what exactly is farming-as-a-service? Sponsors: Castro Linkedin  Links: Huawei Braces for Phone Sales Drop of Up to 60 Million Overseas (Bloomberg) Broadcom's $2 billion warning rattles global chip sector (Reuters) Kuo on 2020 iPhones: 5.4-Inch and 6.7-Inch Models With 5G, 6.1-Inch Model With LTE, All With OLED Displays (MacRumors) Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content (WSJ) Infarm closes $100M Series B to scale its 'urban farming platform' (TechCrunch) CHOOSING THE WRONG LANE IN THE RACE TO 5G (Wired) Study finds that a GPS outage would cost $1 billion per day (Ars Technica) On Snapchat, Original Series Are Finding Return Viewers (The Hollywood Reporter) 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 TechMeme right home for Monday, June 17th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The 5G iPhones might be both bigger and smaller. Both Huawei and the chip industry prepare for tough times. Genius says it caught Google red-handed. Is the U.S. making a big 5G mistake and what exactly is

farming as a service? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Two related stories to start off with today. First, sources are telling Bloomberg that Huawei is bracing for a 40 to 60% drop in overseas smartphone sales as the U.S. ban begins hurting its business. That would ding Huawei's overall revenue by about $30 billion over the course of two years. Quoting, China's largest technology company is crunching internal estimates and exploring options, including pulling the latest model of its marquee overseas label, the Honor 20, people familiar with the matter said. The device begins selling in parts of Europe, June 21st, including France and the UK. but executives are monitoring the launch and may cut off shipments if it sells poorly as expected,

they said, asking not to be identified discussing internal matters. Already, two of France's largest carriers aren't bothering with the honor at all, two people familiar with the matter said. Huawei sales and marketing managers are internally charting a drop in volume of anywhere between 40 to 60 million smartphones this year, the people said. That's a big chunk of an international business that in 2018 accounted for almost half of the 206 million phones it moved. The unusually wide range underscores the uncertainty gripping Huawei, end quote. And in a move that Reuters described as sending a shockwave through the chipmaking

industry, Broadcom is forecasting that U.S.-China trade tensions, as well as the Huawei ban, could reduce its own sales by $2 billion just this year, quote, we'll see a very sharp impact simply because there are no purchases allowed and there's no obvious substitution in place. Chief Executive Officer Hock Tan said on a post-earnings call with analysts on the Huawei ban. Huawei accounted for about $900 million or 4% of the company's overall sales last year. Broadcom, however, said that the forecast cut extends beyond one particular customer. We're talking about uncertainty in our marketplace, uncertainty because of demand in the form of order reduction as the supply chain out there constricts, compresses, so to speak,

Tan said, end quote. Widely watched Apple analyst Miching Quo says that Apple will be launching three phones next year in 2020. High end 5.4 and 6.7 inch models that will both sport 5G and a lower end 6.1 inch model that will not. And let me note again, this is his forecast for the 2020 iPhones. will be no 5G iPhones this year. At least no one anywhere seems to expect that. And more interesting details, quoting Mac rumors. Quo believes that all new iPhones will support 5G starting in 2021.

He also believes that Apple will have its own 5G modems ready by 2022 to 2023, which should reduce its dependence on Qualcomm and Samsung. The new 5.4-inch and 6.7-inch sizes suggest that Apple may be planning to shrink the size of the current, 5.8 inch iPhone 10s, a move that fans of smaller phones would certainly appreciate while increasing the size of the current 6.5 inch iPhone 10s max. The iPhone 10R would remain a 6.1 inch device, end quote. So there was the craziest story over the weekend. Music Lyrics Site Genius claimed that Google was straight up scraping song lyrics from its site to use for Google's search results. And what was more, genius said it had some, sorry, ingenious way to prove that, quoting the Wall Street Journal.

Starting around 2016, Genius said the company made a subtle change to some of the songs in its website, alternating the lyrics apostrophes between straight and curly single quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words red-handed. In a written statement, Google said the lyrics on its site, which pop up in little search result squares called information panels, are licensed from partners not created by Google. We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement, Google said. After this article was published online Sunday, Google issued a second statement to say it was

investigating the issue raised by Genius and would terminate its agreement with partners who were, quote, not upholding good practices, end quote. So Google apparently has a partnership with Lyric Find, a Canadian company that makes deals with music publishers to publish song lyrics online. I think the Occam's Razor solution here is that someone at LyricFine was probably just getting lazy and copying and pasting lyrics from Genius, and Google didn't know about it. But a couple of things. First, Genius says that it first notified Google about its concerns in 2017, and again, this past April and Google did nothing.

In the most recent letter, Genius told the company that copying transcriptions from its site would break its terms of service and, wait for it, possibly also break antitrust law. And that's the crux of the matter in this odd story, at a time where antitrust scrutiny is turning toward all of tech and especially toward Google, this sort of taking advantage of its own platform dominance is something that Google probably can't afford at the moment. It's one thing for, say, Yelp to claim Google's business ratings are favored over Yelp's business ratings, or for travel companies

to complain, say, that searchers for flight prices are directed to Google's own listings over, say, those of Expedia. But a lot of other people say that, Google goes beyond just favoring its own services over rivals. For a long time, Google has tried to provide answers right in search, instead of sending searchers to pages that can provide those answers. Indeed, a report came out in March that said that 62% of all mobile searches did not result in a user clicking through to a website. Of course, why would you need to if Google provides you with the answer you're looking for?

Google, of course, says that this practice, of providing the answers without having to click through to anybody else is simple and efficient and better for searchers, for consumers. But if Google makes it so that you never have to leave Google to get anything you want from the web, then what use is the web? Critics have been long arguing that Google is essentially strip mining the value from the open web and keeping that value for itself. And if on top of that, Google is found to be literally scraping the data and content, of the open web, then yeah, isn't that the ultimate argument that people are making about the tech platforms generally in terms of antitrust and other things?

Paraphrasing something that someone said to me this morning, instead of being platforms where others can operate on top of, profitably, and create value in a thriving ecosystem that the platforms just take rents from, the modern tech platforms seem to want to take all of the value for themselves to strip mine it and keep it. Oh, and they'll take enormous rents while they're doing that. Last week, I told you about helium, that peer-to-peer networking startup, that I thought was maybe the most interesting startup we had talked about in a long time on this show. Well, here's another cool one that I had heard about before, but I don't think we've mentioned here. In-Farm is a farming-as-a-service startup that just raised a $100 million series B. Yes, farming as a service. What that means is

in-farm sets up and remotely operates modular farms that can be put in grocery stores, restaurants, and urban locations. Think of server racks, but then think of vegetables and heat lamps. Let me quote, TechCrunch by way of explaining further, quote, The distributed system is designed to be infinitely scalable. You simply add more modules, space permitting, whilst the whole thing is cloud-based, meaning the farms can be monitored and controlled from InFarm's central control center. It's this modular, data-driven and distributed approach, a combination of Internet of Things, big data, and cloud analytics akin to farming as a service, that Infarm says sets it apart from competitors.

The broader premise is that the consumption of fresh produce, which is rarely homegrown, places a significant burden on the environment. This includes over farming and, of course, global transportation. In fact, InFarm says the CO2 footprint of food equals 17% of total global emissions. Separately, we are told that currently 45% of plant nutrients is lost by the time it arrives in the supermarket. To date, InFarm has partnered with 25 major food retailers, including Ideca, Metro, Migros, Casino, Intermarsh, Auschan, Selgros, and Amazon Fresh in Germany, Switzerland, and France. Overall, it has deployed more than 200 in-store farms, 150 farms in distribution centers, and is harvesting 150,000 plus plants monthly, end quote.

On the 5G tip, I read an interesting opinion piece in Wired over the weekend about how the U.S. is basically the only country in the world making high-band spectra. the priority in its 5G rollout. The bottom line is we're obsessed with speed, with internet connections 100 times faster than what we enjoy today, and so we're focusing on the 24 gigahertz spectrum, so-called millimeter wave. But the problem is this spectrum has never been used in cellular networks before

because at that spectrum, signals don't go very far and often get blocked by things like walls and trees. So to roll out at this spectrum, we'll need a lot more transmitters, thus making our network rollout more expensive. The rest of the world, meanwhile, is taking a different approach, focusing on mid-band spectrum for their 5G networks, because that will be cheaper and allow for more ubiquitous deployment. Wired argues that the U.S. should be auctioning mid-band spectrum, though none. Zero is coming up for auction, because, well, quoting. wired. By seeding international leadership when it comes to developing 5G in the mid-band, we miss the benefits of scale and face higher costs and interoperability challenges.

By auctioning only high-band spectrum, we also risk worsening the digital divide that already plagues so many rural communities in the United States. That's because recent commercial launches of 5G service across the country are confirming what we already know, that commercializing millimeter wave will not be easier cheap, given its propaganda. challenges. The network densification these airwaves require is substantial. In fact, recent tests of newly launched commercial 5G networks in the United States are showing that millimeter wave signals are not traveling more than 350 feet, even when there are no major obstructions. They are also not penetrating walls or windows, making indoor coverage difficult. This means that high-band 5G service

is unlikely outside of the most populated urban areas. The sheer volume of antenna facilities needed to make this service viable makes it too costly to deploy in rural areas. So if we want to serve everywhere and not create communities of 5G haves and have-nots, we are going to need a mix of airwaves that provide both coverage and capacity, end quote. So file this one away as either 5G concern trolling, or for all the 5G hype, a warning that on a fundamental level, the U.S. is going down a technological cul-de-sac of its own making.

Let's end with a couple of quick hits today. First, the National Institutes of Standards and Technology released a report stating that if our GPS systems were ever to go down, if there was a GPS outage even for a couple of days, the impact on the U.S. economy would be losses of $1 billion a day, which I think none of us would be. surprised about? Since 1984, when the GPS system was opened up to commercial use, the study estimates that GPS has generated $1.4 trillion in economic benefits. We know that GPS is useful to the point of being crucial at this point. But this data point I thought was worth noting. If you click through to the story in the show notes, you'll see a graph that shows the economic reliance

on GPS is going hockey stick. Why? Quoting from ours, The value of GPS technology to the U.S. economy is growing. According to the study, 90% of the technology's financial impact has come just since 2010, or just 20% of the study period. Some sections of the economy are only now beginning to realize the value of GPS technology or are identifying new uses for it, the report says, indicating that its value as a platform for innovation will continue to grow, end quote. Yes. imagine we really do have a nationwide fleet of self-driving vehicles 20 years from now. Suddenly, the GPS system would be a strategic asset almost as essential to the functioning of the economy as the electric grid.

And I swear I have no skin in the game around the question of whether or not Snapchat and Snap the company are turning things around. But I am intrigued by the fact that almost every day, interesting anecdotal data points seem to, to come across my transom. The Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Snapchat's original video programming is quietly killing it. Quote, over the last year, time spent watching shows on Snapchat every day more than tripled. That was likely brought on by the influx of new projects under the Snapchat Originals manner last fall, including Dead Girls, which reached more than 14 million unique viewers during its first season, and docuseries Deep Creek also renewed for another season, that drew an audience of 18 million. Serialized content is working, says senior director of content

Sean Mills. People are subscribing. They're coming back to watch the shows at the cadence we're distributing them, end quote. So chalk this up as yet another angle to the streaming wars. Let's not forget that Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook have all been investing in their own original video programs for years now. And of course, Quibi is out there now, now investing its billion dollars in short form video as well. But if Snapchat really is getting numbers like that, then they're pretty much alone among the social players in terms of finding actual success. And then there's this, quoting again, another selling point. The apps predominantly young viewers, Snapchat boasts that it reaches 90% of the 13 to 24-year-olds in the U.S.

Snapchat is a great place for us to incubate our ideas with that younger audience, says, Julie Pitsy, president of entertainment and development at Burnham Murray, production company behind another Snapchat original Endless Summer. Quote, my son's 11. I want to make programming for him, and he doesn't watch TV, end quote. So you might have noticed on Saturday's bonus episode, I was supposed to be doing a deep dive into a long read about Amazon's distribution robots, except I forgot to include that long read in Friday's Long Read segment.

I hope there wasn't too much confusion because I did include a link to the story we were talking about in Saturday's show notes. And also, a quick plug to something else that happened this weekend. My other podcast, the Internet History podcast, had on Chris Messina, inventor of the hashtag, of course, but also influential and so many things you probably didn't know about. Chris possibly has a decent claim to being the co-inventor of the co-working space as well. and he's been involved in so many other interesting bits of tech history over the last 20 years. Check out the latest episode of the Internet History podcast to hear Chris talk about some fascinating stuff. Talk to you all again tomorrow.