Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 07/01 - Was Jony Ive Burned Out AT Apple or BY Apple?

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home from Monday, July 1st, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Was Johnny Ive burned out at Apple or was he burned out by Apple? Again, Roku as the quiet mega player in the streaming wars. How TikTok is spending its way to ubiquity, possibly on the backs of those it wants to supplant, and how tech is revolutionizing archaeology. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. The article everyone was talking about today was, the background to Johnny Ives' departure from Apple from the Wall Street Journal. Reading between the lines, there are suggestions of a lot of the things that Apple Kremlinologists have been whispering about recently. Was Ive dispirited by Tim Cook's lack of interest in the product development process? Was he frustrated that Apple was becoming a more operations-focused company at the expense of design? Interestingly, there are hints that other things we've spoken about as well, was I've disappointed that the Apple Watch basically became a glorified health tracker as opposed to the luxury fashion item he might have imagined. The article suggests that in the first year of the Apple Watch,

Starting point is 00:01:17 the Apple Watch only sold a quarter of the units Apple had been projecting, and thousands of the gold version of the watch apparently went unsold. Lots of people on Twitter demanded to know what happened to all of those gold watches. But the most buzzed about details were the picture painted by the piece of Ive being basically AWOL from day-to-day processes at Apple possibly for quite a while. This, in fact, is the very opening of the piece. Quote, as the deadline loomed for the 10th anniversary iPhone, Apple's top software designers gathered in the penthouse of an exclusive San Francisco Club called the Battery. They had been summoned some 50 miles from the company's Copertino headquarters to demonstrate planned features of the product to Johnny Ive, Apple's

Starting point is 00:02:05 design chief, who seldom came to the office anymore from his San Francisco home. For nearly three hours on that afternoon in January 2017, the group of about 20 designers stood around, waiting for Mr. Ive to show, according to people familiar with the episode. After he arrived and listened to the presentations, he left without ruling on their key questions, leaving attendees frustrated, quote, many of us were thinking, how did it come to this? said a person at the meeting. There was a sense, quote, Johnny was gone, but reluctant to hand over the reins, end quote. Now, as the piece notes, Ive has been dealing with the poor health of his father, which sometimes necessitated long visits to his native Britain. Still, some little birdies certainly seem to want

Starting point is 00:02:53 to describe a scenario where Ive's singular genius no longer fit. in at Apple, or, I suppose, reading it in a different light, he was no longer enthused about being at Apple. The piece ends with this kicker, quote, Mr. Ives' old design team, once thought of as gods inside Apple, will report to COO Jeff Williams, a mechanical engineer with an MBA, end quote. There is a different angle to the streaming wars to consider, which is the hardware angle, The platform angle. Strategy Analytics predicts that Roku will, with 52 million shipped devices, by year end, have 70% more over-the-top streaming video devices installed than its next closest competitor, the Sony PlayStation. After the PlayStation, quote,

Starting point is 00:03:48 in terms of streaming device sales in Q1, the next closest competitor were devices powered by the Amazon Fire TV operating system, which accounted for 12% of sales. Less than half of Roku's sales. Devices powered by Samsung's Tizan accounted for 11% of sales, while those enabled by Google's operating platforms, Android TV, and Chromecast, accounted for 9%. Roku's extensive content offering, comprehensive search function, and simple and intuitive user interface have been key factors in its success alongside affordable hardware and regularly updated software, said David Watkins, Director at Strategy Analytics, and the report's author. Roku has managed establish itself as a highly respected and trusted brand in the U.S. with no perceived hidden agenda

Starting point is 00:04:34 when it comes to promoting content on its platform, end quote. Now, again, this is not the only vector in the streaming war, as little devices connected to your TV are not the be-all and end-all here, but it is a platform vector to consider, and that last bit of that quote is interesting, no perceived hidden agenda. Might there be something useful to that once the bullets really start flying in about a year's time? Might there be something useful to neutral ground? Oh, and this is just an interesting little data point that may or may not relate to that at all. Quoting deadline, the proliferation of streaming and the novelty of the subscription video on-demand interface

Starting point is 00:05:18 are contributing to paralysis among consumers grappling with too much choice, according to Nielsen's latest total audience report. Among adult SVOD users, only one third of them report browsing the menu of a streaming service to find content to watch, with 21% saying they simply give up watching if they are not able to make up their minds. In the more traditional pay TV realm, by contrast, 58% of viewers told Nielsen, they're more likely to go back to their favorite channels if they find themselves unable to make a choice about what to watch. Think about the last time that you or loved ones decided to sit down and watch TV, listen to new tunes or stream a program, the report said.

Starting point is 00:05:57 Were you stuck in decision purgatory endlessly checking out previews, unable to make an actual choice? How long were you there? And how much do you think the paradox of choice cost programmers, content owners, brands, and marketers, end quote? Actually, how long were you there? Trying to make a decision on what to watch? According to the report, the average adult takes 7.4.

Starting point is 00:06:19 minutes to make a decision about what to watch on a streaming video on demand service. Another dispatch from the TikTok watch. We all know that TikTok has been on the rise over the last year or so, and now we know, at least to some degree, why. According to the Wall Street Journal, TikTok's Chinese parent bite dance spent around $1 billion advertising on Facebook, Instagram, and Snap in 2018 alone. In fact, bite dance via TikTok. TikTok became Snap's single biggest advertiser. So the first obvious question would be, how happy can all of these platforms be about basically becoming the promo platform for a next

Starting point is 00:07:06 generation challenger, a social network that is looking to supplant them? In fact, the piece says that there has been a heated internal debate inside Snap about running TikTok ads at all. Although, if your Snap, can you turn down money from your biggest overall average? advertiser, you probably can't. And then there's this interesting tidbit. Quote, BightDance has expressed interest in buying SNAP if the U.S. company gets closer to profitability, people knowledgeable about BightDance's plans said. BightDance also has considered buying Twitter and Quora, several people said. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel has said he has no interest in selling

Starting point is 00:07:45 and a person familiar with Snap and BightDance didn't express its interest to SNAP. Twitter and Quora declined to comment, end quote. Although, given the current environment, what odds would you give me about that going through, about a Chinese social network being allowed to swallow a major U.S. social network? I've become really very bullish when it comes to AR tech, but specifically AR tech in the industrial and construction space. basically in a few years I expect any job site where folks are in hard hats. It will probably also be common to see some sort of smart screen slash eye dongle thingy attached to those hard hats because why not? This is a super obvious use case for where extra data points and data overlay and the like

Starting point is 00:08:43 would be super useful. So interesting raves today by Industrial AR headset maker Realware, which announced an $80 million series B led by industrial automation company Terridine, bringing its total raised to over $100 million, quoting from Forbes. Realware debuted the HMT1 head-mounted display in September 2017. Since then, it has shipped 15,000 units to 1,300 industrial enterprises around the world. Realware now has 120 applications that its partner ecosystem has optimized for its device. According to the company, year-over-year growth is 500%. Of all companies who have already deployed head-mounted wearables,

Starting point is 00:09:28 Realware has already captured 40 to 50% of the market. Company Representative Aaron Cohen told me this is coming from market growth, which he estimated to be 500 to 1,000 percent. Not a typo. The kind of AR done with headsets like RealWares is often called assisted reality to differentiate it from immersive AR experiences with see-through displays such as the HoloLens. Realware is focused on keeping a connected enterprise workforce heads up and hands-free, greatly increasing situational awareness and reducing fatigue.

Starting point is 00:10:03 Companies using assisted reality devices cite greater worker satisfaction, increased efficiency, and greater accuracy. Realware runs on Android so thousands of apps can immediately be loaded onto the HMT1 to transform them into a hand-hand-success. free voice experience, end quote. After getting out of the cellular modem business, Intel is putting around 8,500 of its patents related to wireless modem technology up for auction. Quote, the auction offering is comprised of two parts, the cellular portfolio and a connected device portfolio. The former includes approximately 6,000 patents related to 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular standards, and an additional

Starting point is 00:10:47 1,700 assets that read on wireless implementation. technologies. The latter is made up of 500 patents with broad applicability across the semiconductor and electronics industries. Although that represents a large portion of Intel's cellular IP, it is understood that it will retain significant wireless assets. The size and strength of Intel's portfolio means that this auction is likely to draw plenty of comparisons with the bidding process for Nortel's patent assets back in 2011. That sale attracted a lot of interest from the giants of the mobile and broader tech world as the bankrupt Canadian telco sold off its grants at a time when rapid growth in the smartphone market meant that legacy operators and new entrants were looking to

Starting point is 00:11:31 strengthen their IP positions. After a highly competitive auction process, the assets were acquired for $4.5 billion by the so-called Rockstar consortium, comprising Apple, Blackberry, Erickson, Microsoft, Sony, and EMC. That group outbid Google for the portfolio. While the Nortale portfolio was regularly cited as the strongest in the mobile space. The tough licensing conditions in the U.S. meant that Rockstar struggled to monetize the grants, and they were eventually acquired by PRX, end quote. A new rule in the European Union will mean that all new electric cars sold in Europe will now have to be fitted with noise making devices. The rule came into force today, and it says that all four-wheel electric vehicles must soon have what is called an

Starting point is 00:12:23 acoustic vehicle alert system or AVAS, which will make a low noise, vaguely reminiscent of a standard internal combustion engine when the vehicle drops below 12 miles per hour. Quoting from TechSpot, the noise makers activate at 12 miles per hour and lower because the EU says cars are most likely to be near pedestrians when driving slowly or backing up. Interestingly, drivers will be able to deactivate the devices if they believe it is necessary. From 2021, all new electric cars must include the noise makers, not just new models. It's thought that EVs already on the roads will be retrofitted with the devices, end quote. And finally today, a couple of fun stories about how technology is changing the game for the Indiana Joneses of the world.

Starting point is 00:13:15 1-0 looks at how things like ground-penetrating radar, drones, lightar, and hyper-accurate 3D mapping has been revolutionizing archaeology by enabling cheaper non-invasive site surveys, Quote, drones have been the true game changer. Instead of mounting large-scale survey expeditions and manually plotting sites inch by inch, Spencer and his colleagues can now send up a flying camera and create a three-dimensional digital model on their laptops. These reveal where walls once lay, where wells were dug, where field boundaries were laid out, detailed granular information that helps target further analysis, all in a matter of hours, end quote. And then there's the magnetrometry and radar that can penetrate deep into the earth with no need for digging and the LiDar cameras on low-flying aircraft that uncovered that monster lost Mayan city comprising 61,000 structures hidden beneath the vast Guatemalan jungle.

Starting point is 00:14:13 There are now even 3D scanning apps that you can download to smartphones. And here's another G-WIS example. The MIT Technology Review looks at how machine. learning can increasingly be used to translate long-loss languages. If you don't know the story of the ancient scripts known as Linear A and Linear B, do a Wikipedia search. But long story short, the deciphering of Linear B was one of the great feats of ancient scholarship when it happened in the 1950s. Well, now computers have shown that using machine learning, they can replicate that feat all by themselves, and soon they may be able to turn this technique loose.

Starting point is 00:14:54 on the long elusive linear A. Quote, the key insight enabling machine translation is that words in different languages occupy the same points in their respective parameter spaces. That makes it possible to map an entire language

Starting point is 00:15:07 onto another language with a one-to-one correspondence. In this way, the process of translating sentences becomes the process of finding similar trajectories through those spaces. The machine never even needs

Starting point is 00:15:18 to, quote, know what the sentence means. This process relies crucially on the large datasets. But a couple of years ago, a German team of researchers showed how a similar approach with much smaller databases could help translate much rarer languages that lack the big databases of text. The trick is to find a different way to constrain the machine approach that doesn't rely on the database. The idea is that any language can change in only certain ways. For example, the symbols in related languages appear with similar distributions, related words have the same order of characters, and so on. With the

Starting point is 00:15:53 With these rules constraining the machine, it becomes much easier to decipher a language, provided the progenitor language is known. Researchers put the technique to the test with two lost languages, linear B and ergoritic. Linguists know that linear B encodes an early version of ancient Greek, and that ergoridic, which was discovered in 1929, is an early form of Hebrew. Given that information and the constraints imposed by linguistic evolution, the researchers' machines were able to translate both languages with remarkable accuracy. Quote, we were able to correctly translate 67.3% of linear B cognates to their Greek equivalence in the decipherment scenario, the researchers said. To the best of our knowledge, our experiment is the first attempt of deciphering linear B

Starting point is 00:16:40 automatically, end quote. So the thinking is, the next step from here might be to turn the machines loose on linear A with a brute force approach. And who knows? one of the last great mysteries of ancient history and archaeology might finally be solved. Happy Canada Day, according to our stats, 5% of you listening to me out there right now should be celebrating today. So kudos to you, friends from the north. Talk to you, all of you, tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 07/01 - Was Jony Ive Burned Out AT Apple or BY Apple?

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