Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/26 - The Most Powerful Chromebooks Ever

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 from Monday, August 26th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google and Dell team up for enterprise grade Chromebooks. Baidu makes big leaps in smart speaker market share. Binance lets you lend crypto for interest. Publishers sue Audible and why when it comes to autonomy. Maybe we should swim before we try to drive. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google and Dell have teamed up to produce the latitude lineup of enterprise grade.

Starting point is 00:01:08 Chromebooks. These new laptops come with 8th-gen-intel core I7 CPUs are the first Chromebooks to offer up to 32 gigabytes of DDR for RAM and SSDs of up to one terabyte, making these surely the most powerful Chromebooks ever available. They can also be configured with LTE, with connections of up to 450 megabits per second. So again, these are serious Chromebooks met for serious enterprise work. And to top all that off, Dell and Google are trying to make this palatable to your enterprise's IT folk, quoting and gadget. What makes these different from the existing Chromebooks that your organization can already hand out is the behind-the-scenes stuff catering to your IT department's needs. Businesses currently using Chromebooks can add the new Chrome Enterprise

Starting point is 00:02:01 upgrade and make use of the new Google admin console for ChromeOS, which Google says provides 10 times faster load times. This will allow admins to enable a managed Linux environment on Chromebooks, which will let them grant access to specific users, as well as offer VPN support for internal files. These are all backed by Dell's unified workspace program that IT administrators can use to oversee their entire organization's fleet of devices across different operating systems and from the cloud. Specifically on the new Latitude Enterprise Chromebooks, IT professionals will appreciate that they come with year-round 24-7 Dell support as well as Chrome Enterprise support. They'll also be able

Starting point is 00:02:42 to conveniently add G-suite and Drive Enterprise via Dell, which will take on the task of reselling the Google service. This will let employees use apps like docs, sheets, and slides natively on the Chromebooks without worrying about remaining online, end quote. Seems like a pretty comprehensive offering, so don't be surprised if the next time you get assigned a knockabout company laptop from your IT department. It's one of these, especially because the price is likely to be super compelling to your bosses too. The new latitude Chromebooks will be available to order beginning on August 27th, starting at $699 for the base model and $819 for a two-and-one version. Industry analysts Canalis say that for the first time, Baidu has surpassed Google to capture 17.3% of

Starting point is 00:03:38 the global smart speaker market growing 3,700 percent year over year with 4.5 million shipments in Q2 of 2019. The global smart speaker market grew 55.4% in Q2 2019 to reach 26.1 million units. Amazon maintained the worldwide lead by shipping 6.6 million units of the Echo Smart Speakers. Baidu, despite only serving the China market, grew 3,700 percent to reach 4.5.5%. million units in Q2, 2019, after it re-entered the market with Zhajodu devices in Q2 of last year. Baidu became the second largest vendor and overtook Google, which shipped 4.3 million in the same quarter. China's smart speaker market performance outshone others as the country doubled its quarterly

Starting point is 00:04:28 shipment size to 12.6 million units, more than twice as large as the U.S. market, which stands at 6.1 million units. For Baidu to replace Google to become the world's second largest smart speaker vendor, is no small feat, but bears little significance as both companies operate in mutually exclusive markets. Quote, aggressive marketing and go-to-market campaigns built strong momentum for Baidu in China. The vendor stood out as a key driver of smart displays to achieve 45% smart display product mix in its Q2 shipments, said Canala's research analyst Cynthia Chen. Quote, local network operators' interest in the device category soared recently.

Starting point is 00:05:05 This bodes well for Baidu as it faces little competition in the smart distribution. display category, allowing the company to dominate in the operator channel, end quote. Binance, the world's largest crypto marketplace has jumped into the lending business and will soon allow customers to lend their assets to earn interest on them, quoting the block. The new offering dubbed Binance lending allows holders of B&B token, Ethereum Classic, ETC, and Tether, USDT, stablecoin, to earn interest on their funds. The service will be available on a first-come, first-served basis starting from 6 a.m. UTC on August 28th to 12 a.m. UTC on August 29th. Binance said the annualized interest rate for the initial B&B lending product, which has an initial 14-day period, is set at 15%.

Starting point is 00:06:00 The maximum cap per account is initially set at 500 BNB and 1 million USDT, respectively. Binance users can decide the number of tokens they want to lend at the time of subscription and will be able to retrieve funds with guaranteed interest after the designated subscription period, it added, end quote. Worth pointing out that it's also basically giving customers the ability to earn a 10% annual rate of return on Tether, which, in a zero-interest rate environment, which we are essentially in, would be pretty darn attractive to certain pools of money. top U.S. publishers have sued Audible aiming to block the company's planned rollout of captions,

Starting point is 00:06:47 a new feature that will show text on screen as a book is narrated. The publishers say this is copyright infringement. Quoting Reuters, the lawsuit was filed by seven members of the Association of American Publishers' AAP, including Harper Collins, Penguin Random House, Hachette, Simon and Schuster, and McMillan. Quote, essentially Audible wants to provide the text as well as the sound of books without the authorization of copyright holders, despite only having the right to sell audiobooks, AAP said in a statement, end quote. Basically, the publishers are arguing beyond the fact that audible licenses don't include the rights to text versions of works, only audio versions. They say the machine-generated transcriptions might contain errors that harm the quality of the work,

Starting point is 00:07:32 which in my experience with some Kindle books would probably bear out. Quoting Bloomberg, We are surprised and disappointed by this action and any implication that we have not been speaking and working with publishers about this feature, which has not yet launched, Audible said in a statement posted online. The feature called Audible captions could compete with both physical books and e-books as well as cross-format products that may incorporate both audio and text, the publisher said. Audible told the publishers that the new feature could have transcription errors of as much as 6% or about 18 pages of a 300-page book, according to the complaint, end quote. Hot on the heels of that recent weekend bonus episode where we talked about Netflix algorithms. Interesting news leaked late last week that Netflix is apparently testing a new feature in its iOS app called Collections, which curates a bunch of titles into collections, based. on recommendations and selections from actual flesh and blood humans. Quoting Sarah Perez in TechCrunch,

Starting point is 00:08:40 if you've been opted into the test, the collections option is available at the top right of the app's homepage, where my lists would have been otherwise. You can follow the collection from the main screen, or you can tap into it to further explore its titles. If you tap a collection that interests you, it smoothly expands to show the thumbnails of the suggested titles, below a header that explains what the collection is about.

Starting point is 00:09:03 You can choose to follow the suggestion from there, which presumably ties into Netflix's notification system, end quote. Again, this is only a test for now, and only available on iOS. So you either see it on your iPhone or you don't. Last week, I expressed my skepticism around Google's plans for a new anti-ad tracking standard for the web, on the grounds that Google never tends to take on projects like this, unless it at least it at least shores up the moat around their existing advertising business or, at worst, makes things difficult for competitors. Now, granted, Apple is doing exactly this, quite explicitly to Google's business with their moves around ad tracking in Safari. So I'm not trying to pile on here with any

Starting point is 00:09:56 bias, but I did have my eye out over the weekend for people smarter than me that could analyze what Google is up to here. And on Freedom to Tinker, Jonathan Mayer and Averin, Narayanianian came through for me. They basically accused Google of reacting to the privacy improvements made recently by Firefox and Safari to propose specious arguments that argue that blocking cookies somehow undermines privacy, and Google is basically using the web standardization process to at least slow down what is probably an ongoing threat to their underlying ad business. This isn't the first time that Google has used disingenuous arguments to suggest that a privacy protection will backfire. We're calling this move privacy gaslighting because it's an attempt to

Starting point is 00:10:42 persuade users and policymakers that an obvious privacy protection already adopted by Google's competitors isn't actually a privacy protection, end quote. And quoting from later in the piece, Apple and Mozilla have tracking protection enabled by default today. And Apple is already testing privacy preserving ad measurement. Meanwhile, Google is talking about a multi-year process for a watered down form of privacy protection. And even that is uncertain. Advertising platforms dragged out the do not track standardization process for over six years without any meaningful output. If history is any indication, launching a standards process is an effective way for Google to appear to be doing something on web privacy, but without actually delivering.

Starting point is 00:11:27 In closing, we want to emphasize that the Chrome team is full of smart engineers passionate about protecting their users, and it has done incredible work on web security. But it is unlikely that Google can provide meaningful web privacy while protecting its business interests, and Chrome continues to fall far behind Safari and Firefox, end quote. Now, I will concede that this is just one post from two guys, though they do seem to be well-respected researchers. I'm sure that someone somewhere on the internet has posted some sort of counter-argument to this, supporting what Google is doing, but I have to admit, I'm somewhat persuaded that this looks at least like a rearguard action on Google's part. That's probably unlikely to be persuasive, at least to the two other

Starting point is 00:12:14 main web browser makers that seem to be the target of Google's defensive actions in the first place. Finally, today, one of the knocks against self-driving technology has been that the technology really is most of the way there in a lot of use cases. It's just that the main thrust of research has been focused on the most devilishly difficult use case, i.e. autonomous cars driving on urban or suburban streets with, hopefully, an infinitesimally small error rate. Why are people concerned trolling the speed of the advance in self-driving vehicles? Because even if today we're 90, of the way there already, that last 10% is really where the Sisyphian heavy lifting will come in. So, a counter-bullish argument for autonomous vehicles generally is that instead we should be focusing

Starting point is 00:13:15 now on the easier environments where existing technology might already be 97 or 99.7% of the way there. For example, autonomous driving on highways. Easier. Autonomous operation of planes in the open skies easier. And as we've mentioned before, autonomous boats. Think about it. In these spaces, there are far less opportunity or chance for edge cases to crop up and create those errors and accidents. Well, a ship called the Max Limer could be the first unmanned surface vessel to cross the Atlantic Ocean. The Max Limer is only 36 feet long, but it is completely completely robotic. It is produced by Seekit out of Southeast England. And it's already made history by sailing from Britain to Norway in the first completely unmanned commercial pipeline inspection. Also, it's made regular cargo runs between Britain and Belgium. And again, unmanned. No safety sailors on board like on Waymo cabs. The maiden transatlantic voyage for the Max Limer is slated for the first half of next year. Why might unmanned ships be a big deal, quoting The Daily Beast?

Starting point is 00:14:34 Iying potentially lucrative contracts supporting offshore oil and gas drilling, C-kit aimed to produce a flexible ship that's cheaper and safer than manned ships are. With no need to support a human crew, a robotic support ship, could devote more space to equipment, including a flotilla of smaller drone boats and submarines that it can launch and retrieve. Since it doesn't get hungry, tired, or sick, it could sail at a leisurely 8 miles per hour until it runs out of fuel, potentially nine months at a stretch. Max Limer is, quote, almost like a utility pickup vehicle of the sea,

Starting point is 00:15:06 C-Kit managing director Ben Simpson said. It's robust, it's adaptable, it's got a huge range, end quote. It can carry two and a half tons of cargo. And it's cheap. Quote, C-Kit vessels use less than 5% of the fuel required to operate a standard ocean-going vessel. Neil Tinmouth, C-Kitt's chief operating officer told the Daily Bee. This is a game changer when it comes to the carbon footprint and environmental impact of those operations, end quote. When the Max Limer is in port, or coming into port, a human operator steers the vessel via radio.

Starting point is 00:15:41 Out at sea, it uses just regular GPS. It's also got the usual cameras and sensor dome, like on a self-driving car. Right now, Sea Kit is focused on conducting ocean surveys for oil, gas, and wind companies, but the U.S. Navy is also beginning to experiment with unmanned ships. And then, of course, there would be the promise of unmanned cargo vessels. But the article cautions that would still be decades away, which brings me back to my evergreen skepticism around self-driving cars. If unmanned cargo ships operating out in the vastness of the open sea is still decades away, how soon can we realistically expect an autonomous car to pull up to a street corner near any of us anytime soon. Hey, everybody, a couple weeks ago, I asked y'all to send us some candidates to host

Starting point is 00:16:39 slash produce a celeb news ride home. And you came through, you sent us some insanely talented people. So let me do this one more time. Picture this. A gamer ride home. So, just like the tech meme right home. But for games. gaming news, not tech news. If you are someone who would be perfect for this, email me at Brian at ridehome. info. If you know someone who would be perfect for this, have them email me at Brian at ridehome. com. Again, the same parameters apply.

Starting point is 00:17:14 We'd love someone who has podcasting experience, but that's not required because we can train that, we think. We'd basically give far more weight to a journalist or blogger who has previous experience writing and covering news in the gaming space because the biggest skill set we need is someone who can know the space cold and who can reliably figure out what the biggest stories are in the space every day and then write them up quick and authoritatively. And as I said before, these are essentially franchise podcasts. There is a revenue share for all ad revenue generated.

Starting point is 00:17:50 If you got a gamer ride home to the same audience as the TechMeme right home, the producer revenue share would be well into the six figures per year. So again, all interested parties, send an email to Brian at ridehome.com with resumes or as much info on you as you feel like sharing. Talk to y'all tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 08/26 - The Most Powerful Chromebooks Ever

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