Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/09 - Apple Hides Its Own Apps (Sorta)

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

The MIT Media Lab director steps down, Apple sort of hides its own apps in App Store searches, why big tech should worry about the states as much as Uncle Sam, reviews of the Google Nest Hub Max and why hands-free games actually make you a better driver. Sponsors: Legacybox.com/ride Capterra.com/ride Links: Director of M.I.T.’s Media Lab Resigns After Taking Money From Jeffrey Epstein (NYTimes) How an Élite University Research Center Concealed Its Relationship with Jeffrey Epstein (New Yorker) How Apple’s Apps Topped Rivals in the App Store It Controls (NYTimes) Facebook, Google face off against a formidable new foe: State attorneys general (Washington Post) GOOGLE NEST HUB MAX REVIEW: BIGGER SCREEN, BETTER SOUND, AND A CAMERA (The Verge) Drivetime raises $11 million for interactive audio games like Jeopardy in the car (Venture Beat) Daimler brings driverless truck tests to public roads in Virginia (Venture Beat) 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 ride home for Monday, September 9th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The MIT Media Lab Director steps down.

Apple sort of hides its own apps in App Store searches. Why Big Tech should worry about the States as much as Uncle Sam, reviews of the Google Nest Hub Max, and why hands-free games actually make you a better driver. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. MIT Media Lab Director, Joychi Ito, has resigned from his position after Ronan Farrow published a piece this weekend in The New Yorker that suggested that Ito had hidden the extent of the fundraising role financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein had with the Media Lab and Ito personally. Farrow's piece alleged that the Media Lab had a consultation relationship with Epstein around fundraising that previously hadn't been disclosed and even went so far as to make contributions.

from him anonymous and, quote, avoided disclosing their full extent, both publicly and within the university, end quote. Eto also stepped down from his positions on the boards of the MacArthur Foundation, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the New York Times Company. He also left his visiting professorship at Harvard, quote, after giving the matter a great deal of thought over this past several days and weeks, I think that it is best that I resign as director of the Media Lab and as a professor and employee of the Institute effective immediately. Mr. Edo wrote in an email on Saturday to MIT's provost. Quoting the New York Times, Mr. Edo's resignation came less than a day after an

article in the New Yorker described the measures that he and other media lab officials took to conceal its relationship with Mr. Epstein. The internal emails, which a former media lab employee shared with the New York Times, described the handling of donations that Mr. Epstein made and apparently solicited from the rich and powerful over the years, including a $2 million gift from the Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates. In an email in October 2014, six years after Mr. Epstein had pleaded guilty to a sex charge involving a minor in Florida, Mr. Edo wrote that the gift from Mr. Gates had been, quote, directed by Jeffrey Epstein, end quote. A development official at the Media Lab, Peter Cohen, wrote in a subsequent email, quote,

For gift recording purposes, we will not be mentioning Jeffrey's name as the impetus for this gift, end quote. In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Gates said Mr. Epstein had been introduced to Mr. Gates as a person interested in helping increase philanthropy. Quote, although Epstein pursued Bill Gates aggressively, any account of a business partnership or personal relationship between the two is simply not true, the statement said, and any claims that Epstein directed any programmatic or personal grantmaking for Bill Gates is completely false, end quote. It's interesting what even the hint of antitrust scrutiny can do. Apple has announced that it is now handicapping its own apps in the

App Store in search results after an analysis found that Apple created apps magically ranked first for at least 700 search terms inside the App Store. The analysis in question was done by the New York Times, who, for instance, did a search for podcast in the app store. What they found was, first you'd get an ad, then you'd get the Apple podcast app, which, okay, fair enough, you're on an iPhone or iOS device, and Apple does have the most popular podcast app out there. But then the remaining searches might include Apple's Compass app, then it's Find My Friends app, then it's Tips app, then Apple TV, then the Apple Watch app. The Times noted that on some days you had to scroll past as many as 14 Apple apps before you could find an app from a different publisher. And, and you know,

And note, all of those Apple apps, they didn't actually have anything to do with podcasting, right? So in essence, if you were a developer who had a podcast app and wanted it to find an audience, not only were you competing with Apple's own offering, your only way to be found was to pay them for an ad. Well, Apple is, of course, facing antitrust inquiries in the EU, and Spotify has piled on by filing a formal complaint against Apple for the same issues. And it turns out Apple itself just happened to notice how search in the App Store was, shall we say, unbalanced? Quoting from the Times. The search algorithm in the App Store was built by a small team of engineers in Cooper Tino, California,

some of whom said in a separate interview arranged by Apple that they hadn't noticed for months that Apple was dominating search results for music and other categories. Once they did notice, they said a single engineer decided to. to change the algorithm. The engineers said they had to be vague when talking about how their algorithm worked to avoid revealing too much to fraudsters looking to game it. The algorithm examines 42 different signals, they said, including the app's relevance to a given search, its ratings, and its popularity based on downloads and user clicks, end quote. So one of those 42 signals, apparently, was that Apple's algorithm would want to group apps from the same developer in search results. So if you did a search for podcasts or music or whatever, the algorithm had a tendency

to give you, say, a music app from that same developer, then a photo app from that same developer, then maybe an exercise tracking app from that same developer, regardless of what you actually search for. Even though you search for music, you'd get all that other stuff, which, of course, makes no sense if you're searching for relevancy. So now, Apple says it has turned off grouping, or packing, as Apple turned it, in the search results. It made this change on July 12th, which it should be noted was after Spotify filed its complaint in Europe. So now if you search TV in the App Store, for example, the top results are no longer for Apple apps, as the New York Times originally found, but two. If you search for maps, the results have changed from three

top Apple apps to just one. Still, this is likely to be four. fodder for interested parties. In the Times piece, Amy Fitzgibbons of Podcast App Stitcher noted that her app had been stuck in the hundreds in the search results when you searched for the term podcast. She noticed, conversely, that people searching for the term podcast accounted for the majority of Stitcher's downloads on the Google Play Store. Quote, in the Apple App Store, podcast did not even rank as a source of downloads for us, she said. Apple's Phil Schiller and Eddie Kew were quoted in the Times piece as well. Here's the conclusion of the piece, in fact, quote, Mr. Schiller and Mr. Kew said the algorithm

had been working properly. They simply decided to handicap themselves to help other developers. Quote, we make mistakes all the time, Mr. Kew said. Quote, we're happy to admit when we do, Mr. Schiller said, quote, this wasn't a mistake, end quote. which, I suppose, depending on how you're looking at it, you can read that last sentence a couple of different ways. Speaking of regulatory scrutiny, Tony Rahm in the Washington Post has a great one-stop overview of the potential challenges facing Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and all of Silicon Valley,

as they face this new line of inquiry from state attorneys general. Basically, Rom notes that the federal government is one sort of foe, but all of the states coming at you at the same time, that's a whole other kettle of fish. Quote, when state attorneys general have banded together on a broad bipartisan basis, they've managed to muscle major changes to other industries. They forced billions of dollars in payments from big tobacco to pay health claims and finance anti-smoking campaigns in the 1990s. Two decades later, they helped reform unfair mortgage lending practices. More recently, states have led lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies they contend are responsible for the opioid crisis. Now they threaten to do the same to Silicon Valley, unleashing potentially wide-ranging antitrust punishments against not only Google but all of tech's biggest players.

The attorneys general have found they can actually rewrite the rules for entire sectors and individual companies through these cases, said Rob McKenna, a former attorney general in Washington State, and now a partner at the law firm of Oric. quote, the attorneys general have a lot of power here to achieve regulation by litigation, end quote. I was actually talking to a lawyer about this this weekend. There was a legal summit at the fireside conference going on concurrently with the broader conference. And the person in question made a similar point to me. Executive summary would be this. The feds go for headlines and tend to like big fines and also slaps on the wrist that can still have a bit of a thing. But when the states band together, they're the ones more likely to force meaningful remedies.

Also, this individual said, they're less likely to be placated by showy but toothless results. The Google Nest Hub Max reviews are in. And again, I'm not going to do a full review whip around right now. So let's just let Dan Seafert's review from The Verge speak for the crowd. Seaford's summary is this. The Google Nest Hub Max has a beautiful screen, though it's a bit on the small side if you intend to really sit down and watch video for any meaningful period of time. It's got a versatile camera, which basically turns the device into a fully functional nest cam in its own right. It's got extensive smart home controls, but the sound is not all that powerful, and the inability to play Netflix is a glaring hole in the overall offering. Also, he finds it weird that even

Facebook on its home devices allows you to cover the camera while the Nest Hub Max doesn't, although it does indicate when the camera is on. And then there are the perennial complaints with Google's home devices that have yet to be addressed. You have to say, OK, Google, or hey, Google, every time you want to control the HubMax by voice and you can't access anything through it that's in a G Suite account. I can't even get the HubMax to show me appointments in my shared family calendar, even though that's set up through a standard Google account.

The Nest Hub Max does do most of its advertised functions well, however, and it is a very competent smart display with some features that stand out from the crowd. But it asks a lot from you to get those functions. A higher price, especially compared to the frequent discounts on the Nest Hub, a larger footprint, and trust that the camera won't be hacked or used for nefarious purposes. If you've been wanting a Nest Hub that just does more, the HubMax is it. but for most people, the Nest Hub is the better smart display to purchase, end quote. Let's end with a couple of auto tech stories.

First, drive time is a startup that just raised an $11 million Series A round led by makers fund and joined by Amazon's Alexa fund and Google. Why? Because Drive Time is doing something interesting in the voice space. Drive Time makes interactive, hands-free audio games, but for drivers. What's that? Well, the idea is that if you're playing engaging but not too distracting games while driving, you might actually be able to remain more focused behind the wheel, quoting Venture Beat. Interactive voice speech recognition as a platform is here.

Gaming will emerge as the biggest use case on any new platform, said Nico Vowrie, CEO of Drive Time in an interview with Games Beat. Quote, we are big believers that voice will be important. We've got some very engaged users and strong monetization, end quote. Drive time started off with a trivia game on your mobile phone with audio interactivity. The game pits you against other drivers in a contest. It asks you a multiple choice question through your car's audio speakers and your phone speakers, and then you respond by saying A, B, or C.

Your points are tallied up and the game declares a winner. Google's speech recognition in the cloud parses the answers. Quote, we have one app in the app store and we want to be synonymous with commute time entertainment. Vowrie said, quote, we want drive time to be a destination that contains all of these experiences. It's like having a bunch of channels on Sirius XM satellite radio, end quote. Drive time is targeting the 110 million commuters in North America who are bored while driving their daily commutes every day. Back in April, the company started charging a $10 a month subscription fee, end quote. There's actually some sound science behind all this.

Studies have shown that what are known as alert maintenance tasks, allow you to focus more on what you're doing by occupying that wandering, distracted part of the back of your brain. Also, you're less tempted to do things that will hijack your full attention when the distracted part of your brain is engaged, things like picking up your phone and scrolling Instagram. Most commutes come in at around a half an hour, so drive time keeps games running about 25 minutes. And with this most recent raise, drive time has also. announced that Jeopardy is coming to their app via a deal with Sony Pictures television. Each Jeopardy session on the Drive Time app will again pit you against another random driver

and will include about 30 clues. And Daimler says that it has begun testing level four self-driving trucks on public roads in Virginia. Of course, there are still trained drivers and engineers on board in the cabins of these trucks to watch over things so that nothing goes wrong. but, as a reminder, Level 4 autonomy does mean that the vehicles should, in theory, be able to operate with limited human oversight in select conditions. Quote, Daimler separately notes that its wholly owned commercial vehicle division. Daimler Trucks North America is designing a truck chassis,

tailored for automated driving, along with the infrastructure to support Level 4 truck testing in the next decade. It's currently implementing Level 2 tech in its latest version of its Detroit Assurance program, which will include automatic lane centering and lane departure protection features but require drivers to remain engaged at all times. Daimler expects the platform to become broadly available in the first quarter of 2020. It's the latest of several moves DTMA has made in pursuit of a self-driving future. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, it announced it would invest $570 million to achieve level four driving within a decade. And in June, DTMA established an

autonomous technology group to consolidate its automated driving activities, the globe, including Torx operations in Blacksburg, end quote. So just wanted to take note that subtly, they slipped in there, that the goalposts have been moved once again to within a decade. But that's always been my gripe, right? Self-driving cars have been about a decade away for at least the last decade or so. Buckle in, everybody. The iPhone event is tomorrow, of course. And, of course, since it only starts about four hours before this show is due to post, and we'll probably end only two hours before our usual published time, please be prepared for the show to post at least a little late tomorrow. Hopefully not hugely late. Yes, by the way, I'm back from the amazing fireside conference.

It really is kind of impossible to describe how cool a conference fireside is. it's literally a summer camp. It's adult summer camp. You sleep in literal cabins on literal bunks and eat in a literal dining hall and are on a lake with canoeing and axe throwing and beach volleyball and bonfires and smores and everything. Summer camp should be. But there's also great sessions on everything from mental health in startups to podcasting to the legal and economic issues around cannabis startups. and of course, great, great networking. I met some amazing folks, video game developers,

dozens of startup founders, an intellectual property lawyer, all sorts of people. And I met members of the Mutant Podcast Army, of course. Shout out to Chris Martin. Shout out to Alan. Shout out to Josh. I don't know if Alan and Josh wanted their last names mentioned. But also, shout out to the fireside guys themselves.

Daniel and Stephen, they listen. and every day, so I know they'll hear this too. Thank you guys for by far the most amazing conference I've ever attended. Talk to you all again tomorrow.