Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/23 - Google Play Pass And WeWork Soap Opera

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Google Play Pass might usher in a new era of mobile gaming, the WeWork saga is becoming a soap opera, Facebook’s foes and (erstwhile) friends are talking to the FTC, and has Google ushered in the era of quantum supremacy? Sponsors: Metalab.co Zapier.com/ride Links: Google Play Pass bundles 350 Android games and apps for $4.99 per month (The Verge) Some WeWork Board Members Seek to Remove Adam Neumann as CEO (WSJ) SoftBank’s Masa Son is in favor of ousting WeWork CEO Adam Neumann (CNBC) How Adam Neumann’s Over-the-Top Style Built WeWork. ‘This Is Not the Way Everybody Behaves.’ (WSJ) Snap Detailed Facebook’s Aggressive Tactics in ‘Project Voldemort’ Dossier (WSJ) Samsung Galaxy Fold will be available September 27th in the US (9to5Google) World Robotics Report: Global Sales of Robots Hit $16.5B in 2018 (Robotics Business Review) Google may have just ushered in an era of ‘quantum supremacy’ (The Verge) Classified AD: RobBettis.com For many businesses, digital marketing is essential to success. However, despite its importance, most companies can’t justify the cost of another full-time employee and they can’t stomach being burned by another flaky freelancer. What you really need is a partner. Rob Bettis is an independent digital marketer who helps e-commerce retailers and app developers build bigger, better businesses online through PPC media. Unlike agencies who are all about scale, Rob works with a limited number of businesses, managing advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon & Apple Search - ensuring every client gets the expertise and attention they deserve. Rob has spent the past 15 years managing PPC accounts. And since going solo, Rob has generated a return on ad spend of over 700% for his clients. If you want to build a bigger, better business online, contact Rob at RobBettis.com or click the link in the show notes. 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, September 23rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google PlayPass might usher in a whole new era of mobile gaming. The WeWorks saga is becoming a soap opera. Facebook's foes and erstwhile friends are talking to the FTC and has Google ushered in the era of quantum supremacy. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So there were a plethora of great think pieces over the weekend about Apple Arcade and how it could, change the incentives for game developers. In other words, kind of a TLDR, a lot of the pieces

made the point that maybe going forward with services like this. Developers wouldn't be lazy and just design games that are nothing more than Skinnerboxes intended to extract money from players. Well, I suppose two makes a trend, at least if you believe the New York Times, a trend that completely changes the economics of especially mobile gaming, possibly. Today, Google unveiled what it is calling Google PlayPass. For $49 a month with a $1.99 per month introductory price, you get a subscription to more than 350 fully unlocked Android apps and games. Note, there's a lot of differences here between this and Apple Arcade.

First, we're talking apps and games. Second, there are no exclusives here. No need to make a completely new thing to participate in Google PlayPass. Theoretically, any existing app or game could someday be in this package with the only real changes required, being the removal of in-app ads and in-app purchases. Quoting Dieter Bone in The Verge. At launch, all of the apps and games included in Google PlayPass were already available on the Play Store and will continue to be available as standalone purchases or ad supported.

If you've previously installed any app that's included in the service and sign up, your current app could automatically have its ads removed and its in-app purchases unlocked. In a demo, Google showed me a game that normally would have an in-app purchase for an expansion pack, but as a part of PlayPass, it was simply free. The Google Play Store will soon begin showing a small multicolored ticket next to apps that are included in the PlayPass bundle, showing subscribers that it's free and enticing non-subscribers to sign up. Also, unlike Apple, Google was willing to share at least a little about how it plans to pay developers via user engagement with the apps. What precisely that entails is not entirely clear. Google says it's more than simply tracking screen time or number of opens per week.

developers may bulk at their income being handled by another algorithm, but then again, the state of Android apps is such that anything that brings in money at all would be a big improvement for Android developers. The platform has a reputation for doing a worse job of monetizing apps than iOS, after all, end quote. Again, Google says developers won't have to do much to make their existing stuff compatible with Google PlayPass, so long as they're already using standard APIs. The Google PlayPass for developers is invite only for now, but soon you can sign up on an online

form to express your interest, as Google put it. If you want to give this a try as a consumer, it will be available to U.S. Android users later this week and other countries soon. You'll have the first 10 days free, and again, it'll only be $1.99 per month for the entire first year. Well, the WeWork situation has now evolved into Socon Valley's biggest popcorn event since the heyday of Travis Kalanick and Uber. And what folks are wondering is, with Wee, do we have another Kalanick situation brewing? Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal reported that several members of Wee's board of directors, including those directors put there by SoftBank, plan to push for Adam Newman to step down as the Wii CEO. quote, the board is expected to meet as soon as this week and potentially consider a proposal for Mr. Newman to become WE's non-executive chairman, some of the people said. That would allow him to stay at the company he built into one of the country's most valuable startups, but inject fresh leadership to pursue an IPO that would bring we the cash it needs to keep up its toward growth.

The company burned through more than $2 billion in 2018, and analysts have projected that on its current path, we will run through what it has on hand sometime next. year. Any attempted coup is a gamble. Mr. Newman still has allies among the directors and the ability to fire the entire board, thanks to shares he controls that carry extra votes. But SoftBank, which has invested more than $9 billion into the company and is represented on the board, has considerable influence too. And we needs the Japanese conglomerate to continue pumping in cash, end quote. Yeah, there is that, as we've said. The whole Adam can fire the board thing is interesting, but there's also the money thing. Reading with tea leaves, it feels like the emergency plan right now would be for SoftBank to continue as Wee's investor of last resort. Another infusion of a few billion dollars might buy time for We to postpone the IPO, I don't know, six months or more.

but then again, Dan Premack in his pro rata newsletter this morning wrote, quote, It's unclear if SoftBank really wants Newman out or if it's just using the threat as leverage to postpone the IPO, thus buttressing internal rates of return for Vision Fund 1 as fundraising for Vision Fund 2 continues, end quote. Yeah, that's the other main thing, because, again, of primary concern to Masa San is raising that second fund. If the Wii IPO did go out the door at, say, $12 billion in valuation or less, just imagine the losses that he'd have to show on Vision Fund 1. Notable that CNBC was reporting that it is Sahn himself that wants Newman to step down. And WeWork Insiders seem to believe that as well, quoting the CNBC report. WeWork views Sons move against Newman as an effort to prevent the company from going

public, one of the people said, if we work doesn't go public, it would prevent a write-down for soft bank after valuing the company at $47 billion earlier this year, end quote. In addition to all of that, I don't think I spoke about this last week, but there was a big profile of Newman's alleged antics posted last week by the Wall Street Journal that got a lot of chatter. Link to that story in the show notes. So that profile has been pretty embarrassing to the whole we-sendous. soap opera over the last week. But at this point, it probably has nothing to do with what is going on other

than providing a handy excuse. As Dan Premack, again astutely notes, quote, The unofficial narrative is that the directors were shocked, just shocked, to find out that Newman likes to smoke pot and had some questionable self-dealings with the company. Too bad they didn't ask anyone who knows Newman about the former or read their financial disclosures about the latter. Yes, the part about transporting marijuana over international borders was likely new, but but hardly the sort of thing that would get most CEOs canned in 2019. What the directors do seem to have learned recently is that public market investors are very hesitant to invest in a we work with Newman at the helm, so they're putting up a smokescreen to

deflect from their own blind spot. Again, please don't peddle that the board is suddenly blanching at how Newman spent company money, save for fraud, of course, but there's not yet even a whisper of that. There also are market concerns about losses, but that's why. one in which Newman and SoftBank seemed to share the same Grow at All Costs philosophy. Hey, DoorDash, are you watching this? End quote. Worth noting that this is actually finally happening. Samsung announced this morning that the Galaxy Fold will finally go on sale in the U.S.

on September 27th for $1980. Quoting 9 to 5 Google, it'll be available at AT&T, Best Buy, and kind of sort of, Samsung stores, quote, with the U.S. launch of the Galaxy Fold, Samsung is offering the device in two variants. There's an AT&T version, which will be sold by AT&T, both in retail stores online and through Best Buy. Further, an unlocked version will be available in select Best Buy stores and from the retailer's website. This removes the T-Mobile option as well as Samsung's own online store, end quote. So if you've got the money and the inclination, have at it. The fold is finally here. That also means we should be getting some new reviews posting soon, which I

can't wait for. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that sources are telling them that competitors of Facebook are talking to the FTC about that company's hardball tactics, some of which main Facebook nemesis slash whipping boy snap apparently compiled over the years into a dossier that they called Project Voldemort. Quote, the files in Voldemort, a reference to the fictional antagonist in the popular Harry Potter children's books,

chronicled Facebook's moves that threatened to undermine Snap's business, including discouraging popular account holders or influencers from referencing Snap on their Instagram accounts, according to people familiar with the project. Executives also suspected Instagram was preventing Snap content

from trending on its app, the people said. In recent months, the FTC has made contact with dozens of tech executives and app developers, people familiar with the outreach said. The agency's investigators are also talking to executives from startups that became defunct after losing access to Facebook's platform, in addition to founders who sold their companies to Facebook, according to people familiar with that conversation, end quote. It's that last bit that I find particularly interesting.

If we take as read that the mood in Washington is such that some sort of regulatory action is likely at this point, then it's worth gaming out some possible scenarios here. But also, each case, each big tech company in the crosshairs is different. Amazon might be sanctioned for specific behavior on its sales platforms. Google might have constraints imposed upon their advertising platform behavior, but neither of them seem to be obvious targets for some sort of breakup. In the case of Google, we've actually talked about how a breakup might be completely unworkable. But for Facebook, some sort of breakup, some sort of divestiture would be the most obvious and the most headline-grabbing way to go. For all the talk of data privacy, and don't get me

wrong, the FTC still might do stuff on the data privacy angle. The obvious antitrust action against Facebook would be to force divestitures, especially of Instagram and WhatsApp. Each of these services are obviously entities that could be run on their own, since they each have the same business model. Advertising-supported surveillance capitalism. It would be hard to see how you could separate Google's search engine from its search ads or even display ads business, but the same cannot be said for Instagram if you separated it from Facebook. You could just pull it apart, run the same sort of ads that are already running. Zuck obviously knows this too, thus the rapid moves to integrate all of Facebook's units, both behind the scenes and brand-wise.

So it's interesting to me that this is obvious to the feds as well. If they're talking to competitors harmed and even founders acquired, then they're probably thinking about putting together a narrative that's sort of like this. Facebook didn't want or need these companies that it acquired. They just didn't want those companies to remain independent. If that's the case, I think you can see where this is going going forward. Interesting data about a market. that I've never considered in this way before, according to an outlet called Robotics Business Review,

global sales of robots in 2018 reached 422,000 units, making the overall robotics market $16.5 billion. Seventy-four percent of global robotics installations were, in this order, in the following countries, China, Japan, the U.S., South Korea, followed by Germany. We're talking in this report, largely robots installed for industrial and commercial uses, so robots in factories. But there were also some interesting data points about other categories as well. This data, by the way, comes from a group called the International Federation of Robotics or IFR. The group said shipments in 2019 will recede from the record levels in 2018, but also expects an average growth of 12% per year from 2020 to 2022. In the service robots category, the IFR said the sales value of service robots for professional use increased 32% to $9.2 billion in 2018.

Logistic systems such as autonomous guided vehicles or AGVs represented 41% of all units sold, followed by inspection and maintenance robots, 39%. Service robots aimed at personal and domestic use, mainly in the area of household robots such as vacuums and lawnmowers, was up 15% to $3.7 billion in sales. end quote. So here's what I meant by interesting subcategories. As stipulated, the most popular category of robots in this report is the automotive category, which accounts for 30% of installations in 2018 and a 21% overall increase. Again, those are robots on factory floors. The electronics industry comes in second, and the metals and machinery industry comes in third. Again, large industrial uses. But beyond that, the so-called professional service category are robots for logistics, so robots like in Amazon warehouses, and in the

medical field, the medical field rose by 61% year over year. So-called field robots, agricultural bots, milking bots, farming, and horticultural bots rose 50% year over year. And so-called personal service or domestic robots are expected to increase 46% on average through 2022. So depending on what sector you care to look at, the robot market is starting to go a little bit hockey stick. Google might have just kicked off the era of so-called quantum supremacy, which would represent a major milestone in quantum computing. Quantum supremacy is a somewhat controversial term within the field that means that a quantum computer can do a bit of computation that couldn't possibly be performed by a traditional

computer. Google researchers made the announcement in a paper that was published on NASA's website before it was taken down for unknown reasons. Still, quoting the verge, Google's quantum computer was reportedly able to solve a calculation, proving the randomness of numbers produced by a random number generator in three minutes and 20 seconds. That same computation would take the world's fastest traditional supercomputer summit around 10,000 years. This effectively means that the calculation cannot be performed by a traditional computer, making Google the first to demonstrate quantum supremacy. Despite hitting the milestone, it's likely that quantum computers capable of tackling

practical tasks are still years away. However, once developed, the computers are expected to have huge implications for areas as diverse as cryptography, chemistry, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Google expects the power of quantum computers to expand at a, quote, double exponential rate, end quote, whereas traditional computers have long been pegged to Moore's Law, which saw power double every 18 months or so. Google previously said that it hoped to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of 2017, however, the 72-cubit system it developed proved too difficult to control. Following this, Google developed a 53-cubit design called Sycamore, which was used to achieve the recent

breakthrough, end quote. Worth noting that others in the quantum computing space are disputing the findings. IBM's head of research, Dario Gill, told the Financial Times that Google's claim to have achieved quantum supremacy is, quote, just plain wrong, end quote. Still, as they like to say online, big if true. So yeah, I'm done with jury duty. Only got called the four lawyers for one case. It was just a simple summary judgment thing, not a criminal case, just a how much in damages would you award, if any? And it was, going to be a one-day trial. So I was excited. I heard that, at least here in New York, they keep you for a minimum of two days anyway. So I figured, hey, one-day trial on Monday,

Bing, bang, boom, I'm done. But out of everyone called into that room for that particular trial, I was the only one not picked. So I got sent back to the holding area, and the rest of the afternoon I was cringing because every time they called names, I was sure I'd be called, and I had missed my best shot that I'd end up catching some horrible. manslaughter case or something that would last weeks. But no, my luck actually turned out because by the end of the day, they finally did call my name and they let me go home and handed me my certificate of service. So there you go.

That was my little adventure in civic duty. My thanks to Glenn Fleischman, as always, for his exceptional service to this show in my absence. Hey, let's end today with a podcast classified. If you too want to share something with the Mutant Podcast Army and you want to purchase a classified ad, remember just go to ridehome.comfo forward slash classifieds. For many businesses, digital marketing is essential to success. However, despite its importance, most companies can't justify the cost of another full-time employee and they can't stomach being burned by another flaky freelancer. What you really need is a partner. Rob Bettis is an independent.

digital marketer who helps e-commerce retailers and app developers build bigger, better businesses online through PPC media. Unlike agencies who are all about scale, Rob works with a limited number of businesses managing advertising on Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Apple Search, ensuring every client gets the expertise and attention they deserve. Rob has spent the past 15 years managing PPC accounts, and since going solo, Rob has generated a return on ad spend of over 700,000% for his clients. If you want to build a bigger, better business online, contact Rob at Robbedis.com.

That's R-O-B-B-E-T-I-S.com or click the link in the show notes.