Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/19 – Apple Launches Apple Music TV (A-MTV? iMTV?)

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 for Monday, October 19th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple wants you to want your MTV, or your AMTV, I'm MTV, I don't know, Apple has launched a music videos channel. The new Samsung Galaxies might be coming sooner than ever. The company bringing AR to car windshields crosses my radar, and why Japan saying it's getting on the regulate tech bandwagon might be the tipping point for the entire sector. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. For years, the joke has been, remember when MTV actually played music videos? I guess the truth is that most music video consumption moved to YouTube and places like that,

Starting point is 00:01:19 but one does have to imagine that there has to be some value to airing music videos elsewhere. I know, how about on a channel that a company is trying to gin up eyeballs for, with the added bonus that that self-same company has a streaming music service and sells devices to play music on. Apple Today unveiled Apple Music TV, a free 24-hour curated live stream of popular music videos available now in the U.S. on Apple's music and TV apps. Quoting Variety. The service premiered Monday morning with a countdown of the top 100 all-time most stream songs in the U.S. on Apple Music. On Thursday, October 22nd, it will celebrate the upcoming release of Bruce Springsteen's Letter to You album,

Starting point is 00:02:04 an all-day Bruce Takeover featuring music video blocks of his most popular videos, an interview with Zane Lowe, anchor of Apple Music's radio station, and a special live-stream fan event. It will also have two exclusive video premieres on Friday at 12 p.m. Eastern Time 9 a.m. Pacific, Joe G's 777 and St. John's Gorgeous. The channel will premiere new videos every Friday at that time, end quote. So appointment television, possibly another good idea that should make a comeback. Also, in Apple's announcement of all this, the stream will also include, quote, exclusive new music videos and premieres, special curated music video blocks, and live shows and events, as well as chart countdowns and guests, end quote. Why not live concerts?

Starting point is 00:02:53 Why not tons of live events? Seems to do wonders for Fortnite, you know, but maybe that's coming. Since we're on Apple, I thought I'd give you another little tidbit here about the new iPhones that has dribbled out over the weekend. A filing with regulators in Brazil has revealed that the iPhone 12 has a 2,815 MAH battery, while the iPhone 12 Mini has a 2,226 MAHBH battery. This is notable because, quoting 9 to 5 Mac, in comparison, the iPhone SE 2020 has an 18201. M-A-H battery, which is 18% less than the new iPhone 12 Mini battery capacity. Based on Apple's website, iPhone 12 Mini can reach up to 15 hours of video playback with its battery,

Starting point is 00:03:45 while the 2020 iPhone SE and iPhone 8 can reach up to 13 hours. However, this is less than the 17-hour battery life promise for iPhone 11, which has a 3,110 M-H internal battery. Apple also says on its website that the iPhone 12 and iPhone 12 Pro battery can last up to 17 hours for video playback, but the internal battery capacity numbers of those models are still unknown, although it's hard to imagine that the numbers will be so different from last year's iPhone 11 model, end quote. Well, it was later confirmed that the iPhone 12 has a 6% smaller battery than the 11. Now, Apple does have a history of doing a lot with smaller batteries, you know, the whole idea of

Starting point is 00:04:30 doing hardware and software together. And all that, talk of A-14 chip efficiency gains, probably wasn't just happy PR talk on Apple's part. Also, using an OLED instead of an LCD should make up for most of the lost battery capacity, but as Stephen Hall pointed out on Twitter, quote, the iPhone 12 has the same battery size as the small pixel 4, end quote. And on the flip side of the great phone divide, sources are reporting that Samsung's next Galaxy S flagships, the S-21 and S-30, will be launched in January with three new models, a standard, a plus, and an ultra, quoting Android Central.

Starting point is 00:05:15 A January arrival for the Galaxy S-21, combined with a mid-November debut for Apple's top-end iPhone 12 Pro Max, would see the Apple and Samsung flagships launching closer together than ever before, while the immediate post-holiday period isn't typically seen as a great time to launch new products in the West, Samsung may be looking to capitalize on delays to its rival's 2020 handsets with this earlier launch. Following recent rumors of the phones entering mass production earlier than ever, leaker Steve Hemerstoffer has revealed the design of the Galaxy S-21 on his voice page. Hemerstoffer, who also goes by at OnLeaks, published CAD renders of an S-21 with a 6.2-inch display, hole-punch selfie camera, and more uniform bezels than the Galaxy

Starting point is 00:06:01 S-20. These kinds of renders have proven to be accurate in the past, and Hemistoffer has a solid track record. Around the back of the Galaxy S-21, there's a new style camera module that seems to extend from the phone's outer frame. Dimensions are quoted as being 151.7 by 71.2 by 7.9 millimeters, or 9 millimeters with the camera bump, making the S-30 slightly wider than the S-20, but otherwise very close in size to its predecessor. In a separate leak, Hammerstaffer released purported renders of the larger flagship Galaxy S-21 Ultra, like the S-20 and Note 20 Ultras. This one has a larger display and a honking camera bump on the back, along with four sensors, a laser autofocus module, and a flash, end quote. Okay, but when is someone going to release a phone called the knee plus?

Starting point is 00:06:53 Ultra. Interesting new project from nonprofit tech watchdog news site, The Markup. It's called the Citizen Browser Project. It's being done in conjunction with the New York Times. And in short, the project is going to pay people to watch their web browsing in an attempt to reverse engineer the algorithms that platforms like Facebook and YouTube use to serve you content, quoting Fast Company. Social media platforms are the broadcasting networks of the 21st century. says the markup's editor-in-chief Julia Anguin. They dictate what news the public consumes with black box algorithms designed to maximize profits at the expense of truth and transparency, end quote. The markup has impaneled a group of 1,200 people who will use a special browser when they browse

Starting point is 00:07:43 Facebook and YouTube. The browser will send back information in real time about the content being served up to the participants. Just the content served, not the way users interact with it. In time, the data will create a statistically valid. sample that delivers insights about how Facebook's and YouTube's algorithms work. Anguant says, the view from the browser will enable researchers at the markup to make connections between the personal characteristics or demographics of a given user and the content they are shown. It will reveal differences in the way the platforms serve content to black users versus white users, for example, or conservative users versus liberal ones, she says.

Starting point is 00:08:19 She believes that the browsers will show whether some users see more harmful content, such as COVID-19 misinformation, more than others. The browser data should also shine some light on how Facebook uses personal and demographic data to micro-target advertisements. In its publicly available ad library, Facebook provides a certain amount of analytics data showing in general terms how ads were targeted. But Anguon says that the company doesn't provide the full picture of the user's personal or demographic data that triggered the display of the ad.

Starting point is 00:08:49 The markup's research subjects will get started using their browsers within the next few weeks. Quote, hopefully before the election, says Angwin. They'll continue using them at least until presidential inauguration in January. Quote, The public has a clear interest in understanding exactly how powerful institutions are using technology to reshape our society, said Nabila Seid, president of the markup. And whether those institutions are public or private government actors or companies, we think the public deserves to know exactly how they wield power over our world. Citizen Browser helps us do that, end quote.

Starting point is 00:09:21 This isn't an interesting raise, but it is an interesting company that just popped up on my radar. For all of my skepticism about augmented reality on our phones, if sci-fi movies have told us anything, we should long ago have had robust augmented reality on the windshields of our cars. Turns out that a British company named Invisix has been working on doing something like this for fully a decade using head-up holography, and they say they've cracked it, if you'll forgive the unfortunate phrase to use around windshields, quoting Bloomberg. InVisix, a A 10-year-old British company is quietly turning the heads-up display into a wonderland of holographs, a three-dimensional projected image a la, help me, Obi-Wan, or a posthumous Tupac performance at Coachella.

Starting point is 00:10:12 Instead of a simple speedometer and some crude navigation arrows, Invisix promises a layer of augmented reality stretching from the hood to the horizon. At first, it will tell a driver more clearly where to go. Once the self-driving robots take over, it may offer Pokemon-style games or your Instagram feed. calls are impressive now, wait until you take one at the wheel and you're talking to a hologram. Founder and CEO Jameson Christmas, who has a Ph.D. in Holography from Cambridge University, says the venture has been a lifelong dream that started with a Star Wars fascination and progressed to a seminal deal with Jaguar Land Rover. More recently, Invisx landed a $50 million investment round led by General Motors Venture Capital Unit and Hyundai Mobis, a giant South Korean tech supplier.

Starting point is 00:10:57 Christmas told Bloomberg that carmakers are excited about the implications around active safety with holograms on the windshield quote. The ability to really orchestrate what the drivers should be looking at, what hazards there were in an urban environment. But other really significant use cases were things like navigation, the ability to take navigation as we experience it today, where you look at a map and look at the world around you and try to link that information together. The ability to actually overlay that information upon reality, to put the arrows on the point. place where you're supposed to turn is incredibly compelling. As for autonomous systems, quote, for level two and level three, which requires you to pay attention, there's a really compelling use case for augmented reality still. The car can virtually tell you what it's aware of,

Starting point is 00:11:43 what it's doing, and why it's doing it. It makes it that much more comfortable and also means you can shift responsibility for actually driving from the car to you almost instantaneously, whereas if you're reacting to prompts, you don't have the information you need to make informed decisions. With level four and level five, you are very much a passenger, in which case, the ability to create future revenue streams for the car companies is a really interesting opportunity. Adverts or useful information about what's going on in the world around you. The ability to take your everyday interaction with your cell phone and overlay it on reality. Those things all become possible, end quote. Invisix hopes to launch in the premium car market

Starting point is 00:12:20 as early as 2023. Japan's Fair Trade Commission, says that country will join U.S. and European regulators in challenging market abuses by Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon, the usual suspects. Quoting Reuters. Kazuyuki Ferruya, chairman of Japan's Fair Trade Commission, or FTC, also said Tokyo could open a probe into any merger or business tie-up involving fitness tracker-maker Fitbit if the size of such deals are big enough. Quote, if the size of any merger or business tie-up is big, we can launch an anti-monopoly investigation into the buyer's process of acquiring a startup like Fitbit, he told Reuters. We're closely watching developments, including in Europe.

Starting point is 00:13:08 EU antitrust regulators in August launched an investigation into a $2.1 billion deal by Alphabet Unit Google's bid to buy Fitbit that aimed to take on Apple and Samsung in the wearable technology market. Japan is laying the groundwork to regulate platform operators. Among them are big tech giants dubbed Gaffa, Google Apple. Amazon and Facebook, that face various antitrust probes in Western nations. Multinational companies like Gaffa have similar business practices across the globe, which makes global coordination crucial, Faruya says, quote, we'll work closely with our U.S. and European counterparts and respond to any moves that hamper competition, he said. This is an area I will push through aggressively, he said,

Starting point is 00:13:50 adding the FTC was ready to open probes if digital platforms abuse their dominant market positions against consumers, end quote. which is why I'm telling you about this now. In recent years, it was mostly Europe that was cracking down on or pressuring tech companies in a regulatory way. And yes, Europe is a big enough market that whatever new rules they enacted mostly had to be adhered to by the big tech companies, but still on some level, you could set up two different systems, one for Europe and one for the rest of the world. And in the worst case scenario, you could walk away from the European market entirely. You wouldn't want to, but you could do it. But now it seems,

Starting point is 00:14:27 that America is moving in a more, shall we say, stringent regulatory direction. And if Japan is getting in lockstep as well, then yeah, any sort of ad hoc patchwork of regulatory compliance won't be possible. You can't walk away from essentially the entire first world market. Also, for the last decade or so, the argument could have been made and was made that those self-righteous Europeans were just overzealous in their ideas of how tech and business should work in the modern world. But if most of the entire Western world now seems to be lining up in agreement that maybe tech has gone too far, then maybe it's time to bow to reality. Because I mean, yes, the most ardent tech cheerleaders could still make the following argument. Governments are just jealous of our power.

Starting point is 00:15:21 Yes, take note of this from the Wall Street Journal, that tech companies now account for nearly 40% of the S&P 500 and are set to end the year eclipsing 1999 when tech set a record by accounting for 37% of the stock indexes value. Few analysts say tech stocks are as overvalued as they were two decades ago, with sturdy earnings growth and near zero interest rates, justifying much of the group's recent assent. But many investors are bracing for more volatility in a sector that has risen remarkably quickly and pulled the rest of the market along with it. analysts estimate the tech sector's share of S&P 500 corporate profits could reach about 36% this year,

Starting point is 00:16:02 fact-set data show. And the information technology sector has a price to earnings ratio of 28, based on the group's profits from the past year, compared with a ratio of 24 for the S&P 500. Communication services firms trade at 25 times earnings, while Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Alphabet have valuations in the mid-30s. Netflix's ratio is about 90, while Amazon's, is roughly 130. Few analysts expect the biggest tech firms to soon be broken up, and regulatory actions are often slow to play out, but many investors think regulation could be another source of volatility in the weeks ahead. The only thing that really makes me nervous as a tech bull is the likelihood of government intervention, said Jacob Welther, Chief Executive of Blueprint

Starting point is 00:16:46 Capital Advisors, end quote. Yes, just putting this out there as food for thought. Tech has had the wind at its back since about 2006. And I'm not saying that the sky is falling, but if the whole world is seemingly aligning to at least put some hurdles in front of tech's continued rise to dominance, at the very least, one could imagine a decade or so where acquisitions are harder to make, at the very least, as in that Japan case, or on the outside, one can certainly increasingly imagine regulatory push for some sort of shattering and divestiment of the biggest tech oligarchs on the outside. But most importantly, if the whole Western wealthy world is aligning with regulatory ideas, then the idea of creating one product or platform that can be run across the

Starting point is 00:17:36 entire globe, that might truly be coming to an end. If the winds are blowing hard enough and in the same direction for long enough, only a fool fails to take notice and plan accordingly after a while. That's all for today. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 10/19 – Apple Launches Apple Music TV (A-MTV? iMTV?)

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