Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 7/23 - Samsung's Big Step Toward 5G

Episode Date: July 23, 2018

Susan Fowler Rigetti gets a high profile new job, a Lyft and Uber driver was live-streaming without consent, Samsung takes a big step toward a 5G world, and why is Google Translate spitting out religious prophecies? Links:St. Louis Uber driver has put video of hundreds of passengers online. Most have no idea. (St. Louis Dispatch)$20K in Crypto: The First Bets on Prediction Market Augur Just Paid Out (CoinDesk)Qualcomm's new chips fix a major problem for 5G phones (CNET)Why Is Google Translate Spitting Out Sinister Religious Prophecies? (Motherboard)Pinterest nears $1 billion in ad sales and valuation rises as it looks to go public in mid-2019 (CNBC)Consumer startups are dead. Long live consumer startups. (Eric Feng) 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, July 23, 2018. Today, Susan Fowler-Rigetti gets a high-profile new job. A Lyft and Uber driver was live streaming without consent.

Samsung takes a big step towards a 5G world. And why is Google Translate spitting out religious prophecies? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Susan Fowler-Rigetti, the former Uber engineer who blew the whistle on sexual harassment at the company, and arguably set off the chain of events that led to Travis Kalanick's being kicked out of the company, has a new gig. She's joining the New York Times as a technology opinion editor working out of San Francisco. Quote, as our tech editor, she will be responsible for commissioning and sometimes writing pieces on all the ways technology is shaping

our culture, economy, relationships, politics, and play. The New York Times said in a press release, she will bring her unique brand of courage, clarity of mind, and moral purpose to our pages starting in September, end quote. Until now, Fowler Rigetti has only worked as an engineer, most recently at Stripe, but she has been working on two books, and at Stripe, she launched a magazine for technologists called Increment. Did you hear the one about the driver who was suspended by both Lyft and Uber for secretly live streaming hundreds of his rides on Twitch, the live video streaming service, most famous for gamers streaming their matches of things like Fortnite. Jason Gargak of the St. Louis area allegedly streamed hundreds of his rides on Twitch, and viewers tuned in in the thousands, often commenting in real-time chat along with the rides. When confronted about this by the St. Louis dispatch, Gargak said that he saw nothing wrong with

what he was doing. Quote, I tried to capture the natural interactions between myself and the passengers. What a Lyft and Uber ride actually is, he said in an interview to the dispatch. He also said that it was a way to earn extra money, revealing he had earned about $3,500 off of his Twitch audience. He was only making $150 to $300 a night as a driver. But passengers weren't so happy when they found out about what Gargak was up to, reporting that they're instead felt violated. When Lyft and Uber were confronted with Gargak's alleged streaming, however, there was initially confusion because while in some states it is illegal to record people without their consent, it seems that Missouri is not one of them. But after considerable publicity,

both Lyft and Uber subsequently kicked Gargak off their services entirely. I want to just read you the end of the piece from the St. Louis Dispatch that reported on this because it has quite a kicker. Quote, at the end of a 90-minute in-person interview with the post-dispatch, Gargak asked that his full name not be published in connection with this story. The post-dispatch already knew his name. He said it in one of his own videos, and his identity was later confirmed through public records and social media accounts. He gave a reporter his business card. quote, stick with my first name if you can because privacy concerns, he said. You know, the internet is a crazy place.

One of the biggest tech narratives for the next three to five years, perhaps the big narrative, will be the global rollout of so-called 5G wireless technology. Imagine browsing the web on your phone, out in the world, at speeds that rival, or eventually exceed what you can get from your wired broadband connection at home. Will we even need or want wired broadband connections if we can get speeds that fast and if coverage becomes widespread? Will this finally issue in the age of the Internet of Things that we've been promised? What might broadband as ubiquitous as oxygen do for, say, self-driving cars? 5G has been promised for years now, so you might be forgiven if you've just gotten inured to all the hype.

And indeed, a lot of things still need to happen before 5G can become a reality. The actual new hardware needs to start going up in actual towers. New modems need to be developed. The standards themselves still need to be agreed upon. But this is all coming. And the news from Qualcomm today says one major piece of the puzzle is falling into place now. See, before all this happens, we still need to get 5G into smartphones. And one major step towards doing that came today when Qualcomm unveiled its QTM-052 millimeter wave

and QPM 56X sub-6 gigahertz radio frequency antenna modules. These modules are small enough to fit into handheld devices. It's expected that these modules will start coming to mobile hotspots later this year and to smartphones starting in the first half of next year. Quote, this is a bona fide breakthrough, Sharif Hanna, Qualcomm's director of product marketing said in an interview to CNET. The payoff for using millimeter wave, especially in densely populated area, is huge, end quote. So why is this a big deal? Part of the promise of 5G is that it will use higher

frequency bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, something called millimeter wave. You might remember from your high school physics class, the higher the frequency, the faster the speeds you can achieve. But those higher frequencies don't travel as far, and they have serious problems with things like walls and corners and trees and such. Even holding your hand over a a millimeter wave antenna could be enough to block the frequency. So without getting too technical on you, the breakthrough of these new Qualcomm antennas is that they've gotten around those physical limitations,

all with an antenna the size of a penny. Qualcomm's initial 5G modems and millimeter wave antennas were so large you had to wheel them around in a cart. But apparently, these new antenna modules are so small, they could be embedded in a phone's bezel. So when these antennas start coming to smartphones, the 5G revolution can well and truly begin. And what will that revolution bring us? Quoting from CNET's piece on this, quote,

5G, the next generation of cellular technology vows to significantly boost the speed, coverage, and responsiveness of wireless networks. It can go 10 to 100 times faster than your typical cellular connection today, and even quicker than anything you can get with a physical fiber optic cable going into your house. It'll take seconds to download a full TV season, and doctors will be able to perform remote surgeries in real time. Quick check in on the crypto world. Auger, spelled A-U-G-U-R, is a decentralized platform for bets and predictions. It's a predictions market like in-trade or predict it.

But you can wager cryptocurrencies, and there's a bit of that blockchain magic of autonomous smart contracts. built in. The first bets made on auger have just paid out to the tune of $20,000 or so in ether, going to the first wave of users who, I guess, guessed correctly on various bets and markets. It looks like the most valuable, in quote, market up to this point, was betting on the outcome of the World Cup final, contested between Belgium and France recently. Quoting from an article on Auger in Coinbase, quote, the amount of money. staked on auger prediction markets has ballooned in recent days. Predictions.global shows 1,963 ether in total open interest

worth nearly $1 million at the time of writing. That figure has tripled since Monday. Okay, so at least as of 30 minutes ago when I tried this out myself, it still worked. Do this. Go to Google Translate, set the input language to Moward. and the output language to English and start typing the word dog in over and over and over. Dog, dog, dog, dog. Put the spaces in there, but just keep doing dog, dog, dog, dog, dog.

Don't be surprised if something like this comes back to you. Quote, Doomsday Clock is three minutes at 12. We are experiencing characters and a dramatic developments in the world, which indicate that we are increasingly approaching the end times and Jesus' return. End quote. That's a bit dramatic, right? Try it again. This time set it to translate from Irish to English,

and then type in more gibberish, like AG. That's not even a word. AG, over and over again. Ag, ag, ag, ag, ag, ag. This time you might get something like, quote, as a result, the total number of the members of the tribe of the sons of Gershon was 150,000, end quote. So why is Google Transatlantic?

Translate spitting out what feels like lines from the Bible if you put gibberish into it. On Twitter, some people are blaming actual demonic possession. There's also a subreddit called TranslateGate that has conspiracy theories that are all over the map. But what's the real culprit here? Alexander Rush, a Harvard professor who studies natural language processing and computer translation, says it's probably down to machine learning and the corpus of text that Google has used to train its translation bots. Quoting from a motherboard piece on this, quote, in neuromachine translation, the system is trained

with a large number of texts in one language and corresponding translations in another to create a model for moving between the two. But when it's fed nonsense inputs, Rush said, the system can, quote, hallucinate bizarre outputs. Not unlike the way Google's Deep Dream identifies and accentuates patterns in images, end quote. So basically, Occam's Razor says that at some point in its development, Google trained its translation machines on Bible verses, and when the bots encounter stuff that they can't parse, they simply go back to their early programming. Does that remind you of anybody? According to insiders that CNBC has spoken to,

Pinterest is aiming for an IPO by mid-2019. With all the talk of unicorns going public this year, people were wondering why Pinterest had been conspicuously absent in the conversation about unicorns going public. Well, it seems like they were waiting to deliver this sort of news. According to CNBC's sources, Pinterest will likely generate around $1 billion in revenue

this year for the first time. And that given it did $500 million in sales the last year, maybe this is a nice time to make your public market debut. When you hit a billion dollars and your sales are doubling. Apparently, ads on mobile are paying off handsomely for Pinterest, which now has 200 million monthly active users. On secondary markets, shares of Pinterest are trading at levels that suggest the company is worth between,

$13 and $15 billion. If Pinterest does go public next year, it's expected that it will be joined by the debuts of other high-profile unicorns, Uber and Airbnb. And that will lead me nicely, after much delay, to our next segment or what I had intended as the next segment. Finally, today, there was a post on Medium over the weekend that has gotten a lot of attention, so I'm going to bring it to your attention.

The post is from Eric Fung, who's a general partner at Kleiner Perkins and was previously at Flipboard and previously at Microsoft. In the piece, Fung essentially looks back and notes that from 2009 to roughly 2012, there was a bit of a mini golden age for tech startups that arose basically in the wake of the app store becoming a thing. He cites specifically Pinterest, WhatsApp, Uber, Instagram, Zhaumee, Snapchat, and Tao Tiao. Quote,

these are some of the most iconic consumer companies around that touch more than a billion mobile users every day and have become fundamental parts of our society, all founded in consecutive years between 2009 and 2012. Truly, once in a generation, outsized consumer businesses that made 11-figure valuations seem routine, were somehow being started every single year for four years straight.

This was as hot a streak as you can possibly have, end quote. But then, Fung notes, that all sort of started to trail off a bit. And I think we've all felt that, right? There was a while there where seemingly every other week you felt like, okay, now what's this new thing? Do I have to be on this? What is Pinterest? What's a pin?

What's a snap? Have you tried to Uber yet? And then it just sort of hasn't felt that way in a little while. hasn't felt quite that frenzied. What's been happening in the intervening years? Well, Fung's post is full of amazing charts, so take a look at it and look at the one that outlines the market caps of the big tech companies in just the last five years.

Quote, in 2008, when the App Store first launched, not a single member of Fang, and that's Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Google, was among the top 30 most valuable companies in the world by market capitalization. Fast forward 10 years, that group of five has collectively increased in value by approximately $3 trillion, such that all but one of those companies, Netflix, by the way, is now ranked among the top 10 most valuable companies in the world. And that laggard, also Netflix, of course, happens to be the fastest growing among all of Fang,

having increased its market cap by 100 times since 2008. But more interesting is when you look at when that rocket ship growth has. happened. 80% of the value of Feng was generated after 2013, end quote. So Fung's point is basically that whereas from 2009 to 2012, it was all about creating new market leaders, 2013 to 2018 reinforced established market leaders. Does that mean there's no hope for newer startups breaking through anymore, that the rebellion, as he calls it, is over? The people piece is full of Star Wars metaphors and Jiffs, by the way. Fung argues that, yes, it's harder to overcome the advantages in scale and distribution that

the tech overlords currently have, but it's not impossible. Here's an interesting thing that he points out, quote, mobile users are so savvy and product fluent these days that they are comfortable using multiple services simultaneously. The average mobile user is active on nearly three social networking services, has over four shopping apps installed on their phone. Communicates on two messaging apps, subscribes to two on-demand video services. Again, that's the average user, not just advanced users, who are regularly switching between multiple services instead of staying on a single service, even in the categories that the Empire,

again I said he loves his Star Wars metaphors, that the Empire dominates. So to gain traction in a consumer category, a disruptive startup does not. have to defeat and displace an incumbent, defended by its network effects moat. As Sun Su once said, on contentious ground, attack not. A startup can avoid the direct battle and exist alongside the incumbent, because users have proven capable and willing to adopt multiple services, end quote. So maybe it's not one app for something, as I've been saying over and over. Fung concludes by being optimistic.

The rebellion can rise again, he says, and the three key factors which will allow this to happen will be consumers' willingness to adopt multiple services simultaneously, apps being able to become breakout hits overnight, and most importantly, technology becoming more accessible to builders of all shapes and sizes. Excellent piece. Highly recommend you read it. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McConaugh.

I really have nothing pithy for you today on days like this. Maybe I'll just have to end by quoting random movie lines, and whoever guesses which movie it's from will get a prize. First prize is a Cadillac L Dorado. Anyone want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Yes, of course, that's a line from a movie.

Then again, though, in the age of Google and I, IMDB and time-shifted trivia contests are probably pointless, right? That's why HQ trivia is live with a 10-second timer. So never mind. Anyway, let's end with a quote from the same movie. Go and do likewise, gents. Money's out there. You pick it up, it's yours. You don't? I got no sympathy for you. You want to go out on those sits tonight and close? Close. It's yours. If not, you're going to be shining my shoes. Talk to you to you to my tomorrow.