Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, 7/16 - Instapaper Goes Solo

Episode Date: July 16, 2018

A Roku wireless speaker, better Uber pickups, Instapaper goes solo, what to expect from the Galaxy S10 and it’s Amazon Prime Day everybody! Links:Wave Uber’s new Spotlight or send canned chats to find your driver (TechCrunch)Airbnb is grappling with how to treat people with criminal convictions (Quartz)A German court ruled you can inherit Facebook content like a letter or a diary (Quartz)Here's what to expect from the Samsung Galaxy S10, including a new feature you won't find on iPhones (Business Insider)Amazon’s share of the US e-commerce market is now 49%, or 5% of all retail spend (TechCrunch) 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, July 16th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a Roku wireless speaker, better Uber pickups,

Instapaper goes solo, what to expect from the Galaxy S-10, and happy Amazon Prime Day, everybody. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Guess who else has decided to get into the speaker game? Roku. The company today unveiled Roku. TV wireless speakers that use the company's Roku Connect platform to link up with Roku powered smart TVs over Wi-Fi. The speakers are going to be available exclusively from Roku.com in

October for $200, but you can pre-order them today for a first week price of $150. Now, there's a couple of caveats here. These are not necessarily smart speakers. These are speakers designed to make your Roku TV sound better. Roku notes that these days you can spend thousands of dollars to buy a super thin TV with a great screen, but inside that thin device, you're probably not getting very good speakers, because there's just no room. And Roku has been aggressively expanding its line of Roku TV televisions, so these speakers are designed to work specifically with them. But it's not a full surround sound system. It's a very simple value proposition, actually, as Mark Eli, Roku's vice president of product management puts it,

quote, our fundamental belief here is that by delivering a better sound experience, you get a better entertainment streaming experience, end quote. So again, not a full smart speaker per se, but they do come with the Roku voice remote, and it's not a sound bar like other companies have produced as the solution to flat screen TV sound. These speakers look slightly bigger than Sonos ones, and you put them on either side of your TV for stereo purposes. The Verges Haym. Gartenberg got to test the speakers out, and this is the report, quote, I was able to listen to a pre-production demo of the wireless speakers compared to the built-in speakers on a TCL Roku TV, and they do what Roku is promising here. The paired speakers offered a fuller, richer stereo sound than the TV speakers. Music

had a better range, especially on the low end, and movie clips had more detailed audio than without the extra punch the speakers provided. We'll obviously have to wait for the speakers to come out to see how they sound compared to their competition, but Roku seems to have succeeded in its goal of outperforming the default option. Insta Paper is becoming an independent entity again. The Read It Later and Bookmarking Service announced that its erstwhile owner, Pinterest, has agreed to allow a new company to be formed that will take over the ownership of the app. Pinterest bought Instapaper two years ago, but after GDPR passed,

the service was suspended in Europe, raising questions as to whether or not the entire service would continue or not. The same development team that has been working on the app during the course of the Pinterest Interregnum will continue to manage things going forward. On Twitter, Instapaper founder Marco Arment tweeted, quote, I bet this is very good news for the future of Instapaper. Last week, we mentioned Ming Chi Quo's predictions about what to expect from the forthcoming new iPhone announcements. Well, Quo is back with more predictions this time

on what we might be able to expect from the soon-to-be-announced Samsung Galaxy S-10. Quo believes Samsung will release three models of its flagship phone in 2019, a 5.8-inch version, a 6.1 inch version, and one with a 6.4-inch screen. He thinks the standout feature on the higher-end phones will be a fingerprint scanner built right into the screen. The Galaxy S9 currently has a fingerprint scanner on the back of the phone. Quoting from Business Insider, quote, Quo predicts Samsung could ship 40 million Galaxy S-10 phones next year, mostly the two larger models, which will be more expensive. Samsung could also ship 14 million to 16 million Galaxy Note 10 phones next year,

according to the TF International Security's forecast. Uber is still attempting to make the act of hailing a ride as fail-proof as possible. A few years ago, Uber started using Spot, which let users pick a color that would light up on LED bars, installed in a driver's windshield. That way you could identify. which car was your intended driver. A couple years ago,

lifted something similar with its amp dashboard light that assigned a color you could look for. Then Uber stepped up the game even more by rolling out an actual gadget called beacon that Uber drivers could stick in their windshields. When you called for an Uber, you would select which color the beacon lit up so you knew who to look for.

But that's only one part of the equation, right? Because until now, there was no way for the driver to identify you, which can be a problem if you're on a curb and there's a whole bunch of people waiting to be picked up. So today, Uber is rolling out what it calls Spotlight. As you see your Uber driver approaching on the map inside the Uber app, you can tap the Spotlight button,

and your screen is completely taken over by a bright color, which you can then wave in the air to get your driver's attention. Apparently, each driver will be assigned a different random color gradient, and they'll get a message telling them which color to look for. But that's not all because you can now message drivers easier and say something like, I'm the dude wearing the bright pink shirt. And Uber has added a much requested feature. If you pre-schedule a ride, Uber now guarantees that the driver will show up at the time you've requested.

If the driver doesn't show up within the expected time window, Uber will credit you $10 towards your next trip. Uber said in a statement that all of this is part of an effort not only to take more of the friction out of getting a ride when you need it, but also to make it easier for drivers and to reduce ride cancellations, either on the part of the driver or the writer. Quote, human interaction is hard, says Uber Senior Project Manager for Rider Experience Ryan Yu to TechCrunch's Josh Konstine. Driver initiated cancellations after the driver has arrived at the pickup point

are particularly stressful. With these new features, we found cancellations on both sides reduced significantly, especially for drivers, after they've arrived. Speaking of the gig economy, we spoke last week about Uber improving its background checks on drivers, but obviously Uber doesn't do background checks on riders,

on their customers, right? Well, that's not the case for another on-demand service, Airbnb. If you want to stay at an Airbnb, you yourself have to submit to a background check as well. So if you have any convictions in your past, guess what? you might not even be allowed to be an Airbnb customer. As a piece in courts notes, this happened to Marlon Peterson, who's an activist, a podcaster, and soon to be a novelist.

And full disclosure, Marlon happens to be a friend of mine and a fellow Ted resident. Marlon was involved in a serious crime almost 20 years ago, but he's paid his debt to society, 10 years in prison. But that past conviction, no matter how long ago it was, means that Marlon can't even open an Airbnb account, much less rent accommodations on the service. As Marlon has said in a USA Today op-ed, quote, after years of healing and loving work, I am confronted yet again with the cruel reality that society makes people like me keep paying for mistakes far beyond our prison term, end quote. Having a conviction on your record doesn't mean you can't stay at a traditional hotel or can't

get a job, but it does mean in a lot of cases you can't participate in the modern gig economy and not just as an employee, but in this case and a lot of others, even as a customer. How can it be sustainable to exclude people from parts of modern life that are rapidly becoming ubiquitous? There are 20 million people in the United States that have felony convictions after all. Are they forever to be unable to participate in things like Uber or Task Rabbit or even Wag? This isn't some futuristic Black Mirror episode. This is a problem confronting people and companies right now today. In the case of Airbnb, as Quartz says, quote, Airbnb's policy on who is allowed on the platform is messy, and it's not clear how exactly the company came up with its rules, end quote.

Until courts press them on it, the help section on Airbnb's website was not exactly clear on the restrictions about who and who could not use their platform. As of an update that Airbnb made to the site last Thursday, things are a little more spelled out. There are certain crimes which mean users will never, ever be allowed to be Airbnb tenants or renters. Murder, rape, terrorism, that sort of thing. But other offenses apparently merit time-based bans. Burglary, larceny, you can't use an Airbnb for 14 years from the time of the conviction for those crimes. Fraud, even property damage, Airbnb hands down a seven-year ban. As courts writes, quote, the rise of the sharing.

economy has run into a widening push to stop denying the formerly incarcerated certain basic rights. The ban the box effort, which aims to look at job applicants without considering their conviction history, has been gaining steam in recent years. The debate gets complicated by the nature of the sharing economy, which by pairing private citizens in exchange of services largely depends on trust. In the case of Airbnb, it confronts people directly by coming into their homes, end quote. But as Marlin says, how long should people pay for mistakes of their past? When is enough enough? End quote.

If a larger and larger percentage of our economy is going to operate on this trust-based system, is it fair or even economically viable to create an entire class of people who are effectively turned into unpersons? And can no allowances be made for the actual reality of rehabilitation? As a spokesperson from Airbnb says in the courts, piece that is, quote, worth discussing, end quote. And here's another court story that is grappling with the realities of modern life. A German court last week ruled that the parents of a teenager who died in 2012 should be

allowed to access her Facebook account, including her private messages. The girl in question was apparently hit by a train and her parents have wanted to look into her accounts to determine whether or not she committed suicide. Facebook has argued that it couldn't give access on privacy grounds, not just the girl's privacy, but also the privacy of those other Facebook users that the girl had interacted with on the service. See, it's not quite as black and white an issue as you thought, right? But the parents argued that digital content should be passed on to airs in the same way that letters, books, and diaries are, and the German court agreed. In a statement, a Facebook spokesperson said, quote,

These questions, how to weigh the wishes of the relatives and protect the privacy of third parties, are some of the toughest we've confronted. We empathize with the family. At the same time, Facebook accounts are used for a personal exchange between individuals, which we have a duty to protect. While we respectfully disagree with today's decision by the court, the lengthy process shows how complex. the issue under discussion is.

We will be analyzing the judgment to assess its full implications. So by the time you listen to this, Amazon's Prime Day will have already kicked off. Browse around the web, and there's a ton of sites monitoring the great deals that might be popping up. And Amazon itself actually has special pages up that will allow you to be notified of sales in specific categories. Prime Day has been extended for a full 36 hours this year, and there will apparently be a million deals offered worldwide. this time up from just about 100,000 only a couple years ago. And heck, one of the fascinating things about Prime Day is how competing retailers now seemingly have to piggyback on Prime Day and offer

their own discounts just to keep up. So look around, outside of Amazon even for great deals in the next day or so. That Wiley Jeff Bezos, he wins coming and going, right? Amazon's going to move a ton of product and get a bunch of press over the next couple days. But all of his, his rivals have to deeply discount themselves as well, just to look competitive. There was an article about Amazon I saw over the weekend that really blew my mind. According to e-marketer, Amazon will likely do $258 billion in U.S. retail sales this year. That will account for 49.1% of all online retail. So Amazon is about to take 50 cents on every dollar spent on retail online.

And more impressive than that, that same name. number represents 5% of all retail sales in the U.S. All retail, online or off. Super impressive, right? Even more so when you dig into the numbers, because the thing that's really fueling Amazon's sales growth at the moment is not even its own sales. Amazon, of course, operates the Amazon Marketplace, the platform where third-party sellers pay to make use of Amazon's retail and logistics platform to sell their own products. Third-party sales on Amazon now account for 68%. of Amazon's overall retail sales versus only 32% for Amazon's own direct sales.

The funny thing about Amazon marketplace is, the fees that Amazon can charge to allow others to sell on its platform can very often represent fatter margins to Amazon than Amazon can make from selling its own stuff. So Amazon actually makes more money being the middleman than it does being the actual merchant. What is it that I said earlier?

Bezos is winning coming and going, coming and going. And I'm not kidding. Today, Jeff Bezos became the richest person in modern history, with a net worth that has now officially passed the $150 billion mark. He's worth $55 billion more than the second richest person in the world, Bill Gates. And in inflation-adjusted terms, Bezos is now the richest person ever calculated by Bloomberg since they began their billionaire's index in 1980.

Bezos has gained $52 billion in personal wealth just this year as Amazon's stock has soared. By the way, Bill Gates would still be the richest person in the world had he not been giving away his fortune over the course of the last decade. Anyway, that's the tech meme ride home for today. I've been Brian McCullough. I'll talk to you tomorrow.