Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, June 18, 2018 - Apple Upgrades 911 Calls

Episode Date: June 18, 2018

Apple upgrades 911 calls—and is taking a case to the Supreme Court—Google invests big time in China, gaming addiction is officially a disorder, and how an Australian telecom company is screwing up the World Cup. Stories from: @stevelevine, @tiffkhsu Tweets: @mhbergen Links:In China, a picture of how warehouse jobs can vanish (Axios)Video Game Addiction Tries to Move From Basement to Doctor’s Office (NYTimes)Google Is Training Machines to Predict When a Patient Will Die (Bloomberg)SBS to screen World Cup games after Optus fail (Sydney Morning Herald) 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, June 18th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple upgrades 911 calls and is taking a case to the Supreme Court. Google invest big time in China. Gaming addiction is officially a disease.

And how an Australian telecom company is screwing up the World Cup. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple today announced a new feature coming to iOS 12 that for some reason wasn't announced at WWDC. When iOS 12 arrives this fall, it will automatically share your location information if you make a 911 call in the U.S. First responders will be able to access location data in a way that Apple says is secure and automatic. It will do this by integrating next generation 911 technology from a partner firm called RapidSOS into iOS 12. The emergency responders won't be getting any new information just better, more accurate information.

The idea is to save lives, but Apple says it isn't taking its eye off the ball when it comes to user security. The data cannot be used for any non-emergency purposes, and only the responding 911 call center will be able to access a caller's location, and only during that call. Apparently, 80% of 911 calls are now made from a mobile phone. Apple's Tim Cook said in a statement, quote, Communities rely on 911 centers in an emergency, and we believe they should have the best events. technology at their disposal. When every moment counts, these tools will help first responders reach our customers when they most need assistance, end quote. The FCC requires cellular carriers to locate callers to within 50 meters of their location at least 80% of the time by 2021. Apple is

trying to reach this benchmark today instead of years from now. Speaking of Apple, the U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear Apple's appeal of a lower court ruling, which, found that Apple can be sued for monopolizing the iOS app market. The justices said that they would hear Apple's appeal to a ruling that revived a class action lawsuit that was brought because the iOS App Store is a walled garden, and because there is no way to install software on iOS devices without going through the app store, and because Apple takes a cut of every sale in the app store, it is behaving in a monopolistic manner. The antitrust claims against the App Store date back to a 2011 lawsuit in California

federal court, which claimed that by locking down applications on iOS devices, app prices were being artificially inflated compared to a scenario where you could install whatever app you wanted on your device. Apple has attempted to have the case thrown out of court on the grounds that the plaintiffs did not have legal standing, and a federal judge in Oakland agreed. But then, the San Francisco Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals revived the litigation in 2017. Obviously, Apple would be on the line for significant damages

if it ultimately ended up losing the case, but before that happens, the Supreme Court will decide if the case can go ahead at all. And in the end, any company that operates an app store or an app store-like environment from Apple to Steam will be keeping their eye on this one. CNBC was reporting overnight that Google will invest $550 million in China's second largest e-commerce site, JD.com, as a part of a strategic partnership.

In return, JD.com will join the Google Shopping Advertising Network and will work with Google on other e-commerce projects. Google will also get more than 27 million shares of JD.com, which represents less than 1% of the Chinese retailer's shares. J.D.com already has Walmart as a major investment. as well as Chinese tech giant Tencent, but competes aggressively with China's largest e-commerce powerhouse, Alibaba. For its part, Google left the Chinese market in 2010, but as the New York Times puts it, quote, if the American Internet giant wants that to change someday,

then half a billion dollars worth of goodwill couldn't hurt, end quote. And of course, as Bloomberg's Mark Bergen put it on Twitter, the enemy of my Amazon is my friend, end quote. Last week, Axios had a story up about a giant new fulfillment center that JD.com has opened in Shanghai. It can handle 200,000 e-commerce orders a day, but only employs four people. And those four people are there merely to service the robots that do all of the actual packing, shipping, and warehousing. With its $58 billion market cap, JD.com has been seen as the scrappy upstart to Chinese giants like Alibaba. but according to the Axios piece,

JD is determined to follow Amazon's playbook and get big fast, said JD CTO Chen Zhang, quote, Everything is about scale. When you invest in technology, you don't worry about spending money. You worry whether you can get to scale. When scale comes, profit will come. Speaking of Asian tech powerhouses, Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxcon

has announced that it will establish its North American headquarters in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, after purchasing a 17-story building in that city's downtown. Foxcon says that more than 500 people will be employed there. A year ago, Foxcon announced plans to invest $10 billion over four years to build a 20 million square foot LCD panel manufacturing plant in Wisconsin that could eventually employ as many as 13,000 people. Wisconsin's governor Scott Walker tweeted on Saturday,

Foxcon is here to stay. The company has made Milwaukee the home of its North American headquarters. Hashtag made in Wisconsin. Hashtag Foxcon bonus. Foxcon, most noted for being a major supplier to Apple for iPhone production, was lured to Wisconsin via a series of tax breaks to the tune of $3 billion over the next 15 years. The LCD factory is expected to open in 2020. We haven't spoken about GDPR for a while,

you might be forgiven for assuming that that whole storm sort of blew over. Well, that's certainly not the case for everybody. For companies that rely on email newsletters or regular mailings to do business, GDPR is turning into a nightmare that by some estimates could decimate the $22.16 billion email marketing industry. Quote, people are not opting back in. So said Michael Horn, the director of data science for digital marketing agency huge to CNBC. Quote, it's one thing for your customers who don't have a relationship with the brand to decline and not respond, but you're also losing a sales channel, end quote. See, under GDPR, if you're on a mailing list and you've never bought anything or you haven't responded for a while,

companies are required to ask permission to keep on emailing you. Thus, all those urgent emails you've been getting from companies about their privacy policies, etc., some companies are reporting that 80% of those emails asking if you want to stay on the list are going unopened. And if an EU citizen never opts in to keep getting those emails, a company can never contact them again without facing stiff fines. The sound of the world's tiniest violin playing for the email marketing industry. The World Health Organization will be adding gaming addiction as a medical condition in its international classification of diseases. This compendium of medical conditions is used by medical practitioners around the world. As the New York Times says, quote,

the WHO designation may help legitimize worries about video game fans who neglect other parts of their lives. It could also make gamers more willing to seek treatment, encourage more therapists to provide it, and increase the chances that insurance companies would cover it, end quote. Gaming addiction treatment centers have been popping up worldwide in recent years, though proof that treatment for gaming addiction is efficacious is still somewhat controversial. In the Times piece, Dr. Petros Levinosis, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Rutgers, New Jersey Medical School, said, quote, I have patients who come in suffering from an addiction to candy crush saga,

and they're substantially similar to people who come in with a cocaine disorder. Their lives are ruined, their interpersonal relationships suffer, their physical condition suffers. I mentioned a tweet from Bloomberg's Mark Bergen earlier in the show, but he also has an interesting piece up describing how Google is training medical devices to predict health care patient outcomes. Google's medical brain team is tasked with developing AI tools that have commercial applications, and this could certainly be a big one. The story describes how Google is developing tools that will forecast patient care performance, estimating how patients will respond to treatment, what the likelihood is that they will require more treatment in the future, even the likelihood that treatment won't be successful. Quoting from the piece, what impressed medical experts most

was Google's ability to sift through data previously out of reach, notes buried in PDFs or scribbled on old charts. The neural net grabbed up all of this unruly information and then spat out predictions, and it did it far faster and more accurately than existing techniques. Google's system even showed which records led to its conclusions.

Hospitals, doctors, and other health care providers have been trying for years to better use stockpiles of electronic health records and other patient data. More information shared and highlighted at the right time could save lives, and at the very least help medical workers spend less time on paperwork and more time on patient care, end quote. Google hopes to bring its predictive system to clinics in the near future to help predict symptoms and disease and help doctors make better diagnoses and prescribe medication. But I wanted to highlight this because this piece really encapsulates so. much about the state of the technology industry at the moment, or at least our feelings

about it and coverage of it, Google has been trying for years to build a new business line that goes beyond just selling ads. If they can create systems for improving medical care, there would potentially be a mountain of new revenue to be had, obviously. And obviously, saving lives and improving health care sounds exactly like the making the world a better place promise that companies like Google have always been touting as their core mission. But how is Google able to develop these predictive AI systems? Well, by gaining access to and scanning millions of medical records, personal medical records.

And there you go, that sets off warning bells to a lot of people. Quoting from the piece, A deeper dive into health would only add to the vast amounts of information Google already has on us. Quote, companies like Google and other tech giants are going to have a unique, almost monopolistic ability to capitalize on all the new data we generate, said Andrew Burt, chief privacy officer for data company Immuda. He in pediatric oncologist Samuel Volkenbaum wrote a recent column arguing governments should prevent this data from becoming, quote, the province of only a few companies, like in online advertising where Google reigns, end quote.

Last year, Google's Deep Mind program was penalized by British regulators for analyzing public medical records without informing patients. with the research described in this Bloomberg piece, Google worked with the University of California, San Francisco, and the University of Chicago, to obtain 46 billion pieces of anonymous patient data, but only after receiving patient consent. As I say, this is almost the quintessential 2018 piece about tech,

the promise of tech changing our lives and the fear that by doing so, we might be opening a Pandora's box of other problems. The author of the piece, Bergen, even went with the first, provocatively titled headline, Google is training machines to predict when a patient will die. But at the same time, we want Google to be making advances that will make the world better, right? As opposed to using AI to train military drones to kill more effectively?

Finally, today, I found a tech angle to the World Cup, everybody. No, it's not VAR. In Australia, Optus is the second largest telecom company in that country. and two years ago, Optus secured World Cup streaming rights, but also the exclusive broadcast rights to about 39 of the 64 World Cup matches for its over-the-top service. Sounds good, right? Get people to try out your cellular service

and have a really compelling reason for people to test out your new OTT service. The problem is, and it sounds crazy, but it seems that Optus didn't anticipate the level of demand that World Cup matches would receive. There have been widespread reports of video outages and other glitches. To put it mildly, people are pissed about this, especially as for some of the games, there has been no viewing alternative.

It's gotten so bad that Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull personally phoned to the CEO of Optus to intervene. Quote, I had a call with Alan Liu, with Optus, to seek his assurance that the failures in the streaming service have been rectified. Prime Minister Turnbull tweeted yesterday. Optus insists that only a small percentage of viewers have encountered problems, but in order to stem the outrage, Optus has agreed to let Australia's SBS free over-the-air TV channel broadcast all games over the next 48 hours as they work to fix their streaming issues. Ironically, SBS, which is a hybrid public broadcasting network, originally had the rights to the World Cup but sold them on to Optus in the first place.

Alan Liu, the Optus CEO, told the Sydney Morning Herald that letting the game's air on free TV was a, quote, fail-safe backup. We've been talking about tech and telecom companies trying to get into the content game here in the states lately. Well, that's exactly what Optimus has been trying to do as well. It obtained English Premier League streaming rights to push its foray into being a broadcaster, not just a cell service provider,

but this is obviously blown up in their face in the case of the World Cup. Optus CEO Lou told the Morning Herald, I think there is no doubt this has adversely affected the Optus brand. But he said, quote, We believe the brand is stronger than just one event over three days. We will recover and show Australia we can be a credible multimedia company. Speaking of the World Cup, quick match report of the England game. Interesting and excellent first 10 minutes, then, you know, look, England gonna England.

but then England do have Sir Harry of Kane, and believe me, as an Arsenal fan, it gives me no pleasure to point that out. Anyway, onward and upward, talk to you again tomorrow.