Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, May 21, 2018 - Break Up The Big Tech Companies?

Episode Date: May 21, 2018

Is the government coming after Big Tech, Microsoft doubles down on voice AI, Lyft joins the e-scooter scramble, the Obamas officially join Netflix, and which smartphone is most likely to shatter? Stories from: @TaylorLorenz, @coryweinberg Tweets: @tanayj, @ibogost Links:Lyft Explores Launching Scooter Service in San Francisco (The Information)Electric Scooter Charger Culture Is Out of Control (The Atlantic)We Dropped $18,000 Worth of Phones, and These Are the Toughest (and Weakest) (Tomsguide.com) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Tech Meme Right Home for Monday, May 21st, 2018. Today is the government coming after Big Tech. Microsoft doubles down on voice AI, Lyft joins the e-scooter scramble, the Obama's officially

joined Netflix, and which smartphone is most likely to shatter? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, with the big tech backlash of the last few months, people have been speculating that it was just a matter of time, before there would be calls to break up the big tech companies. And right on time, there were some noises made about that very idea today from some pretty powerful voices inside the U.S. government. Today, Treasury Secretary Stephen Mnuchin urged the Department of Justice to review the notion of monopolies in tech

after a scathing 60-minute segment last night, which took a look at Google's monopoly in search. appearing on CNBC's squawk box this morning, Mnuchin said, quote, these are issues that the Justice Department needs to look at seriously. Not for any one company, but obviously as these technology companies have a greater and greater impact on the economy, I think that you have to look at the power they have, end quote.

He was referring to questions about a segment that aired on 60 minutes last night, which I'll quote from briefly here. Gary Reback is one of the most prominent antitrust lawyers in the country, widely credited with persuading the Justice Department to sue Microsoft back in the 90s, the last major antitrust case against big tech. Now he's battling Google. Steve Croft, you think Google's a monopoly? Gary Reback.

Oh, yes, of course Google's a monopoly. In fact, there are a monopoly in several markets. There are a monopoly in search. There are a monopoly in search advertising. Google makes the internet work. The internet would not be accessible to us without a search engine. Steve Croft. And they control it.

Gary Rebeck. They control access to it. That's the important part. Google is the gatekeeper for the World Wide Web, for the Internet as we know it. It is every bit as important today as Petroleum was when John D. Rockefeller was monopolizing that, end quote. So it might be Google's turn to sit under the hot glare of public scrutiny, but prior to this, of course, Facebook has been the company taking all the heat. And there are folks suggesting a breakup of Facebook as well, a collection of progressive, groups are reportedly launching a six-figure ad offensive today, telling the Federal Trade Commission to split Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger into separate companies. All of those apps are owned by Facebook in case you weren't aware. The groups are asking the FTC to also pass rules that would require interoperability for data across different social networks and to require the implementation of stronger privacy rules. The coalition is planning to run digital ads with messages like Facebook keeps violating

your privacy, break it up. And Mark Zuckerberg has a scary amount of power. We need to take it back. Guess where the ads will be running on Facebook and Instagram. The chatbot slash natural language slash conversational AI arms race is real. Microsoft announced over the weekend that it is acquiring AI startup semantic machines. Semantic machines is based in Berkeley, and as part of the acquisition, Microsoft says it will be establishing a conversational AI Center of Excellence in Berkeley to combine semantic machines technology with Microsoft's own AI work to, quote, push forward the boundaries of what is possible in language interfaces, end quote. Microsoft, of course, has its own digital assistant, Cortana, as well as a slew of social chatbots that Microsoft says,

has had more than 30 billion conversations, averaging up to 30 minutes each with 200 million users across platforms in China, Japan, the United States, India, and Indonesia. This, of course, comes hot on the heels of that Google Duplex demonstration at I.O. That got so much attention because it made a restaurant reservation without the person on the other end of the phone, even able to recognize that they were talking to a machine. The key part of this acquisition would be the founders of semantic machines.

UC Berkeley professor Dan Klein and former Apple chief speech scientist Larry Gillick. Both men are considered pioneers in conversational AI. In 2016, TechCrunch had a profile of Klein, where he described the work semantic machines was doing to make conversational AI more lifelike. Quote, today's dialogue technology is mostly orthogonal. You want a conversation system to be contextual, so when you interpret a sentence, things don't. stand in isolation." In announcing the acquisition, Microsoft wrote in a statement that semantic machines had, quote, developed a revolutionary new approach to building conversational AI. Their work uses the power of machine learning to enable users to discover access and

interact with information and services in a much more natural way and with significantly less effort, end quote. Financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but according to crunch base, semantic machines had raised 20.9 million in funding from investors, including General Catalyst and Bain Capital Ventures. Speaking of CrunchBase and speaking of a

technological arms race, crunch base data released over the weekend shows that VC investment in blockchain-related startups, not counting ICOs, but traditional venture investments, reached $1.3 billion just so far in 2018, exceeding the

investment totals of the previous 18 months. Just five months into the year, and VC rounds raised by blockchain companies exceeded 2017's totals, and it only seems to be accelerating. As TechCrunch said of the news, quote, all of this is to say that investor interest in the blockchain space shows no immediate signs of slowing down, even as the price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other cryptocurrencies hover at less than half of their all-time highs, considering that regulators are still figuring out how to treat most crypto assets.

massive price volatility and dubious real-world utility of the technology. It may surprise some that investors at the riskiest end of the risk capital pool invest as much as they do in blockchain. And another tech industry horse race. There is a real land grab slash land rush happening in the electric scooter market at the moment, it seems. The information has sources telling it that consultants from Lyft have approached San Francisco officials about applying for permits to launch an e-scooter service in the state. city. Apparently, lift is some ways down the road in developing prototypes for potential scooter designs. Why would a ride hailing company be interested in getting in the scooter game? Well, as I've

pointed out before, it's all about the last mile problem. Maybe you have taken a lift to your office, but then to head home, you want to take the train and the nearest station is a half mile away. You could just hop on a scooter and you'd be there in three minutes. Again, the state of the scooter market is this, at least in San Francisco. There are three big startups who have descended on the city, Bird, Lyme, and Spin. Between them, they've raised $250 million in venture funding. There are rumors that Bird is actually chasing a new monster round, and coincidentally, Bird's founder is Lyft's former C-O, Travis Vander Zandin. San Francisco authorities have not been pleased that the companies launched by just dumping the electric scooters willy-nilly on sidewalk.

so they have decided that companies will need permits to continue operating in the city, and that for now they will only allow 1,250 scooters with that number raising to 2,500 after a testing period. All sorts of companies are applying to get some piece of those limited number of permits, including Chinese bike share giant OFO and Jump, which Uber acquired in February for $200 million. One thing I've always wondered is how these companies charge. their scooters. I actually own an electric scooter myself, and if I ride it home at night and then write it back into the office in the morning, I pretty much need to charge it right away because the battery is basically cashed. Electric scooters aren't like bike share services

where you just reshuffle the bikes in the various docks around the city to meet demand while occasionally fixing a flat tire. These scooters need juice. Well, in the Atlantic, Taylor Lawrence has a really fascinating piece about what what is known as bird hunting. The way e-scooter firm Bird outsources the work of searching for and charging their vehicles. In short, Bird has gamified the process, and it's become a popular way for high school students, among others, to earn a little extra cash. Bird hunters can make up to several hundred dollars a night.

All you have to do to become one is sign up on the Bird app, give the company your payment information, and Bird sends you three charging packs in the mail. You use the app to find the GPS-enabled scooters, then you bring them home and charge them from your own wall sockets. Quoting from the piece, charging scooters for Bird is like Pokemon Go, but when you get paid for finding Pokemon. So says Nick Abuzide, a 21-year-old charger in San Francisco.

Several nights a week after work, he and his girlfriend go on walks around the city, collecting scooters and bringing them back to his apartment to charge them in the basement. Quote, it's really fun to grab a few scooters, charge them, and in the end it pays for a fancy dinner, Abu Zid says. It's like a game, and I would do it even if the prices were halved, which they probably will be, end quote.

I really can't recommend reading this piece highly enough. Link is in the show notes, of course. Some reactions to the piece from Twitter, Facebook's Tenei Jiporia, said, quote, Bird, like Uber, is a market which needs to manage supply and demand. It makes total sense that they manage supply by allowing people to become bird chargers with variable pricing based on location of scooters. While the Atlantic's own Ian Bogost tweeted, quote, Soon the only viable jobs will be VC-funded startup business plan last-mile arbitrage.

What are you doing tomorrow? Want to watch some more Mark Zuckerberg testimony? The European Parliament's president tweeted out this morning that Mark Zuckerberg's meeting with members of the European Parliament tomorrow will be live streamed. This is a turnaround because originally it was believed that Zuckerberg's appearance would be behind closed doors. But European Parliament President Antonio Tejani tweeted, quote, I have personally discussed with Facebook CEO Mr. Zuckerberg the possibility of web streaming meeting with him. I am glad to announce that he has accepted this new request.

Great news for EU citizens. I thank him for the respect shown. towards EP. Meeting tomorrow from 1815 to 1930. So that time actually works out to 6.15 p.m. Brussels time on Tuesday, which is 12.15 p.m. Eastern and 9.15 a.m. Pacific. The live stream will be hosted on the European Parliament website. Be sure to check techmeme.com tomorrow morning, as we'll definitely have a link to the video as soon as it's live. Well, it was rumored a couple months ago because I remember covering it early on in this podcast.

But today, Barack and Michelle Obama confirmed that they have officially signed a multi-year deal with Netflix to produce, quote, scripted series, unscripted series, docu-series, documentaries, and features for the streaming company. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. But don't expect this to be a political thing or an attempt to create, say, a progressive answer. to content from the likes of Fox News. According to the New York Times, the former president is telling associates that he and the former first lady want to create thought-provoking and uplifting content.

To that end, the Obamas have named their production company, Higher Ground Productions. In a statement, the former president said, quote, one of the simple joys of our time in public service was getting to meet so many fascinating people from all walks of life and to help them share their experiences with a white, audience. That's why Michelle and I are so excited to partner with Netflix. We hope to cultivate

and curate the talented, inspiring creative voices who are able to promote greater empathy and understanding between peoples and help them share their stories with the entire world. Finally, what phone is the toughest? What phone is the weakest? If you dropped a phone right now, which would be the most likely to see the screen shatter or to stop working entirely? Tom's guide wanted to find out, so they dropped $18,000 worth of smartphones four times from heights of four feet and six feet onto wood and concrete floors. They even dropped the phones into toilets. Which phones took a licking and kept on ticking? Among the best performers for durability, according to Tom's guide, were the Motorola Moto Z2 Force, I guess as the name implies, followed by the LGE.

X Venture, the Apple iPhone 10, and the Samsung Galaxy S9. The iPhone 8 was in the middle of the pack, but among the worst performers, the most fragile, if you will, were the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, and rounding out the very bottom of the list,

the iPhone SE. So I guess it's the cheapest of the iPhone lineup, not just for size, but perhaps for materials and build quality as well. That's all for today. I wanted to take a moment here to thank Leo Lipport and the whole gang at This Week in Tech for having me on this week's episode. It was a blast.

Shout out to Twit TV. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC and follow TechMeme at TechMeme. They tweet every headline they post every hour of the day. Great way to keep up on the news. Talk to you tomorrow.