Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/06 – Google Brings “It Just Works” To Everything

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 Thursday, January 6, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google's big announce at CES is better syncing and interoperability with everything. Instagram is launching their feed experiment. IBM might be looking to dump Watson. Ethereum has the most developers in crypto,

Starting point is 00:00:51 and you know startups have been awash in money lately. Here's exactly how much money. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google's big announce at CES was that they want their stuff to work with everything better, faster, easier. Google announced it is partnered with Acer, HP, and Intel to bring fast pair to select Windows PCs in later 2022, quoting in gadget. You can quickly connect your Android phone to your laptop. You can then set up Bluetooth accessories, sync your text messages, and easily share files via nearby share. Meanwhile, Google is also bringing fast pair to devices beyond wearables, cars and Bluetooth audio accessories to include things like TVs and TVs and smart devices. It already works with the pixel buds and some Fitbit watches enabling easier

Starting point is 00:01:41 setup on those devices. In a few weeks, your Chromebook can automatically detect your fast pair enabled headphones when you turn them on, allowing you to connect them in a single click. New Chromebooks arriving later this year will be easier to set up too. You can connect your Android phone and port over save data like your Google account and Wi-Fi password. The company said it'll let you connect headphones to Google TV and Android TV in the coming months, and that FastPair will work with new Matter-enabled smart home devices as well. That should make adding connected appliances to your home network easier than ever before. It doesn't sound as simple as Apple's HomePod setup where you just hold your iPhone near your speaker to trigger the installation

Starting point is 00:02:20 process, but we'll have to wait and see Google's solution in action to know for sure. After your gadgets are all set up and synced with each other, Google also wants to enable convenient connections a la Apple's Airplay or AirDrop. It's bringing cast support to more brands, starting with all Bose smart speakers and soundbars so you can stream music and audio from your Android phone to compatible speakers. The company is also, quote, building a technology for Bluetooth-enabled headphones that will let them automatically switch audio output depending on what device you're using. Say you're wearing earbuds while watching a show on your Android tablet and a call comes in on your phone. The system will pause your movie and the headphones will switch over to your phone, then go right back to your tablet when your conversation is over. This will work for all audio playing through your devices at a system level rather than on a supported app-only basis.

Starting point is 00:03:07 For Apple users, this is similar to how AirPods can automatically switch between iPads, iPhones, and Macs, end quote. Though it has to be noted not very well. I basically turned off auto switching on my Mac because it got to be so annoying. Anyway, Google also announced home integration with some Volvo cars, allowing control of car systems with assistant commands, starting in the U.S. and six European countries. And there were 13 other software features to make its devices work better together, including expanded fast pair, as we said, and unlocking an Android phone with a WearOS3 watch, quoting the verge.

Starting point is 00:03:44 Google will also enable smartwatches running WareOS3 to unlock paired Android phones or Chromebooks, much in the same way an Apple Watch can unlock an iPhone. That feature will arrive in the coming months, and hopefully there will be more Wear OS3 watches available when it launches. Right now, the only major smartwatch running the new OS is Samsung's Galaxy Watch 4. All of the features Google is announcing today are planned to arrive later this year in time spans ranging from in the coming months to in the coming weeks and also later this year. They will hit Android phones via software updates that may or may not require full OS updates, Chromebooks, Android TV, Bluetooth headphones, and even some Windows laptops from ACER and HP.

Starting point is 00:04:23 That last detail may turn out to be one of the most important announcements from Google. HP, Acer, and Intel are partnering with Google to support some of its better-together features on their laptops. Users will be able to use FastPair, sync text messages, and use Android's nearby share feature to share files to their upcoming Windows PCs. Alongside Google's announced plans to bring Google Play games to Windows, it's another sign that the company won't seed Android integrations on Windows entirely to Microsoft's software and partnerships. The Windows integrations are notable, but there are, of course, more planned features for Chromebooks beyond FastPair. Google says it will create an ecosystem so that any messaging app on your phone can be mirrored on a Chromebook allowing users to directly use their messaging apps. It will also add a feature called Camera Roll for Phone Hub that will make it easier to move photos from your phone to your Chromebook. Chromebooks will also be getting a new setup if you have an Android phone, pair them during setup and some settings and account information will be transferred over automatically.

Starting point is 00:05:19 They'll also be unlockable via WearOS watches, end quote. Instagram is going ahead with its test of the ability to switch between a home feed, a favorites feed, and a following chronological feed rolling out to all users in the first half of this year, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Instagram ahead, Adam Mosseri says that the company will launch three different views on the user's home screen, with two of them giving you the option to see posts in chronological order. There's home, the experience users know today, according to Mosseri. The app ranks content based on how it.

Starting point is 00:05:58 interested it thinks you are. Favorites is a list of accounts that you want to make sure you don't miss things from. Mosseri says he uses this feed to see what his siblings are doing, his favorite creators, and a few of his best friends. Following is just like the old Instagram. You'll see posts from all your followers in chronological order. Mosseri says these new feed options are already out for some users and Instagram expects to roll out this feature to more users in a couple of weeks with the full experience available to all users in the first half of 2022, end quote. HTC has announced the Vive wrist tracker, a watch-like controller that tracks hand-to-elbo positions for its Vive Focus 3 VR headset. The new accessory is launching in Q1, 2022 for $129, quoting the verge.

Starting point is 00:06:50 The wireless Vive-Rist tracker fits like a watch around a user's arm, tracking the orientation and position from hand-to-elbo. It's designed to complement the business-focused headset's existing controllers, particularly for simulation and training experiences where body position is important. It's also part of a larger suite of new features HTC revealed at CES, including a 5G-powered VR experience. The wrist tracker looks a lot like a small, light, and specialized version of the Vive tracker device HTC debuted in 2017. It includes a strap and a toggle, indicating whether the tracker should be on a left or right arm, but unlike the multi-buttoned Vive Focus 3 controllers, it's designed to basically connect to the headset wirelessly and transmit movement data without the need for the headset's cameras to see it.

Starting point is 00:07:35 You can also attach it to inanimate objects. The VR training company Flame describes using it to ensure that people are holding a virtual fire extinguisher, say, in the correct position, something you couldn't necessarily determine with a handheld controller alone. And TaserMaker Axon will apparently integrate it into the company's VR training systems, end quote. sources are telling Axios that IBM has restarted attempts to sell its unprofitable Watson Health Division, potentially for over $1 billion. IBM has spent $4 billion on mergers and acquisition to build Watson Health to date. Quote, Big Blue once out of health care after spending billions to stake its claim, just as rival Oracle is moving big into the sector via its $28 billion acquisition of Serner.

Starting point is 00:08:30 IBM spent more than $4 billion to build Watson Health via a series of acquisitions. The business now includes health care data and analytics business. Truven Health Analytics, Population Health Company, Fytel, and medical imaging business merge health care. IBM first explored a sale of the division in early 2021 with Morgan Stanley leading the process. The Wall Street Journal reported at the time that the unit was generating roughly $1 billion in annual revenue but was unprofitable. sources say it continues to lose money. Bids were due yesterday, according to one source who says IBM hopes to select the winner by months and one strategic buyer and several private equity firms are said to be in the mix, end quote.

Starting point is 00:09:13 How do you measure the most successful crypto projects? You might think price or market cap, but does that really tell you which projects have gotten traction? How about measuring how much development is actually being done in a given ecosystem? Closer, according to new research with more than 4,000 monthly active developers. Ethereum has the largest open source developer ecosystem in crypto, followed by PolkaDot, Cosmos, Solana, and Bitcoin, quoting Electric Capital. We fingerprinted nearly 500,000 code repositories and 160 million code commits across Web3 to create the 2021 Electric Capital Developer Report. Web3 developers are at an all-time high and growing faster than ever. More than 18,000 monthly active developers commit code in over.

Starting point is 00:10:01 open source crypto and Web3 projects. More than 34,000 new developers committed code in 2021, the highest in history. More than 4,000 monthly active open source developers work on Ethereum, more than 680 open source developers work on Bitcoin, more than 20% of new Web3 developers join the Ethereum ecosystem, and 65% of active developers in Web3 joined in 2021. Not only that, fully 45% of full-time developers in Web3 joined just this last year. There are several vibrant ecosystems, emerging beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum. The largest ecosystems are Ethereum, Bitcoin, Pocodot, Cosmos, Solana, BSC, Near Avalanche, Tezos, Polygon, and Cardano, each with more than 250 monthly active developers. Pocodot, Salana, near BSC, Avalanche, and Terra are growing faster than Ethereum did

Starting point is 00:10:50 at similar points in its history. More than 2,500 developers are working on D-Fi projects. Less than 1,000 full-time developers are responsible for over 100 billion in total value, into smart contracts and defy. Ethereum and Bitcoin continue to add developers, growing by 42 and 9% respectively, over 2021. Ethereum retains 30% of full-time developers who joined after 2017. Ethereum continues to have the largest ecosystem of tools, apps, and protocols, and is 2.8x larger than the second largest ecosystem. One out of every five new developers coming into Web3 works on Ethereum.

Starting point is 00:11:29 More than 34,000 new developers worked on an open source Web3 project in 2021, the highest number of new developers in history. Over 3,000 new developers joined Web 3 every month in the last months of 2021, and roughly 60% of all developers and 45% of full-time Web 3 developers started in 2021, end quote. Although you could measure crypto adoption and transaction this way, according to Chainalysis, a record $14 billion flowed to criminal crypto addresses in 2020. up from $7.8 billion in 2020, driven largely by defy scams. So via this lens, criminal activity in crypto doubled year over year. However, quote, those numbers don't tell the full story.

Starting point is 00:12:21 Cryptocurrency usage is growing faster than ever before. Across all cryptocurrencies tracked by chain analysis, total transaction volume grew to $15.8 trillion in 2021, up 567% from 2020's totals. Given that roaring adoption, it's no surprise that more cybercriminals are using cryptocurrency. But the fact that the increase was just 79%, nearly an order of magnitude lower than overall adoption might be the biggest surprise of all. In fact, with the growth of legitimate cryptocurrency usage far outpacing the growth of criminal usage, illicit activities share of cryptocurrency transaction volume has never been lower, end quote. Yes, so if the headline is like, wow, crime is exploding in crypto, that's still way less

Starting point is 00:13:05 than 1% of overall crypto activity, as Darabasandro points out, quote, one trope that we can put to bed is that crypto is primarily used by criminals for ransomware and rug pools. According to chain analysis, only 0.15% of crypto transactions were due to known criminal activity, $14 billion out of $15.8 trillion, end quote. And finally, today, since we're on a numbers kick, you might have heard that startups have been swimming in money lately. So put this in your pipe. According to Pitchbook, U.S. startups raised a record $329.8 billion in 2021, up from a record, previous record, of $166.6 billion in 2020. So, yeah, roughly doubled the previous record amount. And over half that amount, $190.9.8 billion came from rounds greater than $100 million in size, quoting the Financial Times. investors put about four times as much money into startups than they did five years ago. Venture

Starting point is 00:14:11 capitalists paid steep prices for stakes in promising startups, which sometimes had scant revenues, attracted by strong demand for business software, e-commerce providers, and other winners in the pandemic economy. Stitch, a two-year-old authentication software startup, had less than $1 million in annual recurring revenues when CO2 management and other investors valued the company at $1 billion in November, according to the company. Publicly listed business business software companies trade at about 16.4 times revenues, according to the BVP NASDAQ emerging cloud index. Globally, private startups raised a total of $671 billion last year, according to Pitchbook data, an increase of more than 90 percent from the previous year. U.S. Venture Capital

Starting point is 00:14:52 Groups raised a record $128 billion last year, including $41.3 billion for first-time fund managers suggesting that large amounts of unspent capital could keep the boom alive, end quote. Hey, everybody, there's going to be a Twitter space tonight, the first one of 2022. And it's a different format than we usually do. Chris Messina, my illustrious co-host, is like the most super organized early adopter you'll ever meet. He's the number one hunter on product hunt, right? So he's got all the new things before anybody else. Anytime we do anything, he's like, hey, why don't you use XYZ app to just throw up a whatever?

Starting point is 00:15:44 And I'm like, what's this? He knows every app, every shortcut, every tool under the sun. And sometimes I've been like, you need to sit down and explain your workflow to me so I can work better. So that's what we're going to do. We're just going to sit down and talk about the apps that Chris uses, that I use to get things done. Consider this a life hacking episode or just a here's how we work episode. So come join us and bring along your favorite apps and tools that maybe we're not aware of. And hopefully by the end of this, every one of us will be turned on to some new thing that will help

Starting point is 00:16:14 us all work better in 2022. It's going to be at the usual time tonight. 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. See you there.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/06 – Google Brings “It Just Works” To Everything

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