Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/09- The Phantom Title (Explained at the End of the 01/10 Episode)

Episode Date: January 9, 2020

Twitter will allow you to limit who can reply to your tweets, iPhone sales in China seem to have rebounded, the Chinese version of TikTok is why TikTok can distance itself from China, AI is going to pick which movies get made, and why sex tech finally has a home at CES. Sponsors: Tiny Capital Links: Twitter will put options to limit replies directly on the compose screen (The Verge) Firefox gets patch for critical 0-day that’s being actively exploited (Ars Technica) iPhone Hits Double-Digit Growth in China, Official Data Show (Bloomberg) Douyin, TikTok app in China, hits 400 million daily active users (TechCrunch) Warner Bros. Signs Deal for AI-Driven Film Management System (Exclusive) (The Hollywood Reporter) At CES 2020, the AirPods Pro competitors arrived in droves (The Verge) Sex-Tech Companies Are Having More Fun Than the Rest of Us at CES (Wired) 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 Thursday, January 9th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Twitter will allow you to limit who can reply to your tweets. iPhone sales in China seem to have rebounded. The Chinese version of TikTok is why TikTok can distance itself from China. AI is going to pick which

movies get made and why sex tech finally has a home at CES. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. All of those jokes that I made about Twitter finally innovating its product are so stale at this point because the changes that Twitter is apparently implementing are well on the way to making it a completely different product. Twitter announced at CES yesterday that a conversation participants compose screen tool is coming to Twitter later this year that will allow users to limit who can reply to their tweets, quoting the verge. Twitter's director of product management, Suzanne Z said Twitter is adding a new setting for conversation participants right on the composed screen. It has four options. Global, group, panel, and statement. Global, lets anybody reply. Group is for people you

follow and mention. Panel is people you specifically mention in the tweet. And statement simply allows you to post a tweet and receive no replies. Zee said that Twitter is, quote, in the process of doing research on the feature and that the mock-ups are going to be a part of an experiment we're going to run in the first quarter. It will take learnings from that experiment and use them to launch the feature globally later this year. Quote, getting ratioed, getting dunked on, the dynamics that happen that we think aren't as healthy are definitely part of our thinking about this, Z said. When asked if there's a concern if the ability to limit replies could mean misinformation couldn't be as easily rebutted,

Xi gestured to the ability to, quote, tweet as one possible resolution. But it's, quote, something we're going to be watching really closely as we experiment, end quote. Twitter is apparently also testing around things like conversation threading. Apparently, this involves on-screen lines that will organize replies and allow you to more easily find specific authors of specific replies. And they're making it easier for you to organize your Twitter. lists, especially around specific topics. But back to the big news, you can now limit replies to only people that you follow. Think of how fundamentally that has the potential to change the Twitter

experience for some people. You go to Twitter to share some news or have a reasonable debate, but you can't because randos always swoop in and pile on to any conversation. By making the people you follow and the people who can jump into your thread one and the same has the effect of turbocharging the curational aspect of Twitter that, frankly, when done right, is what makes the platform so useful to begin with. As Casey Newton tweeted, could solve a lot of abuse and harassment issues in one fell swoop. I suspect most people will never use this feature. I can't imagine using it much myself. There will still be plenty of conversation on Twitter, but it should offer much needed protection to the platform's most vulnerable users. The best argument for Twitter

implementing this feature is that the men in my replies are absolutely terrified of it, end quote. To which user Travis D. Bartley replied, quote, could also create safe spaces for fragile babies who need to be insulated in their own echo chamber, end quote. To which Casey replied, see, this is exactly the sort of reply I could do without ever seeing again, end quote. has patched an actively exploited Firefox zero-day flaw that would allow attackers to take control of a computer by accessing sensitive memory locations. Quoting Ars Technica, CVE 2019-17026, as the vulnerability is indexed, is a type confusion, a potentially critical error that can result in data being written to or read from memory locations that are normally off limits. These out-of-bounds reads,

may allow attackers to discover memory locations where malicious code is stored so that protection such as address space layout randomization can be bypassed. Out-of-bounds reads can also cause crashes. The flaw is fixed in Tuesday's release of Firefox 72.0.1. The patch came out a day after version 72 fixed 11 other vulnerabilities, six of which were rated high. Three of those six bugs might make it possible for attackers to run malicious code on affected computers, end quote. Remember when Apple had that earnings shock that it blamed on plateauing sales of the iPhone in China? Yeah, well, that looks to be old news, quoting Bloomberg. Apple bagged a significant smartphone shipment jump in China last month as the world's largest

consumer electronics market heads into its holiday season, official data indicate. iPhone makers shipments in China grew 18.7% year-on-year in December to roughly 3.18 million units, according to Bloomberg calculations based on government data on overall and Android device shipments. The increase marked an acceleration from the prior months, which were buoyed by the iPhone 11's release in September. The numbers come from the China Academy of Information and Communication Technology, a government think tank, end quote. We've talked about how TikTok is mauling various moves to put some distance between itself and China for public image reasons. TikTok can do this because TikTok itself is apparently not targeting the Chinese market directly. I did not know this, but TikTok owner ByteDance is also the owner of a separate app called Duyan, which is effectively the Chinese version of TikTok.

and Duyan now has over 400 million daily active users up from just 250 million a year ago. These numbers were revealed in ByteDance's annual report, quoting TechCrunch. The report, which describes the user behavior and trends, illustrates the cultural difference between China and the U.S., said Catherine Wu, an investor at New York-based firm Notation Capital. Quote, things that trend in these two countries are insanely different. For example, knowledge-based content is extremely popular in China, and less so in the U.S. Also, this is wild to me. Those creators that did the most dance videos in China are users born in the 60s, whereas in the U.S.

It seems that it's mostly teenagers who are creating the dances, she wrote. Byte Dance claimed that Doyen has established itself as the largest knowledge, culture, and art platform in China. Doyen is only available in mainland China. Indeed, 14.89 million knowledge-based content videos were shared on the app last year, it claimed. Citing an example, one of the world's most valued startups claimed that one user alone, who posts videos about chemistry, reached 130 million people last year. On the art and culture front, videos that revolved around those topics had 543.1 billion plays on Doyen last year, it claimed. quote, the behavioral differences also underscore one major thing to me. There really isn't a one-size-fits-all social app that exists. Different regions like different types of content, even though the medium

itself, in this case, short-form video is the same. Cultural factors, geography, age, local pop culture play a huge role in how users end up using a product, Wu added, end quote. Warner Brothers is going to use AI to pick which movies it makes, quoting the Hollywood reporter, The movie division has signed a deal with Cynolitic to use the latter's AI-driven product management system that was launched last year. Under the new deal, Warners will leverage the system's comprehensive data and predictive analytics to guide decision-making at the Greenlight stage. The integrated online platform can assess the value of a star in any territory and how much a film is expected to make in theaters and on other ancillary streams. Founded four years ago by Tobias Kuesciay,

Cynolitic has been building and beta testing the platform for three years. In 2018, the company raised $2.25 million from T&B Media Global and signed deals with ingenious media, Wind River, and productivity media, The Little Hours. STX, which endured a number of flops in 2019, including Playmobile and Ugly Dolls, became a Cynolidic client in September. While the platform won't necessarily predict what will be the next $1 billion surprise, like Warner's hit Joker, it will reduce the amount of time executive spend on low-value repetitive tasks, and instead give them better dollar figure parameters for packaging, marketing,

and distribution decisions, including release dates, end quote. So the algorithms are going to pick the movies we see now, at least more than they already do, I guess. On Twitter, Zach Stence, the screenwriter of Thor and X-Men First Class, and a lot more, said this, quote, the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe was built on John Favreau convincing a bunch of executives that a middle-aged actor, not long out of rehab and prison, who had described himself as box office poison even during his earlier 1990s heyday, would be the perfect Ironman, end quote. So there's that as a counterpoint to letting the algorithms guide your decision-making. Finally, today, let's wrap up our coverage of CES with a couple more observations.

about CES. I can confirm that after the blockbuster success of Apple's AirPods, this place was absolutely filthy with earbuds and headphones stuff. A lot of the energy in the space is also around competing with the AirPods Pro because a whole bunch of noise cancellation tech was on display. Quoting the Verge, it would be an oversimplification to claim that all of these companies are responding to the AirPods Pro from last November. After all, Sony released its first pair of noise-canceling true wireless headphones, the WF-1000X, way back in 2017. But Apple's move and the lengthy rumor cycle that preceded it almost certainly played a part given how dominant the AirPods are. If Apple is one part of the equation, then Qualcomm is almost certainly another.

The chip manufacturer best known for its smartphone processors also produces a wide range of wireless chips for headphones, and these provide a much easier foundation for headphone companies that want to go wireless. Qualcomm makes numerous ultra-low-power chipsets that are designed specifically for true wireless headphones, and crucially, many of its most recent chips now come with built-in support for noise cancellation. It's rare for a headphone company to specify whether it's using one of Qualcomm's chips, but if a pair of headphones supports Qualcomm technologies like AptX Audio, as almost half of the headphones on this list do, then you can be fairly sure it's using the company's hardware.

Despite the hardware these headphones are likely to have in common, there's still a lot of variation between the true wireless headphones on display at this year's show. Manufacturers still have control over numerous elements of their construction, including the drivers, which end up determining how good they sound. It's unfair to label an entire product category as an alternative to a single Apple product, but like it or not, the AirPods continue to dominate most people's idea of true wireless earbuds. Those options can offer things that the AirPods don't, whether you want higher sound quality, a different form factor, or just the interoperability of USBC charging. The market is already filled with alternatives to Apple's original AirPods, and after CES 2020, it sounds like the same is going to be true for the AirPods Pro very soon, end quote.

And finally, finally, sexual health and wellness tech had its own category at CES this year. That happened after the controversy last year surrounding Laura DeCarlo and her woman's sexual aid product, The OES, which DeCarlo developed with the help of Oregon State University's robotics and engineering lab. The O's was awarded a CES Innovation Prize in the robotics and drone category last year, but when DeCarlo applied for exhibition space, the Consumer Technology Association disqualified the OES. Well, the CTA did an about phase of this year. DeCarlo and the O's were stars of the show. DeCarlo debuted two new products, the Onda and Baki, and won an innovation award again.

And the Sex Tech category got to carve out its own space in the show for the first time, quoting Wired. Last summer, the CTA sent out an email detailing a few policy changes for CES 2020. This year's show would include tech-based sexual products, on a one-year trial basis, provided the products were deemed, quote, innovative by the CTA. They would be put into the health and wellness bucket, and they had to include some sort of new or emerging tech to qualify. Your vintage vibrator wouldn't cut it. I asked the CTA why this was happening on a one-year trial basis. One of the associations' spokespeople told me, quote, this is the process we follow when introducing a new category, end quote.

DeCaro said that, to her knowledge, that wasn't exactly true, quote, I think they're just trying to cover their bases. There are also rules around how we can market and advertise our products. You don't want to see anything lascivious, end quote. Still, she considers this year's policies progress made. One of the restrictions for sex toys at the show is that the products can't be anatomically correct dolls or robots. DeCarlo is on board with this.

She believes they often objectify women. And when I asked the CTA for a link to the sex tech criteria, I noticed that VR pornography had been banned. It seems arbitrary, perhaps because it is. There were around a dozen sex tech companies exhibiting at CES this year, according to the CTA. They have names like Satisfire, Oh My Bod, and Crave. Sex positive or downright punny signs abound, ones that read, Come as You Are, or if we talk about pleasure outside of the sheets, we can bring it out of the shadows.

Almost all of them were marketing products to women, though many have inclusive language. in their messaging, end quote. I did happen to wander past this section of the show, and all I can tell you is that, like everything else, the smartphone has transformed the sex tech category. No matter what the product was, no matter what you were supposed to do with it, or where you were supposed to put it, there was inevitably also an app that would help you manage it, and a lot of the selling points were that you could grant access to that app management to a partner who could do the managing for you, which made me smile, remembering how adamant Steve Jobs was, that he didn't want anything vaguely pornographic or sexual to ever show up on the iPhone.

Hopefully, my voice was not too distracting on this episode. This is how CES gets you, I guess. You got to wake up at 3.30 a.m. to write and record a show so that you can get in a cab to the airport by 11, so that you can make a flight that will put you back in New York. at 9.30 at night, all while nursing the CES flu that I swear I can't really blame on CES because I'm pretty sure my boy Max gave it to me before I left. Anyway, by the time you hear this, I'll be somewhere over Iowa. And believe me, I will be glad to be heading home. Talk to you tomorrow.