Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/10 - Foldable Phones Have An Arrival Date

Episode Date: January 10, 2019

We have a good idea when that foldable Samsung phone is coming, Google is actually close to a big legal win in Europe (for a change), the government shutdown might actually be affecting CES and why the “gig economy” might actually be a big nothingburger. Sponsors: Flatironschool.com/podcast Metalab.co Go.BitRide.io/ride Links: Samsung to Show Off Its New Foldable Phone in February (WSJ) Amazon Web Services calls MongoDB’s licensing bluff with DocumentDB, a new managed database (GeekWire) Google Nears Win in Europe Over ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ (WSJ) Google Only Has to Respect Your 'Right to Be Forgotten' in the EU, Court Says (Gizmodo) 2019 is already full of weird and wonderful monitors (The Verge) Government shutdown halts FCC device approvals (Axios) How Estimates of the Gig Economy Went Wrong (WSJ) 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 Ride Home for Thursday, January 10th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, we have a good idea when that foldable Samsung phone is coming.

Google is actually close to a big legal win in Europe for a change. The government shutdown might actually be affecting CES and why the gig economy might actually be a big nothing burger. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. What was it that I said yesterday about that comfort? that wanted to rush out a foldable phone because it sensed that Samsung was on the horizon. Well, we now know just how far away the horizon is because Samsung announced the date of its next unpacked event, where most likely it will debut the latest Galaxy S flagship smartphone lineup. Mark your calendars because the event will be Wednesday, February 20th at 11 a.m. Pacific in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco.

In the invitation, Samsung notes that 2019 is the 10th anniversary of the Galaxy series. And rumors are there will be bigger screens this year and possible additional cameras, of course. In fact, further rumors are there might be three versions of the Galaxy lineup initially, with possibly a fourth version coming later in the year that will feature, guess what, 5G. But the immediate headlines will probably be the expected announcement of a fully functional foldable screen phone. According to the Wall Street Journal, quote, Samsung has signaled to partners that the foldable screen phone could be released in April, though no final decision has been made, according to people familiar with the matter.

The device's name is still being determined with Fold or Galaxy Fold, as well as Galaxy F as three possibilities, the people said. Samsung's crush of feature-heavy launches, totaling five premium models by mid-year, will serve as a major litmus test for a smartphone industry struggling to cajole consumers into buying the newest and most profitable devices. Samsung's smartphone shipments declined 13% from a year earlier for the three months ended September 30th, according to research firm Strategy Analytics,

a more severe drop than the industry-wide slide of 8%, end quote. So indeed, one way to fight back against a smartphone recession is to pioneer an entirely new smartphone form factor. And frankly, producing the first phone in years that doesn't look like every other phone out there probably will get some attention. For a while at least, Samsung has actually moved up the date of its unpacked event this year. And possibly the reason for that is that Huawei is rumored to be debuting its own foldable store. screen device at Mobile World Congress, which is held just a week later. So for a bit of time now, Amazon's AWS has been accused in some circles of reusing or piggybacking on the best open source projects out there without actually giving back significantly to those projects or

communities. Well, even more specifically, some people accuse AWS of just taking open source projects and resources and simply rebranding them. Well, expect this debate to continue as AWS has announced the launch of DocumentDB, a new document database that it says is fully compatible with MongoDB version 3.6, quoting from TechCrunch. The company describes DocumentDB as a fast, scalable, and highly available document database that is designed to be compatible with your existing MongoDB applications and tools. in effect it is a hosted drop-in replacement for MongoDB that doesn't use any MongoDB code. AWS argues that while MongoDB is great at what it does,

its customers have found it hard to build fast and highly available applications on the open source platform that can scale to multiple terabytes and hundreds of thousands of reads and rights per second. So what the company did was build its own document database but made it compatible with the Apache 2.0 open source MongoDB 3.6 API, end quote. Now, if you've been following the debate, you might know that MongoDB tried to combat AWS's in some circles questionable practices by relicensing its open source tools under new terms that said that anyone who did the sort of white labeling that we're talking about had to purchase a new commercial license.

But note I said document DB specifically doesn't use any MongoDB code. It's just plugging into the API, quoting from Geekwire. Given that DocumentDB is designed to work with a version of MongoDB release before that license went into effect, the SSPL doesn't appear to apply to DocumentDB. But AWS thinks that it will be able to help companies that have tried and struggled to implement MongoDB on their own achieve better performance and scale than MongoDB. The corporation can provide, end quote. In order to give developers what they want,

AWS has been pushed to offer an imitation MongoDB service that is based on the MongoDB code from two years ago. That's MongoDB co-founder and CTO Elliot Horowitz in a statement Wednesday. But might there be a bigger war brewing? As Paul Dix tweeted, quote, open source licensing won't save anyone from Amazon. My only fear is that this will precipitate vendors to get behind that terrible Oracle API lawsuit, which would be disastrous for the software industry.

Big win for Google in Europe, or at least close to a big win, an advisor to the European Union's Court of Justice told the court that search engines shouldn't be forced to apply right-to-be-forgotten rules beyond the borders of Europe. Quoting the Wall Street Journal. The Advocate General for the Court argued in Thursday's non-binding opinion that if the EU ordered removal of content from websites accessed outside the EU, there was a danger that other jurisdictions would use their laws to block information from being accessible within the EU. There is a real risk of reducing freedom of expression to the lowest common denominator across

Europe and the world, the advisor, wrote. You might recall back in 2014, precedent was established in European law that EU citizens could demand any personal information about themselves that turned up in a search engine, things like personal addresses, photos, what have you, but frankly, even details and news information about those individuals that the individuals themselves didn't like, people in Europe could demand that that stuff be taken down. Since that decision, 1.1 million links have been removed from Google's search results in the EU, but Google left those links intact for search results outside of Europe. In 2015, however, France's privacy regulator said Google had to expand its takedown regime

for any individuals who complained in regard to all search results anywhere provided that individual was an EU citizen. What about VPNs, etc.? So the court took this on, and now the advisor has advised. The court does not have to take the advisor's recommendation, but most court watchers think it will. I should note that a ton of free speech advocates backed Google on this. In a written statement shared with Gizmodo, Google's senior privacy counsel Peter Fleischer echoed the court advisor's statement. Quote, public access to information and the right to privacy are important to people all around the world,

as demonstrated by the number of global human rights, media, and other organizations that have made their views known in this case, end quote. Fleischer said Google has, quote, worked hard to ensure that the right to be forgotten is effective for Europeans, including using geolocation to ensure 99% effectiveness. CES is winding down this week, which means all the attendees will be jumping on planes and bringing us back that infamous CES flu. but as I said, there are certain categories of tech that only really get their moment in the sun this week. So I wanted to check in with one of those niches again. Computer monitors, especially high-end monitors, those big 30, 40, even 50-inch monitors that you might dream of for multitasking or gaming, those big, sexy-looking wraparound monitors. According to Tom Warren at the verge, curved displays are becoming common.

50-inch displays are becoming common, and there's even a 65-inch 4K monitor coming for gamers in February. It will cost you 5 grand, but, you know. And also this, quote, there's also been progress on portable displays this year. ASIS's portable USBC monitors first debuted in 2017, offering a 15.6-inch display that connects over a single USBC port. LG display is now experimenting with a 27,000,

inch portable monitor that can be powered from a laptop battery. These concept monitors are portable in the sense that you can move them from room to room, but traveling on public transit with a 27-inch monitor isn't exactly my idea of portable, end quote. Come on, remember back in the days of CRT? That was the whole point of IMAX, the original IMAX, right? An integrated display with a handle, so you could lug that bad boy around. another trend apparently at CES right now. Bezzles are disappearing.

They're disappearing everywhere, of course. And so just like on smartphones, that means that monitor manufacturers have to get creative to make room for things like cameras. But at least with the monitors, forget about a notch, kind of. Asis and Lenovo have monitors with a notch sticking out above the screen instead of, you know, trying to squeeze it into the screen. So a reverse notch, if you will. Others are sticking cameras in other places,

like beneath the display or even in the keyboard. Oh, and real quick, the government shutdown is claiming a CES-related casualty, or potentially lots of them. Thousands of electronics products are debuting this week at CES, right? And most of them need FCC approval, especially if they use radio frequency. C. Wi-Fi, cellular, anything with an antenna. But guess what? As long as the government is

shut down, the FCC can't approve any new products at all. Thus, that might lead to delays for some of these products that were announced. Quoting from Axios, there's a trade show exemption that allows companies to discuss or announce products even if they haven't been formally approved by the FCC, but they can't be marketed or sold without that authorization. RF devices needing FCC approval include cell phones as well as Internet of Things devices such as smart appliances or smart home gadgets, end quote. In addition to product authorizations, the FCC has downed tools on its other duties like consumer complaints and licensing proceedings. Heck, the review of the Sprint and T-Mobile merger has ground to a halt. As a lawyer notes in the Axios piece, quote, companies rely on government top.

timelines for things to get resolved, end quote. Finally, today I've been sitting on this segment for a little while. It's another story tipped to me by a listener on our subreddit, which is R-slash-R-R-R-Sash-Rid Home, by the way. In Mother Jones, Kevin Drum has a piece up called The Gig Economy is a Big Nothing Burger. You might have heard of the gig economy. A few years ago, it was supposed to be the next big economic earthquake. Forget things like contracts and defined work hours and salaries and salaries and, and things like that.

The whole job market was going to evolve into a universe of Uber gigs and Postmates gigs. One-offs. Essentially, the workforce was going to become one big churning mass moving from opportunity to opportunity like so many gazelles on the Serengeti

as needs and work opportunities dictated. A lot of the hype around this came from a 2015 paper by Alan Kruger of Princeton University and Lawrence Katz of Harvard. In the paper, Messrs. Kruger and Katz estimated that suddenly 15.8% of the U.S. workforce was engaged in what could be termed as gig employment. However, subsequently, when the U.S. Labor Department released its own study on the gig economy last summer, it said that no, the number of gig workers was not 15.8%. it was only 10.5%. And guess what? That fits a long-term trend. Going back to 1995,

the number of workers engaged in this kind of transient work was roughly 10%. To their credit, Mezzers, Kruger, and Katz, have looked at their work again and are issuing a Maya Kopa. In a paper this week, they explained how their original thesis was wrong, quoting the Wall Street Journal. First, the gig economy appeared swollen largely because, the labor market earlier this decade was so weak for so long in the aftermath of the recession. Rather than heralding a permanent shift in the relationship of Americans to employers, a lot of gig economy activity was odd jobs that people took up to make ends meet. As the economy returned to normal, they return to more familiar work arrangements.

Second, Messrs Kruger, and Katz conclude the surveys used to measure alternative work arrangements remain riddled with flaws, and the Labor Department does. a poor job of accounting for people with multiple jobs. These explanations, however, were hard to spot because there was so little quality data about the gig economy's size. Since 2005, the Labor Department had repeatedly sought but been denied funding for a survey that examined contingent and alternative workers, such as independent contractors, on-call workers, temporary agency workers, or workers provided by contract firms. Many jobs in the gig economy were a subset of these jobs, End quote.

So apparently where they went wrong was Kruger and Katz tried to fill the gap in this data with their own survey, which is where they saw that jump in gig job participation that was 5% higher than labor statistics eventually proved out. But for various reasons, their survey itself was also flawed. Quote, after sifting through the new evidence, Mr. Krueger told the Wall Street Journal, Larry Katz and I now conclude that there was a modest rise in the share of the workforce in non-traditional. jobs over the last decade, probably on the order of one to two percentage points instead of the five percentage point rise we originally reported, end quote. Ah yes, but a thousand hot takes were launched based on the original data. Hundreds of books were published. There's probably a small industry of

public speakers and international conferences devoted to this idea that the gig economy is the future of work. And it still might be, by the way, but this could potentially be one of those zombie ideas that will persist long in conventional wisdom and general memory, irrespective of the fact that it might not have been true in the first place. Well, this is the latest that I've ever gone producing a show. As I write these words, it is 303 p.m. Eastern Time and I have less than two hours to record and edit this bad boy. Let's see when you actually receive this in your feed. Bad procrastination today, Brian, bad. Talk to y'all tomorrow.