Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 02/06 - Google Maps Freshens Up For Its Birthday

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Google Maps turns 15 and puts on a fresh coat of paint, it turns out you WILL be able to unlock your car via iPhone and really soon, Huawei is suing Verizon, Twitter impresses investors, Casper has a rollercoaster IPO, and does the fact that Google has stopped reporting a key metric basically guarantee that they have crossed the ad-load Rubicon? Sponsors: TinyCapital.com Podcorn.com Links: Google Maps gets a new icon and more tabs to celebrate 15th anniversary (The Verge) New ‘CarKey’ feature in iOS 13.4 beta brings built-in support for unlocking, driving, and sharing NFC car keys (9to5Mac) Apple now sells more watches than the entire Swiss watch industry (The Verge) Huawei sues Verizon for alleged patent violations (The Verge) Twitter reports $1.01B in Q4 revenue with 152M monetizable daily active users (TechCrunch) Casper surges nearly 30% in market debut (CNBC) The mysterious disappearance of Google's click metric (ZDNet) Ancestry to lay off 6% of workforce because of a slowdown in the consumer DNA-testing market (CNBC) U.S. allows SoftBank-backed Nuro to deploy driverless delivery vehicles (Reuters) 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 Thursday, February 6th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google Maps turns 15 and puts on a fresh coat of paint. It turns out you will be able to unlock your car via iPhone and really soon. Huawei is suing Verizon. Twitter impresses investors. Casper has a roller coaster IPO and does the fact that Google has stopped reporting a key metric basically guaranteed that they have crossed the ad load Rubicon. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Feels like there's been a lot of birthdays in the tech world recently. The latest is Google Maps, which is turning 15, and in honor of the occasion, has rolled out a whole app refresh.

Now, when you go to Google Maps, you'll see five tabs, explore, commute, saved, contribute, and updates. Also, there's a new icon and a bunch of new features, which will actually be coming in March, quoting the verge. The first is increased crowdsourced information for public transit. Before, Google Maps could only tell you whether a train or bus was expected to be crowded, but the new update allows users to submit other details like temperature, wheelchair, accessibility, or whether there's a women-only carriage or onboard security. The other update is coming to Google's augmented reality live view feature, which is getting a more lightweight mode that will simply show the location of your destination

without launching into the full-fledged 3D turn-by-turn navigation mode that's currently available, end quote. and those five tabs are pretty much what you would think they are. They do what it says on the tin. Explore is Google Maps like you normally use it. Commute is for getting places. Saved collects the locations you've saved. Contribute is where you do some of the stuff we just mentioned, like reporting things like bus conditions.

And the new updates tab, quoting from Google, provides you with a feed of trending must-see spots from local experts and publishers like the infatuation. In addition to discovering, saving, and sharing recommendations with your network, you can also directly chat with businesses to get questions answered, end quote. There's a whole bunch of smallish Apple nuggets today, so I'm going to try to cram them all together into one segment. First up, developers, Apple has added universal purchases for iOS,

TVOS, and MacOS apps to the Xcode 11.4 beta. So for the first time, you can sell apps across all these platforms as part of a single bundle, and in-app purchases will show up across platforms without having to ask users to pay multiple times. Also, Apple might be releasing a new Apple TV in the near future as Eagle-eyed folks have spotted references to an as-yet-unreleased model in the TVOS 13.4 beta. Apple hasn't refreshed the Apple TV since September 2017 when the Apple TV 4K came out. And speaking of that first iOS 13.4 beta, Apple has included a car key API, which will make it possible to lock, unlock, and even start a car with an iPhone or Apple Watch, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. It will not be necessary to authenticate with face ID similar to what happens with Express Transit cards. This also means that the feature will work even with iPhone or Apple Watch out of battery. The pairing process will be done through the wallet app,

and then it will be necessary to have the car manufacturers app to proceed with the setup. Users should place the iPhone on top of the NFC reader in the car during the initial process, and then Car Key will be available in the wallet app. After that, the key can easily be added to Apple Watch. Another interesting detail is that Car Key can be shared with other. other people, such as family members, drivers can invite them also through the wallet app to have access to the key on their own Apple devices, end quote. So maybe my move your car for alternate side of the street parking days as a service idea can be a reality sooner than I thought. And then final bit,

we've always had to guess just how big the Apple Watch really is as a business, since Apple has never broken that out in its reporting. Well, a new report suggests. that Apple Watch is bigger than the entire Swiss watch industry. Quoting the verge. According to new sales estimates compiled by strategy analytics, the report estimates Apple shipped nearly 31 million units in 2019, a 36% jump over last year. The Swiss watch industry,

which includes brands like Swatch and Tag Hoyer, only shipped an estimated 21.1 million units, a 13% decline, strategy analytics says. according to fellow strategy analytics analyst Stephen Walzer, quote, traditional Swiss watchmakers like Swatch and Tissot are losing the smart watch wars. Apple Watch is delivering a better product through deeper retail channels and appealing to younger customers who increasingly want digital risk wear. The window for Swiss watch brands to make an impact in smart watches is closing, end quote. I think that tech earning season ends today, unless there are some major surprises or something.

from some of the names that we usually don't cover. Twitter does usually bring up the caboose, and it did so again by reporting revenue of $1.01 billion, up 11% year-over-year. Net income of $119 million, which was down significantly from $255 million a year ago. It also reported its favorite metric, monetizable daily active users of $152 million compared to $126 million a year ago. At 21% that jump in double. Dow is the fastest rate of growth in Dow Twitter has ever reported. It is apparently that,

which has investors excited because Twitter did miss earnings per share estimates, but the stock is still up 17% at the time of this writing. And Casper had its IPO today. It has been a bit of a roller coaster, to say the least. Casper priced its IPO last night at the lowest end of its newly lowered range. Casper originally filed to price shares between $17 and $19 a share, which already made them an undercorn. Then it cut that range to $12 to $13 a share. It priced last night at $12 a share, suggesting a market cap of $476 million, way below the $1.1 billion of its last private valuation. And then today, the stock opened and the price soared to $15 a share, They're creating a 28% first-day pop.

So underwriter pricing for the win, I guess. I'm being sarcastic. Huawei is suing Verizon, accusing it of using 12 patents related to Huawei's own network technology without authorization from Huawei. Quote, the patents relate to network technology with titles like sending method, receiving, and processing method, and apparatus for adapting payload bandwidth for data transmission. None of them involve 5G, but a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity describes them as crucial to network functionality.

Huawei is the world's biggest maker of telecoms equipment and often makes a point of highlighting its R&D expenditure, which reached almost 15% of the company's revenue in 2018 at $15 billion. Quote, since 2015, Huawei has received more than $1.4 billion in patent license fees, the company says in a statement. To date, it has also paid over $6 billion for, the legitimate use of patented technologies developed by industry peers. 80% of these license fees have gone to companies in the United States, end quote. So this is probably a dumb legal question, but if, say, for example, U.S. companies are forbidden

from doing business with certain overseas companies, can they be made to pay royalties? I'm genuinely asking. Remember how Google reported YouTube revenue for the first time this week, and I suggested that it was something along the lines of, hey, investors, look over here on Google's part. Yeah, well, most people missed it at the time, but there was something that Google slipped into its earnings this quarter that is kind of important. Google stopped reporting, costs per click, and the growth of paid clicks for the first time in 15 years with no explanation. And analysts must have missed it, too, because nobody asked Google. Google about this. This is kind of a big deal because Google still makes, what, 80, 90% of its money

when people click on their ads. Reporting how much it makes per click is pretty much the bedrock metric to let investors know how that business is going. This actually gets to the heart of our previous discussions we've been having around Google Search getting absolutely gummed up with ads beyond perhaps that invisible line where it's even tolerable anymore. more. So you can click through for some charts in the piece I'm about to quote from, but it shakes down like this. For 19 straight quarters, revenues per click have been declining, often by more than double digits. In other words, for every click on an ad, on average, Google is making less money, sometimes 29% less. But at the same time, the overall number of paid clicks,

i.e. the number of times Google can get you to click on an ad has always been growing at a rate that has been outpacing the decline in revenue per click. As long as Google could keep the number of clicks growing ahead of the rate that the money made per click was declining, they were fine. So stopping this reporting suggests maybe the jig is up, quoting ZDNet. Every three months Google has to find faster ways of expanding the total number of paid clicks by as much as 66%. How is this a sustainable business model? There is an upper limit to how much more expansion in paid links can be found, especially with the shift to mobile platforms and the constraints of the display. And what does this say about the effectiveness of Google's ads? They aren't very good,

and their value is declining at an astounding and unstoppable pace. To survive, Google must find ways of showing even more ads. This is the future with Google, more ads in more places, or rather more ineffective ads in more places. This is an unsustainable business model, end quote. Again, for the web company that I still run, which I won't plug, we stopped buying Google Ads years ago because they stopped working for us. And this is a business that was built entirely on Google Ads 20 years ago. Every 18 months or so, I break down and do a trial ad spend to see if Google Ads suddenly work again. Well, I ran the trial in January, and I shut it down even before the month ended, because the results were, again, abysmal.

I didn't cover it recently when 23 and me laid off 14% of its workforce because I thought, you never know, maybe a company-specific issue. but now Ancestry says that it is laying off 6% of its workforce. Plus, in a blog post announcing the layoffs, Ancestry cited, quote, a slowdown in demand across the entire DNA category now that most early adopters have entered the category, end quote. So this is officially a thing. Might there be a significant crisis in the DNA testing market, quoting our friend Christina Farr at CNBC?

It's not just consumer DNA testing companies feeling the impact. Frances DeSuzza, chief executive of Illumina, maker of DNA sequencing machines, noted in its earnings call last summer that the entire segment was down. DeSuzza said his company is taking a cautious view of the market for ancestry and health tests. One of the biggest potential factors is privacy. Consumers are increasingly concerned that their DNA might end up in the wrong hands or be used in unexpected ways after the 2018 arrest. of a suspect in the decades-old Golden State Killer case. A distant relative had shared their

genetic information through a free online database where anyone who got their DNA tested through a company like ancestry could upload it. Criminal investigations found a close match with the DNA on the scene, showing how DNA data, unlike other kinds of data, is unique because it's linked to and potentially exposes information about family members, end quote. Finally today, an update on my autonomous burrito delivery by the end of 2020 wager. Autonomous vehicle startup, Nuro, says that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has given it the OK to deploy 5,000 of its low-speed autonomous delivery vehicles, which look kind of like a cross between those ankle droids from the Death Star and basically a smart car.

They can be deployed now on real roads. Not only will the neuro vehicles be driverless on real roads, but they are apparently the first vehicles ever okayed by the N. HTSA to go onto real roads with controls like mirrors and steering wheels missing. Quoting Reuters. The rollout of the R2 vehicle will take place in Houston with plans for it to deliver items like pizza and groceries. It is about half the width of a regular car and has no steering wheel or seating positions and boasts gall-wing cargo doors reminiscent of the time-traveling car in the Back to the Future films. Neuro, a privately held robotics company based in Mountain View, California, said it will begin public road testing to prepare deliveries in

Houston in the coming weeks. Nero called the regulatory approval by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration a milestone for the industry. Americans, quote, waste a lot of time running errands, Nero said, adding that it envisions a future where everything comes to you on demand for free. The agency's approval of Nero's petition will allow the company to deploy the R2, a vehicle designed to have no human occupants, and operate exclusively with an automated driving system as part of a delivery service for restaurants, grocery stores, and others.

Walmart and Domino's said last year they would launch pilot delivery projects with Nero in Houston. The R2, which Nero describes as an electric-powered delivery robot, is designed to make short trips and will be restricted to pre-mapped neighborhood streets. Neuro told NHTSA in its October 2018 petition that the R2 vehicles will at all times be monitored by remote human operators who can take over driving control if needed. So I know, I just said this is only Houston for now. But Nero, if you can get me that burrito delivery some lunchtime before the end of the year, call the cameras, call the press, because I'm willing to be your free PR monkey.

But also, the roads of Dumbo are crazy tore up right now. So getting anything here would be a hella proof of concept. Nothing for you today. Be excellent to yourselves and each other. Talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.