Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 02/28 - Make Any Day Amazon Day

Episode Date: February 28, 2019

Amazon Day gives you the ability to schedule your Prime Deliveries, Motorola teases more details about the foldable resurrection of the Razr phone, the state of the smartwatch market, and seemingly every messaging platform might soon have a crypto coin. Sponsors: Tiny.Website DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Amazon Prime members can choose a weekly delivery date with launch of 'Amazon Day' (TechCrunch) Motorola confirms its foldable phone is coming (Engadget) Apple self-driving car layoffs hit 190 employees in Santa Clara, Sunnyvale (San Francisco Chronicle) Apple shipped 9.2M Apple Watch units in Q4 2018 to capture half of market, report says (AppleInsider) Uber and Lyft drivers will reportedly get stock in the highly anticipated IPOs (CNBC) Facebook and Telegram Are Hoping to Succeed Where Bitcoin Failed (NYTimes) Mozilla updates Common Voice dataset with 1,400 hours of speech across 18 languages (Venture Beat) 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. February 28th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon Day gives you the ability to schedule your prime deliveries. Motorola teases more details about the foldable resurrection of the razor phone. The state of the smart watch market and seemingly every messaging platform might soon have a crypto coin. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. File this one in the I can't believe they didn't already do this category, but has this ever happened to you? You want to order something from Amazon, but you make yourself wait in order to have the delivery come on a certain day. Maybe so you know you'll be home to take delivery of it or you know you'll need the item at a specific time.

So you wait to order until the two-day shipping window lines up the way you want. Well, that will no longer be an issue as Amazon has launched Amazon Day, a new delivery option allowing Prime members to pick a specific day of the week to take delivery of all recent orders. This would also allow you to group all of your orders into one delivery so you're not answering the doorbell every day for days in a row. You can now pick a day and make it say Amazon Delivery Day Tuesday, if you want. Quoting TechCrunch. The move clearly benefits Amazon by reducing the number of deliveries drivers have to make to the same address while positioning the option as a new prime perk. However, there are other benefits to grouping shipments like this.

For example, if you live in an area where a package theft is a concern, you could make your Amazon Day a day you are scheduled to work from home, for example. It also means you'll have fewer boxes to break down and recycle, which could be useful for regular Amazon shoppers concerned about waste. Amazon says it tested the new shipping option with a group of Prime members and found that Amazon Day reduced packaging by tens of thousands of boxes over the course of several months. An Amazon Rep would not confirm how many Prime members were participating in that test,

however, end quote. So now when you check out, you'll see an Amazon Day option, Choose the day you want, and throughout the week, as you continue to place an order here and an order there, if you keep choosing that Amazon Day as your delivery option, then boom, you'll get your stuff all at the same time. This is all part of what Amazon is calling its shipment zero initiative. It's planned to make 50% of all Amazon shipments net zero on carbon emissions by 2030. Amazon Day is rolling out today to all prime customers in the U.S. though it does make me wonder if there won't end up being some sort of default day that everyone ends up choosing out of habit.

This might make things easier for Amazon and for us, but I wonder if FedEx and UPS are going to suddenly see, say, Fridays as these huge spike in volume delivery days because suddenly everyone picks the same Amazon day. Motorola has confirmed that, yes, it is working on a foldable smartphone. And yes, it will likely be a revival of the Razor brand when it comes. This is quoting from Engadget, who spoke with Motorola's vice president of global product, Dan Derry, quote, We started to work on foldables a long time ago, Derry said, and we have been doing a lot of iteration, end quote. Derry also said that Motorola has, quote, no intention of coming later than everyone else in the market. And considering the upcoming launch dates for the Samsung Galaxy Fold, which is in April, and Huawei's Mate X in mid-2019, it seems safe to assume that we're looking at a Motorola launch by summer, end quote.

But do not expect Motorola to go with the screen on the outside method that both Samsung and Huawei have seemingly adopted. If you've seen the sketches of the patent filings that tipped everyone off to the possibility of a foldable razor and the razor's return, this potential foldable looks very much like the razor of olden times. It's a straight up clamshell. Quoting again from Engadget, quote, it's an especially unorthodox look compared to what other foldable makers have unveiled so far, and that's potentially a good thing.

While he thinks the screen on the outside approach adopted by Samsung and Huawei is, quote, the nicest and the purest way to go, Derry believes the inherent fragility of those displays meant Motorola had to find a different way forward. Quote, we have been testing a plastic OLED device with plastic film on top, he said, referring to the same kind of design.

and Huawei used for its mate X. Quote, the fact that you're touching that kind of display with your nails is scratching it. It has a short life right away. It starts dying the day you unpack it. But it's beautiful. That first day, it's beautiful, end quote. But wait, there's more. The clamshell foldable that we think the razor is going to return as.

Obviously, that makes sense, especially with the residual razor brand halo. But what about a dual hinge device? one that could fold over twice. So you could flip open a third of the phone to make a call and then flip open the bottom third to achieve the fully unfolded tablet mode. That would certainly make the footprint of the phone in your pocket much smaller.

And in the interview, Derry said that, quote, a couple of Chinese vendors were working on that sort of design and, quote, we're looking into that too. But definitely that's not going to be our first shot, end quote. In a letter to the state of California, Apple has confirmed what was previously rumored. 190 employees will be laid off from its self-driving car division. Quoting the San Francisco Chronicle, The layoffs were disclosed along with new details in a letter this month to the California Employment Development Department.

CNBC reported last month that layoffs were occurring in the self-driving car division known as Project Titan. Tom Neumeier, a Apple spokesperson, confirmed that the letter to the state referenced the same layoffs. Most of the affected employees are engineers, including 38 engineering program managers, 33 hardware engineers, 31 product design engineers, and 22 software engineers. The layoffs will take effect April 16th, according to the filing, end quote. So once again, not sure what Apple is doing with Project Titan, but then, as Mark German told us, maybe Apple's not sure either. Speaking of Apple, strategy analytics says Apple shipped 22.5 million Apple watch units,

minutes in 2018. If those numbers are in the ballpark of being accurate, that would account for about half of global smartwatch shipments last year. However, that would also mean that Apple's share of the global smartwatch market has slipped from 67% to 51% year over year. Quoting from Apple Insider, Apple Watch is losing market share to Samsung and Fitbit, whose rival smartwatch portfolios and retail presence have improved significantly in the past year, said Neil Mawston, executive director of strategy analytics. Samsung grew its piece of the pie during quarter four, shipping 2.4 million units for a 13.2% share of the market.

The company shipped some 600,000 units over the same period in 2017. Samsung ended 2018 with an 11.8% market share on 5.3 million units shipped. Industry stalwart Fitbit fell to third place in the fourth quarter of 2018, trailing Samsung's quarterly performance by roughly 100,000 units. The firm managed to boost shipments from 500,000 units to 5.5 million units on the year, putting it in second place with 12.2% market share. Garman trailed the pack with 1.1 million units shipped in the fourth quarter, up from 700,000 units in 2017.

The company ended 2018 with 3.2 million units shipped for a 7.1% share of the market, end quote. Of course, Apple does not report Apple Watch unit sales, and overall strategy analytics believes the global smartwatch market grew 52% last year. IPOs from Uber and Lyft are coming down the pike, and both companies are reportedly going to let some of their longest serving drivers participate in the process. Apparently, both are mulling cash bonuses or awards that the drivers would have the option of using to purchase stock at their IPO prices. Quoting CNBC, more specifically, Uber's plan would give some drivers either a cash bonus or the option to use that money to buy, shares at the IPO price, the report says. Lift, meanwhile, would give drivers with 10,000 rides

logged $1,000 they can keep or use to participate in the company's IPO. Lift drivers with at least 20,000 rides would be eligible for $10,000 in cash or a stock equivalent, end quote. Sources are telling the New York Times that Facebook is working on a crypto coin for use on WhatsApp and has held talks with various crypto exchanges as part of its development. But they're not alone because apparently messaging apps, telegram and 6.com. signal are working on similar coins. Quoting The Times, the Internet outfits are planning to roll out new cryptocurrencies over the next year

that are meant to allow users to send money to contacts on their messaging systems, like a Venmo or PayPal that can move across international borders. Facebook has more than 50 engineers working on the project, three people familiar with the effort said. An industry website, the block, has been keeping track of the steady flow of new job listings for the Facebook project. The Facebook effort, which is being run by former president of PayPal David Marcus, started last year after Telegram raised an eye-popping $1.7 billion to fund its cryptocurrency

project, end quote. The Times piece notes that just because it's Facebook, that doesn't mean these coins wouldn't face the same regulatory and technological hurdles everyone else has in the crypto space, but then no other crypto projects have been able to leverage a platform as massive as, say, WhatsApp. And Telegram is no slouch either with an estimated 300 million users worldwide. it is possible that the massive installed and active bases that platforms like these have could provide the missing ingredient that will help crypto finally achieve mainstream widespread adoption. Quote, it's pretty much the most fascinating thing happening in crypto right now,

said Eric Meltzer, the co-founder of a cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm, primitive ventures. They each have their own advantage in this battle, and it will be insane to watch it go down, end quote. On Twitter, Facebook's former... Security head Alex Stamos had a lengthy tweet storm. Quote, this explains how Facebook plans to monetize a unified 2 billion user end-to-end encrypted messaging service. I can't think of a tech project with more important privacy slash safety-balancing acts than this one.

I hope my friends working on it start public discussions on that. On one end, a completely private and encrypted messaging service tied to an open zero coin like SK snark-backed, cryptocurrency and backed by a tech giant would instantly become the go-to mechanism for global money laundering, tax evasion, and just general crimeing. On the other hand, without mathematically backed privacy features having all of this data in one place would be a massive source of security and privacy risk and a huge boon for countries with leverage over Facebook to get data access. Creating something with strong privacy guarantees that a billion people will have access to on day one would combine liquidity with anonymity in a way we've never seen before. no precedent for this. Hence my suggestion that Facebook start public discussions on the trade-offs early.

Wow. Going to be an interesting couple of years, end quote. Mozilla wants to make it easier for you to create voice-enabled apps and services. To that end, it is releasing Common Voice, an open-source collection of transcribed voice data comprising more than 1,400 hours of samples for more than 42,000 contributors across 18 languages. Quoting from Venture Beat. It's one of the largest,

multi-language data set of its kind, Mozilla claims, substantially larger than the Common Voice Corpus it made publicly available eight months ago, which contained 500 hours, 400,000 recordings from 20,000 volunteers in English. And the corpus will soon grow larger still. The organization says that data collection efforts in 70 languages are actively underway via the Common Voice website and mobile apps. Common Voice, which can be integrated into deep speech, a suite of open source speech to text, text to speech engines, and trained models maintained by Mozilla's machine learning group, consists not only of voice snippets, but of voluntarily contributed metadata useful for training speech engines like speakers' ages, sex, and accents. Collecting it,

and the snippets themselves requires a lot of legwork. The speech prompts on the Common Voice website have to be translated into each target language, end quote. And that's not all. In the coming months, Mozilla wants to roll out new partnerships and community initiatives to increase the amount of data available and also increase the quality. Quote, Mozilla aims to contribute to a more diverse and innovative voice technology ecosystem, Mozilla wrote in a blog post. The Common Voice website is one of our main vehicles for building voice data sets that are useful for voice interaction technology.

The way it looks today is the result of an ongoing process of iteration. We listen to community feedback about the pain points of contributing while also conducting usability research to make contributions easier, more engaging, and fun, end quote. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCalla. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Follow our friend and guest host Chris Higgins on Twitter at Chris Higgins. And follow the TechMeme editors on Twitter at TechMeme. Talk to you tomorrow.