Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/18 - Why The Galaxy Folds Are Breaking

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, April 18th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Samsung responds to the Galaxy Fold review unit issues, Google and Amazon and their streaming video spat, Pinterest and Zoom have their IPOs, and could the Chinese web end up being more popular than the open web? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Samsung has responded to those reports late yesterday of display issues on the Galaxy Fold review units that some journalists, were reporting, as M.G. Siegler tweeted,

Starting point is 00:01:10 don't say you're folding it wrong. Don't say you're folding it wrong. Don't actually, Samsung said this. Quote, a limited number of early Galaxy Fold samples were provided to media for review. We have received a few reports regarding the main display on the samples provided. We will thoroughly inspect these units in person to determine the cause of the matter. Separately, a few reviewers reported having removed the top layer of the display causing damage to the screen. The main display in the Galaxy Fold features a top protective layer, which is part of the display structure designed to protect the screen from unintended scratches. Removing the protective

Starting point is 00:01:47 layer or adding adhesives to the main display may cause damage. We will ensure this information is clearly delivered to our customers, end quote. So that protective layer, that is apparently what bricked Mark German's phone, because as he provided pictures of on Twitter, Twitter, he peeled that layer off. Apparently, the screens come with a thin, protective, plastic layer on them that kind of looks like that thin, plastic, protective layer that most new phones have right out of the box. German figured this was that and peeled it off. Apparently, you do not peel that off. But look, German is a seasoned tech reporter. If he didn't know not to do that, Would most consumers know? Also, that response doesn't answer what happened to other phones like

Starting point is 00:02:41 Dieter Bones at the verge. Over at Android Central, they've diagnosed two separate issues here. One, they say, is eminently fixable and one is not. So, yeah, that plastic covering on the screen looks removable. So some extra messaging inside the box might help this issue, or a slightly redesigned coating or something that looks less removable. But the other issue is this. If the screen is so fragile that just removing a thin plastic coating can destroy it, maybe this technology is not quite ready for prime time. Quote, if as we've seen, all that's keeping the display running is a thin piece of flexible plastic,

Starting point is 00:03:23 it doesn't bode well for its prospects of long-term durability. With very strong gorilla glass screen coverings, we've gotten used to being pretty rough on phones. and the fold just isn't going to be able to take that much abuse. Despite lots of engineering being put into keeping the folding portion of the display operational with thousands of folds, that doesn't necessarily mean it can handle impacts and damage elsewhere, end quote. One man's being rough on a phone is another man's, I don't know, daily use putting it in my pocket. Android Central points out that neither of its review units have had any issues. yet.

Starting point is 00:04:10 Facebook says it unintentionally collected the email contacts of 1.5 million users without their knowledge or consent when they opened a new account on the service. This new controversy stems from that practice, widely condemned by security experts, where new users were asked to provide Facebook with their logging credentials to their email. If you did that, a pop-up popped up saying it was importing your contacts without giving you the ability to opt out. quote, quote, on Wednesday, Facebook disclosed to Business Insider that 1.5 million people's contacts were collected this way and fed into Facebook's systems where they were used to improve. Facebook's ad targeting, build Facebook's web of social connections, and recommend friends to add, end quote.

Starting point is 00:04:47 Facebook has said it will delete the information and notify those affected. But there is some question as to whether the 1.5 million people might actually be higher, as of course that's the nature of contact lists. You, I, everyone could have hundreds of people in our contacts. I just, y'all, I don't have the time, the patience, or the inclination for this one today. But I will purposely put this story right here so that you can connect the dots of what I'm trying to say in your own mind. CNBC is reporting that a team at Facebook Reality Labs has been working on a voice assistant since 2018 and has contacted vendors in the smart speaker supply chain about ginning up some sort of Facebook home speakers. quote, the tech company has been working on this new initiative since early 2018.

Starting point is 00:05:43 The effort is coming out of the company's augmented reality and virtual reality group, a division that works on hardware, including the company's virtual reality Oculus headsets. A team based out of Redmond Washington has been spearheading the efforts to build the new AI assistant, according to two former Facebook employees, who left the company in recent months. The effort is being led by Iris Snyder, director of ARVR at Facebook Assistant. That team has been contacting vendors and the smart speaker supply chain, according to two people familiar. It's unclear how exactly Facebook envisions people using the assistant, but it could potentially be used on the company's portal, video chat, smart speakers, the Oculus headsets, or other future products, end quote. Peace is breaking out all over Silicon Valley.

Starting point is 00:06:44 Google and Amazon have officially ended their stupid streaming video spat. that YouTube will finally be available on Fire TV and Prime Video will work on Chromecast and Android TV. But note, YouTube is not coming to the Echo Show and there's no YouTube app for Amazon's fire tablets, but then that's not really necessary because you can already access YouTube via a web browser, of course. NGadgett sums this whole spat up by saying, quote, this should mark the end of a long contentious relationship between Amazon and Google. For a while, Amazon declined to sell Google's Chromecast devices, products that compete directly with Amazon's own Fire TV products. Amazon also didn't include support for Googlecast in the Prime Video app, which made it essentially impossible to get Prime Video on bigger screens if you use Google products.

Starting point is 00:07:34 Google responded by pooling support for the YouTube apps on Fire TV as well as the Echo Show. Late last year, though, Amazon started selling Google's Chromecast devices, something that indicated relationships between, the companies was improving, end quote. As a part of the efforts to appease, I mean comply with the European Commission's recent rulings, Google will now display options for five alternative search apps and browsers when Android users in the EU open Google Play. Google wrote, quote, users can tap to install as many apps as they want. If an additional search app or browser is installed, the user will be shown an additional

Starting point is 00:08:15 screen with instructions on how to set up the new app, e.g. Play app icons and widgets or setting defaults. Where a user downloads a search app from the screen, will also ask them whether they want to change Chrome's default search engine the next time they open Chrome, end quote. The Google apps will still be listed first on this new option screen, since Play will note that the Google apps are already installed on the device. A total of five options for both browser and search will be provided.

Starting point is 00:08:45 The new choice interface is rolling out in the next few weeks and will apply both to new Android phones and existing phones in Europe. The Unicorn Parade continues. Pinterest has opened up 25% on its first day of trading after raising $1.43 billion in its IPO at evaluation of $10 billion. But that first day pop actually gives the company a market cap slightly above $12.5 billion, which is notable because remember how Pinterest risked being an undercorn, an underwater unicorn, its last private funding round valued the company

Starting point is 00:09:29 at $12 billion. So good news for those last investors in the door, assuming the price stays that high when their lockup period ends. And Zoom has opened up around 80% on its first day of trading after raising $356.8 million in its IPO at a valuation of $9.2 billion. Remember, Zoom, maker of essentially conference call software that people actually seem to like, was that stealth unicorn in the parade that I told you has a special feature, known as Black Ink, also known as profits. And that seems to have made a difference to investors, quoting CNBC. The initial pop gives Zoom a stock market value of $16.7 billion.

Starting point is 00:10:16 Zoom is among a growing crop of tech companies going public in 2019, but with a twist, it's profitable. Bull. After filing to go public on March 22nd, Zoom estimated two weeks later that it would price shares in the range of $28 to $32.000. Zoom increased the range to between $32 and $35 per share this week, and on Wednesday it priced above the top of that range, valuing the company at $9.2 billion, end quote. At the time of this writing, 2 p.m. Eastern, Zoom is trading at around $65 a share. The crypto winter might still be upon the land, at least if you measure things like the price of specific coins and their market caps, but that hasn't stopped VCs and other banks and institutions from pouring $850 million into crypto startups so far this year. It might help and might be germane to point out that they are largely making these investments in the infrastructure of crypto, in the pipes, the plumbing, as it were, quote,

Starting point is 00:11:23 Such bets by companies, including London Stock Exchange Group and Microsoft, spiked over five-fold to a record 2.4 billion over 117 investments in 2018. This suggests large companies see promise in the nascent technology, even as it struggles for acceptance. They have mostly given digital coins, including Bitcoin, a wide berth, avoiding direct investment because of worries over tightening regulation, frequent security lapses, and high volatility, end quote. I was just quoting from a Reuters piece and one other interesting nugget in that piece, Reuters says that Coinbase grew revenue at a 20% clip last year to around $520 million, which should stem some of the rumors that were swirling that trading and thus revenues at Coinbase had all but ground to a halt last year as the crypto winter descended. This is a piece from Bloomberg that I've been saying,

Starting point is 00:12:24 sitting on all week, but I think it's worth thinking about, and so I'm not going to hold it for the long reads where it would get mixed up with all the others. You know that recent idea that we've been talking about, the idea that the web is splitting up. There was the open web, call it the American web, and now there's the emerging European web. Think of that, well, I guess kind of in shades of an economic analogy. The European web is basically the open web, but more regulated, just like the European version of capitalism is capitalism, but slightly more regulated than the American version. But the original alternative web for the better part of two decades now has been the Chinese web, the locked down web, the authoritarian web.

Starting point is 00:13:09 And Bloomberg says it maybe is getting popular. Quote, a swath of the world is adopting China's vision for a tightly controlled internet over the unfettered American approach, a stunning ideological coup for Beijing that would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago. Vietnam and Thailand are among the Southeast Asian nations warming to a governance model that twins sweeping content curves with uncompromising data controls because it helps preserve the regime in power. A growing number of the region's increasingly autocratic governments watched enviously the emergence of Chinese corporate titans from Tencent Holdings to Alibaba group, in spite of draconian online curbs, and now they want the same. The more freewheeling Silicon Valley model once seemed unquestionably the best approach,

Starting point is 00:13:57 with stars from Google to Facebook to vouch for its superiority. Now a remolding of the Internet into a tightly controlled and scrubbed sphere in China's image is taking place from Russia to India. Yet it's Southeast Asia, that's the economic and geopolitical linchpin to Chinese ambitions, and where U.S.-Chinese tensions will come to ahead, a region home to more than half a billion people whose internet economy is expected to triple to $240 billion by 2025, end quote. The crux of the Chinese model is that information on citizens' data must be stored in country and be made readily and always available to government scrutiny.

Starting point is 00:14:38 That's pretty appealing, frankly, I'm sure, on some level, to basically all governments. But going part and parcel with this is the rise of these so-called super apps that we've been talking about where you can do all of your shopping and banking and ride-hailing and everything. All in-app in one place, these apps are more culturally and socially native to countries that have jumped straight into mobile without the intermediate digital steps that the West has gone through. Sort of an early long read, as I said, but one with a bunch to think about. finally today a bit of science Thursday, or at least a bit of Indiana Jones Thursday,

Starting point is 00:15:21 did you hear about the newly discovered 4,000-year-old Egyptian tomb that has stunned archaeologists because of how well it was preserved? Quote, the tomb near Sakara, a vast ancient burial ground in Egypt south of the capital of Cairo, belonged to a senior official named, boy, I don't know, K-H-U-Y, K-W-Y, Qie, let's say Chewy, who is also believed to have been a nobleman during the 5th Dynasty, a period spanning the 25th to 24th century BCE. Mostly made of white limestone bricks, the tomb features several paintings, which surprisingly remain brightly colored despite the passage of time in hues associated with royalty. It also boosts a tunnel entrance that is usually only found in pyramids, CNN reported, end quote. basically nothing really more to tell you about this story than that but do click through to the link in the show notes because frankly i just want you to see the photos of this tomb it really is stunning

Starting point is 00:16:23 it's bright brightly colored it looks like the tomb was abandoned just yesterday that's all for today i've been your host as always brian mcca follow me on twitter at brian mccc the podcast subreddit is r slash ride home the link to the premium ad-free version of the is in the very bottom of the show notes. And check out our new podcast, the primary ride home. And subscribe to it. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 04/18 - Why The Galaxy Folds Are Breaking

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