Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 05/23 - An Indie Game Boy for the 21st Century

Episode Date: May 23, 2019

The Playdate is a Game Boy for the 21st Century, GitHub launches a Patreon for open source developers, Amazon is working on a health app that can monitor emotions, Door Dash is emerging at the leader in the food delivery wars, and Rotten Tomatoes brings the hammer down on review stuffing. Sponsors: AirTable.com/techmeme Castro Podcast App Sonic.com/ride Links: Playdate is an adorable handheld with games from the creators of Qwop, Katamari, and more (The Verge) GitHub launches Sponsors, lets you pay your favorite open-source contributors (TechCrunch) Amazon Is Working on a Device That Can Read Human Emotions (Bloomberg) DoorDash Is Now Worth $12.6 Billion After New $600 Million Investment (Forbes) Andreessen pours $22M into PlanetScales' database-as-a-service (TechCrunch) Walmart starts selling self-branded Android tablets starting at $64 w/ Play Store (9to5Google)  A year after GDPR, mobile notifications are up, location sharing is down (MarketingLand) Rotten Tomatoes will start verifying ticket purchases for audience reviews (TechCrunch) Subscribe to the premium, ad free feed! 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 right home for Thursday, May 23rd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Playdate is a Game Boy for the 21st century. GitHub launches a Patreon for open source developers. Amazon is working on a health app that can monitor emotions. DoorDash is emerging as the leader in the food delivery wars. And Rotten Tomatoes brings the hammer down on review stuffing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The entire internet has been all a flutter today over PlayDate. and I think rightfully so.

But let me back up for a second first. You know, Panic? Panic is that high-end Mac software developer. They've been around forever. Going back to the days when they developed one of the first ever MP3 players for the Mac before even the iTunes store. More recently, they moved successfully into game publishing, and they were responsible for that hit indie game Firewatch,

as well as the upcoming Untitled Goose game. Well, guess what? Today, panic is getting into the hardware business. You heard me correctly. The hardware is called, as I said, the play date. It's a little yellow gameboy-like gadget that will run you $149 when it ships in early 2020. When you get the device and you first turn it on, it will have only one game on it. But over the course of a year, what they are calling a season, Panic will deliver 11 more titles,

pushed to the device one each month, each specifically designed and curated for the playdate. If that sounds fun, I haven't even gotten to the best part yet. Listen to the description of this hardware. And remember, this thing is tiny, cute, and bright yellow. And it's got a crank on the side, quoting the verge. The device is incredibly tiny, measuring in at 74 by 76 by 9 millimeters with a 2.7 inch display. It looks, a bit like a stretched out iPod Nano. The playdate features a reflective black and white screen with no backlight, two buttons on the face, a directional pad, and a hand crank that neatly slots into the side of the device. The crank doesn't power the handset, as you might expect. Instead,

it's a unique control option. Think of the crank like an analog stick, but one you can turn endlessly, Panic says. As for the screen, Panic says that while it sounds incredibly low-fi, It's a bit more high-end than you might imagine. On the surface, it might be tempting to compare the screen to say the Game Boy, the company says. But PlayDates display is quite different. It has no grid lines, no blurring, is extremely sharp and clear and has much higher resolution. It sounds odd to say, but it's truly a premium black and white screen, end quote. Other features include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USBC, and a headphone jack.

The handheld runs on a custom OS built by Panic. and it has a battery that recharges with the USBC port. We don't have any final numbers yet, but early playtime results look promising, the company says, a battery life. If you're wondering why the hardware looks so slick, it was designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering, the Swedish company renowned for its beautiful synths.

They came up with the crank idea. While we don't know much about the games themselves, Panic has assembled a crack team of indie creators to design experiences for the device. The first game to unlock is called Kranken's Time Travel Adventure and it's designed by none other than Katamari Damasei creator Ketia Takahashi. Here's the basic premise. This game uses the crank exclusively to control the flow of time backwards and forwards.

Your goal? Get crankin to his date with crankette while avoiding an ever-increasing series of ridiculous obstacles, obstacles that aren't affected by the time control. Will Crankan make it to his rendezvous on time? Spoiler alert. No. End quote. As I said, all. day. People have been absolutely losing their minds over this thing. And if you check the pictures, I think you'll see why. Again, it's shipping early 2020 and pre-orders will begin later this year.

GitHub has launched sponsors, a tool that lets you pay your favorite open source contributors directly. Developers can opt in to sponsors today and put a sponsor me button on their repositories. You have to be an open source developer to participate in sponsors, and during the first year, a developer participates in the program GitHub, by which of course we mean GitHub owner Microsoft, will match all contributions people make up to $5,000. And for at least the next year, GitHub won't charge any payment processing fees either. Developers can set up multiple sponsorship tiers, sort of how you would with a Patreon or Twitch streamer, quoting TechCrunch. The mission here, GitHub says, is to expand the opportunities to participate in and build on open source.

That's likely to be a bit controversial among some open source developers who don't want financial interests to influence what people will work on. And there may be some truth to that, as this may drive open source developers to focus on projects that are more likely to attract financial contributions over more esoteric projects that are interesting and challenging, but aren't likely to find financial backers on GitHub, end quote. Sources are telling Bloomberg that Amazon is working on a wearable, voice-activated health and wellness device that will work with a mobile app. But what's super interesting beyond that is that somehow the device is rumored to recognize human emotions.

Quote, the wrist-worn gadget is described as a health and wellness product in internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. It's a collaboration between Lab 126, the hardware development group behind Amazon's Firephone and Echo SmartSpeaker, and the Alexa voice software team. Designed to work with a smartphone app, the device has microphones paired with software that can discern the wearer's emotional state from the sound of his or her voice, according to the documents, and a person familiar with the program. Eventually, the technology could be able to advise the wearer how to interact more effectively with others, the documents show. end quote. It's unclear how far along the device is in its development or if it will ever see the commercial light of day. And of course, Amazon refused to comment on the Bloomberg story. Walmart has launched its own line of really cheap Android tablets under its store brand on. On N.

Starting at $64. These new tablets run Android Pie right out of the box without apparently even a skin. So you get the full Android experience, the full Play Store experience, and all the Google apps, which makes this a notable competitor to Amazon's ultra-cheap fire tablets, since they don't have those things, quoting 9 to 5 Google. As you expect from an ultra-affordable Android tablet, Walmart's lineup of on tablets are not impressive on the spec sheet by any means. The least expensive of the trio of new tablets is the 8-inch model, which costs $64. With that device, users get a 1280 by 800 iPS display, an unnamed 1.3 gigahertz quad core processor,

2 gigabytes of RAM, and 16 gigabytes of storage. That's not going to be up to the task of power users, but for watching videos or keeping kids entertained, it should be just fine. There's also a 0.3 megapixel front-facing camera and a 2 megapixel rear camera. The larger 10.1-inch models match those specs, but with the larger screen that, that strangely has no listed resolution just yet. Walmart has a third Android tablet coming soon with a keyboard accessory, but it's not yet listed on the retailer's website. In the meantime, the 8-inch model is available for $64,

with the 10.1-inch model costing just $79. Both are available online and should be in most Walmart locations around the U.S., end quote. I haven't done a funding roundup segment in a while, but two raises in particular caught my eye today. I don't know if I've mentioned it on here, but there's a chart on MarketShare for food delivery services that's been making its way around Twitter that shows that DoorDash has quietly been killing it, slowly rising to the point where it might soon take the market share crown in the food delivery space. Well, I guess I'm not the only one that has seen that chart, as DoorDash today raised $600 million led by hedge fund Darsana Capitalized. partners at a $12.6 billion valuation. And guess what? DoorDash raised $400 million at a $7 billion valuation just three months ago. And if you think that's impressive, consider how much the story

of DoorDash is sort of a comeback story as well, quoting Forbes. Three years ago, it didn't look like DoorDash would become the delivery darling. In 2016, DoorDash raised a down-funding round after investors lowered the share price and a slew of other delivery startups failed in the months following. That's changed. And now DoorDash's market share has surpassed Postmates and Uber Eats in the U.S., end quote. P.S., I'm going to do a really brute force shoehorning in here of a bit of news related to DoorDash that probably wouldn't earn a full segment. Google says it has partnered with delivery services, including DoorDash, but also Postmates and others, to let users order food via Google search. Google Maps or Google Assistant in the U.S.

Notably not a partner listed there is Uber Eats. Quoting Google, to use the assistant on your phone to get your food fix, simply say, hey, you know, order food from whatever restaurant. You can also quickly reorder your go-to meal with some of our delivery partners by saying, hey, reorder food from whatever restaurant.

The assistant pulls up your past orders and in just a few seconds, you can select your usual dish. end quote. Okay, but back to the raises. The other raise that caught my eye is Planet Scale, a database as a service startup that is based on Vitesse, the technology that helped scale YouTube and Dropbox. Planet Scale raised a $22 million series A led by Andresen Horowitz. Quoting TechCrunch, Planet Scale wants to take what Vitesse did for YouTube and Dropbox and sell it to, quote, any enterprise that wants their data both secure and consistently accessible.

And thanks to its ability to re-shard databases while they're operating, it can solve businesses' troubles with GDPR, which demands they store some data in the same locality as the user it belongs to. Vitesse, a predecessor to Kubernetes, is a horizontal-scaling sharding middleware built for MySQL. It lets businesses segment their database to boost memory efficiency without sacrificing reliable access speeds. Planet Scale sells Vitesse in four ways, hosting on its database as a service, licensing of the tech that can be run on-premises for clients or through another cloud provider, professional training for using Vitesse and on-demand support for users of the open-source version of Vitesse, end quote. A couple of months ago, I ended a segment about notifications on smartphones, notifications from apps by warning developers that if you don't learn the lesson of advertising, advertising on the web. You're just going to overdo things and you're going to turn a feature that is actually useful into something that people will come to hate. Well, apparently nobody listened to old Brian because according to the Airship Global Mobile Apps Study, businesses send 36

notifications via their apps per user per month on average, which is up 18.4% year over year. Interestingly enough, though, at least to me, the average opt-in rate for notifications for apps is 67% which seems insane to me because my default answer is no, you may not send me notifications and very, very, very few apps get to break that rule on my phone. So is this the reason why I'm always seeing those studies that say that people check their phone something like 2,000 times a day? Are all you all just triaging pings from Sweet Green and Starbucks with coupon offers? You maniacs? There's also some interesting data on location sharing, though, quote. The airship data also reflects interesting differences between users on iOS and Android. Pre-Android Q users are blocking location more often than iOS users who have the option to share location only while an app is in use.

Android Q adopts this approach as well, which should make future location performance. permissions on Android look more like iOS. On iOS, unprompted location sharing is up, which suggests caution among some developers and a recognition of the value of app location among users. Airship didn't have visibility into the app categories where this was happening. In addition, fewer users on both platforms seem to be disabling location less often, end quote. Finally today, Rotten Tomatoes says it will now calculate its audience score using only ratings or reviews from users whose ticket purchase has been verified through Fandango.

I think we've discussed the reason why they're making this change before. The site's audience scores, distinct from the tomato meter, which is based on professional reviews, have become a target for supposed fans looking to voice their discontent around big releases. That's particularly been the case for movies like Captain Marvel, Black Panther, and Star Wars, The Last Jedi, which featured women or people of color as their leads. Despite the reactionary backlash, each of those films has grossed more than $1 billion worldwide. Earlier this year, the site announced that it would not allow users to post comments about a movie until it came out.

But that only delayed the debate. If you wanted to rant about a title without seeing it, you just had to wait a little longer. So starting today, Rotten Tomatoes is taking advantage of the fact that it's owned by ticketing service Fandango, which in turn is owned by Comcast and Warner Media. For all new movies, moving forward, users who want to leave a rating or review will be asked to verify their ticket purchase through Fandango. To be clear, you'll still be able to leave a review without verification, but verified reviews will be clearly marked, and only those reviews will be included when calculating the audience score, end quote. Hey, I haven't done this in a while, but I do have two open ad slots next week,

so I thought I'd throw it out to listeners. as I did last summer. Since I'm trying to fill these slots at the last minute, I'm offering these slots up to anyone on the cheap. And as I said the last time I did this, if you've got a product, a game, an app, a project, anything that you might promote on, say, product hunt, why not promo it to the best connected audience in tech?

You don't have to be a company. You can even be a one-person dev team. but if you do work at a company, maybe go bug your boss, see if there's any budget to throw at a podcast ad experiment. I'll work with you to write a decent ad read super quick, and some of the advertisers who tried this out last time have come back several times now and are among our regular stable of friends at this point. So if you're interested in trying out an ad on the tech meme ride home next week, again on the cheap, get in touch at podcast. at techmeme.com. Talk to you tomorrow.