Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/06 - This is Google Stadia (?)

Episode Date: June 6, 2019

Google Stadia details are revealed, Amazon shows off its delivery drone and Uber debuts Uber Copter, Facebook is going to do an official white paper for its cryptocurrency, and our mobile gadgets have finally dethroned the television. Sponsors: Tiny.website Pantheon.io/ride Links: GOOGLE’S STADIA GAME SERVICE IS OFFICIALLY COMING NOVEMBER: EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW (The Verge) Google cloud boss Thomas Kurian makes his first big move — buys Looker for $2.6 billion (CNBC) Facebook plans June 18th cryptocurrency debut. Here's what we know (TechCrunch) A first look at Amazon's new delivery drone (TechCrunch) Uber Copter to Offer Flights From Lower Manhattan to J.F.K. (NYTimes) Average US Time Spent with Mobile in 2019 Has Increased (eMarketer) People spend more time on mobile devices than TV, firm says (Los Angeles Times)   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, June 6, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google Stadia details are revealed.

Amazon shows off its delivery drone and Uber debuts Uber Copter. Facebook is going to do an official white paper for its cryptocurrency, and our mobile gadgets have finally dethroned the television. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, Google finally gave us the full details on Google Stadia, that big move into gaming, that they've been prepping. us for for a couple months now. Quick headline details. The service is coming in November to 14 different countries, including the U.S., UK, and Canada. There are at least 31 games available at

launch from 21 different publishers. A so-called Stadia Pro subscription costs $10 a month, not including extra games. And a free tier is coming in 2020. In short, the idea of being able to play games anywhere on any screen isn't quite coming yet. Right now today, you can pre-order a founder's edition for $130, which gets you a hardware starter kit and three months of service before that $10 a month kicks in. The game lineup at launch is impressive. There are brand new games from high-profile franchises like Borderlands, Wolfenstein, Doom, Dark Sider, Mortal Kombat. In fact, the just-announced Balders Gate 3. The only way you'll be able to

play that will be on PC and Stadia. But quoting Sean Hollister in The Verge. While you've probably heard predictions that Google Stadia will be the Netflix of games, it turns out the analogy only goes so far. While Google intends to eventually

have a back catalog of free games included for your $10 monthly fee, Stadia is not primarily a subscription service. The subscription only includes a single game as of today, Destiny 2. Primarily, Google tells us you should expect to buy, not rent, cloud games for the same retail prices you'd find in other platforms like PlayStation Network, Xbox Live and Steam. We will sell these games like any other digital storefront, Google's

Director of Games, Jack Busser tells the verge, end quote. And back to that $130 founder edition option, quoting and gadget. The pack available to pre-order today. Day will come with a Chromecast Ultra Puck, limited edition Night Blue Controller, first dibs on a Stadia username, and two three-month Stadia Pro subscriptions, one for you and a friend. Stadia Pro will otherwise cost $9.99 per month and grants you access to Google's library of up to 4K resolution and 60 frames per second with HDR and 5.1 surround. Destiny 2 will come with the base game. all previous add-ons, the new Shadowkeep expansion, and the annual pass.

If Stadia Pro sounds too expensive, fear not. Google will offer a Stadia-based service next year that lets you buy and keep individual games. These purchases will be capped at 1080P resolution and 60 frames per second with stereo sound, however. Still, it could be a decent option if you already pay for a bunch of game-related subscriptions. PS Plus, Xbox GamePass, EA Access, and the like. and are unsure about going all in on Stadia Pro, end quote. So bring on the skepticism, quoting Ars Technica. A big part of Google's sales pitch for Stadia was the fact that the service would work on any computer with a web browser,

as well as generic mobile phones and tablets using non-proprietary USB controllers. Requiring early adopters to purchase $129 worth of Chromecast, Ultra, and Stadia controller hardware, cuts against that open-to-any-one messaging. in a world where an Xbox one with a bundled game routinely sells for under $250 asking for a $129 hardware commitment to use Stadius platform doesn't seem especially revolutionary. Yes, that Founders Edition purchase requirement and the attendant $9.99 per month pro-tier subscription will go away sometime in 2020, likely after Google has confirmed its game streaming servers can work at scale. but by then Google will have already lost the initial impact it could have had with a launch to billions of Chrome users, end quote.

Nelai Patel tweeted, Google's stadia pricing makes a little bit of sense if you compare it to Xbox Live or PS Plus, I suppose, but against a regular console paying $10 a month and then still having to buy games just seems silly. And David Ruddock tweeted, $10 a month probs and you'll have to buy most games a la cart, RIP Stadia, end quote. Google is also buying analytics startup company Looker for $2.6 billion, or I should say, Google Cloud is, making this the first major acquisition under Google Cloud's new CEO, Thomas Currian. Curion is a former Oracle executive who became Google Cloud CEO in November.

Also notable that this will be Google's biggest acquisition overall since it bought Smart Home company Nest in 2014. Google, of course, has been locked in a tussle with Amazon Web Services for the cloud computing market. Quoting CNBC, the purchase of Looker will add a new analytics tool for Google Cloud's customers. Google said the technology will help its customers analyze their data in a consistent way across different sources and help Google provide industry-specific analytics for its targeted verticals. Google said in its press release that it already shared over 350 customers through an existing partnership, including BuzzFeed, Yahoo, and Hearst. Looker's business intelligence tool works on multiple clouds in addition to Google's

and integrates with other databases that compete with Google's own products, end quote. Two quick hits on the Facebook coin front. TechCrunch says that Facebook plans to release a white paper explaining the basics of its cryptocurrency later this month, June 18th, to be specific, ahead of a formal launch in 2020. If you don't know, white papers are the sort of hello world foundational documents of cryptocurrencies. Quote, the company's head of financial services and payment partnerships for Northern Europe, Laura McCracken, told German magazine, ah, geez, the German words.

Wersch Schraff's Washies, Sebastian Kirch, that the white paper would debut June 18th and that the cryptocurrency would indeed be pegged to a. a basket of currencies rather than a single one, like the U.S. dollar, to prevent price fluctuations. Kirsch tells me, I met Laura at Money 2020 Europe in Amsterdam on Tuesday, after she watched fellow Facebook payments exec, Paulette Rose talk. Quote, she told me that she wasn't involved in what Facebook blockchain's David Marcus's team was doing, but that I'd have to wait until June 18th when a white paper was supposed to be published to get more details, end quote. She told him she thought the date was already a publicly known fact, which it wasn't. Then yesterday, TechCrunch received a

request for a June 18th news embargo from one of the communications managers for Facebook's blockchain team. The information's Alex Heath and John Victor also reported yesterday that Facebook's cryptocurrency project would launch later this month, end quote. And the information is reporting that Facebook intends to create an independent foundation to manage its cryptocurrency, charging members a $10 million dollar licensing fee for the right to operate nodes. Quote, node operators could send their own representatives to the foundation to help steward the network. It isn't known how the node operators will profit from their participation, but node operators are typically rewarded for their efforts through newly unlocked tokens or transaction fees from users. Facebook hopes to launch the network with 100 nodes

in an effort to limit the control a single entity can have over it, according to multiple people familiar with the matter, although that number is far lower than on other cryptocurrency. networks. Bitcoin, in comparison, has thousands of nodes validating transactions. Some of the people added that the number of nodes could be fewer at launch. The company has discussed designing the network so that it will become more decentralized over time, which could happen by adding more nodes. Facebook plans to use the roughly $1 billion at hopes to generate from licensing fees to back the cryptocurrency using a basket of currencies and low-risk securities from various countries, people familiar with the matter said. Backing the token with reserves of traditional

assets is designed to ensure the token's price remains stable, unlike other cryptocurrencies, which are prone to dramatic price fluctuations, end quote. At the Remars conference in Las Vegas, Amazon showed off its latest delivery drone, saying it will use this drone to make deliveries to customers in the coming months. The drone has a 15-mile range and can carry up to five pounds, and you're going to want to click through to look at the picture and video, quoting TechCrunch. Chances are it neither looks nor flies like what you'd expect from a drone. It's an ingenious hexagonal hybrid design that has very few moving parts and uses the shroud that protects its blades as its wings

when it transitions from vertical helicopter-like flight at takeoff to its airplane-like mode. What's maybe even more important, though, is that the drone is chock-full of sensors and a suite of compute modules that run a variety of machine learning models to keep the drone safe. Today's announcement marks the first time Amazon is publicly talking about those visual, thermal, and ultrasonic sensors, which it designed in-house and how the drone's autonomous flight systems maneuver it to its landing spot. The focus here is on building a drone that is as safe as possible and able to be independently safe. Even when it's not connected to a network and it encounters a new situation, it'll be able to react appropriately and safely, end quote.

Amazon has reportedly designed almost all of the drone's software and hardware in-house, and some details are still not available. For example, how loud this thing will be when it flies overhead or maybe lands in your backyard. Uber Today debuted Uber Copter, a helicopter service starting July 9th that will ferry customers between Lower Manhattan and John F. Kennedy Airport for around $200 to $225 per person for an eight-minute one-way flight, and you'll even get private ground transportation on both ends. This new service can be booked through the Uber app itself under the Uber Elevate banner, quoting the New York Times. Currently, that trip by car can take at least an hour,

and in rush hour traffic can last more than two hours. Other modes of transit, the subway and the Long Island Railroad take between 50 and 75 minutes. Uber Copter promises to cut the total travel experience, including ground transportation, to as little as 30 minutes. Our plan is to eventually roll out UberCopter to more Uber customers and to other cities, but we want to do it right, Mr. Allison said. The main goal of this initial venture is to understand the operations behind aerial vehicles, end quote. Uber Copter will be available only to users who are platinum and diamond members, the top two tiers of the company's loyalty program, Uber Rewards. Those customers can book Uber Copter on demand for up to five days in advance.

The helicopters accommodate up to five people and will run Monday through Friday during the afternoon rush hour. Once seats are reserved, passengers will receive an email from Uber with a boarding pass. Similar to Uber rides, Uber Copter will have dynamic pricing determined largely by demand, end quote. P.S. Aside from the possibility of surge pricing, as several people on Twitter pointed out, that's actually really not that insane a price. A normal run-of-the-mill cab ride from JFK to Manhattan is a flat fee of $52.

So if you're not a cheapskate and you add a reasonable tip, you're looking at at least $65 one way. And trust me, an hour for. from JFK to Manhattan is absolutely the best case scenario. I'm not saying I'll ever be the sort of person who copters to the airport, but eight minutes for only $100 and change more than the default option, it's not outside the realm of possibility. Finally today, the streaming wars again,

but from a big picture angle, want to know why everyone is finally getting into streaming. It's because that's where the eyeballs are, or where they're going. For the first time ever this year, U.S. consumers will spend more time per day using their mobile devices than they do watching TV, quoting e-marketer.

The average U.S. adult will spend three hours, 43 minutes on mobile devices in 2019, just above the three hours, 35 minutes, spent on TV. Of time spent on mobile, U.S. consumers will spend two hours and 55 minutes on smartphones, a nine-minute increase from last year. In 2018, mobile time spent was three hours. and 35 minutes with TV time spent at 3 hours and 44 minutes. Tablet use among U.S. adults

continues to lose ground, having peaked at 1 hour, 11 minutes daily in 2017, and dipped to 1 hour 8 minutes this year. This trend will continue through 2021. We've expected that mobile would overtake TV for a while, but seeing it happen is still surprising, says Yoram Wersmoursmur, e-marketers principal analyst. As recently as 2014, the average U.S. adult watched nearly two hours more TV than they spent on their phones, end quote. Now, watching video is not yet the primary thing people do on their mobile devices, according to e-marketer. We spend 30% of our time on our devices on audio-related apps, streaming music and podcasts

for the win, and social networking apps take up 24% of our time. Video apps only account for 19% of time spent on mobile, but you got to skate to where the puck is going, quoting from the... Los Angeles Times. The difference in time was even more pronounced for younger Americans, with people 18 to 34, spending one hour and 51 minutes on live and time-shifted TV and three hours and 25 minutes on the web or apps on smartphone and tablets in the third quarter of last year. Nielsen said, over time, e-marketer expects the trend to continue. In 2021, e-marketer estimates adults will spend three hours and 54 minutes on their mobile devices compared to only three hours and 22 minutes watching TV.

unquote. Again, you got to go to where the eyeballs are. That's all for today. As always, I've been Brian McCullough, and you can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show subreddit is our slash right home, and the link to the ad-free version of the show is the very bottom link in the show notes. Talk to you tomorrow.