Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/16 – Serious Cases Of TikTok Envy

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

Google says YouTube Shorts is keeping pace with TikTok. Meta plans to make Facebook more like TikTok in order to keep pace themselves. That new Sonos Voice Control assistant sounds pretty good to me. Why a bunch of folks are going to string internet cables under the shrinking polar ice. And why the Japanese are freaked out about Internet Explorer going away. Sponsors: HubSpot.com Kolide.com/ride Links: YouTube Says It Is Gaining on TikTok in Short-Video Race (WSJ) FACEBOOK IS CHANGING ITS ALGORITHM TO TAKE ON TIKTOK, LEAKED MEMO REVEALS (The Verge) Samsung Wallet is back to organize your ID, keys, and crypto (The Verge) SONOS VOICE CONTROL REVIEW: A SPEEDY, PRIVATE, MUSIC-FOCUSED ASSISTANT (The Verge) A Warming Arctic Emerges as a Route for Subsea Cables (WSJ) Internet Explorer shutdown to cause Japan headaches 'for months' (NikkeiAsia) 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, June 16th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google says YouTube shorts is keeping pace with TikTok. Meta plans to make Facebook more like TikTok in order to keep pace themselves. That new Sonos voice control assistant sounds pretty good to me, why a bunch of folks are going to string internet cables under the shrinking polar ice, and why the Japanese are freaked out about Internet Explorer going away. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google says more than 1.4.4.5.com. Google says more than 1.4.4.4.com. billion people watch YouTube shorts every month. TikTok had more than one billion monthly active users in September 2021, and third parties estimated almost 1.6 billion mouths in March 2022. So I guess

Google wants you to know they can do what TikTok does. You'll see why I'm leading with this story in a second, quoting the journal. YouTube shorts was first released in India in late 2020 and made available in the U.S. the next year. YouTube officials pitched the product to creators as part of a multi-format approach that includes longer videos, the services bread and butter, and newer outlets such as live streaming. Shorts are up to 60 seconds long. Our creators want fame or fortune or creative expression or ideally all three, said Tara Walpert Levy, vice president of Americas at YouTube. This is the best way to deliver against that, end quote. Although Apple's to Apple's data aren't publicly available, YouTube's newly public.

viewership number would give shorts a similar audience to TikTok and its Chinese counterpart, Doyuan, according to the most recent figures. TikTok said in September the app had drawn more than one billion monthly active users. Third-party estimates have pegged the number as high as almost $1.6 billion at the end of March. BytDance said in 2020 that Doyenne had reached more than 600 million daily active users. Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, hasn't said how many monthly users interact with reels, end quote.

So I'm leading with that, because I compare that story with this one. The Verge has seen an internal memo suggesting that meta plans to make Facebook more like TikTok, including bringing Messenger back into the main big blue app and recommending posts from unconnected sources in what used to be called the news feed. Quote, in an internal memo from late April obtained by the Verge, the meta executive in charge of Facebook, Tom Allison, spelled out the plan. Rather than prioritize posts from accounts people follow, Facebook's main feed will, like TikTok, start heavily recommending posts regardless of where they come from. And years after Messenger and Facebook split up as separate apps, the two will be brought back together,

mimicking TikTok's messaging functionality. Combined with an increasing emphasis on reels, the planned changes show how forcibly meta is responding to the rise of TikTok, which has quickly become a legitimate challenger to its dominance in social media. While Instagram has already morphed to look more like TikTok with its focus on reels, executives hope that a similar treatment to Facebook will reverse that app's stagnant growth and potentially lure back young people. The moment is similar to win Facebook copied Snapchat as it was growing quickly, but this time the stakes are arguably higher.

Investors are doubting meta's ability to navigate challenges to its ads business. And with its stock price already battered, the company needs to show that it can grow if Zuckerberg wants to keep funding his Metaverse vision. Allison put it bluntly to employees in a comment underneath his April memo I saw, quote, the risk for us is that we dismiss this as being not valuable to people as a form of social communication and connection, and we fail to evolve, end quote. After I asked Meta for comment on his memo, the company set me up with Allison for his first interview since taking the helm of the world's largest social network last year.

He says the new goal for Facebook is to build the discovery engine, a phrase also mentioned as a top priority by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during Meta's most recent earnings call with. investors. Here's how the future Facebook app will work in practice. The main tab will become a mix of stories and reels at the top, followed by posts its Discovery Engine recommends from across both Facebook and Instagram. It'll be a more visual video-heavy experience with cleaner prompts to direct message friends a post. To make messaging even more prominent, Facebook is working on placing a user's messenger inbox at the top right of the app, undoing the infamous decision to separate the two apps eight years ago. Instagram is all.

already well ahead of Facebook in its push to show more reels from accounts you don't follow, or what the company calls unconnected sources. Right now, only about 11% of content in Facebook's main feed is unconnected. The company tells me, and to date, those posts have mostly surfaced through reshairs people posts to their network, not the company's AI. Based on my conversations with Allison and his memo, it's clear meta realizes that to really compete with TikTok, it has to replicate the magical experience of TikTok's main for you page. The news feed, which dropped news from its name earlier this year, pioneered a social feed that learns from explicit cues you give it, such as friending someone or following a page. TikTok took that a step further by guessing

what you like based on your passive viewing habits, injecting a never-ending fire hose of short videos into people's screens. By removing the need to follow accounts before you see interesting videos, TikTok also leveled the playing field for creators, giving them a way to go viral overnight without a large following, end quote. Samsung has merged its pay and pass apps to create what it is calling wallet, letting users pay for things, organize ID cards, keys, and even crypto, all from one singular app. This is rolling out as we speak, quote. The new Samsung wallet is available today, and it will take the place of the current pay and pass apps, which currently handle payments, cards, and passwords respectively. It also integrates with smart things to store certain digital home and car keys.

And of course, the new Samsung wallet integrates with the existing Samsung blockchain wallet app, so you can easily check the value of your cryptocurrency portfolio, or maybe don't. Samsung also plans to add some features it teased at its unpacked event earlier this year, including the ability to store your digital IDs and driver's license. Samsung's digital key feature had been previously available in Samsung Pass for one car, the Genesis GV60. Now the company is expanding compatibility to include the Genesis G90 and Hyundai Palisade, as well as certain BMW models launched after July 2020. The new wallet is also compatible

with nine smart home security companies via smart things, so digital house keys can be used. There are other more pedestrian features like the ability to store airline boarding passes, though that's currently limited to Korean air flights. Samsung wallet is available today in the US, UK and parts of Europe for Galaxy phones with Samsung Pay running Android 9 or later, end quote. The Wall Street Journal says that Alaskan, Finnish and Japanese companies, alongside the Russian government are planning new Arctic undersea internet cables made possible by shrinking ice coverage. Quote, subsea cables, bundles of fiber optic lines carry about 95% of intercontinental voice and data traffic. There are currently over 400 such cables with speed of communications roughly proportional to the length of each cable.

Because the geographical distance between continents is less at the Arctic than further south, a cable through the region would promise faster communications experts say the possibility of a route has become more feasible as accelerated warming has opened the area to development. A bank in London, say, transmitting data to Tokyo, could do so 30 to 40% faster via an Arctic route than existing routes, which go from London and head east, crossing Egypt, said Tim Strange, analyst at subsea cable analysis firm telegeography. Industries like defense, petroleum, gas, and fishing, as well as scientists doing climate research in the Arctic, would all benefit from faster communications, he said, adding that communities living there would also have better internet access. Alaskan company Far North Digital, which is partnering with Finland's

Sinia and Japan's Arteria Networks, plans to build a cable through the Northwest Passage, the route that curls around northern Alaska and scattered Canadian islands, and loops under Greenland, linking the Arctic with the Pacific. The company expects to deploy ships to begin survey work in the summer of 2023. The proposed Far North Fiber Route, which aims to be operational by the end of 2026, would travel approximately 14,000 kilometers or 8,699 miles east from Japan through the Northwest Passage and then on to Europe, according to Ethan Berkowitz, a co-founder of Far North Digital. The project has been in the works for several years, he said. Mr. Berkowitz said the project has obtained an engineering, procurement, and construction

contract from Alcatel submarine networks and began the permitting process, quote, at various locations around the route. The companies are in advance talks to finance the project, he said, which is expected to cost approximately $1 billion or $1.04 billion, end quote. Something that I'll have to try to test out at some point this weekend when I get a chance, the new Sonos voice control assistant. Sonos has brought voice control in-house, instead of farming it out to Alexa or Google. Chris Welch at the verge says that Sonos voice control is fast, It's good about keeping things private and is good at tasks like grouping rooms and picking songs, but lacks Spotify support and doesn't understand some artist's names.

Quote, when Sonos voice control was announced last month, the company made it abundantly clear that its new voice assistant, free to use on all Sonos smart speakers, isn't meant to directly compete with Amazon's Alexa or the Google Assistant. Sonos lacks the size and resources to build any smart assistant that could go toe to tow with the scope of those existing big tech platforms. Instead, the company went and bought a voice assistant startup called Snips and remained laser focused on what it's good at. Music. Sonos voice control's sole purpose is controlling audio playback across the various Sonos speakers around your home.

It can't tell you the weather or set a timer. The smartest thing Sonos voice control can do is tell you the time. But its singular focus results in extremely fast performance when playing songs, adjusting volume or grouping rooms together. And the voice is based on actor Giancarlo Esposito, and it sounds pleasant, lifelike, and warmer than other voice helpers. Sonos is also emphasizing privacy with its new voice service. All commands are processed locally on your device with no data or transcripts ever sent to the cloud. This is part of what makes the system so fast,

and it also means you can control the Sonos move or roam when those speakers are in Bluetooth mode and far from Wi-Fi. Setting up Sonos voice control is a simple process that involves updating your Sonos gear to the latest software and then choosing a default music service for requests. I went with Amazon Music Unlimited. The reason I did so is actually the first downside of Sonos voice control. It doesn't currently support Spotify. If music from Spotify is already playing on your system, you can use basic voice commands like skip tracks, volume up, etc. But you can't start Spotify content with the service. Amazon Music, Apple Music, Dizer, Pandora, and Sonos Radio are the services with Sonos voice control integration as of now, so Title and YouTube music are also a no-go. You activate Sonos voice control with a Hey Sonos hot phrase, after which you can ask for a particular artist, song, genre,

or so on. Where Sonos's solution really comes into its own is when you want to move music around different rooms. Saying things like, Hey, Sonos, group the living room and bedroom, or Hey, Sonos, play everywhere. Worked exactly. as I expected. The latter can be helpful if you need to switch rooms but want to keep listening to TV audio. You don't need to speak carefully worded phrases to the service. It can handle natural language commands like, Hey, Sonos, turn it up, or Hey, Sonos move the music here, just fine. But there can be hiccups or cases where things don't go as you'd expect. When I was listening to tunes on my Rome and play five, saying, hey, Sonos play on Ray, resulted in a completely different playlist starting up on the

soundbar when I assumed it would just join in with what was already playing elsewhere. You can also use voice controls for Sonos-specific features like enabling or turning off loudness, which can make speakers sound more punchy and full. If you've got a Sonos soundbar, voice control can toggle on the night mode or speech enhancement options, and it can also turn your TV on or off in the case of HDMI-connected beam and arc. In these early days, I'm generally happy with Sonos voice control. Its focused ambition means that the service generally does what you're asking and quickly. But the fact that Spotify isn't yet playing ball will limit the appeal for the many customers of both companies.

Hopefully that'll happen sooner or later. Once Spotify is on board and after the service gets a little more comprehensive at fielding artists and song names, Sonos voice control will be something I use daily. It's almost there as is, and it goes to show that voice assistants don't need to do everything under the sun to be hugely beneficial, end quote. Finally today, speaking of Japan, Niki Asia tells me that Japanese businesses and government agencies, are panicking, as Microsoft, as we've said, has retired Internet Explorer. A March 22 survey revealed that 49% of organizations in Japan still use IE for work, quote, since April, Tokyo-based software developer, computer engineering, and consulting

has been inundated with requests for help. Those customers are mostly government agencies, financial institutions, and manufacturing, and logistics companies that operate websites only compatible with Internet Explorer. Could you please do something so we won't have any problems, one customer pleaded? They have known about the phaseout for a long time, but they must have postponed taking actions, said a CEC official who expects the chaos among the procrastinated customers to last for a few months. A March survey by information technology resource provider, Kamen's Net, revealed a large number of organizations in Japan relied on Internet Explorer, with 49% of respondents saying they used the browser for work.

They said the browser was used for employee attendance management, expenses, settlement, and other internal tools. In some cases, they have no choice but to use Internet Explorer because of clients' systems used to handle orders. Over 20% of those respondents did not know or had not figured out how to transition to other browsers after Internet Explorer's retirement. Government agencies are particularly slow to respond. The portal site for information on government procurement and bidding will switch its recommended browsers to Microsoft's New Edge and Google Chrome on Thursday. But for Japan's pension service, notices concerning online applications must be viewed in Edge's Internet Explorer mode.

The website of a government-backed Mutual Aid Corporation for Private Schools still listed Internet Explorer as its only recommended browser, end quote. Our Twitter space this week is going to take place tomorrow at a different time. We're going to do it tomorrow afternoon at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific, whatever that is in Europe, I don't know. But join us, if you would, if you've not been able to because of, you know, previous times being not convenient for you. Also, if there's anyone out there listening to me right now that has experience with Dolly, that AI image generating thing, I want to talk about that.

So please get in touch or put someone in touch with me who has experience with it or knows about it. We want to, you know, dig into it. So we'll do that tomorrow. Talk to you then.