Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/25 – Amazon Has A Counterfeit Crimes Unit (Sounds Like An NBC TV Show)

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 Techmeme ride home for Thursday, June 25th, 2020. I'm Brian McCalla. Today, Wirecard is wiped out. Amazon has its own counterfeit crimes unit, which sounds to me like a TV show from NBC or something. Apple quietly made a change that will make things pretty tough on advertisers. Google won't keep your data forever anymore. And hey, basically wins. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Again, this would be a huge story if we were talking about a huge story. If we were talking about a, you know, U.S. tech company, Wirecard has apparently completely collapsed and filed for insolvency, facing an almost complete wipeout for its creditors who are apparently on the hook for nearly

Starting point is 00:01:21 $4 billion, quoting Reuters. Wirecard is the first member of Germany's prestigious Dax Stock Index to go bust, barely two years after winning a spot among the country's biggest 30-listed companies with a market valuation of $28 billion. The wire card case damages corporate Germany. It should be a wake-up call for reforms, said Volker Potoff, Chairman of Corporate Government's think tank, Armid. Creditors have scant hope of getting back the $3.5 billion euros. They are owed, sources familiar with the matter said.

Starting point is 00:01:54 Of that total, wire card has borrowed $1.75 billion from 15 banks and issued $500 million in bonds. The money's gone, said one banker. We may recoup a few euros in a couple of years, but we'll write off the loan now, end quote. Google has announced a licensing program to pay publishers for content for a new news product, which it is apparently launching later this year as a part of the Google News Initiative. This is quite a departure on Google's part, something it said it would never, ever do, quoting Axios. Regulators around the world have been threatening Google with broad-based policies that would force it to pay publishers on policymakers' terms. Google aims to get ahead of that threat by introducing

Starting point is 00:02:44 its own payout terms while also strengthening its relationship with the embattled publishing community. The new program, to be announced in full later this year, consists of two aspects. Google will pay select publishers to distribute their work, whether it be video, audio, images, or text, as part of a new news product, details of which have not been made public. Google will also offer to pay for free access for users to read paywalled articles on a publisher's site. where available to help those publishers grow their audiences. Google has already signed partnership agreements with local and national publications in Germany, Australia, and Brazil, and plans to expand to other countries in the next few months. For now, all Google is saying about the new product is that

Starting point is 00:03:24 it is an enhanced storytelling experience that will exist in Google News and discover its curated list of articles that appear on Android phones, end quote. Paying for paywalled articles is something interesting. But as Dan Gilmore tweeted, quote, sounds like Google will pick the winners. Is that really what you wanted, journalists? Also late yesterday, Google said it will now auto delete location and search data that it keeps on us. By default, four new users after 18 months as part of a broader expansion of its privacy options. But still, another change of pace from Google, quoting the verge. Google's auto delete feature applies to search history on web or in app, location history, and voice commands collected through the Google Assistant or devices like

Starting point is 00:04:16 Google Home. Google logs that data in its My Activity page where users can see what data points have been collected and manually delete specific items. Historically, Google has retained that information indefinitely, but in 2019, the company rolled out a way to automatically delete data points after three months or 18 months, depending on the chosen setting. Starting today, those settings will be on by default for new users. Google will set web and app searches to auto-deleteer.

Starting point is 00:04:41 after 18 months, even if users take no action at all. Google's location history is off by default, but when users turn it on, it will also default to an 18-month deletion schedule. The new defaults will only apply to new users and existing Google accounts won't see any settings change. However, Google will also be promoting the option on the search page and on YouTube in an effort to drive more users to examine their auto-delete settings. Auto-delete can turn on from the Activity Controls page.

Starting point is 00:05:09 The system also extends to YouTube history, although the default there will be set to three years to ensure the broader data can be used by the platform's recommendation algorithms, end quote. Of course, if you want to be cynical about this, one might say that this is Google being magnanimous about something it really doesn't care about. It's your most recent data that is the most valuable to marketers. No one really wants to buy 18-month-old or especially 3-year-old data. Casey Newton tweeted, quote, this is good, although it feels like Google is setting the point of auto-deletion at the moment. It has comfortably extracted 99% of the value of the data. Amazon has formed a counterfeit crimes unit made up of former federal prosecutors, investigators, and data analysts to fight counterfeiters on its site. This comes from Geekwire.

Starting point is 00:06:06 The new unit announced Wednesday morning brings together former federal prosecutors with investigators and data analysts. The group will allow Amazon to, quote, more effectively pursue civil litigation against bad actors, work with brands in joint or independent investigations, and aid law enforcement officials worldwide in criminal actions against counterfeiters, the company says in a news release. The company describes it as the latest step in its longstanding effort to detect and combat malicious activity on its site, using advanced technology and teams of investigators in a quest to eliminate counterfeit products on Amazon. But lawmakers have been calling on Amazon to go further to reduce the prevalence of

Starting point is 00:06:41 counterfeit products on its site after numerous reports and studies have spotlighted the problem. A Wall Street Journal investigation in August, for example, found more than 4,100 products on Amazon.com that federal agencies had declared unsafe. A Washington Post article last fall described a, quote, flea market of fakes on Amazon.com saying its system was, quote, failing to staunch the flow of dubious goods, end quote. Here's another interesting little dribb-drab from WWDC. The Apple identifier for advertisers, which is critical to tracking mobile ad spend, will become opt-in with iOS 14, which would be a considerable privacy boon for users and a commensurate

Starting point is 00:07:26 big loss for marketers. IDFA works like this. If a company runs a user acquisition campaign, IDFA is the little marker that lets the marketer know. It's because of, you know, users clicking on ad X that they signed up for. for your app Y. And if you actually sign up for an account and then pay for something, it also tracks the spend so that the marketer can directly account for the return on investment for their campaigns. But now, quoting Forbes, yesterday Apple killed the IDFA without killing the

Starting point is 00:07:58 IDFA by taking it out of the depths of the settings app where almost no one could find it, although increasingly people were finding it and turning it off, and making it explicitly opt in for every single app. If an app wants to use, the IDFA, iOS 14 will present mobile users with a big, scary dialogue box. And if you check the article, you can see the dialog box. It's pretty big and pretty scary. Quoting again, would you say yes to allowing an app or brand permission to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies? Neither will 99% of consumers. This is actually a genius move by Apple. Marketers can't really get upset about losing the IDFA capability because technically it's still

Starting point is 00:08:42 around. Apple gets to burnish its privacy credentials while not taking huge amounts of flack from brands and advertisers, because after all, who can argue with giving people more rights with their personal data? And make no mistake. This is a great move for user privacy, but it's also a huge problem for a massive industry. Apps Flyer estimates mobile app install spend at close to $80 billion in 2020. And that estimate was made before COVID-19 threw mobile into high gear for the gaming industry. one of the biggest spenders in the mobile user acquisition space, so it could be low. And while Android accounts for more than twice as many app installs as iOS, 22.5 billion in Q1, 2020 versus 9 billion, according to App Annie,

Starting point is 00:09:26 the numbers are almost reversed when it comes to spend per platform, end quote. SoftBanks Masayoshi Son is stepping down from his position on Alibaba's Board of Directors, a position he has held since 2005. This is significant because, one could argue that it was Sons' investment in and roll with Alibaba that led to Masa San's second act as a high-profile investor. I've told you before that Sahn made huge bets during the dot-com bubble that briefly made him the richest man in the world, only to see most of those bets blow up when the dot-com bubble burst and his investing reputation went along with that. But Alibaba reversed things and gave him a second chance, quoting Bloomberg.

Starting point is 00:10:17 The billionaire said his departure shouldn't be interpreted as signifying any disagreements, even though Alibaba co-founder Jack Maa is quitting SoftBanks board at the same time. Ma and Son have maintained a close friendship since the Japanese entrepreneur was an early investor in Alibaba and helped it along to its current value of roughly $600 billion, calling it the crown jewel of SoftBanks portfolio. It's not like we had a fight, Saan said during the virtual shareholder meeting, this was perfectly amicable, end quote. While the mutual departures are unlikely to have an immediate impact on either company, they mark

Starting point is 00:10:49 the end of an era. The two men are among the most successful entrepreneurs of their generation and have been able to rely on each other's advice for decades. Son was on Alibaba's board as it went public in 2014 in the largest initial public offering in history. When SoftBank ran into trouble with investment losses this year, Saan was able to use his Alibaba stake to raise much-needed capital. Alibaba remains Sons' most successful investment by far and SoftBank's most valuable asset. In early 2000, Sahn invested $20 million in the then-unknown-unknown web portal connecting Chinese manufacturers with overseas buyers, a stake that is now worth more than $150 billion. That spectacular return cemented his reputation as an investor and later helped him raise

Starting point is 00:11:32 the $100 billion Vision Fund. Sahn has previously spoken highly of Ma, end quote. has announced what it is calling Honeycode, a cloud-based tool that it hopes will help non-coters build apps, quoting CNBC. Honeycode includes a visual interface that people can use to build applications for a variety of purposes, including scheduling managing tasks and tracking customers, AWS said in a statement. Amazon employees even used Honeycode to plan the launch of the service. And Mira Vidia Nathan, a general manager at AWS, has used. it to manage headcount in her organization, she said in an interview on Wednesday. The name of

Starting point is 00:12:16 the product was decided in an app that was built in Honeycode. The service is free for up to 20 users and as many as 2,500 rows of data in a spreadsheet that's part of the product. AWS will charge based on storage and number of users. Longtime AWS customers, Slack, and Smug mug are among those planning to use the service, the company said. The service is available today, currently in one AWS region. AWS says it also plans to make it possible to export data from Honeycode. And hey, if you're interested in checking out, hey, after that whole kerfuffle last week, you're in luck.

Starting point is 00:12:57 Because number one, Hay has opened its email service to everyone, no more need for an invite code. And number two, it looks like Hay is basically one, because they say that Apple has now approved their update with all of those changes to the app that were made to meet App Store guidelines, quoting the Verge. The app's version 1.0.3 update is now available, offering free temporary 14-day burner Hay accounts with randomized addresses for iOS users, making the app, quote, functional by Apple's

Starting point is 00:13:30 definition when it's first downloaded. Hay is also adding support for multi-user corporate accounts with this update, as Apple had originally taken issue with the purely consumer-favor-favor-favor-favor-fewater consumer-focused nature of hay, end quote. Finally, today a bit of sad news to end the show with, but I did want to note the passing of Michael Hawley, whose work at MIT Media Lab helped lay the groundwork for the internet of things as we know it today. And also, you might have seen his work on YouTube because he apparently helped Steve Jobs and Larry Page write some of their more famous commencement speeches, quoting his obituary in the New York Times.

Starting point is 00:14:13 Mr. Hawley began his career as a video game programmer at Lucasfilm, the company created by the Star Wars director, George Lucas. He spent his last 15 years curating the entertainment gathering, or EG, a conference dedicated to new ideas. In between, he worked at Next, the influential computer company founded by Steve Jobs after he left Apple in the mid-1980s, and spent nine years as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, a seminal effort to push science and technology into art and other disciplines. He was known as a scholar whose ideas, skills, and friendships span an unusually wide range of fields from mountain climbing to watchmaking. Mr. Hawley lived with both Mr. Jobs and the artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky, published the world's largest

Starting point is 00:14:58 book, won first prize in an international competition of amateur pianists, played alongside the cellist Yo-Yo Ma at the wedding of the celebrity scientist Bill Nye, joined one of the first scientific expeditions to Mount Everest and wrote commencement speeches for both Mr. Jobs and the Google co-founder Larry Page. Two of Mr. Holly's Media Lab projects, Things That Think and Toys of Tomorrow, anticipated the Internet of Things movement, which aims to weave digital technology into everything from cars to television's to home lighting systems, end quote. Michael Holly was 58 years old. Hey, quick thing about that ad-free feed that I always tell you about, A listener got in touch and said that what they wanted to do was go back and binge a whole bunch of back episodes.

Starting point is 00:15:51 So they wanted to sign up to the ad free feed to do just that and save themselves some time. And then they wanted to cancel right away and they wanted to know if I was cool with that. And if you had a similar thought, I mean, yeah, knock yourself out. You can cancel at any time. So if you want to pay the five bucks, download all the episodes you want to binge and then cancel again before the next billing period. knock yourself out. And thank you for the support. That's actually a pretty cool way to do it, I think. But do note, if you do want to do something like this, not every single episode is available in the ad-free feed, because we only started doing that about a year into the show. So we have ad-free

Starting point is 00:16:32 episodes in that feed going back to early March of 2019, I believe. So that is more than a year of episodes, but it's not the entire back catalog. Just an FYI. Talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 06/25 – Amazon Has A Counterfeit Crimes Unit (Sounds Like An NBC TV Show)

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