Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/23 – Corning Introduces A New Gorilla Glass: Victus!

Episode Date: July 23, 2020

Corning has introduced what it is calling it’s best Gorilla Glass ever, with a tough new name: Victus! HBO Max already has more than 4 million customers. It was Nvidia that was inquiring about buying ARM. And more on the whole ad supported free streaming tv angle. Sponsors: Metalab.co Tovala.com/ride Links: Corning’s new Gorilla Glass Victus could let your phone survive a six-foot drop, plus scratch resistance (The Verge) Plex launches a live TV service with over 80 free channels, most available worldwide (TechCrunch) HBO Max has more than 4 million subscribers, AT&T says (The Verge) Twitter admits hackers accessed DMs of dozens of high-profile accounts (TechCrunch) Nvidia Eyes Biggest-Ever Chip Deal in Pursuit of SoftBank’s Arm (Bloomberg) Hundreds Of Thousands Of Instacart Customers’ Personal Data Is Being Sold Online (BuzzFeed.News) Tesla reports fourth straight quarter of profits (CNBC) 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 ride home for Thursday, July 23, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Corning has introduced what it is calling its best Gorilla Glass ever with a tough new name, Victus. HBO Max already has more than 4 million customers. It was Invidia that was inquiring about buying Arm and more on the whole ad-supported free streaming TV angle. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Corning has announced what it is calling Gorilla Glass Vict. Very gladiatorial sounding name, which I guess is the point. Because Corning says it can resist a six-foot drop and has twice the scratch resistance of the old gorilla glass.

Corning says this is the toughest glass it has ever created, quoting the verge. It's a little known fact that Corning's Gorilla Glass hasn't gotten much better at resisting keys and coins, thus scratches, since 2014's Gorilla Glass 3, and it has arguably gotten slightly worse, Since our reporting showed that Gorilla Glass 4 actually performed worse in some tests. Grilla Glass 5 was in the middle and Grilla Glass 6 didn't improve any further since Corning was more focused on making your phone survive a nasty tumble instead. But Corning claims the new Victus Glass, there's no Gorilla Glass 7, just Victus, can do both drops and scratch resistance simultaneously with no known tradeoffs.

The company says it has twice the scratch resistance of Gorilla Glass 6. four times the resistance of competing glass and a representative victus-clad dummy phone can survive up to a two-meter or six-and-a-half-foot drop. That drop resistance is nothing to sneeze at. It's a foot and a quarter higher than Corning quoted for Gorilla Glass 6, 1.6 meters or 5.25 feet, or the 1.2 meters, 3.9 feet that the company claimed Gorilla Glass 5 was capable of. We've theoretically gone from shoulder height to head height survivability in just four years, which is good news if you ever feel like holding your phone up to your ear. People still do that, right?

End quote. Streaming wars. Streaming platform Plex has launched more than 80 live TV channels, which will be accessible both to free users and subscribers. Plex already allowed you to capture and record live TV using a digital antenna and tuner connected to the company's flagship Plexhip Plex media server. But this is simpler, quoting TechCrunch. The new live TV service, meanwhile, will offer easier access to a broad range of free content across categories like news, sports, film, classic TV, comedy, game shows, anime, kids,

entertainment, e-sports, and more. The piece then goes on to list all of the channels available, which I won't read to you because, well, quoting again, while none of these are big names, they expand Plex's service with a range of free content where you might catch something interesting upon browsing, like a cooking show, old movie, classic TV episode, funny video, or kids cartoon, for instance. Initially, Plex users will access the service from a new section called Live TV on Plex. From here, you're taken to a more traditional grid guide that shows you what's currently airing on each channel and what's coming up in the hours ahead. In the future, Plex says it aims to integrate the free live channels with its existing product

for recording from live TV via the over-the-ear antenna in order to simplify navigation. Unlike with its current live TV products, you can only tune into and watch the free live TV programs. You can't record the shows or movies. However, in Trueplex fashion, it's making it easy to customize the guide to your particular interests by allowing you to do things like reorder channels to your liking or even hide those you don't care about, end quote. But remember what we said on the weekend bonus episode about Ad supported free streaming services getting interesting all of the sudden. Viacom CBS now runs free streamer Pluto.tv and Fox Corp acquired free streaming service

to be back in March. And indeed, it's getting quite literally interesting, quoting again. The free content is supported by programmatic advertising, which also supports Plexes on-demand movies and TV library and its free news offering. The company says it has no plan to directly sell its own ads for any of these properties, but its continued expansions into ad-supported content have begun to return revenue. The company declined to speak to its specific revenue situation, but Plex co-founder and chief product officer Scott Olachowski described the numbers as getting interesting, quote, it's now becoming interesting enough that we're able to expand this footprint, the licensing we're doing, the resources we're putting into it, and the marketing we're doing

around it, he explains. Because of Plex's independence, the quality of the catalog and the quality of the app, the amount of interest we're getting from demand partners is pretty impressive, Olachowski ads, end quote. And real quick, AT&T says HBO Max has already signed up more than four million customers. So it's not quite a Disney Plus-sized hit. Disney Plus, if you'll remember, got 10 million customers in like 24 hours. But it's still pretty impressive for HBO Max only being a couple months old. and it's certainly not a quibbish flop. Also, according to AT&T, users are spending 70% more time on HBO Max than they did on HBO Now. This despite the fact that HBO Now is on Roku and Amazon Fire TV,

but HBO Max, you'll recall, is not. As the great Julia Alexander notes in The Verge, Roku and Amazon Fire TV account for about 70% of the streaming market in the United States. Not being on those services drastically impacts how, many people can sign up for HBO Max, especially if they don't have another connected device, like an Apple TV or gaming console. WarnerMedia is having ongoing negotiations with both Roku and Amazon about getting HBO Max on those devices. Stanky addressed the lack of HBO Max on Fire TV devices on the earnings call, noting that, unfortunately, Amazon has taken an approach

of treating HBO Max and its customers differently than other services and their customers, end quote. The whole debate boils down to wanting more independence. WarnerMedia wants HBO Max to be its own individual app, but Amazon and Roku want HBO Max as a part of their growing channels division. Channels keeps a number of streaming services inside a bubble of sorts within the respective Roku and Amazon ecosystems. HBO and HBO now are currently part of Amazon and Roku's channels, so Roku and Amazon customers subscribe to the services through the channel's offering.

WarnerMedia wants to leave channels entirely. In doing so, HBO Max can then exist on its own. That would give WarnerMedia more control over the customer's app experience and, most importantly, access to important user data, end quote. Remember the great Twitter hijacking of last week? Well, we're finally getting more word from Twitter about what actually went down. Twitter now says that the hackers accessed the DM inbox for up to 36 of the 130 high-profile accounts, targeted in that attack. One of those accounts that had their DMs snooped on was an elected official in the Netherlands,

Gert Wilders. Twitter is in the process of contacting all of those who have been affected, quoting TechCrunch. Twitter had declined to say in the immediate aftermath of the attack whether DMs had been accessed by the hackers. Twitter's messaging system is infamously not well encrypted, but it was not clear whether the administrative tool reportedly used by the hackers offered access to inboxes. Apparently, whatever method was used, it indeed gave access to DMs some of the time, or perhaps the hackers simply didn't avail themselves of the opportunity for the remaining 94 accounts they took over.

It's all not really clear from Twitter's announcement. Twitter has previously said that it has, quote, no evidence that passwords were accessed by the hackers, and nothing in the update contradicts that. The companies attempted to place a silver lining on this cloud, saying it had, quote, no indication that any other former or current elected official had their DMs accessed. Considering the accounts of Barack Obama and Joe Biden were among those affected, that is technically good news, end quote. As Andrew Kaczynski tweeted, I don't understand why you can't purge all your DMs like email or have them disappear like Snapchat or Instagram. This was obviously going to happen, end quote. Or as Brianna Wu tweeted, Can we all agree it's time for Twitter to enable end-to-end encryption for DMs?

Something Twitter doesn't have the keys to access can't be stolen at Twitter, end quote. Hey, this solves a mystery from last week. It was Nvidia. Sources are telling Bloomberg that it was Nvidia that went to SoftBank to inquire about acquiring Arm. However, Apple was involved. because, according to these same sources, SoftBank subsequently reached out to Apple to gauge Apple's interest in acquiring arm, and Apple demurred, quoting Bloomberg. SoftBank approached Apple to gauge its interest in acquiring Arm, according to people familiar with the matter. While the two firms had preliminary discussions, Apple isn't planning to pursue a bid,

the people said. That's because Arm's licensing operation would fit poorly with Apple's hardware and software business model, the people said. There may also be regulatory concerns about Apple owning a key licensee that supplies so many rivals, and Apple spokesman declined to comment, end quote. But back to Nvidia's initial interest. That is certainly interesting. InVIDIA has been the big on-the-up company in the chip space over the last decade. In just the last few years, Nvidia's shares have gone up more than 25-fold. And as we mentioned, Nvidia recently and briefly surpassed Intel in overall market cap. As Stephen Nellis pointed out, quote, with Arm on board,

Nvidia could supply 100% of the IP in a supercomputing system, CPU, network, accelerator, but also what happens to Apple? There's bad blood with Nvidia on the client GPUs, end quote. Yeah, that Apple Nvidia feud is interesting. Can't get Nvidia GPUs on the most recent high-end Macs. But let me give you a couple of other interesting takes. Daniel Rubino tweeted, quote, Individia potentially buying Arm from SoftBank is likely the best scenario for a healthy market.

Microsoft wouldn't slash shouldn't do it, and I can't say the tech world would be better if Google, Intel, AMD, or Apple snatched them up, end quote. But as Enchell SAG tweeted, quote, Invidia would effectively kill the value of Arm to most of their customers. That's the problem with Arm being sold to anyone. IPO is the only way to preserve Arm's current value. Apple and Nvidia are customers and computers, and competitors to most of Arm's clients, end quote. Which as Patrick Walter tweeted, that might actually be what all this shopping around has been about in the first place, quote, the best thing for SoftBank and its investors is that this approach would put a bottom line value for Arm at around $50 billion at

least, be it for an IPO, a sale, or for SoftBanks some of the parts valuation, end quote. The personal information of more than 200,000 Instacart users is apparently, at this very moment, for sale on the dark web. The data being sold includes names, addresses, and even the last four digits of credit card numbers. And what's odd about this is that Instacart, at least at this point, is denying it has suffered any data breach. Quote, we are not aware of any data breach at this time. We take data protection and privacy very seriously, and Instacart spokesperson told BuzzFeed News, outside of the Instacart platform, attackers may target individual users

using fishing or credential stuffing techniques in instances where we believe a customer's account may have been compromised through an external fishing scam outside of the Instacart platform or other action. We proactively communicate to our customers to auto force them to update their password, end quote. The source of the information, which also included email addresses and shopping data,

was unknown but appeared to have been uploaded from at least June until today. It's looking recent and totally legit, Nick Espinoza, the head of cybersecurity firm's security fanatics, told BuzzFeed News after reviewing the accounts being sold. The account information was being sold for around $2 per customer. According to one of the websites where the information was being sold, the personal data of people using Instacart accounts had been added throughout June and July, with the most recent upload being July 22nd, end quote. And finally today, let's do a quick earnings rundown because there was really nothing head-turning in the earnings calls yesterday. Everybody I'm going to be telling you about here is either sticking to existing narratives or just doing about as well as you would think they'd be doing.

For example, Microsoft, Q4 revenue was up 13% year over year, net income down 15% year over year. But intelligent cloud revenue was up 17% and Azure revenue was up 47%. So same old, same old, at least recently for Microsoft, their cloud business has revived them. Microsoft shares were down a bit this morning and some of the other. tech companies were down as well, but it's unclear if that had something to do with the jobless claims this morning. Twitter missed its Q2 expectations as revenue was down 19% year over year, ad revenue specifically was down 23% year over year, but remember how Twitter has that unique metric of monetizable daily active users? Well, that came in at 186 million MDOWs,

up 34% year over year, and for that reason, seemingly, Twitter was up more than 5% this morning. The really headline-grabbing number, I guess, was Tesla, which reported its fourth straight quarter of profits, making this the first time Tesla has reported a full year of gap profits, and thus Tesla is now eligible to join the S&P 500. But then, if you've been watching the Tesla stock price over the last week, again, this is not breaking any narratives at all, at least not the very recent narrative. The very recent narrative for Tesla is all roses. This is quoting CNBC. On the earnings call Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that Tesla will build its next factory

near Austin, Texas. The company plans to dedicate its Fremont, California car plant, to the production of Model S and Model X vehicles for all markets. The Texas factory, Musk said, will be used for production of the company's cyber truck, semi, and Model 3 and Model Y vehicles for the eastern half of North America. Automotive revenue declined by 4% year-over-year for Tesla from $5.38 billion to $5.18 billion, despite the company adding a new crossover SUV to its lineup, the Model Y, and opening a new plant in Shanghai in the past year, end quote. P.S. the show will be dropping earlier than usual tomorrow, possibly before noon Eastern time, if I can manage it, because I have a bit of personal business to take care of tomorrow afternoon

that, if it all goes well, I will be thrilled to share with you all next week. Talk to you tomorrow.