Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/27 – Meta Back To Par

Episode Date: July 27, 2023

Meta’s earnings say, hey, let’s just forget the last two years even happened. Is the next iPhone about to get an “action” button? What does it mean if Waymo is basically hitting pause on self driving trucks? Checking in on SBF. And a super fast new version of 5G. Sponsors: Crashplan.com code techmeme Links: Meta’s Improved Ad Sales Buy Time for Zuckerberg’s Metaverse (Bloomberg) Microsoft Faces European Antitrust Investigation Over Bundling of Teams Software (WSJ) iPhone 15 Pro Action Button Options Potentially Revealed in iOS 17 Code: Flashlight, Shortcuts, Voice Memos, and More (MacRumors) Alphabet’s Waymo Self-Driving Unit Slows Autonomous Trucking (Bloomberg) Sony has sold 40 million PS5s (The Verge) Prosecutors want Sam Bankman-Fried sent to jail after witness-tampering allegations. Judge issues gag order (CNN) T-Mobile says its ultrafast 5G capable of up to 3.3Gbps is rolling out now (The Verge) 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, July 27th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Meta's earnings say, hey, let's just forget the last two years even happened. Is the next iPhone about to get an action button? What does it mean if Waymo is basically hitting pause on self-driving trucks, checking in on SBF, and a super fast new version of 5G? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Meta's earnings report last night was interesting, not for the usual headline numbers, revenue up 11. percent year-over-year, net income up 16 percent year-over-year. Overall, daily active people across their various apps up 7 percent year-over-year. The real interesting number was the projected one.

Meta forecast 20 percent revenue growth for Q3, which would represent a return to pre-pandemic and pre-ATT levels of revenue growth for the company. Quoting Bloomberg, meta's revenue could grow as much as 20 percent in the current quarter. The company said Wednesday, that's a pace the social media giant hasn't seen since before the sluggish post-pandemic economy, and a privacy rule change from Apple led to the worst route in meta's digital ad sales in history. Revenue declined for the first time ever last year, prompting investors to lose patience in Zuckerberg's spending outside of the core business. After cutting thousands of employees and improving efficiency of the advertising business through artificial intelligence, Zuckerberg is now on stronger footing with his shareholders.

Even news that expenses will continue to climb over the next two years didn't dampen the shares, which rose more than 7% in aftermarket trading following the earnings report. Meta's advertising acceleration and leaner business may provide the air cover Zuckerberg needs so he can continue spending on artificial intelligence and his far-off vision for the Metaverse, a virtual reality world. The CEO expects everyone to embrace one day. On a call after the report Wednesday, executives promised to remain careful about spending priorities. We expect to bring the discipline and habits that we built during this year of efficiency with us as we plan for the future, Chief Financial Officer Susan Lee said. At the same time,

we remain focused on investing in the significant opportunities ahead. This is particularly true in the areas we see the most significant opportunity, which include AI and the Metaverse. We see a host of opportunities Medica can capitalize on to monetize AI, said Angelo Zeno, an analyst at CFRA. That includes improving recommendations and ranking, and using generative AI to create new products. That includes AI chatbots, agents and coaches that Zuckerberg teased on the call. AI, quote, is going to both complement and touch and transform every single thing that we're doing, and I'm really excited for it, he said. Meta's recovery and advertising revenue is thanks to an investment in Reels, the short-form videos on Instagram and Facebook

that were made to copy rival TikTok's format. Reels have been played more than 200 billion times on Instagram and Facebook becoming more popular due to improvements in targeting each person's feed with videos that will fit their interests, Meta said. Meta's commitment to showing users more reels and advertisements among the video clips has also curbed profitability because those ads don't make money for the tech giant as quickly as other content types. Still, revenue from Reels is growing, reaching an annual sales rate of $10 billion, Zuckerberg said, up from $3 billion in the third quarter of 2022, end quote. The EU has opened an antitrust investigation into whether Microsoft abuses its dominant position by bundling teams with

office. This is notable because this is the first investigation Microsoft has faced in more than 10 years. They've been watching in the corner while everyone else was taken to the woodshed in recent years, but the regulators, I guess, finally noticed that kid over there in the shadows. Quoting the journal, the Block's executive body, the European Commission, said it is concerned that Microsoft may be giving teams an unfair advantage by not allowing customers to choose whether access to the product is included when they subscribe to the company's productivity software. Microsoft may also have limited interoperability between its productivity suites and other products that compete with teams, the Commission said. Microsoft said it respects the European Commission's

work on the case and takes its responsibilities very seriously, quote, We will continue to cooperate with the Commission and remain committed to finding solutions that will address its concerns, a spokesman said. The investigation stems from a 2020 complaint lodged by business messaging app Slack, which alleged that Microsoft was forcing companies to install teams and blocking its removal. Slack is now owned by the business software company Salesforce. German video conferencing company AlphaView filed a similar complaint last week, saying Microsoft's bundling practices give its teams software a competitive advantage that is, quote, difficult to catch up without intervention by antitrust authorities, end quote.

Microsoft antitrust battles in both Washington and Brussels defined the early days of enforcement in the digital era. The U.S. government sued the company in the 1990s for allegedly using the dominance of its Windows software to squash competition in the market for internet browsers, in a case the two sides ultimately settled. In Europe, antitrust complaints led to a long-running dispute with the regulator and a total of $2.2.2 billion or about $2.45 billion in fines against Microsoft between 2004 and 2013, end quote. iOS 17 Beta 4 code is hinting at a rumored action button, and perhaps coming to this fall's new iPhones,

which would theoretically offer quick access to things like shortcuts, silent mode, camera, and more similar to how the watch Ultras button works. Quoting Mac rumors. The action button, which could be similar to the Aval Watch's Ultra Action button, but with more phone-focused options, is expected to be a new physical button on the next generation pro-iphone models that replaces the ring slash silent switch. The action button would allow users to quickly access various functions and settings without

necessarily unlocking the device or navigating to an app. According to the code found in iOS 17 Beta 4, the action button could have nine different options that users can customize and assign to different actions. While the code only lists feature names related to the action button, we can infer what most of them will be able to do. Accessibility, this option would presumably let users access various accessibility features such as voiceover, zoom, assistive touch, and more. shortcuts. As on the Apple Watch Ultra, this option would let users run any shortcut they have created

or downloaded from the shortcuts app, such as sending a message, playing a playlist, or controlling smart home devices. Silent mode, similar to how the switch works on current iPhone models, this option would let users toggle silent mode on or off, which would mute or unmute the ringer and alerts. Camera. This option would likely let users launch the camera app and or take a photo or video with a single press of the action button. Flashlight, this option would let users turn on or off the flashlight on the back of the device. Focus. This option would let users activate or deactivate a focus mode. Magnifier. This option would presumably let users activate the magnifier app to use the iPhone's camera as a magnifying glass to zoom in on small text or objects. Translate. This option could let

users launch the translate app and start a conversation or text translation with a single press of the action button. And finally, voice memos. This option would let users start or stop recording a voice memo with the voice memos app, end quote. I don't know what this means because I basically given up trying to figure out where we are on self-driving at this point. Waymo says it plans to slow the development of autonomous trucking as the company moves its focus and investment to ride-haling primarily, quoting Bloomberg. With our decision to focus on ride-haling, we'll push back the timeline on our commercial and operational efforts on trucking, as well as most of our technical development on that business unit, the company said in a statement,

We'll continue our collaboration with our strategic partner, Daimler Truck North America, to advance technical development of an autonomous truck platform, end quote. Move comes as Alphabet is prioritizing financial discipline. The company said on Tuesday that it's promoted chief financial officer Ruth Porat to president and chief investment officer saying that it will stick to the more thrifty culture she has instilled. Self-driving technology has taken a step back in the past several years. Autonomous ventures like Waymo have spent billions of dollars in capital only to bring in little, if any, revenue. Waymo has made more progress monetizing its robotaxie business than it has

in trucking. Waymo Via has a partnership with Uber Freight to develop autonomous long-haul trucking as a business, making it the only self-driving company that has worked to develop Robotaxy Technology and highway trucking. The company said that it's focusing its efforts and investment on ride-haling, given the tremendous momentum and substantial commercial opportunity we're seeing on that front, end quote. So that right there. That's sort of why I can't figure out self-driving at all, I always assume things like highway driving and trucking were the low-hanging fruit because they were the easiest things to implement technically. City and suburban ride hailing seemed to be the most difficult nut to crack, take maybe the longest to get here. But we have seen a bunch of momentum

in terms of Robotaxy deployments on Real Roads this year. So are we on the cusp of a breakthrough here, on the cusp of things flipping? Sony says it has sold over 40 million at PS5s since that hardware units launch in November 2020, up from a mere 10 million back in July of 2021, and this all coming despite what they call the unprecedented challenges of COVID and supply chain issues. Quoting the verge, unlike the press release shared when PS5 crossed 10 million units sold as of July 2021, Sony didn't call its flagship console out as the quote, fastest selling console in the history of Sony Interactive Entertainment, reflecting a slower pace of sales even as supply issues ebbed. PlayStation 5 shipments have begun to ramp up this year. Sony hit nearly 40 million

consoles sold earlier this year and tripled the number of consoles it shipped from January to March 23 at 6.3 million units. At the same time, last year, it shipped just 2 million PlayStation 5 consoles. Still, the PlayStation 5 sales have dominated this generation, excluding the Nintendo Switch, like the FTC says you should, handily outpacing both Xbox series consoles since they all launched in November 2020, end quote. Are we still interested in this? I'm seriously asking, and I'm kind of leaning no, but just to stay in the no, let's catch up with Sam Bankman Fried, shall we?

U.S. prosecutors are asking a judge to detain Sam Bankman Fried over witness tampering allegations saying he leaked Caroline Ellison's personal writings to the New York Times recently, quoting CNN. They said last week that Bankman Fried 31 had attempted to discredit the start. witness, Caroline Ellison, who is expected to testify against him at his trial in October. In a hearing before U.S. District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan on Wednesday, Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon cited multiple instances of the FDX founder actively communicating with the media and alleges he was a source for multiple stories, part of, and quote, ongoing

campaign with the press that has now crossed the line, she said. The prosecution, quote, placed too much trust in the defendant and now believes it is, quote, not possible to design a set of adequate release conditions to ensure the safety of the community. Bankman Freed's lead attorney, Mark Cohen, suggested the defense hadn't been given sufficient lead time from prosecutors regarding the request to jail him, saying the defense found out about the change one minute before court. Cohen also noted the unusually large volume of discovery documents, 32 million pages so far, he said. This is a complex case involving complex financial transactions, making it, quote, almost impossible to work with our client if he were remanded, he said. At a previous bail hearing, Kaplan alluded to

the possibility of revoking Bankman-Freed's bail deal and forcing him to await trial in jail. But he has also extended leniency on Bankman-Freed use of electronic devices, citing the complexity of his case. In February, Judge Kaplan tightened restrictions on Bankman-Freed's bail after prosecutors flagged a direct message Bankman-Freed sent to a former FTX employee, raising concerns about potential witness tampering. Since his arrest, Bankman-Freed has ignored the standard legal advice of remaining silent in the run-up to trial, frequently speaking in the media and blogging about his experience. His lawyers have pushed back on prosecutors' allegations of witness tampering, citing a toxic media environment. That has been, quote, almost uniformly negative.

Bankman Fried, quote, has a right to counter that public narrative by making his comment in the media. His lawyers wrote. Bankman Fried's lawyers say that the New York Times article had been in process for months and that the reporter already had other sources. In the article, the Times quotes from private diary entries that Ellison wrote in Google Docs. The documents reportedly detailed her, quote, unhappy and overwhelmed emotional state as CEO of Alameda Research, FtX's crypto hedge fund. The writings also reportedly expressed her doubts about her ability to make decisions and effectively run the business. Ellison, who is 28, pleaded guilty in December to multiple accounts of conspiracy and fraud for her role in a scheme that led to the collapse of FTX, end quote.

Finally today, T-Mobile has begun rolling out ultra-fast 5G capable of 3.3 GbPS. A first. This is coming first in a few U.S. markets for Samsung Galaxy S23 users only, though it is going to apparently go nationwide in the quote coming weeks. Quoting the verge, T-Mobile has started the rollout of its new 5G tech that can deliver speeds of up to 3.3G GPS using carrier aggregation, which combines four different 5G channels into one for devices that can handle it, only Samsung's newer Galaxy S23 phones at the moment, similar to a trick used by Wi-Fi routers to create a faster connection. That's even faster than what you'd get out of MMWave 5G, which is more heavily touted by Verizon and AT&T, as also being capable of extremely high speeds.

Ukla recently reported download speeds of up to 1.6GBPS in the U.S. However, it has limited range and device support and is easily hampered by common impediments like trees and buildings. The four channels T-Mobile is using include repurposed 1900 megahertz spectrum from T-Mobiles and sprints previously, mothballed 3G networks, along with two, 2.5 gigahertz channels or carriers and a 600 millahhertz channel. The rollout is already live in parts of T-Mobile's network and, quote, will be available nationwide in coming weeks per the company's release, although you'll have to guess exactly where that is since T-Mobile isn't saying. Senior communications manager Justin Pulsin told the Verge in an email that no specific plan is required to take

advantage of the aggregated channels, and there are no limitations on connection speed. However, not everyone will be able to use the faster connection yet. You'll need a Samsung Galaxy S23, which has the same Qualcomm Snapdragon X70 modem found in the 1 plus 115G. AT&T and T Mobile are working on similar upgrades. As AT&T reported earlier this year, it had aggregated two upload channels, while Verizon reports seeing upload speeds of over a gigabit and downloads at up to 4.3GBPS in its testing. But it seems T-Mobile has gotten to real-world use first, at least among the major

U.S. carriers. Last year, it announced it had hit the 3GBPS throughput mark with this technique on a live standalone 5G network, which no other cell service provider had done yet, end quote. Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.