Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/05 – Nest Refreshes Everything

Episode Date: August 5, 2021

Google has refreshed the entire Nest lineup and I guess TPU’s will be a thing going forward. Ethereum’s latest hard fork is live and bringing big changes. There’s a new Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the government all combatting cyberattacks. And if some companies are seeing a Covid Times hangover, nobody bothered to tell Hopin. Sponsors: WealthFront.com/techmeme Metalab.com Links: Google’s new Nest cameras and doorbell have lower prices and more smarts (The Verge) Ethereum just activated a major change called the ‘London hard fork’ — here’s why it’s a big deal (CNBC) Senators propose exclusion of miners, software developers in infrastructure bill's crypto 'broker' definition (The Block) U.S. Taps Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Others to Help Fight Ransomware, Cyber Threats (WSJ) Nintendo profits decline year-on-year as Switch hits 89 million sold (The Verge) Two-year-old events start-up Hopin boomed in the pandemic. Now it’s a $7.75 billion business (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 TechMeme right home for Thursday, August 5th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google has refreshed the entire Nest lineup.

Expect TPUs to be a thing going forward. Ethereum's latest hard fork is live and bringing big changes. There's a new joint cyber defense collaborative with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the government all combating cyber attacks. And if some companies are seeing a COVID-Times hangover, nobody bothered to tell Hopin. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google has refreshed its entire Nest lineup, including its video doorbell and indoor-only camera, all with a new unified design language and lower prices across the board.

So come for the new look, stay for the new deal, quoting the verge. The new models which include an indoor-only camera, an indoor-slash-outdoor camera, a floodlight, and the video doorbell replaced the older Nest IQ cameras and Nest Hello doorbell. The main themes with the new devices are a unified design language and more accessible pricing. Each model costs less than the camera it's replacing while adding more capabilities. The design of the new cameras will be familiar to anyone who's seen other Nest products released in the past couple of years, such as the latest Nest thermostat, Nest Wi-Fi, or the Nest Audio Smart Speaker.

The company has been moving toward softer edges and muted color palettes, and the new cameras adhere to that, with color options that are meant to blend in. not stand out. Google is also adding a bit more intelligence to the cameras, thanks to advances in on-device machine learning. The new models can detect people, animals, packages, and vehicles, and provide specific alerts for each of them without the need for cloud processing or its related subscription costs. The familiar faces feature, which uses cloud-based facial recognition, still requires a paid subscription, however. The idea behind it all is to cut down the noise from constant motion notifications, a common complaint with home security cameras and video doorbells.

Google says the tensor processing unit or TPU in the new cameras allows the algorithms to run on twice as many pixels and at twice the frame rate of previous NECAMs, which provides more reliable event detection and alerts, similar to how a TPU will improve the upcoming Pixel 6 smartphone's capabilities. The cameras also include three hours of event history without a subscription and have internal storage for up to an hour of event clips, roughly equivalent to a week of events, in case the Wi-Fi goes down. Lastly, Google is pitching versatility with this lineup, as both the doorbell and the new Nesscam can be used in either battery-powered or wired configurations.

There is also a range of accessories available for wall or table mounting or setting up a camera indoors or out, end quote. Seems like Google plans to lean into the whole tensor processing unit thing, as a branding differentiator for all of its hardware, doesn't it? This is a pretty big deal in the crypto world. Perhaps one day we'll look back at this as maybe the biggest deal of all time. Ethereum's hard fork known as London has been activated with changes to how transaction fees are calculated to decrease volatility, among other fixes, including making Ethereum

deflationary a la Bitcoin, kind of. Maybe not, it's complicated, quoting CNBC. It has always been a tough go for Ethereum users. The blockchain has a long-standing problem with scaling, and it's highly unpredictable and sometimes exorbitant transaction fees can annoy even its biggest fans. The problem has become worse in recent months, thanks to a surge in interest in non-fungible tokens, which are mostly built on Ethereum's blockchain, as well as an explosive growth in the world of decentralized finance or defy, which also largely uses the Ethereum blockchain.

Thursday's changes to the code, which has little to do with the City of London, are designed to fix many of these issues by destroying or burning ether coins and changing the way transaction fees work so that they are more predictable. It adds a lot of complexity to the fee logic, but it's an interesting approach that could potentially stabilize the fee dynamics, said Nick Carter, Castle Island Ventures General Partner, and Coin Metrics co-founder. Rather than holding a blind auction every block to determine the gas price, Ethereum's protocol will algorithmically decide the transaction fee based on overall demand on the network. Having the protocol decide a uniform gas price should prevent major spikes in prices, although that doesn't necessarily mean it'll be cheaper for buyers. It is, in essence, one big hedge against the market falling totally out of whack. But an even bigger change formatted by the fork, known as EIP 1559, is a doubling of the block size. while in theory this means that twice the number of transactions can happen in each block, the upgrade has actually been designed so that the protocol only wants the block to be half-full.

This is meant to help smooth out spikes in demand, helping gas fees to stay stable. Though it's not getting the same attention as EIP 1559, another one of the EIPs included in the London Fork is EIP 3554, and its significance cannot be understated. This change in the code paves the way for, Ethereum 2.0, an upgrade and total overhaul of the system, which has been in the works for years. Ethereum 2.0 would have the network switch from the energy-intensive proof-of-work mining system, where miners solve difficult math equations to create new coins, to proof of stake, which just requires users to leverage their existing cash of ether as a means to verify

transactions and mint new tokens. This change will be huge, not just for Ethereum, but for the wider cryptocurrency community at large. EIP 3554 takes an important deadline that will encourage Ethereum miners to upgrade their software to prepare for the switch, known as the difficulty time bomb, and moves that deadline from summer 2022 to this December. The point of the difficulty bomb is to force miners and node operators

to upgrade their software after a predetermined amount of time has passed, explained Carter. As Bunsen describes it, the proof-of-stake transition would essentially make Ethereum un-miner, once activated. In other words, a few years from now, once the protocol has fully migrated to a proof-of-stake model, the entire industry around Ethereum mining, as it exists today, will no longer be relevant, end quote. Speaking of crypto, there was a creeping worry that language in the infrastructure bill that is making its way through the U.S. Congress introduced some really broad

language that would essentially make nearly any entity in crypto into a broker by definition, thereby forcing folks to collect their users' data. Well, Senators Loomis, Wyden, and Toomey are proposing an amendment to the bill to exclude crypto, developers, miners, node operators, and others from this broker definition, quoting the block. The Wyden-Lumus-Tumee Amendment made public Wednesday comes days after it first emerged that the trillion-dollar infrastructure Bill included language aimed at tightening reporting requirements for brokers in the digital asset space. But critics quickly highlighted the vague language used in the provision which they said could subject companies not involved in the actual brokerage of digital assets to overly burdensome

regulation. The push to amend the existing language won some key allies in the Senate in the days that followed resulting in today's Senate amendment. Over the weekend, Ron Wyden, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, wrote that the initial language was, quote, an attempt to apply brick-and-mortar rules to the internet and fails to understand how the technology works, end quote. Crypto industry firms including Coin Center, the blockchain association, Coinbase, and Ribbett Capital published a joint statement of support on Wednesday saying that the senators, quote, are right that this language would place unworkable requirements on a nascent industry,

and we support their proposed amendment to the provision, end quote. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled what is being called the Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative, collaborative to combat ransomware and cyber attacks in partnership with Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others in the tech industry. Quoting the journal. The effort will initially focus on combating ransomware and cyber attacks on cloud computing providers, said Jen Easterly, director of the DHS's cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency. Ultimately, she said it aims to improve defense planning and information sharing between government and the private sector. This will uniquely bring people together in peacetime so that we can plan for how we're going to respond in

war time, she said in an interview. Ms. Easterly was sworn in as CISA's director last month. She was previously a counterterrorism official in the Obama White House and the commander of the Army's first cyber operations unit at the National Security Agency, America's Cyber Spy Agency. The partnership with industry, Ms. Easterly said, would improve the country's response to widespread attacks, such as last year's sophisticated hack of software maker Solar Winds. The U.S. and cybersecurity researchers have said Russian hackers were able to parlay their attack into access to more than 100 company networks and some government systems too. Russia and China have denied that they engage in hacking.

Improving information sharing between government and companies will make it easier to spot and combat threats, such as what happened with solar wins, Ms. Easterly said. With more and more sensitive company and personal information stored in the cloud, the providers of those vast data centers are often on the front line of cyber attacks, giving them insight into the latest hacks and the resources available to mitigate the attacks, said Phil Venables, the chief information security officer with the cloud computing group at Google, a unit of alphabet. Quote, there's a recognition and has been for a while among the cloud providers that security

and increasingly high levels of security are a core part of the offering, he said, and quote. I just want to highlight a couple of tech-related earnings reports because they conform to a growing narrative that seems to be unfolding. Let's call it the hangover from good in COVID times business, i.e., companies like Netflix, who had unusually turbocharged usage and thus revenue numbers during lockdown, which may be tapering off at this point. For example, Nintendo missed its Q1 consensus numbers with operating profit down 17.3% year-over-year and revenue down 9.9% year-over-year as switch sales declined by 21.7% year-over-year to 4.45 million units, quoting The Verge. That's perhaps not surprising, given the company was writing a surge in demand for

video games during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic a year ago and had just released the mega-hit Animal Crossing New Horizons. Unlike last year, when Nintendo sold more than 10 million copies of Animal Crossing to nearly double its figures from the previous quarter, there weren't any blockbuster switch titles to Bank on. New Pokemon Snap sold 2.07 million copies outside Japan. The game is published by the Pokemon Company in its home market. And Mario Golf Super Rush sold 1.34 million. Animal Crossing, meanwhile, added an extra 1.26 million copies to its total. It's now sold nearly 34 million copies worldwide, end quote. So maybe in the case of Nintendo, it's a cyclical thing in terms of blockbuster titles being released or the lack thereof.

Because, for example, EA beat their earnings estimates, and Roku saw revenue up 81% year over year when it reported yesterday, although it did note that streaming hours on its platform was down a whopping one billion hours quarter over quarter. And Pinterest missed on user growth in Q2 with 454 million monthly active users versus 482 million, which was the estimate, so that even though it beat on revenue, which was up 125% year over year, investors are really not happy at the implication that COVID-time usage surges might be over, and the stock was down about 20%. Now, I want to be careful about cherry-picking

examples to fit this narrative. Uber and Lyft earnings, for example, seemed not bad, and other good in COVID companies are seeing their stocks hold up, but still, a narrative becomes a narrative when enough people buy into it, and there are a lot of companies that seem to be in the headlights of this narrative. Conversely, on the good in COVID times front, maybe the quintessential COVID-times unicorn, is Hoppin. Hoppin was founded to manage virtual events of all shapes and sizes. It was founded in June of 2019, and, well, do the calendar math. That was pretty good timing, if you can call it Good, like that. Like with Zoom, there was suddenly a surge in demand for what Hoppin could offer folks, quoting CNBC. That wave of demand quickly catapulted Hoppin to unicorn status, with its valuation

surging past $2 billion in a November funding round. Hoppin's market value then more than doubled to $5.65 billion in March. Now the company has bagged yet another mega investment. It's fourth since February of last year. Hopin said Thursday it had raised $450 million. $450 million. in a funding round co-led by Arena Holdings and Altimeter Capital. The latest cash injection values the startup at a whopping $7.75 billion, making it one of Europe's most valuable tech unicorns. Hopin founder, Johnny Bufferat, 27 said a lot of his firm's success boiled down to luck. I feel lucky, he told CNBC in an interview Thursday, you work really hard and you make some critical decisions to get your business to where it is, but there's also a really big part of luck

that takes you there, end quote. The Australian-born. entrepreneur started hopping in London in June 2019 after falling ill with an autoimmune disease that prevented him from leaving the house. His company's platform lets organizations host events online with up to 100,000 attendees with tools for virtual talks and one-to-one networking. It proved a hit during the pandemic and now has over 100,000 customers, including American Express and NATO, while more than 17 million users have registered for an account. The rising valuation of the business has made Bufraat, Britain's youngest self-made billionaire on paper, according to the Sunday Times rich list. To put Hoppens' growth into perspective, the company had only eight employees in March

2020. Its headcount now stands at 800. All of Hopin's employees work remotely, quote, quite a few things that had to click in place for that to happen were out of my control, Bufrat said of the company's success, quote, it's actually sad. We wish COVID never happened. We were still growing fast pre-COVID, but obviously COVID was a massive accelerator for the company, end quote. The company says that it now has annual recurring revenue, or ARR, of about $100 million, up from 70 million in March and 20 million in November, end quote. I highly recommend the streaming show The Northwater with Colin Farrell. You've got to subscribe to AMC Plus to get it, but it's extraordinarily well done in all ways.

including, if you've never understood what the whaling industry was probably like in real life, watch this. Whaling was the energy exploration and extraction of its day, and there's actually a tech connection to that. It has been argued that the whole concept of modern venture capital comes from the pools of money that went into backing whaling expeditions in the 1800s. Anyway, not a fun show exactly, a dark and gritty show, Extremely good. Talk to you tomorrow.