Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/08 - I Put Zero Thought Into This Episode Title (explained in the episode)

Episode Date: August 8, 2019

All the headlines from the Galaxy Note 10 event, to what degree does Zuckerberg really want to keep Instagram independent, Google is expanding podcast search capabilities, you can now tell Alexa to slow down, and Netflix bags Benioff and Weiss and what that means to the streaming wars. Sponsors: Mealime Originate.mobi Links: The 7 biggest announcements from the Samsung Note 10 event (The Verge) Google Maps lets you pull up flight and hotel reservations on the go (CNET) Google will start surfacing individual podcast episodes in search results (The Verge) Now you can choose how fast Alexa talks on your Amazon Echo (The Verge) Instagram's lax privacy practices let a trusted partner track millions of users' physical locations, secretly save their stories, and flout its rules (Business Insider) 'Game of Thrones' Creators Close $200M Netflix Overall Deal (The Hollywood Reporter)   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, August 8th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. All the headlines from the Galaxy Note 10 event.

To what degree does Zuckerberg really want to keep Instagram separate? Google is expanding podcast search capabilities. You can now tell Alexa to slow down. And Netflix bags, Benny Off and Weiss, and what that means to the streaming wars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Yesterday at its unpacked event, Samsung Unveillance, unveiled the note 10 and note 10 plus. The note 10, 6.3 inch screen, wide angle and telephoto rear cameras, a Snapdragon 855, 8 gigabytes of RAM,

and 256 gigabytes of storage coming on August 23rd for $949. The note 10 plus 6.8 inch display, also a Snapdragon 855 processor, but 12 gigabytes of RAM. and either 256 or 512 gigabytes of storage, also coming August 23rd, but starting at $1,100. Samsung did invite me to the event, as I said, so I can actually give you a brief hands-on report. You know how phones have been moving toward and boasting of a device that is just basically all-screen. That's the ideal, right? Well, in the hand, the note tens are the fullest manifestation of that dream that I have ever held, I think. My iPhone afterwards felt oddly like some sort of play school toy.

And with that sort of top of the line power inside it, I feel like if you're in the Android ecosystem and you have the money, I'm not sure why you'd consider any other phone. More on the notes. They come in a slew of really fun colors. Yes, they lost the headphone jacks, which has apparently led Samsung to embarrassingly have to take down those old ads making fun of iPhones for lacking headphone jacks. And the S-Pen has been updated. It's got Bluetooth, a gyroscope, an accelerometer,

and thus allows you to make gestures with it to do a whole bunch of stuff to control the phone and also things like this fun little AR doodle thing that they showed off on stage. and there is actually also a third Note 10, the Note 10 5G edition, which starts at $1,300 because it has, you guessed it, 5G. It is going to temporarily be exclusive to Verizon. Also, Dex, which is that platform that lets your note sort of function like a desktop computer when you connect it via USB to a computer, has been updated with new Mac and Windows apps, which leads me to the other hardware announced yesterday a new galaxy-branded laptop, the Galaxy Book S, which sports a 13.3-inch touchscreen.

Snapdragon 8C chips, LTE connectivity built-in. It runs Windows 10 and has what Samsung claims is 23 hours of battery life. That is supposedly coming in September. And yes, Samsung's extended partnership with Microsoft got a lot of play yesterday. such a Nadella came on stage at the end of the event to talk up the tighter integration of Outlook, OneDrive, Office, and the Your Phone app with the Note 10s. Microsoft will be selling the Note 10s in their online and brick and mortar stores, and Microsoft says that Samsung developed the Galaxy Book S in tight partnership with them.

All in all, really top-of-the-line stuff here, but I couldn't help but agreeing with Owen Williams' assessment in his newsletter this morning. is Samsung whistling past the graveyard of Peak Smartphone? Quote, we're talking about an $899 phone in 2019, which has nothing that tries to push the boundaries, be it on price, hardware, or even interesting software. When there's the $350 pixel 3A or the boundary pushing 1 Plus 7 Pro for $669, it's hard to get excited about an iteration on the same old idea. Peak smartphone means we're going to increase.

increasingly see this. There's just not that much space left for bombshell innovations each year, though I'd have expected Samsung to have more self-awareness, given that it saw one of the highest sales drops of all time in Q1. While Apple is seeing slowing smartphone sales, it's already looking to its next business model in subscription services, which help make the iPhone stickier than ever for those that buy them. Smart or not, Apple sees the writing on the wall, while Samsung is stuck looking to the past, end quote. Google has expanded the beta test of its augmented reality walking around and navigating on your phone feature for Google Maps.

That feature, which is now officially called LiveView, is now available to all Android and iOS devices that support AR Core and AR Kit beginning this week. This is all part of Google's suddenly really aggressive strategy of building out Google Maps with a ton of new bells and whistles. Like, quoting CNET, one new feature lets people pull up their travel reservations like flight and hotel bookings so they don't have to leave the app

while they're navigating to a new destination. The tool works if you're offline, so it's available for travelers going to off-the-grid places. Another update lets people export a list of restaurants and other places they visited to share with friends. The changes come after Google shut down its travel management app trips earlier this week but said it would integrate its features into the company's other products, end quote. Earlier this year, Google Maps added tools to help people

during natural disasters, and I think we talked about it, but Google Maps also integrated more restaurant menus, even highlighting the most popular dishes among other users at a given establishment. And Google is apparently about to... start surfacing individual podcast episodes in search results. And also users will be able to ask Google Assistant to play podcasts about specific topics. But let's get back to that first bit of news because it's potentially huge for podcasting, which, as we've discussed until now, has basically been completely invisible in search. Quoting the Verge, for now people have to search using the word podcast. So if you want to find a show that talks about golden retrievers, you'll have to search

podcasts about golden retrievers or golden retriever podcast. Once you choose one to listen to, it'll open in Google Podcast's web app. The same command structure applies to Google Assistant, so users will have to say, hey, Google, play a podcast about golden retrievers. Eventually, Google says it'll support third-party playback, which is important for podcasts that are exclusive. to certain platforms. The publishers will have to define where they want the show to play themselves if it's a third party. It'll also eventually drop the podcast search term requirement. Google hasn't said when the assistant functionality will roll out, end quote. Google is making this happen because, as we discussed, and actually you even helped test a few

months ago, Google is automatically transcribing podcast episodes. Our friend at Google, Zach Renaudou we dean who helped us out when we had that RSS indexing issue on Google podcasts that a few of you experienced last month. Zach told The Verge that Google has already indexed over 2 million shows. Mainly, I'm just excited that if this works out and I want to search for the podcast that a specific guest has been on, this might make that possible. But also, yeah, there's a lot of chatter about how this might lead to SEO-style shenanigans from podcasters. Will we be incentivized to gussy up our episode titles in an

attempt to juice discovery? Don't worry, listener. I put like zero thought into the episode titles for this show, as today's episode title can attest to. You can now choose how fast or slow Alexa talks to you on your Amazon Echo. There are seven. different speed options for Alexa, which you can invoke by saying speed up or slow down, quoting the verge. Amazon is touting the feature as something that helps with accessibility, and that certainly is a possible benefit. In the press release, Sarah Kaplanar, the head of Alexa for everyone is quoted as saying

the slower speeds are for, quote, hard of hearing and older customers, end quote, while the faster speeds are a boon to, quote, customers who are blind or low vision because they are, quote, used to consuming audio content and want to be able to listen more quickly, end quote. Amazon has been working to make Alexa more accessible on several fronts over the past year, end quote. But also, you know, sometimes if you're just like, get on with it, Alexa. I mean, she can really be, shall we say, verbose when you make certain requests. Sources are telling Business Insider that Instagram has banned a, quote, preferred marketing partner called Hyper, which the sources say has been scraping millions of posts

from Instagram per month, including stories and even it's been tracking users' locations. Basically, the sources say Hyper has straight up been thumbing its nose at Insta's standards for partners, quote, the profiles which were scraped and stitched together by the San Francisco based marketing firm Hyper were a clear violation of Instagram's rules, but it all occurred under Instagram's nose for the past year by a firm that Instagram had blessed as one of its preferred, quote, Facebook marketing partners. On Wednesday, Instagram sent Hyper a cease and desist letter after being presented with business insiders findings and confirmed the startup broke its rules. The total volume of Instagram data Hyper has obtained is not clear, though the firm has

publicly said it has, quote, a unique data set of hundreds of millions of the highest value customers in the world, end quote, and sources said more than 90% of its data came from Instagram. It ingests in excess of one million Instagram posts a month, sources said. Data scraping is a persistent problem across the web for open platforms. Instagram is not the only service to have been affected over the years, and Hyper is almost certainly not the only business scraping its data. But the nature of Hyper's activity raises significant questions about the extent of the due diligence that Instagram and parent company Facebook conduct on partners using their platform as well as on their own procedures to safeguard user data, end quote. Yeah, sort of reminds you of Cambridge Analytica, right?

A third party doing shady stuff because Facebook slash Instagram isn't very good at policing stuff like they should. Indeed, the joke that everyone made is, quoting Willa Ramos, man, Facebook is really going all out with this campaign to make sure everyone knows that it owns Instagram, end quote. Which brings up something that I didn't cover because the news broke late last Friday, but it's worth making you aware of. Alex Heath at the information reported that Facebook intends to rebrand Instagram and WhatsApp to Instagram from Facebook and WhatsApp from Facebook, which is an odd choice, if true. Hey, everyone kind of likes Insta and WhatsApp because they feel like they're less icky than Facebook. And most people don't even know that Facebook owns those apps. So I know what we should do.

Let's wipe the Facebook brand halo all over those other apps to make sure, I don't know, something. Apparently even employees inside Facebook are confused about what this achieves, if anything. Quoting Heath again in the information. But Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been frustrated that Facebook doesn't get more credit for the growth of Instagram and WhatsApp. Associating those apps with Facebook could improve the overall company's brand with consumers. Bertie Thompson, a Facebook spokeswoman, confirmed the branding change to Instagram and WhatsApp. quote, we want to be clearer about the products and services that are a part of Facebook, she told the information, noting that the company uses similar branding for other products like

workplace, its enterprise chat tool. The from Facebook branding will be visible inside the apps. Users will see it when they log on, for instance, and elsewhere, such as in app stores, end quote. So again, insert head scratching emoji here. I mean, if this is true, If it's just a Zuck ego thing, it flies in the face of the crazy genius move that we all assumed was behind acquiring Insta and WhatsApp. The idea that it didn't matter how social networking evolved because Zuck would just keep acquiring any new companies, competitors, or innovators, and thus would just leap from new hotness to new hotness like so many lily pads. But no? Apparently Zuck really wants you to love his original creation as much as he does. does, to the point that he will bear hug them into a Borg-like absorption into the mothership?

Or is this maybe all about the fear that someday Facebook would be forced to break up and divest itself of, for example, Instagram? Is it that simple? Whatever the truth, it's weird. As Casey Newton tweeted, borrowing against Instagram's brand to bolster Facebook does not strike me as good long-term strategy for either, end quote. So again, if true, does this news put page? to the notion that Zuck is the four-dimensional chess genius that lots of people seem to think he is.

If he is really doing this because he doesn't like that the companies he's acquired are more beloved than the one he built, then maybe. But if this is all a part of a long-term strategy to just mash everything up into one messaging platform to rule them all, one single platform for communication with a capital C in the 21st century, then maybe not. And finally today, a little bit of Hollywood news. That's a little bit streaming wars news and a little bit nerd news. Netflix has signed a multi-year film and TV deal with Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and Dan Weiss. Sources report that the deal is worth $200 million. Quoting from the Hollywood reporter, Benioff and Weiss, who created and served as showrunners on HBO's mega-hit Game of Thrones, were also in discussion.

with Disney and its newly owned cable network FX and Amazon and came to their decision after extensive talks with Netflix. Sources say Amazon Studios had been the frontrunner until early July when Netflix reemerged with a competitive offer. Disney had also entered the conversation more recently, and some said the new supersized mouse house might have been offering a TV deal with the FX productions to go alongside a film pact with the company. Beniof and Weiss are already in business with Disney,

working on a Star Wars trilogy for Disney-owned Lucasfilm. Sources say Benny Off and Weiss were seeking a deal worth as much as $200 million as they attempt to surpass the $150 million-packed Westworld creators Lisa Joy and Jonah Nolan signed with Amazon in April, end quote. No word on what shows or movies Benny Off and Weiss might develop. now for Netflix, but it reportedly won't be that Confederate show. That's dead. And the pair, again, are still committed to write a Star Wars film trilogy, the first episode of which is set for a December 2022 release date. And the boys will still be listed as executive producers

on any and all Game of Thrones prequel and or spin-off series HBO brings out eventually, even though they won't have any hands-on involvement in those shows going forward. If you followed along on Twitter yesterday, it was kind of hilarious. Right when the Samsung event let out was exactly when the thunderstorm of biblical proportions broke over the skies of Brooklyn, I don't know if it was audible on the live stream, but right when Sacha Nadella was announced on stage, everyone's emergency alert phone signals went off. It was sort of a funny cacophony.

Anywho, other than my shoes getting soaked, and actually one portable mic getting soaked, and I guess dying at this point, I made it out okay? And that was my Samsung unpacked adventure. Talk to you tomorrow.