Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/27 – Halo, Amazon’s New Fitness Wearable

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Amazon announces Halo, a weird and ambitious new fitness wearable. Facebook warns of an ad-apocalypse. TikTok’s CEO abruptly resigns, for: reasons. The reMarkable 2 e-ink tablet. Intel is causing the US to fall behind in supercomputing. And the first big podcaster to sign exclusively with Spotify is leaving the platform and burning his bridges. Sponsors: Masterworks.io, select PODCAST, then enter: RIDE TinyCapital.com Links: AMAZON ANNOUNCES HALO, A FITNESS BAND AND APP THAT SCANS YOUR BODY AND VOICE (The Verge) Facebook Says Apple’s Changes to iOS Will Dramatically Hurt Ads (Bloomberg) Kevin Mayer calls it quits (Source Code Newsletter) Intel Slips, and a High-Profile Supercomputer Is Delayed (NYTimes) Opensignal: U.S. 5G speeds slump as other countries leap ahead (VentureBeat) The reMarkable 2 is the latest attempt to turn your paper notepad digital (The Verge) Joe Budden is taking his podcast off Spotify because the company ‘is pillaging’ his audience (The Verge) Thanks to: @eliweiss1 Get in touch with him at: eliaweiss.com And @openendedfilms Check out his film at: aoamovie.com 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 27th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon announces Halo, a weirdly ambitious fitness wearable.

Facebook warns of an ad apocalypse. TikTok's CEO abruptly resigns for reasons. The remarkable 2E ink tablet, Intel is causing the U.S. to fall behind in supercomputing, and the first big podcaster to sign exclusively with Spotify is leaving the platform and burning his bridges. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I guess everybody sees dollar signs in digital health and fitness these days, even Amazon, who today unveiled Halo, a $99.99-0.99-fitness fitness band with an app to track everything from emotional tone to sleep quality, activity, even creating 3D scans for body fat.

Indeed, you have to say in a way, this is the most ambitious health wearable we've seen yet, quoting the verge. Unlike the Apple Watcher, even most basic fitbits, the Amazon Halo Band doesn't have a screen. The app that goes along with it comes with the usual set of fitness tracking features along with two innovative and potentially troubling ideas. Using your camera to create 3D scans for body fat and listening to the emotion in your voice. The Halo band will cost $99.99 and the service, which is required for Halo's more advanced features, costs $3.99 per month.

Amazon is launching it as an invite-only, early access program today with an introductory price of $64.99 that includes months of the service for free. The Halo service is a separate product that isn't part of Amazon Prime. The lack of a screen on the Halo Band is the first indicator that Amazon is trying to carve out a niche for itself that's focused a little less on sports and exercise and a little more on lifestyle changes. Alongside cardio, sleep, body fat, and voice tone tracking, a Halo subscription will offer a suite of labs developed by partners. Their short challenges designed to improve your health habits like meditation, improving your sleep habits, or starting up basic exercise routines, end quote. Amazon insists that this is not a medical device and hasn't

submitted it for FDA approval even. And unlike almost everything else out there right now, it lacks basic things like GPS, Wi-Fi, or a cellular radio. This allows the battery life to run for a full week, apparently. The microphone the device does have on it is not for invoking Alexa, as you might think, but for that emotional voice tone thing. Let's talk about that first, quoting the Verge again. Once you opt in, the Halo app will have you read some text back to it so that it can train a model on your voice, allowing the Halo band to only key in on your tone and not those around you. After that, the band will intermittently listen to your voice and judge it on metrics like positivity and energy. It picks up on the pitch, intensity, rhythm, and tempo of your voice,

and then categorizes them into notable moments that you can go back and review throughout the day. Some of the emotional states include words like, hopeful, elated, hesitant, bored, apologetic, happy, worried, confused, and affectionate, end quote. I guess the idea is to give you a sense of your emotional well-being over time. Amazon swears that this voice data is analyzed locally on your phone and then deleted. Nothing going to the cloud. In fact, they're stressing privacy on this device, especially with the body scans, which you use your phone's camera to do, and then they're only briefly uploaded to Amazon's servers and then deleted again after 12 hours. Quoting the Verge again as well.

Once you have the 3D scan, Amazon uses machine learning to analyze it and calculate your body fat percentage. Amazon argues that body fat percentage is a more reliable indicator of health than either weight or body mass index. Amazon also claims that smart scales that try to measure body fat using bioelectrical impedance are not as accurate as its scan. Amazon says it did an internal study to back up those claims and may begin submitting papers to peer-reviewed medical journals in the future. Finally, once you have your scan, the app will give you a little slider and you can drag your finger on it to show

what you would look like with more or less body fat, end quote. Bottom line, this is a interesting device that is sort of all over the place, but if you want a basic fitness tracker, a really cheap fitness tracker for the basic activity monitoring and then a whole bunch of other wild stuff too maybe it's worth a gander for just a mere hundred bucks the long anticipated ad apocalypse on ios is very nigh and facebook at least is getting ahead of it facebook has sent out a message to publishers warning that apple's upcoming privacy changes in ios 14 which clamped down on ad tracking and IDFA Usuage will make its audience network less effective. The audience network is what allows advertisers to follow you around from app to app and serve you up targeted ads.

Now that info about you will be less specific, Facebook is warning that publishers could see a revenue drop of as much as 50%. Quoting Bloomberg. Facebook on Wednesday said it won't collect IDFA through its own apps on iOS 14 devices. A decision that will severely impact audience network. thousands of developers use the Facebook platform to fill the ad inventory within their mobile apps. And without IDFA information to help target those marketing messages, audience network revenue could drop as much as 50%. The company said, Facebook is considering eliminating the service altogether for iOS 14 users. This is not a change we want to make, but unfortunately Apple's updates to iOS 14 have forced this decision.

Facebook wrote in a blog post, We know this may severely impact publishers' ability to monetize through audience network on iOS 14, and despite our best efforts may render audience network so ineffective on iOS 14 that it may not make sense to offer it on iOS 14. The future. Facebook said it expects less impact on its own advertising business. The company doesn't need device-level information for targeting inside of Facebook and Instagram. example, because it has extensive profile information, as well as phone numbers and emails

for many of its users." BTW, it's not just Facebook that will be affected by this. Google is the other big company that tracks you around the digital realm using IDFA. Again, let me turn to David Pierce who summed up quite succinctly what is about to go down. When users upgrade their iPhones to iOS 14 sometime in the next month or so, they're going to start seeing a slightly startling message when they open many apps. It will say, basically, do they want to allow this app to track them on other apps and websites? If they say yes, they're allowing Apple's identifier for advertisers or IDFA. To follow them around on their phone,

if they say no, well, they're not. Most people will probably say no, and that's a pretty scary idea to a lot of companies, end quote. Let me real quick summarize some interesting developments in some of the ongoing sagas we've been covering. TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer is resigning from the company, which is soups interesting since he hasn't been there long, and he jumped ship from Disney Plus to go to TikTok. But as David Pierce put it in his newsletter this morning, Mayor left Disney on a high, having successfully launched Disney Plus,

and took over what looked like the next big thing and social and entertainment. But that was in early June and by early July. TikTok was firmly in the crosshairs of the U.S. government. In mayor's message to his staff, he basically said, this wasn't what I signed up for. Quoting mayor's email, in recent weeks, as the political environment has sharply changed, I have done significant reflection on what the corporate structural changes will require, and what it means for the global role I signed up for. He wrote in an email to staff that was obtained by the financial times. You have to wonder, though, whether mayor should have seen this

coming. The U.S. China trade war has been brewing for a while. and the anti-tick-tok crusade has been rolling since at least last fall, Mayor must have had an inkling he was diving into the middle of a global fight. Even if he didn't see it going quite this far, anyway, the subtext, Mayor wasn't going to be CEO much longer anyway. No matter who TikTok sells to, he'd suddenly have a new boss at a new company. Mayor didn't want to work for Satya Nadella or Larry Ellison. His new boss might not have even wanted to keep him on.

And don't forget, Mayor was also the CEO of Bite Dance. a job title he definitely have lost as soon as TikTok was sold, end quote. And in our other ongoing saga, Epic once again warned Fortnite gamers on iOS and MacOS that they will not be able to play the games next season, which launches today, and they will lose cross-play capabilities with non-Apple platforms. So the rubber is really going to hit the road in terms of Epic's leverage play today. Remember me saying that Intel continues to fall further and further behind the state of the art in the whole chip game. Yeah, well, their troubles are not just their own anymore.

Sources say problems at Intel are likely to delay the Department of Energy's $500 million exas scale supercomputer project codenamed Aurora, which was scheduled to be installed near Chicago in 2021, quoting the New York Times. Intel, which supplies electronic brains for most personal computers and web services, has long-driven miniaturization advances that make electronic devices smaller, faster, and cheaper. But Robert Swan, its chief executive, warned last month that the next production advance would be 12 months late and suggested that some chips for Aurora might be made outside Intel factories. Intel's disclosures caused its stock market value to drop by close to $50 billion. They were also bad news for Aurora. Intel's

problems make it close to impossible that Aurora will be installed on schedule, researchers and analysts said, and shifting a key component to foreign factories would undermine company and government hopes of an all-American design, end quote. now know that the U.S. cannot manufacture basically anything high-tech since all of that know-how and infrastructure has been outsourced overseas. We also can't build our own telecoms networks because basically there is no native telecoms industry left in North America. And now we can't even build our own supercomputers because our star silicon maker has basically est the bed, or all of the triumphalism of major tech companies, American tech companies basically swallowing the world these days

economically, it's no wonder that policymakers here in America are suddenly worried that America itself is falling behind in fundamental technology now. Another thing that suggests we in America can't have nice things for all of the hype around 5G, I was skeptical that it would deliver all of the miracles that boosters promise. But at the very least, I assume, that we would get faster data out of it, right? Faster networking. Yeah, well, a new report from OpenSignal has the depressing news that as of right now, average US 5G speeds are coming in at 50.9 mbPS, which is a mere 1.8 times faster than the 4G speeds that were used to, which typically clock in at 28.9 mbps. So not the blazingly fast, brave new world we were promised. If you want the

5G future you were promised, guess what? You got to go elsewhere to places like South Korea or Saudi Arabia, quoting Venture Beat. The new report looks at the average 5G download speeds across the globe with South Korean users seeing 5.3 times faster 5G speeds than 4G, clocking in at 312.7 mbps, followed by Australia at 215mbps, then Taiwan and Canada, Saudi Arabia's 5G gap is even more pronounced at 14.3 times the speed of 4G, averaging 414.2 mbPS. But in the United States, the difference is a mere 1.8 times and slow in both cases. Average U.S. 5G performance was actually slower than in the OpenS. study published in May, while other countries have increased their download speeds. Consequently, users in several countries have faster 4G

connections than the average US 5G speed, which is also the lowest of any country in the Open Signal report, with the worst combined 4G-5G download speed for 5G users, 33.4 mbPS on average. The Netherlands was the second slowest 5G performer, but still delivered average 5G speeds of 79.2 mbps over 55% higher than the US 5G average, with combined 4G 5G speeds of 68.9 mbps, end quote. Now, theoretically, this poor performance is down to various U.S. carrier decisions in terms of hardware and throttling and limited availability of mid-band spectrum, all issues that could be fixable over the next couple years. Still combining that story with the previous one has given me sort of a bummer outlook on U.S. tech generally this morning. So I think you heard me say

recently that I took a long, hard look at the remarkable two E-ink tablet, because I just love a tablet I could use for scratch paper and note-taking and the like. Well, The Remarkable 2 is officially out, and the reviewers tend to come to the same conclusion that I did. The Remarkable 2 does offer the best writing experience. Apparently has an excellent display, but it has very limited capabilities if we want to, you know, share your notes and sketches anywhere. Also, it's friggin' expensive at $399. I'll just use Heim Gartenberg's Review and The Verge to speak for the consent.

The company has made some admirable progress in refining the design for the second generation model. Almost every facet of the device has been improved on. The remarkable two is 30% thinner than the original with slimmer bezels at 0.19 inches thick. It's actually the thinnest tablet on the market. It charges over a modernized for faster charging and file transfers USBC port. There's twice the RAM, a faster processor, and a battery that lasts nearly three times as long. and the design itself is just plain nicer with the plastic frame replaced by aluminum and frosted glass. It's much more befitting of the Remarkable's premium price. The new model is slightly heavier at 0.89 pounds, about twice as much as standard

about twice as much as a standard yellow legal pad, but it's the good kind of weight, one that makes the new model feel sturdier in your hand and on your lap when you're using it. The Remarkable 2 also offers big improvements to the actual writing experience for the E-Inc panel. second-generation 10.3-inch canvas display is the same size and 226 DPI resolution as the original model. The panel itself is now layered with actual glass instead of plexiglass, making it a stiffer writing surface that doesn't flex as much under your pen. Latency has been reduced by nearly half. The Remarkable 2 offers a 21 MS latency for writing, fixing the biggest issue on the original model. It's a huge improvement one that makes writing on the Remarkable feel nearly as fast

is using a regular pen and paper, end quote. But, and you knew there was a butt coming, the lack of backlighting is apparently annoying, and if all you want to do is annotate PDFs and ePUB books, great, but you have to do it through their clunky companion desktop and mobile apps. There is no wide interoperability with things like, I don't know, Evernote, Simple Note, office apps, or any graphics programs. If you want to share your drawings, you can only do so as PDFs, PNGs or SVGs through, get this, email. So high-end artists will find this severely limiting, quoting Hiam in conclusion. That short list of features encompasses the entirety of what the remarkable can do, draw, write, read, and share. According to Remarkable, that rather

limited list of features is an intentional design choice. The company argues that the goal of the tablet is to offer a more advanced version of traditional paper, one that's unbound by limits of physical space and more easily shared in a digital age, but without weighing down the experience with the distractions and temptations of a full-fledged tablet. The remarkable too wants to be for writing what a Kindle is for reading, a bespoke device that's the master of its digitized domain, instead of a Jack of all trades device like an iPad or Android tablet. But the reason that the Kindle works as a unitasking device is that it starts at about 80 bucks before factoring in Amazon's frequent sales. It's cheap enough to justify its more limited and focused

feature set. The $399 remarkable, on the other hand, is actually more expensive than a far more functional $329 iPad, which leaves it as a luxury device for the few who can justify spending more on a marginally nicer writing experience rather than a true paper replacement for the digital age, end quote. Finally today, before Joe Rogan, before Bill Simmons, one of the first major talents to take his podcast exclusively to Spotify was Joe Budden. Well, in the most recent episode of his podcast, Budden announced that he's leaving Spotify because he claims it is pillaging his audience, quoting the verge. September 23rd, I cannot tell you where this podcast will be, he says. But as it stands, I can tell you where it will not be, and that is Spotify, end quote. Budden takes the announcement as an opportunity to scorch Spotify and detail his history with the company, which in the years since he signed his deal, has become a sizable competitor in the podcast.

field. He claims his show exceeded Spotify's audience reach expectations by 900% to the point that his listeners crashed the platform. Still, he says he never received a bonus, and the company wouldn't allow him and his team to take vacation days on Christmas and New Year's Eve because that would have required them to miss two episodes. While the company wouldn't pay them actual bonuses, it offered to give them Rolexes instead, only to say the watches they picked out were too expensive. Then he suggested Spotify give money away to their fans for Christmas. The company declined. That was the first time it dawned on me that Spotify is pillaging, he says. You pillage the audience from the podcast and you've continued to pillage each step of the way without any regard for the fans.

He says compared to two years ago when he signed to Spotify, podcasters can find better deals for multiple companies, and he suggests that Spotify is only interested in finding new popular shows rather than feeding the podcast ecosystem. Everybody's not looking to feed the soil, some are just looking to take the fruit, he says. He claims to be the guinea pig for Spotify's podcast ambitions because he was already established and brought audience to Spotify. He proved the model of exclusives could work for the company, he says. Quote, Spotify never cared about this podcast individually, he says. Spotify only cared about our contribution to the platform, end quote. The company wanted him to read ads, and he refused, making it one of the only shows not to be

monetized on the platform. He says he and Spotify differ on, quote, where podcasting is taking us for the next five years, end quote. As Justin Jackson tweeted, When one company controls the means of distribution, creators suffer, end quote. So obviously there were two segments in today's show that were done via that descript deep fake audio robo voice using my voice. As promised, I didn't give you any warning. Not because I thought it would fool you, but because, well, here's what I'm trying to test. We've had a lot of breaking news happen around publishing time lately,

And so I thought if I could quickly write up something without having to record and edit it, then I could quickly jam in more breaking news items into shows when that happens. But also, we're considering doing a thing where we have an overnight episode that drops every morning, because, you know, I only get to like a third of the things that happen every day. So if we could just pull all of the headlines from overnight and throw them into the Descript program, we could produce for you every day a short little three-minute episode that would be waiting for you every morning. Some of it would be stuff that happened overnight, so you could be in the know to start your day. Some of it would be stuff I would cover in greater detail later on in the show proper.

But some of it would also be just basic headlines that I might never even get to. So we're looking to see if the Robo Brian voice would be just ever so acceptable to you that we could actually use that for these two purposes. So let me know what you think. I've got a thread in the subreddit at R-slash ride home. Brian Robo Voice, too annoying to listen to for three minutes or good enough for quick morning episodes or breaking news segments. By the way, I need to thank the two listeners who helped me train the audio we used for the hopefully improved Robo Voice. Eli Weiss is one, and he asked me to ask you, is your business or startup looking for high-quality video, photo, or graphics, be it for advertising, product walkthroughs or website material, Well, Eli is a skilled film production student up to the task. Professional and hardworking,

with quick turnaround times. He's worked on material for brands such as Subaru, Amazon, Nissan, and more. Get in touch with Eli and see some of his work at Eliaywice.com. That's E-L-I-A-W-E-I-S-S.com. There's a link in the show notes. Thank you, Eli for your time. You can also follow him at Eli Weiss One on Twitter. and longtime listener to the show, Sean Michael Cologne also helped me out. Follow him on Twitter at Open-ended Films. He's in the midst of producing a documentary about podcasting called The Age of Audio. You can find out more at AOAmovie.com, linked also in the show notes, of course. The doc will feature interviews with the likes of Ira Glass, Kevin Smith, Scott Ackerman, Leo Lipport,

and the podfather himself, Adam Curry. and a whole bunch more. They briefly filmed me about a year ago, putting my head into my box to record in the studio in my office. Anyway, thanks to both of you. Talk to you tomorrow.