Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/19 - Huawei Launches a Flagship Without Google Apps

Episode Date: September 19, 2019

Huawei tries to launch a flagship smartphone without a Google net, could Apple and Disney have merged? Some really interesting raises, for Automattic and Stripe, but also an autonomous construction equipment startup, and why there now might be SSD’s that are basically failproof. Sponsors: Mealime.com OpenVPN.net/ride Links: Huawei Mate 30 Pro goes official w/ no Google apps, ‘horizon’ display (9to5Google) GitHub acquires code analysis tool Semmle (TechCrunch) “WE COULD SAY ANYTHING TO EACH OTHER”: BOB IGER REMEMBERS STEVE JOBS, THE PIXAR DRAMA, AND THE APPLE MERGER THAT WASN’T (Vanity Fair) Datadog Rises 53% in Trading Debut After Rebuffing Cisco (Bloomberg) Amazon signs Climate Pledge to advance Paris Climate Accords goals by 10 years (VentureBeat) Built Robotics raises $33M for its self-driving construction equipment (TechCrunch) Automattic raises $300 million at $3 billion valuation from Salesforce Ventures (TechCrunch) Fintech Company Stripe Joins Silicon Valley Elite With $35 Billion Valuation (WSJ) Samsung unveils new PCIe 4.0 SSDs that "never die" (TechSpot) 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 ride home for Thursday, September 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Huawei tries to launch a flagship smartphone without a Google Net.

Could Apple and Disney have merged? Some really interesting raises for automatic and stripe, but also an autonomous construction equipment startup. And why there now might be SSDs that are essentially failproof. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. No Google, no problem? Huawei has unveiled its 6.53-inch Mate 30 Pro flagship smartphone with a Kieran 990 chip set, 8 gigabytes of RAM, a 4,500 MAHB battery, a 4G as well as a 5G version, depending on the market, and fast 27-watt wireless charging. But, crucially, no Google licensed apps. Quoting 9 to 5 Google.

This is the first flagship to be released by Huawei since being blacklisted by the U.S. government. Therefore, it is the first new release to explicitly come without access to common Google Play services. Sideloading these services is likely to be possible, but it is unclear just how this will be possible for most non-techie buyers. The Huawei Mate 30 Pro does come with EMUI 10, which is based on the recently released Android 10. although as expected this build does not come with any Google apps, end quote. The Mate 30 Pro also has a vibrating screen for audio, 3D face unlocking, an in-display fingerprint

reader, and dual 40 megapixel cameras on the back, a third 8-mepixel telephoto zoom lens on the back, and a 32-mepixel selfie camera on the front. So basically, a year ago, we would be talking about this phone as potentially a global standard bearer. But without the Google apps, it remains to be seen how popular this phone or any phone can be in, say, the European market. Huawei has built out its own Huawei Mobile Services Store to get around the ban on using Google Play Store, which already has 45,000 apps in it. So I guess we're going to see pretty soon. GitHub has acquired code analysis tool Semmel, which helps identify secure security vulnerabilities. Semmel had raised $31 million in VC funding and counts Microsoft, Google, and

NASA among its existing client roster. Quote, just as relational databases make it simple to ask very sophisticated questions about data, Semmel makes it much easier for researchers to identify security vulnerabilities in large codebases quickly, writes Shanku Nyogi GitHub's senior vice president of product in today's announcement. Many vulnerabilities have the same type of coding mistakes as the root cause. With Semmel, you can find all variations of a mistake, eradicating a whole class of vulnerabilities. Furthermore, this approach makes Semmel far more effective, finding dramatically more issues, and with far fewer false positives, end quote. So yeah, not hard to imagine how GitHub could integrate such a suite of tools effectively. You might have seen this already,

and it is a bit of a long read, but it's made some headlines, so no need to wait for tomorrow and the long read segment. Disney's CEO Bob Iger has a new book out, and part of it was excerpted last night in Vanity Fair. The piece in question is actually a fairly long and touching recalling of Iger's relationship with the late Steve Jobs. It was Iger, of course, that purchased Pixar on behalf of Disney. Lots of behind-the-scenes details here about that acquisition, about colorful things. Like, apparently the only thing Steve Jobs hated more than video games, according to Steve himself, was comic books.

The part, though, that has made the headlines is as follows, quote, with every success the company has had since Steve's death, there's always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, I wish Steve could be here for this. It's impossible not to have the conversation with him in my head that I wish I could be having in real life. More than that, I believe that if Steve were still alive, we would have combined our companies, or at least discuss the possibility very seriously, end quote. Now, obviously, some sort of Disney Apple merger or acquisition has been something that has been speculated about quite often, ever since Disney started allowing its content into the iTunes store. And ever since Disney acquired Pixar, thereby making Steve Jobs.

and his family, the largest Disney shareholders. But it is worth wondering the directions that Apple has gone in in these last few years, this move to services, the move to basically, I don't know, getting into the content and Hollywood business. Might that have happened sooner or more comprehensively in a sliding door situation? Would Steve have come to a similar vision for digital media and would he have been willing to tie Apple's fortunes more closely to those of his friend? Bob. Quoting Henry Blodgett on Twitter, Mr. Eager means that he would have sold Disney to Apple? I personally doubt that Apple would have wanted to buy it. And as an Apple shareholder, I would have not wanted Apple to buy it. But who knows? End quote. Another unicorn has gone public. Data Dog. An app performance

monitoring and analytics platform raised $648 million in its US IPO, valuing the company at Open at $7.83 billion. Now, if you are a long-time listener to this show, then you know that Datadog has been a longtime advertiser on this show, one of our first advertisers, in fact. So I do want to, you know, full disclosure that. But I would be reporting on this anyway because a $7.8 billion valuation makes it one of the more significant of the unicorn IPOs this year. Also, Datadog's stock popped 52% in its early trades, giving it a valuation of nearly $12 billion. So that's a good IPO. But also, it's not every day that you see something like this, quoting Bloomberg.

Datadog recently received a takeover bid from Cisco Systems that would have valued it at significantly more than what it had expected in its IPO. People familiar with the matter said. Data Dog rebuffed the advance to pursue the public listing because it felt it could be worth more as a public company over time, the people said. Datadog lost $13 million during the first six months of 2019 after earning $498,000 during the same period a year earlier. It reported a 74% gross margin on 153 million in revenue for the first half of 2019. That compares with a 78% margin on 85 million in revenue for the same period last year according to its filings, end quote. Tomorrow, a big set of global climate strikes are scheduled to kick off around the world. That's not why you won't be hearing from me tomorrow, but more on that at the end of the show.

Ahead of these climate strikes, however, Jeff Bezos has announced the climate pledge for businesses to commit to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2040, quoting Venture Beat. During a news conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. this morning, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, alongside former United Nations climate leaders, unveiled the climate pledge where businesses commit to meeting the goals of the Paris Agreement 10 years ahead of schedule. Amazon will become the first signatory pledging to regularly measure and report greenhouse gas emissions

while implementing decarbonization strategies through efficiency improvements, renewable energy, and materials reductions. Bezos also announced a new $100 million reforestation effort in partnership with the Nature Conservancy, the right now climate fund, as well as a new order for 100,000 electric delivery vans to move away from diesel vans. Coinciding with these, Amazon launched a new sustainability website to report on its commitments, initiatives, and performance. The aforementioned vans will come from Rivian, which plans to begin deploying them starting in 2021.

Amazon led a $700 million funding round in Rivian earlier this year. Amazon plans to have 10,000 of these new electric vehicles on the road as early as 2022, and all 100,000 vehicles on the road by 2040, which it says will save an estimated 4 million metric tons of carbon per year by 2030, end quote. So maybe we will be getting those smiley-faced branded Amazon vans rolling through our neighborhoods after all. Interesting raise time. And I think you can see a theme sort of developing here.

Not one that I'm creating to editorialize purposefully or anything. This just does seem to be what a lot of money has been going to lately. Built robotics makes autonomous construction equipment and has raised $33 million as a Series B bringing its total raise lifetime to $48 million, quoting TechCrunch. With the construction industry facing a global labor shortage, Bill's aim is to allow one equipment operator to oversee a fleet of vehicles working autonomously in parallel, hopping in the cab only for tasks the machine can't handle. Rather than building its own vehicles, built focuses on converting the popular construction equipment that's already out there.

They sell a kit that straps to the top of things like excavators, bulldozers, and skid steers, taking tech like LiDAR, GPS, and Wi-Fi, and meshing them into the machines innards to give it autonomous smarts. They sell the conversion boxes to other companies, help them get installed, then charge a usage fee whenever the machines are in autonomous. No one wants a 20-ton piece of machinery blasting around a construction site without a care for those around it, so the autonomous machines tried to keep a constant eye on their surroundings. Cameras on and around the vehicles are constantly checking for anyone who might stray too close. If something goes wrong and the machine starts to tip too much, or if onboard sensors detect that something is in the way even underground, power gets cut. and there's a big red emergency stop button on the back of each machine and a wireless button

meant to stay on the operator's desk for good measure, end quote. And actually there were two headline-making raises today that were interesting, but these are companies that you've definitely heard of. First, automatic, the company behind WordPress.com, woo commerce, and soon Tumblr, has raised a $300 million series D from Salesforce ventures at a post-money valuation of $3 billion. Romaine Delette of TechCrunch spoke with Automatic Head Honcho Matt Mullenweg. Quote, back in 2014, 22% of the world's top 10 million websites used WordPress. There are now 34% of the world's top 10 million websites running on WordPress.

I think there's potential to get to a similar market share as Android, which I believe now has 85% of all handsets. When you think about it, open source has a virtuous cycle of adoption, people building on the platform, and more adoption, automatic founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg told me. While WordPress started as an open source blogging platform, it has evolved into a highly customizable content management system. You can use it to show a portfolio, build a restaurant website, run an e-commerce company, or even distribute news articles to millions of people. What we want to do is to become the operating system for the open web. We want every website, whether it's e-commerce or anything, to be powered by WordPress. And by doing so, we'll make sure that the web can go back to being more open, more integrated, and more user-centric than it would be if proprietary platforms become dominant, Malinweg told me, end quote.

And Payments Powerhouse Stripe might be the new biggest unicorn in the land, or at least very close to it, after raising, $250 million from Sequoia Capital, General Catalyst, and Andreessen Horowitz, at a $35 billion valuation, which would value Stripe above Palantir and even Airbnb, quote. Stripe's technology allows internet companies and online marketplaces to accept credit cards for their goods and services and pay out money to the people and firms that sell on their platforms. It processes hundreds of billions of dollars in payments annually for millions of users including consumer apps and websites such as Airbnb and The Real Real Inc and makers of business software such as GitHub and Twilio.

Investors view payments companies like Stripe as a way to get exposure to a basket of fast-growing public and private tech companies since Stripe's revenues are tied to its customer's growth. The market for payment services is also expanding as more commerce moves away from physical stores and toward digital storefronts. Stripe is, more than ever, a bet on the internet as an economic engine, said Will Gaborik, Stripe's chief product officer, end quote. And finally today, has Samsung unveiled a new SSD that could never die?

Samsung released two new SSD lines that utilize the new PCI 4.0 interface, quoting from TechSpot. Samsung's PM 1733 and PM 1735 series come in 19 different models covering the HHS card type and 2.2 formats. Design for use in servers and data centers, their storage ranges from 0.8 terabytes right up to a massive 30.72 terabytes. But the most compelling feature of these drives could be their fail-in-place or FIP software. It works by detecting any faulty NAND chips on the SSD, scanning for any damage, then moving the data into working chips. This means normal operations can continue even when errors occur at chip level. Enabling what Samsung calls a never-dying SSD. The drives, quote, also ensure endurance of one or three drive rights per day, DWPD over a five-year period, end quote.

The drives also come with Samsung's virtual. visualization technology, allowing a single SSD to be divided into a maximum of 64 smaller SSDs, providing virtual work spaces for multiple users. They also feature machine learning tech to ensure superior data reliability, end quote. No word on pricing or availability yet. So, yep, you will not be hearing from me tomorrow. Glenn Fleischman will be filling in because I have to report for jury duty. I hope. to talk to you again on Monday. But you know how these things go. So hopefully you'll be hearing from me soon. In the meantime, no weekend bonus episodes this week because of jury duty and other reasons.

But, well, let's just say, I hope it's not too long before we speak again. Have a good weekend. What do the latest smart digital scales, speakers, thermostats, and ovens all have in common? They can all be connected to and utilized over the internet. One of the main ways companies are securing Internet of Things communications is by implementing a virtual private network. Take, for instance, train, a world leader in air conditioning systems, services, and solutions. Train needed a way to securely monitor the health of critical HVAC systems all around the world in real time. They were able to do exactly that by creating a private network using OpenVPN Access Server. train enabled their central monitoring center to carry out around the clock remote monitoring of more than 4,000 of their remote telemetry locations all around the globe.

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