Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/20 - Alexa For Friggin' Everything!

Episode Date: September 20, 2018

Amazon announced Alexa for friggin everything, AmazonGos might soon be friggin everywhere, a life insurer will only sell you a policy if you own a smartwatch, and they’ve finally found Spock’s home planet of Vulcan.  Links: Amazon Will Consider Opening Up to 3,000 Cashierless Stores by 2021 (Bloomberg) Strap on the Fitbit: John Hancock to sell only interactive life insurance (Reuters) Life Insurance Offering More Incentive to Live Longer (NYTimes) ESPN's new streaming service passes 1 million paid subscribers in five months (CNBC) Google, Facebook Lead Digital’s March to Half of U.S. Ad Market (Bloomberg) Spock’s planet ‘Vulcan’ found years after Star Trek prediction (SlashGear) 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 Ride Home for Thursday, September 20th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon announced Alexa for friggin' everything.

Amazon Goes might soon be friggin' everywhere. A life insurer will now only sell you a policy if you own a smartwatch, and they've finally found Spock's home planet of Vulcan. Here's what you miss today in a wild day in the world of tech. Unlike Apple events, Amazon apparently likes to spring events on people like me that have to report on them. It was only announced this morning, but it had kind of been rumored off and on for a couple weeks now. Amazon held a hardware event today in Seattle where it announced a whole slew of things. Get ready because there's more than a dozen.

First up, Amazon announced a refresh of its popular Echo Dot, with Amazon calling the smart speaker quote, the best-selling speaker ever, end quote. Rolling out next month, the new dot still comes in at $50, but gets a nicer cloth covering and an updated software driver. Also, as rumored, Amazon announced Echo Sub, a $129 sub-wulfur that you compare with two other echo speakers to achieve 2.1 stereo sound experiences. The Echo Sub sports a six-inch downfiring wolfer

with 100 watts of base. The high-end Echo Plus also got a fabric design upgrade and something Amazon is calling local voice control, which means essentially even if your internet goes down, you'd still be able to use Alexa to control your smart home devices. Amazon is running natural language understanding and automatic speak recognition locally on the high-end Echo Plus devices.

The new Echo Plus remains $149 and will ship today, in every country Alexa is already in. And an all-new Echo Show, completely redesigned with the fabric design of its kin, two speakers now, and a larger display, now 10 inches. It will integrate into Skype for video chatting, and it will also integrate into the new Alexa Home Guard thingy, which I'm going to get to in a minute. You can now also take any speaker and turn it into an Alexa-enabled smart speaker. Amazon introduced, at $34.99 a hockey puck-looking thing called the Echo Input,

which sports the far-field microphones of a normal echo device. But you can plug this baby into an existing speaker's audio input, and you're good to go. This is Amazon's answer to Google's Chromecast audio dongle that plugs into speakers and allows you to stream music from them. And yes, the Amazon microwave is, in fact, official. The Amazon Basics Microwave doesn't have, Alexa built-in because if you haven't noticed, microwaves kind of mess with Wi-Fi signals. So the microwave only works with an Alexa speaker nearby, but it does have a built-in dash button so you can reorder directly from the device, specifically popcorn.

Coming later this year for $60. Now, no one saw this next one coming, an Alexa-powered wall clock. So you can do things like set alarms and timers, and the clock will illuminate in time with the progression of your countdown. Alexa also pointed out that this is a clock you would never have to update for daylight savings time ever again because it would do that automatically. It might be worth it for that alone, right? But is it $30 worth it because that's the price when the clock ships later this year? And as I said, Alexa Guard is a home security gadget that integrates with existing echoes. While you're away from home, it listens out for sounds like broken glass, but it also features smoke

and carbon monoxide detectors and can apparently integrate well with existing security systems like ADT and Amazon's own ring products. Speaking of ring, what number of product are we on at this point? Speaking of ring, there's a new $180 ring stick-up cam, one that's battery powered and one that's wired. So it's sort of like a drop cam slash nest cam sort of thing, a camera you just put wherever you need it. They were kind of a little vague on this one, but it is coming later this year at $179. More hardware. How about what Amazon is calling a smart plug? Essentially, plug this into any outlet and plug anything into the smart plug, and you can switch it on and off with your voice.

So I guess, you know, plug in a coffee pot or a light, and on and off. The price tag for this is kind of hefty, though, $125. So for just a few bucks more, you could get a full Echo Plus. But if turning your coffee pot on or off with your voice, is that important to you? I don't know. Okay, I swear we're wrapping up at this point. Probably the two biggest announcements are the following. First, the Amazon Fire TV recast is a $2-DVR. Coming later this fall in a 500-gagabyte two-tuner version and a 1-terabyte four-tuner version. Here's the premise.

This baby has built-in digital antennas. You can plug it in anywhere in your house to pool in over-the-air live TV broadcasts. It can record those broadcasts or it can send them live and wirelessly to your fire TV, your echo show, your echo spot, which is the alarm clock, by the way, or even iOS and Android devices. So bottom line, use this box to stream live TV from, say, NBC, CBS, ABC, to your existing Amazon video offerings. To some extent it functions like a slingbox or a TiVo. but will help fill the gaps if you're one of those cord cutters who's been shut out of things like the big game or the Academy Awards. And last but not least, Alexa is coming to your car. The Echo Auto is a small dongle that plugs into your car's infotainment system.

You can interact with the doodad to ask Alexa for things like traffic reports, starting to play music, telling your connected smart lights back at home to turn off, or I guess if you're heading home to turn on. You can make voice-styled calls using the existing Echo drop-in feature. And I suppose you could also add items to your shopping list, of course. Echo Auto works with ways by default, but Apple and Google Maps will soon be available as well. So imagine this as a plug-in nav slash entertainment-in info system for your existing dumb car. It will cost only $50.

But if you help Amazon with testing it, you can get one for only $25 just for being an early adopter. Crimony, do you think Amazon gave us enough news today? That was dozens of products in just an hour and a half event. It makes Apple look like pikers. But can you handle some more Amazon news? Because I've got some. More Amazon news that, if it turns out to be true, is kind of astonishing. Bloomberg has sources reporting that Amazon.

Amazon is considering opening up to 3,000 of those Amazon Go cashierless stores by 2020. And this wrinkle from the Bloomberg piece is really interesting. Quote, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos, sees eliminating mealtime log jams in busy cities as the best way for Amazon to reinvent the brick and mortar shopping experience, where most spending still occurs. But he's still experimenting with the best format, a convenience store that sells fresh prepared foods, as well as a limited. grocery selection similar to 7-Eleven franchises, or a place to simply pick up a quick bite to eat for people in a rush, similar to the UK-based chain predamagee, one of the people said. This is from later in the piece, quote, the challenge to Amazon's plan is the high cost of opening each location. The original Amazon Go in downtown Seattle required more than $1 million

in hardware alone, according to a person familiar with the matter. Narrowing the focus to prepared food to go would reduce the upfront cost of opening each store because it would require fewer cameras and sensors. Prepared foods also have wider profit margins than groceries, which would help decrease the time it takes for the stores to become profitable, end quote. But really, what has everyone agog at this news, would be the pace of the retail rollout at a scale that basically no one's ever seen. Austin Allred tweeted, the scale Amazon operates at now is breathtaking. There are 5,300 Walmart stores in the U.S. today. Amazon wants to get to 50% of that in three years. Mike Dudas did some similar math tweeting Walgreens and CVS each have around 10,000 stores. Amazon operates at an alien level scale.

Oki VanderWal is straight up calling BS, quote, 3,000? Someone must have added an extra zero. Yes, I know it's Jeff Bezos, but opening up 3,000 stores within three years seems high. unlikely, even if it's a cashierless store, end quote. So some of the specific numbers Bloomberg pulled out in the piece, Amazon expects to have 10 Amazon Go locations open by the end of this year, then 50 by the end of 2019, and then to get to that 3,000 number, the plan is they would grow out in close proximity to those existing beachhead stores. Proximity would allow for centralized food production with one kitchen serving potentially several locations. There are apparently 155,000 convenience stores in the U.S. with about

122,000 of those attached to gas stations. Non-fuel purchases at convenience stores totaled $233 billion in 2016 with tobacco products as the best-selling item, though. Somehow I can't see Amazon Go ever offering cigarettes. Can you? Sign of things to come, question mark. John Hancock is one of the largest life insurers in North America, and actually one of the oldest. It's 156 years young. But it's setting a trend by announcing yesterday that it will stop underwriting traditional life insurance policies and will instead only sell what it terms interactive policies, policies tied to fitness tracking and healthy data collected via wearable devices and smartphones.

John Hancock apparently pioneered interactive policies. with its partner, the Vitality Group, a South African company who creates these activity accountability programs with health and life insurers around the world. Quote, policyholders score premium discounts for hitting exercise targets tracked on wearable devices such as Fitbit or Apple Watch and get gift cards for retail stores and other perks by logging their workouts and healthy food purchases in app. In theory, everybody wins as policyholders are incentivized to adopt healthy habits and insurance companies collect more premiums and pay less in claims if customers live longer.

Privacy and consumer advocates have raised questions about whether insurers may eventually use data to select the most profitable customers while hiking rates for those who do not participate. The insurance industry has said that it is a heavily regulated industry and must justify in actuarial terms its reasons for any rate increases or policy changes, end quote. So apparently you can knock your premiums down by as much. is 15% if you participate in this plan. The way it works, apparently, is that you log your daily activity measurements and sometimes even your eating and drinking habits. In some previous vitality programs, they gave you an Apple Watch for free, and as long as you met a set of health and wellness

goals over 24 months, the watch remained free. In a piece on this in the New York Times, a John Hancock representative was straight up about the motivation behind this. Quote, the longer people live, the more money we can make. If we can call it, collectively help our customers live just a bit longer, it's quite advantageous for us as a company, end quote. But interestingly, that same time's piece did suggest that this will be a self-selecting sort of thing. People who know they can meet basic fitness goals will be attracted to these programs for the lower rates. Unhealthy people or people who don't think that they can cut it will probably go to other insurers. So John Hancock will naturally who,

over up all of the healthy people. Clever, clever, clever. I'm going to have to shove a whole bunch of things into another quick grab bag section here. Spotify just announced it will now allow indie artists to directly upload their music to the service. The upload feature is debuting in beta on an invite-only basis in the U.S.

artists will be able to schedule release dates of their content. Use Spotify's built-in analytics tools, and Spotify will offer 50% of Spotify's net revenue, for all plays and 100% royalties on the songs uploaded. So one more step in Spotify potentially cutting the record company slash middlemen out of the equation entirely. Shares of parent company Disney were actually up significantly this morning onward

that ESPN has signed more than 1 million paying subscribers to its $4.99 per month, ESPN Plus streaming service. The service was only launched in April. And for the first time in history, online ad sales will account for more than half of all U.S. ad sales this year. Online ads will reach an estimated $106.6 billion this year the first time online ads have passed the $100 billion mark. An increase of 16% year over year, according to researcher Magna Global. Of course, Google and Facebook hoovered up most of the ad dollars. Their ad sales grew by 18% and 36% this year, respectively.

Meanwhile, excluding political ads and special events like the Olympics, local TV ad sales this year will decline by 4%. Finally today, listen up, nerds. Scientists have finally found Spock's home planet of Vulcan. Apparently back in 1991, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry wrote a letter to Sky and Telescope, arguing that the Star 40, or Randy A, would likely be the location of planet Vulcan. Actually, in the Star Trek mythos, for a long time the location of Vulcan was left intentionally vague. You could always assume Vulcan was close to Earth since the Vulcans were the ones that made first contact with Zephrum Cochran.

And, of course, Vulcan was a founding member along with Earth of the United Federation of Planets. Although that didn't solve the problem of how the Romulans were a racial split off of the Vulcans. So does that mean Romulus is close as well? Let me stop there before I get too far into the weeds. Anyway, Roddenberry had consulted with astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics when he wrote the letter, and he, along with they, made the argument that since 40 A. was approximately 4 billion years old, any planet orbiting it would have plenty of time for intelligent life to evolve. Our sun is, of course, 4.6 billion years old, BT-dubs.

Well, guess what? Scientists have just found a planet right where Roddenberry wanted it to be. Quote, the discovery was made by the Dharma Planet Survey, which involves a 50-inch telescope that looks for blips in starlight that could indicate the presence of planets. The planet found orbiting 40 Orandi A is estimated to have between 8 and 9 times the mass of Earth, as well as double its radius. The planet's orbit is 42 days long, and it resides a bit inside of the 40 Arandi's systems habitable zone, making it quite hot. Researchers don't know much about the planet at this time, but it's a bit of the 40 Arandi's system's habitable zone, making it's quite hot. It's the closest Super Earth found so far, end quote. Okay, so we've got a new sponsor coming on the show next month, and as part of their promotion, they want to create some swag for the podcast.

So the obvious thing to do would be to take the TechMeme Right Home logo and just throw it on a t-shirt or a coffee mug or something, but this new sponsor wants to get a little more creative than that. So I wanted to throw it out to you guys. If there was some podcast swag that got produced, even if you wouldn't buy it yourself, what would you want to see? Is there some phrase that I use over and over again? I mean, I do say, here's what you missed today in the world of tech every day,

but is there some even verbal tick or something that you think of when you think of the show, maybe some joke I've made, some common theme like self-driving cars ain't coming by 2020 or something like that? I don't know. That's why I'm throwing it out to you guys. at me on Twitter. I'm at Brian MCC, of course. Give me some creative, funny, interesting ideas for some podcast swag, something that would look neat on a coffee mug or a t-shirt. And hey, you might actually get a chance to own one yourself someday. I'll be interested to see what you guys come up with. Talk to you tomorrow.