Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 09/29 – A Kindle You Can Write On

Episode Date: September 29, 2022

Meta takes down an app that tried to strip out the cruft from Instagram (but also the ads). Bunch of new Maps features from Google. All the headlines from yesterday’s Amazon event, including a Kindle you can write on. And text to image generators are cool. But you know what’s really cool, text to video generators. Sponsors: Titan.com/ride Links: The OG App promised an ad-free Instagram feed then got pulled from App Store (TechCrunch) The 11 biggest announcements at Amazon’s hardware launch event (The Verge) Amazon’s Kindle Scribe is an E Ink tablet for reading and writing (The Verge) Here are all of the new features and updates coming to Google Maps (TechCrunch) SWIFT Partners With Crypto Data Provider Chainlink on Cross-Chain Protocol in TradFi Play (CoinDesk) Meta’s new text-to-video AI generator is like DALL-E for video (The Verge) 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, September 29th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough. Today. Meta takes down an app that tried to strip out the creft from Instagram, but also the ads. A bunch of new maps features from Google, all the headlines from yesterday's Amazon event, including a Kindle you can write on. And text to image generators are cool, but you know what's really cool? Text to Video Generators. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. So somehow this fell through the cracks this week, but earlier this week, A company called Unafeed launched what it called the OG app for Android and iOS,

which let users create and share Instagram feeds without ads or suggested posts, similar to how Twitter lists works. Quoting TechCrunch. Users can log into their Instagram account, and it shows the home feed right away, but the app removes ads and suggested posts from their home feeds as well, plus it lets users create alternative feeds and share them with friends, Think of it as Twitter lists, but for Instagram. For example, you can create different feeds for food, cocktails, tennis, movie celebrities, and photographers without following all those accounts.

Users can choose a default feed on launch. This way, users can give priority to another list over their own home feed. This is useful when a user's interest-related feed would have more engaging content than the default feed, end quote. But then yesterday, Unifeed said Apple had removed the OG app from the app store, the app had apparently achieved the rank of number 50 in all of the app store. And this morning, Meta confirmed taking what it called enforcement actions against the OG app for, well, probably for obvious reasons. How dare anyone make Instagram better?

But also, of course, you can't cut meta out of its own business, right? Quoting in Gadgett. This app violates our policies and we're taking all appropriate enforcement actions, a meta spokesperson said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to elaborate on, what those actions were or if it had been in contact with Apple, but pointed to a blog post outlining Meta's policies barring clone sites. A clone site is a third-party site that duplicates in whole or in part the content of an existing site, Meta explains. On Twitter, the developers of

the OG apps said their entire team had been permanently banned from Facebook and Instagram as a result of their ties to the service. Users deserve the right to control what they consume and OG will continue to defend and fight for that right. Hardik Patil, one of the apps founders told in gadget. He said he had received no direct communication from Meta, end quote. Yeah, I don't think that argument's going to fly legally at all. Meta's policy has long banned third-party clients, or at least clone clients, and they've sued many developers who have cloned their services, though it's worth noting that I believe at this moment the app is still available on Android. As teased yesterday and as promised, Amazon announced all the things yesterday.

trying to pick through the various headlines for the most meaningful right now, beginning with Alexa getting a bunch of smart home features like a multi-view stream and scheduling. Amazon says Alexa triggers more than 30% of smart home interactions without users having to say anything. Amazon's ring added bird's eye view, 3D motion detection to the spotlight camera pro and virtual security guard for small businesses to the Astro Robot. Amazon unveiled its fifth generation $50.50.0.0.000 echo dot with clock, which doubles as EROMesh Wi-Fi extenders. So your echo dot can now extend your home internet. And it also has a temperature sensor and deeper base. Also say hello to a refreshed Fire TV Cube Media player with Wi-Fi 6E for

$140 that also allows you to control your cable box with your voice. has gotten into the higher-end TV business as well with the Fire TV Omni Q-led series starting at $800 and up. There's also a refreshed Alexa voice remote pro for $35. And there's the $140-dollar HALO rise, a bedside sleep tracker that uses contactless sensors coming later in 2022 with a free six-month Halo subscription from Amazon. There's also Amazon Roadside Assistance, accessible from the Alexa app. Echo Auto and other Echo Devices for contacting a local roadside assistance provider. What else? There's an upgraded Echo Auto device, an Alexa-based BMW voice assistant. Amazon's Astro Robot can now detect your pet, the better to monitor it, but also, I guess,

to avoid running it over. If you want a brief rundown of all of these announces, I've got a link to a Verge piece that summarizes all of this and more. But the big news was, yes, they did indeed update the high end of the Kindle line, but they did so by coming directly for my beloved note-taking tablet the Remarkable 2. The $340Kindal Scribe is a Kindle Oasis-like device for reading, but also a remarkable like device for writing with a 10.2-inch E-ink display and two stylus options available for pre-order as of yesterday. Quoting the verge. With a 10.2-inch E-ink screen, a stylus that attaches to the side of the device and a bunch of new software, the 310.3,000, the 3.3 $39 scribe is trying to be as much a tablet as an e-book reader. It's available for pre-order

today, and Amazon promises it'll be out before the holidays. You can buy it with one of two stylus options, a basic pen or a premium pen for $30 more that also includes a customizable shortcut button and an eraser sensor at the top. Both use the same WACOM EMR technology and magnetically attached to the side of the scribe but don't have batteries or need to be charged. Amazon built new note-taking capabilities into its reader so you can tap on a passage and scribble a note, similar to the way you'd highlight or type a note on the on-screen keyboard. Those handwritten notes are stored in your Kindle collection along with everything else. One of the biggest knocks against e-book readers has been that they don't support marginalia,

the quick reactions and scribbles that so many bookish types like to leave on their pages. The scribe brings a lot of that back. A bigger screen should also make images and charts easier to work with. a color e-ink screen would be even better, but that's apparently for a future Kindle. The device also supports PDF markup and can display saved web pages and other file formats. Amazon even partnered with Microsoft to put a button into Word that'll let you export a document right to your Kindle. The whole idea is over time you want to make sure that it's in your natural workflow.

Amazon said, Amazon's document sending features haven't been particularly useful in the past, but the company says the team is working on making it easier to get all your stuff on and off the scribe. Right now, you won't be able to see your notes in the Kindle app on other devices, but Amazon says that's coming soon. The scribe borrows its asymmetric design from the Kindle oasis with that chunky bezel on one side meant as a handhold. One hand on the device and one hand on your pen seems to be how Amazon imagines most people using the scribe. It's 5.8 millimeters thick and weighs 430 grams, which makes it a little thinner and a little lighter than the most recent iPad air. About the battery life? It sounds like your experience will

depend on how much you write. Amazon says the Scribe will last 12 weeks based on a half hour of reading a day, but just three weeks based on a half hour of writing every day. The difference is most likely due to the scribe's screen having to refresh far more often to show your scribbles, and it means heavy writers might not get the weeks of battery Amazon advertises. My colleague Alex Kranz says she gets one to two weeks out of her books note air, so that might be a good barometer here too. The formula works, at least for some users. The Remarkable 2 is a solid E-ink tablet with plenty of devoted users and more powerful Android-powered devices from companies like Books are becoming popular as well. Even Kobo beat Amazon to the E-Ink writing and reading tablet game with the Sage and Elipsa, end quote.

Yes, given my love for The Remarkable 2, I couldn't resist pre-ordering this one, because if there's one thing I don't love about the Remarkable is its software integrations. put books on my remarkable, but having access to my Kindle library as well is something that I just couldn't pass up. From the actual plausible use case for the blockchain file, news that Swift is working with blockchain data provider chain link on a cross-chain interoperability protocol to let Swift messages instruct on-chain token transfers, quoting CoinDesk. Swift, the interbank messaging system that allows for cross-border payments, is working with chain. Link, a provider of price feeds and other data to blockchains on a cross-chain interoperability

protocol, CCIP, in an initial proof of concept. CCIP will enable swift messages to instruct on-chain token transfers, helping the interbank network to be able to communicate across all blockchain environments. This will help accelerate the adoption of distributed ledger technology, DLT blockchains, and benefit various institutions across capital markets, chain link co-founder Sergey Nazarov said at the SmartCon 2020 conference in New York City on Wednesday. Swift's strategy director Jonathan Aaronfeld-Solet said that one of the reasons working with ChainLink on CCIP has been successful is that there is, quote, undeniable interest in crypto from traditional investors,

traditional finance or Tradify players want access to various digital and traditional assets on one network that can connect to different types of asset classes, Solay said. The partnership between ChainLink and Swift and cross-chain interoperability will help bridge the gap between traditional and digital assets for tradfi institutions, he added. ChainLink's native token is Link, L-I-N-K, end quote. Google has announced new Maps features, including the ability to visually soar over some areas, 250 more landmark views, enriched neighborhood info, and AR search, quoting TechCrunch. The upcoming immersive view feature, which Google first announced at I-O-N-May,

is designed to help you plan ahead and get a deeper understanding of a city before you visit it. Immersive View leverages a combination of computer vision and AI technology to fuse together Street View with aerial imagery with what the weather, traffic, and crowds will be like on a given day and time. The feature allows users to explore by visually soaring over an area to see what it may look like. Using predictive modeling, Immersive View automatically learns historical trends to determine what an area will be like tomorrow, next week, or even next month. For example, say you're planning to visit Oracle Park in San Francisco and want to check it out before you go. You can use Immersive View to see where the parking lots and entrances are and also see what the weather will be like so you can dress accordingly. You can also use the feature to glide down to street level to see how busy nearby restaurants will be on that given day.

Amercive View is launching in Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Tokyo in the coming months on Android and iOS. Google says it will add more cities in the future. Google also announced that it's launching over 250 photorealistic aerial views of global landmarks today, which it says marks a step toward its goal to offer a more immersive map. Today's expansion comes as Google added 100 aerial views of global landmarks to maps in June. As for Neighborhood Vibe, the new feature is designed to give users the ability to instantly see the vibe of any neighborhood through photos and information from the Google Maps community. Neighborhood Vibe instantly shows you trendy places to highlight what's interesting about a specific neighborhood.

The new feature is launching globally in the coming months on Android and iOS. You can use the feature to see if a neighborhood has an artsy vibe or has an exciting food scene, so you can decide how you want to spend your time there. Google says that the feature aims to help users decide what's worth exploring by surfacing local gems right on the map. Google also announced that it's bringing search functionality to live view, the feature that overlays arrows and directions right on top of your view of the world. The new search with live view feature lets you use your camera to find essential places like shops, ATMs and restaurants when you're on the go. Say you're in a place that you're unfamiliar with and you

want to find the nearest ATM, you can lift up your camera and search to instantly see the ATMs in the area, end quote. Finally today, OpenAI has removed the waitlist for Doll E, giving everyone immediate access to that text to image AI service, so you know, go have at it. But Meta said this morning, hold my beer, quoting the verge. A team of machine, learning engineers from Facebook's parent company Meta has unveiled a new system called Make a Video. As the name suggests, this AI model allows users to type in a rough description of a scene, and it will generate a short video matching their text. The videos are clearly artificial with blurred subjects and distorted animation, but still represent a significant

development in the field of AI content generation. In a Facebook post, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg described the work as Amazing Progress, adding, it's much harder to generate video than photos because beyond correctly generating each pixel, the system also has to predict how they'll change over time, end quote. The clips are no longer than five seconds and contain no audio but span a huge range of prompts. The best way to judge the model's performance is to watch its output. Each of the videos below was generated by make a video and captioned with the prompt used to generate the video. However, it's also worth noting that each video was provided to the verge by meta, which is not currently allowing anyone access to the model.

That means the clips could have been cherry-picked to show the system in its best light. Again, while it's clear these videos are computer-generated, the output of such AI models will improve rapidly in the near future. As a comparison, in just the space of a few years, AI image generators have gone from creating borderline incomprehensible pictures to photorealistic content. And though progress in video could be slower, given the near-limiless complexity of the subject matter, the prize of seamless video generation will motivate many institutions and companies to pour great resources into the project. In Mehta's blog post announcing Make a Video,

the company notes that video generation tools could be valuable for creators and artists, but as with text-to-image models, there are whirring prospects too. The output of these tools could be used for misinformation, propaganda, and more likely, based on what we've seen with AI image systems and deepfakes, generating non-consensual pornography

that can be used to harass and intimidate women. Meta says it wants to be, quote, thoughtful about how we build new generative AI systems like this, and is only currently publishing a paper on the make-of-video model. The company says it plans to release a demo of the system, but does not say when or how access to the model might be limited, end quote. Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific, our first Twitter space in about a month. Chris and I are going to talk Crypto Winter, the NFT crash, Apple antitrust stuff,

especially relating to a story that I didn't cover involving the App Store and NFTs. We'll probably also get to that new Kindle. whatever other stories Chris and I missed talking about during our hiatus. Quick Wikipedia rabbit poll that I went down last night. You know how the family that controls the rights to the James Bond films is called the Broccoli. You know, ha, ha, their name is broccoli, literally like the vegetable. But it turns out the broccoli's claim that the vegetable itself is named after their ancestors, the Broccoli of Carrara, Italy.

Which sounds like myth-making. until you look up broccoli, the vegetable on Wikipedia, and realize that the modern form of broccoli was probably bred in the Carrara region of Italy, also famous for its marble, of which, you know, statues like Michelangelo's David is carved from. So, I don't know, neither here nor there, but fun little fact. Talk to you tomorrow.