Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 10/11 - F*** Everything, We're Doing 4 Cameras!

Episode Date: October 11, 2018

Facebook cracks down again, ahead of the election, Apple make some interesting acquisitions, how many cameras does a smartphone need, and Dieter Rams just wants Silicon Valley to slow down. Links: Facebook purged over 800 accounts and pages pushing political messages for profit (The Washington Post) Apple inks $600M deal to license IP, acquire assets and talent from Dialog to expand chipmaking in Europe (TechCrunch) Apple buys machine learning AR firm specializing in mixed realities (Apple Insider) Samsung’s Galaxy A9 is the first quad camera phone (Engadget) Samsung hopes these four cameras will save its mid-range phone lineup (The Verge) Gartner: Microsoft passes Acer to become top 5 PC vendor in the U.S. (Venture Beat) Apple plans to give away original content for free to device owners as part of new digital TV strategy (CNBC) Coinbase's Active Customers Drop 80% in Crypto Slump, Study Says (Bloomberg) Plan to Fix Journalism With Cryptocurrency Draws Skepticism (WSJ) Dieter Rams wants Silicon Valley to stop (Fast Company) 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, October 11th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook cracks down again ahead of the election. Apple makes some interesting acquisitions. How many cameras does a smartphone need? And Dieter-Rombs just wants Silicon Valley to slow down.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Facebook is taking this upcoming U.S. election very seriously, or at least it wants you to know, it is taking this election very seriously. Facebook announced this afternoon that it is removing over 800 U.S. publishers and accounts from its platform, some with more than 100,000 followers. The crime? Spamming users with political content. Facebook said these publishers violated the company's spam policies, according to the Washington Post, quote, the accounts and pages with names such as reasonable people unite and reverb press were probably domestic actors using clickbait headlines and other spammy tactics to drive users to websites where they could target

them with ads, the company said. Some had hundreds of thousands of followers and expressed a range of political viewpoints, including a page that billed itself as the first publication to endorse President Donald J. Trump. They did not appear to have ties to Russia, company officials said. Facebook said it was not removing the publishers and accounts because of the type of content they posted, but because of the behaviors they engaged in, including spamming Facebook groups with identical pieces of content, unauthorized coordination, and using fake profiles, end quote. That one page mentioned above, Nation in Distress, is the one that pitched itself as the first to endorse Trump for president. Founded in 2012, it had 3.2 million likes and over 3 million

followers. But also banned was Reverb Press, which had over 700,000 followers, according to the post, and had posts attacking President Trump and referring to Republicans as, quote, cheating scumbags, end quote. Apple usually acquires small teams when it does acquire companies. So word today that Apple is making its biggest ever acquisition in terms of employees is interesting. Apple is paying $300 million in cash to buy a portion of Dialogue Semiconductor, a European shipmaker that has been an Apple supplier since the very first iPhone. Apple is also committing $300 million to purchase the remaining part of Dialog's business. This is sort of an asset transfer and licensing deal come IP and talent acquisition.

300 employees are moving over to Apple, which represents 16% of Dialog's total workforce. So what does Dialog Semiconductor do? Apparently, the teams involved that are moving over to Apple work on power management and chip development in that area. At the same time, various outlets are reporting that late last year, Apple quietly acquired a Danish startup called Spectral, which specializes in real-time separation of objects and photos and videos for a green screen effect. Quoting Apple Insider, Spectral's process relied on machine learning and computer vision technology, even handling object separation for video running at 60 frames per second. The company touted this as useful for creating mixed reality material.

Apple's plans are uncertain, though, it could. conceivably incorporate the technology into apps like camera or clips or expand on the use of an emoji and memojis end quote as benedict evans tweeted at least in regards to the dialogue semiconductor news quote i tend to presume most primary tech stuff apple does these days has at least half an eye on glasses and or cars in a few years let me paraphrase that old onion headline screw everything. We're doing four cameras. Today, Samsung unveiled the first quad camera phone, and interestingly, it's not on a flagship phone, but on a mid-range one. The Galaxy A9 comes with four rear cameras, a 6.3-inch display, a Snapdragon 660, 6GB of RAM, and 128

gigabytes of storage. It will debut in the UK in November at 549 pounds, so about $724 U.S., which is mid-range now in the universe of $1,000 phones. Though there is no official word on a U.S. release just yet, but what about those four cameras? Five in total, with the front-facing one. According to Jamie Rigg at Engadget, Samsung is billing the Galaxy A9 as a phone optimized for the Instagram generation. Quote, each of the four lenses does something different. The main camera, if there is such a thing here, is a 24 megapixel affair, while another lens is a simple 5 megapixel sensor that captures depth information

for the obligatory bochia mode. Then you get a 10 megapixel telephoto camera with up to two times optical zoom as its unique feature, and finally an 8 megapixel ultra-wide lens with a 120-degree field of view and a slight fish-eye effect. Oh, and there's a 24 megapixel front-facing camera that should satisfy the requirements of any particularly demanding selfie kings and queens, end quote. So is this just a gimmick? Having four rear cameras just to say you're the first to have them. The verge notes that Samsung is consciously changing its strategy in terms of its phone lineup.

For years, the flashy new features tended to debut on the flagship phones and then creep down market over ensuing product cycles. Think of things like fingerprint sensors, which debuted on the high end, but are now table stakes on most phones. But Samsung is trying to mix this up as a way to differentiate phones across its lineup. Samsung Mobile CEO DJ Coe recently told CNBC, quote, In the past, I brought the new technology and differentiation to the flagship model and then moved it to the mid-end. But I have changed my strategy this year to bring technology and differentiation points starting from the mid-end, end quote. Still, is having four cameras worth anything, if we're being honest? Samsung just launched the Galaxy A7 a few weeks ago with, in air quotes here, only three cameras.

But that one extra camera doesn't really do anything for you. And in the end, you could get the A7 and save yourself some money. Every quarter, Gartner and IDC come out with their global PC shipment estimates. And we know the story by now. The PC market has plateaued or is even in long-term decline. In fact, the latest numbers continue that narrative. Gartner says global PC shipments were up only 0.1% year over year, while IDC saw a 0.9% decline.

But the interesting news is that for the first time ever, Microsoft has broken in to the top five PC vendors, at least in the U.S. market. Quote, Microsoft is still a far cry from the other place. in the top five and its shipments were in fact only up slightly by 11,000 units, gaining just 0.1 percentage points to 4.1% market share. Still, Dell and Apple were down, and the overall U.S. market was flat, down some 50,000 units in Q1, 2018. So in that context, surface sales are doing just fine.

Back to the streaming wars real quick. We had the news of the planned Warner Media streaming service yesterday, but we're still waiting on more news about the two big players slated to enter the fray, Disney and Apple. According to CNBC, Apple currently plans to make the original content it produces for its upcoming streaming service, content for which it is prepared to spend billions to produce, free to anyone who owns an Apple device. Quote, owners of Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV will find the still in the works service in the pre-installed TV application, said the people who ask not to be named because the details of the project are private.

The product will include Apple-owned content, which will be free to Apple device owners and subscription channels, which will allow customers to sign up for online-only services, such as those from HBO and Stars. Apple plans to debut the revamped app early next year, the people said, and Apple spokesman declined to comment, end quote. So free content, if you already own one of our devices, is pretty powerful. None of the other players can afford to or even have the ability to do that, which in the long term, were Apple to be successful at this, wouldn't that have antitrust implications? Movie studios can own their movie theaters, remember?

Though that law might be going away soon. And a check-in with Crypto Land. According to data from tribe capital, the volume of trading by U.S. customers on Coinbase has dropped 80% from December of last year through September of this year. That's probably not a surprise given the sharp declines in the cryptocurrency markets over that time period. Still, Coinbase is by far the platform normal people use to speculate on crypto and is often the gateway to getting people started in crypto in the first place. So if your thesis is that crypto will go mainstream and everyone will be using it once they get a taste, that does not bode well in terms of adoption by Joe and Jane Sixpack. Quote, Tribe compiled the data by analyzing credit card and other identifiable bank transfers. The resulting numbers are not comprehensive and only include U.S. transactions, but still capture overall trends, Tribe said.

Other retail-focused exchanges likely saw similar declines. Tribe is an investor in S-Fox, a smaller exchange focused on institutional investors and a Coinbase competitor. Tech website Recode reported this month that the San Francisco-based Coinbase is raising $500 million at an $8 billion valuation. If it closes that funding round, it would quintuple its valuation from last year before cryptocurrency's 2017 bull run. The news site Axios later reported that Coinbase's valuation would have been significantly higher had cryptocurrency, prices not nosedived, end quote. And civil media is a company that has created a token to use blockchain technology in a way that it has touted would save journalism.

Civil is trying to sell 34 million of its civil tokens for between $8 million and $24 million. It will then donate the proceeds of this token sale to the Civil Foundation, a sister nonprofit in order to make grants to news organizations. If you were to own a civil token, you would get to vote on which publications to fund and allow into the network. Forbes, just this Tuesday, said it would be the first major media brand to start testing Civil's blockchain, though notably pitches to others like The Washington Post and New York Times have so far been unsuccessful. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, though, on Wednesday, Civil said the token sale has attracted commitments of 2.1 million from more than 2,300 purchasers. If Civil fails to generate at least $8 million by an October 15th deadline, the sale will be canceled and all money returned.

However, regardless of whether the company hits that $8 million target, Civil could offer existing buyers the option of keeping their money in the sale under new terms, the person said, end quote. One of Civil's founders was Daniel Cyberg, a former journalist and former spokesperson for Google. It should be noted that Mr. Seiberg was fired from Civil in July, but he gave this quote to the Wall Street Journal. After undergoing a more thorough investigation of the token economics, it led me to the same conclusion that anybody who looks closely at this puzzle box of a company will reach. This is demonstrably never going to work as a business model, end quote. Finally today, I feel like there's a really good chance that listeners to this show have seen some of the documentaries of Gary Hustwit. He's the guy who did the films Helvetica, objectified and urbanized about typefaces, industrial design, and architecture. If you haven't seen especially Helvetica, but really all of them,

please, please look them up. Hustwit is sort of like the Ken Burns of design, if you will. Anyway, it almost seems inevitable in retrospect that Hustwit would eventually do a documentary on the God of Modern Design, Dider Ram's. I also assume you know who Deter Roms is, But in case you don't, let's just say that Johnny Ive has been thoroughly inspired by Roms' aesthetic. But then most modern designers have, it turns out the now 86-year-old Roms is probably done talking about his work. But he met Hustwit during the filming of Objectified and insisted he would only consent to a documentary about his life if Hustwit himself directed it. Three years later, the documentary simply called Roms. is touring the U.S. and Europe currently,

and we should be able to rent it on digital platforms in December. When the film was shown in San Francisco, 1,400 people rented out the theater and almost 1,000 more bought tickets for a second showing. According to Hustwit, the entire Apple and Facebook design teams came. The question is, did they get the message Roms was trying to impart to them? Quoting from Fast Company, that is because Roms clearly wasn't made for Normies.

Even Hustwit admits it was made for designers first. Many will be lured into this honeypot promising a rare peek into the world of a design god only to be shamed for their complicity in the world he helped create. Over 75 minutes, Roms indicts himself and his industry for destroying the environment with objects people don't need and distracting the world with screens they can't ignore. In what may be the film's most damning moment,

Roms walks into an Apple store in London and looks at a tablet with a detached sadness. while lamenting that people don't look each other in the eye anymore. I am of the opinion that all this digitization now is becoming more and more a part of our life. I think it diminishes our ability to experience things, says Roms. There are pictures that disappear one after the other without leaving traces up here, pointing to his head. This goes insanely fast, and maybe that's why we can or we want to consume so much. The world that can be perceived through the senses exudes an aura,

that I believe cannot be digitized. We have to be careful now that we rule over the digital world and are not ruled by it, end quote. The author of this fast company piece, I'm quoting from, tells Hustwit, it's great that all the tech designers came to the screening, right? Hustwit replied, totally. That's why I do feel like it's a challenge to the design world to reassess what we're producing, why we're producing it and how we could do it better. Do we really need all this stuff?

San Francisco is the center of the design world, packed with all these people, and they're listening to this 86-year-old German guy in his backyard for an hour and a half about how they're effing up, and they're loving it, and they're laughing, end quote. As Mark Wilson says at the end of the Fast Company piece, hopefully they're laughing to the point of tears. That's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC.

and don't forget my book is available for pre-order. It's called How the Internet Happened. And don't forget to go to 99designs.com forward slash tech meme to vote on those reimagined logos for the podcast. Sometime when this contest is done next week, I think there are going to be some cool t-shirts or mugs. You'll be able to get your mitts on if you're interested. Talk to y'all tomorrow.