Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/19 – Google Pay Pivots In An Interesting Way

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, November 19th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a major strategy pivot for Google Pay might be a big deal, but a minor shift in YouTube monetization is the same old, same old. Apple pays to settle an investigation into iPhone throttling,

Starting point is 00:00:52 affirm files for its IPO, Apple Silicon continues to absolutely wow people. And by the way, the iPhone 12 Pro Max camera is wowing professional photographers. Here's what you. Here's what. what you missed today in the world of tech. Google has unveiled a major redesign for Google Pay for iOS and Android, part of which is a new series of partnerships with about 11 banks to launch a mobile first bank accounts service called Plex, beginning next year in 2021. I did not know this, but Google Pay does have about 150 million users in 30 countries in its five years of existence thus far. So not earth shattering, but not bad either. This shift in direction and design, though, signals a shift towards helping people manage their personal finances, which I think could end up being a huge differentiator

Starting point is 00:01:47 for Google Pay. Forget just about paying. What if Google Pay was more like your personal banker? Google wants to be its own challenger bank, I guess. Frankly, the more details I read about this, the more I think this could be a really big deal, quoting TechCrunch. Called Plex, these mobile first bank accounts will have no monthly fees, overdraft charges, or minimum balances. The banks will own the accounts, but the Google Pay app will be the main conduit for managing them. The launch partners for this are City and Stanford Federal Credit Union. Quote, what we're doing in this new Google Pay app, think of it as combining three things into one. Google Director of Product Management, Josh Woodward said as he walked me through a demo of the new app.

Starting point is 00:02:28 The three things are three tabs in the app. One is the ability to pay friends and businesses really fast. The second is to explore offers and rewards so you can save money at shops, and the third is getting insights about your spending so you can stay on top of your money, end quote. Paying friends and businesses was obviously always at the core of Google Pay, but the emphasis here has shifted a bit. Quote, you'll notice that everything in the product is built around your relationships. Caesar Sangupta, Google's lead for payments and next billion users told me, it's not about long lists of transactions or weird numbers, all your engagements pivot around people, groups, and businesses, end quote. It's maybe no surprise then that the feature

Starting point is 00:03:08 that's now front and center in the app is peer-to-peer payments. You can also still pay and request money through the app as usual, but as part of this overhaul, Google is now making it easier to split restaurant bills with friends, for example, or rent and utilities with your roommates, and to see who already paid and who is still delinquent. Woodward tells me that Google built this feature after its user research showed that splitting bills remains a major pain point for its users. In the same view, you can also find a list of companies you have recently transacted with, either by using the Google Pay Tap and Pay feature or because you've linked your credit card or bank account with the service. From there, you can see all your recent transactions

Starting point is 00:03:46 with those companies. Maybe the most important new feature Google is enabling with this update is indeed the ability to connect your bank accounts and credit cards to Google Pay so that it can pull in information about your spending. It's basically mint light inside the Google Pay app. This is what enables the company to offer a lot of other new features in the app. Google says it is working with, quote, a few different aggregators to enable this feature, though it didn't go into details about who its partners are. It's worth stressing that this, like all the new features here, is off by default and opt in, end quote. So think of this as mint, not mint mobile, but mint.com. the pioneer of financial data aggregation, the first to do things like Plaid famously does.

Starting point is 00:04:32 Basically, all of your financial details in one place organize in a way you can understand it. The details of this seem really compelling and always have done when people offer products like this. Add on top of that Google search and AI mouse built into everything to help you find transactions. So like on a Monday morning, you could swipe around to find out how much you spent over the weekend. using those Google smarts in a smart way, even the ability to be notified of virtual coupons so you can clip them. Of course, this means sharing basically all of your financial data with Google, who swears, absolutely swears that they will never sell your info to third parties, or even share it with the rest of Google for Google's ad targeting purposes, which,

Starting point is 00:05:18 right. Because as excited as I am about the potential of this, remember, Google's going to be Google. And Google's problem is, as we've said many times before, they still have only that one cash cow advertising. And since they've not successfully ginned up another one, since they don't yet have their AWS, if you will, they're still forced to always try to squeeze more blood from that one stone. Don't be evil, died at Google a long time ago in the face of having to show quarterly earnings growth on the regs. Thus, ads slowly took over, all of organic search. Thus, everything that happens in the Google ecosystem is in the end about, yeah, shading the edges and blurring the lines so that eventually they can serve the ad maw and keep ad revenue from plateauing for just one more quarter if they can manage it. Forces like that force Google to do stuff like this. There once was a time when basically anyone could create a YouTube channel and make money off of Google throwing ads on top of those videos. But the advertisers, which of course are Google's real customers, complained that that meant that

Starting point is 00:06:35 their ads were showing up on a lot of garbage content. So a while ago, Google changed the rules. You can't monetize your YouTube channel until you have 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 hours of watched videos on your channel within a one-year period. YouTube creators complained at the time, but, you know, something, something. Don't put all your eggs in one basket. It's your fault if you build your livelihood on someone else's platform, the rules of which or out of your control, et cetera. But remember, Google needs to make those quarterly ad revenue numbers

Starting point is 00:07:05 continue to go in one direction only. So by demonetizing small channels until they prove themselves, Google was actually leaving a lot of money on the table. Money that they don't want to leave on the table. So YouTube announced yesterday that channels of all sizes, even if they've not hit that magic subscriber or watch hours number, will start to see ads on their videos once a again. So does that mean Google reverse themselves on the policy that so angered so many of their YouTube creators? Not exactly, because it turns out if you're not big enough yet to be a part of that YouTube partner program, the ads will still show up on your videos without you being able to do anything to prevent it, and you won't make any money from it because Google is going

Starting point is 00:07:52 to keep all the ad money. Only YouTube partners get a slice of the ads. In other words, Google is monetizing all those videos that it demonetized, and it's keeping all of the money for itself. Quoting Julia Alexander in The Verge. Advertising is big business for YouTube and its parent company Google, with the video site generating $5 billion in the last quarter alone. Advertising is also a big deal for creators who may rely on the site's payouts to support themselves. Now YouTube will be able to run more ads on its platform and won't have to pay a number of creators in the process. The company confirmed to the verge that the ads will still not run on videos from non-partnered creators that center on sensitive topics. These include politics, religion, alcohol,

Starting point is 00:08:32 and gambling. The news did not go over well with members of the YouTube community. The creator community's relationship with YouTube over advertising revenue has been fraught for years. In late 2016 and early 2017, YouTube creators who were in the partner program were hit by a sudden drop in advertising revenue as the platform struggled to contain disturbing children's videos and other harmful content. Then in 2018, the Logan Paul incident led to changes to the partner program and more difficulty for creators to start earning revenue. YouTube didn't say how many creators will see ads run on their videos without paying out to them, but the company confirmed channels of all sizes may see ads appear. The company will monitor the impact on creators, end quote.

Starting point is 00:09:13 Point I am making is this. Sure, go ahead and sign up for that Google personal banking feature. I mean, it sounds great even to me. Although you'll have to share all of your financial details with Google literally every dime you spend with every merchant in the world. Sure, Google promises never to use that data, consumer spending data that is literally the holy grail of what an advertiser might want in order to target ads to you, but Google promises never to do that. Promises, even though their whole MO for 20 years has been slowly crossing every line in terms of feeding their advertising beast. We've said before no one ever went broke, betting on Google being inconsistent. about what they will or won't do, especially when it comes to juicing their advertising numbers.

Starting point is 00:10:03 Just ask YouTube creators. The Cavalcade continues. A firm has filed its draft S1 for its upcoming IPO. Affirm is that payment service that you might have seen popping up on websites that lets you pay for larger purchases over months instead of all at once. How is a firm as a business? Well, for the fiscal year ending June 30th, 2020, a firm's revenue was up 93% year over year to $509.5 million, and its net losses fell just a bit to $112.6 million. So if the perfect time to go public is when your growth is accelerating or peaking right as your path to profitability is nigh, then hey, a firm is checking all the important boxes.

Starting point is 00:10:56 But I did find this bit interesting, quoting Finledger-Degger-D-Eye, Notably, the S-1 reveals that a significant portion of a firm's revenue comes from Peloton, which means that the company needs to be careful not to put all its eggs in one basket. Specifically, Affirm states Peloton was its top merchant partner, making up about 28% of its total revenue for the fiscal year ended June 30th, 2020, and 30% of its total revenue for the three months ended September 30th, 2020. The loss of Peloton as a merchant partner or the loss of any other significant merchant relationships would materially and adversely affect our business, results of operations, financial

Starting point is 00:11:32 condition, and future prospects, a firm wrote in its S-1. Other significant merchant partners include Tonal, West Elm, and Expedia, end quote. Apple has agreed to pay $113 million to settle an investigation into iPhone throttling, which was brought by 34 states and the District of Columbia, quoting the Washington Post. The company's much maligned throttling efforts that drew nationwide score, when they came to light in 2017. Stunning consumers who at the time saw it as an attempt to nudge them into buying newer, more expensive devices. States led by Arizona, Arkansas, and Indiana soon opened a probe into the matter,

Starting point is 00:12:14 and on Wednesday they secured a financial penalty and legal commitment from Apple to be more transparent in the future. Quote, Big Tech must stop manipulating consumers and tell them the whole truth about their practices and products. Arizona Attorney General Mark Bernovich said in a statement, I'm committed to holding these Goliath technology companies to account if they conceal the truth from their users, end quote. Investigators from 34 states and the District of Columbia, including Democratic and Republican attorneys general, join the settlement.

Starting point is 00:12:42 Apple declined a comment for this story and its agreement with the states does not require it to admit guilt. The company in 2018 tweaked its settings to make its battery management practices clearer to users, end quote. Nvidia's G-Force now cloud gaming service launched today on iOS as a web app, thereby bypassing Apple's app store and allowing iOS users to play Fortnite once again, quoting the verge. So any mobile Fortnite players who have been unable to access the game can simply claim the game on Epic's PC storefront and sign in with their account. and any players who already play Fortnite across mobile console and PC have likely already linked their account and should have no trouble booting up the game within GForce now, end quote. Remember, this all stemmed from Apple saying, you can't do cloud gaming on iOS without paying us our 30% Vig. But you're free to do it outside of our native app, i.e. do it in a web browser.

Starting point is 00:13:43 So now, Nvidia and soon Microsoft, which has promised an iOS version of XCloud sometime next year, are taking Apple. up on that. I said that gaming would be the thing that would crack the app store open, and we saw just yesterday it's cracked a bit. Now is gaming the thing that could break the app store entirely? Listen, today is just going to be an Apple heavy news day, not because I'm some incorrigible Apple fanboy, but just because that's how the headlines crumbled today. And mainly it's because of this dynamic. The interest and excitement that people are having about Apple Silicon keeps coming out seemingly hourly, and that's worth noting. PixelMator, for example, has released PixelMetor Pro 2.0,

Starting point is 00:14:34 which might not be enough for me to talk about as a story normally, although, I don't know, actually, that's a great app. But the interesting news is that PixelMator Pro 2.0 will run natively on Macs with the new M1 chip, and because of that, PixelMator says, features like machine learning super resolution will be up to 15 times faster on these new Macs, quoting The Verge. The big news is that PixelMetor Pro 2.0 will run natively on Macs with Apple's new M1 chip. Currently, versions of apps that were developed for Intel systems can only run on the new

Starting point is 00:15:08 Macs through an emulation layer called Rosetta 2. Other third-party developers, such as Adobe, don't plan to release the final arm-native versions of their software until later this year, so photo editors may be relieved to see PixelMator Pro support so soon after the M1's launch. You'll still be able to run PixelMator Pro 2.0 on Intel-based Macs as well. PixelMator Pro 2.0 also includes new machine learning features that take advantage of the M1's 16-core neural engine. The company says that functions like ML Super Resolution, which enlarges low-resolution

Starting point is 00:15:41 photos while preserving details and textures, will be up to 15 times faster on the new max, end quote. And how about this? Apple has apparently debuted a forked version of TensorFlow that is optimized for MacOS, and if you run it on the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with the M1 chip, say, it will train up to seven times faster than the 2020 MacBook Pro 13-inch with Intel chips inside. Quoting Venture Beat. According to Apple, the new MacOS fork of TensorFlow 2.4 starts by analyzing higher-level optimization, such as fusing layers of the neural network, selecting the appropriate device type, and compiling and executing the graph as primitives

Starting point is 00:16:27 that are accelerated by the CPU and metal performance shaders on the GPU. TensorFlow users can get up to seven times faster training on the 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1, Apple claims. Apple's internal benchmarks show that popular models like MobileNet V3 train in as little as one second on a 13-inch MacBook Pro with M1 and the new TensorFlow release,

Starting point is 00:16:49 compared with over two seconds on the, the Intel-powered 13-inch MacBook Pro running an older TensorFlow package. Moreover, the company claims that training a style transfer algorithm on an Intel-powered 2019 Mac Pro with the TensorFlow optimizations can be done in around two seconds versus six seconds on unoptimized TensorFlow releases, end quote. But also remember how if you wanted the best camera on an iPhone possible, you had to plump for the big guy, the iPhone 12 Pro Max. So I hadn't seen if anyone had actually gone and looked at if it was worth paying up for that bigger camera.

Starting point is 00:17:31 Well, I saw this blog post from the folks at Halide, which I figure they know from photography, and their conclusion was, the Pro Max's camera achieves images of quality they claim they've never seen before, quoting their conclusion. As developers of a camera app, the results are mind-blowing. It achieves images previously only seen in dedicated games. cameras with sensors four times its size. It allows photographers to get steady and well-exposed shots in conditions that weren't imaginable a year ago. It captures low-light shots beyond anything we've seen on an iPhone, by a lot. If you are an advanced user, the type that uses more than just

Starting point is 00:18:08 the stock apps, this phone offers a lot. Compare it to when Apple releases a new chip. They're already ahead of the curve, and then they release an even newer chip that blows the old one away. Some will ask, what can this even be used for? Before you know it, you have a new chip. You have a little bit of the curve. have console quality graphics and amazing AR experiences. We'd compare this camera to a next-generation chip. In daily use, an average person won't notice the signal-to-noise ratio or longer lens or superb stabilization and sensitivity. But as developers like us build apps for it, and this camera system works its way into future iPhones over the next few years, we can expect even the traditional camera market to be forced to step up. The iPhone 12 Pro Max is a pro photographer's

Starting point is 00:18:50 iPhone, and we couldn't be more excited to start building for it, end quote. And finally, if you like me have been thrilled by the ability to put shortcuts on the home screen of your iPhone at long last, you've likely bemoan the fact that it's still been sort of a cluge when you tapped a shortcut to, say, immediately route a course to a favorite location in Apple Maps. It won't actually open in the Apple Maps app directly. It has to go through the shortcuts app first, then to that opened app that you were shortcutting to. Well, no more, quoting TechCrunch. In iOS 14.3 beta 2, the shortcuts app will now no longer open when you tap on an app shortcut on your iPhone's home screen. That means users who have created custom icons

Starting point is 00:19:40 for their favorite apps as part of their iOS 14 home screen makeover will no longer be annoyed with this intermediate step where the shortcuts app opens before the actual app does. This change was first spotted by Max Stories founder Federico Vitici, end quote. I swear I don't like to do a day when I basically only talk about two companies. Today it was Google and Apple with a brief mention of a firm, I guess. But again, I can only deal you the hand that I myself have been dealt. And I would be doing you a disservice if I didn't highlight how excited people have been getting over all of this Apple Silicon stuff. Anyway, we recorded such an amazing bonus episode with Chris Messina last night.

Starting point is 00:20:28 Thank you to those listeners who tuned in and contributed questions. I cannot wait for you all to hear this and give me some feedback on this one over the weekend. We'll go up on Saturday, of course. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/19 – Google Pay Pivots In An Interesting Way

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