Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 11/29 - YouTube Jumps on the Stories Bandwagon

Episode Date: November 29, 2018

Amazon gets into self-driving cars… in a way, Google Assistant adds some familiar features, YouTube rolls out Stories, and WTF is happening in Crypto? Stories from: @RolfeWinkler Tweets: @CrankGameplays, @SavinTheBees Links: Amazon debuts a scale model autonomous car to teach developers machine learning (TechCrunch) New Parents Complain Amazon Baby-Registry Ads Are Deceptive (WSJ) An Amazon revolt could be brewing as the tech giant exerts more control over brands (Recode) Google Assistant gets visual lyrics and more in big holiday update (Engadget) YouTube is rolling out its Instagram-like Stories feature to more creators (The Verge) Facebook Considered Charging for Access to User Data (WSJ) WTF is happening to crypto? (TechCrunch) 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, November 29th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon gets into self-driving cars, sort of. Google Assistant adds some familiar features, YouTube rolls out stories, and WTF is happening in crypto.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. AWS has been holding its Reinvent conference this week, and there were a slew of announcements last night. Let me just run down some of the more interesting. Last year, Amazon said it didn't see any point in getting into the blockchain with AWS, but this year it's rolled out AWS managed blockchain, which lets you create and manage scalable blockchain networks using popular frameworks such as HyperLedger Fabric and Ethereum. S3 Glacial Deep Archive is a new storage class for Amazon Simple Storage Service

that is designed for long-term data archival work and is priced at only $1.1.1 per terabyte per month. Amazon TextTract is an optical character recognition service to extract text and data from documents. Amazon Timestream is a new fully managed time series database. AWS Lake Formation is a fully managed service to build and manage data lakes, and AWS Security Hub will allow you to centrally view

and manage security alerts and compliance checks across your AWS accounts. Cool stuff, I'm assuming. But that's not the really cool news. The really cool news is Amazon is getting into self-driving cars. Kind of. AWS also announced DeepRacer, a 118th scale radio-controlled car. But this is not just any radio-controlled car. It's a self-driving radio-controlled car.

has an Intel atom processor, a 4 megapixel camera with 1080p resolution, multiple USB ports, and a two-hour battery life. It costs $399, but is available for pre-order now on Amazon for $249. It will ship this March. So, fun little toy, right? But AWS DeepRacer also has a deeper purpose. Amazon wants developers to use it to train on a machine learning technique, called reinforcement learning or RL.

Quoting from TechCrunch, RL takes a different approach to training models than any other machine learning techniques, Amazon explained. It's a type of machine learning that works when an agent is allowed to act on a trial and error basis within an interactive environment.

It does so using feedback from those actions to learn over time in order to reach a predetermined goal or to maximize some type of score or reward. This makes it do. different from other machine learning techniques like supervised learning, for example, as it doesn't require any labeled training data to get started, and it can make short-term decisions while optimizing for a long-term goal. The new race car lets developers experiment with RL by learning through autonomous driving, end quote.

If you order one of these bad boys, you can also participate in AWS's recently announced Deep Racer League. The league kicked off today in a virtual cloud environment with six tracks and will continue into next year at AWS Global Summets worldwide. All culminating in the AWS Deep Racer 2019 Championship Cup, which will be held at Reinvent 2019. So yeah, talk about gamifying development, I guess. One more Amazon piece before we move on.

This story popped up yesterday, and it actually, actually got resolved before I could even talk about it. If you missed Tuesday's show, there was a rant at the end about how cluttered Amazon's website has gotten with all the ads, vendor options, shipping options, et cetera. But remember the ads. Over the weekend, last weekend, people began complaining online that when they signed up for something like a baby registry on Amazon, they ended up getting gifts that they never registered for. How did this happen? Well, Amazon, it turns out was charging brands, advertising fees to get their products inserted into user registries whether the users actually wanted those products on their registry or not.

Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, Kima Nieves recently received two Avino bath time sets and a box of Huggies diapers through her baby registry on Amazon. The only problem, the new mother didn't ask for the products or even want them. Instead, Johnson and Johnson and Kimberly Clark each paid Amazon hefty sums to place those sponsored products onto Ms. Nieves and other consumers' baby registries. The ads look identical to the rest of the listed products in the registry except for a small gray sponsored tag. Unsuspecting friends and family clicked on the ads and purchased the items, assuming Ms. Nieves had chosen them, end quote. If you click through to read the piece, they have, pictures showing the sponsored items with the tiny sponsored label on them. And trust me, it's so

tiny. It took me like 20 seconds to see the label, and I was looking for it. Amazon apparently sells three of what it calls native baby registry product placements each quarter for a half million dollars each. There's that vaunted advertising push we've been hearing about. But come on, this is super aggressive. I mean, if you create something like a registry and painstakingly select the items that you want on it, the items that you need on it? Doesn't that feel like you should be able to assume it's a private space? I mean, what if they did this with Amazon Holiday Wishless?

Would you end up getting Christmas presents that you never wanted also? I think the point that we need to make here, at least as it's been becoming clear over the last several weeks, is doesn't it seem like there's been some sort of cultural shun? shift inside Amazon in the last 18 months or so, they're so aggressive about everything all the sudden. Aggressive about cluttering the site, aggressive about pushing ads. In the show notes, I've also linked to a piece from Recode about how pop sockets, that popular cell phone grip slash cell phone stand thingy that you see on a lot of people's cell phones, about how popsockets

just stopped doing business recently with Amazon entirely. because Amazon suddenly got so aggressive with requests to lower prices or spend more on marketing that Popsocket CEO David Barnett felt like they were making him godfather-style offers he couldn't refuse. Barnett's quote in the piece is, it often does not feel like human beings over there. It's like a robot, end quote. So, yeah, did some new team come in at Amazon that has suddenly turned that company into a slash and burn? omnivorous and rapacious agro company.

I'd love to know the background there. I'm sure it's an amazing story. It's starting to feel a bit like Amazon has become Facebook all the sudden, copying Facebook's playbooks. If any Amazon insiders want to get in touch and give me the scoop anonymously, I'd be all ears. Just in time for the holidays, Google is bringing a whole bunch of new features to Google Assistant.

Google Assistant is, of course, the voice. assistant that you can use with your smartphone, but also with Google's Home Hub or related smart devices. Among the new features are visual lyrics. In other words, when you play a song on a Home Hub, you can see the words on screen, the better to sing along with. Google recently introduced a read-along feature for children's stories as well. And also, this is timely. You can now make lists, gift lists, shopping lists, to-do list, just say, hey, blank. Create a gift list for me. There's also a two-way nest talkback feature

that lets you speak with a visitor before letting them in if you have nest set up at your front door. And also, broadcast replies. A feature announced earlier this month begins rolling out next week. In essence, this is two-way communication between any Google smart devices. It also essentially allows you to text with a smart device from your smartphone.

Several people are pointing out that a lot of these features are copped from features that Amazon's echo devices have recently introduced. And nothing more so than this one, the Pretty Please feature. Here's how in Gadget describes it, quote, another Amazon feature that Google paid homage to is Pretty Please. It aims to encourage good manners in both children and adults by offering delightful responses when you ask it to please do something rather than just bossing it around.

For instance, if you say, hey, blank, please play some holiday music for me. It will reply with, thanks for asking so nicely. Sure, here are some songs. The feature looks very familiar to what Amazon introduced on its kid-friendly version of AL-E-X-A earlier this year, end quote. Do you like stories? Do you think stories are the future of social media? Well, YouTube apparently agrees with you. YouTube is rolling out stories to more creators today.

If you're a YouTube creator with more than 10,000 subscribers, you can now post stories, which will last for seven days on the mobile app, can be viewed by everyone. We'll show up in the up-next sidebar beside any video. And if you post a story, you can respond to fans who interact with the stories via comments or questions, but apparently you can only respond with more videos or pictures. The idea here is that since full videos often require a lot of work and production and editing, these stories are something more off the cuff that creators can use to keep engaged with their fans in between proper video posts.

Currently, a lot of YouTube creators post stories on Instagram for short-form content and behind-the-scenes stuff, so this is clearly a move to head that off at the pass. But as you may know, YouTube has a very opinionated and outspoken community. So get ready for some snark. User at Crank Gameplays tweeted, I really love how YouTube spent their time making a story feature instead of fixing the things that are broken like subboxes and recommends and just the site in general, end quote.

And user at saving the bees tweeted, YouTube community. Please fix the algorithm, subboxes and notifications. YouTube. We've heard you like Snapchat stories. boy do we have news for you. Remember those internal Facebook documents seized by UK Parliament earlier this week? Well, we've gotten our first hint of some of what might be revealed when these documents are made public next week, as the British lawmaker who has them has pledged to do.

The lead of the Wall Street Journal piece on this sums it up perfectly, quote, internal emails show Facebook considered charging companies for continued access to user data several years ago, a step that would have marked a dramatic shift away from the social media giant's policy of not selling that information, according to an unredacted court document viewed by the Wall Street Journal. The emails in the document also indicate that Facebook employees discussed pushing some advertisers to spend more in return for increased access to user information. Taken together, the internal emails show the company discussing how to monetize its user data in ways that are employed by some other tech firms, but that Facebook has seen.

said it doesn't do. At a congressional hearing in April, Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said, I can't be clearer on this topic. We don't sell data, end quote. Now, whether this is a bombshell worthy story is debatable, because on the one hand, as I just read, when the scandals broke earlier this year, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg took the stance that they were defenders of user data and always had been. They might advertise against your data, sure, but they weren't data merchants, data pushers. So this revelation shows that that maybe was not always a hard and fast

philosophical stance. Quite the opposite. Facebook at one point might have seriously considered dropping all pretense and just going into the data merchant business whole hog. They didn't, though, in the end, fair enough. Quote, we were trying to figure out how to build a sustainable business, a Facebook spokeswoman told the journal, we had a lot of internal conversations about how we

do this, end quote. So yeah, I mean, people forget this, but there was a lot of questions as late as 2010, 2011, 2012 as to whether or not Facebook could actually build a sustainable business model on top of the scale of usage that it had achieved. There was a lot of question as to whether or not Facebook was actually a good business. That was an open question for a long time until it wasn't. Indeed, as Josh Konsteen tweeted surrounding the IPO, Facebook was desperately considering tons of monetization plays as the book Chaos Monkeys details. In this case, many staffers would likely veto selling user data, but though aborted, it would now be used to validate the public's worst fears, end quote.

Indeed, if you haven't read the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia-Martinez, and you're curious about Facebook's culture and history as it was in its maturing stage, read the book Chaos Monkeys by Antonio Garcia-Martinez. Finally today, we did talk about the crypto crash last week, and though things have recovered slightly, they're still bad. In fact, for the Internet History podcast, just last night I recorded my first ever interview with a crypto founder, and he was, shall we say, chastened? Like, almost sort of wistful? Like, well, I'm not even sure where things are these days. It was really kind of fascinating, because, you know, if you've been watching these things,

from blockchain maximalism to let's see where things are going to go from here in just less than a year. It's been a wild ride. I'll actually post that episode sometimes in January. And we'll see maybe it will be a historical document at that point. Or maybe everything will have recovered and it will just be a postcard from the depths of the crash, I suppose.

Anyway, I've been hunting around for a good summation piece from somebody who was willing to speculate on why this crypto crash has happened. and in a piece called WTF is happening to crypto, John Biggs gives it to me in TechCrunch. Here are Biggs's theories. There's the bagholder theory that everyone was waiting around expecting November to be a blowout month to the upside

like it was last year. And when that didn't materialize a bunch of folks waiting for an upsurge simply sold. Then there's the tether theory. It's a bit complicated, but tether is a cryptocurrency that a lot of people use to trade in and out of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, sort of a replacement for Fiat.

But for a long, long time, certain circles in crypto have been suspicious of Tether, suspicious that Tether and the company and exchange behind it, BitFinex, were actually using Tether to manipulate the price of crypto. In fact, some people suspect that the majority of last year's price run-up might have been a manipulation scheme by BitFinex. As Biggs writes, quote, This alone could point to the primary reason Bitcoin and crypto are currently in freefall. Without artificial controls, the real price of the commodity becomes clear.

There's also the theory that Bitmain, which recently canceled its high profile and massive IPO, is behind all this because all the Bitcoin that the Chinese mining giant has been sitting on has an uncertain future now. And then there's the idea that there were just too many crappy ICOs, too many people have been burned by too much S. as it were, S-coins. But, and I'm just going to end here by reading Biggs's conclusion, because if we're going to be optimistic, I think this is the part that rings true to me. Quote, ultimately, crypto and the attendant technologies have created an industry,

that this industry is connected directly to stores of value, either real or imagined, has enervated it to a degree unprecedented in tech. After all, to use a common comparison between Linux and blockchain, Linus Torvalds didn't make millions of dollars overnight for writing a device driver in 1993. He and the entire open source industry made billions of dollars over the past 27 years. The same should be true of crypto, but the cash is clouding the issue. Ultimately, say many thinkers in the space, the question isn't whether the price goes up or down instead.

Of primary concern is whether the technology is progressing, end quote. I think that last bit is key. Even with the price dropping, if we saw tangible signs of the technology progressing, it would be easier to be sanguine about crypto. But right now, all we're really seeing is get rich quick scenesters panicking because they're losing their shirts. Although, as Ben D. Francesco tweeted, quote, waiting for the next crypto bull run right now, might be like waiting for the next.com bull run in 2002.

one never came but then one day a couple decades later we woke up to realize the internet had infiltrated and reshaped every crevice of media politics, business and culture end quote

so I was considering outlining the whole sad saga of that missing episode on Tuesday I did finally find the root cause have done a temporary fix and we'll do a permanent fix this weekend but you know it's not really that interesting

and it's over now so forget it Suffice to say, though, don't rely on products that Google has stopped supporting. Frankly, sometimes the impulses don't depend or make long-term plans around any Google product because, as we've learned many times now, any Google product might not be here in three months or three years. Anywho, sorry again for Tuesday, but I now know how to make it never happen again. And thanks to all of you who tried to be helpful on Twitter and on the podcast subreddit, Mutant Podcast Army for the win once again. Talk to y'all tomorrow.