Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/06 - Huawai’s CFO Arrested and Stock Markets Quake

Episode Date: December 6, 2018

Huawai’s CFO arrested and stock markets quake, Google’s Allo joins the crowded Google Deadpool, Lyft files for an IPO and are Amazon’s robots finally rebelling?Sponsors:DatadogHQ.com/RideHomeMetalab.coLinks:Canada arrests Huawei’s global chief financial officer in Vancouver (The Globe and Mail)Microsoft is rebuilding its Edge browser on Chrome and bringing it to the Mac (The Verge)Google is shutting down Allo (The Verge)Ride-hail firm Lyft races to leave Uber behind in IPO chase (Reuters)These Confidential Charts Show Why Facebook Bought WhatsApp (Buzzfeed)Firefly Nets $21.5 Million Seed Round To Boost Ride-Hail Driver Revenues With On-Car Ads (Crunchbase News)Cuba to roll out mobile internet for the first time (CNBC)Robot Accidentally Hospitalises 24 Amazon Workers After It Sprays Them With Bear Repellent (Huffington Post) 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, December 6, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. Huawei's CFO arrested and stock markets quake.

Google's Allo joins the crowded Google Deadpool, lift files for an IPO, and are Amazon's robots finally rebelling? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, once again, tech has found itself in the midst of the geopolitical and economic back and forth between China and the U.S. Canada has arrested Huawei's chief financial officer Meng Wangzhou, who now faces extradition to the U.S. on a warrant from New York State, which claims that she violated U.S. trade sanctions against Iran. In case you've forgotten, Huawei is one of the giants of the Chinese tech industry, quoting the Globe and Mail. Huawei said in a statement to the globe that Ms. Meng faces, quote, unspecified charges in the Eastern District of New York and that she said, was arrested when she was transferring flights in Canada. Quote, the company has been provided with very little information regarding the charges and is

not aware of any wrongdoing by Ms. Meng. The company believes the Canadian and U.S. legal systems will ultimately reach a just conclusion, Huawei said, and added the company, quote, complies with all applicable laws and regulations where it operates, including applicable export controls and sanction laws, end quote. Now here's the wrinkle, the CFO in question. Meng Wangzhou is not only Huawei's CFO and deputy chair of Huawei's board, she is also the daughter of the company's founder, Ren Zheng Phi. As Tom Gara tweeted, quote,

Imagine an Apple exec who is also Tim Cook's daughter arrested in Singapore for extradition to China on charges of selling stuff to Taiwan, contra to Chinese law, end quote. But actually, it is more than that because Meng is considered the heir apparent at the company and functionally it's number two. And it's even crazier than that because if you've been following these things, President Xi and President Trump just recently had dinner

where they signed off on a so-called 90-day truce on their ongoing tariff and trade war brinksmanship. As I am writing these words, the stock market is down sharply and all of the talking heads on CNBC have been saying all day that this drop is directly attributable to Ms. Meng's arrest because traders fear that this could cause

the trade truce to unravel completely. So from rumor to fact, and then when that happens, you've got to report the fact, if you've previously reported the rumor. Microsoft today confirmed it will rebuild its edge web browser to run on Google's open source chromium project, and this is new news, will also make it available on MacOS and Windows 7 and Windows 8. But unlike what was rumored, the Edge brand. and is not going away.

And if you already use Edge on Windows, all you'll notice going forward is web pages will render more like they do on Chrome, but also Edge users will apparently get access to Chrome extensions in the near future. So this is probably just a straightforward case of market share. Chromium-based web browsers are so dominant in the market, web developers and designers don't often care about designing for anything else.

And the MacOS news is probably attributable to a ton web developers using Macs to develop. So Edge needs to be there without forcing developers to dual boot Windows or something like that. Microsoft hasn't set a date for the browser to show up on MacOS, but both that occurrence and the Chromium Edge browsers should probably show up sometime next year.

What did I say just last month? Don't depend on Google Services because you never know when they will sunset. themselves. And weirdly, messaging services seem to be especially star-crossed. It doesn't help that Google has tried its hand at about a dozen different types of messaging services,

and none of them have really stuck. Well, another one bites the dust because Google has announced it will stop working on chat app, Allo. Allo will stop working entirely in March of 2019. And Google says it will be focusing its messaging efforts going forward

on, well, that messaging service that we've been talking about, the one that Google imagines as a replacement for SMS, called, again, messages built on its so-called RCS chat standard. It's confusing, I know. And then there's this, quoting the Verge. The timing for Allo's pending shutdown is particularly apt, given that Verizon is set to officially launch RCS chat

on the Pixel 3 and 3XL on December 6th. Unlike ALO, RCS chat will be carrier-based in its implementation and could finally give Google the sort of iMessage competitor it's been looking for on Android for all these years, albeit through a service that won't actually be run by Google at all, end quote. All right, to sum up here, Google Hangouts, still alive, I think? That's kind of unclear to me. Duo, definitely still alive. And messages is slated to become the one messaging product to rule them all. So I guess things will get less confusing as ALO gets taken out of this equation, but I won't blame any of you if you haven't been able to follow anything that I've said in this segment. As it was hoping to do, Lyft has beaten competitor Uber to an IPO, or at least it has gotten the ball rolling sooner than Uber has.

Lyft announced that it has filed with the SEC for an IPO, but, quoting Reuters, the company, which was last valued at about $15 billion, did not specify the number of shares it was selling or the price range for the offering in a confidential filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday. The IPO is slated for the first half of 2019. Sources have told Reuters, Uber is expected to pursue an IPO next year that could value it at about $120 billion, while home renting company Airbnb valued at $31 billion is also seen listing in 2019, end quote. I did want to follow up on a detail from that Facebook docu dump from the UK Parliament yesterday.

Among the emails and messages in there were some that showed how Facebook used the VPN app Anavo, which it later acquired, to closely track the rise and growth of WhatsApp, which of course Facebook viewed as a competitive threat, and of course it later acquired. In short, Anavo allowed Facebook to get a granular look at how WhatsApp was outpacing Facebook Messenger on mobile in certain key markets. So that's why Facebook ultimately paid a king's ransom of $19 billion for WhatsApp.

Charlie Wurzel and Ryan Mack at BuzzFeed looked into this, and this is how they described the story. Facebook used Anavo's engagement data to see WhatsApp was beating out popular apps like Tumblr, 4Square, and Vine around 2012, 2013. WhatsApp was sending 8.2 billion messages a day

compared to Facebook messengers 3.5 billion a day at that point. And this was right when Facebook was making its vaunted pivot to being a mobile first company and making messaging a core service. In identifying mobile usage trends, Anavo became a crucial tool for Facebook to survey its competition. The only issue, the data wasn't exclusive to Facebook. But that all changed in October 2013 when Facebook purchased Anavo for $100 million. By acquiring Anavo and turning it into a private tool, the company took away one of the best avenues for understanding. mobile trends outside of Facebook's ecosystem.

The social network was then free to track app usage and trends even at very early stages. If a potential Facebook killer was on the rise, Facebook could hypothetically spot it before anyone else. Five months later in February of 2014, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, end quote. Though caveat, caveat, caveat, as Benedict Evans tweeted, the importance of WhatsApp in 2014 was not a secret. It was obvious to anyone paying attention. The numbers that mattered were public.

Those ECG features on the Apple Watch Series 4 went live today for U.S. users as a part of the most recent WatchOS 5.1.2 update, thereby allowing users to detect irregular heart rhythms. In a blog post, Apple said, quote, starting today the ECG app on Apple Watch Series 4 marks the first direct-to-consumer product that enables consumers to take an electrocardiogram right from their wrist, capturing heart rhythm in a moment when they experience symptoms like a rapid or skipped heartbeat, and helping to provide critical data to physicians. The irregular rhythm notification feature on Apple Watch can now also occasionally check heart rhythms in the background and send a notification if in a regular heart rhythm that appears to be

atrial fibrillation is identified. It's been a while since I've done a funding round story, so let me tell you about Firefly. Firefly wants to use GPS and other sensors to display contextual advertising on ride-sharing cars, and it just announced a $21.5 million seed round co-led by NFX, Pelion Venture Partners, decent capital, and Jeffrey Hosenbold of the SoftBank Vision Fund,

which might explain why this was a pretty large seed round. Apparently, until now, Firefly, the company, has been bootstrapping a proof of concept. Apparently, it has already run 50 advertising campaigns across more than 110,000 hours of drive time on ride-hailing cars in San Francisco and Los Angeles. So, as Jason DeRally put it in CrunchBase, quote, A car is just a packet carrying a payload through a network, so plopping an ad unit atop it, as it carams from node to node is kind of gross, but probably, a viable business, end quote. Which, yeah, but traditional cabs have had ads on them forever, right? They're usually sort of like cardboard placards or something that swap out different messages weekly or

monthly or whatever. But now imagine a location aware screen at a top in Uber. Is it stopped at a light in front of a Starbucks maybe? Hey, coupon code for that Starbucks. Click through to Jason's article in the show notes. This is actually an interesting business. Yes. targeted real-time location-aware ads, but also you could have things like weather-specific ads, context-specific ads. And at least this is the plan for now. Firefly wants to share the ad revenue with the drivers of the ride-sharing vehicles. Firefly says the average driver could earn $300 a month in extra revenue for putting the digital billboards on their cars. Firefly says it also wants to share its sensor data with cities

so that they can use that data to do things like monitor traffic situations or even air quality. And Firefly is setting aside 10% of ad inventory for local nonprofits and related non-commercial potentially community-specific messaging and announcements. When you think of places in the world where the modern Internet, as we understand it, doesn't quite exist, you often think of North Korea, of course, but I did not know. know about Cuba until David Belson in the subreddit turned me on to an article from CNBC

outlining how the Cuban State Telecon Company is rolling out 3G cell phone service for the first time today. Apparently the Cuban state runs internet cafes, which opened in 2013, and Cuban households were only able to get home internet and public Wi-Fi hotspots beginning in 2017, which coincidentally was also the year that Google servers went live in Cuba, making Google the first foreign internet company to operate in Cuba. Quoting CNBC, announcing the deal on television on Tuesday night, executives from Cuba's state telecom monopoly E-T-E-C-SA said they will offer packages of data ranging from 600 megabytes for seven convertible Cuban pesos, or around $7, to four gigabytes.

for 30 Cuban pesos, which is around $30. According to trading economics, the average Cuban in 2017 took home a state salary equating to around $30 each month. So yeah, that's pretty pricey for the average Cuban. If you think your cell phone bill is high, imagine that your cell phone bill was your entire monthly paycheck. Finally, today, I checked and double-checked, and I'm fairly sure this story, is on the up and up, and it's not a story from the onion, but if I was fooled, shame on me. According to the Huffington Post, but now a lot of other venues that I checked are reporting

this too. 24 Amazon workers in New Jersey were hospitalized yesterday after a robot sprayed them with bear repellent. I think the only sensible thing to do here is just quote, quoting from the Huff Po. A robot hospitalized 24 Amazon workers after it accidentally tour a can of bear repellent spray in a warehouse in New Jersey on Wednesday, officials said. The workers were treated at five different hospitals in Robbinsville, New Jersey. One remains in a critical condition and an additional 30 workers were treated at the scene,

according to ABC News. Bear repellent is made with capesin, which is also present in pepper spray. When it comes into contact with humans, it can lead to difficulties breathing and cause severe pain, especially if it gets in the eyes or mouth. The warehouse, which is approximately 1.3 million square feet, was given the all-clear by Wednesday evening, end quote. So, of course, I want to express any industrial accident, people hospitalized, not funny.

I sincerely hope everyone is okay and recovers. But the headline when I saw it on Twitter this morning said something like robot accidentally sprays Amazon workers with bear repellent and the original poster, who I'm sorry I didn't fave, so I don't know who it was, replied by saying, accidental. Yeah, right. Yes, when the robots rise up and take over,

they're probably just going to grab whatever weapons are on hand, I guess. Even bear repellent. Hey, real quick and random question, among the tens of thousands of you out there listening to me right now, surely some of you are search marketing gurus right, like specifically AdWords gurus, or maybe you know an AdWords guru or work for one. I've got an AdWords project for a side project of mine,

and I can't seem to get it to run right. So if anyone wanted to consult with me on it real quick, I'd be happy to pay for your time, and it could possibly turn into a full-on consulting contract managing this specific AdWords campaign that I want to do. If you really are truly experienced in this field, and can answer why I can't get the one thing to work that I want to make work. Please get in touch.

Podcast at Techmeme.com if you're an AdWords guru, or maybe if you're an AdWords employee at Google even. Thanks. Talk to you all tomorrow.