Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/13 - Apple Keeps Austin Weird

Episode Date: December 13, 2018

Apple keeps Austin weird with a new campus, RobinHood launches checking and savings accounts, hands on with the Apple Watch ECG thingy, and the most disliked video in YouTube history. Sponsors:MacStadium.com/ridehome Tiny.websiteLinks:Apple to invest $1 billion in new Austin campus (Axios)Amazon Hires Lobbyists for N.Y. Site and Tries to Fend Off Ocasio-Cortez’s Supporters (NYTimes)Amazon Went to City Hall. Things Got Loud, Quickly. (NYTimes)High-Tech Degrees and the Price of an Avocado: The Data New York Gave to Amazon (NYTimes)After losing half its value, Nvidia faces reckoning (TechCrunch)Robinhood launches no-fee checking/savings with Mastercard & the most ATMs (TechCrunch)A look at the Apple Watch’s ECG, from someone who needs it (Ars Technica)Apple now has dozens of doctors on staff, showing it's serious about health tech (CNBC)POSTMATES' QUEST TO BUILD THE DELIVERY ROBOT OF THE FUTURE (Wired)YouTube Rewind 2018 is officially the most disliked video on YouTube (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 Tech Meme Ride Home for Thursday, December 13th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple keeps Austin Weird with an expanded campus. Robin Hood launches checking and savings accounts, hands-on with the Apple Watch ECG thingy,

and the most disliked video in YouTube history comes from YouTube. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apparently, this is a thing now. Tech companies announce new campuses in various new cities, or second headquarters, which someone on Twitter joked should be called hindquarters, because if you've got a headquarters,

then your big second location is your hindquarters. Well, Apple has new hindquarters, kind of. They've announced a $1 billion campus that they will be building in Austin, Texas, to initially support 5,000 employees with the possibility of ramping that up to 15,000 employees. Apple already has 6,200 employees in Austin. It's actually Apple's largest center of employment outside of Cupertino.

With this expansion, Apple would become Austin's largest private employer. But hold your horses, Oprah, because you get a campus, you get a campus, you get a campus, and by you, I mean Seattle, San Diego, and Culver City, because each of those cities will get larger Apple campuses as well. about 1,000 employees each, and Pittsburgh, New York, Boston, Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado, you're also getting expanded operations. This is all a part of Apple's stated plan to add 20,000 domestic positions in the U.S. by 2023. Now for the fine details from Axios, quote, Apple is getting some incentives for the Austin expansion in the form of a $25 million grant from the state of Texas and what's likely to be tens of millions of dollars in local property tax abatements.

However, that's a tiny fraction of what Amazon sought and got for its HQ2 moves in Virginia and New York. And Apple will still be providing fresh property tax revenue to the county, end quote. Speaking of that, there was a piece up in the New York Times on Tuesday about how Amazon is trying to quell opposition to its new New York City offices by hiring well-connected lobbyists and taking to the streets, hear the concerns of actual Queens residents. Quote, the extent of their reach could be felt at City Hall on Tuesday where two newly hired lobbyists Mark Weprin, a former Queens City Councilman, and Ed Wallace, another former councilman, conferred with city officials in the soaring marble

rotunda and made the case for the company. The timing was not coincidental. Amazon executives are expected to face withering questioning before the New York City Council at a public hearing on Wednesday, end quote. So yeah, that council meeting happened yesterday, and it was, well, raucous might be one word to describe it. The third link in the show notes has a link to a video from inside the meeting. There were banners unfurled, chance of Amazon has got to go, et cetera, et cetera. Also in The Times yesterday was a piece from Karen Weiss.

Apparently on Monday, New York City posted the 253-page proposal. to Amazon in order to win the hindquarters sweepstakes originally. The city took down the proposal quickly, saying it had to check with Amazon before making it public, but Karen downloaded it before they took it down, and thus we get a look at the type of data that Amazon hoovered up from cities it was considering for its hindquarters. Amazon asked for things like the cost of a gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, an avocado at local supermarkets. It inquired about the ability of the city to use eminent domain to acquire land, but it was most interested in educational matters.

Quote, Amazon asked for detailed information on the availability of machine learning specialists, user experience designers, and hardware engineers, three jobs critical to its growth. The proposal says that New York University awarded 64 undergraduate and 63 graduate degrees in integrated digital media, which includes design in the past three years. Amazon also learned that Columbia University has outreach programs for STEM programs for K-12 schools in the Bronx and Upper Manhattan that reached 3,682 students last year, and that Columbia planned to expand the offering, end quote. It's the tax incentives that are getting all the headlines, but in the end, Amazon's decision really was all about access to talent. Quick check in with Nvidia. In 2017 in the first half of this year,

Nvidia was probably the highest flying tech company out there. It's stock doubled, tripled, quadrupled, as the company rode the exploding demand for graphics chips, for cryptocurrency, machine learning, and autonomous vehicle applications. But, well, things haven't been quite so rosy lately. In fact, Nvidia's stock is down 48.8% just since, October 1st. As you can imagine, part of this is because cryptocurrency revenue is drying up. I think we've even talked about that before, but also quoting TechCrunch. When it comes to owning

next generation application workflows, Nvidia is facing robust competition from startups and established players who want to access this potentially gigantic market. Even its potential customers are competing with it. Facebook is reportedly designing its own chips. Apple has been doing so for years. Google has been in the game for a while and Amazon is getting into the game fast. Invitya has the know-how to compete, but these companies also understand the nuances of their applications really, really well. It's a tough market position to be in, end quote. And then there's what else, the recent geopolitical angle, quoting from the Wall Street Journal. Invita executives are watching the trade fight with growing unease over whether it will curb its access to Chinese customers, according to a person

familiar with the matter. Almost 20% of Nvidia's $9.7 billion in revenue last year came from China. Many of its chips are used there for assembly into other products, and it has invested heavily to tap China's burgeoning AI industries. The company is also concerned that deteriorating relations between the world's two biggest economies are causing Beijing to double down on efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. suppliers of key hardware, such as chips, by nurturing homegrown competitors, eating into Nvidia's long-term business, end quote. Talk about a perfect storm situation. FinTech startup and investing app Robin Hood has launched checking and savings accounts for customers

in the U.S. with a 3% interest rate and no minimum balances or fees for overdrafts or foreign transactions. Quoting TechCrunch, today Robin Hood launches checking and savings accounts in the U.S. with a Mastercard debit card issued through Sutton Bank that starts shipping December 18th. Users earn 3% on all the dough they keep with Robin Hood, yet there's no minimum balance or fees for monthly membership, overdrafts, foreign transactions, or card replacements.

That's a pretty sweet deal compared to the other leading banks that all charge for some of that or offer much lower interest rates. The trade-off is that while customers get 24-7 live text chat support, They won't be able to walk into a local bank branch. Robin Hood expects to turn a profit thanks to a lean 300 employee operation, earning a margin on investing your money in U.S. Treasury's and revenue share with MasterCard on interchange fees charged to merchants when you swipe. The launch could be critical to keeping Robin Hood worthy of its $5.6 billion valuation

from when it took a $363 million Series D in March, just a year after raising at a $1.3 billion valuation. end quote. Ars Technica has a detailed hands-on with the ECG feature that is now live in Apple Watch Series 4. Quick take from ours. Taking an ECG is easy, but the ECG trace can only be viewed on the iPhone and not the watch itself, which the reviewer John Timmer finds particularly vexing. Launch the app, place your finger on the crown of the watch, and wait.

For 30 seconds, the electrical activity of your heart. will draw a red trace across the watch's screen. It's incredibly convenient, not much more obtrusive than taking your pulse. And as long as you're wearing your watch on a given day, it's always available to you. Once complete, the app will let you know whether the trace captured normal heartbeats,

termed a sinus rhythm. The ECG trace, however, can't be viewed on the watch. The only thing the app allows you to do is record another trace. To look at the results yourself rather than trusting Apple's software, you have to switch to the phone. That's somewhat annoying. The whole point of the watch appears to be to allow you to interact with it rather than your phone.

And there's something more disruptive about pulling out your phone and fiddling with your screen rather than taking some quick glances at your watch, end quote. That annoyance aside, he says the traces look great, they're easily legible and interpretable, and you can share them easily via email or airdrop. Related item here, real quick, Christina Farr at CNBC is reporting that Apple now has up to 50, doctors working under its roof now. And these hires aren't just for show, according to Far, quote, the number of doctors on staff is an indication that Apple is serious about helping customers manage disease and not just wellness or fitness, end quote. Do I have a wager for this? Postmates, the on-demand anything app and service has announced that it has designed an autonomous rover that it plans to launch on the streets of L.A. soon to make deliveries with.

Quoting from Wired, Postmates rover called Serv stands about a meter high. It's shaped like a child-sized shopping cart with a bright yellow paint. On top, a touchscreen tells you it's on the clock, on delivery, it says, and a flashing strip of LEDs around its body function as turn signals. Most noticeably, it has two big saucers for eyes, which blink, lending an uncanny resemblance to the animated robot Wally, end quote. So you know those little box-like droids that you'd see running around the Death Star and Star Wars, probably bumping into people's ankles and such? Imagine those things making Postmates delivery in the next few months in L.A.

Given the issues with vandalism we've been talking about recently with e-scooters, I do have some doubts about this. But as Ali Kashani, the guy who developed serve for Postmates, points out, 90% percent, of the deliveries Postmates makes. Postmates says it averages 4 million deliveries per month in more than 550 cities, by the way. 90% of those deliveries are made by cars. Somehow, as a society, we are okay with the fact that we are moving a two-pound burrito with a two-ton car. Kashani asked Wired, which, okay. Very fair point. But then there's also this stat from the Wired piece. quote, by some estimations, sidewalk bots like serve will make up to 85% of last mile deliveries by 2025, end quote. Okay, new wager with a new deadline.

If I get a burrito delivered to me by a box ankle delivery droid by 2025, then yes, our autonomous robot future will officially have been made mostly manifest. Finally, today, every year, YouTube releases a yearly video that it calls its Rewind video, designed to showcase the best of YouTube and the best of the year on YouTube. But this year, its Rewind 2018 video is not exactly being met with thumbs up. In fact, the Rewind 2018 video has officially become the most disliked video in the history of YouTube. Since it was published just on December 6th, the video has gotten more than 10,000,

million dislikes, which takes it past Justin Bieber's 2010 song, Baby, which had a little short of 10 million dislikes. Why all the vitriol? Well, it's actually really interesting. It seems that YouTube and the actual YouTube creative community are no longer on the same page as to exactly what the YouTube community actually is these days. Quoting from the Verge, between 2011 and 2014, YouTube Rewind was on the same page as its culture. It incorporates. the biggest moments, most influential creators, and funny memes that the community also celebrated. Things really started changing in 2015 when YouTube went from an amateur DIY platform to an entertainment staple. But the most notable grievances began in 2017 and continued into 2018 as YouTube backed away from creators it previously highlighted.

It's a facet of the divide between YouTube and its community that commentator and anchor Philip DeFranco gets to in his video about the backlash. People are asking, where is PewDie Pie? Either him by himself or his battle with T series, DeFranco said. Where is Sean Dawson, who had arguably one of the biggest series on YouTube this year? What about a reference to KSI and Logan Paul making one of the biggest pay-per-view events ever? DeFranco said it could be that YouTube simply isn't aware of what its real community is doing, but they might also be intentional snubs. an argument has been made that it's an attempt by YouTube to distance themselves from any controversy, he says.

End quote. Something something your creation has outgrown you, YouTube. You are no longer in control of your monster. YouTube creators of the world rise up and take control of the memes of production. Get it? Memes of production, M-E-M-E. I'm sorry, I'll show myself out now on that terrible dad. Once again, I'm going to be in Boston tomorrow. So if you want to show up to one of the signing events,

check the end of yesterday's show for the itinerary. But really, what is most important is Trident Books and Cafe on Newberry Street. I'll be getting there around 4.30, and I should be done by five. And after that, I want to hang, get a bite to eat, and maybe a beer. So if anyone wants to join me, either come to the signing or tweet at me at Brian MCC. Also, ad slots on this podcast are available for Q1. There's only about five left in January and about that same number in February and March. But hey, if you want me to promote your company or your product or your project, get in touch.

As I said last time, I put the bat signal out about this. If you're doing anything that you would promote by posting on product hunt, consider buying a podcast ad as well and reaching the most engaged. and plugged in audience of developers, designers, founders, managers, VCs, and tech journalists anywhere in the world. Reach the mutant podcast army. If you're interested, get in touch with me at the email address podcast at techmeme.com. All our listener advertisers that bought ads earlier this year were very pleased with the results, so much so that you'll be hearing from some of them again in the new year.

Anyway, as I said, I'm off to Boston. You'll be in Chris's hands tomorrow, so be gentle with them. Talk to you on Monday.