Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 12/27 - Mobile Alerts Are Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

Episode Date: December 27, 2018

Amazon has a record-breaking holiday season, surprising absolutely no one, another Instagram crackdown, a look at Austin as a tech hub, and why mobile alerts are a Frankenstein monster increasingly out of control. Amazon Says Alexa Voice Shopping Tripled During 2018 Holiday Season (Fortune) Instagram’s Christmas Crackdown (The Atlantic) Tesla's Supercharger network will cover all of Europe in 2019 (Engadget) With Tech Expansion, Austin Is Still Weird. It’s Just More Wired Now, Too. (NYTimes) Pushed Even Further: US Newsrooms View Mobile Alerts as a Standalone Platform (CJR) Movie Theaters Bounce Back: What’s Behind the 2018 Rebound (Variety) Watch the trailer for Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, releasing Friday 28th on Netflix (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 Mem Ride Home for Thursday, December 27th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon has a record-breaking holiday season, surprising absolutely no one. Another Instagram holiday crackdown, a look at Austin as a tech hub, and why mobile alerts are the Frankenstein monster that is increasingly out of control. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It would really only be news if it were otherwise, but as it has done, I'm pretty sure every holiday season since its founding, Amazon announced yesterday a record-breaking holiday season. Amazon said that worldwide its customers ordered more items than ever in the U.S. alone.

More than one billion items were ordered via its Amazon Prime Free Delivery Program, and third-party retail partners on Amazon's platform accounted for more than half of all items shipped. Quoting from Fortune, Amazon said the LOL surprise glam glitter series doll with seven surprises was its most popular toy this year, followed by the Nerf and Strike Elite Strongarm Blaster. On the electronic side, the Bose Quiet, Comfort 35 Series 2 wireless headphones were tops, followed by Samsung's 65-inch 4K-UHD 8 series TV. Apple's 32-gigabyte Wi-Fi-only iPad was the third most popular electronics sold on Amazon during the period.

Moving to fashion, Amazon said that Carhart clothing for men and women tallied more than 1 million orders, end quote. But the headline news was that the number of items ordered verbally over Amazon's AL-E-X-A voice-activated shopping platform tripled year over year. That was probably to be expected as well, of course, but Amazon didn't provide any absolute numbers, as they are wont to do, so we can't exactly compare apples to apples. But then one sign that the AL-E-X-A platform is indeed soups popular was the news that, at least in Europe, at least for a time, the smart assistant was down for a lot of users because, most likely, so many new smart speakers were being activated for the first time. Beginning about 10 a.m. GMT yesterday, good old Ms. A. could only tell people... Sorry, I'm having trouble understanding right now. Please try a little later. Speaking of holiday outages, Instagram actually has some history of cracking down on accounts

over the festive period around Christmas of 2014. Instagram deleted hundreds of thousands of of accounts in what became known as the Great Instagram Rapture. Users are complaining this year that as many as 500 high-profile accounts, with some of them millions of followers, have been taken down from the platform, among the affected popular accounts at Comedy Slam, at Pubity, and even at God, which seems like a pretty gutsy thing to do around Christmas.

Quote, we've seen behavior on Instagram whereby some usernames are stolen or traded an Instagram spokesperson said in a statement on Tuesday. We do not allow people to buy, sell, or trade aspects of their account, including usernames. We are consistently taking steps to disincentivize and stop this behavior, including removing accounts that violate our policies, end quote. Quoting from the Atlantic, Dylan White, a 21-year-old who ran at jaw, a popular account that posted memes and pop culture news, along with photos of men with strong jaw lines,

said he had been running his account for three years and had never had a problem with it previously. This is my full-time income, so it's very detrimental to my livelihood, he said. Ryan was also worried about the money he lost in the crackdown. I was trying to eat dinner and socialize with my family, he said, but knowing behind the scenes everything I've built my entire net worth was just gone before my eyes, end quote. So lesson number 137 that if you build a business on top of someone else's platform, it's not really your business. Those of us who have built businesses on top of the open web,

aka the platform that Google owns by default, have known this for years. The most nefarious thing about being de-platformed in this way is that it can be hard to let your audience know what happened because your megaphone has been stripped from you. But then there's also the issue of having no recourse or right of appeal. He was talking about something completely different, AI specifically, but I'll leave this recent tweet from Kevin Kelly right here because it speaks to the Kafka-esque situation.

You can find yourself in when you're the victim of such deplatforming. The scary AI future is not Terminator, where the AIs kill us or take our jobs. The scary future is one where AIs run all the bureaucracies. They can't explain their decisions and there's no appeal to humans, end quote. On Twitter yesterday, Elon Musk revealed that Tesla's super-tubees. Charger Network will soon cover all of Europe. Specifically, he said by the end of 2019, quote, yes, Musk tweeted in response to a Tesla owner in Ireland complaining of spotty coverage in that country, supercharger coverage will extend to 100% of Europe next year, from Ireland to Kiev,

from Norway to Turkey, end quote. In case you weren't aware, Tesla recently started displaying Model 3s in showrooms across Europe and said that the European version of that vehicle will come with combined charging systems, CCS, the fast charging compatible ports, and that existing European superchargers would be upgraded with CCS plugs. Quoting and Gadget, If the company plans to retrofit existing superchargers with CCS plugs, then the new installations might already come with them from the get-go. Since CCS technology is commonly used for EVs in Europe,

people wondered whether Tesla intends to open up its network to other companies' vehicles. Tesla's head of global charging infrastructure, infrastructure, Drew Bennett, said the company has been talking to other automakers, but there are no concrete plans just yet, end quote. I remarked in a recent episode how surprising to me, at least, it has been that one of the big tech stories of 2018 was actually real estate, Amazon's HQ2, but also a bunch of other headlines about tech companies planning for and opening big new campuses outside of Silicon Valley. It certainly is starting to look like that long speculated about Silicon Valley Diaspora might really be upon us. But contra the hopes of Steve Case and Ashley Vance,

a lot of the movement so far seems to be to cities. Actually, let's pause and note that because it's important, cities to cities that already had major tech presences like New York City, the DC metro area. So far at least, it's not the rise of the rest, so much as it is the rise of the already homesteaded. The most recent headlines surrounded, Apple's major expansion plans in Austin, Texas. The New York Times has a piece up looking at Austin's tech scene generally, which it is labeling Silicon Hills, although Austin has been trying to make that name stick for a while now. Back in the 80s, actually, when a surprising amount of PC startups flowered in Texas, there was also the Soberkett Silicon Prairie. Anyway, apparently there

are already more than 138,000 tech jobs in the Austin area, more than 14% of that region's total employment. And one estimate says that tech alone accounts for $31 billion of the area's overall economy, about 35% of the total. In terms of tech talent, according to another estimate, Austin ranks sixth behind San Francisco, Seattle, Washington, Toronto, and New York. But this, from the Times piece, was news to me. Quote, the buzz lately does not revolve solely around Apple, a different older global behemoth, rarely embraced by hipster tech has become a major player, the United States Army. Months before Apple's announcement, the Army opened a new center in downtown Austin to help

modernize its weapons and equipment and to identify, acquire, and develop innovative technology. The Army Futures Command is the only so-called four-star command that is based not on a military installation but in a civilian building, in this case in the heart of the city in a satellite of the University of Texas. The soldiers mostly shun camouflage for buttoned-down shirts and khakis. They have embedded in Austin's tech culture, military officials say, to help make the Army smarter and more cutting edge. The leader of the Army Futures Command, General John M. Murray, a four-star general who also wears casual business attire to work, has been meeting with tech entrepreneurs hanging out at the Capitol Factory and recently attended his first Austin Hackathon. One of the things

that we are working on, and we have not solidified yet, this is just still a concept, is can the Army work with venture capitalists, General Murray said, adding, I've probably had in the last couple months a dozen, or a dozen and a half conversations with VCs. For me, it's more about understanding because this is all new to me. So understanding the world they live in, what their requirements are, how they can help us, and how we can help them, end quote. From the, this is why We Can't Have Nice Things Department. The Columbia Journalism Review did a content analysis of mobile news alerts in 2018 that showed both the number of mobile alerts, the average user received this year, and the average length of the alert, and showed that both have risen dramatically since 2017. A comparison study also says that the type of alerts have shifted from just breaking news to, well, fluff.

If you've gotten a mobile alert this year from, say, your favorite news app that served you a headline that made you say, this is news, then you probably know the feeling. Mobile alerts have shifted away from useful, actionable alerts to essentially clickbait, or tap bait, I guess. Quoting from the CJR, among the 30 news outlets in our study, most averaged more push alerts per week this year than last. The weekly average across all outlets jumped up 16% from 22.4 per app per week in 2017 to 26 per app per week in 2018. The average length of alerts across the two studies, as evaluated by number of characters, has also grown since last year. Among select outlets, alert length increased by over 30%. In sum, push notifications are becoming yet another platform on which news publishers can find readers where they are,

both literally and emotionally, offering a series of bite-sized content that begins to construct its own record of journalistic events, end quote. Now, CJR is all about studying journalism, so I don't begrudge them this hopeful framing of mobile alerts as a way for news outlets to engage with their audience. But this is a well-trod road of good intentions that only leads to heartache. Devs know this. In the era of floppy disks, entire OSs could size to fit mere megabytes, and then CD-ROMs increased capacity, and suddenly programmers wrote to fill all the space. Remember when mobile apps could be tiny. Now an ambitious app can take up entire gigabytes of your phone's precious storage space. So this is why we can't have nice things. Give someone enough rope and they'll use it to hang themselves. But also, I'm old enough to remember when we were all clamoring for things like notifications on iOS.

Now, app developers all rush to take advantage of them to such a degree of excess that we're all forced to manually curate the notification frequency app by app and mobile OS makers have had to develop things like screen time just to give us the tools to make our smartphones not become these overwhelming platforms of annoyance. So all mobile app managers and developers, less words, please, less alerts. Don't give in to the impulse towards aggressiveness and greed. Learn the lesson that tech developers have had to learn over and over again. Just because you can serve an alert every minute,

just because you can fill up all the word count every time with purple pros, there are diminishing returns and they come sometimes pretty quickly. Brevity is the soul of wit, and restraint can be the soul of virtue. Last year, 2017, not 2018, was a soft year for Hollywood in terms of movie theater attendance and a lot of wags at the time were blaming the likes of Netflix and Amazon and the whole crew of streaming video services. In a way, that's not a new thing ever since the rise of radio and especially TV and, especially TV, and, then home theaters and home video, the studios have gnashed their teeth and rent their garments worried about competition from new media. And in a way, maybe this is another instance of industry cries wolf, because Variety is reporting that movie theater revenue actually bounced

back in 2018. Quote, The exhibition business came roaring back in 2018 as blockbusters such as Black Panther, Avengers Infinity War, and Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom powered ticket sales to record levels. The domestic box office hit a new high watermark of $11.5 billion and global revenues also have a chance of reaching new heights if Christmas releases such as Aquaman and Mary Poppins returns can ring in the new year in style, end quote. Apparently, according to variety, the movies were just better this year, appealing to broader audiences. Hollywood also spread releases over more of the calendar this year instead of relying on the usual blockbub windows of the summer and the holidays. But there are still causes for concern.

Quote, six of the top 10 highest grossing domestic releases in 2018 were superhero picks and nine of the 10 most successful North American movies were sequels or spin-offs, hardly a triumph for originality, end quote. Now, that has probably been true for years now. But still, you can only go to the well so many times. And in terms of overall audience numbers, there haven't been back-to-back yearly theater attendance increases since 2002. And, I mean, look, the perma bear that cries recession, can be wrong every single day until the day that the recession actually hits. Long term, Netflix's bulging coffers, to say nothing of the willingness of Apple, Amazon, and others

to spend their seemingly endless cash flows on content, means that talent is increasingly being tempted away from tent-pulled cinematic releases to create instead for these new digital platforms. So if the biggest thing next year never actually hits the theaters, then why will people have any reason to leave the house? At this year's Venice Film Festival, Spike Lee was asked about Netflix's willingness to finance the Irishman, the upcoming high-profile crime drama from Martin Scorsese, and starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

Quote, Netflix, they wrote a check, and it was a check that no other studio was willing to do, Lee said. So it's a decision that if you're an artist, when you get to that level, do you want your film made? He added, Netflix is the future of cinema. You can have access to it anytime and anywhere.

That is what people need, end quote. Speaking of, this is a perfect example of what we were just talking about. For certain audiences, new episodes of Black Mirror dropping in your Netflix queue constitutes a drop everything and watch sort of event. Well, the trailer for the first new episode of the new season of Black Mirror titled Bander Snatch has appeared and it is set to premiere tomorrow Friday, December 28th. The last link in the show notes is to the trailer with the thumping beat of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood Club. classic relax. Quoting from the verge, it's still not clear if the episode will be a choose-your-own-adventure experience, as per rumors earlier this year, what we do know is that the special will have

a distinctly retro feel as well as a reality-warping plot. The action is set in 1984 and follows a young programmer adapting a sprawling fantasy novel, the titular Bander Snatch, into a video game. Pretty soon, this task turns into mind-mangling challenge. because, of course, it does. That's all for today, if you can tell by the probably noticeable change in the sound quality over the last couple of days. I'm down at my parents' house in Florida. It's been typically lovely Florida weather, but for at least part of the day, I still have to hole up to get this show out, stay inside.

But I've written this entire episode today on the back porch, getting gentle breezes coming in off the water. So maybe tomorrow I'll record out here as well, and you can get some Florida ambiance to the recording. If you're with your family this week, my best to them and to you. We'll be back at you again tomorrow, perhaps with a bit of Florida flavor.