Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 8/09 - Galaxy Note9 Announced

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

The new Galaxy Note 9 is unveiled, New York City caps ride hailing companies, Discord kneecaps Steam—as expected, the continuing saga of Alex Jones and what’s up with Elon Musk now? Links:Samsung Galaxy Note9: Design, specs, features, and pricing (VentureBeat)New York Plans to Cap Uber and Lyft (WSJ)Where’s the Money Coming From, Elon? (Bloomberg Businessweek) 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 TechMeme ride home for Thursday, August 9th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the new Galaxy Note 9 is unveiled.

New York City Caps ride hailing companies. Discord kneecaps, Steam, as expected. The continuing saga of Alex Jones and What's Up with Elon Musk now? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Samsung has that other flagship phone line. And today it. the Galaxy Note lineup got its official announce with the unveiling of the new Galaxy Note 9, sporting a 6.4-inch super Amo-led plus display, dual rear cameras, and a 128-gigabyte 6 gigs of RAM version for $999,

as well as a 512-gigabyte storage, 8 gigs of RAM model for $1,250. $50. Pre-orders begin tomorrow, August 10, and the phone will be available August 24th from all major carriers. The Note 9 looks pretty identical to its predecessor to my eyes, but apparently the rear fingerprint sensor has been moved slightly. The cameras, I think, are the exact same ones from the Galaxy S-9 Plus. The processor is Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845. You can still add in a micro-SD card, so if you loaded a... a 512 gigabyte card into the 512 gigabyte model. I suppose you would have a phone with a terabyte of storage,

which is a little nuts. The phones will ship with Android 8.1 Oreo and the available colors are blue and pink purple. There's no black option, which is a little weird. There's a new S-pen that has added Bluetooth low energy so that you can use it as a sort of remote control, especially with the camera. And a lot of chatter has been about the battery.

The new note sports a 4,000-m-amp-hour battery, the largest ever in a note. Samsung says you can get about a day and a half of usage out of a single charge. Please hold all exploding battery jokes. Samsung's already heard them. Oh, and the phone does have a standard headphone jack. A couple of other PSs. Samsung's Dex software is now built right into the phone. No more dock required, so you can plug this phone directly into an external display

for a desktop-like user experience. And Fortnite for Android is now available in beta on the Samsung Galaxy App Store for all Galaxy flagship phones, Galaxy S7 and Galaxy Tab S3 and Up. Note I said Samsung Galaxy App Store, not Google Play Store. I have no idea what Google ever did to Epic Games, but it seems like Epic is willing to shun Google at every opportunity.

Essentially the only major gaming platform you can't find Fortnite on at this point is the Google Play Store. And a few more things. Samsung is back with a new smartwatch entrant, the Galaxy Watch, featuring LTE connectivity and wireless charging. The watch looks similar to the Gear S2 Classic with a less obvious bezel. And Samsung is getting into the smart speaker battlefield with its newly announced Galaxy Home Speaker.

The home pairs with a home pairs with, Samsung's Bixby Smart Assistant, which also got upgraded to Bixby 2.0, and was demoed with the ability to do the usual of making restaurant reservations and ordering Ubers, though Bixby appears to be more conversational and with what Samsung says is a faster response time. Samsung also announced it was entering a long-term partnership with Spotify, not just for the new smart speaker, but spanning all of its devices from phones to TVs to speakers. Spotify will now be part of the setup experience on all Samsung devices going forward. The New York City Council has voted to cap Uber and Lyft licenses operating in the city for one year,

while the city studies the impact of ride hailing generally. Passed on a 39 to 6 vote, the measure would freeze new ride hailing licenses for 12 months, something that both Lyft and Uber have obviously fought stridently. but New York City taxi unions have supported just as stridently. This makes New York City the first in the U.S. to attempt to limit the number of ride-hailing operators in a municipality, as recently as 2015. New York licensed 25,000 ride-hailing vehicles in the city.

Today, that number is 80,000. As there are only 13,500 yellow cabs in the city, clearly you can see that there's been an explosion in ride hailing in this neck of the woods. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal, New York is unique because it issues licenses to Uber drivers, allowing the taxi and limousine commission to more closely monitor ride-hailing firms.

As a result, New York's Uber and lift drivers tend to be professionals, many of whom used to drive yellow cabs. In other cities, just about anyone with access to a vehicle who passes a background check can drive for Uber. The council also voted to allow the city to set a minimum hourly wage for ride-held drivers. The companies would be required to fill in the gap

if drivers don't meet the threshold. Well, when was it? Last week, two weeks ago, when we talked about Steam adding more robust chat to its services in order to keep up with Discord, the chat application

that gamers have so really taken to. Steam apparently felt threatened by Discord because it had accumulated so many users. All it had to do was introduce a commerce platform of its own and it would be in competition with Steam's bread and butter. Well, that's happened.

Discord today launched a game store in beta, available to 50,000 randomly selected customers in Canada. The company also added a game launching tab in its app so users can launch games within Discord. There will only be a limited number of games available for purchase for now, 11 at the time of this recording, but Discord will also be offering, quote, first on Discord titles,

which will launch on the platform and exclusively, and then go on sale everywhere 90 days later. We've actually been mulling the idea for a long time, Discord chief marketing officer Eros Resmini told Variety via email. We wanted to build an amazing platform that people wanted to use every day, and we wanted to grow that platform before focusing too much on monetization. We now have 150 million users, so timing felt right. We knew we didn't want to sell ads or user-dise.

data, so we had two options left. Cosmetics or content. Nitro was our attempt at cosmetics. Now we're adding games to that subscription and building a retail store too, end quote. Update on the Alex Jones getting banned from Everywhere saga. If you'll recall, the ball really got rolling earlier in the week when Apple banned Jones and Info Wars podcasts from its podcast directory. But Apple pointedly did not ban the Info Wars app. which has subsequently risen to the top of the news charts in the iOS App Store. Why did Apple ban Jones from one platform but not another? After all, the InfoWars iOS app allows users to stream the same shows that Apple just removed from iTunes.

In a statement to BuzzFeed News, Apple said, quote, We strongly support all points of view being represented in the App Store as long as the apps are respectful to users with differing opinions and follow our clear guidelines ensuring the App Store is a safe marketplace for all. We continue to monitor apps for violations of our guidelines, and if we find content that violates our guidelines and is harmful to users, we will remove those apps from the store, as we have done previously, end quote. So, yeah, your guess is as good as mine as to whether that's an actual answer or not. By the way, InfoWars is also now the number one trending app in the Google Play Store. So this is looking a bit of like the old Streisand effect in effect.

If you're not familiar with the Streisand effect, look it up on Wikipedia. Jones and InfoWars have also faced takedown action from Pinterest, LinkedIn, and even MailChimp this week. But remember, Twitter has proudly stood alone by refusing to take any action whatsoever. Yesterday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey called into Sean Hannity's radio show to discuss the Jones saga, but also to address persistent claims from alt-right circles that Twitter, among other platforms, engages in so-called shadow banning of certain voices, i.e., not banning people outright, but tweaking the algorithms a bit so that what people do say gets a little less dissemination. Quote, we do not shadow ban according to political ideology or viewpoint or content, Dorsey

told Hannity. As to how and why Twitter decides to suspend specific users, quote, we have to really understand what the context of the conversation is. Some cultural contexts enable some speech that other cultural contexts don't, end quote. Well, all of this has been too much for Jill Wetzler, who is now the director of engineering at Lyft, but was previously senior engineering manager at Twitter. Wetzler took to Twitter itself to say, quote, trying to feel something other than shame for the two years of very hard, earnest work I put in at Twitter. I'd never worked at a place that was so out of touch with its employees and customers. I try not to burn bridges publicly, but this is real. Y'all still hashtag

Love Where You Work? Finally, on today's episode of what's going on with Elon Musk now, we have the curious case of the 420 tweet. On Tuesday, Elon took to Twitter, as he's want to do to say the following, quote, am considering taking Tesla private at $420, funding secured, end quote. So, okay, we know Elon has become frustrated with short sellers, with Wall Street analysts, with the pressure of running a public company. It can be hard to change the world when you have to answer to quarterly earnings reports every few months. All right, so makes sense. These things happen. Companies go private. Remember, Michael Dell is bringing Dell Inc. back to public markets after several years of it existing as a private company after he and Silver Lake bought out the stock in order to restructure the.

company for the modern age of computing behind closed doors. And $420 a share represents a 25% premium on where Tesla shares have been trading. So that should be acceptable to shareholders. It would be a big deal, though. $82 billion, adjusted for inflation. That would be bigger than the most famous leverage buyout of all time, the RJR Nabisco deal from 1989. Barbarians at the gate, guys, if you've never read the book. Anyway, after that tweet then, though, radio silence. Elon said the funding was secured,

but from whom? We don't know. There's not a lot of people in the world with that kind of money, and to be honest, the CEO of a publicly traded company announcing he's taking the company private in a tweet, not a formal press release, no notification to the stock market or the SEC or anything. This is not usually how things are done. Can you even do that? I mean, Elon's going to Elon and all, but there are rules to

these things. The tweet actually came when the market was still open. Trading had to be halted on Tesla's stock for a time. There has been subsequently an official Tesla blog post about this matter, a 57-word statement from Tesla's board and other things, but it still feels weird and rushed. I mean, it's probably a coincidence, right? But that $420 a share number, 420? Was this all just a stoner joke? So a lot of people are still trying to parse all this. As Bloomberg points out, Musk owns 20% of Tesla's shares,

so he will need to come up with $66 billion. Who can help him do that? Quote, the universe of possible funders is small. Tesla is unprofitable, making it hard to see why traditional leveraged buyout investors who pay off buyout debt with the cash flow of companies they take private, would be interested in backing a deal. No bank or investment funds so far has indicated it was aware of Musk's plan.

That leaves a handful of large tech companies, Apple, Google, and SoftBank, and Sovereign wealth funds as possible candidates, end quote. Ah, SoftBank. Masasan certainly likes big gutsy bets, and Bloomberg has subsequently reported that Musk and Son did, in fact, last year about a possible deal, which didn't end up materializing. CNBC says there are three possible options, if it's not Massasson. The Occam's razor explanation is that maybe there is no funding.

Maybe this is, again, Elon just doing what Elon does. Or Musk feels confident he can raise the money because of previous conversations he's had, and he just jumped the gun a bit, or maybe this is a negotiating ploy to get someone to actually sign on the bottom line by taking the pressure public. Or, third option, Musk actually has the money, and there's some weird reason why the funding source doesn't want to be named right away. Business Insider says taking Tesla private

would actually make some sense. For Tesla, as a public company, every move is closely scrutinized quarter by quarter. Given its mission to move the world away from fossil fuels, this is too fractured a time frame. Musk would probably prefer five-year chunks or 10. We already know that the company's Model 3 production system has been designed for a decade of output. This is the logical timeframe for industrial investment. For Tesla, however, some investors think of the

company as operating according to quick pivot tech protocols. As a private company, that expectation could be eliminated, end quote. So watch this space, I guess. So I'm in the middle of a very modern type of media quandary. The book, Margin of Safety, was written by the hedge fund billionaire Seth Clarman in the early 1990s. It's a legendary textbook of the type of value investing practiced by the Warren Buffets of the world. And it's been out of print for many years. Used copies are so rare that they routinely change hands for thousands of dollars. Well, at some point last month, I noticed that Henry Blodgett had tweeted that the book had mysteriously appeared on Kindle for just $9.99. so I immediately snapped it up.

But then yesterday I got an email from Amazon saying, this version was made available by someone other than the copyright owner and it's not authorized for sale. Amazon said they were issuing me a full refund, but they were also going to remove the book from my Kindle. Well, it so happens that I usually keep my Kindle on airplane mode to save battery life, so the book is still on my Kindle, and it will be until the moment that I turn on the Wi-Fi again.

You know, people have been telling us for years that with digital goods, you don't ever really own anything. And I guess I feel that because it's a little weird to have a purchase unilaterally reversed without my consent. A book is literally going to be ripped out of my hands. I've got the upper hand for the time being because I've been rushing to read the book before the need to buy a new book arises and I'm forced to turn Wi-Fi back on. So I am presently, I guess, illegitimately reading a book that I'm not authorized to read, even though I purchased it legally. Am I sticking it to the man, Jeff Bezos? Or is the only person I'm actually sticking it to billionaire Seth Clarmann because I'm violating his copyright?

As I said, it's a weird, modern quandary. But let's just keep this between ourselves, okay? at least until I'm done with the book. Talk to you guys tomorrow.