Tech Brew Ride Home - Thur. 10/18 - Apple Says: No... Sleep... Till Brooklyn!

Episode Date: October 18, 2018

Spotify Premium gets a spit shine, Facebook think it knows who was behind that big hack, why everyone and their mother has a subscription box service, and an Apple event in Brooklyn! Links: Spotify Premium gets personalized artist radio stations and better search (The Verge) Twitter makes it easier to see enforcement taken on reported tweets (Tech Crunch) Facebook Finds Hack Was Done by Spammers, Not Foreign State (WSJ) Android Creator’s Startup Essential Products Cuts About 30% of Staff (Bloomberg) Inside the $2.6 billion subscription box wars (Fast Company) Beddr’s SleepTuner is a powerful standalone alternative to Apple Watch sleep tracking (9to5Mac) 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 right home for Thursday, October 18th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Spotify Premium gets a spit shine.

Facebook thinks it knows who is behind that big hack. Why everybody and their mother has a subscription box service these days. And an Apple event in Brooklyn. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. If you're a Spotify premium subscriber, you got a whole bunch of new stuff rolled into your iOS or Android. app today, including streamline navigation, personalized search, and finally copying the one killer differentiator Pandora had over it. Spotify now lets you make a radio station based on any individual artist or even individual song. Quoting from The Verge, it's essentially an endless playlist that's

tailored to you, which can also be saved offline. Spotify's new artist radio won't require the thumbs up, thumbs down interaction that helped tailor its old radio offerings to your taste. Now you can hit play and expect as good a listening session as you'd get from any personalized playlist, end quote. By the way, I only Googled around for this briefly, but is there any way to reset your listening history on Spotify? Ever since having kids, my Discover Weekly and various other recommended playlists are completely hosed at this point.

Has anyone had success recovering the listing profile Spotify has on them, other than simply opening a new account from scratch. Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reports that Twitter is changing how it deals with deleted tweets. The service will now differentiate between tweets that were deleted voluntarily by the user who made them versus tweets that were marked for deletion by Twitter because they violated Twitter's rules. In the past, Twitter has swung back and forth between hiding and showing the tweets it deletes in various contexts for good reason. Sometimes a reported tweet contains information that needs to be reported to law enforcement. If the user who reported the tweet can't see the content at all anymore, they can't report it to the police.

And it goes down the memory hole. But at the same time, many users want offending tweets to simply be gone. You know, deleted. Twitter is aiming for a middle ground with this new policy. If a user deletes a tweet voluntarily in the normal day-to-day world of typos and regrets, nothing changes. You can still delete your unreported tweets, and they will show up as deleted if somebody links to them or does a retweet with comment. But if your tweet is reported to Twitter and Twitter decides it should be deleted because of a rules violation, it will be replaced by a note saying that the tweet is unavailable because it violated Twitter's rules.

This note will appear on the tweets page itself and on the account page of the person who posted it for 14 days after Twitter takes down the tweet. Twitter's existing policy of forcing the user to delete those rules violations, deleting tweets before they're allowed to tweet again remains in place. What's most interesting and possibly handy is that if you are the user who reported the tweet in question, Twitter will hide the tweet from you and instead show the message you reported this tweet instead, along with the link to view it if you still choose to. Twitter says the change will roll out on the website and apps in the, quote, coming weeks. Following up on the latest Facebook data breach, Robert McMillan and Deepa Sitha Rothman at the Wall Street Journal report that the hackers that breached Facebook weren't affiliated with any nation state bent on manipulating American politics.

Instead, they were just spammers. So that's a relief, I suppose. According to the report, Facebook believes the hackers who scraped data of about 30 million users planned to use that data to sell ads. The Facebook security team has been looking into the issue since, September 25th, and the FBI is still involved as well. Quoting from the journal, Internal researchers now believe that the people behind the attack are a group of Facebook and Instagram spammers

that present themselves as a digital marketing company and whose activities were previously known to Facebook's security team, said the people familiar with the investigation, end quote. Twitter user superfluous provided the joke of the day, writing, the hackers were not affiliated with a nation state, rather they were plain old affiliates, winking emoji. Chance Miller at 9 to 5 Mac reports that a new sleep-focused wearable device is hitting the market soon.

It's called the sleep tuner. The device is made by better, and it's a small sensor that you stick, no kidding, to your forehead before you go to sleep. So for some perspective, if you go to an actual inpatient sleep study clinic, you're going to get dozens of sensors glued to your scalp and chest and abdomen and clip to your fingers and stuff. I actually have had this done and now have a CPAP machine that I literally cannot sleep without. So putting a postage stamp size thing on your forehead is by comparison not really that bad and shouldn't be too uncomfortable or noticeable. The sleep tuner weighs just over five grams. And it tracks a whole bunch of stuff. Your SPO2 levels, which is the amount of oxygen dissolved in your blood, stopped breathing events like my sleep apnea,

sleep position, heart rate, movement during sleep, and awakenings, all that stuff. It accomplishes all this using optical sensors and a three-axis accelerometer. The data is then transferred via Bluetooth to a companion iOS app, which lets you review it and compare it to previous nights. The device costs $149, and it's available for pre-order now. But here's why I found this device interesting. The sleep tuner is not positioned as a daily wear device. Better actually suggests that you wear it just a few days to get a bit.

baseline, then maybe check up on your sleep on a weekly or monthly basis. So in this way, the sleep tuner is somewhat like the new heart monitoring features on the latest Apple Watch, with one key difference. Regulatory approval by the FDA. In Better's PR materials, they repeatedly mentioned that the device is FDA registered. It's even on their checkbox comparison matrix, comparing the product to the Apple Watch, among others. So what does FDA registered mean? Well, again, let's think about the Apple Watch. Apple got FDA clearance for the EKG and irregular heart rhythm monitors. The word clearance is the key.

Clearance is a big step below FDA approval, which requires serious testing to achieve. But still, clearance is a significant thing, and it does mean that the Apple Watch was tested against medical standards and compared to existing devices that do similar things. So the sleep tracker is not even FDA cleared. Instead, it is FDA registered, which is one more step down the latter. Registering a device with the FDA means you paid a fee and submitted some paperwork. Indeed, the FDA says, quote,

registration of a device establishment, assignment of a registration number, or listing of a medical device does not in any way denote approval of the equipment or its products by the FDA, end quote. So, like the Apple Watch, this new sleep tuner device expands the gray area between DIY by tech wearable medicine and real doctors. Depending on who you ask, that might be better than nothing. It might be a huge step up in all of our collective healths. Or it might be harmful because patients probably shouldn't diagnose themselves

by just wearing a doodad or a gadget on their body. Quick follow up to that story last week about Andy Rubin's company Essential. Bloomberg is reporting that Essential has laid off about 30% of its employees. Confirmation came from a spokesperson for Essential who said, in part, quote, we are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game-changing consumer product, end quote. That sharpened product focus is presumably on the product we talked about last week, also revealed by Mark Urban at Bloomberg, a small AI-focused phone that would text your friends on your behalf and rely on voice-powered user interfaces. The Register had the best

headline for this, though, with the headline reading, quote, Android creator Andy Rubin's firm might think its phone is essential, but 30% of staff are not. If you've been online in the last few years, chances are you've been exposed to the burgeoning subscription box industry. Businesses are lining up to mail you monthly boxes of clothes, toys, snacks, crafting materials, alcohol, shaving products, tea, mixology ingredients, you name it. There is literally. literally 30 yards down the hall from where I'm sitting right now, a subscription box startup. According to a Fast Company report by Elizabeth Seagren, the key to a successful subscription box is the unboxing.

Quoting Fast Company, success hinges on a business model that goes beyond making money on the box itself and investing in content that makes the unboxing experience exciting every single time, end quote. This is even borne out by growth in the box. the commentary market around these box services. For instance, there's a very popular website called My Subscription Addiction.com, which exists to talk about subscription box services and to make affiliate revenue through links for new ones. But seriously, on this site, you have reviews of boxes from specific months, plus spoilers for boxes, like it's the upcoming episode of Game

of Thrones or something, plus discussion forums where people bemoan late or lost shipments and And of course, the unboxing itself. The nature of every box is its desire to be unboxed, and this desire is fully explored online now. Anyway, back to the industry itself. It's actually growing. Quoting from Fast Company again, new subscription boxes are popping up every day.

There are now 3,500, an increase of 40% from a year before. And a full 47% of subscription boxes launched in the past 12 months, according to the warehouse management company, SNAP fulfill, end quote. One key value proposition of a subscription box is the monetization of serendipity. The box curators want to delight every box recipient just enough to keep them paying for the next box.

In a very real way, the thing many box sellers are selling isn't stuff. It's the experience of receiving stuff. That's proven by the secondary market of unboxing videos. People are willing to sit through ads to get unboxing experiences secondhand. The range of subscription boxes and how they make money is amazing. There's a growing market of first-party content

like mini-magins, newsletters, and even online communities created by the box companies themselves to promote and sustain their subscription box culture. Here's another quote from the fast company piece. The business models underneath could not be more different. Ipsi, for instance, enlist beauty influencers to create videos

that demonstrate how to use the products in the bag, which leads to ad revenue. Sephora Play is just another tool in Sephora's arsenal to make customers more loyal and more likely to spend money. BirchBox's goal is to drive subscribers to buy full-sized products on its website or brick-and-mortar stores, end quote. In some cases, of course, you do have subscription box services that are indeed just selling stuff. Amazon Subscribe and Save is a good version of that. You pick everything you want for the month and they send it to you with a discount if you add more stuff. Many of the shaving subscription boxes are similar with predictable contents.

These self-picked subscription boxes currently occupy the same business niche as curated surprise boxes, though they probably should be separated into a second category. The difference in customer expectation between a box curated by you or by some stranger is massive and amounts to a core difference in what the customer is buying an actual product versus a experience, as I keep saying. Consider this fast company article on the business of subscription boxes and early weekend long reads recommendation. If you ever wondered about how those boxes are made or what the economics behind them is,

this is the article for you. The title is inside the $2.6 billion subscription box wars, and the link is, of course, in the show notes. And finally today, the next Apple event has a date. Tuesday, October 30th at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The invites that went out this afternoon featured a variety of different. designs, which is a first for Apple and a bonanza for Apple Kremlinologist because seemingly almost no two invites are identical. If you visit the Apple Events page and hit refresh, it'll

show you a new random image each time, all of them artistic takes on the Apple logo. The only words on the invite, quote, there's more in the making, which translation probably means iPads. Further translation probably means iPads running Photoshop, as we discussed earlier this week. In addition to the updated iPads at the event, here's a list of other maybes, maybe a new Apple Pencil, maybe updated Macs, maybe AirPods with Always on Siri. I still can't believe that wasn't announced at the iPhone event. And maybe, but of course probably not the air power charging mat. And hey, it's worth noting this is the first time Apple's done an event in Brooklyn, right? And by the way, in case you forgot, the iPhone 10R goes up for pre-order tomorrow.

Friday, October 19th, with the first shipments a week later. You know, Apple, I'm just saying, Bam is literally a 15-minute walk up the hill from where I'm sitting right this very second. It would be supes easy for me to pop over there with my handheld mic. I could get Chris to actually write up the event while I attended, and then I could run back here

and throw some of the audio into that day's show, maybe even do a special behind the scenes on an Apple event episode. It's not crazy. It's no skin off your nose or my nose, no need to buy a plane ticket or anything like that. Just I walk up the hill with my handheld mic. Podcast at Techmeme.com.

Hit me up, Apple PR. I'm serious. Anyway, Chris Higgins did help me write today's show, as he will tomorrow. Talk to y'all then. Your instruments. Music here. Why are you this, him that? Rock and roll.

Yeah dude, like I think we're the band. I've been waiting for you boys all day. Get on stage.