Tech Brew Ride Home - Thursday, June 7, 2018 - The Fire TV Cube

Episode Date: June 7, 2018

ZTE makes a deal with Uncle Sam, but Google might be in trouble because of Huawei, the new Amazon Fire TV Cube is announced, a new Blackberry phone, a redesigned Lyft app and more Instagram video rumors. Stories from: @stuwoo, @meganrosedickey LinksAfter Scrutinizing Facebook, Congress Turns to Google Deal With Huawei (WSJ)Lyft redesigns rider app to encourage shared rides (TechCrunch)Instagram plans to launch Snapchat Discover-style video hub (TechCrunch)For BlackBerry Key2, privacy is (again) a key pitch for comeback (CNET) 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. show is sponsored by Datadog. Datadog is a software-as-a-service monitoring platform that provides dev and ops teams with a unified view of their infrastructure, apps, and logs. Data Dog allows you to monitor, troubleshoot, and optimize performance. Your servers, your clouds, your metrics,

your apps, your team, altogether. If you go to Datadoghq.com slash ride home, you can get a free trial at Datadog, and Datadog will even send you a free t-shirt. That's Datadoghug-HQ. That's Datadog com slash ride home. Welcome to the TechMeme Ride Home for Thursday, June 7th, 2018. Today, ZTE makes a deal with Uncle Sam, but Google might be in trouble because of Huawei. The new Amazon Fire TV Cube is announced. A new Blackberry phone is announced.

A redesigned Lyft app is announced. And there are more Instagram video rumors. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It looks like the saga of Chinese phonemaker ZTE seems to have come to a resolution. On CNBC this morning, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross announced that the U.S. has struck a deal with ZTE to end the crippling American sanctions that threatened to destroy the company. The details of the deal are as follows. ZTE will have to pay a billion dollar penalty. ZTE must change its board of directors and executive team within 30 days. and a U.S. chosen compliance team will be embedded within the company to monitor ZTE for compliance with the deal.

Quote, we are literally embedding a compliance department of our choosing into the company to monitor it going forward. They will pay for those people, but the people will report to the new chairman, so said Secretary Ross on CNBC's Squawk Box program. If you'll recall, ZTE was penalized by the U.S. government after regulators alleged that the company had done business with North Korea and U.S. Iran in violation of U.S. sanctions. ZTE has already paid $1.19 billion in fines, and this new penalty will be coming on top of that, with some of the money being paid up front to ensure good behavior, said Secretary Ross, quote, if they do violate again, in addition to the billion dollars they are paying us up front, we had them put $400 million in escrow. The total deal is $1.4 billion. That money will be forfeited if they violate anything.

we still retain the power to shut them down again. This is a pretty strict settlement, Secretary Ross insisted, the strictest and largest settlement fine that has ever been brought by the Commerce Department against any violator of export controls. This should serve as a very good deterrent, not only for them, but for other potential bad actors. So ZTE is possibly getting out of Uncle Sam's doghouse, but Google might be getting ready to step right into it.

and thanks to a different Chinese company, Huawei. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that U.S. lawmakers are scrutinizing Google's Android partnership with Huawei and plan to publicly criticize Google for it. Earlier this year, Google made a deal with Huawei, the number three smartphone maker in the world, to use Google's Android Messages service to send text, photos, and other messages. This would represent a deeper integration of Google's software and Huawei's hardware. Google has similar partnerships with about a dozen carriers and phone makers worldwide. Remember when we talked about how Google wanted to possibly replace SMS with this new message's standard?

This is what the U.S. lawmakers are looking at. Quoting from the Wall Street Journal piece, Lawmakers on Capitol Hill have been at the forefront of a push by Washington to curb telecommunications equipment and smartphone maker Huawei and its Chinese peer ZTE Corp. U.S. officials and lawmakers have deemed both companies, national security threats, end quote. According to the journal, the concerned lawmakers in question,

our Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Representative Mike Conway of Texas, and Representative Robert Pittinger of North Carolina. For the first time in three years, ride-sharing company Lyft has redesigned its app. With the redesign, Lyft is more heavily emphasizing both shared rides and public transport. Lyft's shared ride or carpooling service Lyft Line is getting rebranded as shared rides and will be way more prominently featured inside Lyft's app.

Lyft was one of the first ride-sharing companies to introduce true carpooling when it launched Lyft Line in 2014. The company says it has a goal to have these shared rides account for 50% of its overall business by the end of 2020. Currently shared rides only account for around 35% of Lyft rides. Also, to be given more prominent placement will be Lyft's partnership with mass transit systems in more than 25 cities. The first two partnerships will go live in Marin County and Santa Monica. If you live in either of those places, you will soon be able to plan out trips that will suggest lift rides for a certain segment of the trip and public transit options for another segment. The new app will also customize itself based on a given rider's performance. referred Lyft's service options, as well as their favorite locations.

As a part of this, Lyft is beefing up its mapping features to, say, give you turn-by-turn, step-by-step directions, where to go to catch your ride, when you get off, where to walk to, to get on your bus or train, with schedules for those transportation options fully integrated. Lyft's VP of government relations, Joseph Akpaku, told TechCrunch, quote, we've been really bullish on the fact that transit and ride sharing are inherently compatible, end quote. If you open your Lyft app right now, you might not see these changes right away, but all of the updates should be available to everyone by the end of June. It might be aware that rumors have been swirling,

that as a part of its moves to create more comprehensive transportation options, Lyft has been reportedly in negotiations to buy motivate the company responsible for a lot of the major bike sharing systems, like Ford's Go Bike in San Francisco and City Bike in New York. Lyft had no comment on those motivate takeover rumors today. Sources are telling TechCrunch's Josh Constine that Instagram is close to launching a Snapchat Discover-style video hub that will feature scripted content, music videos, and more. Constine's sources say the new feature is tentatively scheduled to be announced June 20th.

Instagram has reportedly been meeting with prominent. its social media stars to get them to create content for this new service. So this would offer direct competition not just to Snapchat, but also to YouTube. Quoting from Constine's piece, The public shouldn't expect Netflix originals or HBO level quality. This is not Insta Game of Thrones. Instead, the feature is more focused on the kind of videos you see from YouTube creators. These often range from five to 15 minutes in length,

shot with nice cameras and lighting, but not some massive Hollywood movie. production crew. Average users will be able to upload longer videos to beyond the current 62nd limit, end quote. If you remember yesterday, the Wall Street Journal was reporting similarly that Instagram was mulling the possibility of allowing users the ability to post videos of up to an hour in length on Instagram, either as a part of their stories product or in the main Instagram feed. Whether all of these video rumors are somehow related to an overall video strategy that is evolving at Instagram is unclear, but as Constine says, quote, Instagram has an opportunity here to skim the best content off the top of the sprawling creator slash publisher ecosystem and curate it

coherently for casual audiences. Amazon today announced a new device, the Fire TV Cube. Essentially, your echo speaker and your Fire TV dongle had a baby, and it's a new set-top video box, which will allow you to get your TV on with full Alexa integration. With the Fire TV Cube, you can talk to Alexa, you can search for movies, you can trigger Alexa skills, you can talk to the device when your TV is off, but it also has that special kind of HDMI that I mentioned yesterday, CDC, which allows you to turn your TV on and off, control the sound, maybe even control your cable box if your cable provider allows that. Amazon says the cube supports boxes from Comcast, Dish, and Direct TV.

In essence, with the Fire TV cube, you could set up a system where, if you were to say, Alexa, watch TV, everything would just simply turn on and work. In a way, it's the vision that Steve Jobs hinted at to Walter Isaacson all those years ago when he said that he thought he had finally cracked the TV experience. By the by, the by, the cube still comes with a standard remote, and it has an IR blaster built in. So if the idea of talking to your TV sounds exhausting, you still have the usual options. But also, expect Alexa to now make use of your TV screen. If you ask for a weather forecast, it can pop up a nice graphic. And daily briefings can now theoretically trigger video. The Fire TV Cube is available for pre-order today priced at $119.99, and it ships June 21st.

Of course, if you're a prime customer, you can order today and tomorrow. and get it for just $89.99. Real quickly, there's another Amazon story from today that I wanted to flag. Jeff Bezos and Company have bought the rights to exclusively broadcast 20 English Premier League football matches per season for three seasons starting 2019. Yes, by football, I mean soccer, if you're confused, but I really mean football. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, and the games Amazon will stream will not be the biggest ones of the season, just a few in December with the major games still to be broadcast by Sky Sports and BT Sports,

the traditional homes for football in Britain. But this is a deal for Amazon to have exclusive broadcast rights for the games on its slate. So this marks the first time a digital player has muscled in on the traditional Sky BT monopoly on English football. I wanted to flag this story as a particularly notable milestone in the continuing race of digital players, to overthrow the traditional TV game. 25 years ago, it was the creation of the Premier League, coupled with its groundbreaking first television deal with Sky, that basically laid the groundwork

for the modern worldwide sports economy that we currently exist in. That Sky deal basically made the Premier League a global phenomenon, flooded money into the game of football for the first time, and you could say that the Premier League also helped Sky become a global business power as well, As the New York Times piece says about this news, quote, Sky was only three years old in 1992

when it bid more than 300 million pounds for the rights to televise live top flight soccer matches in Britain. At the time, the move stunned the world of soccer and gave Sky an identity. The huge influx of cash, several times what had previously been paid for equivalent rights, helped Premier League clubs lure top players from all over the world. Are you still in the world?

market for a smartphone with an actual keyboard. Chinese phone maker TCL today announced the Blackberry key two with a 4.5 inch display, a Snapdragon 660 processor running Android 8.1 Oreo, two 12 megapixel rear cameras, and yes, the famous Blackberry physical keyboard, complete with fingerprint sensor on the space bar, and a new feature called Speedkey, which is a customizable keyboard shortcut that lets you do basically whatever you want to do in a hurry. All of this will be available for $649 U.S., and it's coming later this month in select markets, though the exact launch date is not known. This is the second BlackBerry smartphone released by TCL under a licensing agreement with Blackberry.

The first was the Blackberry Key One. TCL's senior vice president, Elaine Lejeune, said in a statement, quote, with the introduction of Blackberry Key 2, we've created a distinct smartphone that captures all of the traits that have made BlackBerry smartphones iconic, while introducing new innovations and experiences that not only make this one of the best devices for security and privacy, but also the most advanced BlackBerry smartphone ever, end quote. Indeed, CNET is highlighting the Key 2's security features, not just the physical keyboard as perhaps a key way that a BlackBerry phone might stand out in the current crowded smartphone market. As CNET writes, quote,

BlackBerry Mobile introduced new digital lockers that require your fingerprint. You can also lock down apps and even photos, which also require a fingerprint authentication to work. The key two also comes with the Firefox Focus browser, preloaded for anonymous browsing. There's also the DETAC app, which has been redesigned with a new user interface to better present what apps have what access to your phone, end quote.

Alex Thurber, Senior Vice-Vitaph, President of Mobility Solutions for BlackBerry Limited told CNET, quote, at BlackBerry, we truly believe that you own your data, and you need to be aware of how you're releasing it. Finally, today, with all the stories we talk about on the show, it's easy to imagine that we live in a world where everyone is on the Internet. It's easy to forget that a lot of us are privileged that the Internet can still be an expensive luxury for the less affluent, even here in America.

A survey released by the National Telecommunications and Information administration found that internet usage in U.S. households with incomes below $25,000 per year is only 62%. However, the good news is that that percentage is up from just 57% in the year 2015. Among households earning $100,000 a year or more, the internet usage remained unchanged at 86%. The gain of roughly 13.5 million new internet users generally was, according to the study, quote, driven by increased adoption among low-income families, seniors, African Americans, Hispanics, and other groups that have been less likely to go online, end quote. For example, the survey found that senior citizens have increased their internet usage to 63% up from 56% in 2015,

and Hispanic internet usage has jumped to 72% in 2017, up from 66% in 2015. By the way, I did get the message from you guys on Twitter that some Somehow, for some reason, I slipped into pronouncing Huawei as Yahweh yesterday. I actually do appreciate you guys letting me know when I get something wrong on the pod, as long as you do it politely, of course. And maybe don't do it every day, but let's hope I don't get stuff wrong every single day. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. I'll be thinking hard tonight about what I can mispronounce on tomorrow's show.

Talk to you then.