Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/19 – Qualcomm’s New Snapdragon 870

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 870. Cruise, Microsoft and GM all get together in a beautiful marriage that is just as much about cloud computing as it is self-driving. Has the policy controversy endangered WhatsApp in India? And why the whole Smart Home and Internet of Things industry might be taking a breather. Sponsors: Fundrise.com/techmeme MintMobile.com/ride Links: Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 870 reheats the Snapdragon 865 for 2021 phones (The Verge) Microsoft invests in Cruise in new $2 billion round (TechCrunch) India asks WhatsApp to withdraw new privacy policy over ‘grave concerns’ (TechCrunch) 5G Rivals Face an $81 Billion Tab After Spectrum Buying Spree (WSJ) DuckDuckGo surpasses 100 million daily search queries for the first time (ZDNet) Electric car batteries with five-minute charging times produced (The Guardian) CES 2021: A deep breath for the smart home to determine its future (Stacey On IOT) 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 January 19th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Qualcomm unveils the Snapdragon 870, Cruise, Microsoft, and GM all get together in a beautiful marriage that is just as much about cloud computing as it is self-driving cars, has the policy controversy-endangered

WhatsApp in India, and why the whole smart home and Internet of Things industries might be taking a bit of a breather. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Coming soon to millions of Android phones, Qualcomm has unveiled its new Snapdragon 870 chip, which has a similar design to the 865 and 865 plus, but is clocked at 3.2 gigahertz, making it about 10% faster than the 865, quoting the verge. Think of it almost like a Snapdragon 865 plus plus. Qualcomm says that the reason for the new chip is in response to manufacture and market demands. The 870 is designed for companies that want to offer a top-tier processor, but don't need the absolute best features that the flagship Snapdragon 888 offers and the higher price tag that

it demands. Instead, the company says that it expects that Snapdragon 870 phones should hit a sub-800 price tag, although confusingly we've already seen Snapdragon 888 phones like the $799 Galaxy S-21 start to bleed into that. range. Presumably, there's also a marketing aspect here. The Snapdragon 870's new branding and modest, if still real, speed improvements over even the Snapdragon 865 plus mean that companies using the chip in their phones get a new 2021 chip to boast about on spec sheets without concerns of getting looked over by customers for having an outdated or old processor like the 865 or 865 plus, end quote.

Sometimes raises are interesting, because therefore, an obvious leader in a given space, and sometimes they're interesting because it's a who's who actually doing the backing. This is a little of both. GM's electric autonomous vehicle startup cruise has raised a fresh $2 billion round at a $30 billion valuation with backing from GM itself, but also Microsoft, Honda, and a range of institutional investors. But it's Microsoft that is the interesting story here, quoting TechCrunch. While Microsoft's capital is important, the partnership might provide equal and longer term value for Cruise, at least in the two company's views. Under the long-term strategic

partnership, Cruise will leverage Azure Microsoft's cloud and edge computing platform to commercialize its autonomous vehicle solutions at scale. Any autonomous vehicle company aiming to commercialize, meaning bring their tech to the public at scale, needs a robust cloud computing platform. Operating fleets of self-driving vehicles that will shuttle people and even packages, generates a massive amount of data, making cloud services one of the bigger costs for an AV company. Cruise's partnership with Microsoft aims to provide benefits for both companies. Cruise will be able to lock in lower prices for cloud services, and Microsoft will be able to test some of its bleeding edge systems

that can handle workloads needed to bring machine learning and robotics, like autonomous vehicles to life and at scale. The partnership extends to GM as well, according to Tuesday's announcement. Microsoft will be GM's preferred public cloud provider to help the automaker accelerate several of its digitization initiatives, as well as streamline operations across digital supply chains, end quote. So Azure lands a big new client, even as Microsoft makes a big investment in a completely different business.

as Kristen Corsack summarizes it neatly, quote, there's also a cloud vendor announcement in here, which normally is a bit of a meh news, but it is interesting because AVs are so new and really not commercialized yet. Microsoft clearly is targeting this area and wants to be a dominant player, end quote. Last week, we explained the whole,

everyone is leaving WhatsApp and heading to Signal and Telegram, Brouhaha, as perhaps being overblown, overblown, but also probably earned by Facebook's years of a bad reputation for actually giving an F about user privacy or about their users full stop in a way. But even if people are misinformed about the particulars of the WhatsApp policy change, it might not matter in reality. For example, India has asked WhatsApp to withdraw the planned change to its privacy policy, citing grave concerns and also asking why users in the EU are exempt from it, quoting TechCrunch.

In an email to WhatsApp head Will Cathcart, the nation's IT ministry said the upcoming update to the app's data sharing policy has raised, quote, grave concerns regarding the implications for the choice and autonomy of Indian citizens. Therefore, you are called upon to withdraw the proposed changes, end quote. The ministry is additionally seeking clarification from WhatsApp on its data sharing agreement with Facebook and other commercial firms and has asked why users in the EU are exempt from the new policy, but their counterpart in India have no choice but to comply. Quote, such a differential treatment is prejudicial to the interests of Indian users and is viewed with serious concern by the government.

The ministry wrote in the email, a copy of which was obtained by TechCrunch. The government of India owes a sovereign responsibility to its citizens to ensure that their interests are not compromised, and therefore it calls upon WhatsApp to respond to concerns raised in this letter. This all-or-nothing approach takes away any meaningful choice from Indian users. This approach leverages the social significance of WhatsApp to force users into a bargain, which may infringe on their interests in relation to informational privacy and informational security, the ministry said in the email, end quote. Now, you might take this as a sort of ha-ha, someone is threatening to slap Facebook on the wrist again.

cute sort of story, but expect Facebook to take this deadly serious. Remember, overall, leveraging WhatsApp as their sort of entree into business and transactions is one of Facebook's major strategic goals in the coming years. And they especially want to do this in India. Remember that whole tie up with Reliance Geo? But then again, the whole point of the privacy change is to enable the sort of business communications platform in the first place, right? So, between a rock and a hard place for old Zuck this morning. And this is one of those things where I'm super skeptical, but I swear I keep hearing smart people talk about how there's room for disruption and challengers to Google in the search space. I say I'm super skeptical because I've been hearing people say that for 15 years and

basically nothing has actually meaningfully happened in the space. But Google Search does continue to degrade in terms of quality, as we've said, so who knows, and make note of this. DuckDuck Go has surpassed 100 million daily search queries for the first time. They did it on January 11th, and since August of 2020, Duck, Duck Go has started seeing over two billion search queries per month on the regs for the first time, quoting ZDNet. Duck, Duck Goh's popularity comes after the search engine has expanded beyond its own site and now currently offers mobile apps for Android and iOS, but also a dedicated Chrome extension. More than 4 million users installed these apps and the extension, the company said in a tweet in September 2020. But the

search engine's rising popularity is also due to its stated goal of not collecting user data and providing the same search results to all users. As it highlighted last year, this lack of granular data sometimes makes it hard for the company to even estimate the size of its own user base. But this dedication to privacy has also helped the company gain a following among the privacy the conscious crowd. Duck Duck Go has been selected as the default search engine in the Tor browser and is often the default search engine in the private browsing modes of several other browsers, end quote. Obviously, mainstream users finally caring about privacy in a meaningful way is another thing that I've gotten jaded about as I've waited endlessly for it to actually happen.

But it is interesting that this report coincides with everyone suddenly flooding to signal and telegram this month. And remember, the point here is that search is, is such a huge pie. All you've got to do is have halfway decent market share, and even if you limit yourself to discrete numbers of ads, even non-targeted ads, your business opportunity is still in the tens of billions of dollars a quarter. You can disrupt Google by doing the one thing that they'll be unable to ever do, which is pivot to quality, because quality for them would mean sacrificing growth, and the stock market would never allow that to happen. We mentioned this briefly, recently, but every half decade or so, they hold these big auctions for Spectrum. And companies like

AT&T and Verizon bid billions of dollars to lock down said Spectrum. In the old days, there were more players in the game. So what spectrum you managed to land could make the difference between being a Bell South or an Ameritech or eventually becoming an AT&T or a Verizon. And in prep for the launch of 5G, the bidding was as fierce as it's ever been. But apparently, not as fierce as now, as a new record has been set, $80.9 billion was ponied up at the U.S. government airwaves license sale. This was for the so-called C-band of Spectrum Rights, which will allow the existing players, and remember there are fewer of them at this point, to build out their 5G capability. So maybe that was why the bidding was so fierce. And quoting the Wall Street Journal, this auction could have important

repercussions in the entire telecom ecosystem for years to come. Quote, the sale ended Friday, of a second phase that determines the specific frequencies each company will receive. The public won't likely learn the names of the auction's winners for several weeks, but Wall Street is already taking cues from traditional network operators seeking loans or issuing bonds that could be used to foot the bill. AT&T is in talks with banks about a possible one-year loan of around $14 billion and recently borrowed about $3.5 billion in the short-term commercial paper market, according to people familiar with the matter. T-Mobile raised $3 billion through a $8 million. high-yield bond sale earlier this month, and Verizon is widely expected to issue bonds in the

coming weeks, analysts said. The new debt this year adds to several billion dollars in bonds that carriers issued in 2020 before the auction started. AT&T's discussion with banks was earlier reported by Bloomberg News. All told, the C-band auction will cost the winning bidders as much as $96 billion after they cover obligatory payments to satellite companies that are shifting their operations to make room for cell phone service. That financial burden is more than double the price of the previous FCC auction record, a $44.9 billion contest that ended in 2015, end quote. So, see, I'm mentioning possible knock-on effects because, well, go with me on a thought experiment here. We've mentioned before, AT&T, for example, is already deeply in debt. I think they might

actually have the biggest debt load of any corporation in America. And they have that debt load because they gobbled up content companies, the warners, etc., that were put together to make AT&T into a player in the content space to deliver you HBO Max so they could join the streaming wars. But remember, HBO Max is only there to be a loss leader for their actual telecom business. And so AT&T is already deeply in debt because of content and now they're going to be even more in debt to shore up their bread and butter business. Could there come a day when AT&T decides content was merely an expensive distraction and cuts bait on the whole project. Not saying it will happen, but if it did happen, would I be surprised?

No, I would not. You got to service that debt load somehow. We mentioned EV AV startup cruises big rays earlier in this episode, and we're always on the lookout for improvements in battery tech when it comes to the EV space. But if EVs are really about to take over the world, it is stuff like this that could really put nitro into EV adoption. What if you could recharge your EV in just five minutes? That sort of a reality might be closer than you think, quoting the Guardian.

Batteries capable of fully charging in five minutes have been produced in a factory for the first time, making a significant step towards electric cars becoming as fast to charge as filling up petrol or diesel vehicles. The new lithium ion batteries were developed by the Israeli company StoreDot and manufactured by Eve Energy in China on standard production lines. StoreDot has already demonstrated its extreme fast-charging battery in phones, drones, and scooters, and the 1,000 batteries it is now produced are to showcase its technology to carmakers and other companies. Daimler, BP, Samsung, and TDK have all invested in StorDOT, which has raised $130 million to

date and was named a Bloomberg New Energy Finance Pioneer in 2020. The batteries can be fully charged in five minutes, but this would require much higher powered chargers than used today. Using available charging infrastructure, Storedot is aiming to deliver 100 miles of charge to a car battery in five minutes in 2025. Existing lithium ion batteries use graphite as one electrode into which the lithium ions are pushed to store charge. But when these are rapidly charged, the ions get congested and can turn into metal and short circuit the battery. The Stordot battery replaces graphite with semiconductor nanoparticles into which ions can pass more quickly and easily. These nanoparticles are currently based on germanium, which is water-soluble and easier to handle in manufacturing.

But Storot's plan is to use silicon, which is much cheaper and it expects these prototypes later this year. Doron Meisdorf, CEO of Stordot, said the cost would be the same as existing lithium ion batteries, end quote. And finally today, as I said, we're putting together a sort of CES wrap-up episode for this weekend. And of course, there are plenty of Internet of Things gadgets and smart home gadgets in that episode. But over at Stacey on IoT, they are calling a sort of trend that they noticed for IOT at CES this year. Basically, they think the industry is sort of pausing to catch its breath at the moment. after years of basically a shotgun blast approach, a sort of throw everything against the wall and see what sticks philosophy. Maybe you don't need a smart hairbrush or a smart coat rack after all, quote.

For several years, the smart home industry has moved a little too rapidly without a cohesive understanding of what problems it should solve and what services or features consumers want. For context, I think back to the 2015 CES event. There, Stacey and I attended a lengthy Samsung keynote that was filled with promise on how everything in the home was about to be connected, bringing a nirvana to our personal abodes. Samsung and many other companies set about to deliver on that promise without really thinking it through beyond the high level. That doesn't mean it's been a complete wash since then. In fact, we've seen much progress ranging from the now ubiquitous digital assistants and smart speakers to video doorbells and connected cameras to intelligent appliances in the kitchen. By and large, though, these are the low-hanging fruit of the smart home solution. To put it another way, has voice control of the lights or connected devices in your home really made a profound impact?

Would it be that much more difficult for you to use a traditional oven to cook dinner instead of a smart oven? And how many times have you actually used that smart front door lock to remotely let someone in your home? The point is this. Yes, these are new conveniences brought about by the smart home industry over the past half dozen years or so, but have they really solved the major challenges or problems that we want a smart home to deliver or overcome? I think the industry is starting to realize that no, they haven't. Progress has been made, but there's a long way to go yet before the smart home delivers on the promise we expect. And that's actually another reason for this perceived pause at this year's event. I don't think the industry really agrees on what the smart home should be.

It may sound like I'm down on the smart home, but I'm not. Instead, this year's CES event gave me time to take a step back. to see how we got here if here is where we want to be and where we might be going, end quote. That's all for today. The feedback on the interesting Ray's bonus episode this weekend was pretty universally positive. So indeed, we'll have more of that sort of episode coming down the pike on a regular basis. I'll let you know if and when we do settle on a definitive cadence for when new episodes like that will show up. Right now, all I can say is every so often. every month or so or maybe twice a month, I don't know, when enough interesting raises have piled up

is the answer as of right now. Talk to you tomorrow.