Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 02/19 - Why Emoji Are Screwing Up Legal Cases

Episode Date: February 19, 2019

Qualcomm unveils a second gen 5G chip, Huawei’s founder hits back at the US, his biggest investors push back at Masa Son, and why emoji are causing problems in increasing numbers of court cases. Sponsors: The Castro Podcast App Promocode Ride at Vistaprint.com Links: Before the first 5G phone is out, Qualcomm is already moving on to its second-gen 5G modem (The Verge) The US cannot crush us, says Huawei founder (BBC News) How Huawei Targets Apple Trade Secrets (The Information) Walmart’s US e-commerce sales up 43% in Q4, thanks to growing online grocery business (TechCrunch) Key Investors Are Unhappy With SoftBank Tech-Investment Fund (WSJ) Mining Giant Bitmain Posts $500 Million Loss in IPO Financial Filing (Coindesk) Emoji are showing up in court cases exponentially, and courts aren’t prepared (TheVerge) 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 Meme Ride Home Podcast for Tuesday, February 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Qualcomm unveils its second-gen 5G chip. Huawei's founder hits back at the U.S. His biggest investors pushback at Masasaan and why emojis are causing problems in increasing numbers of court cases. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Headlines from our 5G beat.

Qualcomm has announced the Snapdragon X-55, its second-generation 5G modem, which the company says can achieve maximum download speeds of 7GBPS, up 40% from the 5GBPS that the first generation X-55 could achieve, though, as the Verge notes, quote, A combination of geography, radio interference, and spectrum availability means you're unlikely to see anything close to these theoretical limits in the real world. Thankfully, the X-55 contains a number of other benefits that aren't specifically related to speed.

Support for adaptive antenna tuning for sub-6 gigahertz 5G, for example, makes the new chips wireless communication more power efficient. The X-55 is also compatible with Qualcomm's new, physically smaller, millimeter wave antenna module, reducing the amount of space required inside the smartphones that use them. The first 5G devices will all suffer from a bit of gigantism because they need larger batteries to feed more power-hungry and bulkier components. And the X-55 is an early evolution trying to address that issue, end quote. Qualcomm also wants you to know that the X-55 could be tailored to a whole range of devices, not just smartphones, anything from laptops to self-driving cars. So the first wave of 5G capable phones, we expect to be announced next week at MobileW.

World Congress will probably be using the first generation X-50s, but who knows? Qualcomm says it is making the modem available to partners in the coming months, which means theoretically devices using the X-55 could see the light of day by the end of this year. Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei granted an interview to the BBC where he was defiant about the recent charges leveled at his company by the U.S. authorities specifically. It is, of course, his daughter, Meng Wengzhou, who was arrested in Canada recently and is expected to be extradited to the U.S. soon. Also, various countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and the U.S.

have recently banned the use of Huawei devices in their countries. Those countries were citing security concerns for doing so. Oh, and there have been the recent allegations of corporate espionage. by Huawei. Quoting Mr. Wren, there is no way the U.S. can crush us. The world cannot leave us because we are more advanced. Even if they persuade more countries not to use us temporarily, we can always scale things down a bit, end quote. And a little later in the interview, addressing the fears that the Chinese government would use Huawei devices to conduct espionage, as well as perhaps the corporate espionage allegations, quote,

the Chinese government has already clearly said that it won't install any backdoors, and we won't install backdoors either. We're not going to risk the disgust of our country and of our customers all over the world because of something like this, end quote. And quote, our company will never undertake any spying activities. If we have any such actions, then I'll shut the company down, end quote. So on a couple of these points, interestingly, the financials, Times was reporting yesterday that sources have told it that the U.K. government has concluded that it can mitigate the risk of using Huawei equipment on 5G networks. So that sort of muddies the U.S.-led anti-Waway campaign on security grounds a little bit. But also yesterday, the information

published more detailed accounts of what it alleges were Huawei's efforts to steal intellectual property from, in this case, Apple, including pressing suppliers for Apple watch details and copying MacBook Pro components, allegedly. Let me quote a couple of the anecdotes. In November, a Huawei engineer in charge of a competing smartwatch project tracked down a supplier that helps make Apple's heart rate sensor. The engineer arranged a meeting on the pretext of offering the supplier a lucrative manufacturing contract.

But the engineer was unsuccessful when he asked for details about the Apple Watch, according to an executive at the supplier, who requested anonymity because the firm has a non-disclosure agreement with Apple. Quote, they were trying their luck, but we wouldn't tell them anything, the executive said. After that, Huawei went silent, end quote. An anecdote numero dose, quote, Huawei also has attempted to glean information

about Apple's products from former Apple employees involved in its supply chain. One former Apple employee remembers interviewing for a job at Huawei immediately after leaving Apple. In the interview, Huawei executives kept asking questions about Apple's upcoming products and technological features. The former Apple employee wouldn't give any details and stopped interviewing at Huawei. It was clear they were more interested in trying to learn about Apple than they were in hiring me, the former employee said, end quote.

Walmart says that its U.S. e-commerce sales rose 43% year over year in Q4, thanks to its growing online grocery business, which has been boosted by the expansion of grocery pickups and deliveries. Quoting TechCrunch, the company has been challenging Amazon Instacart, targets shipped, and others on grocery. It had toyed with the idea for years before figuring out a model that made sense and didn't lose money. With grocery pickup,

Amazon offers an alternative to the higher cost of using grocery delivery services while still allowing for convenience, as its customers can skip shopping the aisles and instead remain in their cars while groceries are loaded into the trunk. More recently, the company began working with a network of partners to offer grocery delivery to customers' homes. It has ended relationships with Uber, Lyft, and Delive, while adding new partnerships like Point Pickup, SkipCart, Axel Hire, and Rodey, and shifting business to partners like Postmates and DoorDash, end quote. Walmart apparently now has pickup service available at 2,100 Walmart locations, and home delivery is offered by 800 locations. The company plans to expand pickup to 3,100 stores and delivery from 1,600 stores by 2020.

I'm in a place that can't test out these sort of things if you didn't know Walmart has been shut out of the five boroughs of New York City since, well, forever. But that pickup service where you just order online and drive up and someone loads it in your trunk, doesn't that seem to be something that Walmart should have started rolling out in, I don't know, 1998? but better late than never, I can see how Walmart could compete on price here by doing something like that. Having groceries delivered to your home is expensive. Trust me, I've tested out a lot of grocery delivery services over the years, and it ain't cheap. So if Walmart can offer a stepped up level of convenience basically at no cost to it or to the shopper, simply by cutting out the middleman, then that's super compelling for all parties involved, right? And an interesting update from the Masassan beat, because this is something that I've always wondered about.

Masasan's basic strategy is to throw truckloads of money at any company he identifies as worth investing in. Where other VC firms might be willing to kick in $100 million, SoftBank will give you $1.4 billion. Sons been able to do this because he's been playing with basically unlimited money from Sarvan wealth funds. But apparently the two largest contributors to the SoftBank Vision Fund, Sadi Arabia's public investment fund, or PIF, and Abu Dhabi's Mubadala investment company, have started to get uncomfortable with the high valuations. Masa is paying for tech companies. Quote, PIF and Mubadala have privately complained about the high prices, the tech investment fund, the world's largest by far, paid for some tech companies, according to people familiar with the matter.

PIF is also concerned about soft bank's practice of investing in companies first and, later transferring the stakes to the Vision Fund, often at a higher price, according to a person familiar with the Middle East investors' thinking. Some investors have complained to the Saudis that Mr. Son can overrule fund executives on investment decisions and that the fund's decision-making process is chaotic, often leading to last-minute reversals, according to people familiar with the matter, end quote. This is notable because PIF and Mubidallah are the largest outside investors in the Vision Fund. Together they have contributed two-thirds of the total capital in the fund. So if they're getting

skittish at Son's shotgun blast of money approach, then maybe the free spending days of the Vision Fund are over. We heard rumors that SoftBank wanted to invest a further $16 billion in WeWork, only to have that follow-on investment round cut back to $2 billion. The rumors at the time said it was because Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi were none too keen on the WeWork value. On Twitter, Dan Premak joked, quote, you invest in a $100 billion VC fund and then complain it's paying too high prices, to which user Tom Carlo tweeted, maybe they were expecting South Bank to do like 10,000 very selective $10 million investments instead.

I swear it was not that long ago that I was telling you about Bitmain reporting $1 billion in profit and that it was gearing up for what looked at the time like it could be one of the biggest tech IPOs of all time. Once again, in crypto, what a difference a year makes. Bitmain is that cryptocurrency hardware giant that sells custom rigs for people to mine cryptocurrencies on, but it also mined for its own account, and people suspected Bitmain alone might be the largest mining operation in existence. Again, last year, the company claimed a billion dollars in profits.

in the first half of 2018. Well, Bitmain has now disclosed a net loss for the third quarter of 2018 of $500 million. It's sort of complicated, but the Beijing-based company has to provide updated financial results ahead of its application for that IPO filed in September with Hong Kong's stock exchange. And in that update, according to CoinDesk, there are details that bring its earlier rosy numbers into question, quoting CoinDesk. The update showed Bitmain earned around $500 million in the first nine months of last year on slightly over $3 billion in revenues, according to a source familiar with the situation. The filing, which is not made public, does not break down the results by quarter. However, Bitmain previously disclosed it had grossed profits of a billion dollars in the first half of 2018.

Subtracting that from a $500 million profit for the first nine months leaves it with a net loss of roughly $500 million for the third quarter. The company had also previously reported 2.8 billion of revenues for the first half, so the $3 billion figure for the first nine months works out to third quarter revenues of just about $200 million. These are the first precise figures to show the company's reversal of fortune following the significant growth in revenues and profits over the past several years, documented in the IPO application filed in late September, end quote. Finally, today, as emoji are progressively becoming a critical, part of everyday communications, they are also increasingly becoming a problem for courts, which are suddenly forced to interpret their myriad meanings in criminal cases.

Quoting from the Verge, Bay Area prosecutors were trying to prove that a man arrested during a prostitution sting was guilty of pimping charges, and among the evidence was a series of Instagram DMs he allegedly sent to a woman. One read, Teamwork Makes the Dream Work, with high heels and money bag emoji placed at the end. Prosecutors said the message implied a working relationship between the two of them. The defendant said it could mean he was trying to strike up a romantic relationship. Who was right? Emoji are showing up as evidence in court more frequently with each passing year. Between 2004 and 2019, there was an exponential rise in emoji and emoticon references in U.S. court opinions,

with over 30% of all cases appearing in 2018, according to Santa Clara University Law Professor Eric Goldman, who has been tracking all of the references to emoji and emoticon that show up in U.S. court opinions. So far, the emoji and emoticons have rarely been important enough to sway the direction of a case, but as they become more common, the ambiguity in how emoji are displayed and what we interpret emoji to mean could become a larger issue for courts to contend with, end quote. Now, law enforcement has always had to deal with people talking in code or euphemisms. so even if the cops are listening in,

they might not know what's being said or how cops have always had to understand street vernacular to have any sort of sense of what is going on on the streets. Or that bit in the wire where the cops had to crack the pager code to solve their case. I enjoy the idea that if you remade the wire today, poor McNulty would have to get a crash course in emojis. That is all for today.

Tomorrow is the big Samsung event. at 11 a.m. Pacific time, which sucks for me. 2 p.m. East Coast time means I'll only be able to give you the headline details of whatever is announced, and we'll have to do a deeper dive the day after. So if that foldable phone comes as expected, I might just be able to be like, yeah, foldable phone, it exists. This morning, by the way, noted Samsung device scoop leaker Evan Blas tweeted that the name of the phone will be the Galaxy Fold.

So we're about to find out if that pans out into reality. Talk to you tomorrow.