Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/03 - What If Golf Is The Most Like Fortnite?

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

Waymo has an interesting raise. Interesting for what it says about self-driving and about Google Moon Shots. Robinhood has the worst possible outages at the worst possible time. A new player in the quantum computing race. And sports tech offers a new way to watch… golf? Sponsors: Metalab.co Legalzoom.com Code: "ride" at checkout Links: Waymo raises $2.25 billion to scale up autonomous vehicles operations (VentureBeat) Robinhood Trading Site Seizes Up, Customers Miss Stock Rally (Bloomberg) Honeywell set to launch its quantum computer with quantum volume of 64 (ZDNet) Ampere Altra is the first 80-core ARM-based server processor (VentureBeat) iPhone Maker Expects China Plants to Return to Normal in Coming Weeks (Bloomberg) Tim Cook and Apple Bet Everything on China. Then Coronavirus Hit. (WSJ) Alibaba’s new AI system can detect coronavirus in seconds with 96% accuracy (TNW) NBC’s experimental PGA Tour live stream makes it easier to follow your favorite golfer (The Verge) 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 right home for Tuesday, March 3, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Waymo has an interesting raise. Interesting for what it says about self-driving and Google moonshots. Robin Hood has the worst possible outages at the worst possible time, a new player in the quantum computing race, and sports tech offers a new way to watch golf.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Waymo just announced a huge investment round, $2.25 billion coming from Silver Lake, Andresen Horowitz, parent company Alphabet, and others including AutoNation and the sovereign wealth fund of Abu Dhabi. This is Waymo's first ever outside raise. If you listen to this show regularly, though, maybe you shouldn't be surprised that it's happening, quoting Venture Beat. The news comes after a report by the information revealed that Waymo nearly doubled its headcount to 1,500 employees known as Waymonauts from 800 about a year ago. The company's annual cost is estimated to be around $1 billion, while its robotaxy business, Waymo 1, reportedly yields just hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in revenue. Waymo hasn't shared the number of customers who have ridden in its fleet of over 600 vehicles to date,

but it said last December that over 1,500 people are using its ride hailing service monthly and that it has served over 100,000 total rides since launching its rider program in 2017. Waymo is the proven leader in self-driving technology, is the only autonomous vehicle company with a public ride-hailing service, and is successfully scaling its fully driverless experience, said Silver Lake co-CEO CEO Egun Durbin in a statement, quote, we're deeply aligned with Waymo's commitment to making our roads safer and look forward to working together to help advance and scale the Waymo driver in the U.S. and beyond, end quote. So I said this probably isn't surprising, given all of that news of the recent hires and the billion dollars it costs Alphabet to run Waymo at this point. But it's still eyebrow raising nonetheless, as AI guru Callum Chase tweeted, this indicates that self-driving is harder to perfect than people thought. It also shows that Silicon Valley's smartest investors still think the question regarding autos is when, not if.

And that the answer is years, not. decades, end quote. But also, this is twofold interesting from a Google perspective. Again, this is the first time Waymo has raised money that didn't come solely from Alphabet, as Eric Janssa tweeted. In case there were any doubts about Alphabet doubling down on Waymo, they just disappeared. But it's notable that no automakers appear to be involved in this funding round, end quote. I'd say this is also notable to quoting Steve Kovac. This massive outside investment is a signal Alphabet's other bets, need much more money than Alphabet itself is willing to invest, verily raised an external $1 billion round last year, end quote.

Yesterday on a day when the stock market soared back up around $1.1 trillion in overall market wealth, stock trading app Robin Hood suffered what it described as a system-wide outage that affected all functionalities on the platform. By all functionalities, we mean the company's app, website, even the help center. So if you were a Robin Hood customer yesterday, you potentially missed out on that huge market rally and thus missed out on maybe a lot of money. Robin Hood was down starting at 6.30 a.m. Pacific time on Monday and it only came back online at 11 p.m. Pacific time last night. So they basically missed an entire trading day. The company said it would be offering billing credits or other forms of compensation, though it stressed that no customer data was lost.

but at the time of this writing, Robin Hood just confirmed that it is down again shortly after the Fed announced its big rate cut. This is basically the worst possible thing that can happen to a company like Robin Hood. Like the inability to trade, especially on important market-moving days like yesterday and today, is potentially fatal to a stock trading platform. Either you'll lose customers to rivals, quoting Bloomberg, recently much larger competitors, including Charles Schwab and Fidelity investments, have dropped some trading fees essentially matching Robin Hood's offering. Companies including Jack Dorsey Square have also started offering the ability to trade stocks for free, end quote. Or you could be on the hook for potentially ruinous litigation, quoting Drew Olanov on Twitter. The class action

lawsuit is going to be gnarly, end quote. If you'll recall, this is not the first snafu Robin Hood has had in recent years. There was that whole high interest yielding account that maybe wasn't legally kosher with financial regulators. I think I said at the time, you can't move fast and break things in the financial space. You just can't. Quoting Bloomberg one more time, financial technology companies may have difficulty dealing with higher trading volume in more volatile markets, said Craig Perrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. quote, particularly, is the technology scalable enough to handle the amount of orders they're getting, he said, end quote. Yes, this falls into the you had one job category, and neither customers nor courts tend to be very forgiving if you can't do the one thing you absolutely had to be trusted to do above all others.

Today I learned that there is another major player in the quantum computer race alongside IBM and Google. Honeywell today said it would launch a quantum computer within three months with a quantum volume of at least 64, making it the world's most powerful quantum computer. Also, Honeywell says it will increase quantum volume tenfold in the next five years, quoting ZDNet. Quantum volume is a measurement to gauge the power of a quantum computer and account for errors, device crosstalk, connectivity, and compiler efficiency. Quantum volume is different than quantum supremacy, which is the goal of demonstrating that a quantum computer can solve problems. Classical computers can't. Honeywell's quantum volume of 64 is twice what is offered by IBM's Q system fleet. Under Honeywell's quantum plans, customers will connect directly to systems housed by the company. Honeywell will use quantum computing to solve issues for its key verticals, such as oil and gas and industrials, and also has a partnership with Microsoft Azure.

In addition, Honeywell said it is investing in two quantum computing software providers, and partnering with J.P. Morgan Chase to develop quantum computing algorithms for financial services. Honeywell Ventures invested in Cambridge Quantum Computing and Zapata Computing. Both companies have expertise in cross-vertical algorithms and software. Cambridge Quantum Computing focuses on chemistry, machine learning, and augmented cybersecurity while Zapata invents algorithms and builds quantum software to take on supercomputers, end quote. And maybe I'm dumb for not knowing about them previously, but today, I also learned that Ampere is vying to be a major new player in the chip space.

Staying on the hardware beat for just a minute longer, Amper has unveiled the Amper Ultra, an 80-core arm-based 64-bit server processor for applications like data analytics, AI, databases, storage, and more. This is the first ever 80-core arm-based server processor, and it runs on 210 watts, quoting Venture Beat. Intel dominates about 95-5% of the server chip market with its x86-based processors,

and AMD has the rest, but Ampeer is targeting power-efficient, high-performance, and high-memory capacity features. Renee James, former president of Intel and CEO of Ampeer, said in an interview with VentraBeat that the chip is faster than a 64-core AMD epic processor and Intel's 28-core high-end Xion Cascade Lake chip. Quote, we've got the most cores in the market. It's now in the hands of some of the industry's largest cloud providers, James said. We are very happy where this came out. I think people will be surprised there is always something that comes next. And if it doesn't come from the incumbent, it comes from the disruptor. It's exciting to be working on what I think is next, end quote. Santa Clara, California-based Ampere is backed by private equity investment firm, the Carlisle Group. James hopes to take on Intel with the arm architecture used in the world's smartphones, which is known for its efficiency in providing performance at very low power levels. Ampeer was a

built from the ashes of applied microcircuits, end quote. Once again, I have held out as long as I could on the COVID news of the day. I'm not denying that it is the biggest story of the day, almost every day, but I'm trying not to make it always be the lead-off story to avoid repetition, I guess. Today, in COVID-19 tech news, Facebook and Twitter have pulled out of the South by Southwest West Conference citing COVID-19 concerns. South by Southwest organizers say the conference is proceeding as planned, but come on. Realistically, how much longer can we expect that to be true?

Next, some good news. iPhone maker Foxcon says it expects Chinese plants to begin operating normally by the end of March after the disruption caused by the coronavirus, quoting Bloomberg. Foxcon parent Honhai said Tuesday its factories are now operating at about 50% of seasonal capacity, but that should ramp up over the course of the month as workers stream back into its plants. Still, Chairman Yong Liu warned it remained difficult to quantify the full impact of a week's long disruption, or gauge the effects on final demand for the swath of consumer electronics it makes from laptops to game consoles. Business across all of Honai's four

major divisions should decline in the March quarter compared with the previous year, meaning sales in the first half could end up being flat. Liu told investors and reporters on a conference call. Quote, there's not a huge hit on demand yet so far, but I dare not and don't want to predict the outlook of the outbreak, Liu said. We don't see a huge issue with our suppliers, and we are helping them to secure resources, end quote. And the Wall Street Journal had an interesting report that some inside Apple in recent years urged the company to relocate part of its manufacturing systems from China to other countries like Vietnam. But the suggestions were shot down by senior management, quoting from the piece.

Some operations executives suggested as early as 2015 that the company relocate assembly of at least one product to Vietnam. That would allow Apple to begin the multi-year process of training workers and creating a new cluster of component providers outside the world's most populous nation, people familiar with the discussions said. Senior managers rebuff the idea. For Apple, weaning itself off China, its second largest consumer market and the place where most of its products are assembled, has been too challenging to undertake. Apple's reliance on China

has long frustrated staff and more recently unnerved investors. The coronavirus represents Apple's third major setback there in as many years, including the fallout from tensions with the U.S. that included tariffs and slower than expected iPhone sales in the country, end quote. And finally, back to a bit of good news if true. Alibaba says its new AI system can detect coronavirus in seconds, quoting the next web. Per a report from Niki's Asian review, Alibaba claims its new system can detect coronavirus and CT scans of patients' chests with 96% accuracy against viral pneumonia cases. And it only takes 20 seconds for the AI to make a determination. According to the report, humans generally take about 15 minutes to diagnose the illness, as there can be upwards of 300

images to evaluate. The system was trained on images and data from 5,000 confirmed coronavirus, coronavirus cases and has already been tested in hospitals throughout China. According to the reviews report, at least 100 health care facilities are currently employing Alibaba's AI, end quote. Finally today, remember when we did that weekend bonus episode about sports tech and we talked about how streaming is going to change how sports are consumed by viewers? Well, this is what we were talking about. NBC has an experimental live stream of the upcoming PGA tour that will make it easier for you to follow.

favorite golfer or just any golfer you want. It's called PGA Tour Live through NBC Sports Gold, and if you tune in through that app for the upcoming broadcast of the Players Championship, you can switch between any one of the 120 cameras installed on the course, and you can switch in real time. The Verge makes the excellent point that this is taking a page from video game streaming. Quote, if you've ever watched a golf broadcast, you know that they're usually forced to focus on one player at a time. Part of that comes down to matching the slower pace of golf as a sport, but it's also a well-discuized technical limitation. With only a few cameras on a multi-acre course, networks have had to be incredibly judicious about who's on the screen and, crucially, when they're on

the screen. Typically, cameras stick closely to popular players or those who are about to gain or possibly blow the lead, or those who are about to take a challenging shot. This leaves every other player, many of whom are incredibly talented off-screen for quite some time. Unlike basketball or football, having 120 cameras on the golf course isn't going to add exciting or previously unseen angles to the match, but what they contribute to the game of golf is similar to the spectator modes in some video games that let you follow each player's perspective while watching an esport event or when you're just playing an online match yourself. Having the option to watch each player lets you see the game unfold through a different lens, and that's valuable if you want the full

picture. For instance, there are 100 players in a Fortnite match, so it's a lot easier to follow your favorite player when you can see things from their perspective, end quote. Yeah, actually, I would argue that for football and basketball especially, having a ton of extra camera angles is actually overkill. Those are sports where you want to go where the action is, which is generally where the ball is. I mean, yeah, extra camera angles are useful for getting different views of the action as it happens. But there's no point in, say, following the guy all the way on the other side of the field on a kickoff return. But this is what we were talking about when we were talking about this stuff on that weekend episode. Golf, if you think about it, golf has always been the

worst spectator sport, like the worst to watch in person for sure. You have to walk from hole to hole and let the players go by you in a parade, never seeing the t-shot that got the ball to the green if that's where you're standing. And it's only marginally better on TV where the directors of the television coverage often have to rush back and forth to cover action as it occurs. or even back up and cover action that's already happened. So how would it transform the experience of viewing the sport if viewers actually had control of that? If instead of being a spectator sport,

golf was actually sort of an active event? I guess what I'm suggesting here is, weirdly, what if golf is the sport that is the most like Fortnite? I have never played a Zelda game before in my life, and I actually only bought Zelda when I got the Switch because I thought it would be good for my kids. And we are still playing it altogether, but I kind of wish I had started it on my own

because I am suddenly obsessed with this game. I know I'm about two years late on this, but how good is Breath of the Wild? I can see why some people think this is the best video game ever made, possibly. I certainly am starting to think so. Talk to you tomorrow.