Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/19 - Stadia is Google's Gaming Streaming Service

Episode Date: March 19, 2019

Google’s gaming service is called Stadia, the iMac lineup gets an update, Instagram ads in-app shopping, Intel wants to build an exascale computer and Y Combinator’s Demo Day, Day 1. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/RideHome Metalab.co Links: Google Stadia announced, a game streaming service for Chrome, Android, and TVs (9to5Google) Google unveils Stadia cloud gaming service, launches in 2019 (The Verge) Stadia, Google’s gaming platform, changed the rules of the console wars (Polygon) Apple Updates iMac Lineup With Up to 8-Core 9th-Gen Intel Processors and Radeon Pro Vega Graphics Options (MacRumors) Instagram tests in-app shopping with Kylie Cosmetics, Nike and Huda Beauty (Digiday) Nvidia announces $99 AI computer for developers, makers, and researchers (The Verge) Intel claims Aurora will be the first U.S. supercomputer to hit 1 exaflop (Venture Beat) Here are the 85+ startups that launched at YC's W19 Demo Day One (TechCrunch) 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 ride home for Tuesday, March 19th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google's gaming service is called Stadia.

The IMAQ lineup gets an update. Instagram ads in-app shopping. Intel wants to build an exascale computer end. Y Combinators Demo Day Day 1. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the name is Stadia. At the game developers conference today, Google announced Stadia, a game streaming service launching this year for,

Chrome, Android, and TVs that will support cross-platform play and 4K at 60 frames per second with HDR. Google said it wanted to, quote, build a gaming platform for everyone. And Sundar Pachai said that Stadia will be powered by, quote, the best of Google. Quoting from 9 to 5, Google, Stadia at launch will be available on desktops, laptops, TVs, tablets, and phones. This includes ChromeOS, even though there is no hardware acceleration on devices like the Pixelbook. Seamless switching allows users to move between all devices and save their state. Additionally, Stadia will support cross-platform play for developers and gamers on other consoles. For TVs, Stadia will work via a Chromecast Ultra.

Players can use existing controllers, keyboards, and mice. Google designed its own controller to bring the full Stadia experience, end quote. More on that controller in a second. a crowdplay feature, allowing you to join a game that is already being streamed. Google Assistant is built into the system so that you could ask, for example, how do I beat this level? YouTube will be a major driver of discovery. Google demoed a feature in YouTube that lets you watch a clip from a game,

and then hit Play Now to instantly stream playing of that game. Signups for players to try Stadia are available now at stadia.com for players in the U.S. UK, Canada, and Europe. Quoting now from the verge. Google demonstrated moving gameplay seamlessly from a phone to a tablet and then to a TV, all using Google-powered devices. While existing USB controllers will work on a laptop or PC, Google is also launching a new Stadia controller that will power the game streaming service.

It looks like a cross between an Xbox and a PS4 controller, and it will work with the Stadia service by connecting directly through Wi-Fi to link it to a game session in the cloud. This will presumably help with latency and moving a game from one device to another. You can also use a button to capture and share clips straight to YouTube or use another button to access the Google Assistant. To power all of this cloud streaming, Google is leveraging its global infrastructure of data centers

to ensure servers are as close to players around the world as possible. That's a key part of Stadia as lower latency is a necessity to stream games effectively across the internet. Google will support up to 4K at 60 frames per second at launch and it's planning to support up to 8K resolutions and 120 frames per second in the future, end quote. More interesting details. Google has partnered with AMD to PowerStadia, using a custom GPU in those data centers just mentioned, that can deliver 10.7 terraflops, more than the Xbox 1X's 6 terraflops. And about that controller, it looks a bit like Sony's dual shock controller.

As mentioned, it has a sharing button and a Google Assistant button, but crucially it also apparently connects directly to the Google data centers to cut back on lag issues. And this is super interesting. Google has created its own gaming studio for Stadia to produce Stadia exclusive games. The new studio will be led by former EA and Ubisoft executive Jade Redmond. There are a few details at this point on the studio other than the name, which will be called Stadia Games and Entertainment. and no word on what titles and what sort of games are under development. But actually, no word on a lot of the details you might care about.

No firm date on when the service will launch other than 2019. No word on what games or titles it will launch with, or how many, though Google said one of the first games supported will be Doom Eternal. And no word on how much this service will cost you, though Google promised more details in the summer. To sum up at this point, I'm going to turn to Polygon, quote, Google's gaming platform is not a console. Google itself will be handling all the processing power that is required for each game

and will stream that game to your laptop, television, phone, or tablet so you can play anywhere as long as you have a strong internet connection. Google is the first company to try to truly disrupt the gaming business in some time, and Stadia could be a threat to everyone from the companies that create and sell consoles to online storefronts like Steam. It's hard to wrap your head around all the ways this system could change the way we interact and play our games. That focus on streaming and content delivery versus the creation and physical sales of a console that sits near your television is what separates Google from the rest of the major players in gaming platforms. Suddenly, the hardware on which you play barely matters, and stadia will in fact be compatible with your existing USB controller or mouse and keyboard along with Google's new custom controller for the service.

The only thing that matters is whether you have a strong, stable online connection. but it's the speed at which you can begin playing that could take the longest to get used to, as well as Google's ability to leverage YouTube directly by letting fans join streamers instantly. Streaming itself will no longer burden your connection or hardware because Google will be generating the image on its own hardware before sending one stream to the player and another stream to YouTube, allowing others to spectate a high-quality stream that doesn't impact the frame rate of the player themselves. Stadia will also let players create and share their own links

that will lead other players to their exact location in a game, allowing other players to pick up the game from that moment. There are many unknowns here, including how the service will be priced and how many developers will be bringing games to Stadia, but Google has introduced the potential for a huge shift in how we think about and interact with our games, end quote. Yeah, right now, the commentary around this is all more questions than answers,

since Google focused so much on hitting us with the wow, but leaving the details of the reality for later, later. Mainly, we still don't know how exactly this so-called Netflix for games will function on any side of the equation. Is there a revenue cut for developers or studios? Is it a straight will pay you for the rights the way Netflix does for a lot of its content? With the internal studio, there's obviously a sense of an exclusive content library that Google might build out. Everyone will be chewing on this for a while. I'll just leave you with this tweet thread I saw from Noel Berry, quote,

input latency aside, is Stadia a service that you subscribe to like Netflix? As a dev, I'm really not into the idea of a Netflix for games controlled by Google. Do you license your game to them for a set price? Do you make money per play like Spotify? These have huge implications

on how games are designed and how we're able to make a living from games. Frankly, I do not want the primary way of making revenue from games being some kind of Spotify-like system. middleman profiting by giving your work away for cheap and giving you pennies in return, end quote. Tim Cook, are you listening to this podcast? Make my iPhone blink twice, if yes.

For the second day in a row, this podcaster's wishes have come true, and I had to do an Insta purchase once again before I started writing this. I can finally replace my dead IMac because Apple did exactly what I hoped and just quietly updated the iMac lineup with Intel's eighth generation and ninth generation core processors, and added AMD's radion pro-vega GPUs to boot. Quoting from Mac rumors, Apple says the new 21.5 inch iMac models deliver up to 60% faster performance than the previous generation, while the new 27-inch imacs deliver up to 2.4 times faster performance than the previous generation, narrowing the gap between the high-end standard iMac and the iMac Pro workstation.

The new iMac lineup also offers up to 64 gigabytes of faster 2,666 megahertz DDR4 memory and up to 2 terabytes of SSD storage. The base model 21.5 inch 4K iMac in particular has new 32 gigabytes of memory and 1 terabyte of SSD upgrade options for the first time, end quote. Thank you, Mac Rumors, and thank you for. for the ever-trusty Mac Rumors buyer guide. That IMac crapped out on me two months ago, but I knew I could hold off on buying

since the buyer's guide told me to wait. But now that I've discovered that I have this power where I can say what I want Apple to do one day and the next day they just do it, I wonder what I should wish for tomorrow. Instagram has added in-app shopping, allowing users to buy from 20 beauty and fashion brands right inside Instagram itself.

You can shop, check out, pay, and manage orders right inside the app. This is still sort of a beta test, but quoting from Digidae, during the test, when a user taps on a view the product button, they will see a checkout on Instagram option rather than being taken to an e-commerce site. Once a person enters all of their information within Instagram, which can be saved for future purchases, they can buy directly and manage their orders in the app. The feature will be rolled out over the course of the next few weeks to mobile users in the U.S. They will be able to check out products by brands including Adidas, Anastasia Beverly Hills, Color Pop, Huda Beauty, KKW Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, Nike, and O-I-Hare.

O-U-A-I-Hare. It's worth noting that the brands included in the beta test are some of the most popular on Instagram. For example, Huda Beauty has over 34 million followers. Kylie Cosmetics has just under 20 million followers, and Nike has over 85 million followers. Businesses were selected based on their adoption and performance of shopping on Instagram, according to Paige Cohen, a spokesperson for Instagram. Additionally, Instagram tried to choose brands that reflected a wide variety of products and price points, end quote. InVIDIA has announced what it is calling the Jetson Nano, a 70-millimeter by 45-millimeter AI computing board for entry-level AI applications aimed at development. developers, makers, and enthusiasts, all starting at $99, quoting The Verge.

The Nano is the latest in NVIDIA's line of Jetson-embedded computing boards used to provide the brains for robots and other AI-powered devices. Plug one of these into your latest creation, and it will be able to handle tasks like object recognition and autonomous navigation without relying on cloud processing power. This sort of setup is known as edge computing, and because it means that the data being processed from cameras and microphones never leaves the device, the end result is usually hardware that is faster, more reliable, and more secure. So everybody wins. Past jets and boards have been used to power a range of devices from shelf-scanning robots made for lows to Skydeo's autonomous drones. But the nano is aiming even smaller, end quote. $99 gets you 472 gigaflops of computing powered by quad-core arm A57 processors, a 128 core

Nvidia Maxwell GPU and 4 gigabytes of RAM supported AI frameworks include TensorFlow, Pytorch, cafe, Keras, and MXNet. Quote, we expect a lot of the maker community that wants to get into AI but has been unable to in the past.

The Jets and Nano will allow them to do that NVIDIA's vice president of autonomous machines DePu Tala told reporters. And Intel says it will soon build America's first exas scale supercomputer using its new G-GPU architecture, partnering with Kray on a project for the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago. The goal is to produce a computer with one exa-flop of performance, one quintillion floating point computations per second by next year. Quoting from Venture Beat,

the Santa Clara company says that the $500 million system dubbed Aurora is purpose. built for both traditional high-performance computing and artificial intelligence, and that it will be used to dramatically advance scientific research and discovery. It's the second iteration. Intel previously said it would deploy a 180 petaflop supercomputer at Argonne in 2018, architected on its third-gen-Nights Hill Xion phi processors, but scrapped the plans after China revealed it intended to build an exoscale system by 2020. At the core of Aurora, is a future generation of Intel's Xon scalable processor, Intel Z,

paired with next-gen Optane DC persistent memory. It will employ Kray's Shasta Supercomputing system and its slingshot high-performance interconnect, end quote. And finally today, yesterday was Y Combinator's winter demo day, number one. More than 85 companies debuted to the wider world, part of YC's largest winter class yet,

which features more than 200 companies. In fact, the Y Combinator classes have gotten so huge that they had to split the demos into two different stages. And by stages, I mean actual stages that you can stand on. It's sort of gotten like Coachella, where you have to decide which stage you want to watch. Even if you were in the building in person yesterday, you wouldn't be able to see all of the presentations

because they were going on simultaneously. There was a pioneer stage and a mission stage. as they do every year, TechCrunch has a helpful post up, giving a quick summary of every company and basically their elevator pitch. I enjoy just scrolling through the list every time. So in case you do as well, last link in the show notes is to the first half of the Y Combinator Winter Crop. Since the Google event was late in the day, I'm running late getting this done. It is 3.34 p.m. Eastern right now. So I'm just going to say, so I'm just going to say, talk to you all again tomorrow.