Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 04/09 - Google Cloud Next Announcements

Episode Date: April 9, 2019

The headlines from the Google Cloud Next conference, China seeks to ban cryptominers, why ads on streaming services is the new hotness, and also, why Roblox is the new hotness. Sponsors: Tiny.website GetQuip.com/ride Links: Google Cloud announces 7 open source partners, Seoul and Salt Lake City regions (VentureBeat) Google's hybrid cloud platform is coming to AWS and Azure (TechCrunch) Google announces Cloud Run for open and portable serverless compute (VentureBeat) China, home to the world’s biggest cryptocurrency mining farms, now wants to ban them completely (South China Morning Post) To cut down on spam, Twitter cuts the number of accounts you can follow per day (TechCrunch) The next front of the streaming wars is the battle for ad-supported programming (Digiday) Roblox hits milestone of 90M monthly active users (TechCrunch) Why Are People Still Playing Google’s Halloween Ghost Game in April? (Slate) Subscribe to the ad-free feed! Right in your podcast app! No muss! No fuss! 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 for Tuesday, April 9th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the headlines from the Google Cloud Next conference. China seeks to ban crypto miners. Why ads on streaming services is the new hotness. And also, why Roblox is the new hotness. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google's Cloud Next conference started today. So here's a quick rundown of some of the headlines. Google Cloud Next conference started today. So here's a quick rundown of some of the headlines. Google Cloud Next. says it has partnered with seven open source projects, including Elastic, Redis Labs, and MongoDB to offer fully managed serves on GCP in the coming months, quoting Venturebeat.

That means a single user interface, including the ability to provision and manage the service from the Google Cloud console. Unified billing, one invoice from Google Cloud that includes the partners services, and Google Cloud support. Manage and log support tickets. in a single window. Google will also work with its partners to build integrations with native GCP services like Stackdriver and IAM, validating for security and optimizing performance, end quote. And Anthos, Google's cloud services platform for managing hybrid clouds that spanned on-premise data centers and Google Cloud officially came out of beta, and the big news was that it will run on AWS and Azure, quoting TechCrunt.

With Anthos, Google will offer a single managed service that will let you manage and deploy workloads across clouds all without having to worry about the different environments and APIs. That's a big deal and one that clearly delineates Google's approach from its competitors. This is Google, after all, managing your applications for you on AWS and Azure. You can use one consistent approach, one open source-based approach across all environments. Google's senior VP for its technical infrastructure, Ers-Holtzel, Solution. said, quote, I can't really stress how big a change that is in the industry, because this is really the stack for the next 20 years, meaning that it's not really about the three different clouds that are all randomly different in small ways. This is the way that makes these three cloud,

and actually on-premise environments too, look the same, end quote. And Google debuted Cloud Run for open and portable serverless computing, which will let devs run stateless HTT-Driven containers in fully managed serverless environments. Quoting now from Venture Beat, Cloud Run, quote, takes care of all infrastructure management, including provisioning, configuring, scaling, and managing servers.

Cloud Run automatically scales up or down within seconds, even down to zero, so you pay only for the resources you actually use. What we're doing with Cloud Run is introducing a brand-new product that takes Docker containers and instantly gives you a URL, Orrin Tyke, director of serverless at Google Cloud explained, this is completely unique in the industry. We're taking care of everything from the top end of SSL provisioning,

routing all the way down to actually running the container for you. You pay only by the 100 milliseconds of what you use, and it's end-to-end managed, end quote. There might be some more things announced this afternoon, but that is the gist of what came across my transom, at least in time, to talk about today. China is home to the majority of the world's cryptocurrency mining firms and also the biggest miners. But maybe not for long.

China's economic planning body has suddenly proposed new rules that would ban all cryptocurrency mining in China. The rules are under public consultation until May 7th. Quoting from the South China Morning Post, the National Development and Reform Commission, the NDRC on Monday unveiled amendments to its guidance for adjustments to the nation's industrial structure, including categories that are encouraged, restricted, and eliminated. Cryptocurrency mining was included among the sectors to be eliminated immediately. Industries in the eliminated category include those seen as wasting energy or polluting the environment, according to rules enacted by China's cabinet in 2005.

Investment and loans in those industries are banned. During the elimination period, authorities are allowed to raise electricity prices for relevant businesses to force them to close. The manufacturing, sale, and use of products in the eliminated categories is also prohibited. China is home to some of the world's largest cryptocurrency mining firms, data centers hosting the mining rigs, thanks to cheap electricity in the country's coal-rich, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia regions. In recent months, Chinese miners are known to have deployed machines in the southern Yunnan and Shizuan provinces to take advantage of the even cheaper hydropower available there during the rainy season, end quote. So this looks like a sky is falling moment for Chinese Bitcoin mining companies like Bitmain,

at the very least, since it doesn't look like the, quote, public consultation period means public debate. It looks like these companies might have to relocate out of China or just shut down completely. But is this a sky is falling moment for Bitcoin? Maddie Greenspan. A senior market analyst at E. Toro, a social trading network, tweets, maybe not, quote, if this ban does end up happening, it is more likely to push BTC prices up than down. The loss of cheap Chinese electricity would raise the mining cost, which is net positive on price.

It would also serve to kill the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that Bitcoin mining is centralized, end quote. Twitter has lowered the number of accounts a user can follow each day, from 1,000 down to 400 to cut down on spam and bot activity. Now, to be clear, this doesn't limit the number of accounts you can follow full stop. This just means that you can't go hog and in one fell swoop or one day follow 900 people. This move looks to be aimed at, among other things, those buy followers companies, those build followers fast companies, and just spammers in general, quoting TechCrunch.

Several companies had been offering tools that allowed their customers to automatically follow a large number of users with little effort. This works as a growth tactic because some people will follow back out of courtesy without realizing they followed a bot. The companies also offered tools to mass unfollow the Twitter accounts of those who didn't return the favor by following the bot back. Other automated tools were often provided as well, like ones for creating those annoying auto DMs, for example, quote. But a lot of people are asking, why stop at 400? I mean, that still seems like a large enough number that any legitimate user would never need to follow 400 people in a given day, though I do suppose businesses might need to follow their customers a lot throughout a day to respond to customer service issues via DM. And indeed, you all, Roth, head of site integrity

at Twitter tweeted, quote, so why 400 per day and not 100 or 58 or 17? short, we found that 400 is a reasonable limit that allows people to follow the accounts they're interested in each day while stopping most spam. We found that nearly half of all accounts who made more than 400 follows per day were churning. That amounted to more than 20 million follows each day and a high rate of blocks and spam reports, a clear signal that inorganic follows are super annoying, end quote. So I guess this is just targeting the ability to spam at scale, but we'll still allow low-level or work-intensive spamming. As we have been covering the streaming video wars, we've largely been looking at the direct-to-consumer plays, the over-the-top or OTT plays. You pay me

a subscription, I give you access to content. But that's only part of the television and video landscape, right? $70 billion a year still goes to TV advertising. to ad-supported plays. It's not like companies are just going to abandon a market that large. And OTT viewing only accounts for 29% of current TV viewing, and only 3% of TV ad budgets. So there's room for growth here. And that's why there is actually a parallel competition to capture ad-supported over-the-top or OTT video streaming, quoting Digidae. OTT-based advertising hit $2.7 billion in revenue in 2018, which represents a year-over-year growth of 54% according to estimates from Magna Global. That's actually higher than Magna's original estimates, which projected OTT ad revenues to hit $2.2 billion in 2018.

Magna's revised forecasts include growth of 39% in 2019 to $3.8 billion and 31% in 2020 to reach $5 billion. The two current market leaders in OTT advertising, Hulu and Roku, have already built sizable ad businesses. Hulu reached $1.5 billion in ad revenue in 2018, a growth of 45% year over year. Roku, meanwhile, generated roughly $416 million from, quote, platform revenue, which mostly comes from advertising, end quote. New entrants on this scene include YouTube, which has recently been crowing to advertisers about how more than 200 million hours of YouTube, content is watched every single day on big regular old TV sets. So obviously the pitch is bring some of your big old regular TV ad budget over here. And I think we've spoken before about Amazon and the potential it has to do a pretty powerful ad-supported streaming offering

that could build off of what it knows about your buying habits. And then, quoting Digidae, various TV programmers are also investing in ad-supported OTT. CBS has a network of streaming apps, which include three free video streaming services for news, sports, and entertainment news, as well as an ad-supported tier for its CBS All Access subscription service. These services combined to generate hundreds of millions in annual ad revenue for CBS, according to a previous Digiday Story. Viacom, meanwhile, spent $340 million earlier this year to buy Pluto TV, a free video streaming service that offers more than 100 linear-programmed channels. Viacom has been pitching Pluto TV to cable and satellite to

distributors as an add-on for broadband-only subscribers, a key part of Viacom's distribution strategy, according to Viacom's CEO Bob Backish, in an interview with CNBC after the Pluto TV acquisition. Other key ad-supported video streaming services include Jumo and Tooby TV, as well as branded services from TV manufacturers such as Samsung and Vizio. And this doesn't even include the virtual live TV services from Hulu, YouTube, DirecTV, and Sling TV. Four years ago, the TV industry had the option of going slow. They don't have that option now, said Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president and general manager of Roku's platform business. Quote, they have to follow consumers and those consumers are showing up on OTT, end quote.

Fortnite might get all the headlines, but there's another game that has quietly become quite a hit with the kids. And I might not have to tell you that if you have kids of a certain age. Roblox says it now has 90 million monthly active users up from 70 million just last fall. The company behind Roblox was recently valued at $2.5 billion. I told you about Roblox once when it raised a $150 million series F round. In essence, Roblox is a game and a game platform, quoting TechCrunch. The games themselves are built by third-party creators while Roblox gets a share of the revenue. the games generate from the sale of virtual goods.

In 2017, Roblox paid out $30 million to its creator community, and later said that number would more than double in 2018. It says that players and creators now spend more than a billion hours per month on its platform, end quote. I think when we talked about Roblox before, I called it a little bit Minecraft, a little bit open world game, a little bit gaming platform, and a little bit Fortnite. And indeed, the company behind Roblox says that like Fortnite, roadblocks is indeed seeing the same phenomenon where it's become a place for kids to go and hang out with their friends, even if they're not actively playing any game. So a little bit social network as well.

And finally today, speaking of games back in October, the Google Doodle team launched the first ever multiplayer interactive Google Doodle as a game. It was called Great Goal Duel. And it was a great success at the height of the game's popularity around. Halloween, more than 500,000 players were playing in every five-minute window. Great Gould duel was designed to do what Google Doodle does, delight people a little bit. Oh, and also show off some of Google Cloud's capabilities that clearly Google has followed up on with their streaming gaming initiative. But people continue to be delighted by Great Gould Duel, at least a little bit.

In fact, a lot of people are still playing the game today in April. How and why? Well, apparently a commemorative Google Doodle page is still live so you can still play the game. There's still an active subreddit devoted to the game. There's a Discord server. As Slates Marissa Martinelli, a devotee of the game, explains, quote, the two-minute time limit is ideal if you're just looking for a quick break, even if the game's competitive nature makes it oh so tempting to keep hitting the button to play again and again and again. The great Gould duel also lets you. host private matches, which I tested out with a few of Slate's finest gamers. Turns out it's equally entertaining when you're playing one-on-one, though it may destroy friendships and professional relationships when you defeat a worthy foe by just three flames. Maybe you miss the opportunity to play the game first time around, or maybe you played the game at Halloween and then forgot about it. Either way, as we enter the season of florals and Easter bunnies, it's time to dust the cobwebs off the great gould duel, or rather to dust them back on, end quote. Okay, so when

I originally announced the weekend bonus episodes. I said we could experiment with things, like even a listener call-in episode. So let's give that a try. I want you to send me any questions, comments, corrections, topics for discussion, etc. This is your chance to sound off on any of the topics we've covered. Make your own arguments about things. Share your own hot takes, challenge any of my assumptions, or just ask for my opinion about anything.

anything. Something we've covered or maybe not covered. My preference would be to get audio of all of your questions, like an old school radio call-in show so I can edit it in and make an episode out of it. I'd love to give you my Skype number for those purposes and have you leave voicemails, but I just learned that Skype does not allow you to save or export voicemail audio, which is dumb. So instead, what I'm going to suggest is use the voice memo app on your phone. Record a question, call in or whatever, and email it to me at brianattechmeme.com. Try to keep your question to less than a minute, maybe 30 seconds is preferred. And let's use the convention made popular by the Flop House podcast. Identify yourself as first name, last name withheld. So I'd be

Brian, last name withheld. My wife would be Lisa last name withheld. And again, I'd prefer audio so that I can edit your questions in, but I will take email questions as well that I can just read. We'll see whatever is easier or what people prefer. And as I say, this is an experiment. Maybe it won't end up being interesting, but maybe it will. So send me what you got at Brian, B-R-I-A-N at Techmeme.com.

And we'll see if we can put together. an episode for this weekend.