Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 05/25 – Fuchsia OS Finally Arrives

Episode Date: May 25, 2021

Google finally rolls out its Internet of Everything Else OS, Fuchsia. Arm unveils its first new v9 chips. Poparazzi might be the next big social app, and it debuted number one on the app store. And Noom has raised a hell of a lot of money, but that’s because, its making a ton of money helping people lose weight. Sponsors: Oracle.com/goto/ride Cybereason.com Links: Google is officially releasing its Fuchsia OS, starting w/ first-gen Nest Hub (9to5 Google) ARM's first v9 CPUs are built for computers, not just phones (Engadget) Florida, in a First, Will Fine Social Media Companies That Bar Candidates (New York Times) Apple Says iPad Pro's XDR Display Designed to Minimize Blooming, but Some Users Still Notice the Effect (Mac Rumors) Airbnb doubles down on flexible search, improves the host flow in preparation for summer 2021 (Tech Crunch) Poparazzi debuts at #1 on the App Store charts (Protocol) Weight-Loss App Noom Gets $540 Million in Silver Lake-Led Round (Bloomberg) 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, May 25th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Google finally rolls out its internet of everything else OS, fuchsia, Arm unveils its first new V9 chips. Papa Razzi might be the next big social app and it debuted number one on the app store. And Noom has raised a hell of a lot of money, but that's because it's apparently making a hell of a lot of money helping people lose weight. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Google is rolling out its long in development, completely new operating system, Fuchsia OS to first-gen

nest hubs as an update replacing CastOS. The new Fuchsia OS will not change any functionality of your device, but again, it is completely new, and for Google it might be the future, quoting 9 to 5, Google. For all intents and purposes, this update will not change any of the functionality of the nest hub, but under the hood, the smart display will be running fuchsia OS instead of the Linux-based cast OS it used before. In fact, your experience with the nest hubs should be essentially identical. This is possible because Google's smart display experience is built with Flutter, which is designed to consistently bring apps to multiple platforms, fuchsia included. The fuchsia-based update for the Nest Hub will roll out over the coming months,

starting with those in the preview program, before eventually becoming more broadly available, Considering the interface and experience will be unchanged, it's likely that Nest Hub owners won't even notice they've been switched over to Fuchsia OS. That said, Google appears to be moving cautiously with this rollout, moving over the course of months, as switching operating systems is not a simple update. Today's release marks Google's biggest public step toward FUSA being an operating system that the average person can use. By field testing it on real devices in the wild, Google can prove that they're from scratch not. Linux operating system is ready to be used in the smart home as a drop-in replacement for the KastOS. For now, it's not clear whether Google intends for other KastOS-based devices to be ported to Fuchsia. That said, the smart home is just one of many avenues that Google has explored for

fuchsia, with the OS designed to be capable of powering both desktops and smartphones, even natively running Android apps. As suggested by Google's Hiroshi Lachimer in 2019, the smart home may be just the starting point for fuchsia on made by Google devices and beyond. He said, quote, It's not just phones and PCs in the world of Internet of Things. There are increasing numbers of devices that require operating systems and new runtimes and so on. I think there's a lot of room for multiple operating systems with different strengths and specializations. Fuchsia is one of those things and so stay tuned, end quote.

The first half of 2021 continues to be full of chip news. from generational advancements and turnovers to people doing their own silicon, to people not being able to secure enough silicon. Today, Arm unveiled its Cortex X2 CPU, which it says offers 30% more performance than current high-end Android phones, and the Molly G710, which is for Chromebooks and high-end phones. These are the first fruits of Arms V9 architecture, which is Arm's first new architecture in a decade. Quoting in gadget. The flagship is the Arm Cortex X2, a CPU core meant to scale from premium smartphones to laptops. It reportedly offers a 30% performance boost over current high-end Android phones, although Arm didn't provide more details. You'll see gains for more mainstream

uses. The Cortex A710 is the first Arm V9 big core meant for big little chips and is about 10% faster than the Cortex A78 while delivering 30% greater efficiency. Cortex A510, meanwhile, is the first new little high efficiency core in four years and should offer 35% better overall performance and triple the speed for machine learning. Arm claims the A510 is nearly as fast as high performance chips from a few years ago, making it a viable option for watches and smart home tech in addition to lower-end phones. Arm is finally dragging the rest of the industry into the 64-bit Era 2. It's promising that all big and little cores will be 64-bit by 2023, and its partners are

helping put an end to 32-bit apps before 2021 is over. There's a good chance you'll be using 64-bit phones and apps for a while, but this should push stragglers to catch up. Like the Cortex CPUs, the Mali GPUs are aimed at more than just phones. The flagship Mali G710 is about 20% faster for intensive tasks, 35% for machine learning, and is aimed at Chromebooks in addition to high-end phones. The Molly G610 offers similar features at a lower price, while the Molly G510 gives mid-range phones and smart TVs a 100% speed boost, including for machine learning and 22% efficiency gains. At the low end, the Molly G310 brings Arms Valhull architecture to basic GPUs for the first time, boosting performance for everything from smart.

smarter smartphones to wearable devices, end quote. Do not, however, expect to see this in devices soon, as in this year, as folks need time to actually gin up devices to get out with these chips. Still, Arm expects various folks to eventually churn out 300 billion V9 chips in the next few years. I debated whether or not to mention this because I'm basically sure that this will be immediately shot down in the courts, because it almost certainly violates the U.S. Constitution and Section 230 to name just a few laws. But there's a new Florida law that just passed that regulates how Facebook, Twitter, and others are allowed to moderate speech with fines for banning political candidates. The law exempts companies that own theme parks, cutely enough,

hint, hint Disney, quoting the New York Times. The law signed by Governor Ron DeSantis is a direct response to Facebook and Twitter's bans of former president, Donald Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off after Mr. Trump was barred after the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against conservative personalities and

publications, even though those accounts often thrive on the same platforms. More than 100 bills targeting the company's moderation practices have been filed nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Much of the bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas. The Florida law makes it illegal to bar a candidate for state office for more than 14 days in a move that would seem to outlaw the kind of permanent ban the social media platforms applied to Mr. Trump's accounts. Companies would be fined $250,000 per day for cases where they barred a candidate for statewide office. The fine is lower for candidates seeking other offices, end quote. Some 12.9-inch iPad Pro owners have been reporting an undesirable blooming effect

on the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro's mini-l-D screen, most apparent when bright objects are portrayed on a dark background. Quoting Mac Rumors. Thanks to the adoption of mini-l-D display technology, the iPad Pro features 2,500 local dimming zones. Local dimming allows some areas of an LED screen to dim almost off for darker, trueer blacks while preserving the bright parts of the screen. The technology can increase the contrast ratio of images significantly and enable the intense highlights of HDR content. On a display with local dimming, if a zone is lit up and an adjacent zone is not, there may be. be an artifact toward the part of the screen that becomes brighter than its neighboring zone

called Blooming. Oled displays, such as those used on the iPhone 12 lineup, do not need local dimming since they are able to turn off individual pixels to achieve true blacks, all with no blooming effect. Local dimming can be a way to get near OLED levels of picture quality, but it struggles to achieve the same level of contrast. Blooming on the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro is therefore to be expected to some extent, but users seem to be divided about how bad the effect actually is. Where blooming is visible, especially on HDR content with isolated bright shapes on a black background, it is most prominent on the iPad Pro when viewing the display from an off-axis angle and in a darkened environment. That being said, Mac Rumors' editors believe that the effect of

blooming on the iPad Pro looks less severe in person than it does in images, likely due to exposure and image processing, end quote. Just in time for summer and an expected surge in travel once we're all vaccinated, Airbnb has debuted new tools for hosts and guests on its platform, including a streamlined sign-up flow, expanded flexible search, and better support as it aims to boost rental supply, quoting TechCrunch. To start, Airbnb has streamlined the process of becoming a host, minimizing the amount of steps it takes to get a listing up,

Machine learning algorithms can also now automatically arrange photos based on guest's appeal, and hosts are provided suggestions from Airbnb about the best titles and descriptions for their listing. The company is also adding new layers of data to the system integrating with publicly available real estate data so that hosts can simply enter their address and have information like number of bedrooms and bathrooms automatically filled in. On the guest side, Airbnb is doubling down on features around flexibility. In February, for example, the company introduced flexible date search. letting people search for listings based on the type of trip rather than the dates. Users can now search for a long weekend, a week-long trip, or a month-long trip. Today, Airbnb announced that it is making its search product even more supple with flexible matching and flexible destinations.

Flexible matching essentially adds wiggle room to a more specific search. For example, if a user searches for listings under $250 a night, it might show listings that fit all the other criteria but are priced slightly outside of that range, or if a user searches for a certain set of amenities, it might show a listing that's only missing one. Flexible destinations allow a user to search for a certain type of listing regardless of the location. Think tree houses or beachside properties.

Combined, this type of flexible search will expose guests to a much more diverse pool of listings, and the updated host's flow is expected to increase supply in some of these less explored destinations, end quote. I don't know if every VC I follow, invested in this thing or if I just follow the same small group of VCs, but the VCs congratulating themselves Twitter account has been working overtime the past 24 hours as people celebrate a hot new app called paparazzi that debuted at the top of the app store, which is pretty rare for a brand

new app to debut number one, quite a feat in and of itself. But it's also interesting what this app does. Paparazzi is a new photo sharing app that bans selfies, focuses on sharing photos of friends, and has no follower accounts, captions, hashtags, or comments. Quoting Protocol. The app's conceit is simple. You only take photos of other people acting as your friends, paparazzi. On your profile, pictures other people have taken of you appear front and center with photos you've taken of other people relegated to a secondary tab.

The developers say this is designed to quote, the authentic exchange of photos between friends in an attempt to, quote, make social media less self-centered and more about the people we care about, end quote. The app has other features seemingly focused on building a healthier social media app. You can't edit photos before posting them. You can't comment on photos, though you can react with emoji. And you can't see other people's follow accounts, though you can see how many views their pops have. Unlike other hot apps like Clubhouse and Dispo, Paparazzi is publicly available now, and you don't need an invite to sign up. Despite that, it's clearly designed to go viral.

When uploading a photo of someone not on the app, Paparazzi sends a text to that person telling them that a photo has been posted of them. And a hyperactive, haptic-heavy onboarding video seems designed to grab users from the get-go. The app's developed by T-TYL, led by brothers Alex and Austin Ma. The two have previously released other social networking apps, including audio social network, TTIL, video texting app typo, a virtual yearbook signing app, and a clubhouse for schools app. According to CrunchBase, the company raised a $2 million seed round led by Floodgate fund in 2018. Paparazzi appears to be its first big hit. Other VCs seem to be circling.

Signal fires Josh Constine wrote that paparazzi is, quote, the perfect app for Hot VAC summer, while founder funds, Delian Asperuhov joke that A16Z's Andrew Chen has to offer the company a term sheet immediately, end quote. So, next big thing alert, but I've been saying for a couple years now that the zag for social media projects going forward is likely to be leaning hard on making people feel good using social media as opposed to addicting them to doom scrolling. Engineering for engagement is no longer cool. You know what's cool? designing for delight. Maybe this is a bit of that. Finally, today we have an interesting raise episode coming for Ride Home Plus subscribers this weekend, but I couldn't resist telling you all about this one because it's such a huge raise for something that I had my doubts about,

but what do I know? Noom is an app that purports to help people lose weight by changing their behavior, and it's raised, get this, 540,000. million. Sources say at a $3.7 billion valuation. But hey, maybe here's why. Noom apparently had sales of $400 million in 2020, quoting Bloomberg. Noom founded more than a decade ago under a different name, saw interest swell amid the coronavirus pandemic. Sales reached $400 million last year up from $200 million in 2019, said Chief Financial Officer Michael Noonan. Noom is expanding beyond weight loss to areas such as stress management to help with sleep, diabetes and hypertension. While it currently focuses on individual consumers, it's also

reaching out beyond the app store tapping employers and possibly even health insurers. Pushing into the enterprise market will pit Noom against a growing number of companies vying for that business. The digital health space is booming with startups pitching employers on technology to make their workers healthier and reduce their costs. Noom could go public within a year. The company has met with potential advisors to discuss an initial public offering, eyeing a valuation of around $10 billion, Bloomberg has reported, end quote. As I read these words into this microphone, the Microsoft Build Conference is kicking off, but I've elected to cover that tomorrow, so expects a wrap-up of a whole bunch of announces of interest to devs tomorrow.

I don't think we're expecting any hardware or gaming news, but who knows? Anyway, talk to you then.