Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/28 – The Amazon Hardware Event

Episode Date: September 28, 2021

As many headlines from the Amazon hardware event as I can manage to squeeze in. Facebook defines the Metaverse as it sees it. Cloudflare wants to be the 4th big player in the cloud. And Satya Nadella himself dishes on that time Microsoft almost bought Tik Tok. His words, the “strangest thing I’ve ever sort of worked on.” Sponsors: Masterworks.io/ride TinyCapital.com Links: Amazon introduces Amazon Glow, an interactive, video calling device for kids and families (TechCrunch) SAY HELLO TO ASTRO, ALEXA ON WHEELS (The Verge) Astro Intro YouTube Video Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince: ‘We’re aiming to be the fourth major public cloud’ (Protocol) Facebook will publish some of its research on teens and Instagram (Engadget) Coinbase dives deeper into banking by letting users deposit paychecks into their accounts (CNBC) 1Password can now randomly generate email addresses for logins (Engadget) Trump pushing Microsoft to buy TikTok was ‘strangest thing I’ve ever worked on,’ says Satya Nadella (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 TechMeme right home for Tuesday, September 28th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. As many headlines from the Amazon hardware event as I can manage to squeeze in,

Facebook defines the Metaverse as it sees it. Cloudflare wants to be the fourth big player in the cloud, and Satcha Nadella himself dishes on that time. Microsoft almost bought TikTok. His words, the quote, strangest thing I've ever sort of worked on. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the big Amazon hardware event was today at lunchtime, and I've got to be honest with you, this is the hardest event for me to cover in this format. It doesn't help that Amazon refuses to stream it. They also, at least this year, did not give me an invite or any embargoed information. But also, they literally announced like 30 different things at these things. So the best I can do for you right now is just put my face in front of the fire hose and try to tell you what got announced. And then if things really,

resonate or call for extra analysis, perhaps we can get to that tomorrow. If this feels disjointed or lacking a narrative thread, again, remember, fire hose, I'm doing my best. First up, Amazon announced a $60 smart thermostat in partnership with Honeywell with pre-orders starting today. Very competitive price for a smart thermostat, obviously going after Nest, obviously with deep Alexa integration, as you might expect. Amazon is also partnering with Disney, with a Hey Disney service. sits on echo devices alongside Alexa. You'll be able to access that at Disney Hotels next year. Then quoting Chris Welch on Twitter, Amazon says you'll soon be able to teach echo speakers to recognize distinct sounds and alert you when they happen. The example they used was an open fridge beeping.

Useful. On the opposite end, imagine people teaching their smart speaker to recognize sex to catch a spouse cheating, end quote. There's also a new $250 Echo Show 15 with a 15, with a 15, 18.6 inch 1080p display, a wall mount, visual ID for tailored content, a picture frame mode, and more. This was that sort of home hub mounted on your wall device. We speculated about a few days ago. Sling TV is coming to all existing Echo Show devices in the U.S. And then this one sounds really cool. If you've got kids, it's called Amazon Glow. It's a $300 interactive device that kind of looks like an echo show for kids that kids could easily. cart around the house, but it's also an 8-inch display and projector that can create a 19-inch

touch-sensitive space below it on, say, a coffee table, quoting TechCrunch. Amazon Glow differentiates itself by providing more than just another connected screen experience. It also uses technology to create an interactive projected space in front of the device to provide a surface for virtual activities like games, art, puzzles, and more to give the feeling of an in-person experience. To do so, Amazon Glow combines immersive projection, sensing technologies, and video into a single device. Unlike other smart screens on the market, the glow doesn't look like a tiny TV. Instead, its 8-inch display stands up vertically, and a projector creates a 19-inch touch-sensitive space in front of the display for playing virtual games and engaging in other activities with

remote family members who are participating on their own tablets. This gameplay takes place on a special mat, which is also included with the device, end quote. Next, Amazon, Open an invite-only program for its previously announced $250 home surveillance drone, the Always Home Cam, as it's known. Remember, it's the drone that has a base station that you put somewhere in your house, but then it flies around your house to investigate disturbances in various rooms, I guess. But if that's not enough for you, Amazon's Ring subsidiary debuted what it calls Virtual Security Guard, a new pro-alarm system and smarter motion alerts,

including for package delivery. It also has an integrated ERO Wi-Fi 6 router, and it's available for a pre-order today. If they haven't done before, I guess this is Amazon going directly at ADT and the professional home security system market. Then say hello to the $80 HALO View Fitness Band, the second device from Amazon's Halo Health and Wellness Initiative, alongside a new Halo Fitness Service. The band has an Ameled color screen and haptic feedback, so a direct challenge to Fitbit. here. What else? A $19.99 per month elder care subscription service called Alexa Together with an emergency helpline feature, care alerts, tools for caregivers, and more. A $50 blink video doorbell with Alexa integration, 1080P video, and a $130 solar-powered camera bundle and a $140-dollar floodlight cam.

And then because Amazon has to do weird stuff, they do more weird stuff. than basically anyone else if you think about it. The Echo, for example, was a weird outlier when it debuted, but then it became a whole product category. So maybe the same with this. Let me introduce you to Astro, a $1,000 tiny wheeled robot with an echo show-like 10-inch display on top, meant to roam around your house. It's invite only for now, but it is already open for applications if you're interested. Quoting the Verge. The Astro, which will initially cost $999, $0.99 and available as a day one edition product that you can request an invite for. The privilege of buying is Amazon's most ambitious in-home product yet. Amazon sees it as bringing together many different

parts of the company, robotics, AI, home monitoring, cloud services, all into one device. Best described as the love child between a Roomba and an Echo Show smart display, the Astro is meant to be the next step in what Amazon believes to be the seemingly inevitable home robot. Amazon claims the Astro can do a wide variety of things you might want from a home robot. It can map out your floor plan and obey commands to go to a specific room. It can recognize faces and deliver items to a specific person. It can play music and show you the weather and answer questions like any echo smart display. It can be used for video calls, always keeping you in frame by literally following your movements. It can roam around your house when you are at home, making sure everything is okay. It can raise its periscope camera

to show you whether you've turned the stove off. It can use third-party accessories to record data like blood pressure. But as ambitious as the Astro is, it still is very much a first cut of what a home assistant robot could be. It doesn't have any arms or appendages. It can't clean your floors. It can't climb stairs. It can't go outside of your home. And it probably can't do a zillion other things I'm not thinking of at the moment. That's part of the reason why Amazon is limiting its availability at launch. Even after years of development, it still has a lot to figure out. The Astro stands roughly two feet high and weighs about 20 pounds. Its main drive wheels are about 12 inches in diameter, large enough to clear door thresholds and move through carpet, while a single caster in the back helps it keep balanced.

The Astro can zip along at a top speed of one meter per second, and it has the ability to move in 360 degrees, forward, backwards, or any direction it pleases. Inside the plastic-clad shell are five different motors, one for each drive wheel, one to raise and lower its periscope camera, and two to twist and tilt its face. That face is effectively the screen lifted off in Echo Show 10. It's got an array of sensors in its bezel, plus a standard 5 megapixel video calling camera. Most of the time, the screen displays two circles that behave as eyes, allowing you to understand what the astro is doing or where it's planning to go. It can also show some limited personality through these circles, contorting them into different shapes and angles, similar to the ill-fated gibos expressions or the also-ylphated cosmo. But those circles aren't what the astro uses to see you or its environment. its actual eyes are the variety of sensors and cameras packed into the base of the unit,

things like ultrasonic sensors, time of flight cameras, and other imaging tools that let the robot know what it's around and where it's going. The Astros navigational tools are all inside of itself. There's no need for special boundary markers or other external guidelines like some robot vacuums rely on, and it can tell when it's about to head down a set of stairs or hit an object, end quote. This is probably one of those things where maybe you need to see it for yourself, so I've also included a YouTube video that Amazon released as a sort of introduction to Astro. Cloudflare, once in on the cloud game. Cloudflare this morning announced Object Storage Service R2,

running across its global network, and takes aim at AWS by foregoing data egress fees, quoting protocol. The service will be called R2, one less than S3, Quipped Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince in an interview with protocol ahead of Cloudflare's announcement Tuesday morning. Cloudflare will not charge data egress fees for customers using R2, taking direct aim at the fees AWS charges developers to move data out of its widely popular S3 storage service. R2 will run across Cloudflare's global network, which is most known for providing anti-DEDOS services to its customers by absorbing and dispersing the massive amounts of traffic that accompany

denial of service attacks on websites. It will be compatible with. S3's API, which makes it much easier to move applications already written with S3 in mind. And Cloudflare says that beyond the elimination of egress fees, the new service will be 10% cheaper to operate than S3. Quote, we are aiming to be the fourth major public cloud, Prince said. Cloudflare already offers a serverless compute service called Workers, and Prince thinks that adding a low-cost storage service will encourage more developers and companies to build applications around Cloudflare's services.

Joining the ranks of AWS, Microsoft, and Google will be a difficult undertaking. It has been 15 years since AWS launched S3, which kick-started the cloud computing revolution, and currently stores an enormous amount of web content on behalf of its customers. Couple that history with the dozens of compute and software development services it currently offers, and it's not hard to see why AWS has more than 40% of the market for cloud infrastructure services, according to Gartner. But Prince thinks cloud buyers are less enamored with AWS. these days and rarely passes up an opportunity to bash the company while promoting the services

that Cloudflare offers, which generated $431 million in revenue last year. R2 strikes directly at one of the biggest sources of frustration with AWS. Getting your data out of its cloud network can be an expensive and frustrating undertaking, end quote. Let me catch you up on the latest from the Facebook beat. Facebook spokesperson extraordinaire Nick Clegg said Facebook will release two internal slide decks central to the Wall Street Journal's story on Instagram's impact on teens to the public in, quote, the next few days. Quoting and gadget, we're just making sure that all the T's are crossed and all the eyes are dotted so that we can release it both to Congress and then to the public in the next few days, Clegg said of the slides, some of which have already been made public.

His comments come more than 10 days after the Wall Street Journal published an investigation into how Instagram affects the teens who use it. Citing internal research conducted by Facebook, the journal wrote that, quote, Instagram is harmful for a sizable percentage of teens, particularly teenage girls. The investigation prompted immediate pushback from lawmakers, many of whom were already wary of Facebook's handling of child safety and its plans to build a version of its service for children under 13. On Monday, Instagram said it would pause that work in order to create, quote, more parental supervision tools, end quote, members of Congress responded saying that they want the company to end the project entirely. Facebook's head of safety is scheduled to testify at a Senate conference. Committee hearing on the subject Thursday, end quote. Facebook's pushback on recent controversies have been,

hey, you've been cherry-picking data points that are unfair to us, except, of course, Facebook is the only one with the complete data set. So now, not a few folks have been calling on them to release everything, if indeed the reporting has been unfair. This is part of that. And meanwhile, other folks have said Facebook has conveniently been floating this recently as a way to counteract controversy, but Facebook also wrote a blog post that defines the term Metaverse, at least in Facebook's eyes, and announced plans to invest $50 million over two years in programs and external research to responsibly build what it calls the next computing platform, quoting the verge. Facebook has announced a $50 million fund that it says will help it develop the Metaverse more

responsibly. It's officially called the XR program and research fund, and the company says it'll be invested into, quote, programs and external research over the course of two years. years. Facebook has previously funded academic research into the social impact of AR wearables and solicited VR hardware proposals. Facebook's announcement blog calls the Metaverse the next computing platform and says the company will be working with policymakers, researchers, and industry partners while building it. The announcement also gives us Facebook's definition of the sometimes nebulous word metaverse. The company describes it as, quote, virtual spaces where you can create and explore

with and quote, that you're not physically with, spread out over a variety of product. and services. Facebook says the fund's goal is to make sure it builds its part of the Metaverse with an eye toward compatibility with other services as well as inclusivity, privacy, safety, and economic opportunity. Right now, Facebook's biggest Metaverse program is a platform called Horizon, which exists as a beta Oculus app that lets people have VR meetings, end quote. Coinbase has announced that it will let U.S. users directly deposit any percentage of their paychecks into their Coinbase account in USD or cryptocurrencies, quoting CNBC. With direct deposit, customers can more easily access our crypto-first financial services

and be ready for any trade or purchase. Max Brandsburg, vice president of product at Coinbase said in a blog post, quote, we're determined to deliver the most trusted full suite of crypto-first financial services to our 68 million users, end quote. The launch, which goes live in the coming weeks, comes after customers complained that frequent transfers from their bank accounts to Coinbase are time-consuming and inconvenient, the company said. Coinbase added that it aims to give, quote, instant access to the crypto economy, end quote. Coinbase said it will use an FDIC-insured bank partner for direct deposit, but did not specify which one. The company works with MetaBank for its Coinbase rewards card.

Other popular online financial apps already allow for direct deposit. Banking companies like CHIM and SOFI provide the service as part of a broad portfolio of products, while PayPal and stock trading app Robin Hood also let users deposit their paychecks, and quote. OnePassword has partnered with email host FastMail to introduce masked email, which creates unique emails for logins, quoting and gadget. Like its Apple counterpart, the tool allows you to create unique email addresses for your logins. You can create the aliases directly within the OnePassword app, which means you can access the tool on all platforms, where the password manager is available. Reliance on technology has grown substantially, especially over the last year, and so has

our susceptibility to data breaches and spam. One password CEO Jeff Shiner told Engadget in an email interview, for any streaming services, newsletters or other online accounts that people have signed up for, mass email makes it possible for them to use email aliases to keep their online identities private on any platform, but still manage them from a primary email inbox. And if they start receiving unwanted emails, it's also a clear way for people to identify which of those services have shared, leaked, or sold their email addresses, end quote. Just how much the ability to hide your email can do to help safeguard your online privacy can't be

overstated. The vast majority of privacy breaches start with phishing emails. You're far less likely to click on a suspicious link or inadvertently share your personal information if you don't get one of those messages in the first place, end quote. Finally today from the, it's just a round number, but it's still probably worth making note of file. TikTok, now has has one billion monthly active users. This is according to the company itself. I've got no real color to add to that, but it does give me the excuse to talk about this. Remember almost exactly a year ago when TikTok looked like it needed to sell to a U.S. Sugar Daddy to avoid being banned by the Trump administration? Remember when Microsoft wanted to buy the company but got

muscled aside by Oracle, only to have the whole deal blow up as a big nothing burger. Well, in an interview, Satchinadella described Microsoft's failed TikTok. deal as the strangest thing he has ever worked on and says TikTok came to Microsoft, not the other way around, quoting the verge. Speaking today at the Code Conference, Microsoft CEO Satcha Nadella said the whole ordeal was the, quote, strangest thing I've ever sort of worked on, end quote. In terms of the value of such a deal for Microsoft Nadella said he was, quote, kind of intrigued by it before trying to move right along with a laugh, deadpanning after a pause, and then I guess the rest is history, end quote.

Kara Swisher pressed him for the story, and Nadella, clearly still a little agog at the strangeness, walked through a few of the key steps. The important start is that, quote, TikTok came to us. We didn't come to TikTok, he says. The company was looking for a U.S. partner to help with, quote, these security things we seem to have been hearing about, end quote. Nadella thought TikTok might have been a good fit because it was a social cloud-based service that heavily leveraged AI, all areas of focus for the company. It is an interesting product, he says. Nadella's contention is that Microsoft would have been an interesting partner for TikTok because of its established work with, quote, investments in social media, in particular what we're doing in content

moderation and child safety, end quote. Those strengths, plus the key fact that it is a U.S.-based cloud services provider, were seen to be key to assuaging the Trump administration. Quote, there was a period of time when I thought that the U.S. government had a particular set of requirements, but it just disappeared, Nadella says. President Trump, I think, had a particular point of view of what he was. was trying to get done and then just dropped off, end quote. TikTok ultimately let Microsoft know that it wouldn't be moving forward with the deal in September. Later in the year, days ahead of a deadline Trump set for parent company ByteDance to sell off its U.S. assets. TikTok suggested the administration had forgotten about the ban altogether. President Biden ultimately revoked the order this year,

quote, at this point, it's all moot, right? Nadella says. He says he hasn't followed up on what's going on with TikTok and Oracle. Hint, it's been shelved indefinitely. Would he like to buy TikTok now if it came back on the table? Quote, no, Nadella says. At this point, I'm happy with what I have. So I guess I got to check out this show on Netflix that everybody's talking about. Squid Game. Everybody is talking about it all the sudden overnight it feels like I hear like it's super intense,

but that you still got to watch it. You have to. Which is sort of what everyone said about Black Mirror when that came out. And when Black Mirror came out, it did sort of blow my hair back. so I guess I'll give Squid Game a try as well, gave the first episode of Foundation a try, and it was good, I guess. I'll give it at least one more episode for sure, but I did kind of run out of Steam with the books. Anyway, talk to you tomorrow.