Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/29 - With Amazon One, Amazon Wants You To Pay With Your Palm

Episode Date: September 29, 2020

With Amazon One, Amazon wants you to pay with your palm. Google is trying the carrot and the stick approach with its App Store controversies. What if Zoom was redesigned specifically for remote learning? The world’s first foldable PC is here. And why another Netflix price hike is likely coming soon. Sponsors: Metalab.co LinkedIn.com/ride Datatribe.com/challenge Links: Amazon will now let you pay with your palm in its stores (Recode) Google Demands 30% Cut From App Developers in Its Play Store (NYTimes) Judge suggests Apple vs Epic should go to jury, trial expected in July 2021 (Apple Insider) Google Meet brings noise cancellation to Android and iOS, adds attendance reports for schools (9to5Google) Zoom's earliest investors are betting millions on a better Zoom for schools (TechCrunch) The world’s first foldable PC is now available to order from Lenovo (The Verge) Disney+ now lets you binge watch with friends, even when you're not together (CNN Business) Netflix Price Hike Is “Probable” Soon, But It Won’t Slow Company’s Roll, Analyst Says (Deadline) 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, September 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today with Amazon One. Amazon wants you to pay with your palm.

Google is trying the carrot and the stick approach with its app store controversies. What if Zoom was redesigned specifically for remote learning, the world's first foldable PC, and why another Netflix price hike is likely coming soon? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. You gotta say, Amazon really does seem to believe in physical retail. which is an odd thing to say, right? But Amazon does seem to want to do physical retail their way, and their way is automated. In just the latest innovation slash experiment in the physical retail space, Amazon has unveiled Amazon One, a new biometric technology that allows shoppers to pay using their palm.

They are going to implement it first at two Amazon Go stores in Seattle, quoting Jason Delray in Recode. Amazon One, quote, allows shoppers to pay at store. by placing their palm over a scanning device when they walk in the door or when they check out. The first time they register to use this tech, a customer will scan their palm and insert their payment card at a terminal. After that, they can simply pay with their hand. The hand-scanning tech isn't just for Amazon's own stores. The company hopes to sell it to other retailers, including competitors, too. The technology will be available at the entrance of two of the company's Amazon Go cashierless convenience stores in Seattle starting Tuesday, and will roll out to the

rest of the chain's 20 plus stores in the future, Amazon's vice president Dilip Kumar told Recode in an interview Monday. Recode reported in December that Amazon had filed a patent application for such a hand payment technology. The technology could also show up in Whole Foods stores with Amazon hinting in a press release that it will introduce palm payments in the coming months at its other stores beyond Amazon Go locations. Kumar wouldn't comment on a potential Whole Foods implementation, though the New York Post reported a year ago that such a plan was in the works. But the Amazon executive did make it clear that the company expects to sell the technology to other retailers, like it began doing earlier this year with its just-walk-out technology,

the cocktail of cameras, sensors, and computer vision software that powers Amazon Go stores. Kumar said the Amazon-1 pitch to other retailers is straightforward. Reduce the friction for your customers at checkout, thereby shortening lines, and increasing how many shoppers are served along the way. Amazon's plan to license these two homegrown technologies to other retailers, whether a competitor or not, is the real story here. Amazon isn't satisfied with e-commerce dominance. It wants to earn a cut of more transactions in the physical retail world as well, where 80-something percent of commerce still takes place in the U.S., end quote. As Brian Romala tweeted,

The Amazon One payment technologies are a masterstroke for Amazon pay. via a number of biometric payments methods, Amazon is rapidly becoming the AWS of payments for not only retail, but online, end quote. And as Jason Delray himself tweeted later, interesting to consider if Amazon would ever have gone in this direction if it had created a phone that people actually wanted to use, end quote. Which is an excellent point, and something that I've been thinking quite a lot about recently. If you step back and think about it, Amazon's many forays, into the real world, into MeatSpace, if you will. Think of all the ring products. Think of building mesh networks in our neighborhoods for Internet of Things devices. Think of physical stores

with alternative payment platforms beyond the smartphone. There's been a lot of Amazon activity in the real world, right? Smartphones have been the one platform to solve almost everything in recent years. So not having their own smartphone as a platform has forced Amazon to the margins where smartphones haven't yet locked down the solution to everything yet. And that means certain corners of the real world. And that means they're trying to put their layer on top of those certain corners wherever they are. Via that angle, all of these recent moves make a ton of sense. Of course, as Matthew Kessalonelli snarked on Twitter as well, quote, pretty wild how Amazon is the only company to really lean into 2020. Surveillance drones in your home,

monitoring the tone of your speech and now scanning your palm print end quote all of the attention about app store controversies and battles have mainly focused on apple up until this point but i've said before on the show could this be an opportunity for google to sort of shiv apple to differentiate themselves and you know stick it to apple by undercutting them an aggressive bold company would do something like suddenly announced their 30% cut is going to be reduced to only a 15% cut or something like that. Doing so would make Apple immediately look terrible, and maybe I'm wrong, but Apple is maybe more dependent on that 30% cut than Google is? Yeah, well, I guess I was wrong about that because the New York Times says Google has noticed

that a lot of folks like Netflix and Spotify have been bypassing Google's 30% cut for in-app purchases, and they're shutting that down. Google has announced that all Play Store apps must use Google's billing system, giving everyone a year to comply. So I guess they really do want that 30% cut after all, quote, Google said the enforcement of its billing policies would apply to a small fraction of its app developers. It said only 3% of app developers on Google Play offered in-app purchases, and within that group only 3% were not using Google's billing system, end quote. And yet maybe it's a carrot and stick approach, because Google also announced it is working on making it easier for Android users to install and use third-party app stores beginning with Android 12 next year.

So third-party app stores, the sort you could use if you were, you know, a cloud gaming service, quoting Venture Beat. Google says that in response to developer feedback, quote, we will be making changes in Android 12, next year's Android release, to make it even easier for people to use other app stores on their devices while being careful not to compromise the safety measures Android has in place. We are designing all this now and look forward to sharing more in the future, end quote. Google also made sure to add that Android has, quote, always let users choose which apps they use, be it their keyboard, messaging app, phone dialer, or app store, end quote. Putting aside that this isn't strictly true, the message is clear.

Android gives users more control over apps than iOS does. In short, Google's argument amounts to, please don't punish us, Android is already more open than iOS when it comes to apps, and we're making it better, end quote. By the way, the judge in the case has proposed a jury trial for that Apple versus Epic Games litigation, with the case likely starting only in July of 2021, quoting Apple Insider. Toward the end of a virtual hearing on Monday morning at the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez-Rogers told the legal teams of Epic and Apple that it would be worth considering having the trial with a jury to weigh in on the fortnight saga. While a trial such as this could be handled by a judge or a group of judges, Rogers proposes

it may be suitable for regular people to weigh in on the matter as a jury. Quote, they are important cases on the frontier of antitrust law, said Rogers, pointing out how major the case could be. However, Rogers also suggests the opinions of a federal judge may not necessarily be as useful as the public, especially in such important matters. It is important enough to understand what real people think, the judge added. these security issues concern people or not, end quote. Early indications indicate that Epic may not want to use a jury with lawyers pushing for a bench trial instead. Legal teams have until Tuesday to declare

whether a trial by jury is demanded, end quote. Forget foldable phones. The world's first foldable PC is here. The ThinkPad X1 fold from Lenovo has a 13-inch OLED screen, 11th gen Intel processors, and 8 gigabytes of RAM, and it's available for order now, starting at $2,49, quoting the Verge. Think Samsung's Galaxy Fold, but a 13-inch OLED laptop screen. The idea is that you can use the fold like a large tablet when it's fully unfolded, or divide the screen into two adjacent displays. You can prop the fold up horizontally to use it like a full 13-inch notebook with an optional detachable keyboard and easel stand. You can fold the thing up 90 degrees, turn it vertically, and use it like a miniature laptop. A touchscreen keyboard pops up on the bottom half. You can turn it horizontally

and use it like a book with an optional stylus. Or you can fold the whole thing up and easily carry it around without it taking up much space in your bag. Lenovo also announced the thinkpad X1 Nano, which is the lightest think pad ever made at 1.99 pounds. This think pad is based on Intel's new Evo platform, which is meant to certify that laptops deliver long battery life, fast charging, and a quick boot time, among other features. Evo systems also need to include Intel's 11th-gen Tiger Lake processors, Wi-Fi 6, and Thunderbolt 4. The Nano has a 13-inch 2K-16-10 display with touch and non-touch options. Lenovo says it's about the same height as a 14-inch 16-9 screen, and it comes with a number of AI security features. It can detect when you're walking by and

wake itself up, for example, and lock itself when you walk away, end quote. Someone online, I can't remember who pointed out recently that it's somewhat crazy that we've taken Zoom, which was essentially an enterprise conferencing tool, and adapted it to do everything from live concerts to actually teaching our kids' school. I can tell you, as someone who now has a remote learning first grader, at least part of the week in my house, Zoom functions fine as an education tool, but you could see so many simple ways that you could improve video conferencing for an education use case. And I'm not the only person to have noticed this. For instance, Google Meet has added noise cancellation on Android and iOS for G Suite Enterprise and Enterprise for

education customers. They've also added one of those obviously simple functions that would make it more useful for teachers, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Joining Background Blur, GoogleMeet, can filter out background noise to make calling possible from any environment. This includes keyboard typing, doors opening and closing, and construction outside your window. Google's cloud-based AI works to isolate anything that isn't your voice. To enable, tap the more overflow menu, select settings, and click noise cancellation. It's off by default, and Google recommends disabling it entirely if non-speech is an important part of your call, like playing musical instruments. Meanwhile, G Suite Enterprise for Education organizers can now get an attendance report after a meeting ends.

Sent over email. It's available for Google Meet Conversations with between 5 and 250 participants. It contains their name, email, or obfuscated phone number, join slash exit time, and length, end quote. And that leads me to this to telling you about an interesting raise that I've been sitting on for a little bit called Class EDU. Class EDU has launched a video conferencing product designed specifically for schools. The product is called Class for Zoom. And Class EDU has raised a $16 million seed round from a bunch of people, including an insider on Zoom's actual board of directors. Also, one of the founders of Class EDU is the former CEO of the Education SaaS product,

Blackboard. I find it fascinating because, number one, it's imagining using Zoom. for education, not as just a band-aid that we as society have thrown together just because it's good enough for now, but also it's something being built on top of Zoom itself instead of trying to build out its own conferencing platform, quoting TechCrunch. The best way to break down Class for Zoom's features is by separating them into two buckets, instruction tools and management tools. On the instruction side, Class for Zoom helps teachers launch live assignments, quizzes, and tests,

which can be completed by students in real time. Students can also be pulled to motivate engagement. Instructors can be granted access to unmute a class or mute a class during appropriate times. The marquee feature of the instruction tool is that teachers and students can talk privately without leaving the Zoom call if there's a question. This is key for shy students who might not want to speak up, inspired by Chasin's daughter who struggled to share in front of an entire classroom. On the management side, tools range from attendance trackers to features that allow a teacher to see how, much time a student is participating in activities. Chasen, who founded Blackboard when he was in college, also gave a nod to his prior company by allowing teachers to integrate CMS systems right into the Zoom

classroom. Less popular, Chason jokes, is Class for Zoom's ability to give teachers intel on if a student has Zoom as the primary app in use on their screen. The attention tracking feature is not new, but it is oversight some people might not be okay with. Students can disable the ability to track focus, but administrators can make it mandatory. The platform also allows teachers to monitor a student's desktop during an exam to limit cheating, end quote. So that sounds really good, and frankly it sounds like one of those ideas where you're like, that's so obvious, why didn't I think of that first? But as the author of the piece, Natasha Mascoranis says,

the Zoom SDK is currently wide open and free to use. But what if it's not always that way? If Zoom decided tomorrow that it was a platform in the app store sense of the word and they changed their SDK policies, wouldn't that be lights out for a product like class for Zoom? Something that I can see the McCullough household putting to use almost immediately, as long as I can get Grandma and Grandpa to figure out how to do this, Disney has launched Group Watch on Disney Plus, a feature that lets up to seven people watch a movie or show completely simultaneously and in sync. Viewers can react using emojis on screen, but they can't chat yet. You gotta figure they'll try to find a way to add that soon. And imagine if you could somehow sync this with something like a Facebook portal or Echo Show or something like that, quoting CNN. To use this service Disney Plus subscribers select a title to watch and press the Group Watch icon on the details page.

The leader then sends out an invite to up to six other Disney Plus subscribers, which then plays the content simultaneously on everyone's screens. While watching, viewers can react by using emojis or pause the title. Viewers can't react by chatting or writing on the screen just yet, but Jimerson said it could become a part of the feature later on. Disney had begun working on GroupWatch before the pandemic, Jimison says, but the lockdowns taught Disney Plus more about its consumers. We saw significant increases in engagement as people dove deeper into the catalog, he said, and we had more and more requests for features like Groupwatch. People were trying to hack it through Zoom, end quote.

So goodbye to Zoom watch parties, I guess, once this sort of thing becomes commonplace among streaming services. Not to be too bold in my prediction making, but you got to figure that party watching and group streaming probably will become a standard feature across the entire streaming industry within, I don't know, five years. And speaking of the elephant in the streaming industry, and finally today, an analyst says that another Netflix price hike is probably coming. soon, but he doesn't expect that any such price hikes will do anything to slow the company's momentum. In short, Netflix should raise prices because it probably needs to for its balance sheet. It should also raise prices because it can, quoting deadline.

Alex Giamo of Jeffries pointed to a shift in tone between remarks from management on the first quarter earnings call in April to the second quarter call in July. After a change in language regarding pricing on the second quarter call, we believe a potential hike is probable in the near to midterm, Giamo wrote in a note to clients. In Q1, Netflix said that they were not even thinking about price increases, while the Q2 language was more open-ended, end quote. An increase of $1 to $2 a month in North America or Europe

could generate $500 million to a billion in fiscal 2021 revenue, Giyamo says. Giamo sees an increase of $1 to $2 a month in Europe, Middle East, and African countries, as most likely, estimating that it would add an incremental $700 million to 2021 revenue. Prices in the 200-plus countries where Netflix operates are constantly in flux. U.S. subscribers saw their last increase in May of 2019, the fourth such price hike since 2010, when the most popular plan went from $11 a month to $13. While the hikes invariably caused some subscribers to bail on the service, the company's momentum has continued in terms of

subscriber trends and the company's stock price. Subscriber growth has flattened in the U.S. but is still on a growth curve elsewhere, quote, We have confidence that Netflix can raise prices in international markets given its deepening content library and outside's consumer value proposition, Giamo wrote, end quote. Quick programming note that the Google Pixel launch event is tomorrow, starting at about 2 p.m. Eastern, so tomorrow's show could be a tad on the late side,

as of course I'll have to take the time to actually watch the event and then put it all together into podcast summary form for you. although the last time I said the show would be late because of an event, the last Apple event, I think I had the show published by four, so maybe I'll achieve the same miracle tomorrow. Oh, and I almost forgot. We've got a classified ad that I think some of you out there might find very interesting.