Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/09 - The "Made By Google" Event

Episode Date: October 9, 2018

The big Made By Google event, follow up on that Google+ bug, WeChat is willing to debunk rumors for you and Saudi Arabia doubles down on Masa Son. Links: First look at Google’s Pixel 3 and 3 XL (The Verge) Exclusive: iPad Pro Face ID details, 4K HDR video over USB-C, AirPods-like Apple Pencil 2 pairing, more (9to5Mac) Google, Exposures, and Breaches; Was Google Wrong?; The Political Considerations (Stratechery) Google Drops Out of Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Competition (Bloomberg) Some advertisers are moving half of their search budget from Google to Amazon, say ad industry sources (CNBC) How China's biggest social network fights fake news (Abacus) Saudi Arabia Doubles Down on SoftBank Bet With Extra $45 Billion (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 TechMeme ride home for Tuesday, October 9th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, the big made-by-Google event.

Follow-up on that Google Plus bug. WeChat is willing to debunk rumors for you, and Saudi Arabia doubles down on Masasan. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Google held its big hardware event today in New York City. The headliner, of course, was the new Pixel 3 smartphone, which has a 5.5 inch screen and the Pixel 3XL, which sports a 6.3 inch screen. The bezels on both devices have been slimmed down significantly,

giving each phone an increase in screen real estate over last year's models, but also welcome to notch-life pixel heads. Both phones have wireless charging for the first time, dual-front cameras, and you can pre-order them now for delivery October 18th. The starting price for the Pixel 3 is $799, and the 3xl starts at $899. That gets you $64 gigabytes of storage, but for $100 more for either phone, you can juice that up to 128 gigabytes of storage. It should be noted, however, that those price points represent an increase of $150 and $50, respectively, on last year's models. Both phones include a Snapdragon 845 and 4 gigabytes of RAM.

Notable are the front-facing stereo speakers, the new Titan M security chip, and if you pre-order, you'll get six months of YouTube music for free with your phone. Google stuck with a single rear 12.2-inch megapixel camera on both phones, but then pixels are widely considered to have the best cameras in the business anyway, so NBD. but those dual front-facing cameras allow for some fancy new selfie stuff. That is enabled by some clever new software that Google demoed extensively. In a brief hands-on, the Verges Dieter Bone wrote, quote, These phones feel significantly more premium than last year's pixel 2.

Moving to a glass front and back gives them a much higher quality look and feel overall. The glass on the rear is a single pane with the matte finish sort of sanded in the bottom half, It does mean, however, that these phones are slightly heavier than the previous generation, end quote. He also said that on first impression, the screen is significantly improved over last year as well. But there were a couple of related items surrounding the pixels that will get headlines as well. Google is now selling you a pixel stand for $79, which will make use of the wireless charging capability, in an impressive new stand that will allow for useful Google Assistant interactions when docked. so you can still make use of, hey Google, when charging.

And this was the G-Wiz, wow moment of the whole thing, Duplex. That robot voice thingy is coming to the pixel, sort of. Let's say you get a call on your pixel from a number you don't recognize. There is now a new option called call screen, which will appear when you get a phone call. If you tap screen call, the Duplex Robot Voice will pick up the call for you and say the person you're calling is using a screening service and will get a copy of this conversation. Go ahead and say your name and why you're calling.

Then in real time, the digital assistant will transcribe the call's message for you right on screen. You can then tap to tell the robot what to ask if you need more info. And of course, if you decide you want to take the call, you can just tap and actually jump right in and talk yourself whenever you want. It was really quite impressive. There was also a new tablet, the pixel slate, a Chrome OS tablet with a 3,000 by 2,000 display, 8 to 16 gigabytes of RAM, front and rear cameras,

coming later this year beginning at $599. It has an optional $200 keyboard, which Sherilyn Lowe at Engadgett says is an absolute must-have. So that would make the whole kit and caboodle start at more than $800, but that's still less than an iPad Pro, although there is also a $99 stylus that you can use to draw on the tablet, so that would be another $100 or so. After her hands-on, Sherilyn wrote, quote,

I'm surprised at how much Google was able to cram into the pixel slate while keeping its costs much lower than the competition. What I'm most excited about is the potential for Chrome OS to be a powerful 2-1 OS. It looks like Google was able to take a lesson it learned from the mistakes of the Pixel C, a strangely beloved device in spite of its flaws, and parlay that into a promising contender for the growing 2-1 category, end quote. Finally, we saw the Facebook portal just yesterday and the refreshed echo shows as well. Well, here's Google's entrant into the smart speaker slash assistant with a screen sweepstakes.

The 7-inch home hub was announced, which comes in four colors, pre-orders today for $149, and ships October 22nd. Notably, the home hub has no camera on it. So that means no video chatting, but also, hey, you might not feel so creeped out about putting one next to your bed, say. And that's exactly what Google wants, next to your bed or in your kitchen. They touted all of the smart home integration that this device would allow with things like Nest and other smart home devices. They really want this to be what it says in the name, your home hub. Turn off the lights, check your calendar, ask Google a question, look up a recipe, and get step-by-step directions on screen. You can also watch YouTube and YouTube TV on the device.

You get six months of free YouTube premium included when you pre-order. And when not in use, it doubles as a digital photo display integrating with all those photos you upload to Google Photos every day. All in all, I have to say for that price, this was a super compelling device to me at least, and again, no camera, so I don't have to worry about any creep shots. as Janko Rutgers tweeted, quote,

Google couldn't have wished for a better buildup to the Home Hub reveal than yesterday's Facebook portal announcement, end quote. Although I bet they wish that Wall Street Journal piece hadn't come out yesterday as well, not a single mention of Google Plus

during the entire event today. Funny, isn't it, how little rumor stories like this have a tendency to pop up the day anyone else has a hardware event, isn't it? According to 9 to 5 Mac, sources are saying that the 2018 iPad Pro models that are expected to be unveiled sometime this month will sport super thin bezels with no notch. We'll lose the home button and will thus support Face ID in both portrait mode and landscape mode.

We'll have a USBC port which will be able to output 4K HDR video to external displays. And we'll get a new version of the Apple Pencil that will have proximity pairing, like AirPods do. Also, apparently, some kind of new magnetic connector at the back of the iPad that will allow for a new version of the smart keyboard and other third-party accessories. So let's do a little more analysis of that Google Plus bug that made news late yesterday. In his overnight letter, Ben Thompson adds some excellent nuance, quote, not only does an exposure not mean breach, but also the vast majority of exposures never lead to breach.

To that end, it is completely unreasonable to expect that any company report every single potential exposure. There would be a lot of them. It would be impossible to police, and perhaps worst of all, it would introduce significant moral hazard. Companies would be motivated to not invest in security because that investment would only lead to bad press. Again, for disclosing an exposure, not a breach, end quote. So, yeah, I can see that. Google didn't find any evidence that anything had actually leaked, just that there was a bug in the code that could have been exploited. I get it if companies always had to disclose every time something funky happened in code, it would be chaos.

If you fix it, you fix it. No harm, no foul, right? Douglas Macmillan, who posted the original story, tweeted some additional details that I found interesting, though. Quote, Google investigators ran tests over two weeks and found up to four. 496,951 users could be affected. However, that was just two weeks. The bug went unfixed for over two years. Over the full period, the actual number of affected users could be much higher. How thoroughly did Google investigate the possible misuse of data?

Google estimated 438 apps had access to user data. The company tested these apps but did not call or visit with any of the developers, sources say, end quote. To which user cloud underscore opinion tweeted, Let's say a county clerk forgets to lock a building in the evening, comes in the morning and finds out that it was open all night, but no evidence that records were looked at by 438 people who drove by that building. Does the county need to notify its citizens? To which McMillan himself retort tweeted, quote,

The 438 people are known to visit the building all night, rifling through file cabinets in the front yard. There's a reason he locks that door, end quote. To me, the interesting angle here, again, though, is the decision, the consciously taken decision by Google, to keep this quiet for one very specific reason. Quoting again from the original piece, revealing the incident would likely result,

quote, in us coming into the spotlight alongside or even instead of Facebook, despite having stayed under the radar throughout the Cambridge Analytica, scandal, the memo said. It, quote, almost guarantees Sundar will testify before Congress, end quote. So as I tweeted last night, we thought it was just a clever strategic move by Sundar Pichai to sit out that last round of congressional grilling, but maybe he was between a rock and a hard place. If Pachai had testified and didn't disclose this bug, he could have potentially opened himself up to perjury charges. But what would the alternative have been? Revealing this bug in real time before a congressional committee? That would have made for some huge headlines, right? But as I

also tweeted last night, the irony here is, by any rational measure, Google Plus was a product that should have been sunset and shut down years ago. As Dave Weiner tweeted, no one loved it. It was born only to slow Facebook growth. It was like having a kid so that kid can beat up your neighbor's kid, end quote. So by being too prideful and not admitting their failure in this space, Google kept alive a product longer than it should have that did nothing more than allow this breach to happen. On the flip side, Google said today that it has decided not to compete for a Department of Defense contract that could be worth potentially $10 billion, citing, among other things, a poor bidding

process, but also potential conflict with Google's values around the use of artificial intelligence. The DOD project known as the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure Cloud or Jedi intends to transition massive amounts of Defense Department data to a commercially operated cloud system. Quote, we are not bidding on the Jedi contract because first, we couldn't be assured that it would align with our AI principles, a Google spokesman said in a statement. And second, we determined that there were portions of the contract that were out of scope with our current government certifications, end quote.

Quick check-in with one of the big narratives that we've been keeping our eye on, of course. Again, Steven Sinovsky says this is just business as usual dressed up in a new name, advertising, but sources are telling CNBC that some advertisers are moving half of their total budget for Google search ads, over to Amazon ads instead, amounting to a shift of hundreds of millions of dollars. That's real money, and it's only just beginning. Now, caveats, these are probably some very specific advertisers. Quote, not all categories of brands are shifting money to Amazon. Most of the movement is coming in consumer packaged goods, while huge and lucrative advertising categories such as automotive and travel are not yet moving to Amazon.

Also, while Google search may be flattening, advertisers are moving parts of their ad spend from other media to different Google properties, particularly YouTube, end quote. So, right, the brands that are making the shift are brands that are probably already sold on Amazon anyway. Still, Google has been plugging away for years to make Google shopping a thing. But this is also an interesting angle to note, quote, one exec from a large agency said some brands find Google search ads quaint and want their budgets moved to Amazon because it directly correlates to sales.

About 49% of product searches begin on Amazon, according to Servata. Another said, clients appreciate Amazon is a seamless shopping experience. Using a Google search ad to lead to a purchase may require a person to set up an account and input their credit card information with a separate website,

especially for smaller brands, there's not really an advantage between selling direct to the consumer versus selling through Amazon, end quote. Let's end with a couple of the stories I cut from yesterday's show to make way for the Google Plus news. The site Abacus has an interesting piece up looking at WeChat,

the chat and communications app platform that is so popular in China, many have called it the Chinese Facebook. So how does WeChat deal with fake news? because fake news is everywhere now. Well, WeChat actually posts the top 10 rumors every month so it can debunk them. They have also created a WeChat rumor debunking mini program that lets you search for terms and see if there are any debunked articles related to those terms. This is apparently used by 300,000 people every single day.

And WeChat even sends you a notification if you've read an article that has later been debunked. what are some of the examples of debunked rumors quote an article told people to stop using microwave ovens because microwaved food gives people cancer not true or that you can scan Chinese currency in the app QQ to see if they're counterfeit you can't end quote now whether or not such a system would work for other platforms is not at all clear of course in this country the overriding problem we have is no one can

agree on anything. One person's fake news is another person's stone cold fact. I guess the advantage we chat has is that in China, fake news is whatever the Chinese government says it is. And finally, let's check in again with Masa San. Saudi Arabia has announced it will invest $45 billion in soft banks' expected and planned second vision fund. That represents a sizable chunk of the approximately $170 billion the Saudi investment fund expects over the next three to four years. Quote, that money would come from the sale of a stake in Saudi Basic Industries Corp, the initial public offering of state oil company Saudi Aramco, according to PIF chairman Mohammed bin Salman,

who is also Saudi Arabia's crown prince. The PIF wants to be a key investor in the second $100 billion investment fund, that softbank group chief executive officer son plans to raise, Prince Mohammed said in an interview with Bloomberg. That would bring the PIF's contribution to the two funds to $90 billion, he said, end quote. So again, I know I go on and on about how Masa San has upended VC with the massive amounts of money he can deploy. But think about this even from a geopolitical or historical perspective. The world's largest petro state is now diversifying away from fossil fuels by funneling proceeds from its fossil fuel economy to a Japanese investor who is essentially using all of that money

to fund the technology companies that will be transforming the world for the next 50 years. That is all for today, everyone. Real quick, since this was a Google heavy day, coincidentally, any listeners on Android out there, can you help me solve a mystery? As I think I mentioned last week, September saw healthy growth in subscriber numbers for this pod, but growth in subscribers coming specifically from Google Play or Google Podcasts, whatever it is they call themselves now. I'll try to remember to pin a screenshot of a chart to the top of my Twitter feed so you can see, but Google Play subscribers have gone all hockey stick graph on me, which is great.

I'm not complaining. I'm just wondering why all. the love from Google Play all of a sudden. Is Google promoting us or something that I'm not aware of? Which, if so, is great. Thank you, Google. But I'm just curious. So if you're a listener who just found us over the last month,

over the last two weeks even, get in touch over Twitter. Let me know how you found the show. And, by the way, thanks for finding it and becoming a listener. Talk to you all tomorrow.