Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/11 – Odds And Sods

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

A whole bunch of things, including a major US bank getting into crypto custody, paying for Google cloud with crypto, Chromebooks made for gaming, the lack of anyone in the current slate of virtual worlds, the return of the cable bundle example 100, and did you know your Apple AirTags only last a year? Sponsors: Masterworks.com/ride Medcline.com/techmeme Links: America’s Oldest Bank, BNY Mellon, Will Hold That Crypto Now (WSJ) Google selects Coinbase to take cloud payments with cryptocurrencies and will use its custody tool (CNBC) Chips, canvases, and chats: Google Workspace’s plan to crush Office (The Verge) Google is trying to make Chromebooks built for cloud gaming (Engadget) It's Lonely in the Metaverse: DappRadar Data Suggests Decentraland Has 38 ‘Daily Active’ Users in $1.3B Ecosystem (CoinDesk) You Hated Your Cable Package. Your Streaming Services Are Bringing It Back. (WSJ) ‘The Owner of This iPhone Was in a Severe Car Crash’—or Just on a Roller Coaster (WSJ) How to change the AirTags battery (AppleInsider) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Tuesday, October 11th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. A whole bunch of things, including a major U.S. Bank getting into crypto custody, paying for Google Cloud with crypto, Chromebooks from Google, made for gaming, the lack of anyone in the current slate of virtual worlds, the return of the cable bundle example number 1,000. And did you know your Apple air tags only last a year? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. A whole bunch of sort of odds and ends stories today. For example, the state of New York has granted Bank of New York Mellon or BNY Mellon, which is, by the way, the U.S.'s oldest bank, permission to receive some customers, Bitcoin and Eith. BN.Y will store the keys, offer bookkeeping services, and more. So for the first time, I guess, a large U.S. bank is getting into the crypto custody business. quoting the journal. The nation's oldest bank said it would begin receiving clients' cryptocurrencies on Tuesday, becoming the first large U.S. Bank to safeguard digital assets alongside traditional investments on the same platform. BN.Y. Mellon won the approval of New York's financial regulator earlier this fall to begin receiving select customers, Bitcoin, and Ether starting this week. The bank will store the keys required to access and transfer those assets and provide the same bookkeeping services on those digital currencies that it offers to fund managers for their portfolios of stocks, bonds, commodities, and other assets.

The move marks an important milestone for traditional banks and their growing acceptance of digital assets as a legitimate market and a source of new business. While many Wall Street executives still question crypto's potential and aim to tread cautiously until Washington clarifies how the market will be regulated, firms have responded to calls from a growing number of large investment firm clients to step into their traditional roles as intermediaries. Money managers have long relied on BNY Mellon and other custody banks for an array of vital if humdrum back office functions such as tracking changes to the value of their assets. Founded by Alexander Hamilton, more than two centuries ago, BNY Mellon is the world's biggest

custody bank. Until now, fund managers would have to custody their digital currencies with a crypto specialist. BNY Mellon said it is the first of the eight systemically important U.S. banks to store digital currencies and allow customers to use one custody platform for both its traditional and crypto holdings, end quote. And Google has partnered with Coinbase to let some customers pay for its cloud services using crypto. It's going to start doing that in 2023. Coinbase will move some data from AWS to Google Cloud as a part of this deal, maybe in the end the more important part. Quoting CNBC, the Google. The Google Cloud, the Google. cloud platform infrastructure service will initially accept cryptocurrency payments from a handful of

customers in the Web3 world who want to pay with cryptocurrency, thanks to an integration with the Coinbase Commerce Service. The deal announced at Google's Cloud Next Conference might succeed in luring cutting-edge companies to Google in a fierce, fast-growing market, where Google's top competitors do not currently permit clients to pay with digital currencies. The cloud business helps diversify Google Parent Alphabet away from advertising, and it now accounts for or 9% of revenue up from less than 6% three years ago, as it is expanding more quickly than Alphabet as a whole. Over time, Google will allow many more customers to make payments with cryptocurrency. Google says, Coinbase Commerce supports 10 currencies including Bitcoin, Bitcoin,

Degecoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum prices have all declined over 60% in the past year. Terms of the deal weren't disclosed, but like other Coinbase commerce arrangements, Coinbase will earn a percentage of transactions that go through it, the company said, end quote. Meanwhile, Google has updated its workspace enterprise suite, adding integrations with Atlassian, Figma, and other services, releasing new APIs for chat and meat, and much more. Something something, the productivity space is hot right now, quoting the verge. Google is investing more in its smart canvas concept for docs, letting you. users embed information and apps inside a document. It's also releasing some new meat features

with hybrid work in mind, like automatic meeting transcriptions and an AI-powered framing tool for conference room cameras that aims to keep speakers in focus at all times. Google is rolling out new APIs for meet and chat that will let developers start meetings or send messages from their apps, but the workspace team is also beginning to bring more apps into the platform itself, especially in Meat, Figma, Asana, and Atlassian, for instance, joined an early program that lets users work on outside documents within a meet call. More integrations like that are coming, as the company tries to expand the capability of the docs canvas and the embedded chips idea, it's looking at ways to bring non-Google tools into your Google tools, end quote.

And Google this morning announced Chromebooks for gaming. There's three of them. First, the $650.16-inch Aser Chromebook 516 GE, then the $599-16-inch Lenovo IdeaPad, and the $399-15.6-inch ASIS Chromebook Vibe CX-55 Flip, quoting and gadget. Today, Google, along with a handful of hardware and software partners, is announcing what it calls the world's first laptops built for cloud gaming. First, the Acer Chromebook 516 GE features a 16-inch iPS screen with a 2,560 by 1600 resolution and 120-hertz refresh rate along with an RBG anti-ghosting keyboard and 12th-gen Intel processors up to a core I7. It's also equipped with a gigabit Ethernet port, two USBC ports, a USBA port, and HDMI. Finally, it has DTS audio via two upward-facing speakers and two more downward-facing speakers on the underside.

of the laptop. Acer will offer a number of configurations, but the first will be at Best Buy this month for $650. It'll include a Core I-5 processor, 8 gigabytes of RAM, and 256 gigabytes of storage via its NVMESD. ASIS's offering is a little different. The Chromebook Vibe CX-55 flip has a 15.6-inch display that maxes out at 1080p, but it's a touchscreen, and it has an even higher 144-HurRR refresh rate. As the name suggests, the CX-55 can flip around into tablet and tent modes, like many other AIS Chromebooks. It doesn't have R-G-B lighting on the keyboard, but it does have a rather distinctive orange trim, including around the crucial W-A-S-D keys. It also has 1.4 millimeters of travel. Lenovo's IdeaPad gaming Chromebook has a fair bit in common with Acer's device.

It has a 16-inch display with 2560 by 1,600 resolution and 120-Hhertz refresh rate as well as an RGB anti-ghosting keyboard with 1.5 millimeter of travel. Processors include 12th generation Intel Core I3 or Core I5 options, plus 8 gigabytes of RAM and up to 512 gigabytes of storage. The base configuration starts with 128 gigabytes. The port selection is a bit more limited. It only offers two USBC ports, one USBA port, and a microSD slot. Like the other two laptops, the IdeaPad Gaming Chromebook will launch this month it starts at $599. Naturally, software and game access is perhaps just as important as the hardware here. As such, Google has partnered with Nvidia, Amazon, and Microsoft to ensure its devices work with

G4 Now, Luna, and Xbox GamePass out of the box. The Nvidia partnership is probably the most significant as the company is bringing G4Now's high-performance-R-TX-3080 tier two Chromebooks for the first time. This means games will play it up to 1,600p resolution at 120 frames per second. with ray tracing enabled, assuming the game supports these specs, of course. Nvidia also made a progressive web app so you can launch directly into GForce now from your Chromebook's dock or launcher. Microsoft also made a PWA for GamePass, but everything works the same as running GamePass on a PC, assuming you have an Xbox GamePass Ultimate subscription, you can stream any GamePass title

to your Chromebook. Similarly, an Amazon Luna subscription gives you access to a rotating selection of over 100 games. It's fair to wonder, though, how much traction this latest initiative will get. Chromebooks have found a lot of success in education and, to a lesser extent, enterprise settings, but the idea of a full-fledged push to get people gaming on a Chromebook is a pretty major shift. That said, I'm surprised by the pricing on these models. There aren't a lot of Chromebooks with large high-resolution screens, with high refresh rates. Generally speaking, it sounds like you get a lot of bang for your buck with these models

compared to some other premium Chrome OS devices. naturally these laptops are a bit bigger and heavier than the standard 13-inch Chromebook, but that's a trade-off that might work for some people, end quote. Yeah, and also, if only Google had its own cloud gaming, cloud streaming service to offer with these things, oh, they did. It was called Stadia. It's not just Meta's Horizon Worlds that is apparently having trouble attracting interest from normal users. There are other more PurePlay Web3 virtual worlds where folks, have built it, but so far at least not many people have come. According to DAPR radar, thus far in

its life, the largest number of daily active users on DeCentraland was 675 people, and on the sandbox it was around 4,500 people, which is better, but remember, DeCentraland and the sandbox have market caps of around $1.3 billion, quoting CoinDesk. It's important to note that an active user, according to DAPRADAR, is defined as a unique wallet address's interaction with the platform's smart contract. For example, logging onto the sandbox or DeCentraland to make a purchase with sand or mana coin, each platform's respective native utility token is counted as an active use. This means that DAPR radar's compilation of daily active users doesn't count people who simply log in and interact with other users on a Metaverse platform or drop in briefly for an event

such as a virtual fashion week. It also may mean that fewer transactions, like buying or selling non-fungible tokens take place on these platforms than the number of people that visit. Sam Hamilton, creative director at DeCentraland, disputed the way DAPR radar tracks daily active users on the platform, quote, DAPR radar doesn't track our users only people interacting with our contracts. He told CoinDesk, adding that the platform had 8,000 users on an average day, though he did not specify what makes an active use versus a more passive interaction. He noted that while DeCentraland saw peak attendees in March, the number of, quote, tourists and spectators has since cooled down. We are finding the core community of people returning every day is growing,

he said. According to Hamilton, the number of users on DeCentraland can be more accurately observed by looking at a dashboard built by the platform's community. That data measures, quote, unique visitors per day and looks at different periods of time between 7, 14, 30, and 90 days. So from October 3rd through 9th, the platform average 6,999 unique visitors per day. The same data tool measures the number of parcels visited per day and marathon users, which it defines as users with the most online time, end quote. Yeah, but someone on Twitter, I couldn't find the tweet, so I can't give them credit, made an interesting point.

Usually private companies can be private about their user numbers because, well, they can. No one knew how quickly or not quickly usage of, say, Airbnb ramped up in its early days because Airbnb didn't have to tell you. But now, these on-chain startups can't really hide their numbers because they're on chain. Plus, since Web3 companies are sort of quasi-public, i.e., they have publicly traded tokens, there will be pressure to no numbers like these, and if the numbers are poor, that could easily have an impact on the overall. project itself. From the blowing up the cable bundle only to reconstruct it file, the journal this past weekend had a piece about how HBO Max, Amazon's Prime Video, and other streamers are trying to grow in a crowded market by doing things like bundling their services together with rivals

so you can get all the content you want in just one bill. Quote, executives at Amazon have considered selling clusters of rival streaming services at a discounted price through. the company's prime video channels platform, according to people who have spoken to the company about the idea. Warner Brothers Discovery, which is already combining its HBO Max and Discovery Plus streaming services, has discussed eventually participating in new bundles with rivals, according to people familiar with the situation. Some streaming services are hoping to tack on their services to retail memberships. Paramount Global struck a deal for its Paramount Plus streaming service to be offered as a part of Walmart's $98 a year Walmart Plus membership program. Costco,

has also engaged in similar discussions with streaming services over the past year, according to people familiar with the talks. Costco declined to comment. It's a classic case of companies finding that when a new business model runs into trouble, they can crib from the old business model. What's emerging isn't anything like the traditional cable bundle. No one in the streaming industry anticipates stitching all of the big services together into a $100 a month package, but there's a growing sense from the companies and consumers

that some level of bundling is a good thing, end quote. Finally, today a couple of Apple odds and sods from this weekend. Back in the journal, Joanna Stern outlined how some iPhone 14 users have been reporting that the new crash detection feature in the most recent iPhones has triggered false alarms, calling 911 during roller coaster rides or after a phone drops while or after you're driving in a car. For example, if you go to King's, Island Amusement Park in Ohio and ride a gnarly roller coaster? Well, quote,

the Warren County Communications Center provided me with a recording of six iPhone crash detection calls from people at King's Island rides all received since the new iPhone 14 models went on sale in September. Similar alerts have been triggered by the Joker roller coaster at Six Flags Great America near Chicago, end quote. And then, finally, I only got into using air tags personally this summer when I got tired of the kids constantly losing our Roku TV remote. But I thought that air tags had been around for a while, and it turns out, no, they haven't. Airtags have only been out for a little over a year. And guess what I learned this morning, quoting Apple Insider. It's been over a year since Airtag shipped, and if you bought early,

your battery is dying. An Airtag battery will last for about a year, and your iPhone will warn you when that battery is low. But if that notification is all you rely on, you can see there might be problems. Maybe you get the low battery warning in the first hours of your two-week ocean cruise, for instance, and then your luggage gets lost coming off the boat at the end of the trip. You can be sure that Apple won't wait until the last moment to give you a low battery notification, but the reason Apple can only give a rough estimate that an air tag battery will last a year is that it depends on usage, end quote. I did not know that air tags only lasted a year, before you have to replace the battery. The article goes on to explain how to quickly and easily

swap out the battery with those sort of small little disk batteries that are common for these sorts of things. But wow, an Apple product that not only allows for users to replace the battery, but is in fact designed for that to happen. What will they think of next? So the Meta-Connect event is today, but it's later this afternoon, so I'm going to wait until tomorrow to cover the announce of that new VR headset of theirs and whatever else comes out. I might even try to watch the event inside Horizon World, which apparently is a thing you can do. Meanwhile, I woke up to see that the rewatchables podcast

has gotten around to covering the movie Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. Maybe my favorite movie of all time, the one that I said on Twitter. I'd love if someone would let me on a podcast to talk about. So maybe I'll just have to do it myself. Maybe I'll just have to force Chris to watch it, and then we can do a bonus episode about it. I don't know why, but I feel like a lot of startup folks could relate to that movie,

and I have to give it to the Rwatchables guys for a great idea. What if you rebooted Glenn Gary Glenn Ross, but you set it in the Web 3 slash crypto world? Would definitely watch that. Talk to you tomorrow.