Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/29 - Playstation Vue Goes To The Deadpool

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 ride home for Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Earnings from Alphabet and Shopify, hacking the Olympics, the rise of the rest rides again. Amazon is making grocery delivery free and letting you pay your electric bill via Alexa.

Starting point is 00:00:52 And don't update your home pod or you might brick it. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Alphabet earnings. Q3 revenue of $40.5 billion up $20. percent year-over-year, operating income of $9.2 billion up from $8.6 billion, but net income was only $7.1 billion down from $9.1 billion year-over-year. Why the discrepancy? Because Alphabet is spending heavily to continue to build out its cloud computing business, which is third in the market behind Amazon's AWS and Microsoft, quoting Bloomberg. Google, the world's largest online search

Starting point is 00:01:35 provider has been building out data centers, buying equipment, and hiring salespeople and engineers to support its cloud unit, which rents computing power and software services over the internet. Former Oracle executive, Thomas Curran, was hired late last year to reinvigorate this effort. In the latest period, expenses totaled $31.3 billion up 25% from a year earlier, while revenue rose 20% to $40.5 billion. Capital spending was $6.7 billion up 27%. We continue, to invest thoughtfully in talent and infrastructure to support our growth, particularly in newer areas like cloud and machine learning. Ruth Porat, chief financial officer of Alphabet and Google said in a statement, end quote. More deets on Alphabet's overall earnings, Google's other

Starting point is 00:02:23 revenues, which include Play Store, Google Cloud, and hardware like pixel phones, had Q3 revenue of $6.43 billion, up from $4.6 billion, year over year. But those other bets, which include Waymo, Fiber, Verily, and basically everything that is in Google that constitutes the alphabet of Alphabet, had Q1 revenue of only $155 million, and the operating losses from these companies grew to $941 million from $727 million year over year. One of the highest flying tech stocks of recent IPO vintage has been Shopify. Lots of people see Shopify as perhaps creating the only platform in e-commerce that can compete with Amazon's. Shopify is down from the highs it hit earlier this year, but it's still been on a tear, having gained 135% in 2019. That's why the street seems a bit surprised that Shopify reported it. an unexpected net loss of $35.7 million on Q3 revenue of $390.9.6 million, which was up

Starting point is 00:03:39 45% year over year. Shopify had to report a loss per share of 29 cents when analysts had been expecting a profit of 10 cents per share. What's the culprit here? Well, it's actually sort of the same story as with Alphabet, investing for growth, quoting Bloomberg. Shopify said in June that it planned to spend $1 billion to set up a network of fulfillment centers in the U.S. to help merchants using its platform deliver products more quickly and cheaply, much the way Amazon does. The Ottawa-based company, which processes millions of individual sales by hundreds of thousands of merchants every year, could potentially pull shipments from different online stores together, making shipping cheaper and more efficient. Storing products from different merchants

Starting point is 00:04:22 in centralized warehouses would also bring down costs for sellers and buyers alike and net Shopify another revenue stream. That could help the company mount a defense against Amazon, which lowers prices and encourages merchants to use its own warehouses and shipping tools. The improvements have also helped attract new users to the platform, and Shopify said it now has more than one million merchants around the world, end quote. Shopify shares opened down around 7% this morning, and it may be because of what I just told you, or because that 45% increase in revenue does represent the slowest, growth Shopify has reported in its four years as a public company. Microsoft says hackers from Strontium, also known as Fancy Bear, also known as APT-28,

Starting point is 00:05:14 are targeting 16 global sporting and anti-doping organizations ahead of the 2020 Olympics. Why? Well, they do have priors with this sort of thing, quoting ZDNet. The attacks have taken place in the last month after the World Anti-Doping Agency, WADA, announced a possible indiscriminate ban of all Russian athletes from all sporting events, including upcoming World Championships and Olympics. Microsoft said the attacks involved spearfishing, password spraying, exploited internet-connected devices, and the use of both open source and custom malware, posing as an offshoot of the anonymous hacker collective, APT-28, hacked WADA in 2016, and leaked internal emails, documents, and therapeutic use exemptions,

Starting point is 00:06:00 documents that ailing athletes file so they can take prohibited substances. Two years later, APT-28 released the Olympic Destroyer malware during the opening ceremony at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyongchang, South Korea. The malware crippled some routers during the event, but did not crash the live broadcast, though it was pretty close. Both hacks took place after the International Olympic Committee and WADA banned some Russian athletes from participating in the Rio 2016 Summer Olympic. and the Pyongchang 2018 Winter Olympics, and many considered the hacks as some sort of revenge on the part of Russian authorities, end quote. Interesting raise time, but it's an interesting fundraise, not an interesting company raise. Two years ago, AOL founder Steve Case launched his Rise of the Rest Fund to invest in entrepreneurs

Starting point is 00:06:55 outside of Silicon Valley. $150 million later, the fund has invested in companies in 32 states, Washington, D.C., and and Puerto Rico and its portfolio now boasts more than 125 companies. I find this fund to be interesting because not only does it look for and invest in companies away from the coastal tech hubs, but I've also heard from VC friends that it is sort of serving as a scouting fund for more traditional Silicon Valley VC firms, i.e. companies rise of the rest invests in tend to get follow-on rounds from traditional firms after rise of the rest has conferred credibility on them. Well, yesterday in Detroit,

Starting point is 00:07:33 Steve Case announced rise of the rest to, quoting Forbes. The $150 million fund is backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Spanx founder Sarah Blakely, hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, and other business leaders. Also joining the second fund for the first time are Under Armors Kevin Plank, former Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam, and Apollo General Management co-founder Joshua Harris. Hillbilly elegy author J.D. Vance has stepped back from his role directing

Starting point is 00:08:01 the first fund and longtime revolution investor David Hall will manage the second fund. Blake Lee, the Spanx founder, said in an email that her own business was doubted for coming from Atlanta, an unlikely city instead of a fashion hub like Los Angeles or New York. I believe most people at some point in their lifetime will have at least one million dollar or maybe even a billion dollar idea, she said. Geography shouldn't be the reason those bright ideas don't come to life, end quote. And another interesting fundraise. China has created a $29 billion state-backed fund to invest in the semiconductor industry,

Starting point is 00:08:43 ranging from design to manufacture of the silicon to better reduce its dependency on U.S. technology. This would eliminate a major potential pain point for China amid ongoing trade and even national security disputes with the U.S., quoting Bloomberg. Beijing's effort to reduce its reliance on American chips is taking on greater urgency as the Trump administration adds more. Chinese names to its export blacklist, cutting off the flow of chips to targeted companies from Huawei to Sense Time. Beijing is trying to reduce the country's reliance on semiconductor imports worth about $200 billion annually. It fears such dependence undermines national security and hampers the development of a thriving technology sector. The country envisions spending hundreds of billions of dollars to achieve a prominent position in the semiconductor industry,

Starting point is 00:09:28 something U.S. tech executives and government officials have warned, could harm American interests. end quote. It will no longer cost you extra to order groceries from Amazon, assuming you live in the right place. Amazon is eliminating the $14.99 per month Amazon Fresh grocery delivery fee in around 2,000 cities for all prime members. It is doing this in a way we all assumed would probably happen eventually, quoting TechCrunch. Alongside free delivery, Amazon is giving users one and two-hour delivery options for quicker turnarounds, and it's making users local Whole Foods inventory available online and through the Amazon app. Prime members who are already using Amazon's grocery delivery services, either for Amazon's own branded service or to get Amazon-owned Whole Foods

Starting point is 00:10:20 shopping delivered, we'll continue to get these now free. Prime members who might be interested in trying this out for the first time will have to sign up online and wait for an invite. quote, given the rapid growth of grocery delivery, we expect this will be a popular benefit, Amazon explained about the wait list, end quote. Walmart, by the way, just last month, announced that it would be expanding its $98 per year delivery unlimited service. So until today, Walmart's offering was cheaper than Amazon Fresh. Classic Amazon move here, cutting your competition off at the knees. Though it should be noted that some analysts have been speculating that growth in grocery delivery for Amazon was slowing. So this is either an aggressive move on Amazon's part or a

Starting point is 00:11:06 defensive one, or, of course, it could be both at the same time. Staying with Amazon for one more second, the company also says that Alexa users in the U.S. will be able to pay their bills from participating utility companies in the coming months, quoting Venture Beat. Coinciding with the utility bill payment launch, a complementary bill management feature will rollout to Alexa-enabled devices in the U.S. When the functionality launches in earnest, customers will be able to ask Alexa to tell them information about their bill, including when their bill is due, Alexa, when is my water bill do, and how their current bill compares to previous periods.

Starting point is 00:11:49 Alexa compare my electricity bill to June last year. They'll also be able to check the status of bill payments, i.e., did my payment go through, and opt in to receiving alerts when it looks like their payment will be late or their payment account has issues. Amazon notes that customers will be able to turn off bill notifications anytime in the Alexa app for Android, iOS, and Windows by heading to settings, account, notifications, and then bill planner. Additionally, they'll be able to unlink a utility account by saying a command like, you know who, disconnect my electric bill, end quote. The forthcoming features stem from a partnership with customer engagement and payment platform, Paymentus, instant payment

Starting point is 00:12:31 network, which currently spans more than 1,500 billers and 700 utilities. Apple has pooled the HomePod 13.2 software update because some users have been reporting bricked home pod devices after installing the update, quoting Mac Rumors. According to multiple people on the Mac Rumors forums and Reddit, the 13.2 update bricked their home pods, rendering them unusable. Users who are seeing problems are experiencing a white swirl on both of the their home pods or an endless reset loop. Some people had issues immediately after installing the new software, while others have had problems after resetting their devices following the update.

Starting point is 00:13:15 Some users have also reported that the problem happened installing the 13.2 software before updating to iOS 13.2. We thought that the perceived home pod issues might have been linked to an Apple music outage lasting for a few hours today right after the 13.2 software came out, but that may not be the case, end quote. Apple is currently recommending that if you already installed the 13.2 update, you should avoid resetting your home pod or removing it from the home app. If you have already reset your home pod, you're going to need to contact Apple's support. Finally, today, the streaming wars are just about to kick off, as we talk about almost endlessly, but one low-profile player is already tapping out. Sony.

Starting point is 00:14:06 says it will shut down its PlayStation View live TV subscription service on January 30th, quoting the streamable. After reports about trying to find a buyer, it seems that PlayStation View has decided to shut down the service instead. The service, which debuted in 2015, was one of the first live TV streaming services to launch and is now the first VMVPD to shut down. The service will officially go dark on January 30th, 2020. The company has had a difficult time growing the service with the addition of new entrants like Hulu Live TV, YouTube TV, and AT&T TV now. While there had been on and off speculation about Sony's interest in the business, PSVue

Starting point is 00:14:51 continued to make product improvements like Multivue and has renewed deals with WarnerMedia, NBCU, and Disney in recent months, end quote. The View Service reportedly only had 500,000 subscribers far less than Sling TV or Hulu TV Live, which both have over 2 million subscribers. Hey, this is completely random, but remember a few months back when I asked if any of you knew any gaming journalists looking for work that might be available to do a gamer ride home podcast? It was around that time a bunch of gaming journalists were laid off from some publication, and one of you tweeted at me all of their Twitter handles, I think. Well, like an idiot, I can't find that tweet. So if someone out there remembers tweeting at me, can you resend that to me?

Starting point is 00:15:43 Or just get in touch? Or else, does anyone remember what gaming publications shut down maybe two months ago and laid off a bunch of talented folk? Don't know if this will ring any bells or lead anywhere, but I got to try. Thanks in advance. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 10/29 - Playstation Vue Goes To The Deadpool

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.