Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/13 - LeBron's "The Decision" But For Amazon HQ2

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

Amazon’s HQ2 officially lands in Queens and Crystal City; Waymo is launching a driverless car service in December; Apple locks down repairs on modern Macs; get ready for cloud gaming; Pandora applies its music technology to podcasts; and a magic act that’ll make your day. Links: Amazon selects New York City and Northern Virginia for new headquarters (Amazon DayOne Blog) Amazon HQ2 decision: Amazon splits prize between Crystal City and New York (The Washington Post) Pandora brings its Genome technology to podcast recommendations (TechCrunch) Waymo to Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month (Bloomberg) Apple confirms its T2 security chip blocks some third-party repairs of new Macs (The Verge) The Tricky—but Potentially Lucrative—Task of Streaming Videogames (WSJ) Eric Chien 2018 Fism Grand Prix Magic Act (YouTube) 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, November 13th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Amazon's HQ2 officially lands in Queens and Crystal City.

Waymo is launching a driverless car service in December. Apple locks down repairs on modern Macs. Get ready for cloud gaming. And a magic act that will make your day. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, our long national guessing game is over. Today, Amazon announced its HQ2 picks. It's actually opening two new headquarters locations.

One is, as guest, in the Long Island City neighborhood in Queens. That's a borough in New York City, of course, for our international listeners. And the other is in Arlington, Virginia. Weirdly, in its blog post, announcing the decision Amazon called this Virginia location, National Landing, a neighborhood that didn't exist before today. In a press release, Virginia officials explain that this new national landing place actually encompasses the neighborhoods of Crystal City, Pentagon City, and Potomac Yard. Semantics aside, that area is basically a suburb of Washington, D.C.

Amazon says the new headquarters locations will collectively create 50,000 new jobs split equally between the locations. It promises to spend $5 billion on the new locations. It also announced a new Operations Center of Excellence in Nashville, Tennessee, devoted to managing customer fulfillment and supply chain operations. The company says it will add. had 5,000 jobs there. Hiring is set to begin sometime in 2019 in all three new locations, and the hiring will wrap up over time, actually over the course of the better part of a decade. Amazon says the jobs will have an average wage of over $150,000 in all three locations.

As for why the two HQ2 locations were selected, Amazon cited a bunch of reasons. One was access to mass transit and transportation hubs, including major airports. Another was access to top talent, which is obviously present in both locations, but another big driver is what these locales were willing to pay in order to attract all these new jobs and corporate investment. As part of the announcement, Amazon disclosed the incentives it will receive from local governments. In Long Island City, Amazon will get more than $1.5 billion in incentives, mostly in the form of tax credits in exchange for creating the promised high-paying jobs. In Virginia, Amazon will get $573 million in a similar arrangement, and in Nashville, another $100,000.

$2 million. So adding that all up, Amazon is effectively being paid $2.2 billion by three U.S. states for opening large offices. On Twitter, Martin Ostermull pointed out that in the Virginia deal, the amount of money paid to Amazon could actually go higher if Amazon delivers more than 25,000 jobs. Doing the math, he noted that Amazon is getting about $22,000 per job created, though there is a five-year lag between when the job is created and when the payment kicks in. The current plan has Amazon hiring incrementally, only hitting that 25,000 job mark in the year 2030, as I said. This is a long play which will have economic impact for decades. There's plenty to unpack here, and we're not going to get to all of it today. This is a story that touches on local politics in a bunch of places, but also seems to kick up a fight about economics in general.

Let's start with some of the reaction online. Alex Conrad tweeted, this is like winning the bid for the Olympics in that it's probably going to be a pain. for locals and then later politicians will try to pretend it never happened, end quote. Derek Thompson, who wrote about the HQ2 situation for the Atlantic, tweeted a summary of his perspective. Quote, each year local governments pay around $90 billion for companies to move factories and offices like Amazon HQ2 away from other U.S. cities. More than Washington spends on education and infrastructure. It's a national absurdity that requires a national solution, end quote. Tren Griffin, a Microsoft senior.

director of strategy in Seattle took to Twitter to explain why Amazon chose multiple locations for HQ2. Quote, Amazon did the research and found that no single city could handle that much growth as quickly as they needed. Comments from Peanut Gallery pundits failed to grasp that researching this issue was part of the process. Multiple cities isn't a terrible outcome, end quote. Griffin went on to cite Mike Rosenberg of the Seattle Times.

quote, Amazon has single-handedly accounted for 30% of all jobs in Seattle this decade, end quote. Now quoting Griffin again, in a few weeks, construction of 3 million square feet of new office space starts right next to my building east of Seattle. Filling that with STEM grads is hard, end quote. Finally, on our subreddit, user SWYZ commented, U.S. East One has a special place in our hearts. Might as well make it official, end quote. This is a reference to Amazon's AWS server farm, which was already located in northern Virginia. You may remember it from the great Amazon S3 outage of February 2017,

which brought down Quora, Slack, Trello, Twitch, and Kickstarter, among many others, for most of a day. Bloomberg reports that a self-driving car service is coming sooner than expected. According to the story, Waymo plans to launch the world's first commercial driverless car service this December in Phoenix, Arizona. It will compete directly with Uber and Lyft with two key differences. First, the cars, which are technically Chrysler Pacifica minivans, will drive themselves, though sometimes a backup driver will be present. Second, the launch will be extremely limited at first with, quoting Bloomberg here, perhaps dozens or hundreds of authorized riders, end quote. The launch is further limited to a 100-square-mile area around Phoenix. The first customers will probably be from Waymo's existing early writer program, which, Bloom,

describes as a test group of 400 volunteer families that have been using Waymo self-driving cars for more than a year now. The remainder will stay behind in the early rider program testing newer features, effectively beta testing the next wave of features that will eventually roll out to the commercial service. Bloomberg wasn't able to find out the name of Waymo's new service. All they know is that it will be a new brand entirely. And pricing for rides is supposed to be competitive with human-driven lift and Uber offerings. I'm going to read now what Chris Higgins wrote for me in the script here. All I know is that my bet against self-driving cars by 2020 seems busted. If this news pans out, we'll see self-driving cars in 2018 with one tiny caveat.

You have to live in Phoenix to use them. No, Chris, what I really want to say is that the bet is still on. Notice, Phoenix, Arizona, flat, relatively modern road system, generally clear and temperate weather. My criteria for closing this bet is not only that I need to be able to order a self-driving taxi where I live on the regs, as I live in New York City, we can imagine if they do come, self-driving taxis will come to major metropolitan areas first. No, the bet really will be, can I order them on the regs in a place like Des Moines,

in the winter, in the middle of a snowstorm? And I feel like that that is further away than we still want to admit. Today, Pandora released a beta version of what it's calling its podcast genome project to users on iOS and Android. Since it began, you might know Pandora has used its music genome technology to classify music across a wide variety of attributes. That's what allows Pandora to take a seed like a single artist or song and create a station based on that. It's finding songs that are similar, and it also feeds me. needs its music genome system with human curated information. Well, today, that's coming to podcast.

Pandora is now cataloging the world of podcasts, again, using a combination of machine learning and human curation. The service analyzes more than 1,500 attributes from a given podcast, including everything from the production style to whether it uses explicit language. The system also looks at how users interact with the podcast inside the player app, analyzing skipping, replaying, replaying, and other behaviors. The hope is that Pandora will not just tell you what podcasts to listen to overall, but that it will be able to do this situationally,

offering the right episode at the right time. Quoting Roger Lynch, Pandora's CEO, quote, it might feel like podcasts are ubiquitous, but 83% of Americans aren't yet listening to podcasts on a weekly basis, and a majority of them report that that's because they simply don't know where to start, end quote. Well, podcast Genome Project, A good place to start for tech news. I have a few suggestions.

More news on the right to repair front. Apple computers equipped with its T2 security chip can reportedly only be repaired by authorized service centers running proprietary software provided by Apple. I think we covered this briefly a couple weeks ago. After the repair, this software has to be run on the machine to activate the newly repaired hardware. Without it, the Macs won't boot.

According to the Verge, Apple finally confirmed this change, which applies to a laundry list of recent Macs, including the iMac Pro release last year, all the 2018 MacBook Pro models plus the latest MacBook Air and Mac Mini. Apple's T2 chip does a little bit of everything. It's a disk controller managing SSD storage and handling hardware encryption of data on the disc. It has a superfast encoder and decoder for H.265 video. It manages touch ID if the computer has it. It listens for Siri commands. It runs the computer's webcam and microphones, and crucially, disables them in certain cases, like when the Mac's laptop lid is closed.

Most of these features are related to security, but others are just handy performance boosters. So the news is that if you replace certain key components of a T2-equipped Mac, the machine won't boot until it has been authenticated with Apple's repair software. While Apple won't tell anybody the complete list of parts that are restricted in this way, this change is really pissing off the repair community. I Fixit CEO Kyle Weans told the verge that the T2 is, quote, a guillotine that Apple is holding over its users' heads. IFixit's beef is that Apple is removing the ability for hobbyists and non-Apple-approved repair shops to work on Macs,

which effectively locks consumers into using Apple stores or their network of approved repair centers. Now, keep in mind that IFixit's core business is selling repair tools and parts for computers, and other gadgets. If you can't repair these things anymore, that's a real business problem for them. But I Fix, it is part of a growing group pushing for right to repair legislation in the U.S. that would prevent Apple

from doing stuff like this. Apple, of course, opposes that sort of legislation. The Wall Street Journal has a piece up today that is taking a look at something we've talked about in bits and pieces over the last several months. What's likely the next big thing for video games? Cloud Gaming.

The idea here is that in the future, games will run on a server in the cloud rather than a gaming console in your living room. Players just pop open a streaming app on some existing device like one of the zillion streaming boxes attached to our TVs or our phones or whatever grabs a controller and starts streaming a AAA video game that's running remotely. The reason this business model appeals to gaming companies should be obvious to regular listeners of this podcast. Subscription revenue. Right now, the gaming market. involves buying consoles every few years and buying individual games when they come out,

but there isn't a whole lot in the middle. Gamers often pay for online access to multiplayer services provided by the console makers, but fundamentally they're still buying games and consoles in the same way they've been doing since the late 1970s. In a new world of cloud gaming, a casual gamer could pay a monthly subscription fee and get access to a library of games,

accessed anywhere, any device, any screen. Gaming companies see a real opportunity there. It's the untapped market of anybody who got fed up buying gaming consoles every few years, but is still okay with the idea of buying cheap streaming boxes or the potential market of anyone, again, with a smartphone. Cloud computing providers like the idea, too, since it's another use for their massive data centers,

broadband providers are keen on the idea, seeing it as a way to sell fast internet plans, maybe even 5G wireless ones. But the key technical challenge to this promised future is delivering cloud games without latency. latency is the time it takes for that button press you make to get from the game controller in your hand up to the cloud server,

input that input into the game there, and then the resulting video get back down to your TV or device or whatever. That round trip introduces a little bit of a lag, and it's a real problem in super-fast games like first-person shooters, where fractions of a second really do matter. But as the article shows, maybe those hardcore gamers just keep buying consoles

to preserve the experience they already enjoy. The rest of us, the people who aren't really buying consoles every generation anyway, could enjoy slightly slower-paced games. Now, it's a lot like the split between movie buffs who buy Blu-rays for Ultimate Video Quality versus the overwhelming majority of people who are just fine streaming stuff on Netflix

and feel like video quality is no big deal. Last up today, I want to point you to another visual like I did yesterday. But this one is six minutes of literal magic. Magician Eric Cheyenne posted a video of his winning routine at the 2018 World Championships of Magic. And it's delightful. He calls his act ribbon, and without spoiling anything for you, it involves a lot of close magic. Incredible card tricks performed on a small table with a piece of ribbon. been laid down the middle. Part of the fun actually is listening to the gasps in the audience,

which many of whom were also professional magicians, of course. So if they were impressed, clapping and cheering as Cheyenne nails each new piece of the trick, it's for professional reasons, I guess. But you don't have to be a professional to enjoy this. Check out the YouTube link in the show notes and prepare to be amazed. That'll do it for this Tuesday. Another thing. Thank you to all the listeners who are showing up on Reddit to share story ideas and just, you know, chat generally. We're at R slash ride home, all one word. And activity is growing pretty fast there. I think we're at 160 subscribers.

So I guess that's another way to get social on the web and talk tech. Of course, I'm still on Twitter at Brian MCC and Chris Higgins, who helped write today's script. He's at Chris Higgins on Twitter. Looking forward to catching up on about 10,000 hot takes on Amazon's HQ situation while I take the train home. Talk to you tomorrow.