Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 11/30 – Meta Might Do The Giphy Deal Anyway

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

Tue. 11/30 – Meta Might Do The Giphy Deal Anyway The UK quashes the Giphy acquisition, but is it actually dead? Maybe not. Was Cyber Monday a bit of a disappointment this year? Why your Pixel phone might reject your cheap charging cable. AWS’s new tools to help you build robots. And a profile of Twitter’s new CEO. Sponsors: FirstRepublic.com Detectify.com/techmeme Links: Meta ordered to sell Giphy by UK regulator (The Verge) Finland Battles ‘Exceptional’ Malware Attack Spread by Phones (Bloomberg) Cyber Monday Sales Flat as Smaller Savings Curb Incentive to Spend (WSJ) The Google Pixel 6 will refuse to charge if you use a low-quality USB-C cable or charger (AndroidPolice) Amazon launches AWS RoboRunner to support robotics apps (Venture Beat) Who Is Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s New C.E.O.? (NYTimes) 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, November 30th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. The UK officially quashes the Giffy acquisition, but is it actually dead? Maybe not. Was Cyber Monday a bit of a disappointment this year? Why your pixel phone might reject your cheap charging cable,

AWS's new tools to help you build robots, and a new profile of Twitter's new CEO. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. All right, it has happened. The UK's CMA says meta must sell Giffy after finding that the deal could harm social media users and rival platforms by denying access to GIFs. And as UK advertisers, I suppose, also quoting the verge, the tie up between Facebook and Giffy has already removed a potential challenger in the display advertising market, the chair of the independent inquiry group, Stuart McIntosh said in a state. referring to meta. Quote, without action, it will also allow Facebook to increase its significant market power in social media even further through controlling competitors' access to Jiffy Gifts,

end quote. By requiring Facebook to sell, Giffy, we are protecting millions of social media users and promoting competition and innovation in digital advertising. McIntosh also said, end quote. This would be the first time the CMA has attempted to unwind a completed acquisition by a tech giant, the Financial Times previously reported. Although Meta may be a major, appeal the decision, the UK regulator's decision sets a notable precedent for future big tech purchases. Responding to the decision, Meta's EU director of policy communications Robin Koch said, the company is considering all its options including appeal. Both consumers and Jiffy are better off with the support of our infrastructure,

talent, and resources, Koch said in a statement to the verge. Together, META and Jiffy would enhance Giffy's products for the millions of people, businesses, developers, and API partners in the UK and around the world who use. jiffy every day, providing more choices for everyone, end quote. So I'm hearing that this deal might not be dead, despite what I said yesterday, because meta might just, I don't know, whistle past the graveyard and ignore this. I don't know the details, but I've heard that meta might just move forward regardless. Maybe Britain is not a big enough market to concern them. Maybe they'll just eat the, I don't know, fines or whatever if they go ahead and ignore everything. Also, some folks are

questioning the legality or even maybe the enforcement mechanism of this move, quoting James O'Malley on Twitter. Maybe this is a dumb question, but I don't fully understand how a British regulator can compel an American company to do this. If, for example, the US and EU said it was fine, what recourse would Britain have? I mean, would it be that Facebook can't offer integrated Giffy functionality in the UK, or would ISPs be forced to block Facebook? Or would it just get a massive fine? And quote. Meanwhile, in the background, consider the situation for Giffey, quoting the verge again. Jiffy had raised $150 million in funding since its founding, but it had yet to turn a profit prior to its acquisition and was reportedly running out of money. Its sale price to meta was $315 million,

less than a previous valuation given to it by investors, and a sign of its financial trouble. While the CMA's investigation has been ongoing, Giffy's 100-plus employees haven't been able to become full meta employees, although meta has reportedly been paying the company's bills to keep it running. Responding to the CMA's provisional findings, meta argued that the regulator was, quote, sending a chilling message to startup entrepreneurs. Do not build new companies because you will not be able to sell them, end quote. Finland is working to stop millions of text messages spreading what is being called the flubot malware, which is being spread via links. This all started late last week, and this is being called a severe alert in case it goes global, quoting Bloomberg.

Many of the messages claim that the recipient has received a voicemail asking them to open a link. On Android devices, that brings up a prompt that requests users to allow installation of an application that contains the malware, and on Apple's iPhones, users are taken to other fraudulent material on the website, authorities said. The messages with malicious links to malware called Flubot number in the millions, according to Eno Maria Varian, information security specialist at the National Cybersecurity Center. Tellia, the country's second biggest telecommunications operator, has intercepted some hundreds of thousands of messages, end quote. Interesting narrative violation here. According to Adobe, online U.S. consumers spent $7.1 billion by 9 p.m. Eastern time on Cyber Monday yesterday,

which was below expectations for Cyber Monday and down from Cyber Monday spending, of $10.8 billion in 2020. Why? Could it be that many shoppers return to physical stores this year? Quoting the Wall Street Journal. The figures are in line with online retail sales for Thanksgiving's holiday weekend, which failed to surpass the previous year's sales for the first time in years, according to some industry estimates. Overall, U.S. retail sales rose 14% during the Thanksgiving weekend compared with last year and 5.8% from 2019, according to data released by MasterCard's spending pulse. U.S. shoppers have been eager to return to stores with many big box retailers, discount chains, and department stores seeing foot traffic surge on Black Friday. Placer.a.I., an

analytics firm that uses mobile device location data to measure foot traffic, said foot traffic at indoor malls rose 83.5% from 2020, although the surge of in-person shopping wasn't enough to surpass pre-pandemic levels. Online discounts were also lower on Monday compared with last year, with smaller promotions across electronics, appliances, apparel, and sporting goods, Adobe reported. Supply chain disruptions have made it difficult for some retailers to keep their shelves stocked, spurring consumers to begin their holiday shopping early. Out-of-stock messages are up 169% through Sunday compared with pre-pandemic levels, Adobe said, end quote. The Google Pixel 6 will refuse to charge if you use a low-quality USBC cable or charger,

quoting Android police. The Google Pixel 6 and 6 Pro come without a charging adapter, controversially, but at least they come with a USBC to see charging cable. It should be common knowledge that the cable that comes with your phone is the best one to charge it with, but it seems like Google's latest flagships will straight up refuse to charge if you try to use a cheaper cable. As reported by 9 to 5 Google, users are finding that their Pixel 6 and Pixel 6 Pro devices won't charge when they use certain cables. No warning message is displayed. They'll just act as if no power sources connect. This is unsurprising since Google's support page says that, quote,

other Android cables and power adapters might not work with pixel phones, end quote. Both pixel 6 models support USBPD for power delivery, but many older and cheaper cables aren't compliant with this newer fast-charging spec, which means that even if they do charge the phone, it'll be slow. The same goes for older and cheaper charging bricks. While USBC is supposed to make charging of all our devices easier, the obvious flaw is that there are many different specs that use the same port now, which can be super confusing for many users. It may be frustrating that the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro won't charge using

some of your existing cables and chargers, but ultimately it's for the right reason. Slow charging using cheap cables can damage batteries, so using only the cable that came with your pixel is the best way to protect your phone. If this is your first pixel, that likely means you'll have to shell out for a new charging adapter too since USBC bricks are still not super prevalent, and even if you do have one from a previous product, there's no guarantee it'll charge your pixel 6. Google is selling a new 30-watt charger, but beware the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro won't actually charge anywhere near that fast, end quote. Amazon has debuted AWS Internet of Things Robo Runner to simplify building apps for managing robot fleets and AWS Robotics Startup Accelerator to offer AWS clients' credits and expert advice.

Quoting Venture Beat. The adoption of robotics and automation more broadly in enterprises has accelerated as the pandemic prompts digital transformations. A recent report from Automation World found that the bulk of companies that embraced robotics in the past year did so to decrease labor costs, also to increase capacity and navigate a lack of available workers. The same survey found that 44.9% of companies now consider the robots in their assembly and manufacturing facilities to be an integral part of daily operations. Amazon, a heavy investor in robotics itself, hasn't been shy about its intent to capture a larger part of a robotics software market that is anticipated to be worth over $7.52 billion by 2022. In 2018, the company unveiled AWS RoboMaker, a product to assist developers with deploying

robotics applications with AI and machine learning capabilities, and Amazon earlier this year rolled out SageMaker reinforcement learning Kubiflow components, a toolkit supporting the RoboMaker service for orchestrating robotics workflows. IOTRobo Runner, currently in preview, builds on the technology already in use at Amazon warehouses for robotics management. It allows AWS customers to connect robots and existing automation software to orchestrate work across operations, combining data from each type of robot in a fleet, and standardizing data types like facility, location, and robotic task data in a central repository. The goal of IoT RoboRunner is to simplify the process of building management apps for fleets of robots, according to Amazon.

As enterprises increasingly rely on robotics to automate their operations, they're choosing different types of robots, making it more difficult to organize their robots efficiently. Each robot vendor and work management system has its own often incompatible control software, data format, and data repository. And when a new robot is added to a fleet, programming is required to connect the control software to work management systems and program the logic for management apps. Developers can use IoT RoboRunner to access the data required to build robotics management apps and leverage pre-built software libraries to create apps for tasks like work allocation.

Beyond this, IOTRobrunter can be used to deliver metrics and KPI's via APIs to administrative dashboards. Amazon also announced the Robotics Startup Accelerator, which the company says will foster robotics companies by providing them with resources to develop prototype test and commercialize their products and services. Combined with the technical resources and network that AWS provides, the strategic collaboration will help robotic startups in the industry overall to experiment and innovate while connecting startups and their technologies with the AWS customer base, Amazon wrote in a blog post.

Startups accepted into the Robotics Startup Accelerator program will consult with AWS and mass robotics experts on business models and with AWS robotics engineers for technical assistance. Benefits include hands-on training on AWS robotics solutions and up to $10,000 in promotional credits to use AWS IOT, robotics, and machine learning services. Startups will also receive business development and investment guidance from mass robotics and co-marketing opportunities with AWS via blogs and case studies. Robotics startups, particularly in industrial robotics, have attracted the eye of venture capitalists as the trend toward automation continues. From March 2020 to March 2021, venture firms poured $6.3 billion into robotics companies up nearly 50 percent from March 2019 to

March 2020, according to data from Pitchbook. Over the longer term, robotics investments have climbed more than five-fold throughout the past five years to $5.4 billion in 2020 up from $1 billion in 2015, end quote. Finally today, how about a profile of Twitter's new CEO, Parag Agrawal, little known to the public, but apparently a Jack Dorsey confidant who has been involved in many big strategic initiatives at Twitter of late, quoting the New York Times. When Jack Dorsey, then Twitter's executive chairman pushed the company to build out its machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities in 2014, he turned to an engineer, Parag Agrawal. When Mr. Dorsey later became Twitter's chief executive and needed help overhauling the company's infrastructure,

he also tapped Mr. Agrawal. And when Mr. Dorsey envisioned a future for Twitter in 2019 that would be based on the concept of decentralization and technologies such as the blockchain, he again pulled in Mr. Agrawal to help. On Monday, Mr. Dorsey made the handover complete when he stepped down as chief executive and Mr. Agrawal-37 was named Twitter's new leader. Mr. Agrawal, the chief technology officer since 2017, is little known to the public with even some Twitter insiders saying they were surprised by his appointment. But behind the scenes, the India-born engineer has been a Twitter veteran and confidant of Mr. Dorsey, who has been involved in many of the company's biggest strategic initiatives. That made Mr. Dorsey effusive about his successors,

saying in a tweet that the board had run a rigorous search for a new chief executive and had unanimously endorsed Mr. Agrawal. Some tech observers said that Mr. Agarwal's appointment made sense because he was kind of a spiritual successor to Mr. Dorsey. Both are quiet, deeply technical, and enthused about an internet where power and control are given back to users. He definitely takes a big picture view of what should Twitter be in the world and how it should work.

Mike Maznick, the founder of the technology news site TechDirt, who has advised Twitter on decentralization efforts, said of Mr. Agarwal. Born in Mumbai, Mr. Agarwal studied computer science and engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, an elite technical university. In 2005, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Stanford University to pursue a doctorate in computer science. There, he joined a research group focused on databases which let computers store and manage large amounts of digital information. Even among students at Stanford, Mr. Agarwal stood out for his strong grasp of the math and the theory that underpins computer science, said Jennifer Whitam, who led the research. lab and served as his thesis advisor. Having both of those skills, math and theory, can take you a long way, she said in a phone interview. If you are good at the theory, you have the ability to be analytical

to reason to make decisions, end quote. Mr. Agarwal's focus on databases made him a natural fit for Twitter, which must juggle data arriving from tens of millions of people across the globe. He joined the company in 2011 before completing his PhD and became a key member of the engineering team that oversaw the company's advertising technologies. I kept nagging him to go ahead and finish his thesis, Dr. Weidem said. The ads team was among the first inside Twitter to make extensive use of so-called machine learning, mathematical systems that can learn particular skills by analyzing data. Using these technologies, Mr. Agarwal and his colleagues developed ways to target ads to particular users which helped raise Twitter's revenues and his profile. He then became a member of what

was known as the Twitter Architecture Group or Tag, a team of top engineers who reviewed and improved the company's projects that were under development. Even as chief technology officer, Mr. Agarwal has kept a low profile, however. He worked behind the scenes to rebuild Twitter's technical infrastructure, which had been cobbled together over the years. That led to engineering problems and prevented the company from introducing new products and services as quickly as it wanted. Mr. Agarwal helped Twitter shift to using cloud computing services from Google and Amazon, streamlining its operations. Mr. Agarwal's emphasis on product development appealed to insiders who believed Twitter had moved too slowly to introduce new products, a person familiar

with his succession process said. His appointment could also help Twitter mirror the success of other companies that have tapped engineering leaders to oversee turnaround efforts, they said. Mr. Agarwal becomes the latest India-born executive to take over a major American technology company. Executives of South Asian descent are now at the helm of companies including Microsoft, Google, and IBM, with many of them succeeding the company's founders. To summon Silicon Valley, Mr. Agarwal's elevation was the definition of the American dream. Wonderful to watch the amazing success of Indians in the technology world and a good reminder of the opportunity America offers to immigrants.

Patrick Collison, Chief Executive of Stripe, said in a tweet on Monday, congratulating Mr. Agarwal, end quote. Nothing really for you to end with today. So in honor of that amazing Beatles documentary that's on Disney Plus right now, our first lyrical sign off. You never give me your money, you only give me your funny paper. And in the middle of negotiations, you break down. Maybe this is a sub-tweet of the whole meta-giffy acquisition.

Talk to you tomorrow.