Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 8/28 - President Googles Himself, Not Pleased With The Results

Episode Date: August 28, 2018

President Trump accuses Google of rigged search results, Instagram updates its identity systems, Yahoo scans your mail for marketing purposes, BuzzFeed tests memberships and the rarest Apple device in the world comes to auction. Links:You can now apply to be verified in Instagram (The Verge)Yahoo, Bucking Industry, Scans Emails for Data to Sell Advertisers (WSJ)Toyota Investing $500 Million in Uber in Driverless-Car Pact (WSJ)AutoX is using its self-driving vehicles to deliver groceries (TechCrunch)BuzzFeed News quietly tests a membership program (Digiday)Buzzfeed, With Nearly $500M In Funding, Asks For Contributions (Crunchbase News)How ‘Grand Theft Auto’ Is Changing the Way the World Experiences Music (Rolling Stone)First Apple Computer Goes Up For Auction, Expected to Fetch More Than $300,000 (Paleofuture) 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 Ride Home for Tuesday, August 28th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. President Trump accuses Google of rigged search results.

Instagram updates its identity systems. Yahoo scans your mail for marketing purposes. Buzzfeed tests memberships and the rarest Apple device in the world comes to auction. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. At 5.24 a.m. this morning, President Trump, in a.m. series of tweets accused Google of rigging its search results to suppress positive news about him and conservative views generally. Quoting the president, Google search results for Trump news shows only the viewing reporting of fake news media. In other words, they have it rigged for me and

others so that almost all stories and news is bad. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican, conservative, and fair media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on Trump news are from national left-wing media. Very dangerous. Google and others are suppressing voices of conservatives and hiding information and news that is good. They are controlling what we can and cannot see. This is a very serious situation. Will be addressed, end quote. In a statement released this morning, Google responded, quote,

When users type queries into the Google search bar, our goal is to make sure they receive the most relevant answers in a matter of seconds. Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don't bias our results toward any political ideology. Every year, we issue hundreds of improvements to our algorithms to ensure they surface high-quality content in response to users' queries. We continually work to improve Google Search, and we never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment, end quote. In related news, Google Search now highlights veteran-led businesses and matches veterans searching for job listings with skills. that fit their roles. Google is highlighting more than 2.5 million businesses being run by former military personnel and is extending its cloud talent solution job search program to better support searches for

jobs for veterans. FedEx careers, Encompass Health Careers, Siemens Careers, Career Builder, and getting hired are among the businesses adopting the initiative first. Also, the Google Go search app for emerging markets can now read out website content in one of 28 supported languages. Google Go is a stripped-down search app that only sips on data usage and was released last year to appeal to emerging markets in places like India. Quote, the new feature is inspired by user research in India where we heard from people how important it is to understand information effortlessly, especially for people coming online for the first time, consuming long-form text on a small device can be difficult and time-consuming.

With this new feature, you can just press play. and follow along, Google said in a blog post. Instagram announced a whole slew of identity-related updates today. From now on, more people can apply for verification on Instagram. Unlike verification on Twitter, it's a relatively straightforward process. If you have a large audience on Instagram, you can now fill out a form requesting verification. Go to your profile, go to settings, and you should now see a request verification option. Send them your personal or business ID, and after some unspecified period of time, Instagram will tell you if you're verified.

This comes at the same time as a slew of identity and security-related improvements, including support for two-factor authentication, and more information about who is behind various Instagram accounts with a new About This Account feature. If you find an Instagram account with a large following, you can now see details like when they joined Instagram, what country they're located in, a history of username changes and any ads the account runs. In the blog post announcing this edition, Instagram wrote, quote, Our community has told us that it's important to them to have a deep understanding of accounts that reach many people on Instagram. From a story about evolving digital identity

in possibly a responsible way, a mature way, to this story, which is, well, given the current climate around issues like identity, and security, let's just call it retrograde. According to the Wall Street Journal, Oath, the unit of Verizon Communications that owns Yahoo! as well as the remnants of AOL, has been pitching advertisers on a service that it says analyzes the roughly 200 million active Yahoo Mail and AOL mail accounts to mine data about what products users are buying, as well as other personal data.

According to the journal, that makes Yahoo Mail the only major. U.S. mail provider that scans email inboxes for marketing purposes. Gmail stopped scanning for ad-targeting reasons last year, and Microsoft says it has never used email data for advertising. Apparently, Yahoo has been doing this for over a decade, and it seems unashamed to still be pitching it as a product even after the privacy blowups of the last year or so. Doug Sharp, oath's vice president of data, measurements, and insights told the Wall Street Journal that oath ignores personal email and that the practice only applies to commercial emails. So product receipt emails or brand-based mass mailings, and Yahoo and AOL mail users have the ability to opt out. Quote, email is an expensive system, Mr. Sharp said.

I think it's reasonable and ethical to expect the value exchange if you've got this mail service and there is advertising going on, end quote. Yahoo does offer an ad-free email service for $3.49 a month. One interesting tidbit from this piece, quote, Yahoo salespeople told potential advertisers that about one third of Yahoo mail users were active Amazon customers, one of the people said. In 2005, Amazon stopped including full itemized receipts in the emails it sends to customers, partially because the company didn't want Yahoo and others gathering that data for their own use, someone familiar with the matter said, end quote. As Dan Gallagher wrote on Twitter, wonder how much Verizon's purchase of Yahoo and AOL was premised on the idea that people never kill old email addresses.

Various outlets were reporting last night. that Toyota will invest $500 million in Uber as a part of a partnership to work together on autonomous car development. So if this proves out, this is a clear sign that Uber is not abandoning its self-driving vehicle efforts, as some have speculated it might. Quote, Toyota's investment values Uber at about $72 billion, slightly higher than where SoftBank Group valued the ride-hailing company earlier this year with its funding, according to people familiar with the matter. Under terms of the tie-up, Uber will integrate self-driving technology into Toyota-Sienna minivans for use in Uber's ride-hailing network, the companies said. The vehicles later could be owned and operated by third-party fleet managers, they added, end quote. Although interestingly, the information's Amir Afradi had this slight addendum on Twitter,

quote, Eric Newcomer is reporting another third party will do the maintenance of the fleets. Uber, for what it's worth, has been saying this morning. to its employees that it's Toyota's responsibility to figure out the operations piece, end quote. In other words, Uber is putting its self-driving systems into Toyota minivans. Toyota will own them and operate them on the Uber network. Quoting from Afradi again, quote, in essence, Uber sees this as a capital light option versus what they have today in which they buy volvos and maintain the fleet themselves. They'll continue to work on the volvos, of course, end quote.

So maybe there is. a little bit of cost-cutting involved here after all. Toyota has previously made a small investment in Uber as a part of a car leasing program for potential Uber drivers. Staying on the self-driving car beat for a moment more, the world's first self-driving grocery delivery cars are now on the roads of California. If you live in select neighborhoods in San Jose,

you can now get your groceries delivered by AutoX, a self-driving car startup which has kept a low profile until now but has raised $43 million just since 2016. When I say select neighborhoods, though, I really mean it. The pilot program only covers an area of about 400 homes in North San Jose at the moment. AutoX has about 90 employees, but just two autonomous vehicles will be used for the initial launch. The way it works at the moment is you download the AutoX app and you place an order a day ahead of time. You have two different options.

Either you get the items you explicitly ask for or when the... car arrives at the curb, you walk out, the windows roll down, and you select from a shelf of goods on offer. Quote, we don't think it makes sense for people to drive around these two-ton vehicles to go pick up an apple, AutoX director of business and operations Hugo Fazzati, told TechCrunch, echoing what Uber's Dara Kosor Shahi said on yesterday's pod. Quote, last mile delivery for groceries and food will be more convenient and affordable when enabled by autonomous driving technology, AutoX wrote in a post on medium. The traditional way of

grocery shopping is tedious. We are bringing a new way of grocery shopping to free people to enjoy the best part, receiving the goods and enjoying our purchases, end quote. Digidae is reporting that BuzzFeed News, and note I said BuzzFeed News, not BuzzFeed proper, is working with Google to test a donation button. Apparently they're looking to explore a membership or reader contribution model similar to that used by the Guardian. Quote, BuzzFeed News is adding messaging to pages that solicits small donations of $5 to $100. The initial benefits will be updates on big investigations and new video programming.

There's no member-only content for now. If the program is successful, BuzzFeed News hopes to add perks that will come on top of its news content, but that will remain free. BuzzFeed News said it is working on its membership program as a part of the Google News Initiative, a broad suite of programs the tech giant announced earlier this year, and that initially started in March with letting people subscribe on Google to paywalled publishers with a two-click process. Google helped BuzzFeed with tech and market research. It's unclear if Google is planning to expand its subscription program

to accommodate publishers that have reader donation or membership programs. A Google rep confirmed the company is working with BuzzFeed to help it explore different business approaches and understand how its readers would react to this kind of model. quote. So other media outlets have been reporting gleefully on BuzzFeed's evolving business model and missed revenue estimates. The information reported that BuzzFeed missed its 2017 revenue targets by 15 to 20 percent. And BuzzFeed News, you'll recall, was recently spun out to try to claim more of its own identity outside the BuzzFeed parent umbrella. BuzzFeed News has always been

something of an odd cousin to BuzzFeed proper. BuzzFeed News is a real seasoned journalism organization doing real award-winning journalism. But their pieces have had to fight for attention and perhaps respect among the sea of listicles. Also, one suspects that the listicles get more traffic, thus more revenue, and BuzzFeed News has to be something of a loss leader. But then actual news has always been a loss leader, right? For a time four or five years ago, many people were looking at BuzzFeed as perhaps the modern model for news delivery. But as this note from Crunch News points out, the worm has turned a bit. Quote, at the time of BuzzFeed's $200 million raise in November 2016,

the New York Times was trading at $12.85 a share. Today, it closed at $23.75 with a market cap of over $3.9 billion. On February 8, 2018, the newspaper reported it had $2.6 million digital subscriptions, putting its subscription revenue for 2017 over a billion dollars. BuzzFeed's revenue is estimated by Aller to be at $200 million a year, unquote. Oh, and late-breaking addendum to this, were you in the market for a wirecutter replacement? I don't know why you would be. Wirecutter is the best, but maybe having a Pepsi to Wirecutter's Coke would be useful anyway. The Wall Street Journal has reported that a new venture, BuzzFeed Reviews, just went live, though the company has not announced it.

Same reviews of the best products, category by category, same rigorous testing, same, it seems affiliate revenue model. as wirecutter. What was that the Google spokesperson said about BuzzFeed exploring different business approaches? Rolling Stone has a piece up about how the video game Grand Theft Auto has become a powerful tool for music discovery. Driving around, listening to Ingame Radio, gamers have listened to more than 75 billion minutes of music in the past five years. And now Rockstar, the maker of the game, has expanded things with GTA Online, now featuring

live DJ sets in game hosted by actual big-name DJs. Quote, each of the DJs in the update made a pilgrimage to Rockstar in New York City and then out to Long Island and that motion capture studio where they performed music to an extremely select set of people. Pavlovich says the scheduling was incredibly tight both because of the packed schedules of the musicians and the need for secrecy. Rockstar also did motion capture with each DJ for the missions that would occur around their appearance in the game. game. For instance, Black Madonna, suited up in a motion capture suit, got to punch a fake cop for her bit, a request she made of Rockstar before accepting the gig, end quote. Of course, games have been a powerful tool for music discovery for a while now, a decade ago when rock band was the thing.

An entire generation got exposed to classic tracks, and I remember getting turned on to new artists via Tony Hawk games and FIFA. In fact, if memory serves, putting Blur's song 2 on FIFA 98, basically single-handedly turned that song into a hit. Finally, today, a rare, fully functional Apple One computer, just one of only 60 believed to still exist in the world, is coming up for auction in September. Quote, just 200 were originally produced by Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs in 1976 and 77, sold at the Bight Shop Computer Store in Mountain View, California.

The pair sold about 175 of them in total, end quote. This one has been fully restored to its original state by a historic computer expert. Back in the day, this baby sold for $66, or about $3,000 in inflation-adjusted money. But if you're looking to get your hands on this specific piece of history, the expectation is that it will probably fetch $300,000 at auction. paging Chris Freilich, if your gadget museum doesn't already have one of these, now is your chance. So yesterday's reach out for smaller companies to come test out buying ads on the pod has been amazing. I got plenty of responses overnight, and these are exactly the sort of people and companies I hoped would respond,

companies that had never tried podcast ads before, companies that aren't billion-dollar unicorns yet, but will be someday, companies that are doing really cool things in a whole range of fascinating niches. I can't wait to start telling you about them, starting tomorrow. Thanks to everyone that reached out, and thanks to all of you, as always, for listening to the pod.