Tech Brew Ride Home - Tues. 05/19 - If You Virtual Build It, They Will Come

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 TechMean Ride Home for Tuesday, May 19th, 2020. Today, Microsoft's virtual version of its build conference unleashes an array of news, including Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, a new component system for live document editing,

Starting point is 00:00:53 a collaboration with Sony on embedded AI in camera sensors, a superfast open AI supercomputer built on Azure, and better Linux support in Windows 10, Also, new leaks about Apple's AR glasses. The Department of Justice slams Apple on phone encryption. Apple and negotiations to buoy Apple Plus with a back catalog of programming. Walmart puts jet.com out to pasture among a huge sales increase. And finally, a massive database of medical equipment service manuals comes online.

Starting point is 00:01:25 I'm Glenn Fleischman, in for Brian McCullough. And here's what you missed in the world of tech today. Microsoft began its build conference today, an event that normally gathers tens of thousands of people into one place to watch carefully crafted demonstrations and occasionally view awkward A-list and B-list celebrities act as masters of ceremonies. Build has gone virtual, like all conferences, and a slew of announcements emerged today. A couple of brief ironic hits to start with Microsoft Power Toys Run brings something like Apple's MacOS Spotlight to Windows 10 for the first time.

Starting point is 00:01:59 Invoke it with a keystroke and enter freeform text and it matches apps, running processes, and handles tasks like calculation via plugins. Power toys first introduced in Windows 95 were brought back in Windows 10 as a way to add features for power users. Microsoft will also improve how Linux apps work with graphical front ends within Windows 10. Windows 10 will gain a full Linux kernel later in May, allowing GUI apps to run and Linux apps to take advantage of GPU-based acceleration. GPUs are a critical tool for machine learning, which requires massive amounts of computation when chunking through training data. Last week, Microsoft President Brad Smith, a longtime employee,

Starting point is 00:02:38 said in a chat hosted by MIT that, quote, Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally. The good news is that if life is long enough, you can learn that you need to change. But let's dig into the appropriately timed Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, the first offering of what the company intends

Starting point is 00:02:56 as a series of industry-specific cloud services that combine products across its lines of business. In healthcare, this means that systems that buy into the service get a team's license, booking software to manage appointments, and chatbots that can collect routine information from patients, such as the current COVID-19 screening apps that have sprung up in great abundance. Microsoft notes, quote, since March, more than 1,600 instances of COVID-19 bots based in our service have gone live, impacting more than 31 million people across 23 countries, end quote. Chatbots can also be used for simplified intake, avoiding the need to fill out endless forms,

Starting point is 00:03:30 and instead just answer questions. The system facilitates virtual visits a key necessity at the moment and uses Microsoft AI tools to provide an automated transcript of the session. This relies on a bookings app released in beta in November and intended for a slow rollout.

Starting point is 00:03:45 But Christina Baer, a general manager at Microsoft, told Bloomberg News, quote, when COVID happened, we weren't quite ready to make it generally available yet, but we knew there was such an imminent need, we felt a sense of urgency to help, end quote. The system supports Azure, IoT or Internet of Things, allowing it to collect information from patient monitoring devices.

Starting point is 00:04:06 It can also support billing and other recordkeeping and create marketing-like custom plans for providers to help support patients. Microsoft says Cloud for Healthcare will integrate with existing electronic health record providers software in broad use across the U.S. medical system, such as that made by all scripts' healthcare solutions. Microsoft's product is in a public review phase and will be free for the next six months. I'm old enough to remember every previous software promise that instead of siloed apps for different productivity purposes, like spreadsheets and word processing, everything would be modular and we'd be able to move elements around in documents that acted more like containers. I've seen it time and time again.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Microsoft Fluid might be the first product that actually achieves this goal, given the emphasis the company is placed on it as a new direction forward at today's announcement, along with releasing the framework for it with open source licensing. Fluid deconstructs the contents of a document allowing users to create what the company calls components. It even referred to them as, quote, Lego pieces, and quote, presumably without a trademark license. Any item you create like a table chart or list can be sent via email, posted to the web, incorporate it into a document, whatever, and it remains linked to the original. When you update the original, changes flow out to everywhere it's referenced. Edits appear live, like in Google Docs or other collaborative software, but you don't have to be logged into a page or viewing a particular,

Starting point is 00:05:30 location, just working with a component wherever it's referenced. This is kind of like a distributed wiki, and of course there could be real problems when information someone relies on, disappears, or changes. So there has to be a way to have fixed instantiations of these components, too, not just all dynamic. I guess we'll hear more about them. Fluid components can be created in any app and then shared, so there's not a dedicated app required to create, view, or compile them.

Starting point is 00:05:54 And it's optimized for both speed and collaboration. John Friedman, corporate vice president of design and research at Microsoft told the verge, quote, a lot of what's gone into fluid is the concept of being freaky fast. It's truly real time for five, ten, fifteen, or a hundred people to do things at the same time, end quote. Fluid will start to appear in office.com and Outlook on the web in the near future, then roll out into Microsoft Teams later in the year, and finally land in desktop outlook in 2021. Third-party developers can incorporate fluid inside their apps. The framework that enables Fluid will be released under an open-source,

Starting point is 00:06:30 license, but we've seen many companies release technology components in this way that both let them claim open source cred and benefit from contributions without providing enough higher-level integration to result in open products or inclusion in other companies' products. For instance, the most popular browsers besides Internet Explorer all involve open-source projects, but Apple releases just the engine, WebKit, as open-source, Safari is proprietary. Google, in contrast, releases most but not all of what makes up Chrome, leaving a relatively small gap between a relatively small gap between open source frameworks and its production browser. By the way, the Virgil's story declares this, quote,

Starting point is 00:07:05 Google Docs on steroids and, quote, I'd love to have a hiatus on the phrase on steroids, generally. And fluid isn't really much like Google Docs at all. It's really a different approach altogether. Let's pour one out for every previous object linking and embedding environment pushed by major operating system makers. Maybe this time it's for real. I want you to go talk to Tiny,

Starting point is 00:07:31 even if you don't have a business of your own to sell. Tiny Capital is in the business of finding incredible businesses to invest in or to take over and run. So if you point them in the direction of a great company, you'll get credit. All you have to do is email Tiny, pitch them on the company you'd like to introduce them to, and they'll confirm that they haven't spoken to that company in the past, and then you'll get credit if a deal ends up going through. What do I mean by credit? How about Tiny will pay for a trip around the world for you and a friend?

Starting point is 00:08:01 What about Tiny will buy you your dream car of varying degrees of absurdity? Or how about cold hard cash ranging from 25K to 500K and more in a finder's fee? The scale of your credit depends on the size of the deal, of course. But look, just send Tiny an email. Tell them about this great company they might be interested in. It's super easy. Go talk to Tiny at Tiny Capital.com. And when you get in touch, tell them Brian sent you.

Starting point is 00:08:35 Meta Lab is one of the few design agencies. the world that can take a product idea from end to end from napkin sketch to real shipped product. Let's talk about their work for Google. Google's open source framework, AMP, aims to enable the creation of websites that are lightning fast, beautiful, and high performing across all devices. While Google initially launched AMP in early 2016, they wanted to better showcase its capabilities and how content creators could use it to bring the web to life. That's where MetaLab came in.

Starting point is 00:09:04 MetaLab joined forces with the Amp project to inspire publishers, break misconceptions, and completely redefine what's possible in the open source framework by creating amazing demo sites that showed the world what was possible with AMP. Matt Ludwig, project marketing manager of AMP, said, quote, we came to Meta Lab to push the boundaries of what's possible when using AMP. We're thrilled that they ran with this idea and created beautiful, highly interactive sites for us. Need some showcase design just like Google did? MetaLab is your design solution. Check them out at MetaLab.co. Last Thursday, Brian reported on Sony's plan to build artificial intelligence directly into an image sensor, the IMX 500, allowing on-chip AI calculations. Today, Sony and Microsoft said they would embed Microsoft Azure AI capabilities into that Sony chip.

Starting point is 00:10:01 Sony's notion with the chip is that AI models can be loaded directly into the chip, fast direct processing of matches that don't require passing any image data on, just the results of the match. This can preserve privacy by uncoupling visual data from the matches, preventing building an image or video database. Image and video data can be transferred to, but it's not necessary. Sony suggested that the 12-mepixel 4K video camera could be used for purposes like crowd counting in which there's no direct negative consequence to a false match, as opposed to, identifying individuals. The two companies also said they would work to develop an app that would be powered by the Azure IOT and tying into Microsoft's analytic services to pair with the sensor. Also on

Starting point is 00:10:41 the Azure and AI front, Microsoft said OpenAI built a 285,000 processor supercomputer within its Azure services to test large-scale artificial intelligence models. OpenAI is a company Microsoft purchased last year for a billion dollars. Based on current global supercomputer rankings, the company says it would score in the top five for performance. That would mean it had over 23,000 terraflops or 23,000 trillion floating point operations per second. Microsoft said OpenAI paid as a customer for the use of Azure. Previously, Amazon Web Services and an AWS customer aggregated capacity in that on-demand compute cloud to reach 64th in 2013 and 136th in 2019, respectively, on the annual top 500 computers list.

Starting point is 00:11:30 What kinds of amazing AI algorithm computation can you perform with that much capacity? Microsoft hasn't shared that. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told TechCrunch, quote, as we've learned more and more about what we need and the different limits of all the components that make up a supercomputer, we were really able to say if we could design our dream system, what would it look like? End quote.

Starting point is 00:11:51 Okay, then. Leaks have indicated for some time that Apple is pursuing at least an internal prototype of augmented reality or AR glasses. Now, one fairly accurate leak, acquirer, John Prosser, says the new product will be called Apple Glass, pair with an iPhone, and be driven by gestures in front of the glasses. Prosser applies his trade on YouTube and has become known for the relative accuracy of his predictions. Prosser says he saw a video of the glasses prototype. Some of his descriptions are contradictory, however. He says both lenses have displays and the system

Starting point is 00:12:26 relies on LIDAR, which provides ranging, but won't feature a can. camera. However, some of the capabilities he describes would require visual analysis, such as scanning a QR code, and AR is heavily dependent on a live video feed. Prasher says the glasses might not be introduced until 2021 because of the pandemic. The launch price will be $499, he says. The FBI revived a war of words with Apple that began in the Obama administration over unlocking phones. Apple designed its phones and later tablets and computers to lock password or passcode information in such a way. that it's effectively impossible to extract, and brute force efforts either rely on exploits that the company routinely discovers in patches

Starting point is 00:13:12 or require massive resources and long periods of time. The FBI said yesterday that it had broken into iPhones that belonged to the shooter who killed three and wounded eight at the naval air station in Pensacola, Florida, on December 6, 2019. Attorney General William Barr said in a statement that the phones contained, quote, important, previously unknown information, and quote,

Starting point is 00:13:33 that tied the shooter who was killed. in the attack to Al-Qaeda. Barr said, quote, thanks to the great work of the FBI, and no thanks to Apple, we were able to unlock Al-Shimrani's phones. If not for our FBI's ingenuity, some luck in hours upon hours of time and resources,

Starting point is 00:13:49 this information would have remained undiscovered. The bottom line, our national security cannot remain in the hands of big corporations who put dollars over lawful access and public safety. The time has come for a legislative solution, end quote. The DOJ statement said that Apple, quote, declined to assist, unquote, the agency. However, as in the previous high-profile case that caused an Apple and FBI public dispute, the mass shooting in San Bernardino, California on December 2, 2015,

Starting point is 00:14:16 Apple said in a statement that it provided the FBI every possible kind of assistance and information, including iCloud-based backups and other data. Reportedly, due to FBI complaints, iCloud backups lack the same kind of super-strong encryption that's built into Apple hardware. Across multiple administrations from the FBI and other government officials, as well as from many members of Congress, there's an insistence that technology companies can make encryption that's impossible to crack and yet has a backdoor that would only be used by law enforcement in the strictest of circumstances. Barr noted on Monday, quote, we are confident that technology companies are capable of building secure products that protect user information, end quote. The Trump administration and Obama administration have both said that Apple is engaged in policymaking by, protecting consumers' information in a nearly impenetrable fashion. Apple released a detailed statement that noted in part,

Starting point is 00:15:09 quote, as a proud American company, we consider supporting law enforcement's important work, our responsibility. The false claims made about our company are an excuse to weaken encryption and other security measures that protect millions of users and our national security. It is because we take our responsibility to national security so seriously that we do not believe in the creation of a back door, one which will make every device vulnerable to bad actors who threaten our national security.

Starting point is 00:15:32 security and the data security of our customers. There is no such thing as a backdoor just for the good guys and the American people do not have to choose between weakening encryption and effective investigations, end quote. In a closing paragraph, Apple noted, quote, we sell the same iPhone everywhere, we don't store customers pass codes, and we don't have the capacity to unlock passcode protected devices, end quote. This is a very thinly veiled message to allegedly democratic countries that any tool that the company might make available that has the potential of being used responsibly and within judicial constraints in a country with checks and balances would also be readily used in all dictatorships. Apple is reportedly working to acquire a back

Starting point is 00:16:17 catalog of movies and TV shows to enhance its Apple TV Plus subscription streaming service. Apple TV Plus includes a large array of original programming and the company has promoted it by offering a one-year free subscription to purchasers of new Apple hardware. Bloomberg, reported that negotiations are underway and some media purchased, but was unable to disclose any of the shows or movies that might become available. At $5 a month or $50 a year, Apple TV Plus is a mid-priced offering substantially below Netflix and ad-free Hulu. Apple has focused entirely on new programming and has brought on board Blockbuster directors and actors for its shows. However, Bloomberg says about 10 million people had signed up for Apple TV Plus by February

Starting point is 00:16:58 2020 and only 5 million regularly watch programs on the service. Disney Plus acquired 10 million subscribers within a day of launch and now has 50 million. Netflix added 16 million customers in just the first quarter of 2020. The big winners during the pandemic, if anyone could be a winner in any sense of the word, are online retailers and grocery stores. Walmart said today that it saw a 74% increase year over year in its U.S. online sales in the first quarter of 2020, And a total revenue increased year over year across all retail operations of $10.7 billion, bringing its revenue to $134.6 billion. So it's only natural that the company would take this moment to discontinuejet.com,

Starting point is 00:17:45 a wannabe competitor to Amazon, that Walmart purchased in 2016 for $3.3 billion. Walmart didn't disclose the exact date that jet.com will stop operations. This move actually does make sense. It's not a write-off, but rather a success. Walmart was still far behind Amazon and how it approached online. sales, much less volume, back in 2016. While Jet.com was imperfect, it had built an operation that was easier for Walmart to acquire and integrate, but it never made sense to dilute the Walmart name.

Starting point is 00:18:14 In a conference call discussing earnings today, Walmart CEO Doug McMillan, explain the move, referencing Jet.com founder Mark Lour, now the head of Walmart's e-commerce operations. One decision we've made is to discontinue Jet.com. While the brand name may still be used in the future, our resources, people, and financial have been dominated by the Walmart brand because it has so much traction. We're seeing the Walmart brand resonate regardless of income, geography, or age. The jet acquisition was critical to jump-starting the progress we've made the last few years. Not only have we picked up traction with pickup and delivery,

Starting point is 00:18:48 but our Walmart.com non-food e-commerce growth accelerated after the arrival of Mark and the jet team. He leaned into the Walmart brand quickly. We don't anticipate a significant accounting charge due to this decision, and the vast majority of associates have previously been assigned to the Walmart brand. In related news, if you order pizza from Pasquale's Pizza and Wings, you're actually getting a so-called premium pizza from a Chuck E. Cheese Kitchen. Branding people, branding. And in some encouraging news about openness,

Starting point is 00:19:21 the folks at I Fix It have released a huge repair database available for free for repairing medical gear. Medical devices have a wide range of how well they can be serviced and supported by hospital staff and other health care workers. In some cases, hardware is so far. proprietary, kind of like a lot of modern automobiles or tractors, that only licensed expensive repair technicians can perform operations. With other gear, nearly all the cleaning, maintenance, and even upgrades may be managed by the equipment's owners. This surely sounds familiar to all of us in the

Starting point is 00:19:49 technology world, but the routine functioning of a worldwide web of medical hardware support has been massively disrupted, as technicians face reduced or no ability to travel, and parts are in short supply, backordered, or even no longer being made. I Fix It has stepped. It has stepped. into this void by working with biomedical technicians, librarians, and archivists around the world to collect service manuals. IFixit notes that some companies, like Mindray, offer its customers free and open access to manuals already, and some equipment makers relaxed access policies as the pandemic raged. Now, IFixit has assembled repair information for thousands of medical devices. The company devoted half its staff to the project, will host it for free, and will not serve

Starting point is 00:20:30 ads against it. There's your feel-good moment for today. And that's the news. I'm Glenn Fleischman, in for Brian McCullough, who will be back tomorrow. You can find me on Twitter at Glenn F. That's G-L-E-D-N-F-L-N-F-like Frank. I have a new book just out on how to best use Zoom as a meeting participant and as a host. Visit Take ControlBooks.com slash Zoom to get an excerpt. Thanks to the editors at TechMeme who tweet out every headline we post every hour of the day at TechMeme.

Starting point is 00:21:01 It's a great way to keep current. Have a great evening.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Tues. 05/19 - If You Virtual Build It, They Will Come

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