Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, Apr. 24, 2018 - Amazon Wants to Deliver to... Your Car?

Episode Date: April 24, 2018

Amazon now delivers to your car, Spotify updates its app for free users, a wrap up of Alphabet’s earnings, jailbreak-able Nintendo Switches, and Mt. Gox’s Mark Karpelès breaks his silence. Stories from: @ShiraOvide, @KyleOrl, @jenwieczner Links:Google's Writing Checks and Trusts Investors Won’t Bounce (Bloomberg)The “unpatchable” exploit that makes every current Nintendo Switch hackable (Ars Technica)Mt. Gox and the Surprising Redemption of Bitcoin’s Biggest Villain (Fortune) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Ride Home for Tuesday, April 24th, 2018. Today, Amazon now delivers to your car. Spotify updates its app for free users, a wrap-up of Alphabet's Earnings,

Joe breakable, Nintendo Switches, and Mount Gox's Mark Carpella's Breaks his Silence. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. First, Jeff Bezos wanted the keys to your front door, so that he could, better deliver Amazon packages to you. Now he wants the keys to your trunk as well. Amazon today announced a partnership with GM and Volvo that will allow its couriers to drop off packages and leave them in customers' vehicles.

The service, which is rolling out in 37 cities today, will only be available to Amazon Prime subscribers and owners of GM and Volvo vehicles, model years 2015 or newer, that have active OnStar and Volvo On Call accounts. The service will make use of the connected technologies built into a lot of modern vehicles that will allow couriers to locate your vehicle and unlock it, the better to leave the packages inside.

Amazon says the couriers will never have access to customers' car login information and everything is routed through the Amazon Key app. You will have to connect your car to the Amazon Key app, give a brief description of your vehicle, and we'll also need to park it within a certain distance of a given address, like your home or your work or whatever. And then you can also change your mind and block access to the car in your key app if you should need to do so. At that point, the Amazon Courier will default to the usual delivery address. Amazon has reportedly signed a two-year contract with GM and Volvo to test this new service, and according to the Verge, this is very much being thought of, of as a trial period.

Neither of the automakers nor Amazon are looking to earn any additional revenue with this service. The idea is that this is just about convenience, about turning your car into an Amazon locker on wheels. More delivery news, delivery startup DoorDash, announced a pilot program for grocery delivery, partnering with Walmart in the Atlanta area. But Walmart is just the first partner in an ambitious program that DoorDash hopes. it can build out to become the behind-the-scenes delivery network for a whole range of other

companies. DoorDash C-O-O Christopher Payne told TechCrunch, quote, you can use the term white label, but our drivers still will often wear the DoorDash shirt and have the DoorDash bag. But if you go to Walmart.com and you order from Walmart in Atlanta, you'll have no idea. It's from DoorDash. We're very supportive of that scenario. That's the DoorDash Drive scenario. We're excited to build a business with them and provide this capability, end quote. DoorDash originally started out as a restaurant delivery service. With this new last-mile delivery push, DoorDash is looking to expand into what it sees as a larger market,

delivering anything and everything beyond last night's order of PadCU, and looking to stay on par with competitors like Postmates and Uber Eats. Today here in New York City, Spotify announced a brand, new free version of its Spotify mobile app, which will let users listen on demand to any song on one of 15 personalized discovery playlists. This means that non-subscribing free listeners can now listen to whatever song they want, as many times as they want, as long as that song is on one of Spotify's discovery playlists. Spotify also announced that this updated version of the app will also sport a new caching system that will,

will allow listeners to consume more music while using less data. The low data mode will apparently cut down on bandwidth by 75%. But it's the unlimited listening to playlists, playlist which represent 750 total tracks, or a little more than 40 hours of music, that is the big deal here. We've been talking about the strategies Spotify might pursue in the near future to become sort of a platform for new and upcoming artists, eventually possibly signing those artists to Spotify directly,

by channeling more of its 90 million free listeners towards specific playlists that will feature tracks Spotify will select itself, it's taking a step towards creating this sort of hit-making platform that could be very powerful in surfacing new artists. As Cheddar's Alex Heath, who covered the announcement for Cheddar, reported from the event, quote, Spotify highlighting an independent artist thanking their algorithms for giving him exposure.

Very easy to see that Spotify's long-term play is replacing at least the promotional element of the labels. Spotify says that the updated app will land on both iOS and Android in the coming weeks for all non-paying users. Brief follow-up on Alphabet's earnings report yesterday. Alphabet stock opened down about 3% this morning. In general, the news the market was mulling over was that Alphabet is still growing. rapidly, especially for a company its size. Alphabet's 23 and a half percent jump in net revenue

showed growth at the fastest clip since 2014. However, Alphabet's 22 and a half percent operating profit margins were the narrowest that the company had seen since 2012. Why? Well, it's all down to that capital expenditure number we pulled out of the earnings report yesterday. In short, alphabet is telling investors, we're expecting to invest in ourselves in the coming quarters, and we're expecting to do so heavily. As Bloomberg's Shira Oviday wrote, quote, Essentially, Alphabet is taking a page from the Amazon.com playbook. Tell investors the company is going to spend lots of money on promising current and future business opportunities

and demand that investors give it the leeway to keep doing it, end quote. Alphabet's Q1, cap-x numbers, nearly tripled to three. $7.3 billion. Now, $2.4 billion of that represents Alphabet's recent purchase of the entire Chelsea Market building in Manhattan. But even if you back that out, capital costs still roughly doubled. And on the earnings call, Alphabet essentially said to expect more of the same going forward, said Alphabet's chief financial officer Ruth Paratt, quote, the opportunity set ahead of us is quite extraordinary, and we remain focused on investment to support long-term revenue and profit growth. We have both the business confidence to invest appropriately in the next phase of innovation, as well as clarity about some very compelling opportunities, end quote.

I went to return to OVide's piece for more context, quote, Before Perot was hired at Google in 2015, the company's spending had gotten a little out of hand, and her hiring, was seen as a sign that Google was eager to become more disciplined. Stock investors rewarded Google with a significant jump in its share price, end quote. So Perot was seen by Wall Street as someone who was brought in to Alphabet to bring some spending restraint to the company, and Alphabet now seems to be signaling that that frugality might be coming to an end. Many outlets speculated that the new investments Alphabet will be making will be coming

in Alphabet's cloud computing and consumer devices. businesses. Over at Strateree, Ben Thompson said that the reported numbers and the comments on yesterday's conference call suggest that the main driver of the new spending seems to be Google's cloud platform and that Google's own data center costs are rising as well. Quote, make no mistake, this investment is a worthwhile one, much as TAC preserves access to Google's search for mobile users. Investments in machine learning maintain Google's search dominance, along with all of the ancillary services that keep users on Google's properties. It's worth noting, though, that Google finds itself having to spend an ever greater proportion of revenue to maintain that revenue.

Facebook has published the internal guidelines that it says it uses to enforce the site's community standards. Running to 25 pages, the company outlined its policy on things like bullying, threatening posts, self-harm posts, nudity and all sorts of other things. The guidelines will apply to every country Facebook operates in and will encompass Facebook's other services like Instagram and will update regularly as new issues emerge. As part of a new initiative to be open about its community standards, Facebook also announced a process for appealing if you feel that the company

takes down your content when it shouldn't have. Going forward, users can request that Facebook review takedowns If they themselves have posted the content personally, it will be an automated part of the takedown process where Facebook will notify you of the takedown and allow you to request review. Facebook will review the material and let you know within 24 hours if it thinks it made a mistake. Facebook currently employs 7,500 content reviewers up 40% from a year ago. Speaking of those content reviewers, Facebook also announced that it has removed more content related to ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the first quarter of, 2018 than it ever has before. The company said that it took down

1.9 million pieces of content from those groups, about twice as many as in the previous quarter. It also said that 99% of that content was flagged by its own internal systems and only about 1% needed to be reported by users. Facebook says that the median time

before newly uploaded terrorist content gets removed is less than a minute. Different company, similar story, YouTube has released its first Community Guidelines Enforcement Report covering the last quarter of 2017. YouTube says it removed 8.2 million videos, most of which were spam or contained adult content. Of that number, 6.7 million were automatically flagged by its anti-abuse algorithms first. YouTube also said that 75.9% of videos automatically flagged as being violent or extremist content, were removed before they had received any views whatsoever.

Bad news or potentially good news gamers, depending on your point of view. Last evening, Ars Technica was reporting on a seemingly unpatchable vulnerability in Nvidia-Tegra chips that would make all currently available Nintendo Switch consoles hackable. The exploit dubbed Fusee Gellé, or Frozen Rocket, which was published by the hacking team re-switched, tricks Nintendo switches into USB recovery mode by physically shorting out a pin on the JoyCon connector. The exploit could potentially allow users to run pirated games. The TeGRAX-1 boot-rom on the switch is hard-coded in the factory, so there's nothing InVIDIA or Nintendo can do for the approximately 15 million switches that are currently out there in the wild.

So with this hack, we could potentially see total jailbreaks that would allow things like S-NES emulators or even Linux to run on switches, really whatever you would want to load onto one. This does not put you at risk to data hacking. Somebody needs physical access to your switch to break it open. But if you were someone with a DIY inclination, this vulnerability would allow you to, say, backup your saved games or hack into the SwitchOS to do any number of things. Nintendo currently doesn't allow you to do. But there could be a larger story here going forward on Twitter. Charlie Strauss said, quote,

this also potentially affects a wide range of Android phones and a metric supertanker load of Internet of Things smart appliances. Recode is reporting that venture capital firm Andresen Horowitz may soon launch a separate fund that will focus on cryptocurrency assets, meaning that the fund might buy crypto itself, not just invest in companies working in the crypto space. Andresen Horowitz was an early investor in a bunch of blockchain companies like the crypto exchange coinbase, ripple, crypto-kitties, and in crypto-specific funds like polychain capital. But its larger fund has not previously traded the actual assets like Bitcoin.

Recode's speculation comes because of two job postings on A16Z's website, where the firm is looking to hire a legal counsel and a finance and operations manager for a quote, separately managed fund focusing on crypto assets. Andresen Horowitz's existing funds are for early and late stage, mostly tech startups, and also a biotech-focused fund. Speaking of the crypto space, Mark Carpelez was the CEO of Mount Gox, which, if you know your Bitcoin history, was once the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world before the exchange was hacked. 850,000 Bitcoins were lost, around 7% of.

of all Bitcoins then in existence, and the company went into bankruptcy in 2014. Carpelles is still on trial in Japan on charges of embezzlement, manipulation of electronic data and breach of trust, and he has already been jailed on those charges for nearly a year. But Fortune is reporting that Carpellas has a new job as the chief technology officer for London Trust Media, a Denver-based company that runs what it says is the world's largest paid virtual private network or VPN service. The news of Carpella's new job comes in conjunction with a major long-form piece from Fortune, which is titled Mount Gox and the surprising redemption of Bitcoin's biggest villain. The piece outlines for the first time the entire Mount Gox debacle from Carpella's point of view.

Quoting from the piece, Carpellas has, quote, lately developed a sense of gallows humor uncharacteristic of his Mount Gox days. Even if he wanted to buy Bitcoin today, he doubts he could find an exchange that would take his money. he laughs, and notes that it's been a few months since he's received any death threats, a new record. He turns serious, though, when he recounts the sleepless nights in February 2014 when he says he first discovered that all of Mount Gox's Bitcoins were missing. I think this really is the worst experience for anyone to have in life, he says. Still, he's not sure he could have done the job better. If I knew at the time when I know today, I would have done things differently, of course, he says, with a practiced tone. but based on the information I had at the time and the situation at the time,

I still think that I've done the best I could do with what I had. A link to the pieces in the show notes, of course. It's a really, really fascinating read. That's all for today. I wanted to do one more pitch for ratings and reviews because we're sitting at 77 reviews in Apple Podcasts. Don't you dare call it iTunes? Wouldn't it be nice to hit a nice round number like 100?

I know it would do my latent OCD tendencies a world of good. Remember rating and reviewing us on any platform helps more people find us. Actually writing a review is super helpful. If anyone felt like taking the time right now, thanks in advance. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And follow TechMeme at TechMeme. Thanks for listening.