Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, May 1, 2018 - Apple Earnings and Facebook's F8

Episode Date: May 1, 2018

Apple's earnings numbers, all of the announcements from Facebook's F8 conference, a WhatsApp co-founder leaves, publishers criticize Google over GDPR, and will Comcast only give you faster internet speeds if you subscribe to cable TV? Stories from: @lizzadwoskin Tweets: @anildash, @johnbattelle, @jason_kint Links:Mark Zuckerberg Says it Will Take 3 Years to Fix Facebook (Wired)WhatsApp founder plans to leave after broad clashes with parent Facebook (Washington Post)Comcast won’t give new speed boost to Internet users who don’t buy TV service (Ars Technica) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors 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, May 1st, 2018. Today, Apple's earnings numbers are out, all of the announcements from Facebook's F8 conference, a WhatsApp founder leaves, publishers criticize Google over GDPR,

and will Comcast only give you faster internet speeds if you subscribe to cable TV? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple's quarterly numbers came out mere minutes ago, as I did last, week I'll give you the headlines and if there's any major wrinkles to report we'll delve into it tomorrow quarterly revenues and earnings beat consensus expectations but Apple sold ever so slightly fewer iPhones than had been expected quarterly revenue came in at 61.1 billion versus 60.82 billion expected that was up 16% the fastest growth in more than two years earnings per share were $2.73 versus $2.60

$0.54.00 expected. That was up 30%. iPhone unit sales were $52.2 million versus $52.54 million expected. That's where that slight disappointment comes from. As far as those weak iPhone 10 rumors in the earnings statement, CEO Tim Cook, said that customers, quote, chose iPhone 10 more than any other iPhone each week in the March quarter. Two things investors were looking for. Apple announced a $100 billion. share repurchase authorization, and it is raising its dividend by 16%. And Apple reported record services revenue of $9.2 billion, easily beating analyst forecasts up 31% year over year. At the time of this recording, Apple's shares were up 4% in after-hours trading. Facebook's F8 Developers Conference kicked off today, and as a lot of people surmised, it wasn't exactly all developers, developers, developers, developers, to paraphrase Steve Bomber, there were plenty of real headlines for normal users as well. The biggest is the news that Facebook users can now stop their Facebook collected browsing history

from being associated with their accounts. If you weren't aware, Facebook follows you around the web, even when you're not on Facebook's pages themselves, and records all the other websites you visit so that it can show you ads on Facebook. targeted to your browsing history. That's why if you search for a car rental today, you're likely to see, say, a Hertz ad on Facebook tomorrow. Well, now you can tell Facebook to stop doing this.

With an initiative called Clear History, Facebook says you can delete your browsing data from Facebook servers or ask Facebook not to collect it to begin with. Note that Facebook will still be tracking your browsing, but if you ask them nicely, they will anonymize the data. It won't be tied to your profile or used for ad targeting. In a Facebook post announcing the initiative, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, quote, Once we roll out this update, you'll be able to see information about the apps and websites you've interacted with,

and you'll be able to clear this information from your account. You'll even be able to turn off having this information stored with your account. But he also said, quote, to be clear, when you clear your cookies in your browser, it can make parts of your experience worse. You may have to sign back into every website and you may have to reconfigure things. The same will be true here. Your Facebook won't be as good while it relearns your preferences, end quote.

One interesting little detail about this new feature real quick. In Wired, Stephen Levy has an interview with Zuckerberg up from the eve of F8, and this clear history feature to hear Zuckerberg tell it, the inspiration came to him as a direct result of his congressional testimony last month. Zuckerberg tells Levy that he, of course, expected Congress to ask him questions about Cambridge Analytica, but he didn't expect all the questions he got on how Facebook's advertising products used personal data.

Quote, one of my takeaways was that I actually felt like I didn't understand all the details on things like how we were using external data on our ad system, and I wasn't okay with that. On the plane right back, I scheduled a meeting. I was like, I'm going to sit down with this team and learn exactly all this stuff that I don't know, end quote. Okay, now for some of the fun announcements from F8, yes, Facebook is adding dating to its core app. In essence, single folk will be able to create a separate dating profile and will be able to leverage Facebook's existing social graph features to get recommended matches for potential romantic interests from friends and family.

Quote, this is going to be for building real long-term relationships, not just for hookups, Zuckerberg said, announcing the feature. shares of Match Group, the parent company of Tinder, were down as much as 17% on the stock market after the dating feature was announced. Facebook also has a new groups tab as well as a group's plugin for admins and developers to add to their websites and emails in order to entice people to join Facebook groups. Instagram got a bunch of new features, including augmented reality camera effects, as well as group calling, and a redesigned explore page to, better find interesting Instagram accounts to follow. Facebook and Instagram Stories now allow sharing from other apps, starting with partnerships with the likes of Spotify, SoundCloud, and GoPro.

Third-party apps can now share content from within those apps directly to users' Facebook and Instagram Stories. And the Oculus Go, the standalone VR headset that works completely untethered from a phone or a computer, was made available for purchase today. in about a dozen countries. The headset will cost $199. And reviews of this new unit are just now popping up in various places. So more on that, I'm sure.

And actually, there's a ton more. Instagram is expanding anti-bullying tools. Facebook says it's reopening its app reviews, following the pause it took in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. WhatsApp got group calling and stickers. Facebook Messenger got a bunch of new features for businesses, including translations. Seriously, if I went into all of the details of all the things announced this afternoon,

the podcast would be about an hour and a half long. But that's why there's techmeme.com, of course. So head over there, check the headlines, and get deep dives into any of the announcements that catch your fancy. And I'm sure we'll have more on all of this tomorrow. Lots of eyebrows were raised yesterday evening when the Washington Post reported that WhatsApp co-founder and CEO, Jan Kome, was leaving Facebook.

sources told the post that Combe had philosophical differences with Facebook management over WhatsApp's encryption policy, as well as Facebook's larger use of user data to provide targeted advertising. Combe and fellow WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton were big proponents of user privacy in WhatsApp. Early on, the app only required your phone number to use the service, and in lieu of advertising, WhatsApp initially charged users 99 cents a year. But then, in 2014, Mark Zuckerberg came calling and Facebook purchased WhatsApp for $19 billion. According to the post piece, the friction came as Facebook began to integrate WhatsApp into its suite of products. In a blog post announcing the original Facebook acquisition, the WhatsApp founders had written, WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently, and you can still count on absolutely no ads interrupting your communications. Combe himself once told Forbes, quote,

Dealing with ads is depressing. You don't make anyone's life better by making advertisements work better. But then, quoting from the post piece, 18 months later, the promise not to share data evaporated. Facebook pushed WhatsApp to change its terms of service to give the social network access to the phone numbers of WhatsApp users, along with analytics such as what devices and operating systems people were using. WhatsApp executives were comfortable sharing some data with Facebook in order to measure who was using the service, according to the sources the post spoke to.

But they opposed using WhatsApp's data to create a user profile that was unified across Facebook's multiple platforms, which also include Instagram and Facebook Messenger, and could be used for ad targeting or for Facebook's data mining, end quote. Another source of friction, according to the post, was Com and Acton's insistence upon adding encryption to WhatsApp. in 2016. Facebook apparently wanted to weaken the encryption to make it easier for businesses to use WhatsApp, and Combe was reportedly, quote, worn down by the differences in approach, end quote. It's interesting to note that Acton left Facebook in November and has tweeted in support of the hashtag delete Facebook movement, but Combe was actually on Facebook's board of directors, a position he is stepping down from as well. In a Facebook post announcing his departure, Combe wrote, quote,

It is time for me to move on. I'm taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars, and playing Ultimate Frisbee, end quote. That Porsche's line got a lot of snark on Twitter, along with people noting that WhatsApp Insiders likely have seen most of their stock vest at this point.

The Verges Dan Sefer tweeted that the story is less of a, quote, reckoning with Facebook's bad behavior and more of an acquisition whose stock options, grants, whatever, fully vested, so they are free to leave with their pockets full. Although, Bloomberg is reporting that Combe could be leaving as much as $1 billion on the table if he leaves Facebook before May 15th, something that you'd have to imagine he's aware of. It's also worth noting, though, that Combe has already sold $8 billion worth of his Facebook shares, and his personal fortune is estimated at $10.4 billion. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg commented on Combs' Facebook post writing,

Jan, I will miss working so closely with you. I'm grateful for everything you've done to help connect the world and for everything you've taught me, including about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people's hands. Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp, unquote. So that's obviously a calculated pushback on, the encryption privacy storyline being the cause of the friction.

But on Twitter, John Battelle tweeted, anyone who thinks Facebook won't say soothing things now, let this blow over, and then monetize the crap out of WhatsApp, is just not paying attention. And Anil Dash was wistful for times gone by, quote, there's probably no tech deal that's had more potential negative impact globally

than when WhatsApp sold out to Facebook. They had a sustainable independent business. business model, no ads, and a small efficient team. Now? Trade groups representing 4,000 publishers released a five-page joint letter to Google, criticizing the way Google is changing its policies to begin complying with the upcoming European GDPR law. Among the publishers attached to the letter Arconday Nast, the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Guardian, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, and Axel Springer. Google has said that going forward, publishers will be responsible for getting consent from EU visitors if Google's ads are served on their websites, while also forcing

the publishers to share personal data with Google without Google revealing how it intends to use that data. Your proposal severely falls short on many levels, the letter reads, and seems to lay out a framework more concerned with protecting your existing business model in a manner that would undermine the fundamental purposes of the GDPR and the efforts of publishers to comply with the letter and spirit of the law, end quote. At issue are some arcane but incredibly important parts of the GDPR law itself. Google has attempted to label itself as a, quote, controller, under the terms of the law versus a, quote, processor.

It's complicated, but those terms determine who is liable for obtaining consent from EU visitors to websites. Google wants the publishers to obtain consent, and the publishers are saying they don't want that burden. Google says, quote, because we make decisions on data processing to help publishers optimize ad revenue, we will operate as a controller across our publisher products in line with GDPR requirements. So, yeah, more legalese. But as I've said recently, that legalese is what's increasingly at the crux of all of these stories and controversies over our personal data. Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, tweeted, over 4,000 publishers send a letter to Google as it attempts to leverage the same playbook as Facebook in order to protect

the status quo duopoly. And as a counterpoint, writer Glenn Moody tweeted, quote, fun to watch greedy Google and greedy publishers at each other's throats. Hashtag GDPR. The cost of your prime membership might be going up, but that doesn't mean Amazon intends to stop cramming services into it to try to convince you that it's worth your while. Amazon today announced what it's calling Prime Bookbox, a subscription service for children's hardback books. Think of it as a loot crate or a birch box, but for kids' books. The pricing will be $22.99 per box, which Amazon claims works out to about 35% below list price. The books will be hand-selected by Amazon editors, delivered on a regular schedule that the user will select,

and the books will be divided up by age group from infant to 12 years of age. You have to be a member of Prime to participate, and if you're interested, you have to register today for an invite. the book boxes will begin shipping later this year. An Amazon spokesperson told TechCrunch, quote, We want to help Prime members discover great children's books that will inspire a love of reading. Ars Technica is reporting that in response to continuing cord cutting, Comcast is beginning to make higher speed internet contingent on users having a cable TV subscription as well. Ars noted that last week, Comcast announced internet speed increases,

for customers in Houston and the Oregon Southwest Washington markets. The upload and download speeds would increase automatically without users having to do anything or pay anything more for their internet access. However, there's one important catch. To get the speed boosts, customers have to subscribe to certain plans that include internet and TV service bundled together. Ars noted that Comcast, which has 26.2 million internet subscribers and 22.3 cable television subscribers

saw its cable television numbers drop by 151,000 last year. As Ars writes, quote, by making the no extra charge, speed increases contingent on TV subscription, Comcast is using its broadband dominance to try to prop up its declining TV business, end quote. Ars also noted that while Comcast

does partner with Netflix on customer billing for the streaming service, thereby taking it. cut of Netflix subscription money, it obviously can make a lot more when customers also sign up for cable TV. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And be sure to check TechMeme.com all night as people digest those Apple earnings numbers. Talk to you tomorrow.