Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, May 8, 2018 - Google I/O Highlights

Episode Date: May 8, 2018

The highlights from Google I/O, Microsoft gives developers 95%, possible encrypted Twitter DMs, the NYSE wants to trade bitcoin, and Uber unveils its flying car. Stories from: @nathanielpopper, @tonyromm Tweets: @puiwingtam, @bzamayo Links:Link to the video of the full I/O keynoteBest video I could find (in a rush) of the Duplex DemoTwitter has an unlaunched ‘Secret’ encrypted messages feature (TechCrunch)Bitcoin Sees Wall Street Warm to Trading Virtual Currency (NYTimes)Uber shows its flying car prototype, which looks like a giant drone (CNBC) 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 8th, 2018. Today, the highlights from Google I.O. Microsoft gives developers 95%.

It's possible that encrypted Twitter DMs are coming our way. The New York Stock Exchange wants to trade Bitcoin, and Uber unveils its flying car. You missed a lot today in the world of tech. Here's what it is. So the big tech companies like to cluster their earnings. reports into the same week, and they also like to cluster their developer conferences into the same month or so, give or take. Today was Google's turn, kicking off its I.O. Developers Conference. Here are the big headlines. Let's start with Android. What are some of the new changes coming to the new flavor of Android, Android P? Well, the one that's getting a lot of attention is a new dashboard feature that will tell you how much you're using your phone for how long and in what apps.

idea is to actually limit your time on your phone, what Google is calling digital well-being. You can even limit the amount of time you allow yourself to use specific apps. Once your allotted time is up, you can lock yourself out of that app. There are also new changes to notifications that are designed to help you manage their annoyances as well. Android P also has some new navigational gestures similar to the iPhone, but frankly, going all the way back to WebOS, if you remember that dearly departed operating system. Essentially, the basic way you've been navigating Android all this time, those three icons of on-screen buttons at the

bottom, they're going away, replaced by one long tap area where the gesture action will happen. What kind of gestures am I talking about? Things like tap to go to the home screen, long press for Google Assistant, half swipe up to go to the overview screen, full swipe up to go to the app store, etc. Reviewers are already calling this the most fundamental change to Android navigation in years. The new beta version of Android P is available today to developers and on select handsets. There's also a new adaptive battery feature, utilizing Google's own deep mind technology to try to get more out of your phone's battery. It will switch off apps when you don't need them and dim your screen when your device predicts you don't need the brightness.

Google says that by anticipating user usage, this new feature will result in 30% fewer CPU wakeups. Google Assistant has gotten a slew of new abilities, including the ability to order food for pickup and delivery, and features more streamlined integration with select partners like Starbucks and Panera. Google also adds six new voices to Google Assistant that it says are closer to how humans actually speak. one of those more human voices will be musician John Legend. So John can now tell you it's time to leave for your next appointment. But what was the thing that has really, really gotten people jazzed? That would be Google's experimental duplex technology,

which, as demoed, straight up allows you to have what really feels like a two-way conversation with Google Assistant. So if you want to have a whole conversation with John Legend and have Virtual John Booking, you a reservation on open table, and then have him offer you a range of options, and then have him make the call for you. That seems to be what Duplex promises. I have that last bit underlined in my script here. Make the call for you. Here's how Chris Messina describes watching the demo, quote, Google Duplex is the most incredible, terrifying thing out of IOS so far. Example use case. Google Assistant calls a hair salon to book an appointment. The human booking the appointment has no idea she was talking to an AI.

Humans are quickly becoming expensive API endpoints, end quote. Seriously, seek out and watch the video of this duplex demo. It even adds the ums and ahs so that it sounds more human. I have a quick sort of clugey video of this part of the demo linked in the show notes. Google Assistant lives on your phone, of course, but it also lives on that ecosystem of Google Home devices. Google Home now has a continued conversation feature that will keep the Google Home's speaker's microphone enabled for up to eight seconds after you ask it a question or give it a command so that you don't have to keep saying, hey Google or OK Google next time you have another question.

If you want to shut the mic off immediately, you can just say thank you and it shuts off. We've known Google Home is getting a video-based sibling for a while, and Google announced that the forthcoming Echo Show competitor will officially launch in July. More news, specifically Google News News, Google News is getting a full redesign that's rolling out today with the addition of customized news feeds and a new visual format that Google is calling newscasts.

Gmail has gotten a cool new auto-complete feature called Smart Compose, which suggests phrases as you type and lets you auto-complete them by hitting. the tab button. That's rolling out in a month. Google Maps is getting augmented reality directions to help you find your way in real time. Simply hold up your phone. See the street you're on inside the phone and have directions overlaid on top of that video image with helpful arrows, guides, street names, etc. No need to wear goggles or a special visor. Finally, what about AI? Can't have a developer conference these days without AI news. Google announced a third generation

of its TPU machine learning hardware that it says it's eight times more powerful than last year with up to 100 petaflops in performance. Seemingly, every company is making its own custom silicon for AI these days. But the reaction on Twitter that I saw from people who know what

this all means indicates to me that this was impressive. And that's a whole mess of news. Frankly, there's no way to do it justice in just a summary like this. But that's what techmeme.com is for. I urge you to go there right now all night to find all the headlines organized so that you can take deep dives into any announcement

that catches your fancy. Interesting little nugget that fell through the cracks in the deluge of announcements from Microsoft Build yesterday. In a blog post, the company said it will now give app developers an 85 to 95% cut of all revenue generated by non-game apps selling in its Windows store. This news was fleshed out in a keynote earlier today. Currently, Microsoft takes 30% of revenue from all apps and in-app purchases made through its store, in line with other app stores like apples and Googles, though more in line with the Google Chrome Web Store, which charges only 5%. In the original blog post, Microsoft said, quote,

starting later this year, consumer applications, not including games, sold in Microsoft Store, will deliver to developers 95% of the revenue earned from the purchase of your application or any in-app purchases in your application when a consumer uses a deep link to get to and purchase your application, end quote. The caveats here are that if Microsoft plays a role in the sale, say by featuring the app or including it in a promoted bundle, the share to developers drops to 85%. And of course, game developers are still forced to pony up the usual 30%.

The new rates will also not apply to the Microsoft Store for Business or Microsoft Store for Education. As Apple blogger Benjamin Mayo said on Twitter, quote, Incredibly good rates. I guess they don't have a goal to double their services revenue by 2020 then. As happened yesterday, TechCrunch has been tipped off to hidden code inside an app that might be pointing to new features. Yesterday it was Instagram. Today, it's Twitter. Apparently, code within Twitter for Android's APK shows that Twitter might be testing an encrypted DMs feature that it is labeling secret conversations.

As TechCrunch's Josh Konsteen writes, quote, Twitter has long positioned itself as a facilitator of political discourse and even uprisings. But anyone seriously worried about the consequences of political dissonance, whistleblowing, or leaking, should be using an app like signal that offers strong end-to-end encryption. launching encrypted DMs could win back some of those change makers and protect those still on Twitter, end quote. This surprise code was first spotted by Jane Manchin Wong, but the impetus might have come from a Twitter conversation that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey had with the whistleblower Edward Snowden back in December of 2016. Back then, Snowden tweeted, quote, one more ask, Jack. how about secret burn after reading DMs? Even if end-to-end encryption won't work by default in all clients, give us a start, to which Dorsey replied,

reasonable and something we'll think about. So if this scoop proves itself out, it seems that they have thought about it, or at least are continuing to do so. A Twitter spokesperson declined to comment to Constine on the record. Facebook is putting its policies where its mouth has been, at least when it comes to attempting to prevent meddling in elections. The company announced today it will stop accepting foreign-funded ads

relating to Ireland's upcoming referendum vote on abortion, which is scheduled to take place later this month. The referendum will decide whether or not to repeal Ireland's constitutional ban on abortion. Facebook says it is unilaterally stopping foreign-funded ads because the election integrity tools, which it has announced previously and intends to roll out soon, would not be ready in time for the May 25th vote. On its Facebook Dublin blog, the company wrote,

quote, what we are now doing for the referendum on the Eighth Amendment will allow us to operate as though these tools, which are not yet fully available, were in place today with respect to foreign referendum-related advertising. We feel the spirit of this approach is also consistent with the Irish electoral law that prohibits campaigns from accepting foreign donations. This change will apply to ads we determine to be coming from foreign entities which are attempting to influence the outcome of the vote. Over in Crypto Land, yet more signs that Wall Street is beginning to get on board the cryptocurrency bandwagon, or at least the Bitcoin bandwagon specifically. Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange,

is reportedly working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin. This is according to a report from the New York Stock Exchange, is reportedly working on an online trading platform that would allow large investors to buy and hold Bitcoin. This is according to a report from the New York. York Times' Nathaniel Popper. This, of course, comes after the reports we discussed last week about Goldman Sachs being well down the road toward opening its own Bitcoin trading group. According to the Times report, quote, details of the platform that Intercontinental Exchange is working on have not been finalized and the project could still fall apart, given the hesitancy among big Wall Street institutions to be closely associated with the Wild West of virtual currencies.

A spokesman said that the company had no comment, end quote. Bitcoin futures have been traded for a while now on several different platforms, but this continues the move toward trading and holding actual Bitcoins themselves. The discussions inside Intercontinental Exchange reportedly involve the trading of swap contracts, which would result in the ownership of actual Bitcoins, though not by simply ponying up fiat for Bitcoin, as happens on exchanges like Coinbase. But swap contracts do come under the purview of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, thus wholly inside the standard regulatory regime,

something that most Bitcoin exchanges thus far do not. As the New York Times technology editor Pui Wing-Tam tweeted, First Goldman, now the parent company of the NYSE, Wall Street might be warming up to Bitcoin. The White House is going to host a summit on Thursday, the topic of which will be artificial intelligence. intelligence. Among the attendees will be academics, researchers, developers, as well as executives from 34 major U.S. companies, including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Nvidia, Oracle, and Intel. This is a bit of a change in posture for the Trump administration. Last year, Treasury Secretary Stephen Munchin said, AI was, quote, not even on my radar screen and was, quote, not at all worried about robots replacing workers. But there has been a drumbeat all year from industry observers stoking fears that the U.S., widely considered the world

leader in AI research, might be falling behind other countries in the field, especially countries like China. And if there's one thing the Trump administration is focused on, it's maintaining U.S. competitiveness, especially in the area of technology. Dean Garfield, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents the likes of Apple, Facebook, and Google, told the Washington Post, quote, I think it's been a slow ramp up, but they're now focusing on the right things, he said, referring to the about face on artificial intelligence concerns.

Quote, there are a lot of people who say that AI is going to be about job destruction. It's not. It's going to be about job movement. So I think the White House is actually in a unique place to mobilize a movement that's necessary to prepare the American workforce for what will be here in the next 20 years. and that needs to be comprehensive and strategic. Uber yesterday announced that it has hired the former National Transportation Safety Board Chairman Christopher Hart

to advise it on its safety culture surrounding its self-driving cars initiative. This, of course, comes after the fatal accident in Arizona in March, where an Uber self-driving vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian. And I have a bit of an update on that story as well, because the information was reporting yesterday that Uber has determined that the cause of the accident was a problem with the self-driving software. It seems that the car's sensors did detect the pedestrian. It was just that the software decided that the pedestrian was not an obstacle that required immediate reaction. The hiring of former NTSB Chairman Hart is part of a concerted effort by Uber

to get its self-driving efforts up to snuff. As we spoke about yesterday, several outside observers and analysts feel that Uber's technology is at this point nowhere near as good as other self-driving companies. Uber said in a statement, quote, we have initiated a top-to-b bottom safety review of our self-driving vehicles program, and we have brought on former NTSB chair Christopher Hart to advise us on our overall safety culture. Our review is looking at everything from the safety of our systems to our training processes for vehicle operators, and we hope to have more to say soon, end quote. Uber news, the company has unveiled its flying car concept vehicle at its annual Uber Elevate Summit. Quoting from CNBC, the prototypes look more like drones than helicopters with four

rotors on wings. Company officials say that will make them safer than choppers, which operate on one rotor. They'll fly 1,000 to 2,000 feet above the ground and will be quieter than a helicopter, producing half the noise of a truck driving past house." Uber is partnering with NASA to develop what it is calling a Uber Air Service. This would, of course, compete with Kitty Hawk, a flying taxi company we've spoken about previously, which is backed by Alphabet's Larry Page, and which is working with the New Zealand government to test its prototypes.

Uber hopes to begin testing its Uber Air Service in the Dallas-Fork Worth area, as well as the Los Angeles area, by 2020, with its Uber Air Service. a planned rollout sometime in 2013. Man, Google is a company with its fingers and a lot of pies. I know that you've been listening to this show in the edited order, but that first segment on Google I.O. was the one that I recorded last, just a couple of minutes ago. And that was quite a bit of information to sift through in only a couple of hours.

Hope it made sense. I'll talk to you again tomorrow.