Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/08 - CES Day 3

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

Another interesting Facebook memo from Boz, Intel previews its next generation of mobile GPUs, more troubles in Softbank startup land, Quibi had a bit of a launch event today, and I saw Charmin’s toilet paper delivery robot.  Sponsors: Tiny Capital BelovedRobot.com/ridehome  Links: Don’t Tilt Scales Against Trump, Facebook Executive Warns (NYTimes) CES 2020: Intel previews Tiger Lake mobile processors and discrete GPU (CNET) Getaround to Lay Off About One-Fourth of Staff (The Information) ClassPass, finally a unicorn, raises $285M in new funding (TechCrunch) Quibi unveils "Turnstyle," its flagship mobile video format (Axios) Quibi's secret weapon: Videos that work in portrait and landscape mode (Engadget) Mind-blowing Delta board shows 100 passengers personalized flight details at the same time (Mashable) I tried Nreal’s mixed reality glasses at CES and now I want a pair (Android Authority) 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 Wednesday, January 8th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Another interesting Facebook memo from Boz.

Intel previews its next generation of mobile GPUs, more troubles in SoftBank startup land. Quibi had a bit of a launch event today, and I saw Sharman's toilet paper delivery robot. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So there's another leaked internal Facebook memo written by Andrew Bosworth that the New York Times got its hands on, wherein Bosworth said he personally, desperately wants Trump to lose the U.S. election this year, but also argues strenuously that Facebook should not tilt the scales against Trump either. I'm not quite sure what to make of this, but quoting the Times, on December 30th, Andrew Bosworth, the head of Facebook's virtual and augmented reality division, wrote on his internal Facebook page that as a liberal, he found himself, wanting to use the social network's powerful platform against Mr. Trump. But citing the Lord of the Rings franchise and the philosopher John Rawls, Mr. Bosworth said that doing so would eventually backfire. Quote, I find myself desperately wanting to pull any lever at my disposal to avoid the same result, he wrote.

So what stays my hand? I find myself thinking of the Lord of the Rings at this moment. Specifically when Frodo offers the ring to Galadriel and she imagines using the power righteously at first, knows it will eventually corrupt her, he said, misspelling the name of the character Galadriel. Quote, as tempting as it is to use the tools available to us to change the outcome, I am confident we must never do that, or we will become that which we fear, end quote. Mr. Bosworth also waded into the debate over the health effects of social media, rejecting what he called wildly offensive comparisons of Facebook to addictive substances like nicotine. He instead compared Facebook to sugar and said users were responsible.

for moderating their own intake. Quote, if I want to eat sugar and die in early death, that is a valid position, Mr. Bosworth wrote. My grandfather took such a stance towards bacon, and I admired him for it. And social media is likely much less fatal than bacon, end quote. So again, not sure what to make of all this. It's actually a long piece, 2,500 words. Bosworth later reposted it publicly. this does give us a peek inside Facebook's internal thinking and self-justifications for what it does,

but also I would say this, not to get all Twitter-truther on you, but surely this was an intentional leak, right? Maybe by the company, which would make me wonder why now, but also has anyone else noticed that it's Boz's memos that always find a way to leak? Might someone be angling for the top job at Facebook someday? And I do want to address something from yesterday. Facebook's policy around deep fakes, which was announced, has typically drawn a lot of criticism for the company. And yet, in his newsletter, Casey Newton made an excellent point that I hadn't considered, quote, were used to social networks waiting until the damage has already been done before

announcing a cleanup effort. When it comes to the synthetic media known as deepfakes, they've been notably ahead of the curve, end quote. So, you know, credit we're due. Here at CES yesterday, Intel unveiled its Tiger Lake mobile CPUs, quoting C-NET, showing off Tiger Lake during the company's keynote at CES in Las Vegas on Monday. Intel executive vice president Gregory Bryant said the new processor will deliver double-digit performance gains, massive artificial intelligence performance improvements, better graphics performance, and four times the throughput of USB3 with the new integrated Thunderbolt 4. built on Intel's 10 nanometer plus process, Tiger Lake boasts optimizations, quote, spanning the CPU, AI accelerators, and discrete level integrated graphics based on the new

Intel Z graphics architecture, the company said. I can never remember, is that Z or Chi? I think you guys told me at one point. Anyway, quoting again, the first Tiger Lake systems are expected to ship later this year. Intel also offered a preview of the first Z-based discrete GPU, code named DG1, with Intel Vice President of Architecture for Graphics and Software Lisa Pierce, saying the new Intel Z Graphics Architecture will provide, quote, huge performance gains in Tiger Lake, end quote. SoftBank Fallout Watch continues.

Sources are telling the information that car rental startup Get Around plans to lay off around 150 employees or about a quarter of its staff in order to mitigate rising costs. The layoffs mark a significant come down for Get Around. a decade-old company that was among the first entrance in the so-called sharing economy. Based in San Francisco, Get-A-Round runs a car rental service that connects car owners and people who want to rent vehicles. Get-A-Round handles the transactions, customer service, and insurance. It competes for hourly car rentals with firms like Avis's Zipcar and General Motors' Maven, and day-or-week-long rentals with Turo, its chief rival and traditional car rental firms such

as Enterprise. Sam Zade, Get-A-Round CEO, said the company, wants to automate more of its service rather than relying on scores of staffers to assist people who are new to renting cars on the platform, end quote. I failed to mention it up front, but Get Around was one of the recipients of one of those monster piles of cash from Mossison and Company. And things are even worse at another SoftBank portfolio company, Pizza Making Robot Startup Zoom, which raised $375 million from SoftBank. Zoom plans to lay off 400 staff.

or about 80% of its workforce. Quote, according to Business Insider, several teams will be affected by layoffs with the highest concentration in engineering, operations, and corporate development. This follows a massive executive exodus triggered in June. According to his LinkedIn profile, Beverage Industry Executive David Kometzky, the newest board member for Zoom left in December.

The company's press team did not immediately respond for comment, end quote. As Alex Kentrowitz tweeted, turns out pizza has one ingredient you can't automate, love, end quote. Interesting raise Wednesday, class pass, which offers access to gyms and health clubs via a single subscription, raised a $285 million series E round led by L Ketterton and Apex Digital at a $1 billion valuation, quoting TechCrunch. In 2017, the company announced it would be introducing a credit system via virtual currency, combined with its data around the popularity of classes, this allowed Class Pass to introduce

variable pricing. Instead of users paying a monthly fee for three, five, or ten classes per month, users could use their virtual ClassPass currency to sign up for classes and pay based on the demand around those classes. With the revenue model in place and working, Class Pass has focused on growth over this past year. International Growth has been a top priority with the company now operating in 28 countries, partnering with more than 30,000 partners, including Boutique Studios, gyms, and wellness providers. The second area of growth has been on the business front. ClassPass introduced a corporate program that allows organizations to subsidize their employees using the product. CEO Fritz Landman says, this differs from other corporate programs that ask the employer to

subsidize each individual employee, whether they use the product or not. Thus far, Class Pass has more than 1,000 employers using the platform including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, Google, and Facebook, end quote. This morning I went to the Quibi Keynote. What's the next big opportunity in entertainment? Well, that's a question I've been asking myself pretty much my whole career. Jeffrey Katzenberg, who you just heard, and Meg Whitman, both came to talk about their short form video platform. Quibi will have 50 to 60 shows at launch, launching April 6th by the way, and there will be 175 shows and 8,500 Quickbytes, what they're calling episodes, within Quibi's first year.

Whitman expects profitability for the company in two to ten years and revealed that the entire first year of advertising is already sold out to the tune of $150 million. Quoting Axios, Quibi has three types of video formats. Movies told in chapters, bigger stories in video. that are 7 to 10 minutes in length, episodic, unscripted, and documentaries, similar to TV content, which could feature topics ranging from sports to comedy to travel, and daily essentials, five to six minute news and information shows. Quibi says that each day it will deliver one episode of its movies told in chapters, five episodes of its episodic and unscripted series, and docs, and 25 daily essentials. In total, Quibi says that adds up to more than three hours of

premium original content every day, end quote. So one way to think of Quibi is that they're maybe going to do a little bit of what Spotify does in terms of personalizing playlists, delivering stuff just for you every time you feel the need to pull out your phone and kill some time. Quibi will offer two subscription packages for users, $4.99 a month with ads, and $7.99 a month without ads. So it's all pay, but even if you pay less and get the ads, it's a low ad load, only two and a half minutes of ads per hour. Everyone ever since Quibi was announced has been super skeptical of this, including me. But they demoed a lot of content this morning that looked pretty cool.

And even the technology behind their video platform is interesting. For example, they have a system called Turnstile. that shifts seamlessly between portrait and landscape mode when viewing, and is integrated into how the videos are shot, quoting, and gadget. Basically, turnstile means you won't ever see black bars around Quibi shows, no matter how you hold your phone. That's a huge step-up from every other mobile video solution today. If you're watching a widescreen movie, you're forced to go to landscape.

And if you're a Snapchat addict, you're mostly stuck with portrait. While Turnstile might sound superfluous at first, it was a revelation the first time I saw it. As I watched Tom Conrad, Quibi's chief product officer and founder of Pandora, effortlessly jump between portrait and landscape modes, I thought to myself, why hasn't anyone done this before? Quibi creators can also use the different orientations for interactivity. While watching a brief clip from the trailer Wireless,

Conrad viewed it traditionally in landscape mode, but when he flipped over to portrait, Quibi switched over to the main character's iPhone screen, where I watched him flip through texts, Instagram, and Snapchat messages. It's a bit like the multi-angle feature from early DVDs crossed with the screen-based narrative of a movie, like searching or unfriended. Switching between the different modes can help you engage more with the narrative, end quote. Yeah, they showed off several different shows that make use of this technology, and it is

basically seamless. There's no, like, even flicker. You feel like you're looking at the exact same picture, just wider, or more. or taller depending on what you do. And actually, as just described, it made me realize that Quibi could kind of solve a problem that a lot of people have been worrying about in terms of narrative recently. Most of modern life takes place inside our phones now, right? And that's not really cinematic. Like, how would you film a couple breaking up over instant message? Well, as described, several of the shows they demoed seem to take this on as an advantage. You would hold your phone in

landscape mode to see the people typing back and forth and crying going through the breakup, switch to portrait mode, and you could actually see the text messages, the characters were sending back and forth in real time. In a horror movie, you would see a girl on the couch watching TV when she hears a killer knocking on her door. If you switch to portrait mode, you could see what she is viewing on her phone, i.e. the view of of the killer from her ring doorbell camera. So I actually think it'll be kind of interesting to see what creators could do with this sort of narrative back and forth. And also, Katzenberg and Whitman outlined all of the shows

that a billion dollars worth of capital can buy you. Everything from news shows to reality shows, to movies, to sports, to just anything you can think of. Frankly, it's quite a bit. That's more than three hours of premium original content every day, 52 weeks a year. Nearly 35% more than any television network delivers during their prime time schedule. So I have to say, for the first time since I heard about Quibi, color me not as skeptical.

CES is a hell of a thing, man. You cannot imagine how big it is. You cannot imagine how many people are here, how many different products and companies are here. I spent about six hours yesterday, wandering around various venues, and I probably only saw maybe 20% of the stuff that is here. If you follow my Twitter account, then you saw that I saw the Sony car. I also got to play around with a whole bunch of foldable phones, including the Mate X. I can note for the record that Huawei makes some incredibly sexy phones. It's actually a shame we don't get much access to them here in the States. I saw the Bezellus TV. It was indeed

bezeless and impressive. AK TVs are actually just impressive full stop, I have to say. Saw that new sort of chair slash cradle thing from Segway, which I'm not sure we talked about, but yes, basically it's a chair from the movie Wally brought to life. I saw tons of AR and VR stuff. Actually, I stood in line to demo this thing from a company called Enreal. they have these glasses called light, which they're calling mixed reality glasses. I actually think they're basically the first sort of AR device that makes me think, okay, AR is finally going to be coming to our lives in a meaningful way. Picture a somewhat thick pair of glasses, but they are still glasses. They're light enough to sit on your head and feel like you're just wearing regular glasses.

This is not some sort of headset like we're used to. When you put them on, a sort of menu is overlaid on your vision with a whole bunch of apps. There's an app on a smartphone that sort of acts as a joystick or controller to help you navigate around the apps. The demo that they gave me, there were three separate screens I could look at. A video was playing on one, an Instagram feed on another, a web page on another, and I would turn my head left to right to pay attention to the whatever, you know, the Instagram thing was to my left, and then over here was the web page. I could move the content forwards or backwards in my field of vision, so imagine, if you will, sitting in a room and watching

TV that no one else could see. Apparently, the glasses weigh just 88 grams. They're tethered to a smartphone, Android only for now. The picture quality was very good. Some folks were saying it's better than what Magic Leap does, although I've never used Magic Leap so I can't compare. Apparently, though, the light glasses will give you a 52-degree field of view at 1080p. But the really interesting things here are just the companies that are here that you wouldn't even think would be here. For example, Delta Airlines has a major booth. So what did they show off? It was something called a parallel reality board, which was kind of mind-blowing. It's a digital display that shows different messages to different people. Let me let Mashable,

walk you through it, actually. The initial plan is to use the displays from misapplied sciences in airports to give customized boarding, flight, or baggage information for up to 100 people simultaneously. At CES on Monday, I was given a simplified boarding pass on a piece of paper for a flight to Mexico City. After I scanned my pass, I looked up at a giant digital board that welcomed me personally with, Welcome to Mexico City, Sasha. Pick up your luggage at baggage Carousel 9. It even displayed this same information in Spanish. No matter where I stood, I saw my personal message. My fellow passenger, Mark, saw his name and information on the same screen after scanning his own boarding pass.

I could not see his information unless I stood right behind him and he could not see mine. For now, this works only after you've scanned your boarding pass, but it could work with a facial recognition system in the future to bring any associated flight information. But that's getting ahead of ourselves. It doesn't currently use facial recognition to display your info. According to Fast Company, once you scan your pass, the text camera recognizes you as a blob that can be tracked as you pass by the original board and others in the airport, end quote. Apparently, all of this works using something called multi-view pixels. Each pixel in the display sends out light in a different direction. So you and I and 98 other people could be standing right next to each other, and we'd all be seeing completely different things on the screen.

It's really kind of mind-blowing when you see it in person. And finally, I also got a demo from Charmin. Yes, Charmin. They showed off a robot, a little two-wheeled segue, little guy, that holds a single roll of toilet paper on its head, and we'll roll out to deliver you a fresh roll when you need it most. Toilip paper robot. We are. This is the Sherman Robot, and we've all been there.

stranded on the porcelain island, no bath tissue in sight, nobody hears your cry for help. Until now, there wasn't a solution. So I'm going to demonstrate. I basically, I'm there on the commode. Yes. I need help. I fire up my Sharman robot with my smartphone, Bluetooth activated. It comes and saves the day, bringing me a fresh roll of Sharman.

Sharman also had a digital sensor that detects, well, it detects the air quality inside a bathroom to let you know if maybe you want to wait a little while before following your coworker in. Yes, it senses things like the levels of methane and other gases and then alerts you when they've dissipated. So smell sense, we've all done it, walked into that bathroom, hit in the face with the guy that was in there before us. Smell sense is a unit that will pick up the gases and you know what, it will tell you through a reader whether it's safe to go in or you might want to wait a couple of minutes to do so. Basically picks up the carbon dioxide, the hydrogen sulfide, the things that from a scent standpoint will knock you dead if there's enough of it.

As those dissipate and it's safe to go in, the reader will let you know whether this thing is hanging on your door, hooked up to your smartphone, whether it's safe to enter the space. So yeah, this was a gimmick for sure, but this is what I'm talking about. You wouldn't imagine all the various types of products across all the various types of industries that had interesting, cool, new gadgets and stuff to show off.

Something, something, every company is a tech company now. Sorry, Vegas, I have to put the kibosh on the listener meetup tonight. I think I've come down with the cold that my son was incubating before I left to come here, so I'm not feeling my best, and I, of course, do not want to get any of you sick. So next year, if I come again, I promise to give you a rain check. And also, NYC, I know I've been promising to do a listener meetup back home, too. I promise that is coming in the next few months. I'll tell you more about it when I know more about it. Talk to you all tomorrow.