Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/11 – Maybe Software Needs To Eat The Airline Industry

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

Yet another software snafu with the airlines this morning. Apple’s about to do its own screens, its own modems, what is left? Twitter makes a change that they’ve tried to make several times before. Why all the interesting raises are in AI right now. And what to expect from the Surface Duo 3. Sponsors: Zocdoc.com/techmeme Links: U.S. air travel rumbles back to life after FAA computer outage (Reuters) Apple to Begin Making In-House Screens in 2024 in Shift Away From Samsung (Bloomberg) Twitter defaults to a For You page now, just like TikTok (The Verge) DeepL, the AI-based language translator, raises over $100M at a $1B+ valuation (TechCrunch) Microsoft scraps plans for dual-screen Surface Duo 3, pivots to new foldable screen design (Windows Central) Samsung confirms February 1st Unpacked, its first in-person event in three years (The Verge) Tickets to the comedy show at SF Sketchfest 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 Tech meme right home for Wednesday, January 11th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Yet another software snafu with the airlines this morning.

Apple's about to do its own screens, its own modems. What else is left? Twitter makes a change that they've tried to make several times before, why all the interesting raises are in AI right now, and what to expect from the Surface Duo 3. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Anyone starting to think there might be a market in helping the airline industry with its software problems?

The FAA says normal air traffic is resuming gradually across the United States after its notice to air missions system failed. According to Flight Aware, over 32,000 flights were delayed this morning. Quoting Reuters, U.S. flights were slowly beginning to resume departures and a ground stop was lifted after the Federal Aviation Administration scrambled to fix a system outage overnight that forced a halt to all U.S. departing flights. The FAA said shortly before 8.30 a.m. departures were resuming at Newark and Atlanta airports, quote, due to air traffic congestion in those areas. We expect departures to resume at other airports at 9 a.m. Eastern time, end quote. The FAA is expected to implement a ground delay program in order to address the backlog of flights halted for hours. Flights already in the air were allowed to continue to their destinations. U.S. President Joe Biden ordered the Transportation Department to investigate the outage and said the cause of the failure was unknown at this time. asked if a cyber attack was behind the outage. Biden told reporters at the White House, we don't know. The FAA said it was working to restore a system that alerts pilots to hazards and changes to airport facilities and procedures that had stopped processing updated information.

A total of 3,704 U.S. flights were delayed as of 8.39 a.m. Eastern Time. Flight tracking website Flight Aware showed. Another 656 were canceled as of 839 a.m. A notice to air missions is a notice containing information essential to personnel concerned with flight operations, but not known far enough in advance to be publicized by other means. Information can go up to 200 pages for long-haul international flights and may include systems such as runway closures, bird hazard warnings, and construction obstacles, end quote. Mark German won't let up this week. His sources are now telling him that Apple plans to design and develop its own displays for mobile devices. starting with micro-LED screens for the Apple Watch Ultra, coming by the end of 2024, quoting Bloomberg.

The screens upgrade the current OLED, organic light-emitting diode standard to a technology called micro-LED, and Apple plans to eventually bring the displays to other devices, including the iPhone. The changes are part of a sweeping effort to replace Apple supplies with homegrown parts, and undertaking that will give the company more control over the design and capabilities of its products. The tech giant has dropped Intel chips in its Mac computers in favor of in-house designs and plans to do the same with the key wireless components in its iPhones. Samsung is the world's most advanced manufacturer of displays and has been producing its own version of micro-LED for TVs. But by bringing the screens in-house, Apple could in the long

run better customize its devices and maintain a stronger hold on its supply chain. Apple's screen switch has been underway for years. Bloomberg first reported in 2018 on the companies plan to design its own displays starting with the Apple Watch. The move will deal a blow to Samsung display and LG display, the two main suppliers of the watch's screens. Compared with current Apple Watches, the next generation displays are designed to offer brighter, more vibrant colors and the ability to be better seen at an angle. The displays make content appear like it's painted on top of the glass, according to people who have seen them, who ask not to be identified because the project is still under wraps. The micro-L-D displays will be Apple's first screens

designed and developed entirely in-house, end quote. This news follows Mark's scoop from yesterday that Apple is also working on a combined Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chip to replace Broadcom components by the year 2025. Plans to swap the Qualcomm modem in 2023 have hit snags, but again, how far away are we from Apple basically doing the entire widget itself, maybe especially when it comes to the iPhone? I regret to inform that after a much appreciated break for a few weeks, I have some Twitter news. And if you're an actual fan of using Twitter, you're probably not going to like this. Twitter has renamed latest tweets to following and home to For You, thereby making the algorithmic feed the default with no option to change that. So if you don't want the algorithm, you might have no choice now.

Coding the verge. In a change rolling out to iOS users first, the company has taken away. the star button at the top right that lets you switch between two feeds. In its place are two tabs, one labeled For You and the other following, and when you open the app, you'll see the For You tab first. For You, which shares a name with TikTok's algorithmically driven feed, is similar to the old home option, which shows you tweets from the people you follow out of order, interspersed with tweets it thinks you may like. This isn't the first time Twitter has copied a TikTok feature, by the way. Following is what used to be called latest tweets.

While the change makes it easier to switch between them, taking a single swipe instead of a few taps, there is something that's been lost. If you set your app to show you the latest tweets, that would typically stick. But now, however, even when you close the app and reopen it, you're shown the for-you feed. That is a bit of a bummer. There are a lot of people who far prefer the reverse chronological feed and previous attempts to get rid of it or make it harder to access have typically sparked ire. While the change does technically make it easier to get from the algorithmic timeline, it definitely makes the latter option harder to ignore, end quote. Quoting Greg Jericho on Twitter, I already see the tweets I want to see from the accounts I follow. I do not want any other option.

Quoting Barry Purchesky on Twitter, God damn it, Twitter, the timeline I have carefully curated by choosing who and who not to follow is already very literally for me. And quoting Eric Ravenscraft on Twitter, if you ever need to explain what institutional knowledge is, a good example would be that literally any of the people Elon Musk fired could have told him that they tried this already several times, and no one liked it, end quote. Sources are telling Windows Central that Microsoft has ditched a dual screen design for the upcoming Surface Duo 3, opting for an internal foldable screen, an external cover display, and a 180-degree hinge, quote, Microsoft's next foldable surface phone won't be a dual-screen device,

according to my sources who are familiar with the company's plans. After a long year of hardware prototyping and experimentation, the company has decided to pivot over to a more traditional foldable design with a 180-degree hinge, internal foldable screen, and external cover display, similar to devices like the VivoX fold and Honor Magic VS. I'm told that this new foldable device came about after the company had already finalized a dual-screen design for the Surface Duo 3.

This original dual-screen design was supposed to ship at the end of 2023 as the next Surface Duo, featuring narrower and taller edge-to-edge displays, wireless charging, and other improvements. That dual-screen design has now been scrapped, and the Surface Team is now focusing on delivering this new true foldable design. Microsoft began exploring single-screen foldable designs as a potential successor to the Surface Duo 2 in late 2021

after it launched and was met with mixed reviews. It's still too early to know the exact specs that this new foldable device is going to feature hardware, or whether or not Microsoft plans to simulate a dual-screen experience via a software feature or a mode. My sources say there's no concrete shipping window for the device in place yet either, meaning it's unlikely to be ready in time for this fall. Microsoft recently filed several design patents for single-screen foldables with a 360-degree hinge, leading some reports to speculate that this might be what's up next for the Surface Duo to pivot to.

My sources say this is inaccurate and that the foldable device will instead feature a 180-degree hinge, just like most other foldable phones. Of course, with the change in form factor, there may also come a change in name. It's still too early to tell, but given this device isn't a traditional duo in form factor, perhaps the company will take this opportunity to rebrand the line, similar to what it did with the Surface Book and Surface Laptop Studio. Regardless, sources tell me this device is still considered a third-generation duo internally. My sources also tell me there's a larger software effort going on internally that's designed to better differentiate its future Android hardware offerings from the rest of the competition.

This effort is dubbed perfect together and aims to deliver an ecosystem experience between Microsoft's Android hardware and Windows PCs, similar to that between an iPhone and Mac, end quote. Longtime listeners will know that interesting raises have been segments we've done from the very beginning on this show, and for many years the template was sort of easy. Guess who just became a unicorn? Well, the only interesting raises we've done recently have been in the AI space, and that's largely because the fundraising news has been quite muted of late for reasons you all know. Quite simply, AI is the hottest space in tech investing right now, so this is where the unicorns exist at the moment.

Cologne-based Deep L, which offers instant translation as a service to businesses and individuals, has raised between $100 and $125 million, led by IVP at a $1 billion-euro valuation. Quoting TechCrunch, Deepel is not disclosing the full amount it's raised. It doesn't want to focus on this aspect. CEO and founder Jeroslaw Kudelowski said in an interview, but as we were working on the story, we heard of a range of figures. At one end, an investor that was pitched on the funding told TechCrunch that Deepel was aiming to raise $125 million. At the other end, a report with a rumor about the funding from back in November said the amount was around $100 million. The funding closed earlier this month. The startup is also not confirming or disclosing other financials,

but the investor source said that the $1 billion euro valuation was based on a 20x multiple of Deepel's annual run rate, which was at $50 million at the end of last year. In the current fundraising climate, this is a pretty bullish multiple, but it speaks to the company's growth, which the investor noted is currently at 100%, and the fact that Deepel's breaking even and close to being profitable. What is more definitive is the list of investors. DeepL said that new backer IVP was leading the round with Bessemer Venture Partners, Atomico, and WIL also participating. Previous backers in the company also include benchmark and BTOV. DeepL primarily provides translation as a service to businesses rather than individuals, and its forte up to now,

has been working primarily with smaller and medium organizations. Some of those have the potential for a lot of Deep L powers translation on Mastodon, for example. This is a route that the startup is planning to continue, but the plan is to use the funding to expand that scope, both to cover larger enterprises and to build out new services, such as a grammarly style, monolingual, same-language, writing improver that is in closed beta now and will be launching soon. It will also continue to invest in research and development. As we have previously noted, the company's model was originally trained on a database of over a billion translations and queries, plus a method of double-checking translations by searching for similar snippets on the web. This is then housed on a supercomputer that both provides translations but continues to learn and improve

as well. Right now, Kudelowski says that around 60 to 70 percent of the company's staff are engineers and they are focused on building more tech on a range of timescales from short-term with commercial focus to medium and longer-term moonshots and breakthroughs in language modeling for its own sake. Despite the pressure on deep learning these days, investors want returns and commercial endpoints, the latter of these, the moonshots, remain a priority for the company, something DeepL has been able to retain because it's been growing its core translation services, sold on a pro tier and also offered in a more limited format as a free tier. DeepL is indeed in a fortunate position. A lot of startups have been struggling to raise rounds, and those that have say that

there's been a lot of pressure on valuations as a result of that. But Kudulowski said that the rising tide for AI-based language services has helped Deepel on this front, end quote. Yes, though another way to think about the motivation for this raise is that Deepel is probably eyeing competition entering the space from either OpenAI or at least someone using OpenAI to do what they do probably very soon. And finally today, the days of in-person product announces seem to be back. Samsung has set its next Galaxy Unpacked event for February 1st at 10 a.m. Pacific time in San Francisco, its first in-person event in three years, where it is likely to unveil the Galaxy S-23. Quoting the Verge, the company is also bringing back its pre-order reservation incentives

for those who are eager to claim a yet-to-be-named device. By putting in a reservation, you'll get $50 of Samsung Store credit if you follow through and pre-order one device. or $100 when you pre-order two devices. That's all assuming that people are actually able to place pre-orders, which proved tricky last year. There's no obligation, thankfully, so you don't have to purchase one site unseen. The event itself kicks off at 10 a.m. Pacific time on Wednesday the first, and will be live streamed as well. If rumors are anything to go by, the S-23 series could include some interesting camera upgrades like the debut of a 200-machixel sensor in the Ultra. The S-22 Ultra was already one of our favorite mobile camera systems of 2022, so we'll be eager to see what

February 1st brings, end quote. Assuming I actually remember to put the links in the show notes, the very last links in the show notes are to that San Francisco Sketch Fest live comedy show that I'm going to be a part of on Saturday, January 28th at 9.30 p.m. in San Francisco, hit the ticket button to purchase tickets and hopefully come see me not embarrass myself. Don't know if I've said. said this, but Janine Garofalo has been added to the lineup of comedians on stage, grilling me, so that's fun. Now, the show is at the Swedish American Hall at 2174 Market Street. So what is that? The Castro, Corona Heights. Does anyone know this neighborhood? What if we did

a listener meetup at 7 that night? Anyone know a cool bar we could pick to have the Mutant Podcast Army meetup for an hour or so, ideally close to the venue, so we could all head over there. afterwards. Google Maps tells me the detour and high tops. Our two bars literally right there. Any and all suggestions are welcome. Ping me on Twitter or email me at Brian at Techmeme.com. I don't know how many people would show up, but back years ago when I did a book signing in Boston, about 10 of you showed up for a meetup afterwards, and since you got to figure we have a ton of listeners in San Francisco, maybe more than that would show up, 25 or 30? I don't know. Anyway, suggestions welcome, so Chris and I can finalize this. Talk to you tomorrow.