Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 01/16 - Razr's Coming Back To Usher in the Foldable Phone Era

Episode Date: January 16, 2019

More high profile execs quit Snap, Apple’s in talks to get more Apple Watches in the hands of seniors, the state of the App Economy, and the Razr is coming back to herald in the era of the bendable phone. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome (DataDog's Blog Post on Container Trends) Tiny.website Links: WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork (WSJ) Apple is in talks with private Medicare plans about bringing its watch to at-risk seniors (CNBC) App economy expected to be $120 billion in 2019 as small screen leads digital transformation efforts (ZDNet) FACEBOOK'S '10 YEAR CHALLENGE' IS JUST A HARMLESS MEME—RIGHT? (Wired) Madagascar has become a business outsourcing hotspot thanks to its super-fast internet (QZ Africa) Return of the Razr—With a Foldable Screen and $1,500 Price (WSJ) 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 ride home for Wednesday, January 16th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, more high-profile execs quit snap.

Apples in talks to get more Apple watches in the hands of seniors. The overall state of the app economy and the Razor is coming back to usher in the era of the bendable phone. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. A couple of odd executive stories that had Twitter all aflutter this morning. First, another high-profile executive is leaving SNAP. CFO Tim Stone, who only joined SNAP from Amazon eight months ago, has resigned, but will remain at work until February 5th to help with the transition to a new CFO. Snap's stock fell 10% in early trading this morning, likely because, as I said, this is just the latest in the seemingly unending revolving door of executive exits. at Snap. And a lot of people were raising eyebrows this morning at the Wall Street Journal's story

that outlined how, I know it's not WeWork anymore, it's We Company, but whatever, how WeWork Chief Executive Adam Newman has apparently personally reaped millions of dollars by buying buildings, which WeWork then turns around and leases from him. A WeWork spokesperson told the journal that all of what are known as related party deals where the company does business with someone who works at the company are reviewed and approved by an independent committee. But sources at WeWorks investors have apparently told the journal that some investors in WeWork, quote, said the arrangement concerned them as a potential conflict of interest in which the CEO could benefit on rents or other terms with the company, end quote.

In a recent company perspectives, WeWork disclosed it had leases with multiple properties owned in part by Mr. Newman. Quoting from the journal, corporate governance experts say Mr. Newman's ownership of buildings he leases to WeWork is unusual for a large company. Corporations typically bar executives from similar arrangements given that companies risk paying too much in rent or leasing buildings. they ordinarily wouldn't, they said, end quote. At the end of the piece, the journal also notes this, quote, Mr. Newman owes his personal wealth largely to sales of WeWork stock. It's unclear how much WeWork stock he has sold, but he has told some friends it is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, end quote.

So as Miles Udland and a bunch of other folk on Twitter this morning noted, The implication here is, quote, the founder of WeWork has sold hundreds of millions of dollars of WeWork stock to buy buildings. He leases back to WeWork, end quote. Chances are good that you haven't heard of either of these companies, but there's an excellent chance you've used one of them recently. Payment giant FISA is buying Payments Giant First Data in a $22 billion all-stock deal. After the deal closes, FISA shareholders will own 57% of the combined company. Why did I say you've probably used one of these companies recently? Because they're huge legacy players in the payments space.

First data alone, for example, is used by 6 million physical businesses, 4,000 financial institutions and processes, 3,000 transactions a second, $2.4 trillion worth of transactions a year. Again, maybe you're thinking boring story, Brian, what does this have to do with tech? Ah, not just tech. This has to do with FinTech, as Tech Crunches Ingrid London tweeted, you have to wonder what kind of an impact square, stripe, PayPal, transfer wise, aunt, and other upstarts in this area have collectively had on the legacy players. Also, what this means for competition with them, end quote. Over at CNBC, Christina Farr broke the news this morning that Apple is reportedly in talks with private Medicare plans about bringing the Apple Watch to at-risk senior citizens. You might remember that Apple has previously signed limited deals with insurance companies like Etna and United Healthcare to subsidize the cost of Apple Watches.

Why? Because over time and in aggregate, insurance companies hope that the Apple Watch's health care monitoring features will cut down on doxie. and hospital visits. But the companies that Apple is talking to now are slightly different. They provide what are called Medicare Advantage plans. Health experts say that seniors are an ideal market for the Apple Watch, which has introduced features that can be used by anyone, but are most beneficial to seniors, including fall detection and cardiac arrhythmia monitoring. It also makes sense as a business model for insurers as seniors are a

particularly lucrative market. It's the segment of health insurance with the highest dollar revenue and margin per member explains Augustin Ruta, a health insurance consultant with A2 strategy group. Ruda also noted that Medicare members enrolled in these private plans tend to have lower churn rates, which gives insurers more of an incentive to invest in members' long-term health outcomes, end quote. Apparently, 19 million U.S. seniors are currently enrolled, in Medicare Advantage plans, and that number is growing, as one health care executive is quoted as saying in the piece, avoiding one emergency room visit would more than pay for the cost of an entire Apple Watch for the insurance companies. App Annie has released its annual state of mobile report, so let's just run down a bunch of cool stats.

App Store consumer spending was around $100 billion in 2018, up $75,000. percent from 2016. Global app downloads were around $194 billion in 2018, up 35 percent. Total spending in app stores is expected to be $120 billion this year. Social and communication apps account for 50 percent of total time spent inside apps, and time spent inside apps globally increased 45 percent to 720 billion total hours. most lucrative non-gaming apps were all the big subscription apps. Netflix at number one, followed by Tinder and Tencent. Spending on subscription apps was $19 billion last year, but games continued to be the dominant story in app stores. Games accounted for 74% of total app store

spending in 2018. And interestingly, China is far ahead in spending on mobile gaming, 208.1 billion in mobile game spending up 105% since 2016. The U.S. is a distant second, with only $13.5 billion in game spending, only slightly ahead of Japan at $13.2 billion. And WhatsApp is now officially Facebook's most popular app. According to App Annie in September, WhatsApp surpassed Facebook's main app in terms of monthly active users worldwide on Android. and iPhone platforms.

Another report from Mimeland, but with a bit of an extra kick. You know that whole hashtag 10-year challenge thingy, where everyone was posting photos of themselves today alongside photos of themselves from 10 years ago. Well, Cate O'Neill reacted to the meme with a bit of snark by tweeting, quote, me 10 years ago. Probably would have played along with the picture profile aging meme

going around on Facebook and Instagram. me now ponderes how all this data could be mined to train facial recognition algorithms on age progression and age recognition. End quote. Now, she wasn't being serious. No one actually is accusing this of having been a manufactured meme, but it did strike a lot of people as at least plausible. After all, those recapture screens that ask you to pick out all the pictures with cabs in them, we know that they're helping to train AI. for self-driving cars. Well, in an opinion piece in Wired,

O'Neill went ahead and gamed out what would happen if actually we were all tricked into doing things that were used to train AI in other fields. Of course, Facebook and other platforms already have all the data they would need to do this. Photos are tagged with dates uploaded, dates taken, location taken, etc. So, yeah,

It would be somewhat helpful to get a sample set of millions of people labeling the data set themselves, but it's not necessary to crowdsource that stuff, especially when we've already done it, and we're doing it billions of times a day. But in the wake of the scandals of the last year, one does have to probably think twice about any participation in online social activity like this going forward. In what way or to what degree might you be the victim of a social engineering scheme trying to nudge you to do something in a of something else that maybe you're not aware of. As O'Neill writes, quote, Is it bad that someone could use your Facebook photos to train a facial recognition algorithm? Not necessarily.

In a way, it's inevitable. Still, the broader takeaway here is that we need to approach our interactions with technology mindful of the data we generate and how it can be used at scale. Regardless of the origin or intent behind this meme, we must all become savvier about the data we create and share, the access we grant it and the implications for its use. If the context was a game that explicitly stated that it was collecting pairs of then and now photos for age progression research, you could choose to participate with an awareness of who was supposed to have access to the photos and for what purpose.

The broader message removed from the specifics of any one meme or even anyone's social platform is that humans are the richest data sources for most of the technology emerging in the world. We should know this and proceed with due diligence and sophistication, end quote. For years, India, the Philippines, and even Ireland have all been popular outsourcing hotspots for various tax, time zone, and available workforce reasons. It helped that all three also had a certain attraction for U.S. businesses because of ready access to workers who spoke English. Well, what about the French-speaking world? It turns out that over the past decade, a similar progression of outsourcing economies has marched across the Francophone world as well, beginning in countries in North Africa,

like Morocco and Tunisia, but then spreading to Senegal and Mauritius as well. Now, Quartz is reporting on an explosion of what are known as business processing and outsourcing companies, or BPO's, in Madagascar. There are now apparently 233 BPO companies in Madagascar up from just a handful a decade ago, employing between 10,000 and 15,000 people. Francophone BPO leader Morocco, in comparison, has 70,000 BPO employees. But Madagascar is growing. Why Madagascar?

Well, for reasons we've seen before. Time zones, of course, matter. Madagascar is only one hour behind Paris in the summer, two hours. behind in the winter. Also, Madagascar apparently boasts the fastest internet speeds in Africa since making the first investments in broadband connections back in 2009. But there are classic global labor market reasons as well, of course. Workers in Madagascar are 50% cheaper than in Morocco. If you're one of those Malagasy workers, the attraction to BPO work is obvious. Salaries starting at $130 a month are quite good in a country where 75% of the population

lives on less than $1.90 a day. Quote, the sector could have the same effect on Madagascar as it did on Morocco, where it helped create a middle class, says Ludovic de Alsanon, chief operating officer at Alsorcia, a Moroccan BPO company that acquired two companies in Madagascar in 2016, which employ 550 people in that country. Quoting from Quartz, Yusef Charibe, President,

of outsource, explains that the BPO sector in Morocco not only raised the bar for salaries, which has a multiplier effect on consumption and access to credit, but also for social benefits, pensions, health insurance, the employment of women who make up 50% of BPO employees, and education with BPO companies providing extensive on-the-job training. Many of these best practices are now standard in the sector in Madagascar, end quote. But there's one more reason, Some French companies like Deliveroo and Voyage Privet are now specifically requesting Malagasy workers, especially for their call centers and customer service operations. Apparently, Malagasy French is just more melifluous to certain French ears. Quoting again that CEO, D'Alsonan, the tone is softer and slower than in the Maghreb.

Some people have an accent. but it's mild and hard to place, end quote. And finally today, it's looking like the razor phone is making a comeback. Yep, check the door because 2005 is knocking and it wants to come in. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Lenovo is partnering with Verizon to reintroduce the Motorola razor phone in order to jump on the foldable phone bandwagon. This new razor is supposedly going to be high end. $1,500 price tag high end, and it will sport that foldable screen. That is, of course, all the

hotness. You may not remember this, but Lenovo bought the Motorola Mobility handset business from Google back in 2014. The journal says that the new devices could be available in Verizon stores in the U.S. as soon as February. If you were alive back then, then you no doubt remember the Razor phone that Motorola sold 130 million units of globally. And quoting the Wall Street Journal, Motorola has tried to revive the franchise before, including in 2011 when it launched a handset called the Droid Razor with Verizon. But Motorola's share of the U.S. market, it once dominated, continued to slump. It had 5.9% of U.S. mobile phone shipments as of the end of last year's third quarter,

according to IDC, down from 27.3% in 2004, end quote. A lot of people went with similar jokes on this, so I'll just go with Mike Murphy's. Quote, can't wait to put on some gorillas and fallout boy and return to my college days for $1,500, end quote. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. I wrote a book.

It's called How the Internet Happened from Netscape to the iPhone. You can buy it wherever books are sold. This podcast is produced in conjunction with the fine editors at Techmeme.com. Follow them on Twitter at TechMeme for the latest headlines 24-7. And our podcast subreddit is our slash ride home. Talk to you tomorrow.