Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/17 - Epic Games Takes Its War With Apple To Europe

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, February 17th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Epic Games takes its war with Apple to Europe, but Apple wins a skirmish in North Dakota of all places. New York sues Amazon over worker issues. Google Maps will now let you pay for parking, some tangible numbers about the recent NFT explosion, and why the new headphone emoji in iOS looks suspiciously like AirPods Max. Here's what you missed today. in the world of tech. Expanding the theater of war here, Epic Games has filed a formal antitrust complaint

Starting point is 00:01:13 against Apple to the European Commission, claiming that Apple imposes commercially unviable burdens on rivals, quoting from the Financial Times. Epic alleged Apple has, quote, not just harmed but completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes by staging a string of, quote, carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions, end quote, which it argued are in breach of EU law. In the Brussels filing, Epic also accused Apple of giving itself preferential treatment by launching its own gaming distribution service, Apple Arcade, while making it difficult for competitors to bundle multiple games into single apps within the App Store. What's at stake here is the very future of mobile platforms,

Starting point is 00:01:56 said Tim Sweeney, Epic Games founder and chief executive. Consumers have the right to install apps from sources of their choosing, and developers have the right to compete in a fair marketplace, end quote. He said his company will fight what he regards as Apple's abuse of its dominant platform, quote, it's bad for consumers who are paying inflated prices due to the complete lack of competition among stores and in-app payment processing, he said. And it's bad for developers whose very livelihoods often hinge on Apple's complete discretion as to who to allow on the iOS platform and on which terms, end quote. But meanwhile, Apple won a skirmish in this larger war in North Dakota, of all places. The North Dakota State Senate has blocked a bill that would have

Starting point is 00:02:45 required app stores to allow developers to use their own payment systems. Epic, of course, was lobbying in favor of this bill, quoting CNBC. The North Dakota bill targeted Apple's fees by requiring companies that make more than $10 million per year in the state through app stores, essentially just Apple and Google, would be required to offer alternative payment processors for purchases through the App Store, allowing developers to avoid Apple or Google's cut. It would only apply to companies based in North Dakota. One reason why this North Dakota bill was closely watched is that it could inspire other states, such as Arizona, which are currently debating legislation targeting Apple's commercial power. North Dakota is an odd venue for this legislation. It's a small state, not a major center of app development,

Starting point is 00:03:32 and neither Google nor Apple is headquartered there. Quote, North Dakota has a chance to be a leader. We have a chance to send it across the hall for further discussion, State Senator Kyle Davidson, who introduced the bill and supported it said, it's an economic development bill because if this bill gets across the hallway, there isn't enough hangar space to fly the private jets in from California, end quote. Well, I guess that's off the table. The vote in the Senate was 36 to 11 against the bill, so not actually really a close-run thing in the end. And meanwhile, closer to home, at least for me, and also on an unrelated topic, the New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Amazon, alleging it inadequately protected workers

Starting point is 00:04:19 from COVID-19 in Staten Island and Queens, and retaliated against employees who raised concerns. So this is quite literally talking about the very people who are responsible for getting Amazon boxes to my doorstep every single day, quoting the New York Times. The case focuses on two Amazon facilities, a large warehouse on Staten Island, and a delivery Depot in Queens. Ms. James argues that Amazon failed to properly clean its buildings, conducted inadequate contact tracing for known COVID-19 cases, and, quote, took swift retaliatory action to silence complaints from workers, quote, Amazon's extreme profits and exponential growth rate came at the expense of the lives, health and safety of its frontline workers, Ms. James argued in the complaint filed in New York

Starting point is 00:05:04 Supreme Court. Kelly Nantel, a spokeswoman for Amazon, said the company cared, quote, deeply about the health and safety of its workers. New York in its suit said Amazon received written notification of at least 250 employees at the Staten Island warehouse who had COVID-19. In more than 90 of those cases, the infected employee had been at work in the previous week, yet Amazon did not close portions of the building to provide proper ventilation as the state required, the filing said. Ms. James said that until at least late June, Amazon did not interview infected workers to determine their close contacts and instead relied on reviewing surveillance footage, which could take three days, and did not cover the entire warehouse.

Starting point is 00:05:44 The lack of interviews, quote, created a very time-consuming process which did not identify close contacts in a timely fashion, the complaint says. She also argued that Amazon retaliated against Christian Smalls, a worker the company fired in the spring. Mr. Smalls had been raising safety concerns with managers and led a public protest in the parking lot of the Staten Island facility, end quote. Speaking of Amazon, they are rolling out in a unusual new take on crowdfunding of all things. Yes, the richest company in the world isn't going to produce this cuckoo clock unless enough of you pony up ahead of time to hit its pre-order goals, which is interesting, quoting the verge. Amazon is launching a new consumer outreach program.

Starting point is 00:06:35 It's calling Build It. The idea is a safer spin on a familiar crowdfunding idea. If enough people pre-order something, Amazon will produce it. And if not, it won't. The company is starting with three Alexa-powered gadgets, a kuku clock, a thermal sticky note printer, and a smart scale that can provide details on the food you're weighing via a separate echo device. All three concepts are going up for pre-order today as part of Amazon's program for creating experimental hardware. It has already made some devices it doesn't consider mainstream yet, like the Echo Frames under the Day One Edition's branding, but Build It is a subset designed for gadgets that won't even be released without proof of demand, where Kickstarter and

Starting point is 00:07:18 Indiegogo offer the good vibes of supporting a startup and also the risks that go along with that, Amazon's take is simply to display a progress bar of pre-orders. Customers can cancel their order at any time or return the product should it end up being produced. Amazon's program is presumably designed to pick up the marketing benefits and hype that a product can get from a crowdfunding campaign. It may also be designed to cede the marketplace with more Alexa-powered gadget ideas. In any case, Amazon isn't looking to crowdfund these gadgets merely gauge customer interest. When asked if Amazon planned to offer Build It campaigns to third-party companies in the future, a spokesperson wouldn't comment.

Starting point is 00:07:59 They also wouldn't comment on what exactly the pre-order goals would be. Rather than displaying a total dollar amount, as in crowdfunding, or even a total number of desired pre-orders, build-it campaigns will simply display a progress bar with a percentage next to it, end quote. Which, again, why don't you just do the market research yourself and just release the product? Why get us involved in this? Anyway, if you support the goal, you do get pre-order prices, whatever that means. Each project runs for 30 days and you will not get charged until and unless the goal is met. But this is just a weird kind of look for Amazon all the way around, if you ask me, like, what is even the point of this?

Starting point is 00:08:40 This, on the other hand, I can definitely see the point of, and am excited for it. Google Maps will now let you pay for public transportation and parking inside the Google Maps app itself, quoting the verge. Google Maps is integrating two mobile parking payment services into its app, passport and park mobile. Both offer the ability to find, pay for, and replenish parking meters or parking lot fees through a smartphone app. Now those features will also be available in Google Maps, according to. to the company, quote, simply tap on the pay for parking button that appears as you near your destination. Then enter your meter number, the amount of time you want to park for, and tap pay. Need to add more time to your meter. Easily extend your parking session with just a few taps, end quote. The ability to pay for parking in Google Maps will be available in 400 plus cities in the U.S., including Boston, Cincinnati, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., and more, Google said. Android phone users will get the feature first with iPhone owners soon. to follow. Paying for public transportation will work much in the same way. If you are searching for

Starting point is 00:09:50 transit directions in Google Maps, you'll see an option to purchase tickets appear alongside your results. Similar to the Pay for Parking feature, customers will need to have a Google Pay account linked to a valid credit or debit card to make the transaction. Then customers can use their phone, either in a tap-to-pay situation or by showing a digital ticket to a conductor, to ride public transportation. And in places like San Francisco Bay Area, customers will be able to buy a digital clipper card directly from Google Maps. The feature will be available to use in over 80 transit systems around the world, Google says, end quote. You know I love market share numbers when I can find them, but it's been a while since I've seen numbers surrounding the only market that

Starting point is 00:10:36 used to matter in tech. And by that, I mean the non-mobile OS market. What's the state of the market in non-mobile computing these days. Well, IDC has an update, and it says that Windows is still holding on to 80.5% of the non-mobile OS market, though that was down 4.9% year-over-year. MacOS was only up 8 tenths of a percent year-over-year to 7.5% of the market, which means what is the big mover in the remaining slice of the pie? It's Chrome OS, which was up to 10.8%. of the market, surpassing MacOS for the first time on a full year basis. Quoting Geekwire. This is a big win for Google and a warning for both Apple and Microsoft.

Starting point is 00:11:25 It also signals to app and game developers that ChromeOS can no longer be ignored. Frankly, any business that provides a product or service over the Internet should be setting aside resources to ensure the ChromeOS experience is comparable to Windows and MacOS. Three quarters in a row of ChromeOS above MacOS makes a trend. It's safe to say that Chromebooks, from PC makers like ACER, ASIS, Dell, HP, and Lenovo now outsell Apple's range of desktop Macs and laptop MacBooks.

Starting point is 00:11:53 That said, 2020 was not a typical year, end quote. And since I'm continuing to research this whole non-fundable token market, I also know Chris Messina has been poking around as well, so maybe we'll talk about this more soon in a clubhouse room or a bonus episode or something. Anyway, because I'm interested in NFTs, I couldn't resist checking out the first tangible data that I've seen from this totally nascent market. According to a new report, NFT transactions tripled last year to more than $250 million in total,

Starting point is 00:12:33 quoting decrypt. The report is based on NFT on-chain transactions on the Ethereum blockchain using the ERC-721 token standard, which is common among NFTs. According to the data, the total value of all NFT transactions, which includes sales and and other transactions such as breeding crypto-kitties, minting tokens, and renting virtual space increased from over $62 million in 2019 to in excess of $250 million in 2020. In 2020, NFT art sales alone grew by 2,800 per the report, and big brands like Turner Sports and watchmaker Brightling have jumped aboard, making the asset class firmly mainstream.

Starting point is 00:13:15 Quote, traditional brands like Nike, Louis Vuitton, and Formula One. are already spearheading the first generation of commercial uses for NFTs. Nadia Ivanova, chief operating officer at Latier, told DeCript, we expect to see more brands entering and investing more resources in this space as they find new ways to engage virtually and profitably with their customers via NFTs, she added. According to the report, the total number of active wallets transacting with NFTs grew 97% between 2019 and 2020.

Starting point is 00:13:45 On top of this, the accelerating growth of NFTs, through 2020 suggests a strong upward trend in 2021, according to the report. Focusing purely on NFT sales, virtual worlds that house numerous virtual assets, as well as land, formed the biggest sector of the market with 25% of total sales, but virtual art was the strongest performing segment in terms of growth and made up 24% of the market. Sales rose from 456,000 in 2019 to 12.9 million in 2020. Gaming that involved NFTs made up 23% of the market in 2020. 2020 and provided the largest number of sales. Collectibles linked to sports, such as Formula One or NBA, were another growing sector and made up 13% of total sales, end quote. And finally today,

Starting point is 00:14:35 they're not quite digital art, right? But then again, who am I to say that? Emojipedia has a first look at the 217 new emojis that are coming soon in iOS 14.5, including a syringe with and without blood, couples with a mix of skin tones, female avatars with beards, and AirPods Max headphones. That's right. The typical headphone emoji on iOS has now been changed to be an absolute dead ringer for those new AirPods Max. Nice bit of branding there. Quote, coming to iOS this spring in the Northern Hemisphere, updates are in the latest iOS 14.5 beta 2 available for developers now. This is a different schedule to usual as Apple only just released a whole batch of new emojis in iOS 14.2 in November.

Starting point is 00:15:31 The change isn't part of some new initiative at Apple, but stems from Unicode's new release schedule. For the past few years, emojis were approved in January to March and came to iOS around the October to November period. This allowed Apple to release, for example, iOS 11 in September 2017, followed by new emojis in iOS 11.1 in October 2017. The same trend continued with new emojis appearing in iOS 12.1, iOS 13.2, and iOS 14.2, all release in October following the point zero release. With emojis now approved in September, Apple's choices were to wait an entire 13 months to add the latest emojis, probably too long, one month, probably too short, not enough time to prepare and test, or what they actually decided on, pick a new spring

Starting point is 00:16:20 release date. As with all beta software designs are subject to change prior to the final release, end quote. So once again, tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. PST. Chris Messina and I are going to do another wrap-up show experiment on Clubhouse. Again, we're going to talk about what we talked about on the show today and also yesterday, I suppose. And we're also, going to hopefully chat with Nome Bardan, who just about a month ago stepped down after being the CEO of Waze for 12 years. He's the guy that guided Ways into and through the Google acquisition. He's written an essay that's gotten a lot of chatter today. I've linked to that at the bottom of the show notes. But also, I'll share it in the long reads on Friday as well.

Starting point is 00:17:14 Anyway, if you're around tonight on Clubhouse Search Rooms for a tech meme room, and join us. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/17 - Epic Games Takes Its War With Apple To Europe

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.