Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/27 - TikTok Bigger Than Instagram?

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 ride home for Wednesday, February 27th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, fast flash storage for phones. TikTok passes a billion downloads.

Starting point is 00:00:46 FedEx rolls out its own delivery bot, why you might be overpaying for cloud computing, and why China wants to map the faces of pigs. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Samsung has begun mass production of 512-gabyte embedded universal flash storage 3.0 chips for smartphones. The headline here is that these new chips can achieve read speeds of 2,100 megabytes per second and write speeds of 410 megabytes per second. Quoting in Gadget, according to the company, the new storage solutions read speeds are

Starting point is 00:01:22 20 times faster than a typical micro-SD card and are even four times faster than a S-A-T-A-Solid drive. Theoretically, a user will be able to transfer a full H-A-T-A-S-D-E-E-E-S-D-E-E-E-E-RD-E. movie to a PC from a phone equipped with the new UFS chips in as fast as three seconds. Samsung also expects those speeds to be able to help provide a seamless user experience in, quote, future smartphones with ultra-large high-resolution screens, end quote. The new 512 gigabyte E-UFS chip is launching this month, along with a 128-gigabyte version. Samsung plans to start manufacturing a 1-terabyte and a 256-gigabyte.

Starting point is 00:02:05 model and the second half of the year as well, end quote. Still keeping an eye on how TikTok is somewhat quietly, though maybe not that quietly anymore, becoming the new big thing in social platforms. According to Censor Tower, TikTok has surpassed 1 billion downloads on Android and iOS, and that's even when you exclude Android installs in China. TikTok actually saw 663 million downloads in 2018 surpassing Instagrams, 400,000. 144 million downloads over the course of last year. And one other noteworthy angle here, quoting Business Insider.

Starting point is 00:02:46 Popular with children and preteens, sensor towers, data shows that TikTok seems to be taking off in the Indian market. In January 2019, 43% of the apps new users were from India, up from 9.5% in January 2018, end quote. Google and DeepMind are using AI to predict the power output of wind farms, 36 hours, ahead of that actual power generation. Doing so can boost the economic value of wind energy by around 20%. Quoting Google, using a neural network trained on widely available weather forecasts and

Starting point is 00:03:30 historical turbine data, we configured the deep mine system to predict wind power output 36 hours ahead of actual generation. Based on these predictions, our model recommends how to make optimal hourly delivery commitments to the power grid a full day in advance. This is important because energy sources that can be scheduled, i.e. can deliver a set amount of electricity at a set time, are often more valuable to the grid. We can't eliminate the variability of the wind, but our early results suggest that we can use machine learning to make wind power sufficiently more predictable and valuable. This approach also helps bring greater data rigor to wind farm operations as machine learning

Starting point is 00:04:08 can help wind farm operators make smarter, faster, and more data-driven assessments of how their power output can meet electricity demand, end quote. FedEx has begun trialing same-day bot, an autonomous robot that can travel at 10 miles per hour on city sidewalks to deliver packages. The tests are set to begin in Memphis, and there are plans to expand elsewhere shortly after that. Quoting the verge, TEDx says it will initially use the bot to courier packages between the company's offices, in its headquarters in Memphis, pending approval from local government. But if these trials are successful, it wants to expand the service to other companies and retailers, eventually making robots a standard part of its same-day delivery service. The company says it's currently in talks with firms including AutoZone, Lowe's, Pizza Hut, Target,

Starting point is 00:05:00 Walgreens, and Walmart to assess their needs for this sort of robot delivery. On average, says FedEx, more than 60% of customers for those retailers live within three miles of a store, the perfect range for a little wheeled robot, end quote. So the same day bot looks a bit different than those Death Star ankle bots that we've spoken about before. This one looks like a little rugged four-wheeler. There's four wheels at the bottom. They're big, thick sort of all-terrain-like wheels. There's a hinge above that and then a sort of container box atop that.

Starting point is 00:05:36 And then at the very top, the usual LIDAR and radar rig. I point out the wheel design as interesting because apparently Same Day Bot was developed with the help of Dean Kamen, creator of the Segway, and the stair climbing wheelchair iBot. So the Same Day Bot actually has two extra wheels protruding from that hinge part, ostensibly to help the bot summit steps and curbs. In the video that you can see in the link to this story in the show notes, it also has a screen on the front to alert pedestrians as to what its next actions might be. It is interesting that they mention these bots being dispatched from stores,

Starting point is 00:06:15 but really, I still like the vision of a FedEx truck driving to a location and deploying a small squadron of bots, like some sort of a mothership from a sci-fi movie. In the wake of the success of Slack, a whole universe of productivity slash chat at work apps has sprung up. I think I did a segment on this before. It reminds me of the early 80s when everyone was trying their hand at productivity software. This was before office, before Microsoft effectively killed the productivity software category.

Starting point is 00:06:50 But before that happened, there was a whole ecosystem of productivity software in the early PC era. Well, Threads is another startup that is trying to take the work chat, work productivity crown from Slack. Threads has come out of stealth with a $10.5 million Series A from Sequoia. What makes Threads different is that it's not focusing on instant messaging. threads is an asynchronous chat platform for you and your coworkers. Quote, after a certain number of people get involved in an online discussion, conversations just break and messaging becomes chaotic. So says Rousseau-Kazzi, Threads CEO, quoting TechCrunch.

Starting point is 00:07:29 And if you have ever used Twitter or even been in a popular channel in Slack, you will understand what he is talking about. When too many people begin to talk, the conversation gets very noisy and it can mean losing the thread of what's being discussed. and seeing conversation lurch from one topic to another, often losing track of important information in the process. Thread's answer is to view its purpose as addressing the benefit of asynchronous conversation. To start, those who want to start threads first register as organizations on the platform.

Starting point is 00:07:58 Then those who are working on a project or in a specific team create a space for themselves within that org. You can then start threads within those spaces, and when a problem has been solved or the conversation has come to a conclusion, the last comment gets marked as the conclusion. The idea is that topics and conversations can stretch out over hours, days, or even longer around specific topics. Threads doesn't want to be the place you go for red alerts or urgent requests, but where you go when you have thoughts about a work-related subject and how to tackle it, end quote.

Starting point is 00:08:29 CEO Kazi says that Threads doesn't view itself as a competitor to Slack, despite what I said in the intro. Threads thinks it can replace email. It can replace chained conversations and FAQs, and even meetings. After using threads themselves internally, the threads team claims their internal meetings reduced by 80%.

Starting point is 00:08:49 Something in between meetings and chat, something that could kill email. Where have I heard that before? Where have you gone, Google Wave? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. Two related stories here. One of the promises of the cloud was supposed to be cost savings.

Starting point is 00:09:14 It turns out that a lot of cloud converts, though, are experiencing severe sticker shock. Quoting from the information, last year, several prominent corporate customers of AWS, software maker Adobe, the bank Capital One, as well as Pinterest, saw their AWS bills increased significantly in 2018 from the prior year, according to figures seen by the information and people who have worked at the companies. Adobe's bill rose 64 percent, while Capital One's jumped 73 percent. Pinterest rose 41 percent. It isn't clear whether those companies ended up paying the full amount of their AWS invoices, as large corporate customers often haggle with

Starting point is 00:09:50 their cloud providers after getting their bills, end quote. The information blames the sticker shock on the fact that when companies jump into the cloud, they tend to do so in one giant leap. They just move over all their existing and old and legacy applications without rewriting them and thus miss out on the efficiencies that the cloud could provide inherently. So just going cloud doesn't save you much. if you don't rewrite things to actually work in the cloud. In a similar story, ZDNet says containerization might be to blame for cost overruns in the cloud as well.

Starting point is 00:10:25 Quote, the biggest issue is that cloud resources aren't being provisioned well for containers because there isn't the visibility to match the compute, container, and app requirements. There are not sufficient ways to know if the box is big enough or small enough and customers don't have the visibility on how it rolls up in the node, end quote. That last quote comes from Jerry Smith, CEO of Densify, who surveyed 700 IT professionals and says that the survey revealed that 40% of all companies are overspending on cloud services. Now we know why AWS is such a cash cow, huh? Among the other findings in the survey, 80% of respondents in the Densify survey have actively deployed containers or plan to in the near future. 45% believe they are spending too much on cloud computing and 10% of respondents said they were 100% over budget. and 66% of the audience manage cloud infrastructure manually

Starting point is 00:11:18 without artificial intelligence or machine learning. Rotten Tomatoes will no longer let users post reviews and ratings of movies before they are released in an effort to make its audience rating system more trustworthy. Why? Well, in a funny way, this is coming at the whole idea of content moderation from a different angle. Rotten Tomatoes is changing how it does things because of trolls, quoting the Los Angeles Times. Walt Disney Company's Captain Marvel is expected to open with a spectacular $100 million in ticket sales from the U.S. and Canada alone next month. And yet, according to the highly influential website, Rotten Tomatoes, only 28% of moviegoers are interested in seeing Marvel Studios' first superhero film with a solo female lead. What gives?

Starting point is 00:12:07 Blame online trolls who have previously waged campaigns to lower audience ratings for movies, including Star Wars, The Last Jedi, and Ghostbusters by flooding their pages with negative, sometimes sexist comments. Such, quote, review bombing efforts are a serious problem for Rotten Tomatoes, which depends on credible ratings to drive traffic to its free website, end quote. Thus, these changes to make the lives of trolls more difficult on Rotten Tomatoes. This is Fandango CEO Paul Yanover. Fandango owns Rotten Tomatoes. Quote, we said, why are we turning this into a blog where we have people debating one another about a movie they haven't even seen? There's not enough value in continuing to do that, end quote. Well, also, if your primary business is selling movie tickets, as it is for Fandango,

Starting point is 00:12:53 then people waging campaigns, the whole purpose of which is to suppress ticket sales, kind of runs counter to your business, doesn't it? Finally, today, this will sound like a silly headline, but it's actually serious and interesting. According to the New York Times, tech companies in China are hurriedly rolling out facial and voice recognition technology for pigs. See, there's a deadly epidemic of swine flu raging in China right now, and it's endangering the country's supply of.

Starting point is 00:13:21 pork. Thus, quoting from the Times, so China's a bullion technology sector is applying the same techniques it is used to transform Chinese life, and more darkly that the Chinese government increasingly uses to spy on its own people to make sure its pigs are in the pink of health. China's biggest tech firms want to pamper pigs to Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, and jd.com, its rival, are using cameras to track pigs' faces. Alibaba also uses voice recognition software to monitor their coughs, end quote. I should maybe post this to R slash Today I Learned, but today I learned that China is the world's largest pig breeder with a current swine population of about 400 million. And China is the

Starting point is 00:14:03 world's largest pork consumer. Also, this year, 2019, just happens to be the year of the pig. That is all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Follow our friend and guest host Chris Higgins on Twitter at Chris Higgins. And follow the TechMeme editors on Twitter at TechMeme. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 02/27 - TikTok Bigger Than Instagram?

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