Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/06 - This Podcast Is A Year Old!

Episode Date: March 6, 2019

Fitbit unveils a new smartwatch and lowers prices across the board, Samsung is working on two more foldable phones, Grab grabs $1.4 billion from Masa Son and Waymo finally found a way to make money. Sponsors: DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Metalab.co Links: Fitbit’s new $160 Versa Lite is a stripped-down version of its entry-level smartwatch (The Verge) Fitbit kills Alta, Alta HR, Flex 2, and Zip (VentureBeat) Samsung Working on Two More Foldable Smartphones (Bloomberg) WANT A FOLDABLE PHONE? HOLD OUT FOR REAL GLASS (Wired) Chinese Hackers Target Universities in Pursuit of Maritime Military Secrets (WSJ) Uber found not criminally liable in last year’s self-driving car death (QZ) Grab confirms $1.46B investment from SoftBank’s Vision Fund (TechCrunch) Waymo Starts Selling Sensors to Lower Cost of Self-Driving Cars (Bloomberg) 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, March 6, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Fitbit unveils a new smartwatch and lowers prices across the board.

Samsung is working on two more foldable phones. Grab grabs, $1.4 billion from Masasan and Waymo finally found a way to make money. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Fitbit has announced a new version of its Versa smartwatch. The Versa Light now comes in at $160. The Versa Light is not any thinner or lighter than the old Versa, though that is what the name would suggest. It's just cheaper, and to get that way, it lost some stuff. The Versa Light still has sleep and exercise trackers, still runs Fitbit OS, but it won't have Wi-Fi.

It won't have NFC or music playback or swim laps or stair climbing counts. Quoting The Verge, Fitbit's renewed take on the smartwatch appeared to have worked with the Versa, which helped the company grow its smartwatch revenue by 437% less than a year after the device was announced. Now the company is hoping more affordable versions of its wearables will boost that momentum, with stripped-down versions of the Versa and the ACE that are up to $40 cheaper than their predecessors, end quote. Indeed, Fitbit's trusted line of fitness trackers are all cheaper as well, the Inspire and the Inspire HR and the Ace 2, which are replacing the ALTA line of trackers. In fact, that's the other news.

The Zip 2, Flex 2, ALTA, and ALTA-HR line of trackers are being discontinued entirely. Venture Beat sat down with Fitbit Vice President of Product Marketing, Melanie Chase, to talk about the thinking behind the wholesale lineup changes. Quote, there is a ton of growth happening in the smartwatch market, but the tracker market is still really important and it's holding steady, Chase said. We want to right-size our product line to sort of match what's going on there. So you want to have a really efficient value-oriented tracker lineup, where we have a good, better, best model to serve the needs of that consumer with a very efficient device. And then on the smartwatch side, we want to be part of that growth trajectory.

And we really want to lean into where we see important growth for Fitbit, which is in that sub-200 price point that IDC called out as a key growth area, end quote. So bottom line, Fitbit now has three smartwatches, the Versa Light, Versa, and Ionic, three adult fitness trackers, the Inspire, InspireHR, and Charge 3, and one fitness tracker for kids. That's the ACE2. All of the discontinued models will still be available for sale, at least until stock runs out. Sources are telling Sam Kim at Bloomberg that Samsung is working on two new foldable smartphones. One will be a vertical clamshell-like device with an extra outside screen, and the other will be the straight fold-unfold design that Huawei went with with the Mate X.

Quote, Samsung plans to unveil the vertically folding phone late this year or early next year and is using mock-ups to fine-tune the design, the people said. The gadget is designed with an extra screen on the outside, but the manufacturer may remove it depending on how customers respond to a similar display on the Galaxy Fold, they said. The outfolding device, which already exists as a prototype after being considered as Samsung's first foldable gadget, will roll out afterward, the people said. It will be thinner because it has no extra screen, they said. Samsung may also incorporate an in-display fingerprint sensor for its foldable lineup,

as it did for the Galaxy S-10 model announced last month, they said, end quote. Samsung is also reportedly working to improve the durability of the already announced Galaxy Fold display, ahead of that product's upcoming launch. As we were speculating, apparently if you fold the fold 10,000 times, occasionally a slight crease might appear in the panel. Speaking of which, the photoable phones that we've seen thus far,

including the Galaxy Fold and the Mate X, I don't know if we've ever mentioned this, but those are not glass displays. They actually make use of, plastic polymers for the screens. Plastic is, of course, more bendable than glass. It's repeatedly bendable. It's simple physics.

Quoting wired, but plastic is also, as you may by now have guessed, worse at all kinds of things. It's much less hard than glass, which makes it easier to scratch and ding up. And unlike glass, plastic will crease over time, leaving you with a large unfolding display, sure, but one bisected with an unsightly wrinkle. With the polymer, the molecules can rearrange themselves more easily in response to stress, whereas the glass has a more rigid structure. So the response of the glass is going to be more elastic. The structure of the glass will be able to recover after the deformations, end quote.

That was John Morrow, a professor of material science and engineering at Penn State University. But guess what? He was also previously for 18 years at Glass Company Corning. And guess what? quoting again from Wired. Corning is working on ultra-thin, bendable glass that is 0.1 millimeters thick and can bend to a 5-millimeter radius. The trick, though, is to achieve that kind of pinch without losing the toughness that makes glass great to begin with. To get there, Corning is combining its experience with willow glass, which can roll up like a sheet of paper, and gorilla glass,

which gets its strength from an ion exchange process. In fact, it's that process that makes willow glass on. suitable for phones. It involves dipping glass into a molten salt solution where potassium ions enter and push out smaller sodium ions, creating a compressive stress layer, end quote. The Wired article says that Corning has developed demo batches of this new hybrid glass type, but they still have problems with the demos not performing well on drops, or maybe the bend radius isn't quite good enough for their manufacturing partners yet. The article suggests that bendy glass good enough to compete with plastic is still a couple years away,

which may give us a timeline on when we'll see a foldable iPhone if we ever do, because I can almost guarantee you Johnny Ive ain't going to do a phone with a plastic display. According to the Wall Street Journal, hackers believed to be sponsored by the Chinese government allegedly targeted over two dozen universities with spearfishing emails that were doctored to appear like they can. came from other universities. If opened, the emails deployed software that tried to gain access to data related to maritime military research. Quote, the University of Hawaii, the University of Washington, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology are among at least 27 universities in the U.S., Canada, and Southeast Asia that Beijing has targeted, according to eye defense, a cybersecurity

intelligence unit of Accenture Security. The majority of the universities targeted either house research hubs focused on undersea technology or have faculty on staff with extensive experience in a relevant field and nearly all have links to a Massachusetts Oceanographic Institute that also was likely compromised in the cyber campaign, I defense said. Some have been awarded contracts by the Navy, others including Sami Hook University in South Korea, appeared to be targeted because of their proximity to China and relevance to the South China Sea, the analysts said, end quote. Apparently, the hackers in question seem to feel that universities are softer targets than, say, going after military computers or accounts directly. Also, they seem to sense that the

general trust and collaboration among researchers might make them constitutionally better targets for these sorts of hacking attacks because researchers and academics are in the habit of sharing data and collaborating in trusting environments. Quick follow-up to bring a sort of conclusion to a past story. Uber has officially been found not criminally liable for last year's fatal crash of one of its self-driving cars. So one of the lingering questions about where the law falls when it comes to autonomous vehicles has been answered, at least in this one specific instance.

Quote, Yavapai County Attorney Sheila Sullivan Polk said in a letter dated March 4th, that her office found, quote, no basis for criminal liability for the Uber Corporation in the death of Elaine Herzberg, 49, the first known pedestrian to die in an incident involving a driverless car. Maricopa County, which includes Tempe, had referred the case to another county last year because of a conflict. Polk said her office concluded that the, quote, collision video, as it displays likely does not accurately depict the events that occurred, end quote. She didn't elaborate further on possible discrepancies, but recommended, Tempe police get an expert analysis of what the vehicles driver should have seen at the time of the accident, given vehicle speed, lighting conditions, and other factors, end quote. Uber, by the way, reached a separate settlement with Herzberg's family for an undisclosed sum early last year. Actually, I think we'll end the day on vehicles, autonomous or otherwise.

First, grab has become the latest addition to the SoftBank Vision Fund after confirming a one point $46 billion investment from that fund, apparently at a $14 billion valuation, quoting TechCrunch. The deal, which was first reported by TechCrunch in December, takes Grabs' ongoing Series H round to $4.5 billion. Other investors in that round include Toyota, booking holdings, Microsoft, and Hyundai. The new deal means Grab has now raised more than $7.5 billion to date. Grab, which bought out Uber's local business last year, was valued at $11 billion when it secured a $1 billion, investment from Toyota to kick off this Series H in June. A source told TechCrunch that the new round values the company at $14 billion. Despite this huge injection, Grab confirmed that the round,

a record for a Southeast Asian startup, is not closed yet. TechCrunch reported in December that the Series H funding goal, which was originally $2 billion, had been raised to $5 billion, end quote. Grab is Southeast Asia's largest ride hailing company, but it also operates a food delivery service and even a payments and financial services business. Its main competitor in Southeast Asia is Gojek, which got started it in Indonesia but has expanded to Vietnam, Thailand, and Singapore. Gojek just announced a $1 billion funding round in January. And Waymo has started selling its LIDAR sensors to customers who are not competing with it in its robotie. taxi business. So who would the non-competitor customers for these LiDAR sensors be? Well, anyone else building things with autonomy. Say autonomous warehouse bots or maybe autonomous tractors or even

simple security systems. So lots of people joked on this news that Waymo has finally found a way to make money. If they can't make money with the robocabs yet, at least they can make money selling the sensors. Max Chaffkin tweeted, quote, this suggests to me, that self-driving taxi services are still a long way off at any scale, end quote. But there might be more to this here than just generating some revenue. See, the more the LiDAR sensors spread throughout the economy, the more they're adopted, the cheaper the technology will get. So if Waymo can, say, convince Walmart to use LiDAR equipped robots to stock their shelves

or cities to install LiDAR on their, say, garbage trucks or street sweepers then, well, quoting Bloomberg, the development curve is similar to Moore's law in computer chips. Every 18 months, LiDAR sensor resolution doubles and the price drops by half. Quote, that whole cost curve and drive of volume is what's opening up new industries. Right now, the market can support more LiDAR manufacturers because the demand is outpacing supply. That's why you're seeing elevated prices, end quote. That quote comes from Frank Bertini, head of LiDAR sales for non-automotive applications.

locations at VeloDine LiDAR, currently the world's largest LiDAR producer. The overall market for LiDAR will apparently top $1 billion this year and is currently doubling annually. Quoting Bloomberg again, there are three types of sensors used in Waymo's self-driving cars, the 360-degree bubble that sits on the roof like a top hat, a long-range forward-facing sensor and a short-range sensor that monitors the car's perimeter. The last of these is known as the Laser Bear Honeycomb. and is the only one that Waymo is ready to sell to outside companies.

The device, named for its development team, Laser Bear, as well as the shape of the sensor, is the most useful in Waymo's suite of sensors for non-automotive applications. It has a wide field of vision that can quickly map out an entire room and was designed specifically to ensure Waymo cars have no blind spots, even very close to the car and near the ground, end quote. No word yet on what Waymo will charge you, if you want to get your hands on one of those honeycombs.

But the point is, whatever Waymo happens to charge you for a honeycomb this year, it hopes that it will be able to charge you less next year. So exactly a year ago today, we officially launched this podcast. 271 episodes later, we're approaching 6 million lifetime downloads. If you listened to every single episode, I would imagine that if we average out at 19 minutes a show, that means you've listened to me for 85 hours for three and a half solid days. Each script averages about 24,000 words, so that means I've written about 650,000 words over the last year.

All quite large numbers, but I guess that's what you get when you do a show every day, basically, for a whole year. And look, all of this has been made possible by you. I cannot express enough, my gratitude for all of you making me a part of your daily routines. It is genuinely, genuinely humbling to me. Thank you so much. Here's to all of you. Here's to another year. One Facebook scandal. I mean one day and one show at a time. Talk to you again tomorrow.