Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/07 - Android P Released To Developers

Episode Date: March 7, 2018

Android P is released to developers, Blackberry sues Facebook, sources speak of possible Snap layoffs, an interesting Peter Thiel interview, and actually, much more....  Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, March 7th, 2018. Today, Android P is released to developers. BlackBerry Sue's Facebook, sources speak of possible snap layoffs,

an interesting interview with Peter Thiel, and actually much, much more, almost 10 stories today. Strap in, here's what happened today in tech. It's becoming something of a tradition for Google to release a preview of the news. new version of Android to developers in March, and indeed, that's exactly what happened today. The new version is known as Android P, and developers can download the preview today, but only if they have a pixel 1, pixel 1, Excel, pixel 2, or pixel 2 Excel phone. There are, of course, a slew of changes in the new version of Android P that bloggers are only now delving through, but some of the highlights already sussed out include a revamped look for

notifications as well as a new smart replies feature and support for a revamped status bar at the top that will make room for iPhone 10 style notches. Many people notice the plethora of new phones with notches at last month's Mobile World Congress. Android P will also apparently support something called ephemeral profiles, which would theoretically allow you to sign in to any device, use it like your own, sign out, and rest assured that your information was wiped. But of course, the biggest changes casual users will notice will be on the design side, and Alex Dobie, the executive editor of Android Central, tweeted, quote, Android P brings the biggest visual changes to Android since material design for years ago.

He also noted that Android P has shown up one day after National Oreo Day. Oreo, of course, was the most recent flagship version of Android, the version that this Android P will replace. And this is just a developer preview. It's not recommended that you install Android P on your main phone unless you really, really know what you're doing. And if Google sticks to the template set last year, P should be available to the general public around August. Blackberry is suing Facebook, alleging that Facebook's messaging services infringe on Blackberry

patents. Facebook owned WhatsApp and Instagram are named as co-defendants in the lawsuit, and BlackBerry is seeking injunctive relief and an unspecified dollar figure in damages. We have a strong claim that Facebook has infringed on our intellectual property, and after years of dialogue, we also have an obligation to our shareholders to pursue appropriate legal remedies. So said BlackBerry in a press release. In a statement to Cheddar, Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grewell responded, quote, BlackBerry's suit sadly reflects the current state of its messaging business. Having abandoned its efforts to innovate, BlackBerry is now looking to tax the innovation of others. We intend to fight. And that

reflects some people's fear that BlackBerry is turning into a patent troll. As Paul Therrat tweeted, Ladies and gentlemen, I present the new Blackberry business model. The Verge noted that the core of BlackBerry's case centers around interface elements and mobile messaging, including notification design, the displaying of message timestamps, and even the ability to tag people in photos.

The Verges Nelai Patel tweeted, Um, BlackBerry is suing Facebook for infringing a patent that claims to cover displaying account of unread messages, on a notification dot. BlackBerry sold the rights to actually manufacture hardware devices and phones to Chinese company TCL back in 2016, so the existing BlackBerry Limited, the company,

only does software and mobile security products these days. But it still has more than 40,000 global technology patents, apparently. And on the strengths of those patents, BlackBerry sued Nokia just this past February, claiming infringement of patents related to 3G and 4G wireless technology. And last year, Qualcomm agreed to pay Blackberry 940 million to resolve arbitration over royalty payments. But as Josh Konstine pointed out,

Facebook paid around $550 million to buy foundational computing patents from AOL and IBM just to protect itself from this kind of lawsuit. In similar legal news, maybe you've heard that Broadcom has been, trying to buy Qualcomm and recently launched a hostile bid to do so. It's the sort of story that can make even the most fervent news nerds eyes glass over, two chipmakers fighting each other, but it would be potentially the biggest tech deal of all time, and actually there's an interesting new wrinkle,

because on Tuesday, the United States government stepped in to call for a full investigation of the takeover bid, citing national security grounds. This reflects an ongoing trend for, national governments to be more and more wary of the ways that national security and economic power are increasingly tied together. The U.S. seems to feel that if Qualcomm were swallowed up, the U.S. would be at a disadvantage to Chinese chipmakers. This is apparently concerning not just for market reasons, but because computer and cell phones are so central these days, not only to the

modern economy, but to things like secure communications. Also, China has to, has been making an assertive push into mobile computing, supercomputers, artificial intelligence, and the like, and apparently the U.S. government fears a technological cold war is brewing and is worried that the U.S. is falling behind. The Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, which is led by the U.S. Treasury Department, has the power to block foreign acquisitions of American companies for national security reasons, and has actually killed several Chinese tech acquisitions recently. For example, last year a Chinese-backed investor was blocked from buying lattice semiconductor,

and Chinese electronics payment company, Ant Financial, was blocked from buying Moneygram on the grounds that the Chinese company would have access to reams of sensitive U.S. financial data. Tony Balloon, the head of the corporate China practice at the law firm Alston and Bird, was quoted in the New York Times as saying the Trump administration has, quote, turbocharged the committee on foreign investments. Qualcomm is a major supplier to the U.S. government and is seen as a key player in the development and deployment

of next generation 5G wireless infrastructure. It's unclear if the acquisition will be blocked, but a ruling is expected shortly. Sources reported to Cheddar this afternoon that Snap is preparing to lay off around 100 p. in its engineering department, which is less than 10% of that department's workforce. The usual sources familiar with the matter who nonetheless requested anonymity said that the Snapchat maker plans to announce the cuts internally within a week.

Snap has had a series of layoffs over the last year, though this would be the largest to date, and there have been a slate of high-profile departures from the company's management since Snap went public. Cheddar's Alex Heath, who wrote the piece, tweeted, quote, backdrop of all of this is that employees just sprinted to get the redesign out the door, which I'm told was a super rushed directive from Spiegel. Lots of late nights and weekends working. Employees, though, didn't receive cash bonuses at the end of 2017 due to failure to meet

company-wide goals. Amazon today announced that it would be launching a low-cost, version of its popular Amazon Prime membership program to qualifying recipients of Medicaid. Instead of the usual 1099 per month, the new program would come in at just $5.99 per month, but still include all the usual prime perks like free two-day shipping and prime video. To qualify for the discount, customers would have to provide a valid EBT or Medicaid card. TechCrunch notes that while a prime membership might seem like a luxury to sum, for low-income shoppers, online stores can often have the best prices,

thereby helping with budgeting. And of course, for a lot of Medicaid recipients, just getting to a physical store might be a bit of a challenge. Peter Thiel granted a rare interview to the New York Times' David Straitfeld, and people were tweeting out the highlights all day, so I'll just do the same. Here are the main bullet points from the interview, at least for our tech purposes. Of his life in general, Teal said that it had been a crazier two years than he had expected.

He admitted that Facebook's board of directors, of which he is, of course, a member, failed to anticipate the Russian hacking around the election. We were far from perfect, Teal said, in thinking about medium and longer-term problems coming around the corner. Teal said that Facebook in general did not think that its product was so hackable, and that was largely the problem. But he also said that reports that he wanted to leave Facebook's board of directors were incorrect. Of his relationship with the president, he said,

the two of them didn't talk that often, but he had spoken to the president a few months ago. In his estimation, the Trump presidency had, quote, fallen short, end quote, of his expectations, but he had no regrets about his endorsement. Teal also recounted a conversation with a friend of his in Silicon Valley, who, he said, was considering running for governor of California. Teal counseled the friend that if he did so, he would have to come up with a good answer to the question, why is technology good for the average person?

an answer like, it's making us more connected, Teal considered to be too banal a reply. Teal said, quote, he wasn't able to come up with an answer, and I couldn't come up with one either. Teal declined to name the friend in question, but the Times piece noted that Y Combinators Sam Altman is widely rumored

to be considering a run for California governor. True to form, the Times reporter noted a copy of Ein Rand's Atlas Shrug on Teal's bookshelf. But rather than Rand, Teal said that French philosopher René Gerard had a bigger influence on his thinking, specifically crediting Gerard with an insight about how people are not in control of their own desires and are, in fact, powerfully shaped by society. He said that this insight helped him to see the potential of Facebook early on. Finally, Teal denied that he was trying to buy the assets of Gawker

in order to delete its archives forever. Teal said, in fact, quote, I don't want the archives. I don't think it makes sense to destroy them. Preserve them. Study them instead, end quote. Wearing my other hat as Internet historian for a moment, I certainly hope this is true. Coinbase has announced a new passively managed cryptocurrency indexed fund that it is calling the Coinbase Index Fund.

The fund will invest in cryptocurrencies trading on GDax, the exchange which is operated by Coinbase, and will be weighted by market cap. So if the fund were to launch today, the makeup of the fund would be 62% Bitcoin, 27% Ethereum, 7% Bitcoin Cash, and 4% light coin. Business Insider said this was a big move by Coinbase to tap Wall Street's appetite for cryptocurrency. And Coinbase product manager Rubin Brammanathan told Business Insider that the fund reflects, quote, the growing demand on the part of institutional investors and high net worth individuals looking to dive into the market for digital coins. And of course we know why. Coinbase backdated the theoretical performance of the fund back to early 2015 when GDAX was first launched to try to give investors a sense of what their returns would be like. Had you been able to invest

in this new fund back then, you would have increased your investment 49x or approximately 4,900 percent. The fund will launch in a few months, though you can sign up for it today. You will have to meet a $10,000 minimum investment threshold, however, and it is currently only open to accredited investors because Coinbase is waiting for more clarity from the SEC on crypto-based financial products. Also, it will sport a 2% annual management fee, which is quite pricey for a passively managed index fund. Market researcher Meb Faber tweeted, only in the crypto world is a 2% per and a management fee considered a great deal. But it was decidedly not a good day for crypto in general.

This morning, the SEC issued a strongly worded warning about unregulated cryptocurrency exchanges saying that many appear to be SEC approved when they are, in fact, not. The SEC statement said essentially that just calling yourself an exchange does not make you one. the SEC statement read in part, quote, many of these platforms give the impression that they perform exchange-like functions by offering order books with updated bid and ask pricing and data about executions on the system. But there's no reason to believe that such information has the same integrity

as that provided by national securities exchanges. And around the same time, rumors began swirling that Binance, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, with around $1.7 billion worth of digital coins on its platform, had been hacked. Binance said it was investigating reports of coins mysteriously being sold without user permission. The one-to-punch of these stories caused the price of Bitcoin to fall more than 10%, falling under the magical $10,000 a coin mark. Magic Leap, that mysterious augmented reality startup, announced today that it has raised $461 million from Saudi Arabia's public investment fund. This additional Series D funding comes hot on the heels of a $502 million funding round just this past October. This brings the total raise for just this Series D round to $963 million.

Magic Leap has raised more than $2.3 billion from a new point three billion from a new year. investors to date. Magic Leap has still not released a product yet. Why does it need so much money? Well, as TechCrunch wrote on the news, quote, that's a question people have been asking for quite a while. On Twitter, user Koldeep asked what Magic Leap was even doing with all that money? The answer is largely we just don't know yet.

Almost in response, ScaleWorks Drew Olenoff tweeted, either way, Magic Leap's outcome is going to be quite spectacular. Finally, in a headline that is clearly competing for the title of most 2018 headline of the year, owners of Amazon Alexa enabled devices are reporting that they're hearing random, unprompted laughter from Alexa. Amazon said it was aware of the issue and working to fix it. Obviously, Twitter is filled with jokes about this. So I'll just go with Uber privacy engineer, Minotilo, when he said, quote,

the money I'd pay to read that internal bug tracker. And also a story that is very much a sign of the times. British Weekly Music Magazine New Musical Express, better known as NME, announced today that after 66 years, it would be ending its print edition. If you're not familiar with NME, the analogy to Rolling Stone magazine is not perfect, but it was similarly influential on the music scene in Britain, especially during its heyday during the punk era. NME will continue to operate digitally, but this is clearly another storied print brand that has been laid low by the web, which I find personally ironic because

one of the things that first made me fall in love with the web was when I was in college and became obsessed with Britpop. The fact that I was in Gainesville, Florida, and I was in Gainesville, Florida, I could dial up the new NME reviews on their website and figure out which new bands were hot so I could go to my physical music store and beg them to import the latest, say, super furry animal CD really kind of blew my mind. It was one of the first things to make me realize that the internet was magic. So 18-year-old me reading this headline is confused and not a little sad. On that somewhat personal note, let me add another personal note here.

Thanks for listening to our inaugural episode yesterday. Your love and feedback has been tremendous. And I did want to address one bit of controversy yesterday. On Twitter, Josh Constine of TechCrunch complained that I mispronounced his name. I said Constine instead of Constine. But what Josh doesn't know is that the version he heard was a re-recording of the first file I recorded. The first time I did that segment, I called him. Josh Constantine, like the Roman Emperor, Constantine the Great. You know how sometimes when

you've been reading a name or a word for years, but you've never heard it pronounced out loud, your brain just sort of assigns it something else, I guess. All these years, I guess I've seen Josh's byline and his tweets and my brain has just always read Constantine. I've never actually had the pleasure to meet Josh in person, so he was just always to me anyway. Josh Constantine. The lesson here is, guys, I'm basically guaranteed to butcher your names. Please forgive me. Please feel free to correct me, but also, forget.

Facebook Deputy General Counsel Paul Grual. I might very well be talking specifically to you today. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The show was produced by myself and the entire staff of editors at techmame.com. We'll be back tomorrow.