Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/08 – The Desktop Web Is Back (for the time being…)

Episode Date: April 8, 2020

Jack Dorsey literally puts his money to work for Coronavirus relief. More details on that Airbnb lifeline raise. Details on an interesting telemedicine raise. Netflix has increased parental controls, Google is pushing a mandatory new setup for Android development and why the desktop web is back, for the time being anyway. Sponsors: Caramba.store; promocode: BRIAN50 CognitoHQ.com Links: @jack's tweet storm Airbnb Paying More Than 10% Interest on $1 Billion Financing Announced Monday (WSJ) Airbnb In Talks To Raise More Debt (Bloomberg) Update on Zoom’s 90-Day Plan to Bolster Key Privacy and Security Initiatives (Zoom Blog) Netflix will allow parents to remove movies and shows, filter by rating in new update (The Verge) Google is requiring Virtual A/B on new Android 11 devices, paving the way for mandatory Seamless Updates (XDA Developers) Microsoft is freezing hiring except in some unspecified 'strategic areas' (Business Insider) All Microsoft events will be digital-only until July 2021 (The Verge) The Virus Changed the Way We Internet (NYTimes) Restaurant management platform Toast cuts 50% of staff (TechCrunch) Tyto Care raises $50 million to grow its telehealth examination and diagnostic platform (VentureBeat) Google's video chat service adds 2 million users a day amid coronavirus (CNET) Don’t be surprised when ‘Hangouts Meet’ becomes ‘Google Meet’ (9to5Google) 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, April 8th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Jack Dorsey puts his money to work for coronavirus relief. More details on that Airbnb Lifeline raise. Details on an interesting telemedicine raise. Netflix has increased parental controls. Google is pushing a mandatory new setup for Android development and why the desktop web is back, if only for the time being anyway. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Jack Dorsey announced last night that he is moving $1 billion worth of the square equity that he owns, or around 28% of his personal wealth, to an LLC called Start Small, which will initially fund COVID-19 relief.

And once this crisis has passed, will turn its efforts to focus on girls' health and education, as well as universal basic income efforts. He also announced that the operations will all be out in the open and transparent, quoting Jack's Tweetstorm. Grants will be made from Start Small Foundation or the LLC directly based on the beneficiary org. All transfers, sales, and grants will be made public in tracking sheet. Why the transparency? It's important to show my work so I and others can learn. I've discovered and funded around $40 million worth of many orgs with proven impact and

efficiency in the past, mostly anonymously. Going forward, all grants will be public. Suggestions welcome. Drop your cash app, smiley face. Why pull just from Square and not Twitter? Simple. I own a lot more square, and I'll need to pace the sales over some time. The impact this money will have should benefit both companies over the long term because it's helping the people we want to serve. Why now? The needs are increasingly urgent, and I want to see the impact in my lifetime. I hope this inspires others to do something similar. Life is too short. Let's do everything we can today to help people now, end quote. This of course drew widespread appreciation and support from across the political tech and business spectrum. Mike Bloomberg, for example, tweeted, for as long as I've known him,

Jack has been committed to giving back and helping others, and this is a powerful testament to that. And Josh Marshall tweeted, quote, curious to see how this plays out in practice, but if that number bears out, that puts basically every other plutocrat to shame. And I think he's only a minor billionaire. So apparently he's worth 3.3 billion. Certainly plenty to go around, but isn't Bezos worth over $100 billion? And he contributed $100 million, I think, end quote. And indeed, that last bit is what I find so impressive about this. Lots of wealthy people have been making headline-grabbing donations recently, even in the nine-figure range. But a lot of Snark inevitably rose up when that happened to be like, yeah, that person only contributed the equivalent of what you or I could find in the

form of loose change in our couch cushions. Not only is Jack's commitment in the 10-figure range, but he cut that sort of criticism off at the knees by pledging, checking my notes here, more than a quarter of his personal wealth. Not that anyone needs me to say it, but very aggressive, very impressive. Cudos to you, Jack. Quick follow up on that Airbnb funding round from yesterday. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Airbnb is actually paying more than 10% interest on the largely debt round. Actually, sources are saying around 11 to 12% interest. Also, investors were apparently offered free stock warrants in the company based on a valuation of Airbnb at around $18 billion, which would be almost half of its peak valuation. I said yesterday this might be a good

deal for Airbnb, at least well-timed, but I never said it wasn't a strict deal, quoting the Wall Street Journal. The investors have also extracted verbal commitments from the company to reduce significantly its fixed costs and to strengthen its management, adding at least one new executive to support Chief Executive Brian Chesky, the people said. However, the management change is part of a verbal agreement rather than being baked into the terms of the deal, one of the people added, end quote. And Bloomberg is reporting that Airbnb has held talks around raising an additional $500 million to $1 billion in additional debt. Quote, raising second lien debt means that Airbnb has room to take on more senior debt, which it is considering. The company could also raise a convertible

note or equity instead, the people said. As the home sharing company raises debt, it is canceling a $1 billion credit facility with several banks that is administered by Bank of America. Those banks include Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, both of which advised on the Silver Lake Sixth Street transaction, one of the people said. A representative for Bank of America declined to comment, end quote. Zoom has given a progress report on its efforts around privacy and security. Zoom says it has appointed a CISO council and an advisory board. Also, it is bringing in former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an outside advisor, quoting the post by Zoom founder Eric Yuan. Within our CISO council, we are establishing an advisory board that will include a subset of CISOs who will act as advisors

to me personally. This group will enable me to be a more effective and thoughtful leader and will help ensure that privacy and security are at the forefront of everything we do at Zoom. The initial members of our advisory board will include security leaders from VMware, Netflix, Uber, Electronic Arts, and others. One of the important commitments under our 90-day plan is to conduct a comprehensive security review of our platform, and third-party experts will be critical to this effort. To that end, Alex Stamos has joined Zoom as an outside advisor. We are thrilled to have Alex on board. He is a fan of our platform and will no doubt help us implement controls and practices that are best in class, end quote.

parental safeguards from Netflix. Netflix is now letting parents remove specific titles and filter shows out of their cues based on the show's ratings in both the designated kids portal and inside the general section of Netflix itself, quoting The Verge. The biggest addition is the ability to remove an individual TV series or movie by title. Think of it like a search filter. If a movie like The Matrix is listed as inappropriate for a child user, it won't appear as. As a at all on that profile account. Netflix is also making it so that parents can filter out titles based on the rating. If they want to keep everything G rating friendly, Netflix's new tool will make that possible. Other updates to parental controls include adding pins to protect profiles,

the ability to review a child's viewing history, and disabling auto play on TV shows in kids' profiles if parents want to restrict screen time. Quote, choice and control have always been important for our members, especially parents. Michelle Parsons' kids' products. manager at Netflix wrote in a blog post, we hope that these additional controls will help parents make the right choices for their families, end quote. Netflix is one of the biggest providers of

children's entertainment. Roughly 60% of Netflix's entire subscriber base watches family and children's specific content. Melissa Cobb, Netflix animation chief told the New York Times back in 2019, end quote. According to XDA developers, Google will

require a virtual AB partition setup on new Android 11 devices, thereby paving the way for simpler and seamless background updates, similar to how updates currently work on Chrome OS, quoting XDA developers. By forcing the adoption of virtual AB partitions on newly launched devices, they've all but assured that OEMs will have to support seamless updates for their late 2020 and 2021 devices, as spotted by XDA recognized developer, Luca 020-4-00. A software engineer at Google on the Project Treble team submitted a commit to the AOSP Jarrett titled, Require Virtual AB on our launches. The commit updates the vendor test suite

or VTS, which is an automated test that all devices must pass to be considered compatible with Project Treble. The new test checks if the system property row.virtualab enabled is set to true and if row. virtual AB. Retrofit is set to false on devices with a shipping API level of 30 or higher. In other words, this test checks if a device launching with Android 11 or higher supports virtual AB partitions. Virtual AB partitions were introduced with Android 10 alongside dynamic partitions, which are dynamically resizable partitions. They're the same concept as regular AB partitions except they can be freely resized. If a device that launches with Android 11 does not support virtual AB partitions, then it will fail VTS. If the device fails VTS, then it cannot ship with Google Mobile services.

In other words, Google has effectively made it required for OEMs to support virtual AB partitions and by extension seamless updates. This commit has not yet been merged, but will keep an eye out on it for further developments, end quote. Microsoft has announced that it is pausing all new hires. except in some strategic areas, citing uncertainty due to the global pandemic. According to sources, the company is including Azure in that strategic category and is still hiring for Azure teams, quoting Business Insider. According to employees who spoke with Business Insider, Microsoft is still hiring for roles

within its massive cloud computing business and the company was holding virtual hiring events for software engineers as recently as last week. Some groups, one employee said, are quote, prioritizing consumer facing and critical roles, end quote. Microsoft has also announced that it will make all, repeat all of its events digital until at least July 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A tiny nugget of data that surprised me, but makes total sense now that I've actually heard it. According to data from similar web and Aptopia in our new quarantined world, Americans are increasingly using online platforms on traditional computers instead of on smartphones.

Again, that makes sense. To quote that popular GIF, you know the one, the tapping your head one, can't do mobile web if the population isn't mobile. Quoting the New York Times, now that we are spending our days at home with computers close at hand, Americans appear to be remembering how unpleasant it can be to squint at those little phone screens. Facebook, Netflix, and YouTube have all seen their numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown.

The data from Similar Web and Aptopia indicates. Similar Web and Aptopia both draw their traffic numbers from several independent sources to create data that can be compared across the internet, end quote. So I guess for the time being at least, the desktop web is back, baby. And as yet another illustration of how fast things are changing in this current, an environment, I point you to Toast, a cloud-based restaurant management software provider, which was going gangbusters recently, even raising $400 million at a $4.9 billion valuation just this past February. Welp. Toast just announced that it was cutting around 50% of its staff through layoffs and furloughs, and also reducing executive pay, bonuses, and freezing hiring, quoting TechCrunch.

The company's flagship product helps restaurants process payments and handle orders. through a mix of hardware and software. Think handheld ordering pads, self-service kiosks, and display systems for kitchens. It also connects businesses to food delivery services like Grubhub. Toast sits on the bridge between two industries in the spotlight for better or worse, restaurants and fintech. But restaurants have been hit hard as eateries were forced to close down due to state mandates or to simply promote social distancing.

And as a result, fintech companies that help restaurants work better and depend on foot traffic are seeing less transaction volume as well, end quote. But in an interesting raise that's interesting for these times, TaitoCare is a New York City-based telehealth startup that sells an in-home kit to help doctors remotely diagnose patients. TitoCare has raised a $50 million round led by Insight Partners, quoting Venture Beat. Founded in 2012, TitoCare has developed a handheld exam kit that anyone can buy. The accompanying mobile app and clinician dashboard connects the patient with health care professionals to receive a diagnosis, treatment plan, and prescriptions all without leaving their home.

TitoCare kit is available for $300 from Best Buy in the U.S. or from TitoCare's private health system partners in several countries, including the U.K., Canada, Spain, France, Switzerland, Russia, Israel, Thailand, and Uruguay. With Tito, a health care provider can examine the patient's lungs, heart, throat, ears, skin, abdomen, and body. body temperature. This can help diagnose all manner of conditions, including ear infections, allergies, coughs, and respiratory issues, cold and flu, fevers, and more. The kit bundle includes everything required for these assessments, including an autoscope for ear inspections and a stethoscope for heart, lungs, and abdomen. In addition to the money, it makes from selling hardware, title, title care's business is built around a software-as-a-service model, with health care systems paying a fee to use the company's platform, end quote. And finally, more

numbers about changing behavior in a lockdown world, Google says that G Suite now has 6 million paying businesses up from 5 million in February of 2019, although maybe that's just normal growth. On the other hand, Google also says that Meet, its teleconferencing tool, is adding 2 million new users each day and logged 2 billion minutes of video calls in March with daily usage up 25x from January. Just don't let it hijack your Google accounts logins like it did with me. Still haven't gotten that one fixed. But please make note of the fact that I referred to the product in question as meat.

I'm sorry, Googlers, but I can't resist this, quoting 9 to 5 Google. Just today, yes, we religiously track changes like this, Google itself dropped the Hangouts Meet name in favor of Google Meet on its support landing page. Yesterday, Google's support docs called it Hangouts Meat. Today, it's Google Meat. This is not the first sign we've had that Google would begin moving away from the Hangouts name for its meat product. It has long been referred to as Just Meat in shorthand in Google's blog posts. The CEO of Google Cloud has called it Google Meat on the record, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has recently called it Just Meat after previously calling it Hangouts Meet. Notably, it seems to be colloquially referred to as Google. Google Meet just about everywhere. That's not the official Hangouts Meet G Suite page. If you search Google Meet on Twitter, you'll almost find more tweets and posts about the video conferencing tool for Teams than its official name Hangouts Meet, end quote. I mean, guys, you have no idea how many times I had to re-record that just because it's impossible to keep track of all the naming conventions, even when you're reading from an actual script.

as people start telling people to Zoom them more and more, as Stefan Hall tweeted, quote, there's an alternative reality right now where it's Google's video calling service that is earning verb status in pop culture instead of Zoom, end quote. Going out to the grocery store for the first time in about a month after I get done here today, I'm masking up, of course. But wish me luck, everybody. Talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.