Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/04 – Uber Back To Pre-Covid Levels

Episode Date: May 4, 2022

Uber is seeing rider usage return to pre-Covid levels. New, better flash storage. Twitter tests the ability to only tweet to certain circles. An interesting laptop and an interesting raise. And Spotify wants you to hang out, in Roblox. Sponsors: AthleticGreens.com/ride Links: Uber reports surging revenue as drivers return, but posts massive loss on investments (CNBC) NFT Sales Are Flatlining (WSJ) Samsung's UFS 4.0 flash storage is a major upgrade, especially for 5G phones (Android Authority) Twitter Testing New 'Twitter Circle' Feature for Sharing Tweets With a Smaller Number of People (MacRumors) Meta has built a massive new language AI—and it’s giving it away for free (MIT Technology Review) Razer’s Blade 15 is the first laptop with a 240Hz OLED display, but you’ll have to wait a while (The Verge) Larry Ellison leads $21.5 million Series A in cancer treatment startup Imagene AI (CTech) Spotify becomes first music streamer to launch on Roblox (TechCrunch) 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 right home for Wednesday, May 4th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Uber is seeing writer usage return to pre-COVID levels. New better flash storage, Twitter testing the ability to only tweet to certain circles, an interesting laptop and an interesting raise, and Spotify wants you to

hang out in Roblox. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. We don't always cover Uber earnings. I mean, we have done, but not as regularly as, say, Apple. or meta. But I thought Uber's report this morning was notable because, according to the numbers, Uber's core business is back to pre-COVID times levels. Quoting CNBC, the company appears to be on track to surpass pre-pandemic levels as travel accelerates. CEO Dara Kosra Shahi said in a statement that April mobility gross bookings exceeded 2019 levels across all regions and use cases. For the second quarter, Uber anticipates gross bookings of between $28.5 billion and $29, and a half billion. In addition, it expects adjusted EBITDA or earnings before interest, taxes,

depreciation and amortization of between $240 million and $270 million. Uber said it expects to generate, quote, meaningful positive cash flows for full year 2022, which would mark a first for the company. The company reported a net loss of $5.9 billion for the first quarter, which it said was primarily due to its equity investment in Southeast Asian mobility and delivery company Grab, autonomous vehicle company Aurora and Chinese ride-hailing giant D.D. Uber CFO Nelson Chai said in prepared remarks, the company has the liquidity to maintain its positions and wait for a better time to sell. Uber was reliant on its delivery business, which includes Uber Eats, throughout the pandemic. However, mobility revenues have finally surpassed delivery revenues.

Its mobility segment reported $2.52 billion in revenue compared with deliveries $2.51 billion. Revenue strips out additional taxes, tolls, and fees from gross bookings. Uber reported 1.71 billion trips on the platform during the quarter, which is up 18% from the same quarter a year ago. Monthly active platform consumers reached 115 million, up 17% year-over-year. Drivers and couriers earned an aggregate $9 billion in the quarter, which is slightly less than the fourth quarter. Uber said its driver base is at a post-pandemic high as well. The company expects that to continue without, quote, significant incremental incentive investments, Kostrashahi said in prepared remarks, end quote. Should be noted that rival ride-hailing company Lyft did not report earnings quite as rosy, but that seems to be due to business-specific reasons at Lyft and not larger macro reasons related to COVID recovery. Meanwhile, continuing to keep an eye on the health of the NFT market. According to non-fungible, NFT sales fell 92% to around 19,000 daily average this week from a $225,000 per week peak back in September 2021. Active wallets fell 88% to around 14,000 from a November

2021 high. And according to the Wall Street Journal, the broader sell-off in tech isn't helping either. Quote, rising interest rates have crushed risky bets across the financial. financial markets, and NFTs are among the most speculative. Since hitting highs in November, the tech-heavy NASDAQ composite has fallen 23 percent, and Bitcoin has fallen by 43 percent. The Federal Reserve is slated to raise rates this week and next month. As the central bank's easy money policies wind down, investors have turned to more defensive stocks like consumer staples. Interest in NFTs measured by the number of searches for the term peaked in January, according to Google Trends, and has fallen roughly 80 percent since then.

The imbalance between supply and demand is also hurting the NFT market. There are about five NFTs for every buyer, according to data from analytics firm Chainalysis. As of the end of April, there have been 9.2 million NFTs sold, which were bought by 1.8 million people, the firm said. There are signs that collectors may also differentiate between NFTs that catalog a vast set of cartoon-like characters, like the Cryptopunks, and tailored NFT art projects spurred by major artists who already enjoy museum followings. Among those artists doubling down on NFT art is New York artist Jeff Coons. The artist known for his oversized balloon animal sculptures is selling a series of NFTs attached to a real-life sculpture he intends to rocket to the moon later this year. His gallery,

Pace, said his moon-shaped sculptures attached to his NFTs are selling briskly as a package at $2 million apiece. The director, Kevin Smith, plans to sell 5,555 NFTs tied to a coming movie. Kilroy was here. Only people owning the NFTs will have. access to the movie, end quote. Samsung has unveiled universal flash storage 4.0, which they claim doubles the speed of UFS 3.1, making it ideal for 5G smartphones. Samsung has set a mass production goal for this new type of flash for Q3 of 2022, quoting Android Authority.

In addition to making some of the most popular phones on the market, Samsung is one of the top memory manufacturers for the entire internet. industry. Its USF 3.1 is already a solid performer, but the company's next generation offering promises up to twice the performance. According to the company, version 4.0 provides speeds up to 23.2 GbPS per lane, doubling what UFS 3.1 can deliver. Samsung says its throughput makes UFS 4.0 ideal for 5G smartphones given the large quantity of data 5G phones can download. The new memory will also help power the data requirements of augmented and virtual reality applications. is another benefit of the new architecture. These new chips are 46% more efficient than 3.1,

which means users will see improved battery life despite the faster performance. Samsung has managed to pack all of these improvements into an even smaller package. For example, a 512 gigabyte UFS 3.1 module measures 11.5 by 13 by 1 millimeter. In contrast, the maximum size of a UFS 4.0 module will max out at 11 by 13 by 1 millimeter for 1 terabyte of storage. Samsung says it will begin mass production in Q3, 2020, meaning UFS 4.0 could appear in phones as soon as late 2022 or early 2023, end quote. Twitter has begun testing Twitter Circle, a feature for sharing tweets with up to 150 people rather than everybody.

It's similar to Instagram's close friends sharing option. Quoting Mac Rumors. With Twitter Circle, Twitter users can share their tweets with up to 150 people rather than sharing their content publicly. Each user will be able to create a Twitter circle that consists of people who will be able to see the user's Twitter Circle tweets. It's similar to the Close Friends story sharing feature on Instagram, which allows users to select a group of people to share stories with in lieu of publicly sharing stories with all followers. Twitter says that some Twitter users will be able to create a Twitter circle starting today. Those who have the feature available will be able to choose up to 150 followers to add to the Circle after being prompted with the new Circle interface, and only people selected for the user's Twitter Circle Circle will be able to see and reply to Circle tweets. Twitter Circle participants can be edited at any time. There is no word yet on when this feature will see a wider rollout, end quote.

I learned about this feature this morning when friend of the show Nima Oji included me in a circle. I'd share a link to it with you. you, but of course I can't. And that's exactly the point, right? You have to be in NEMA's circle. Meta's AI lab has created open, pre-trained transformer, a language model trained with 175 billion parameters to match GPT3's size, and it's giving it away to researchers for free, quoting Silicon Republic. The social media giant said it is sharing access to both the pre-trained models and the code needed to train and use them. It added that this will allow for, quote, more community engagement in understanding this foundational new technology. Access to the model will be granted to academic researchers, those affiliated with organizations in government, civil society, and academia,

along with industry research laboratories around the world, meta AI said in a blog post yesterday. Large language models are natural language processing or NLP systems that are trained on a massive volume of text. These models are able to answer reading comprehension questions, solve basic math problems, and generate text. Meta said full research access to large language models is usually restricted to a few highly resourced labs, which hinders efforts to increase their robustness and remove issues such as bias and toxicity within the models. For AI research to advance, the broader scientific community must be able to work together with cutting-edge models to effectively explore their potential while also probing for their vulnerabilities

at the same time, the company said. Meta-I believes that collaboration across research organizations is critical to the responsible development of AI technologies, end quote. The social media company said it designed its model called OPT 175B to be energy efficient, and it was trained using roughly 14% of the carbon footprint used to train OpenAI's GPT3 model, end quote. Hey, how about an interesting gadget? Haven't had one of those in a while, I feel like. Razor's new Blade 15 is the first laptop with a 240-hertz OLED display, quoting the verge. The laptop's 15.6 inch display, which covers the entire DCIP3 color gamut, features a quick one- millisecond response that should allow for a lag-free gaming experience as well as 400 nits of brightness. It comes with 32 gigabytes of DDR-5 RAM, a 1-terabyte SSD, and one additional M2 slot that you can use to further increase storage space. You'll also find Thunderbolt 4, USBC, USBA, and HDMI ports on the sides of the laptop, along with, an SD card reader. Razor's 2019 generation of the Blade 15 advanced laptop came with the option for

a 4K OLED panel or a 240-hurtz LCD option. The new Blade 15's display gives you the best of both worlds, a fast refresh rate and an OLED panel, although it isn't 4K. It sports a 12th-gen Intel Core I-9 processor and an Nvidia-R-TX-3070 laptop graphics card that should help you take full advantage of the device's upgraded display. Razor says the Blade 15 will go on sale in the last quarter of 2022 for $3,499, end quote. Or how about an interesting raise, since I feel like we haven't done one of those in a while either. Imogene AI, whose AI tech can help detect cancerous biomarkers directly from a digitized biopsy image has raised a $18.5 million series A from Larry Ellison and others, quoting C-Tech.

Using only a digitized biopsy image, Imogene's AI diagnostic technology delivers real molecular analysis, increasing the level of accuracy and reducing the time required for results from several weeks to just two minutes. Imogene also drives a new approach for a wider scope of treatment response prediction that encapsulates the uniqueness of each patient, bringing cancer care closer to reaching the full potential of precision medicine. Imogene CEO and co-founder Dean Bitan told C-Tech that the connection with Ellison was made through leading researcher Dr. Agus. We understood that the only way to deal with cancer is through precision medicine, said B-10.

Our technology allows the doctor to receive information on a biopsy within a short time and at a low cost, end quote. Ellison, co-founder and chief technology officer of Oracle, and Dr. Agass founded the Institute for Transformative Medicine in 2016 with the mission to spark innovation, leverage technology, and drive interdisciplinary patient-centered research. Imogene's technology classifies patterns that cannot be. seen by the human eye, evolving genomics, proteomics, and spatial insights to better understand the recurrence of specific cancers and the resistance mechanisms. This enables better stratification

of patients in clinical trials and the discovery of novel targets for new drugs, end quote. Finally today, Spotify has debuted Spotify Island on Roblox, the first music streaming brand on that service. Artist and fans can go on quests on the island, unlock content on the island, merchandise on the island and one would assume listen to music quoting tech crunch the new spotify island destination in roblox will actually consist of a central mainland surrounded by a collection of themed islands which players can explore and interact with by walking running jumping and touching and picking up various objects the worlds themselves feature a color palette centered around spotify's shades of green with oranges and purples mixed in there's also a musical playbox

in the top right corner of the world which will feature a soundtrack powered by sound trap, one of Spotify's audio creation tools. The music here can be played or paused or players can skip tracks, the company says. An in-game merch store, meanwhile, will feature a variety of exclusive Spotify merchandise that can be taken into other parts of Roblox, as well as special artist merchandise, which will serve as an additional revenue stream for creators. Spotify says artists will be able to keep Spotify's portion of these merch sales, less Roblox is cut, and Spotify can help with the merch design if need be. Initially, four free items can be unlocked by completing missions around Spotify Island by doing things like

playing sounds within the world's crystal cave and on a trampoline or collecting the musical notes sprinkled throughout the island. Spotify's vision for the island is to turn Roblox players into creators themselves, the company says. At launch, it is doing this by having players create sounds at its virtual beatmaker stations powered by Soundtrap and by moving around a stage area where they can interact with items like a confetti cannon and bubbles, effectively because becoming performers themselves. But in time, the company said it plans to expand on this experience without going into specific detail. Spotify also says the island will continue to evolve with new worlds to explore focused on music and fandoms. The first of these will be K-Park, a custom-built

experience designed as an homage to K-pop culture. The first two artists to activate in the space are Stray Kids and SunMe. The latter will have Roblox merchandise available starting today, while Stray Kids merch will arrive in the weeks ahead. See, this is what I mean about the Metaverse maybe already being here if you squint your eyes and are willing to accept certain limitations. This is the sort of stuff Mark Zuckerberg wants you to do, but while we're waiting the years for him to actually build out something similar, maybe people will start doing things like this now. You know, Bill Gates thought that the information superhighway and information at your fingertips would be the next big thing, but only in the early 2000s when broadband became ubiquitous. The only problem was the web came along, and it was just good enough that people didn't wait for his vision to become a reality. They started going online in the mid-90s, dial-up modems and all.

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