Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 05/26 – Amazon To Launch A Rocky Extended Universe?

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

Amazon buys James Bond. Is Valve working on a Nintendo Switch clone? Google’s new campus in San Jose will make the Googleplex look puny. Tesla is dropping radar. The new standard for USB is beefing up power-wise. And is Microsoft moving on from Windows 10 branding? Sponsors: Masterworks.io promocode RIDE Cybereason.com Links: Amazon to buy MGM Studios for $8.45 billion (CNBC) Exclusive: Valve is making a Switch-like portable gaming PC (Ars Technica) Google's San Jose mega-campus wins city approval. Will it change Bay Area development? (San Francisco Chronicle) Tesla is already shipping cars without radar sensors (The Verge) USB-C power upgrade delivers a whopping 240W for gaming laptops and other devices (CNET) Lightrun raises $23M for its debugging and observability platform (TechCrunch) Microsoft support for Linux GUI apps on Windows 10 coming later this year (ZDNet) Microsoft unveils developer-focused Teams, Outlook, and Search updates (VentureBeat) 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, May 26, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon buys James Bond. Is Valve working on a Nintendo Switch clone? Google's new campus in San Jose Jose will make the Googleplex look puny. Tesla is dropping radar. The new standard for USB is beefing up

power-wise. And is Microsoft moving on from Windows 10 branding? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. It's official. Amazon has acquired MGM Studios for 8. $4.45 billion, including debt. It's Amazon's second largest acquisition ever, after Whole Foods, quoting CNBC. Amazon says it hopes to leverage MGM's storied filmmaking history and wide-ranging catalog of 4,000 films and 17,000 TV shows to help bolster Amazon Studios, its film and TV division. The real financial value behind this deal is the treasure trove of IP in the deep catalog that we plan to reimagine and develop to. together with MGM's talented team, said Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and

Amazon Studios, quote, it's very exciting and provides so many opportunities for high quality storytelling, end quote. TLDR, we now have James Bond for a series already notorious for prominent product placement. The Mind Reels when considering all the various products that Bond might be sporting in future movies. What's this all about, though? Quoting the great Peter Kafka in Recode. The media world is consolidating, and there aren't many targets left for a would-be acquireer. Amazon has spent many billions on video without much to show for it, and thinks owning a studio, and crucially the rights to the intellectual property the studio owns, could help it create

really big movies and TV shows you really want to watch. Not so much because it wants to own streaming, but because it wants you to keep coming to Amazon. MGM, meanwhile, has been trying to sell itself for years. And the way regulators respond to this will be fascinating. Amazon will claim that it's too small in video for this to pose a competitive threat. On the other hand, Amazon is already in regulators crosshairs. In theory, that's for running a marketplace and selling its own items in the same marketplace, but really just for being so big. So this is akin to waving a red flag in front of the likes of Senator Amy Klobuchar and daring her to charge. Amazon doesn't want to compete with Netflix or the other biggies for watchtime and subscriber dollars. It's just wants you to watch some video and then spend some money. Amazon doesn't want to dominate Hollywood. It just wants a toehold. But even that toll hold has been hard to get, and Bezos has been adamant for a while that the way to get it isn't via niche shows like Transparent anymore. It's by buying or making big blockbusters that lots of people will watch. That explains the Lord

of the Rings and the NFL, and that explains MGM. It gives Amazon one giant movie brand everyone has heard of and still wants to watch James Bond, and then a bunch of other stuff that could turn into something maybe one day. MGM owns the rights to the Rocky franchise, for instance, which has already turned into multiple movies, but maybe there's a way to do a Rocky extended universe. What the hell is a Rocky extended universe? No one knows yet, but that's been the conventional wisdom in Hollywood for the last few years. No one knew you would want to watch movies about the Gardens of the Galaxy or a TV show about Wanda Maximoff and Vision, but now that Disney owns Marvel, it has been mining the company's store of obscure superheroes

and turning them into giant popular spectacles. That's the playbook, end quote. Sources say Valve is making a switch-like portable gaming PC that could launch by the end of the year, quoting Ars Technica. Multiple sources familiar with the matter have confirmed that the hardware has been in development for some time, and this week, valve itself pointed to the device by slipping new hardware-related code into the latest version of Steam, the company's popular PC gaming storefront and ecosystem. On Tuesday, SteamDB operator Pavel Jundick spotted the change in Steam's code, which pointed to a new device named Steam Powell. The name is a derivative of a previously discovered code

term Neptune, which began appearing in September of last year and came with a Neptune-optimized games string. At the time, curious codecrawlers thought this discovery referred to some type of controller. Technically, that's true. The SteamPal, whose name we're putting in scare quotes because we do not have confirmation of the device's final name, is an all-in-one PC with gamepad controls and a touchscreen. In other words, it looks and functions like a Nintendo Switch, albeit without removable JoyCon controller functionality, end quote. So I personally do find Switch-like gaming as a category super interesting in which there were more options that had the flexibility that the switch has. Apparently a bunch of folks are experimenting with this right now, but I'm not super

familiar with the gaming space. So from what I've been reading, folks are super skeptical that Steam actually has the attention span to follow through on something like this. Quoting David Lindsay Pittman. Curious. On the one hand, it's the logical conclusion of the Steam machine, SteamOS, steam controller experiment. On the other hand, steam machines were a dud. They discontinued the steam controller and Steam OS is extremely out of date. So, uh, yeah, something, something, this is where my 30% is going. And Pat stares at tweeted, quote, I give it two delays before it comes out. It never hits widespread retail due to its digital nature, and then it gets quietly canceled 18 months later, end quote. The city of San Jose has approved Google's plans for a downtown campus,

with millions of square feet of office space, as well as retail space, and 4,000 new homes, as well as 15 acres of parks. As the San Francisco Chronicle asks, will this usher in a new era of Bay Area Development? Quoting the Chronicle, the project creates the future of San Jose that I want to live in. San Jose Mayor Sam Laccardo said at a Tuesday City Council meeting, especially after overcoming, quote, tremendous mistrust of government and suspicion of big tech. End quote. With the vote on Tuesday, Google can move forward with an 80-acre development plan near San Jose's Central Rail Hub at Diradon Station, including 4,000 new homes, more than 7 million square feet of office space,

15 acres of parks, and 500,000 square feet of retail and other space. Under a community benefit deal approved earlier this year, the company also agreed to create a $155 million community stabilization fund for job training, homelessness, and affordable housing. This is on-pourable. for a Bay Area Tech campus and a stark contrast to tech peers like Amazon and Tesla, which have at times asked governments to compete for business by cutting costs, as well as developers from other industries where community concessions are not the norm. Alexa Arena, director of Google's San Jose Development Plan, called the project a, quote, social infrastructure plan rather than a standard office plan slated to include more than $1 billion in total public investment. This is about

the long haul, Arena said at the meeting on Tuesday. We are not a developer that is coming in for five years. The precedent is incredibly important, said Alex Schor, Executive Director of Public Policy Advocacy Group Catalyze SV. Quote, our hope is that Google is the first best example of the future of Silicon Valley workplaces, end quote. While the majority of the hundreds of public comments before and during Tuesday's City Council meeting were supportive of the Google Project, the plan attracted late

skepticism from fans of professional hockey's San Jose Sharks, concerned about parking, Homeless advocates also criticize potential ripple effects for the local housing market. Quote, We kind of hate to interrupt all the victory laps, but we continue to oppose this project, said Sandy Perry, president of the Affordable Housing Network of Santa Clara County, who noted that homelessness has increased by double digits in recent years as property values climb. For this amount of misery to continue to exist in our city with this amount of wealth is unacceptable, end quote.

A Google spokesman said the company will soon transfer land to the city for planned affordable housing development. It aims to start construction work in 2022 and plans to transfer an initial $3 million to the city within 30 days of approval of the project, the spokesman said. In the meantime, the San Jose City Council will be tasked with appointing a new committee to oversee the $155 million community fund, end quote. Tesla says deliveries of Model 3 and Model Y vehicles in North America will no longer be equipped with radar for autopilot, instead relying on a camera, based system entirely. Quoting the Verge. Tesla has been developing the vision-based version of autopilot during the limited beta test of its full self-driving software, but it's not completely

done making sure autopilot works without the radar sensor, as it is limiting or disabling some features on these vehicles for an indefinite amount of time. Auto-steer, the autopilot feature that can keep a Tesla centered in a lane, even around curves, will only be usable at 75 miles an hour and below. Tesla is also only making it available at an unspecified longer minimum following distance to any cars in front. Tesla is not currently removing the radar sensors from its more expensive models, the Model S sedan or Model X SUV. The company says it is initially focusing on making the Model 3 and Model Y reliant on the exclusively vision-based system because it sells far more of them. Quote, transitioning them to Tesla Vision first allows us to

analyze a large volume of real-world data in a short amount of time, which ultimately speeds up the rollout of features based on Tesla Vision, the company writes. Radar sensors are common in many modern passenger cars, trucks, and SUVs. They're used to help detect fast-approaching objects, even in poor visibility, and are one of the sensors that power safety features like automatic emergency braking. While modern cars also pull data from other sensors, including cameras, to power these features, automakers like to have multiple types to make sure there's redundant If one type of sensor fails or can't perform a certain situation, there's always a backup.

Elon Musk has somewhat famously spent years saying he didn't think laser-based LIDAR systems were necessary to develop semi-and-fully autonomous vehicles, but he recently started talking a lot more about switching Tesla to a vision-based system that mainly relied on the eight cameras embedded in each car and 12 ultrasonic sensors, as well as a neural network processing of the real-time feeds they generate. In April, the company wrote in a press release that, that, quote, a vision-only system is ultimately all that is needed for full autonomy, end quote. The USB standards body has unveiled its USBC 2.1 revision, which will support power up to 240 watts, an increase from the 100 watts currently supported by the USBC standard.

This is aimed at devices like 4K displays and gaming laptops, quoting CNET. The USB Implementers Forum, USBIF, the industry group that develops the technology, revealed the new power levels in the version 2.1 update to its USB Type C specification on Tuesday. The new 240 watt option is called extended power range or EPR. Cables supporting 240 watts will have additional requirements to accommodate the new levels, and USBIF will require the cables to bear specific icons, quote, so that end users will be able to confirm visually that the cable supports up to 240 watts, end quote. A capacity of 240 watts is enough to run larger monitors,

printers, gaming laptops, and other devices. Dell's ultra-sharp 32-inch 4K monitor has a peak power usage of 230 watts, for example, the same level as HP's 17-inch Omen gaming laptop, end quote. As I said, Ride Home Plus subscribers, you're going to get that promised second interesting raises episode this month, this weekend. But I wanted to share this interesting raise with everybody, because if you're a developer, this is news you can probably use. Lightrun is a startup that apparently helps developers debug their live production code from within their IDs,

and it's raised a $23 million Series A led by Insight Partners, quoting TechCrunch. What makes Light Run stand out in a sea of monitoring startups is its focus on developers, more so than IT teams, and its ability to help developers debug their production code right from their IDs. With a few keystrokes, they can also instrument the code for monitoring, but the key here is that Light Run offers what the company calls an ops-free process that puts the developers in control. This shift-left approach moves the application monitoring process away from ops-centric tools like Splunk and New Relic and instead puts them right into the workspaces with which developers are already familiar. The observability market has been very oriented towards

IT operators. When an IT operator gets that dreaded page that a service is down, they see health metrics on running instances on servers and have a variety of failover methods and ways to restore service health. Light Run co-founder and CEO Ilan Pelig explained, and they do this all natively on the same interfaces that they use every day for systems management. But when a developer gets that dreaded notification that there's a bug, it's like the early stages of a crime scene investigation that has no suspects and usually only minor clues, end quote. Currently, the service only supports Java and IntelliJ development environments, but the team plans to expand its language and platform coverage by adding support for Python and Node.js as well as additional IDs. The company recently

launched a free community edition of its service and introduced a set of new integrations with services like Datadog, IntelliJ idea, Logs I.O., Prometheus, Slack, and StatsD. Some of Lightrun's current customers include Tabula, Sysense, and Toofin, end quote. Finally, to as promised, here is all the news from the kickoff of Microsoft's Build Conference yesterday. A couple of odds and ends at the beginning here. Microsoft said the next Windows 10 release will include support for Linux GUI apps, quoting ZDNet. This capability is meant to allow developers to run their preferred Linux tools, utilities, and apps directly on Windows 10.

With GUI app support, users can now run GUI apps for testing, development, and daily use without having to set up a virtual machine, end quote. Next, I didn't cover it, but a few weeks ago, Microsoft announced it was shutting down its Azure blockchain, its crypto development product, but that's apparently because they are debuting Azure Confidential Ledger, which they say helps with security and scalability for blockchain projects. Also, remember us discussing how these large language models are increasingly used by everybody, suddenly everywhere? Well, Microsoft is, of course, a prominent investor in OpenAI, and yesterday the company says it is now using GPT3 models in its low-code power apps service to translate natural language text into code. The big news, though, was that Microsoft debuted Microsoft 365 updates, including tools for developers to integrate deeper into teams, graph updates, and Outlook message extensions on the web, quoting Venture Beat.

During its Build Developer Conference, the company took the Rapsoft enhancements to Microsoft Graph, Microsoft Search Federation, and Organization Explorer, as well as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and Fluid Components. Launched last year, Teams apps for meetings. Make it easier to build apps that let people solve goals and design challenges together. Now Microsoft is introducing features designed to help developers build more unique scenarios, including shared stage integration, new meeting event APIs, together mode, and media APIs with resource-specific content. On the Microsoft Outlook side, Microsoft announced that message extensions are now supported in Outlook on the web, providing a unified development experience that works with both Teams and Outlook. When users write

a message, they'll be able to select a new menu of search-based message extensions to choose from, for example, an extension that surfaces tasks from a project management teams app. Beyond Outlook and Teams updates, Microsoft made enhancements to its Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Search services. Microsoft Graph Data Connect, a high-throughput connector designed to copy Microsoft 365 datasets into the Azure tenant, is now offered on Microsoft Azure as a metered service so developers pay only for the data they consume. And updates are arriving in Microsoft Graph Connectors, which let organizations index third-party data, so it appears in internal search results, allowing information from sources outside Microsoft 365 to be available through Microsoft search results. Microsoft also said Microsoft Search Federation, which creates a unified search experience across Microsoft Azure Cognitive Search and Dynamics 365, connecting systems like Microsoft Search and Azure Cognitive Search, will be generally available later this year.

Beyond this, the company introduced Organization Explorer, an embedded app coming to Outlook that can help discover team relationships in an organization, and Microsoft says it can help employees explore colleagues and teams and identify skills to help them complete their work. And finally, Satcha Nadella teased a, quote, next generation of Windows, which would be announced, quote, very soon. The revamped Windows will likely have big UI changes, a new store, and more, quoting Tom Warren in the Verge. This will likely include some significant changes to the Windows store, allowing developers to submit any Windows application, including browsers like Chrome or Firefox. Rumors have suggested Microsoft may even allow third-party commerce platforms in apps, so developers could avoid Microsoft. Microsoft's own 15% cut on apps and 12% cut on games. Nadella's specific mention of a next generation of Windows is interesting, too. Microsoft typically refers to everything as Windows 10,

and this language could suggest the company is preparing a more significant shift with Windows branding than just the user interface alone, end quote. Tonight, 9 p.m. Eastern, a Twitter space. Chris and I will be talking to Julia Alexander about all of the recent streaming wars news, and there's been quite a bit of it, if you'll notice. That will be the first half hour. Chris and I haven't yet talked about what the other topics are that we might cover tonight. So if you have an idea of something to bring up, tweet at us, then show up and raise your hand.

See you then and talk to you tomorrow.