Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/21 – Dropbox AI

Starting point is 00:00:00 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, June 21st, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Dropbox joins the AI bandwagon. Lots of news from Twitch. Netflix changes how it calculates its top 10. Mark your calendars for Prime Day. And what all the things Apple didn't demo for their new headset might reveal about the direction in which the product could evolve. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Dropbox is joining the AI bandwagon this morning launching two new AI. tools. One to summarize documents and dash, an ambitious universal search engine that aims to be what they're calling Google for your personal stuff. You know, the summarizing documents thing is sort of

Starting point is 00:01:21 what it says. A lot of people have that. So let's take the second part first. Here's what dash is, according to the verge. Quote, it's a universal search engine that can access your files in Dropbox, but also across the entire web. It's called Dash and comes from Dropbox's 2021 acquisition of a company called CommandE. The idea behind Dash, Dropbox CEO Drew Houston, tells me, is that your stuff isn't all files and folders anymore, and so Dropbox can't be either. What used to be 100 files or icons on your desktop, he says, is now 100 tabs in your browser with your Google Docs and your airtables and figmas and everything else. All the tools are better, but they resist useful organization. Quote, So you're just like, okay, I think someone sent that to me. Was it in an email? Was it Slack? Was it a text? Maybe it was pasted in the Zoom chat during the meeting. Dash aims to be the Google for your personal stuff app that so many others have tried and failed to pull off. The Dash app comes in two parts. There's a desktop app which you can invoke from anywhere with the Command E keyboard shortcut that acts as a universal search for everything on your device and in all your connected apps. If you've ever used an app like Raycast or Alfred as a launcher, Dash will

Starting point is 00:02:31 look very familiar. There's also a browser extension which offers the same search, but also turns your new tab page into a curated list of your stuff. One section of the Dash start page might include the Docs Dropbox thinks you'll need for the meeting starting in five minutes. Another might pull together a bunch of similar documents you've been working on recently into what Dropbox calls a stack. You can also create your own stacks, and as you create files and even browse the internet, Dash will suggest files and links you might add. The term stacks is important, by the way. Dropbox has been a and folders company since it was founded in 2007 and is making a conscious break with that paradigm as it leans into all things AI. There's no real container that can hold a Google Doc and an Excel spreadsheet

Starting point is 00:03:13 and a 10 gig 4K video, Houston says, and the old organizational systems break down even further as the platform begins to learn that all three of those things are about your house renovation project and, hey, there are some other documents about that project too. Could you just call that all a folder? Sure, but the way Dropbox sees it, the concept of folders has so much history that it's getting in the way. Folks are looking for an increased kind of flexibility, said Devin Mancuso, Dropbox director of product design, quote, or when it comes to tabs and apps, they're thinking about grouping and arranging those in slightly different ways. You can have a file in multiple stacks, just to name one example, which doesn't work in a folder's world. Houston and Mancuso

Starting point is 00:03:53 both compare stacks instead to Spotify playlist in that they're a mix of personally created and algorithmically enhanced. Losing the F-word is both a practical design and a philosophical one. When Houston gave me a demo of Dash working on his own account, his new tab page pulled up both a bunch of information about me and The Verge, presumably tied to the calendar event that included us both, and built an automated stack of documents related to the planning offsite he and his executives were in the midst of that week. It's such a basic concept, right? He says, mousing around in his browser. Search that actually works, a collection, for links and files and any kind of cloud content, bringing machine intelligence into the experience,

Starting point is 00:04:33 it's more of a self-organizing Dropbox. Not everyone has to be their own librarian filing things away, end quote. As of today, Dropbox AI is available to all pro customers and a few teams, and there's a wait list to get into the dash beta as well. The next phase for Dropbox, Houston says, is to learn what people want and how they use the products. He says he's happy to be somewhat conservative at first in the name of not making huge mistakes. You really can't have AI hallucinating information out of your most sensitive work docs, but he sees this stuff getting better fast, end quote. A bunch of news from Twitch today.

Starting point is 00:05:12 Twitch plans to require streamers to add new content labels for streams with sexual themes, graphic violence, drug use, gambling, or significant vulgarity, in their words, quoting TechCrunch. The company announced Tuesday that it would introduce a new set of content labels that require streamers to signal when their channels will contain sexual themes, graphic violence, drugs, intoxication, or excessive tobacco use, gambling, or, quote, significant profanity or vulgarity. Those new labels roll out today to all Twitch users. The labels will also display when a streamer is playing a game with a mature ESRB rating, which applies to games intended for players 17 and up. In the case of mature rated games,

Starting point is 00:05:51 that label will be applied automatically. Twitch is careful to emphasize that nothing is changing about its rules defining what is and is not allowed on the platform. Instead, the labels are intended to classify, and sort a range of content that is allowed, but now must be labeled appropriately. The new labels are dynamic and can be added and removed throughout a stream as needed, so if only a short segment of a five-hour live stream contains sexually themed content, e.g., content intended to draw attention to an individual's buttocks, groin, or breasts for a prolonged period of time, that label can be toggled on and then off again for that portion of the stream, end quote. Then, remember when Twitch had to walk back new branded

Starting point is 00:06:32 content guidelines. Well, they also expanded their revenue share at around the same time, but according to Streams charts, Twitch's new Partner Plus program, which offers a 70-30 revenue split, will actually just benefit 1,06 Twitch partners or around 2.5% of the more than 71,000 total Twitch streamers. Reminder, if you need one, that a lot of times these kerfuffles making headlines do so because only headline makers are affected by these changes. Speaking of, from the I know there's money in this industry, but until you see numbers like this, you don't really know how much money file. Felix Langiel, aka XQC, a Twitch streamer who has nearly 12 million followers, recently signed a two-year, $100 million non-exclusive deal to join Australian streaming service kick. $50 million a year and not even exclusive.

Starting point is 00:07:27 Again, a lot of value, a lot of money involved. Netflix has tweaked its weekly top 10 rankings to include views calculated by dividing the total time spent watching a film or a show in a week by its running time, quoting the Hollywood Reporter. The streamer will now sort its top titles by what it's calling views rather than by total viewing time, though that figure will still show up on the weekly list. The view tally comes from dividing the total time spent watching a series or movie in a given week by the running time to arrive at the number of Netflix accounts that watched a series or movie. It doesn't necessarily reflect the total number of people watching, however, as the simple equation doesn't account for multiple people watching something together. It also doesn't factor in repeat viewing of a show or movie by the same account. Netflix says the change, in addition to offering a more easily comprehended number to represent popularity, also helps level the playing field for shows and films with shorter running times.

Starting point is 00:08:26 For the week of June 12th through 18th, for instance, Chris Hemsworth's Action Movie Extraction 2, had 88.4 million hours of viewing time worldwide. Dividing that by its runtime of 124 minutes yields 42.8 million views. On the TV side, season six of Black Mirror led in hours viewed at 58.7 million, but the final season of Never Have I Ever had more accounts watching on average, 50 and a half million versus 11.3 million for Black Mirror, thanks to a slightly shorter running time. Netflix is also tweaking its all-time top 10 list by extending the time frame from 28 to 91 days or four weeks to 13 weeks to better account for long-term popularity and also ordering it by accounts viewed. Squid Game is still the all-time leader for any Netflix title, but Wednesday moves ahead of Stranger Things Season 4

Starting point is 00:09:14 atop the English Language series list based on the longer window and the views metric. Wednesday had 252.1 million views over 13 weeks, 1.72 billion hours divided by a 6-hour, 49-minute running time to 14.7 million views for Stranger Things 4 at 1.84 billion hours divided by a running time of 13 hours and 4 minutes. Season 1 of Squid Game gathered 265.2 million views over its first 13 weeks. The all-time top 10 for English language series as ranked by views over 13 weeks now includes limited series The Queen's Gambit and season one of The Watcher. I think they might mean The Witcher by that, by the way. They displace season 5 of Lucifer and limited series inventing Anna from the 28-day hours viewed list. The view counts for Squid Game

Starting point is 00:10:00 and Wednesday, incidentally, is more than its number of subscribers worldwide, 232.5 million as over the first quarter, demonstrating how repeat viewing can factor into the tallies, end quote. Mark your calendars. Amazon plans to hold Prime Day on July 11th and 12th and introduce an invite-only Prime Day's deals program. Also an Indian version will be held, quote, later this summer. Quoting Geekwire. The company will introduce a new invite-only Prime Day's deals program giving Prime members the ability to request invitations in advance to purchase products that are expected to sell out during the Prime Day event. Members who are selected will be notified during Prime Day with instructions on how to purchase the item at the exclusive deal price, the company said in a

Starting point is 00:10:50 news release announcing its 20203 Prime Day plans. Also for the first time, Prime Day deals will extend to participating third-party sites in the Buy with Prime program. Launch last year, year, Buy with Prime lets Prime members buy items on non-Amazon sites, just as they would on Amazon.com, with benefits including streamlined checkout and free delivery. It's the second straight year that Prime Day will be held on the second Tuesday and Wednesday of July, suggesting that the company is settling into a more predictable pattern after the pandemic threw a wrench into the schedule, end quote. Finally today, the information has a really interesting piece up talking about the things Apple didn't demo at the Big Vision Pro headset reveal. These are

Starting point is 00:11:34 things they say Apple didn't want to demo yet, maybe they're not ready, or areas Apple explored but decided not to go further with, at least at this point. This is all speculative, but it is interesting because these might give us a sense of where Apple wants to go with this product. Quote, one app Apple demonstrated to the public was a meditation experience in which a pulsing ball of leaves eventually expands to envelop the wearer. At one point, though, Apple planned many more fitness and wellness applications for the headset, according to former employees who worked on the device. Some employees discussed collaborations with brands such as Nike for working out with the headset, while others investigated face cushions that were better suited for sweaty,

Starting point is 00:12:15 high-intensity workouts, said one of the people. One proposal even involved wearing and interacting with content on the Vision Pro while on a stationary bike, a former employee said. Apple at one point was also developing a Tai Chi app for the device, which would guide users in the practice, as well as some wellness apps for yoga that included the ability for a headset's downward-facing cameras to measure breathing by observing a user's chest and torso. Former team members said Apple may have hesitated to discuss fitness use cases publicly because the device has a cumbersome external battery pack, and the front-facing glass screen could be too fragile to survive a bump from furniture or a wall. The content for such apps also may simply not be ready. Another experience Apple worked on

Starting point is 00:12:56 dubbed co-presence by the headset team gave people the feeling that they could talk to a friend, who lived far away as though they were standing in the same room. That feature involved tracking a person's body movements and representing their likeness in 3D space. Apple hired people from special effects companies such as Weta FX to assist with co-presence and even plan to include headset cameras for eyebrows to more accurately depict a person's facial expressions according to three people who worked on the device, but those brow cams never made it into the device. Apple announced a less ambitious version of its avatar feature that would show a computer-generated version of the wearer's face while they use the device to make video

Starting point is 00:13:31 calls. One likely issue is that Apple has yet to complete full-body tracking, which it had planned for the device according to multiple people who worked on it. That feature is among the reasons the device has two cameras that point downward and can see the wearer's body in hands. Apple representatives told developers earlier this month that full-body tracking wouldn't be available when the device ships next year, according to screenshots of an Apple-hosted Slack conversation following the Vision Pro launch event. The information reviewed the screenshots. Gaming also appears to have fallen by the wayside. Two people who worked on the headset said Apple's App Storehead, Phil Schiller, pushed for the Vision Pro to have more of an emphasis on games. However, in its announcement early this month, Apple failed to highlight anything novel related to gaming, choosing instead to show how users could play existing 2D games on large screen, as well as another company's game controller. One reason for Apple's decision not to focus on games could be the lack of precision in the devices hand-tracking. In the Apple host's Slack conversation with developers after the event,

Starting point is 00:14:30 and Apple engineer wrote that while hand-tracking was great for performing gestures, providing visual feedback, and some finer interaction tasks, it wasn't the best choice for tasks that required very precise interactions, something that is crucial for gaming. When it came to integrating Macs with the Vision Pro's augmented reality, Apple didn't go as far as it had previously considered. While the presentation showcased the ability for Vision Pro users to create a virtual display for a nearby Mac or MacBook, engineers had explored giving people the ability to drag Mac

Starting point is 00:14:57 apps from that window display into a user's 3D space, essentially running Mac software on the Vision Pro. However, Apple killed this feature early on because the Vision Pro's operating system, Vision OS, wasn't capable enough given that it was based on iOS, which is already a stripped-down version of the Mac operating system. Also missing was any mention of augmented or 3D content from the company's Apple TV Plus programs, something a team known internally as Z50 had been working on for years in Calver City, California, the information previously reported. The content included building virtual dinosaurs based on the Apple TV Plus show Prehistoric Planet, and other content based on the science fiction show for all mankind. A virtual dinosaur without Apple TV Plus branding did appear in a private demo given to

Starting point is 00:15:42 journalists. Those who received that private demo experienced a pre-recorded video in which they were sitting courtside at a professional basketball game in 180-degree stereoscopic 3D. However, Apple didn't show this video to the public. That suggests the ability to stream live sports or other experiences from another headset. Whereas point of view is still a challenge given the current state of internet speeds and the amount of data that must stream to the headset to make the experience feel seamless, end quote. Hey, you know how the ride home fund is an investor in T2, that startup that's building a next generation better Twitter? Well, I have about 10 T2 invites for anyone who wants one. I'm going to do this on a first come, first serve basis,

Starting point is 00:16:30 but also I want to gin up a few reviews of the podcast as well. So the first 10 people to send me a screenshot of a review that they wrote on Apple Podcasts for the show will get an invite. You could do Spotify as well, though I don't remember if Spotify does written reviews or just has that five-star system. But either one counts. Rate and or review the show on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, take a screenshot of it and email it to me at Brian at Techmeme. and I'll send you the invite code. See you soon on T2.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/21 – Dropbox AI

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