Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 07/10 - The New Switch Lite Drops The... "Switching"

Episode Date: July 10, 2019

The Nintendo Switch Lite is a smaller cheaper Switch that doesn’t “switch,” HBO Max is ready for the streaming thunderdome, is Slack falling behind Microsoft Teams, and an effort to close a funny tax loophole for crypto investors. Sponsors: SVB.com/next Metalab.co Links: Nintendo announces a handheld Nintendo Switch Lite for $199 (TechCrunch) HBO Max will be the exclusive streaming home of 'Friends' (Engadget) BET Streaming Service Taps Netflix Alum as Leader (Exclusive) (The Hollywood Reporter) AT&T says it will automatically block robocalls ‘in the coming months’ (The Verge) Microsoft might crush Slack like Facebook crushed Snapchat (ReCode) Snapchat announces new shows from Serena Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others (TechCrunch) Next on Facebook’s Shopping List: Acquisitions to Beef Up Gaming (The Information) Bill to provide “safe harbor” for crypto fork taxpayers reintroduced in Congress (The Block) Buy a podcast classified ad at ridehome.info/classifieds TODAY'S CLASSIFIED: The Fortnite Challenges Guide is a community dedicated to completing the many challenges revealed in Fortnite Battle Royale each day. Our goal is to document every challenge soon after they are announced. If you play Fortnite, you've likely spent some time completing challenges. Each one is designed to highlight a specific aspect of gameplay or an interesting location on the map. You'll find hidden areas, loot, and strategies you never knew existed. If you're a content creator, come share your own videos showing how you've completed challenges. Let the community learn from your skills and experience. It's a great way to gain exposure to a new audience. This effort was created by a guy who spent the last 20 years of his career making websites for big companies. This small labor of love was built in his spare time, because he wished an organized, clean site like this already existed. Check it out at fortnite.challenges.guide.  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, July 10th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The Nintendo Switch Light is a smaller, cheaper switch that doesn't actually switch. HBO Max is ready for the streaming Thunderdome. Is Slack falling behind Microsoft Teams? An effort to close a funny tax loophole for crypto investors and at the end of this show, our first ever podcast classifieds. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So the rumors were true. Nintendo has announced a new Nintendo Switch console, the Nintendo Switch Light,

that comes in at $200, which is $100 cheaper than the original Switch. It's launching September 20th. And light means light. It's slightly smaller, sporting only a 5.5-inch screen, 720 pixels compared to the 6.2-inch screen on the original. and that's only the beginning of the changes, quoting from TechCrunch. The biggest difference between the Nintendo Switch and the Nintendo Switch Light is that you can't connect the Switch light to a TV. There's no dock or port designed for TV connection.

That's not the only compromise you'll have to make as the JoyCon controllers aren't detachable. You can't put your switch on a table and keep the controllers in your hands, for instance. Of course, you can buy JoyCon controllers or the more traditional Nintendo Switch Pro controller separately. You'll have to find a way to charge your joycon controllers without the switch. The charging grip could do the job, for instance, end quote. So basically, it's a switch, but without the switching functionality, the ability to switch between big screen gaming and mobile gaming. So then what is the point of this, aside from a cheaper starting price point?

Is this just supposed to be a budget switch? or maybe your spare second switch or something like that. Like you could have one for each kid in your family. Quoting Scott Stein from CNET. Is it really a switch? Does that even matter? I play my old Nintendo Switch in handheld mode most of the time. Nintendo's holiday version of the Switch is making a bet that,

for many people, that will be good enough. To be clear, the original Nintendo Switch, which sold 34 million systems globally in the first two years, will stick around alongside the, the switch light at the original $300 price. We believe the two systems will complement each other and coexist in the market, Nintendo of America

President Doug Bowser said in a conversation with CNET, distinguishing the light as a, quote, compact, lightweight dedicated gaming device, end quote. Although, isn't that what the switch was always supposed to be? Stein concluded his hands-on review

by saying this, quote, I could see myself wanting to take the smaller switch on trips while leaving the household switch behind. But then how would I transfer games between systems? Nintendo hasn't made it easy to do that, but there might be a solution coming. Quote, yes, you will have the ability to transfer between devices, your gameplay experiences. More to come on there. But that is the intention, Bowser told me. Could that be the multi-device account solution I've been waiting for? Maybe Nintendo has a plan in place to make it easier to switch switches, end quote. Well, we now know the official name of AT&T

Wernar Media's entrant into the streaming video wars. Wisely, they are trying to leverage the HBO Patina because it will be called HBO Max, and it's scheduled to debut this spring with 10,000 hours of exclusive programming. And as expected, they're leaning on that programming with the keyword exclusive underlined, quoting from Engadget. Most notably, that includes exclusive rights at launch, to every episode of Friends. True to its word, AT&T won't let Netflix and others share its classics.

There are similar on-launch exclusives for Fresh Prince of Bel Air and Pretty Little Liars. You can also expect streaming exclusives for some CW shows, including Batwoman and the Riverdale spin-off, Katie Keene. HBO Max will also have movie exclusives lined up with Reese Witherspoon, at least two romantic comedies, and Greg Berlanti for Young Adult. titles. The service will debut later than originally expected in spring 2020, but should have 10,000 hours of material, including already announced projects like Dennis Villeneuve's Dune the Sisterhood, the Anna Kendrick-led comedy series Love Life, and an animated prequel series for Gremlins, end quote. So it is interesting that Warner will be debuting this after

several of the other competing services will have launched. Might they be a bit behind the eight ball there? And speaking of those other services, you know, I try to track this stuff every day, and yet today I learned about one that even I wasn't aware of. Apparently, a BET Plus will be launching this fall. It's a streaming service that is a joint venture with Tyler Perry, and will feature Perry's library of content. He'll also be producing 75 hours of original content for the service, as well as content from various Viacom brands. I know this because the Hollywood reporter reported that Devin Griffin will be overseeing BET Plus. Griffin is a Netflix alum. In fact, quote, Devin formed and led Netflix's unscripted group, for whom he commissioned more than 40 serieses, including Queer Eye and the Toys That Made Us.

He also worked on scripted drama, comedy, sci-fi, and anime projects at Netflix, including Black Mirror, designated Survivor, Z Nation, and stand-up specials from the likes of Chelsea Peretti, and Wyatt Senac, among others, end quote. AT&T says that it will be turning on call protect, its free service that blocks robocalls for new customers beginning right now, and existing customers will get the service in the coming months. This makes AT&T the first major carrier to automatically block robocalls in the U.S. Just last month, the FCC ruled that carriers can block robocalls for their customers by default.

No need to opt in to any such services. So AT&T is moving swiftly to capitalize on that go-ahead, quoting The Verge. AT&T's call-protect service does three things. It detects and blocks fraudulent calls entirely, flags telemarketers and spam calls as suspected spam, when the phone rings, and allows you to maintain a personal block list to specifically block individual numbers.

The service has been around and available for free for post-paid AT&T customers for a while now, but the catch has been that you'd have to download an app and actively enable it on your account. Now, thanks to that FCC ruling, AT&T can activate it for you, although you can still manually activate it if you already have an AT&T line and don't want to wait. For those who'd rather receive all their calls unfiltered, AT&T will still allow users to opt out of call protect like before. It's only the default behavior that's changing, end quote. So Slack had its successful quasi-IPO,

Seems like everyone we know uses Slack every day, right? So they've won the Enterprise chat game. Well, an ETR survey of 580 CIOs and IT decision makers at large enterprises reveals that 49% of them use currently or plan to adopt Microsoft Teams compared to just 35% for Slack. In case you weren't aware, Microsoft Teams is Microsoft's Slack competitor. As Recode sums up the findings, quote, Slack's market share among the world's largest companies is mostly flat. Adoption rates are declining and a bigger portion of these companies indicate they plan on leaving the service, according to a new survey by market research firm ETR, which asks chief information officers and other leaders at the world's largest organizations where they plan to spend their company's tech budget. Meanwhile, Teams is seeing increased market share, relatively higher adoption rates and low rates of defection,

according to the data, end quote. So why exactly is this happening? Quoting Recode again. Since many companies already have Office 365, which includes business staples like Word, Excel, and OneDrive, in addition to teams, they basically get the workplace communication software for free. Large organizations spent the last three years moving to Azure and to Office 365, Thomas Delvecchio, founder and chief executive officer of ETR parent company, Aptaviti, told Recode, quote, quote, they're going to go with teams unless there's a dramatic difference with price and performance, end quote. Indeed, cost as well as integration with Office 365 tended to be the main reasons ETR survey respondents gave for using Teams over Slack. Slack also has Office 365

integration. The general consensus among respondents was that teams was not as good as Slack, but it had gotten a lot better than it had been and was, for the most part, an acceptable alternative, end quote. Hmm. Where have I seen this playbook before in tech history? Although that, the one I'm thinking of, is not the historical analogy that Recode went for. They titled their piece, Microsoft might crush Slack like Facebook crushed Snapchat, i.e., simply by copying them. All right, how's this for a tortured segue? Here are a couple stories that tie together some themes that we've already spoken about today. How to win in the streaming wars? Warner Media hopes it's exclusive content like friends. And Facebook copied Snapchat. How can Snapchat stand out? Maybe exclusive content for them as well.

Exclusive content like? Well, Snapchat just announced that it's signed some big name celebrities to create exclusive shows on its platform. And by big names, I guess it depends on your age cohort. If you're an old like me, you'll recognize names like Serena Williams, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Kevin Hart. If you're a young, then I guess you'll recognize the names Emma Chamberlain, Lauren Gray, Ricky Thompson, baby Ariel, and Faze Banks, I don't know, see, I'm old. Quoting TechCrunch, Snapchat launched its original content efforts two years ago, and today it's unveiling a new program called Creator Shows. As initially announced in the Hollywood Reporter, these will be first-person shows designed around individual creators. For example, Schwartz and Eager will be providing motivational advice in a show called Rules of Success.

Well, Thompson will weigh in on fashion and lifestyle trends on trend or end. And Gray offers up beauty advice on glow up. The shows will begin airing this month. They're all exclusive to Snapchat, and many of them come from creators who've a substantial following on other platforms. Chamberlain, for example, was just described in the New York Times as, quote, the funniest person on YouTube, end quote. And the second story, the information is reporting that Facebook is looking to buy game studios and sign exclusive deals with game developers so that it can bolster the slate of content available on its Oculus VR platform. Quote, as part of the new effort in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg is personally involved, Facebook has already signed deals for exclusive VR versions of the popular games, Assassin's Creed, and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, one of the people said. Facebook hopes that seeding Oculus with popular game franchises will help attract more people to buy its VR headsets,

which have so far been only moderately successful, and increase the amount of time spent on the social networks platform. The push also suggests Facebook, which is under intense political and regulatory scrutiny, is looking for new areas where it can expand without raising antitrust concerns. Gaming is an industry, the social media giant does not dominate. The size of the investment is also expected to be relatively small, less than $1 billion, although it could grow beyond that figure, end quote. So, number one, a billion dollars is a lot of money to throw around anywhere, not just the gaming space. And number two, wait a minute, Facebook has owned Oculus for how many years now, and it just now occurred to them that for something like this to take off, to become popular, you should probably have some marquee content to get people to consider adopting it.

Like, I know a lot of people think VR is so clearly the future that if you just build it, they will come. But gaming platforms have known forever that you need to launch with marquee content and titles. All of the streaming video platforms seem to know that. Like, on day one after the Oculus acquisition, Facebook should have begun a shopping spree like this then, right? Finally today, an interesting little tidbit from the world of crypto. So you know how crypto projects can have hard forks? If you're holding Bitcoin, say, and a fork happens, then suddenly you wake up one day and you have Bitcoin cash in your account, say, or Bitcoin SV.

And it's kind of magical because you didn't do anything, but suddenly, magically, you have these other coins in your wallet that are theoretically worth something. It's like, presto, someone just gave you extra money out of thin air. But that can also cause a problem because, well, yes, you've just gotten something of value that you didn't pay for or even ask for. What are the tax implications behind that? Turns out they're unclear because, was this a transaction even? Is the forking of a cryptocurrency realizing a gain in some way? Well, Congressman Tom Emmer has reintroduced a bill to clean all this up, quoting the block. The so-called safe harbor for taxpayers with forked assets bill attempts to bring tax clarity around so-called hard forks when a cryptocurrency splits into two new separate blockchains.

The bill was first introduced by Emmer in 2018, where it eventually lost momentum in the U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means. Emmer said he would reintroduce the bill during CoinDesk's consensus conference in May and made comments that the new iteration could differ from the old version. As the name implies, the bill will provide a safe harbor for taxpayers when their assets are forked, meaning they won't have to face penalties if they don't pay taxes on forked assets correctly. Currently, they can be considered undeclared income by tax agencies. Further, it will restrict fines against individuals that attempt to report those assets until the IRS provides any type of guidance regarding the appropriate means of reporting them, per a press release highlighting the original 2018 bill.

The reintroduced bill aims to safeguard crypto users due to a lack of clarity from the IRS and could remedy the situation, according to James Faust, a senior research fellow at Coin Center. It is unfortunate that the IRS's inaction has made this bill necessary, but we're grateful that Representative Emmer is reintroducing the legislation to protect American taxpayers against tax penalties caused by the lack of IRS guidance on these issues, said Faust, end quote. So after I stop pontificating right now, as promised, we're going to be going to be. to hear the first ever podcast classifieds on this show. I think I said last year, I wish I could use this show to somehow provide a platform to do what product hunt does. You know, help launch and promote smaller projects and such. So our first classified ad is just that, a small side project from a listener that hopefully will grow into maybe more than that. If you want to buy a classified ad for your project, for yourself, you can do so by going to

ridehome.com.com. Forward slash classifieds. Link in the show notes. Basically, for $200, you can buy a classified ad read like the one you're about to hear. As I said, I was surprised how eager some of you were to try this out. And again, this is very much a trial. But yeah, if anyone is interested, like I said, some of you reached out about using this to tell the music. and podcast army that you're looking for work, so you could have me read that message and send people to your resume, and some of you were looking to find good folks to hire, so specific job openings might work. Or heck, anything that a classified ad has historically been good for, this might be good for. Maybe you're looking to sell some used hardware or something. Maybe you want

to promote a meetup or a club or an organization or a special deal or something like that. As I said, ridehome. info forward slash classifieds. Why $200? Why not free? Well, because as some of you know in my previous life, I kind of sort of come from the online classifieds industry. And because of that, I know that for these sorts of things to work, you have to have some skin in the game.

If I didn't charge something, then I'd end up just reading a bunch of birthday announcements or something. And hey, if you want to pay for me to read birthday announcements, I will. But $200 seems like a reasonable investment that will help select for serious parties only. It's just enough that it's not peanuts, but also an amount that you could theoretically make back easily by shouting out to our super committed audience of tech folk. And it's a fraction of what we charge for our normal ads, so it's more accessible to more people. But also that means I will be vetting each classified that comes through.

example would be if you want to advertise a specific job opening, fine. But if you're a big company and you want to do what Fidelity Careers did recently and be like, hey, we're hiring, I'll be getting in touch with you and still ask you to buy a normal ad. If you're a small dev with an experimental new app, that's fine. But if you're, I don't know, Atlassian, then you're going to have to go through the normal ad channels. Anyway, as I said, this is a test. If you want to try it out for yourself, right home. info forward slash classifieds and either this will be a one and done sort of test or maybe this will be something we do on a Wednesday every now and then who knows any and all feedback welcome either on the subreddit or on Twitter talk to you tomorrow this is a tech meme right home classified

the fortnight challenges guide is a community dedicated to completing the many challenges revealed in fortnight battle royale each day our goal is to document every day our goal is to document challenge soon after they are announced. If you play Fortnite, you've likely spent some time completing challenges. Each one is designed to highlight a specific aspect of gameplay or an interesting location on the map. With the Fortnite challenges guide, you'll find hidden areas, loot, and strategies you never knew existed. If you're a content creator, come share your own videos showing how you've completed challenges. Let the community learn from your skills and experience. It's a great way to gain exposure to a new audience.

This project was created by a guy who spent the last 20 years of his career making websites for big companies. This is a small labor of love that was built in his spare time because he wished an organized clean site like this already existed. Check it out today at fortnight.comchallenges.com guide. That's fortnight.