Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/10 - Andy Rubin Can't Quit Smartphones

Episode Date: October 10, 2018

Windows needed a do-over, Snapchat hopes its Originals will give it one too, Minecraft abandons Apple TV, and Andy Rubin can’t quit smartphones.  Links: Microsoft begins re-releasing Windows 10 October update after fixing file deletion bug (The Verge) Snapchat becomes the mobile HBO with 12 daily scripted Original shows (TechCrunch) Snap Is ‘Quickly Running Out of Money,’ Analyst Says (Bloomberg) Google Photos adds automated sharing through ‘Live Albums,’ which can stream to Home Hub (TechCrunch) Apple's dream of making the Apple TV a gaming console just took a major hit (Business Insider) A China Veggie-Selling App May Be Worth $7 billion (Bloomberg) Android Creator Is Building an AI Phone That Texts People for You (Bloomberg) AT&T will launch a Netflix rival next year (CNBC) Where the next 10 million miles will take us (Waymo) 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, October 10th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Windows needed a do-over.

Snapchat hopes its originals will give it one as well. Minecraft abandons Apple TV, and Andy Rubin just can't quit smartphones. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I missed covering this due to the two chock-full of news days we've recently had, but over the weekend, Microsoft briefly pulled the... release of that Windows 10 October 2018 update because some users were complaining that their documents were suddenly being deleted. Well, Microsoft is re-releasing the update, but only to Windows insiders. Microsoft wants to make sure this will be fully fixed before rolling out again to everybody.

Microsoft's John Cable told the verge, quote, we have fully investigated all reports of data loss, identified and fixed all known issues in the update, and conducted internal validation. We will carefully study the results, feedback, and diagnostic data from our insiders before taking additional steps towards re-releasing more broadly, end quote. Files spontaneously disappearing seems to be a fairly big issue for an OS release to not have ironed out before shipping. Not sure how that could have been missed. The Verge did some digging, and apparently that same Windows Insiders community did flag some of these very issues before the release, but Microsoft said they didn't have the proper tools for users to flag the severity of bugs when reporting them.

Quote, we have added an ability for users to also provide an indication of impact and severity when filing user-initiated feedback. Cable told the Verge, we expect this will allow us to better monitor the most important issues even when feedback volume is low, end quote. Yeah, I kind of think that that's the way that sort of thing is supposed to work, right? In that leaked memo from Snap founder Evan Spiegel we spoke about a few days ago, one of the things he promised to double down on was original content produced for Snapchat's Discover section. So in its ongoing efforts to write its ship and keep users engaged with the platform, Snapchat today launched Snap Originals, 12 daily scripted original shows for the Discover section,

with each episode lasting four or five minutes. The shows are being produced by top producers of TV content like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Friday Night Lights. Reaction lenses will allow users to easily post about the shows, and there's something called show portal lenses that will allow users to post a virtual door they can walk through to explore a scene from a given show. Not sure I understand what that means, but apparently it's a tool that will help the show go viral. Quoting TechCrunch's Josh Constine,

Time spent watching shows on Snapchat has tripled this year alone, SNAP's VP of original content, Sean Mills, tells me. The stats on SNAP's previous 60 shows from CBS Viacom, the NFL, and others since the project launched two years ago made it clear there was an opportunity to double down, especially as original mobile programming efforts like Facebook Watch and Instagram's IGTV have stumbled. NBC News's twice daily show, stay tuned, has doubled viewership in the past year to 5 million unique viewers per day, over half of which watch at least three days. per week, while SportsCenters show reaches 17 million monthly viewers, end quote. These new shows will be monetized via two or three-second commercials, which can't be skipped. Some of the shows are funded by the production studio partners, but some are funded by Snapchat itself.

Constine himself has written before that one of Snap's possible Hail Mary plays would be to position itself as a sort of HBO for smartphones. So clearly they're hoping one of these shows magically becomes a runaway hit a la Game of Thrones maybe, or maybe not, because Snap doesn't have the money to invest in something that grandiose. More on that in a second. As Constine put it today, quote, Snap is in the Sex and the City pre-Sopranos stage of turning into the mobile box office, or it's like a modern Netflix funding lots of experiments, but that's yet to find its house of cards. end quote. I mentioned the SNAP money issue because yesterday a Wall Street analyst made some waves by issuing a research report that said SNAP, quote, is quickly running out of money,

end quote, and may need to raise capital by the middle of next year. Analyst Michael Nathanson wrote, quote, we do not see SNAP reaching profitability in the near future unless there are substantial expense reductions. In 2019, SNAP will have to make some moves to ensure it has the liquidity to stay in business, end quote. At the time of this recording, Snap this morning had hit a 52-week low on its stock price at $6.74. Snap's stock is down 58% from its initial public offering in March of 2017. One little detail that I didn't get to mention yesterday about the Google event,

let's say you get one of those new home hubs. You can use it as a photo album, remember? Pulls the photos right from your Google Photos stream. But wait, would that even be a good idea? I mean, shouldn't I have to create a photo album or something first? Otherwise, it would just be showing those three blurry photos I took last night and didn't delete and maybe a screenshot of a receipt from last night's seamless order? Well, no, because Google has also launched a service called Live Albums,

which uses AI to automate the sharing of photos both to groups of people, and on things like the Home Hub. Here's how TechCrunch describes it, quote. In practice, it means that you wouldn't have to manually share photos with certain people ever again. You can just set up a live album once and then allow the automation to take over. For example, the feature could be used to share photos of your children with your extended family instead of just a spouse. You could also specify certain close friends who would always receive the photos you took together, end quote. And during the demo of the Home Hub yesterday, Google bragged that,

that the photos that pop up on this new device will, quote, never get stale because live albums update automatically every time you take any pictures, end quote. In other words, the AI will know to leave out those blurry photos, the photos where no one is looking at the camera, those screenshots of last night's receipts. Microsoft has announced it is discontinuing support for the Apple TV version of Minecraft

and what has to be a serious blow for Apple's push into gaming via the Apple TV device. Microsoft's reason for the move? There were simply no players. Quoting from Business Insider, we need to reallocate resources to the platforms that our players use the most, a pop-up state when you launch the game on Apple TV.

It's a dire statement about gaming on the Apple TV. Minecraft on Apple TV was introduced to much fanfare under two years ago. It was played by so few people that Microsoft, which owns and produces Minecraft, discontinued support as of September 24th, end quote. So that's telling in and of itself. Note that this discontinuation happened a week ago and no one noticed. I guess that really is an indication no one was using it.

If you're one of the apparently few people who was playing Minecraft on the Apple TV, it will still continue functioning for at least the time being. But if that makes you nervous, and if you made any marketplace or other in-game purchases over the the last 90 days, Apple is offering a refund through Apple. As web developer Brian Perry tweeted, If you can't sustain Minecraft on your platform, you probably aren't a gaming platform.

Here's an absolutely fascinating startup that I'd never heard of until now. Mi Kai is a company that has raised what is reportedly the largest round so far this year for a Chinese startup. It just raised $800 million from Hillhouse Capital and Tiger Global, among others, at a $7 billion valuation. That beats the $2.8 billion valuation from its previous round in January of just this year. What Mekai is, is an online marketplace that lets restaurants across China source vegetables from farmers. Here's how Bloomberg describes it.

Mekai, which means beautiful vegetable, was founded in 2014 by Liu Chown-Jun, a rocket scientist who set a goal of sourcing, produce for about 10 million small and medium-sized restaurants in China. Using a smartphone app, customers can order specialties such as bok choy and Chezhuan peppercorns directly from farmers, disrupting traditional wholesaling by cutting out middlemen. As of the end of last year, Miki served close to 100 cities and revenue had surpassed 10 billion yuan, end quote. So this is either an example of developing markets using 21st century technology to create 20th century infrastructure systems, or else it's a sign of frothiness in the valuation of

Chinese startups generally, as Jason Lemkin tweeted, my limited partners laugh at my markups when they compare to their China funds. You can't keep Andy Rubin down. The man has a vision for mobile computing, and seemingly that vision still has not been fulfilled, so he ain't stopping. The Android creator is said to be hard at work on what he hopes. will be another smartphone revolution. After what can be generously described as disappointing sales of the Essential phone,

Rubin's startup, Essential Products, is putting everything aside to focus on a new phone that, quoting Mark Gurman here, will try to mimic the user and automatically respond to messages on their behalf. Apparently, Essential was working on a home speaker and a completely different smartphone, but that is all being put on the back burner for this new, phone concept that, again, I'm going to let Mark German describe, quote. The design of the new mobile device isn't like a standard smartphone. It would have a small screen and require users to interact mainly using voice commands in concert with Essential's

artificial intelligence software. The idea is for the product to book appointments or respond to emails and text messages on its own, according to people familiar with the plans. Users would also be able to make phone calls from the planned device. If all this sounds a bit like the sci-fi movie her, that's sort of by design. Rubin would like to capture people's imagination with a product that's truly different from alternatives, end quote. So I guess a phone that can text people for you. In a separate interview with Bloomberg last year, Ruben seemed to hint at some sort of a similar concept saying, quote, if I can get to the point where your phone is a virtual version of you, you can be off enjoying your life, having that dinner, without

touching your phone, and you can trust your phone to do things on your behalf. I think I can solve part of the addictive behavior, end quote. So there are some obvious technical hurdles to overcome here, of course. If you're honest with yourself, Siri, Google Assistant at all, aren't really useful to the degree that Rubin just described. And if we're being super, super honest, they're not even close. But Essential does have 300 million in funding to play with, which, as German notes, makes it the most ambitious consumer electronics startup in years. Finally today, two quick check-ins on beats that you know I like to cover. First, the streaming wars.

You had to see that this was coming because why did AT&T want to buy them in the first place other than to create a streaming service to rival Netflix? But Warner Media, parent division of HBO and now owned by AT&T, announced today that it will be launching a streaming service to rival Netflix. sometime in Q4 of next year. HBO will apparently be the, quote, lead brand in the new service. Warner Media CEO John Stanky was on stage at the Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit just a few hours ago, and he said, quote, around HBO will come a great library of additional content from not only the Warner Media properties,

but also some selective third-party license content. And the driver behind this is really straightforward. We know there's customers who love to engage with our content. We've got a great history of building it, much of which they can't get in one place, end quote. And Waymo announced that its driverless cars have now driven 10 million miles on public roads, up from 5 million miles driven just eight months ago. In a blog post celebrating the milestone, Waymo CEO John Craftick wrote, quote, today our vehicles are fully self-driving around the clock in a territory within the

Metro Phoenix area. Now we're working to master even more driving capabilities so our vehicles can drive even more places, end quote. Waymo still says that it plans to launch a fully autonomous taxi service in Phoenix later this year. So maybe that's my real yardstick for if driverless cars are really going to be on our road by 2020 challenge. And don't forget, Waymo ordered 62,000 Fiat Chrysler minivans in May in order to gear up for a taxi service. So again, for all my skepticism around this space, I'm happy to be proven wrong. Happy to be proven wrong. By the by, I think we might have an answer to the mystery of why subscribers coming from Google Play have gone all parabolic lately. Listener Alex Keskinev got in touch over Twitter to tell me that

apparently a lot of podcast apps in the Android or Google App Store have either gotten shut down lately or are suddenly chock full of inserted ads. So users like him have been pushed to the stock Google Podcasts app or are switching over out of frustration. So yeah, that seems like that would do it. Well, if you're one such listener, thanks for staying loyal and resubscribing to this pod, even if you have to jump ship on your podcast platform. Much appreciated.

Talk to you all tomorrow.