Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/20 – Facebook To Change Its Name?

Episode Date: October 20, 2021

Dropping the “the” from The Facebook isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Dropping Facebook as a name entirely. All the news from today’s Samsung event. Spotify and Shopify finally team up in the greatest crossover event of tech naming confusion. And a first look at that Comcast branded smart TV. Sponsors: HeyLaika.com/techmeme Kiwico.com promocode ride Links: Facebook is planning to rebrand the company with a new name (The Verge) Galaxy Watch 4 gets its first major update w/ Fall Detection, new watchfaces, more (9to5Google) First Bitcoin Futures ETF Rises in Trading Debut (WSJ) Facebook Fined $69 Million by U.K. Authority for Breaching Order During Giphy Merger Investigation (Variety) Brave Removes Google as its Default Search Engine (Thurrott.com) Spotify Adds Virtual Merch Tables for Music Artists in Pact With Shopify (Variety) Comcast Launches XClass TV, Its First TV Sets in the U.S., Taking Streaming Platform Direct-to-Consumer (Variety) 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 20th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Dropping the the from the Facebook isn't cool. You know what is cool? Dropping Facebook as a name entirely. All the news from today's Samsung event.

Spotify and Shopify finally team up in the greatest crossover event of tech naming confusion history. And a first look at that Comcast branded Smart TV. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So we'll get to that Samsung event in just a second. but last night, Alex Heath was reporting that Facebook is planning to change its company name to reflect its new focus on the metaverse, and the name chains might come as soon as next week at Facebook Connect, its annual ARVR conference, quoting from Alex's reporting on The Verge. The rebrand would likely position the blue Facebook app as one of many products under a parent company overseeing groups like Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, and more.

A spokesperson for Facebook declined to comment for this story. Facebook already has more than 10,000 employees building consumer hardware like AR glasses that Zuckerberg believes will eventually be as ubiquitous as smartphones. In July, he told The Verge that over the next several years, quote, we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company, end quote. A rebrand could also serve to further separate the futuristic work Zuckerberg is focused on from the intense screen. scrutiny, Facebook is currently under for the way its social platform operates today. A former employee-turned whistleblower Francis Hogan recently leaked a trove of damning internal documents to the Wall Street Journal and testified about them before Congress.

Antitrust regulators in the U.S. and elsewhere are trying to break the company up, and public trust in how Facebook does business is falling. Facebook isn't the first well-known tech company to change its company name as its ambitions expand. In 2015, Google reorganized entirely under a holding company called Alphabet. partly to signal that it was no longer just a search engine, but a sprawling conglomerate with companies making driverless cars and health tech. And Snapchat, rebranded to Snap Inc. in 2016, the same year it started calling itself a camera company and debuted its first pair of spectacles, camera glasses, end quote. I think we're going to discuss this in depth in our bonus episode this weekend, but is changing your name something that you do when things are totally going smoothly for your company? also a bit of behind the scenes for you here. The rumor going around among tech journalists is that

the embargo on news of what the name change is going to be is set for Monday since Facebook reports earnings on Monday. But also, there have been rumors all week that there is a huge new trove of leaked Facebook internal documents that a whole bunch of news organizations have gotten access to and they're going to start reporting on that next week. So maybe Facebook will time the name change for whenever that starts to leak out. And also, of course, this news unleashed just, you know, all the tweets, as you can imagine. Jeff Morris Jr. tweeted, Facebook and Kanye, announcing they're renaming themselves on the same day, has to be the end of Web 2. Katie Harbath tweeted, wait, is this what caused the config change problems?

And then there was just the endless speculation about what the possible new name could be. Here's just a sampling of suggestions I saw overnight on Twitter. How about Snapchat? They copy everything else, right? also saw smoking these meats. It's a brisket, the League of Shadows, Visage Garage, Friendster Plus, Facebook Zero, Trunk, Quickster, Quibi, Zuckbook, just Face, MetaBook, Privacy.com, face-off, like the movie, Zucculus, and my personal favorite, that thing your mom loves. Shout out to Paul Rudnick for that one. but of course I bet it's going to actually end up being something anodyne and cringy, probably something like Together or We.

We is available again, right? No offense to them, but the Samsung event today was kind of not much. I mean, they did say it was unpacked part two. But basically the main things that were announced were a Galaxy Z-Flip bespoke edition, which basically allows you to customize the color. for the outside of the device. There are 49 possible combinations of colors, and I'll admit they look tasty as hell, but again, it's just new colors. The bigger news was that the Galaxy Watch 4 got its first major update with fall detection, new watch faces, gesture controls, and more rolling out in the U.S. and South Korea starting today. Quoting 9 to 5 Google.

The fall detection safety feature was supported on the Galaxy Watch 3, but was lost in the switchover to wear OS. New this time around is that the Galaxy Watch 4 can detect whether you've fallen not just during exercise but also when standing still, which obviously makes the feature much more valuable to older users especially. To get that, though, you'll need to manually turn up the sensitivity, but in either case, the feature will allow users to send out an SOS to up to four pre-selected contacts. Samsung tells 9-to-5 Google that fall detection works even if you're not paired to a Samsung phone. Further, Samsung is adding a new gesture control to the... the Galaxy Watch 4, a knock-knock wrist motion can be customized to open an app, start a workout,

or use other features without touching the display. This next update also expands Samsung's watch face collection. Four new watch faces are being added with the info-heavy basic dashboard and info-brick, and Samsung is also adding a weather center watch face. There's also a new live wallpaper watch face that has wallpaper similar to what's on the Galaxy Z-Fold 3 and Flip 3. The My Photo Plus watch face is also being updated to support looped videos and jiffs and the animals watch faces getting complications around the circumference. Rounding out the new watch faces, the Steps Challenge face is adding new animations, end quote. Okay, I know I said before that I'd never mentioned Bitcoin's price again until it either hit $10,000 or $100,000, but I can't tell you about

this next story without mentioning that Bitcoin set a new all-time high today, surpassing 65, $5,607 a coin. And the news is that it is likely due to that pro-shares Bitcoin Strategy ETF, which debuted yesterday and rose nearly 5% in trading. In fact, the ETF had quite the debut, quoting from the Wall Street Journal. About $981 million worth of shares changed hands over the session, making it the second most highly traded ETF debut ever, according to Elizabeth Cashner, director of ETF research at FACT Set. The launch is being closely watched on Wall Street, where finding a way to sell securities linked to Bitcoin has been a priority for many firms. Bethesda-Maryland-based ProShairs rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange on Tuesday

to celebrate the launch of its ETF, which goes by the ticker BITO, and holds Bitcoin futures contracts rather than the cryptocurrency. There are a multitude of investors who have brokerage accounts and are comfortable buying stocks in ETFs, said ProShare's chief executive Michael Sapier in an interview. We think this will appeal to them, end quote. Thomas Lee, a managing partner at research firm Fund Stratt Advisors, said the ProShare's ETF will enable more individuals to invest in Bitcoin. He said assets in the fund could rise to as much as 50 billion from the 20 million the funds started with on Tuesday. This will drive higher asset prices via network effects, Mr. Lee said. He said Bitcoin could rise to $168,000 from a recent $64,000, end quote.

One more bit of Facebook news real quick. The United Kingdom's Competition and Markets Authority has fined Facebook 50 million and a half pounds for breaching an order imposed during its ongoing Jiffy acquisition investigation, saying Facebook refused to report information, quoting from variety. The previously completed merger of Facebook and Giffy, the largest provider of JIFs and meme sharing services, ran into a potential roadblock from the CMA earlier this year. The CMA provisionally found that the merger would negatively impact competition between social media platforms, something that Facebook disagrees with. Facebook is required, as part of the process, to provide the CMA with regular updates outlining its compliance with the IEO. Facebook, quote, significantly limited the scope of those updates despite repeated warnings from the CMA, the authority said.

This is the first time a company has been found by the CMA to have breached an IEO by consciously refusing to report all the required information, the CMA said. Given the multiple warnings it gave Facebook, the CMA considers that Facebook's failure to comply was deliberate. As a result, the CMA has issued a fine of 50 million pounds for this major breach, which fundamentally undermined its ability to prevent, monitor, and put right, any issues, end quote. If that was all too legalistic sounding, the information's Mark DeStefano summed it up succinctly by tweeting, quote, Facebook has been fined 50 million pounds for, well, it seems, deliberately ignoring the UK's antitrust bodies' orders related to its acquisition of Giffy. It's the first time they've ever issued such a fine, end quote. Brave has replaced Google with its own privacy-centric Brave Search as the default search engine in its browser, quoting Throt.com.

As part of its ongoing push to eliminate Google as much as possible from our daily web experiences, Brave is removing Google Search as its default search engine. Going forward, the Brave web browser will default to Brave Search. Brave Search has grown significantly since its release last June, with nearly 80 million queries per month. month, Brave CEO and co-founder Brandon Ike says. Our users are pleased with a comprehensive privacy solution that Brave Search provides against big tech by being integrated into our browser. As we know from experience in many browsers,

the default setting is crucial for adoption, and Brave Search has reached the quality and critical mass needed to become our default search option, and offer our users a seamless privacy by default online experience. Brave Search is built on top of an independent index and doesn't track users, their searches, or their clicks, the firm says. And starting with Brave 1.3 on desktop and Android and Brave 132 on iOS,

it will be the default search engine in the browser instead of Google in the United States, Canada, and the UK. It is also replacing Quant in France and Duck. Dot. Go in Germany. And Brave says that more locales will be added in the next several months. Existing users can keep their chosen search engine default, of course, and new users who prefer can choose other search engines and configure as needed. Brave Search doesn't display ads a day, but the free version of the service will soon be ad-supported. An ad-free premium version is coming, quote, in the new future, Brave says, end quote. One of the behind-the-scenes struggles of producing this show every day is me mixing up the names, Spotify and Shopify.

I can't tell you the amount of times I've said the wrong company when I meant the other one. Usually I can catch it in the edit, but I'm sure an error has gotten through a time or two. I have the same problem with Instacart and Instagram. Even if I read it on the page, sometimes it comes out of my mouth the other one. Well, the singularity, at least for me, has arrived because Spotify has partnered with Shopify to let artists list merch on profiles for $29 a month to $299 a month, starting in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Quoting once more from Variety, any artists globally can already link to their Shopify store if they have one from their Spotify profile. But now Spotify users will see featured product listings from Shopify

on the service. During the initial beta period, Shopify merchandise will only be available to Spotify listeners in five countries, the U.S., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK. To set up their virtual merch tables, Spotify artists must have a Shopify account. Shopify's pricing plans range from $29 a month for a basic e-commerce package, up to $299 a month for an advanced tier that includes enhanced reporting. Shopify is offering a new, 90-day free trial to all Spotify artists signing up for the first time. Shopify provides inventory management features for Spotify artists, for example, out-of-stock items are automatically removed from your profile, while new products can be instantly added to Spotify. For artists just

getting started, creating lines of merch, Shopify offers print-on-demand services and the ability to connect with merchandise fulfillment partners. To list merch on Spotify with Shopify in the Spotify for artist dashboard on desktop, go to the profile tab and click merch to get started. There you'll be able to choose the 3 items from your Shopify store that you want to display on your artist profile. You can link only one Shopify store per Spotify artist's account, end quote. And I can't tell you the amount of times just recording that last bit that I got the two names mixed up. Finally today, Comcast yesterday finally unveiled X-Class. It's long-rumored smart TV lineup, which starts at $298. The TVs are available at Walmart and offer 12 months of ad-supported Peacock

Premium for free as an enticement in the U.S., quoting variety. The X-Class TVs, built by high cents and priced starting at $298, will include 12 months of NBC Universal's Peacock Premium with ads, which normally is $4.99 per month, at no extra cost. Live pay TV services available on the platform at launch include Hulu with live TV, YouTube, YouTube, TV and Dish Network's Sling TV. The sets will provide access to streaming services including Netflix, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney Plus, Amazon Prime Video, and YouTube, as well as free ad-supported services, including Comcast's Zumo, Viacom, CBS's Pluto, Fox's Tooby, and Amazon's IMDB TV. In the next few months, Comcast said it will launch pay TV streaming services from Xfinity and

charter communications on X-Class TV. Those, however, will be available only to customers located in Comcast and charter cable service areas. Comcast teamed with HighSense to bring the first X-Class TVs to market in the U.S. The smart TV models include an integrated interface and voice remote to access live and on-demand streaming content from hundreds of apps and services. The first X-Class TVs from High Sense are available starting this week in select Walmart stores and in the coming weeks through Walmart.com, end quote. Yeah, you know how cable companies have always been constrained by the geographic areas.

their literal cables have been strung through in the past. But hear me out. What if they use this new internet technology to deliver TV to anyone anywhere in the world? That could really shake things up. You might have noticed a different voice for one of those earlier segments. You might have recognized the voice. Chris Messina is actually in town today. So there's not going to be a Twitter space tonight because he's in town. And Alex Cantorowitz just recently moved to the neighborhood. we're going to get a six pack of beer and actually record tonight's bonus episode in person for the first time ever sitting around my kitchen table. We'll see how that goes and you'll hear how that goes as always on Saturday. Talk to you tomorrow.