Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 10/31 - Facebook's Earnings Are Not a Disaster

Episode Date: October 31, 2018

Facebook earnings were not a disaster, another Alphabet employee is out because of scandal, Waymo has a permit to test real driverless cars on California roads, and if you don’t know what computational notebooks are, let me tell you about them.  Links: Zuckerberg says the future is sharing via 100B messages & 1B Stories/day (TechCrunch) Scoop: Executive accused of harassment at Alphabet 'X' unit is out (Axios) Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile Won't Support eSIM Until Later This Year (MacRumors) Gmail for iOS now lets you view all of your accounts in a single inbox (The Verge) Waymo’s excruciatingly gradual launch process, explained (Ars Technica) How Facebook Failed To Build A Better Alexa (Or Siri) (Forbes) Google, Accel and Jay Z invest in life insurance start-up Ethos, valuing it at more than $100 million (CNBC) Why Jupyter is data scientists’ computational notebook of choice (Nature) 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, October 31st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook earnings were not a disaster.

Another Alphabet employee is out because of scandal. Waymo has a permit to test real driverless cars on California roads. And if you don't know what complexional notebooks are, well, let me tell you about them. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. After the closing bell of markets yesterday, Facebook. reported its earnings the first time it's done so since that disastrous earnings report three months ago that the stock still hasn't quite recovered from. The company reported Q3 revenues of $13.73 billion, which was up 33% year over year. That was just under Wall Street's

estimates, but the street seems to have taken that in stride because earnings came in at $1.76 per share, well over the estimate of $1.47 a share, a share. share. This was largely because Facebook has been killing it in mobile ad revenue. Mobile ads represent a full 92% of Facebook's total ad revenue at this point. Facebook's stock opened up nearly 6% at the time of this recording early Wednesday morning. But that's not what really matters, right? What really matters is Mao and Dow. Facebook tends to emphasize Dow, and that's where it gets interesting. Daily active users came in, at 1.49 billion, which is up 9% year over year. Monthly active users clocked in at 2.27 billion people,

which is up 10%. But the number of daily active users in the U.S. and Canada was flat again at 185 million, and Facebook lost 1 million European users, clocking in at 278 million. So Facebook is still growing, thanks to user growth in other markets. But the markets where it is not growing are the markets where Facebook makes most of its money. In fact, the main area of growth, which Facebook terms Asia-Pacific and the rest of the world, earns the company fully 10 times less

than users in North America do. So bottom line is, Facebook's revenue growth is plateauing. No two ways around it. Revenue growth was 59% in Q3 of 2016. 49% in Q3 of last year and only 33% now. On the conference call with analysts, CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked at length about how he thinks sharing is increasingly shifting to private chat, where users are sending 100 billion

messages each and every day on Facebook-owned apps. Again, 100 billion every single day. And of course, stories live in the chat apps, where they are now used by more than a billion people every day. Zuckerberg said, quote, people share more photos, videos, and links on WhatsApp and Messenger than they do on social networks. We're leading in most countries. Our biggest competitor by far is iMessage. In important countries like the U.S. where the iPhone is strong, Apple bundles iMessage as the default texting app, and it's still ahead, end quote. Interesting choice of words, that word bundle. That word,

to be used when companies are accused of any competitive behavior. I see what you did there, Zuck. Souttle, but noted. More fallout from that Blockbuster New York Times story last week that largely focused on Andy Rubin. Ena Freed is reporting in Axios that Rich DeVall, the director of Google's moonshot unit known as X, left the company yesterday,

following reports of sexual harassment that were detailed in last week's New York Times piece. According to Freed DeVal did not receive an exit package, which was some of the controversy that swirled around the Andy Rubin part of that story. Freed also reported that Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent an email to employees Tuesday, apologizing for the company's past handling of sexual harassment claims inside the company. Quote, I am deeply sorry for the past actions and the pain they have caused employees, Pichai said in an email obtained by Axios. Larry mentioned this on stage last week,

but it bears repeating. If even one person experiences Google the way the New York Times article described, we are not the company we aspire to be, end quote. Did you update your iPhone to iOS 12.1? Well, hopefully you didn't update your watchOS to 5.1 because Apple has had to pool the latest. OS update for Apple watches because the update was bricking some of them. Apparently, the update process would freeze on the Apple logo and restarting the watch or the paired iPhone didn't seem to fix the issue. At the time of this recording, Apple has completely pulled the update so you can't update even if you want to, but if you did download the update yesterday, you should refrain from

actually installing it until you get the all-clear from Apple. But back to that 12.1 update for iOS on the iPhone or iPad. One of the key new features included in that update was so-called e-sim support. Digital ESIM allows for dual-sim functionality on the iPhone 10S, 10S max, and 10R. However, U.S. users, please note, ESIM is not actually yet supported by any U.S. carriers, quoting from Mac rumors. AT&T, for example, is telling customers that E-S. ESIM activations are being delayed until later in the year due to technical issues, in part related to visual voicemail. Verizon and T-Mobile will also not be supporting the ESIM at the

current time, according to company spokespeople who talked to PCMag. T-Mobile said that ESM support is in the works and will be available when its software is ready, with no timeline provided. Verizon, meanwhile, said that ESIMs will be available after some kinks are worked out. The fourth major carrier in the U.S. Sprint is not on Apple's list of carriers that are going to be implementing ESIM support, but Sprint has said it will add support at some point, end quote. So, non-U.S. listeners, feel free to get your two phone numbers on one iPhone on. Apple has a list of all carriers supporting ESIM functionality on its website. Those of us in the States will just have to wait a bit, I guess. So this segment is not exactly analogous.

to using two phone numbers on one phone, but you can maybe see how I'm stretching for a segue here. Google says that Gmail for iOS will soon let users view all of their Gmail accounts in a single inbox, a feature that has long been available for users of Gmail on Android. Quoting from The Verge,

in the past, you could access multiple accounts managed by Gmail, but it required tapping the icon on the top left corner to toggle between them. The iOS app now behaves like the Gmail Android app, and an option will appear when the left-hand side drawer is open that says all inboxes. Select this, and all your emails will appear in one inbox.

Google says no emails will be shared between accounts with this enabled, end quote. Apparently, this will be rolling out over the next 15 days. All right, big news in my Will We Really Get Meaningful Self-Diving Car on real roads by 2020 watch. Waymo has been granted the first permit from California's Department of Motor Vehicles for, and this is the key bit, driverless testing of autonomous cars on public roads. So this will be test vehicles out on the roads with no human driver behind the steering wheel. The tests will begin in a limited capacity on the roads of Silicon Valley

in both day and night conditions on roads with posted speeds up to 65 miles per hour. Quote, our vehicles can safely handle fog and light rain and testing in those conditions is included in our permit, Waymo said in a blog post. We will gradually begin driverless testing on city streets in a limited territory and, over time, expand the area that we drive in as we gain confidence and experience, end quote. Why was news like this not announced to great fanfare? Well, as Timothy B. Lee points out in a lengthy post in Ars Technica, this is the way Waymo does things. Quote, Waymo's rollout over the last 18 months has been methodical, excruciatingly gradual, and sometimes conducted in secret. It's a formula for minimizing media-driven hype.

And that's not a coincidence. Other companies need to hype up their products to attract customers, investors, and employees. Tesla even started charging for full self-driving capabilities years before the technology was ready. Waymo has taken the opposite approach. Waymo enjoys a big technology lead, a close connection to one of the world's best-known companies, Google, and access to effectively unlimited financial resources. So media coverage has few upsides for Waymo and could have some significant downsides, end quote. What sort of downsides?

Well, Waymo doesn't want there to be unrealistic expectations around what it's doing. If driverless cars suddenly show up tomorrow without years of hype, anything that they do will seem newsworthy and miraculous. So, as Lee says, quote, stories about Waymo's cars doing something slightly different than they were doing the week before are not as likely to break through, end quote. Waymo just wants friendly skeptics like me to just wake up one day and realize, hey, the revolution happened. And another slightly long read this time from Forbes. When Facebook announced Portal, that video calling a hardware device for your home a couple weeks ago, lost in all the snark about Facebook and privacy and all that was something that even I kind of didn't notice at the time.

Portal is not technically a voice assistant. In fact, Facebook does not have a competitor to Alexa or even Siri. But apparently that's not for lack of trying. Quoting the Forbes piece, Concerted voice efforts came too late by the time Portal became known within the company as a project some two years ago. Facebook wanted to use their own speech to text technology for Portal, but it was not ready, said a senior engineering source who spoke to Forbes on the condition of anonymity, due to concerns about reputational and legal repercussions.

Using Alexa represented, quote, a huge drawback. If you don't have access to data, it's hard to progress and learn and improve things. A spokeswoman for Facebook pointed out that portal customers can activate the device by saying, hey, portal to initiate a call and access device controls, but admitted the company had to partner with Amazon to, quote, provide the range of tools that people have come to expect from a home device, end quote. This piece in Forbes, which is linked in the show notes, of course, blames a chaotic rotation of staff and confused strategic priorities,

among other things, for a resulting product that, let's be honest, increasingly feels like a muddled me-to sort of misfire. Anyone remember the HTC First, aka the Facebook phone? And let's end today with a couple of profiles of some cool startups. who have raised noteworthy rounds recently. Ethos is a startup that says it can process life insurance applications in mere minutes. And Ethos just raised a $35 million series B round led by Excel and GV, which is, of course, Google's venture arm.

Jay-Z's entertainment firm Rock Nation was also a participant in the round. CNBC reports that ethos is now valued at more than $100 million. and possibly for good reason. Quote, ethos, which uses data analytics to predict a person's life expectancy, says it is able to cut the time normally taken to apply for life insurance policies from 10 weeks to just 10 minutes, and that insurance claims are paid out within weeks. It also claims that more than 99% of its customers don't require a medical exam or blood test in order to get a policy. Ethos said it saw, quote, robust growth this year with a more than 400% jump in revenue, customers, and applications in the last four months alone, end quote. And have you heard of Jupiter, which is spelled J-U-P-Y-T-R? This is technically not a startup, I guess, but if you're a scientist, an astronomer say, and you're trying to crunch the terabytes of data,

that your large telescope array hoover's up each and every night. You probably know what a Jupiter notebook is. Quoting from the journal Nature, quote, Jupiter is a free open source interactive web tool known as a computational notebook, which researchers can use to combine software code, computational output, explanatory text, and multimedia resources in a single document.

Computational notebooks have been around for decades, but Jupiter in particular has exploded in popularity over the past couple years. This rapid uptake has been aided by an enthusiastic community of user developers and a redesigned architecture that allows the notebook to speak dozens of programming languages. A fact reflected in its name, which was inspired, according to co-founder Fernando Perez, by the programming languages Julia, Python, and R. One analysis of the code sharing site GitHub counted more than 2.5 million.

public Jupiter notebooks in September of 2018 up from 200,000 or so in 2015, end quote. In other words, nature says that Jupiter has emerged as the de facto standard among data scientists. Quoting again, computational notebooks are essentially laboratory notebooks for scientific computing. Instead of pasting, say, DNA gels alongside lab protocols, researchers embed code, data, and text to document their computational methods. The result says Jupiter co-creator Brian Granger at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo is a computational narrative, a document that allows researchers to supplement their code and data with analysis, hypotheses, and conjecture, end quote. These computational notebooks are essentially a form of interactive computing. The notebooks allow conversations and documentation that drive forward experimentation and the testing of hypotheses in ways that others, can follow and replicate. The Jupyter notebooks in particular

don't have to reside on any one scientist's computer. Instead, you can create kernels, which will run the notebook code and programs on supercomputers remotely or even on cloud resources, which is pretty, pretty cool. We like to think of scientists as always being at the forefront of computing

no matter what their discipline, but that's not necessarily always the case. As one astronomer is quoted as saying in this piece, we went from Jupiter Notebooks not existing some six years ago to, in essence, everybody using them today. And we're a community that still has Fortran 77, as in 1977, sticking around. It's something, end quote. Phew, nine segments today.

That's the most I think I've ever tried to cram into a single episode before. Happy Halloween, everybody. I'm actually taking off about an hour early today so I can head home and chaperone a Thomas the train and a cat boy around the streets of Park Slope. If you've never seen or experienced Halloween in Park Slope, Brooklyn, let me tell you something. It's like friggin' Mardi Gras if Mardi Gras was run by six-year-olds.

It's legitimately nuts. So if I survive tonight, I will be back to talk to you all again tomorrow.