Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/06 - Xerox Makes Some News!

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

Twitter announces Topics, Xerox might take a run at HP, Uber’s getting into the ads business, Ford’s electric Mustang makes Tech Crunch angry, and the best blockchain startup idea I’ve heard of in a long time. Sponsors: Metalab.co Leap.FidelityCareers.com Links: Twitter is rolling out Topics, a way to follow subjects automatically in the timeline (The Verge) Xerox Considers Takeover Offer for HP (WSJ) California Says Facebook Failed to Comply With Subpoenas (NYTimes) California asks for court order forcing Facebook to hand over Cambridge Analytica documents (The Verge) Self-Driving Uber in Crash Wasn’t Designed to See Jaywalkers (Bloomberg) Uber is entering the ads business (TechCrunch) Neural Magic raises $15 million to boost AI inferencing speed on off-the-shelf processors (VentureBeat) How Arweave's Permaweb cheaply hosts sites & apps forever (TechCrunch) Ford built an electric Mustand with a manual transmission. And we're mad. (TechCrunch) 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, November 6, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter announces topics. Zerox might take a run at HP. Uber's getting into the ads business. Ford's Electric Mustang makes TechCrunch angry and the best blockchain startup idea I've heard in a long time.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Twitter has announced topics, a feature which lets users follow more than 300 subjects, including sporting events, gaming, entertainment events, but not politics, notably. You'll be able to follow these topics just as easily as you're currently able to follow individual accounts. The feature is rolling out tomorrow, Thursday, quoting the Verge. We know that the main reason that people come to Twitter is to keep up on the things that they're interested in, said Rob Bishop, who leads the topics team at Twitter, quote, the challenge is, it's really quite difficult to do that on Twitter day to quote. The idea of letting people follow topics in addition to or instead of individual accounts

dates back to the earliest days of the company. But it took the development of machine learning tools and the hiring of a human editorial team, among other things, to make it happen. Bishop says the feature will shine for followers of big fandoms, such as major professional sports teams or the Korean boy band BTS. That group and its members represent one of the most discussed subjects on all of Twitter, he said, and yet there are few official accounts on which to follow daily developments. That left fans searching for fan accounts, even though Twitter has a good idea of what the top accounts are.

Now, fans can just follow the BTS topic, and Twitter will surface popular tweets about the band. If topic succeeds, Bishop said, the average person won't follow fewer individual accounts. In fact, he said they'll likely follow more. It also means that your tweets about many popular subjects may now travel further than ever before, which can be a mixed blessing,

as anyone who has ever seen a tweet go viral and faced harassment, as a result, can testify, end quote. First time ever mentioning Xerox on this show. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Xerox is considering making a cash and stock offer to acquire HP, which is a little odd because HP has a market cap of $27 billion, which is more than three times the size of Xerox's market cap. Quoting the journal, A deal would join two household names with storied paths that have been scrambling to retool their businesses as the need for printed documents declines.

Both companies are in cost-cutting mode, and a union could afford new opportunities to shed expenses to the tune of more than $2 billion, the people said. Xerox, based in Norwalk, Connecticut, primarily makes large printers and copy machines, and most of its almost $10 billion in annual revenue comes from renting and maintaining them for businesses. HP, based in Palo Alto, California, sells mainly smaller printers and printing supplies, and is also one of the largest PC makers in the world. It posted revenue of more than $58 billion for its most recent fiscal year, ended in October 2018. HP is what remains after Hewlett-Packard split off Hewlett-Packard Enterprise,

which sells servers, data storage gear, and related services to corporate clients in 2015. Before a decline in its printing supplies business in recent quarters, it had grown faster than expected as a standalone company, end quote. Oddly, it's Xerox. That is the stock on the up at the moment. Xerox shares have risen 84% this year, thanks to the cost-cutting campaign that that company has been pursuing. HP's shares have been down 10% this year. Xerox is about to get a $2.3 billion windfall after selling its stake in a joint venture to Fujifilm.

For Facebook, Cambridge Analytica is the scandal that will never die, seemingly. Court filings today revealed that California has been probing Facebook's disclosure of user data to Cambridge Analytica and others for more than 18 months. And this afternoon, California's Attorney General accused Facebook of Stonewalling. Quoting the New York Times, in a lawsuit filed by the Attorney General, Xavier Bacera, the state said that over an 18-month period, Facebook had resisted or ignored dozens of requests for documents and internal correspondence between top executives and questions about the company's handling of personal data.

Mr. Becerra filed the lawsuit in the California Superior Court to obtain the communications, end quote. And quoting the verge. In a press conference Wednesday afternoon, Bacera addressed California's lawsuit against Facebook, demanding that the company hand over any documents related to, quote, privacy disclosures and third-party access to user data, end quote, like in the case of its Cambridge Analytica scandal. The lawsuit was filed in the California Superior Court in hopes of forcing the company to hand over the communications and documents.

If Facebook had complied with our legitimate investigative requests, Becerra said, we would not be making this announcement today, end quote. Bacera said that Facebook, quote, has not been fully responsive, end quote, to his office's requests for information. Quote, they have also failed to provide or even search for responsive documents, end quote, between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and C.O. Cheryl Sandberg, Bacera continued, end quote. Follow up to a big story from last year, the National Transportation Safety board finally released more than 400 pages of reports outlining their findings relating to that

Uber self-driving car that killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona. The bottom line, according to the NTSB, the car wasn't programmed to recognize and react to Jaywalkers. The woman who was struck, Elaine Herzberg, was walking her bicycle across a road outside of a crosswalk. Quote, the Uber vehicle's radar sensors first observed Herzberg about 5.6 seconds prior to impact before she entered the vehicle's lane of travel and initially classified her as a vehicle. But the system changed its classification of her as different objects several times and failed to predict that her path would cross the lane of the self-driving test SUV, according to the NTSB. Uber made extensive changes to its self-driving system

after several reviews of its operation and findings by the NTSB investigators. The company told the NTSB that the new software would have been able to correctly identify Herzberg and triggered controlled braking to avoid her more than four seconds before the original impact, the NTSB said. The safety driver behind the wheel of the car was watching a video on a mobile device and didn't see Herzberg in time. Less than five months before the accident, Uber had cut back to a single safety driver in its test vehicles. Other companies such as GM's cruise affiliate use two, end quote. Uber is trying to double down on the success of Uber Eats by beginning to sell ads to restaurants within the Uber Eats app.

So a new revenue stream inside its fastest growing revenue segment and one which would be mostly all margins since Uber won't have to share that revenue with drivers or the restaurants, quoting TechCrunch. An Uber spokesperson confirmed the company would be entering the ads business telling Tech Crunch, quote, we are exploring relevant ads in Eats, end quote. Selling ads could help it improve margins on Eats, where it only takes 10.7% of gross bookings as adjusted net revenue since it pays out so much to restaurants and drivers. The fresh opportunity in ads comes at a critical time when Uber is desperate to show its future potential in the face of a sagging share price that closed at $28 and $2 yesterday, down 40% from a high of $46.38 in June. Today, Uber's post-IPO stock lockup expires and early investors are able to sell their shares,

putting newfound pressure on its stock, end quote. Turning on the ad spigot seems to have worked out for Amazon, right? So why not? Interesting raise time. Neural Magic is a startup which aims to boost AI inferencing speeds on off-the-shelf processors. Neuromagic has raised a $15 million seed investment round led by ComCamp. VENTURES, quoting Venture Beat. Despite the proliferation of accelerator chips like Google's tensor processing unit and Intel's forthcoming Nirvana NMPT, most machine learning practitioners are

limited by budget or design to commodity processors. Unfortunately, these processors tend to run sophisticated AI models rather slowly, exacerbating one of the many challenges involved in AI research and development. Hence, Neural Magic, MIT, Computer Science, and Art artificial intelligence lab research scientists, Alex Mative, and Professor Nierre Chavitt, co-founded the Somerville, Massachusetts-based company in 2018, inspired by their work in high-performance multi-core execution engines for machine learning. The pair describes Neuromagic as a no-hardware AI company, in essence, one whose software processes workloads on processors at speeds equivalent to or better than specialized hardware. Chavit says this release of

Neuromagics product targets real-time recommendation and computer vision systems, the former of which are often constrained in production by small pools of graphics chips memory. By running the models through off-the-shelf processors, which usually have more available memory, speedups can be realized with a minimal amount of work on the part of data scientists. As for computer vision models, Shevique claims Neuromagic solution performs tasks like image classification and object detection at graphics chip speeds, enabling execution on larger images and video streams through containerized apps, end quote. Not exactly an interesting raise, but certainly a hella interesting startup.

So here's the premise of R-Weave. What if you wanted to store something online and make sure that it was available in its original form permanently? R-Weave has built what it calls the perma web to do that. this startup has a unique type of blockchain that relies on the declining storage costs enabled by Moore's Law to allow you to pay for a couple hundred years of storage up front at about half a cent per megabyte. Then, over the years, as storage costs go down, R-Weave will profit on the interest accrued from having you pay and overpay up front for storage costs that are

almost guaranteed to decline over time. When you stop and think about that, how come no one has thought to arbitrage Moore's law like this before now. It's kind of brilliant, really. And Andreessen Horowitz, Union Square Ventures and multi-coin capital agree. They've collectively bought $5 million in R-Weave tokens, betting that the more people use the perma web, the more valuable these tokens will prove to be, quoting TechCrunch. Arwee's mission is to become the new Library of Alexandria, R-Weave founder Sam Williams writes, but invulnerable to the pitfalls of centralized points of failure, ensuring that Humanity's shared knowledge and history is available to all future generations, end quote.

The idea spawned from a slew of Ph.D. dropouts trying to address the fake news problem. They figured if sites or articles could be stored permanently in their original form, they couldn't be changed or eradicated by a future despot. The team discovered blockchains could handle this at small scale. But to decentralize large amounts of data, they developed a special kind of blockchain where miners are rewarded for storing a random old block from the chain, not just the most recent one. That meant the more of the total blocks they stored, the more they'd stand to earn. Those who want to store something, download a free Chrome, Firefox, or Brave browser extension,

fund their wallet, and make a one-time payment. For example, there's a permanently hosted forum that won't likely disappear, unlike many online communities have over the years. While pricier than alternatives like AWS in the short term, the perma web could theoretically keep files alive forever. William says that data storage costs have declined around 30% per year for a while, but the decentralized network would still be able to cover costs as long as that rate doesn't fall lower than one-half of one percent.

Quote, if we dropped below 0.5 percent storage cost decline, then really, really bad things will have happened to humans, end quote. And even then, today's payments would cover 200 years of storage. The goal was always to stop misinformation. Williams concludes, quote, we think that we're closing what Orwell called the memory hole so people can't change what was said so everyone can see it that way in the future without the possibility of redaction or censorship, end quote. This is frankly the best use case for and application of blockchain technology that I've

heard of in a long time. Finally today, Ford has built an electric version of its iconic Mustang car with a manual transmission and TechCrunch is really pissed about it. The all-electric Mustang fastback has a six-speed manual transmission, and the reason TechCrunch is mad is because it appears that this is a one-off. Ford apparently does not have plans to bring it to market. Quote, Ford does say this electrified Mustang is more than just a prototype. It's also a test bed for battery and thermal management technologies Webasto and Ford are creating for the growing e-mobility automotive segment. So maybe there's a chance. The vehicle has a

five-powered dual-core electric motor and dual-power inverters powered by an 800-volt Webasto battery system. The package produces 900 horsepower and 1,000 pound feet of torque ensuring its muscle car status. The vehicle has custom carbon fiber body components, a 1.0 inch lowered stance, and 20-inch staggered fitting forged wheels, according to Ford. Ford highlights the manual transmission as, the unique twist. And it is. Electric vehicles have single-speed gearboxes. There is really no logical

reason to have a manual gearbox, but for those who still love the three-pedal action, an electric vehicle with a manual gearbox makes all the sense in the world. The 800-volt battery system is also worth noting. The Porsche take-hand is considered the first production vehicle equipped with a system voltage of 800 volts, as opposed to the usual 400 volts found in most electric cars. Ford's use of 800 volts might hint at which battery systems might turn up in its production electric vehicles. This more robust system should allow for faster charging. For instance, Porsche credits its 800-volt system in the TAKAN for allowing it to charge from 5% to 80% in 22.5 minutes with a maximum charging power of up to 270 kilowatts, end quote. No word on the battery range of the manual electric Mustang.

But in case you weren't aware, Ford has plans to invest $11 billion to add 16 all-electric vehicles to its lineup by 2022, including an all-electric SUV next year with a range of 300 miles and an all-electric F-150 within the next few years. Some late-breaking news. Elon Musk just tweeted that, Tesla will unveil its all-electric pickup truck on November 21st, which coincides with the LA Auto Show. But also, Elon wanted to point out that that's also the same day as the date listed in the opening credits of the movie Blade Runner. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Talk to you tomorrow.