Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 11/30 – Am I On Your Spotify Wrapped This Year?

Episode Date: November 30, 2022

The Covid lockdown at that Foxconn factory has lifted. The surprising strength of the smartwatch sector. The surprising failure of the Kindle Scribe. Gorilla Glass Victus 2. And Sony has an actual new idea for the Metaverse. Sponsors: InternetSociety.org/techmeme Links: China’s Zhengzhou, home to world’s largest iPhone factory, ends Covid lockdown. Other cities do the same (CNN Business) India Becomes Biggest Smartwatch Market in Q3 2022 (Counterpoint) Amazon Security Lake is a standards-based data lake for security data (TechCrunch) Amazon Kindle Scribe review: absolutely adequate (The Verge) Apple Music reveals top music in 2022 and listener charts (AP News) Gorilla Glass Victus 2 could save your big phone from disastrous falls on concrete (TechRadar) Sony is getting into the metaverse with a new motion-tracking system (The Verge) 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 TechMeme right home for Wednesday, the final day of November 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. The COVID lockdown at that Foxcon factory has lifted the surprising strength of the smartwatch sector, the surprising failure of the Kindle Scribe, Gorilla Glass Victus 2, and Sony has an actual

new idea for the Metaverse. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. According to Chinese state media, that five-day COVID-19 lockdown in Zhangzhou home to Foxxon's iPhone plant has been lifted. An analyst says the disruptions might have cost Apple around a billion dollars a week, quoting CNN business. The relaxation of restrictions imposed earlier this month in the manufacturing and transportation hub came after residents clashed with police Tuesday. Videos circulated on social media showing residents shouting, lift the lockdown. Gangzhou will stop sending all close contacts of COVID-19 patients to central quarantine facilities and allow some to isolate at home. The city will be able to.

also no longer launched district-wide mass COVID-19 testing. Quote, all districts should conduct testing in a scientific manner, said a Chinese official. Foxcon's massive facility is not part of Zhangshal's urban districts. However, analysts say the lockdown would have been detrimental to efforts to restore lost production at the campus, the site of a violent workers' revolt last week. This is some good news and a dark storm for Cooper Tino. Daniel Ives, managing director of Equity Research at Wedbush Securities, told CNN business, referring to the California City where Apple is based. There is a lot of heavy lifting ahead for Apple to ramp back up the factories, end quote. Our buddy Ming Chi Quo estimates that iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max

shipments in Q4 will only be about 70 to 75 million versus the 80 to 85 million estimated. He also says that if we tip into a global recession, demand could, in his words, disappear. Here's better news. for Apple and interesting news if you are concerned about a global recession. We've heard chip shipments dropping, smartphone shipments dropping, computers, etc. But quick, what hardware sector seems to be the healthiest right now, even in the face of consumers pulling back? What if I told you it was wearables? According to counterpoint research, global smartwatch shipments increased 30% year over year in Q3 of 2022, led by sales in India, which were up 171%. Apple, Apple, grew 48% year-over-year, Samsung dropped 2.7% year-over-year, and noise grew 218% year-over-year.

No, I hadn't heard of them either. More on that in a second. Quoting counterpoint, research analyst Wujin-Sons said, quote, among the types of smartwatches, the basic smartwatch with relatively lighter versions of operating systems and more affordable prices, has been the key driver in sharply boosting the global market recently. While high-end smartwatch shipments grew 23% year-over-year in Q3, basic smartwatch shipments more than doubled year-over-year, accounting for 35% of the total market. This remarkable increase in basic smartwatch shipments shows us that the market base is rapidly expanding toward more accessible segments amid aggressive drives by the supply side.

But still, in terms of revenue, the high-end smartwatch overwhelms the basic smartwatch with a market size of almost 10 times due to its high average selling price, end quote. Again, who is noise? According to their web page, Noise started out selling smartphone cases, but the founders saw the smartphone revolution and realized that with a phone at the center of most people's lives, smartphone accessories would be the next big thing in India. Noise diversified into smart wearables and wireless headphones. Noise was one of the first brands in India to offer truly wireless earbuds, the noise shots.

Noise makes the latest personal technology accessories available and affordable to young Indian consumers. We have been listed as best-selling brand on Amazon and Flipkart for four years in a row, and in 2019, Noise was the biggest Indian seller of wireless earphones in the country. We were also the only Indian brand among the top five brands selling wireless earphones in India, end quote. I guess the smartwatch sector for them is the gross sector. AWS has unveiled Amazon Security Lake, a service that automatically centralizes an organization's security data from cloud and on-premises

into a data lake. Quoting TechCrunch. The new product can aggregate data from cloud and on-premises infrastructure, firewalls, and endpoint security solutions. It helps enterprises centralize all of their security data into a single data lake using a standards-based format and manage the lifecycle of this data. Security Lake will obviously aggregate data from AWS's own services, be those Cloud Trail or Lambda, as well as its own security tools like AWS Security Hub, Guard Duty, or the AWS Firewall Manager. But what's important here is that the company is also supporting the new open cybersecurity schema framework, or OCSF, for which it recently announced support. This framework

provides an open specification for security telemetry data. With this, it'll be able to ingest data from the likes of Cisco, CrowdStrike, and Palo Alto Networks too. Security data is usually scattered across your environment from applications, firewalls, and identity providers. AWS CEO Adam Slipsky said today to uncover insights like coordinated malicious activity into your business. You have to collect and aggregate all of this data, make it accessible to all of the analytics tools that you use to support threat detection, investigation and incident response, and then keep the data pipelines updated and continuously do that as events evolve. What this adds up to is that what you really want is a tool that makes it easy to store, to analyze, to understand trends, and to generate

insights from security data, end quote. That tool, of course, is security lake. The service will automatically partition and convert incoming data from the OCSF format and make it available through partners like IBM, Splunk, and Sumo Logic, for example. The new services available in preview in several AWS zones, U.S. East Ohio, U.S. East North Virginia, U.S. West Oregon, Asia Pacific Sydney, Asia Pacific, Tokyo, Europe, Frankfurt, and Europe, Ireland, end quote. So while I did pre-order that new Kindle Scribe that was announced several weeks ago, I then thought, thought better of it and canceled my order, and I'm glad I did. The reviews are out, and the Verge says that the Amazon Kindle Scribe has great battery life, display, accessories, but lackluster,

note-taking, outdated document syncing, and software, and a small writing delay. So I guess they whiffed on all of the things that were supposed to be new about this. Glad I'm sticking with my remarkable two. Quote, this thing is packed full of old ideas turned into, to a mediocre reality, but if you're not deep into the world of E-ink note-taking tablets, they'll just seem neat. I've used a lot of the Kindle Scribes' E-ink competitors, like the similarly priced Remarkable 2 and the more expensive but more flexible, Onix Books Note Air 2. And compared to those devices, the Kindle Scribe, is lacking. Amazon Aped the Remarkable 2 and gave the glass a rougher surface. The nibs on the stylus

have a rougher texture, which gives the scribe a more pleasant feeling when writing, than the hard glass of the iPad will ever have. It, dare I say, almost feels like actual paper. Yet the Remarkable 2 still does it better. Unlike the Remarkable 2, the Scribe has frontlights that create a small gap between the glass you're writing on and the E-Inc surface beneath. The gap is obviously visible, and it creates a very tiny but noticeable delay as you write. I'm crossing my fingers that the whole sink situation will improve, because right now it's also goofy as hell. To get articles and other documents on the scribe, you email your Kindle and wait for it to receive the files, which it automatically loads into your library alongside any books or comics you might already own. But it doesn't actually

sync any notes you make to the Kindle app on your phone or the web. So annotations disappear when you open the same PDF on your phone. Notebooks do sync, but you can't add them on your phone or other device, only read them. And if you're hoping to instantly convert your handwriting to text, seek another device. The scribe doesn't do that. Given an answer, Amazon is one of the largest and most successful cloud computing companies in the world. It's stunningly goofy how poorly this whole process works. The scribe just provides a perfectly adequate, if underbaked, service. The whole time I've used the scribe, I've struggled to escape the sense that this is a sort of lazy entry into a burgeoning market.

While I keep comparing Amazon's Kindle lineup to the remarkable two and devices like the Onyx Bookes Note Air 2, they aren't really significant competitors. Amazon has far more resources, and I expected something of real, quality from Amazon, especially given the Scribe starts at $339, end quote. Spotify this morning released RAPT,22 for users, giving you your yearly profile of your listening habits, but this time adding a music personality feature. However, Apple Music also released something similar yesterday, and what I wanted to talk about was how their listener data shows the rise of non-English language songs. 21 non-English songs were in the global top 100 on Apple

music more than double the number in 2021, quoting the Associated Press. Hip-hop continued to lead the different genres on the global Top 100 with 32 songs, followed by pop with 23 songs and R&B slash soul in third place with 11 songs. The data shows the growing presence of non-English language tunes with African songs on the rise on the Shazam chart, as well as the Global Daily 100, while Japanese language songs made big gains on the most red lyrics chart. 21 non-English songs, were in the global top 100, more than double the number of songs last year. Fifty-five Latin songs reached the Global Daily Top 100 in 2022, up 22 percent from 2021. In 2022, six of the 50 J-pop songs to reach the chart placed in the top 10. Last year, none were in the top 10.

In November, Apple Music crowned Puerto Rican reggaeton superstar Bad Bunny, its artist of the year, thanks in large part to his latest album, Unvarano Sinti, which became Apple Music's most streamed album of 2022 and its biggest Latin album of all time. Apple Music had a big 2022 itself, hitting a milestone in October when it recorded its 100 millionth song on the streaming service. That's more than YouTube music's 80 million songs, Spotify's 82 million tracks, and podcasts, and Amazon Music's 90 million songs, end quote. Corning has announced its new glass technology for smartphones, the Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which let me pause right here and point out that whoever does the name branding for Corning,

deserves a metal. Like, a lot of tech companies could learn a thing or two about naming products. Gorilla Glass, Victus, good stuff. Anyway, quoting Tech Radar. When Corning set out to make unbreakable glass 15 years ago and began testing on mobile devices, the benchmark was 160 grams, which more than covered the original iPhone, which weighed 135 grams. Compare this to the iPhone 14 pro, which clocks in at a hefty 206 grams. iPhone 14 Pro Max, which weighs a dense 240, or the Samsung Galaxy S-22 Ultra, which weighs in at a beefy 228 grams. Corning VP and general manager for Gorilla Glass, David R. Velasquez told me this week that modern smartphones are now packed with far more technology, better cameras, more sensors, bigger batteries, and are heavier and denser

than the phones Corning was originally testing on. Now the benchmark is 200 grams. That's still shy of some of the weight of the latest phones. But weight is not the only part of Corning's testing methodology that's changed. And more importantly, this Gorilla Glass is not. the same either. Victus 2 is a new gorilla glass formulation. When asked for specifics, Velasquez confirmed that it's different than the original Victus, which was introduced two years ago, but added, quote, it's better, that's as much detail as I can give, end quote. The result is a thinner glass that can stand up equally well to scratches, but offers better breakage performance. Corning has changed its testing methodology. After years of dropping thousands of phones from

one to two meter heights on simulated asphalt surfaces, sandpaper representing the course of the surface with metal underneath it, Corning has added in simulated concrete. Guess they finally realized that we drop as many phones on the sidewalk as we do on the street. With Concrete, Corning is testing Gorilla Glass Victus 2 at 1 meter and still using asphalt for 2 meter tests. The difference is not so much hardness as it is the jaggedness of the surfaces. To demonstrate, Corning sent me a sheet embedded with two sandpaper squares, with coarseness designed to simulate both surfaces. The concrete one is noticeably rougher to the touch.

And it's not just larger phones that are making cornucing. 's job harder. Velasquez reminded me that there was a time when protecting glass screens was comparatively easier. Back in the old days before there were shaped glass parts, most of the design work was around the framing the phones would have. The iPhone 4 was the first time glass was elevated, a huge change, and much more likely to break, he said. These days, phones like Samsung Galaxy S-22 Ultra, Google Pixel 7 Pro, and the iPhone 14 Pro seem to be made almost entirely of glass. I think Corning knows how to make a phone that might never break, but the class collaboration between the glass covering company and the phone manufacturer doesn't quite work that way.

OEMs come to us frequently and say, here's what we launch three, five years from now. Can you do this in glass? If so, what are the design considerations, explained Velasquez. What follows our conversations and even some adjustments of molecules and how they're designed to strengthen the glass. Velazquez was quick to add that phone manufacturers do not get bespoke glass products. However, understanding the direction phone manufacturers are heading can impact the kinds of glass, maybe even victim, 2, Corning produces now and in the future. While Gorilla Glass Victus 2 is stronger than Victus 1, Corning has no control over how phone manufacturers use it. Quote, most phone companies take this much better glass and they make it thinner.

Phones can never be thin enough, or they make a more aggressive design, said Velasquez, end quote. Finally today, Sony is getting into the Metaverse, which I know that sounds like a boring headline, but this is different in an interesting way, quoting the verge. Sony has announced Makobi, a portable and lightweight motion capture system that can be used to control a digital avatar in real time within Metaverse applications like VR Chat. The kit consists of six button-like tracking tags, one for your head, hip, both ankles, and both wrists, that use Bluetooth to pair with an Android or iOS smartphone app to input motion data to compatible services like Unity. The McCopie sensors measure 32 millimeters around 1.2 inches in diameter and weigh just 8 grams, making them lighter than Apple air tags despite being of a similar size. The system is portable, thanks to being completely wireless and not requiring a base station,

and the trackers can be fully charged in around 90 minutes via the USBC charging case. Sony claims McCopi can achieve up to 10 hours of battery life, though this will depend on the usage environment. Sony is also releasing a software development kit on December 15th that links motion capture data with Metaverse services and 3D development software, such as Unity and Autodesk Motion Builder. The translated press release announcing the tech suggests that this could be used to develop new services within fitness industries, and we can also picture it being utilized by game developers and VFX artists who lack the budget for professional grade motion capture equipment. The press release isn't precise on a few details, namely if the McCopee system can be

connected directly to a VR headset or PC, or if the smartphone app is required for all external connectivity. Finger tracking also isn't mentioned, which may indicate that users who need that functionality will need to utilize VR controllers or a leap motion tracker. Still, given this is a system completely free of base stations or wires, it could be a popular alternative to expensive motion capture suits for V-tubers and early Metaverse adopters, you know, when it eventually rolls out legs. Macopi has a retail price of $49,500,000 or about $360 and is currently due to release in late January, 2023. We'll have a chance to see it in action prior to release between December 3rd and December 18th, however, when Sony demonstrates the tech at virtual market

2022 winter, end quote. By the way, if you got your Spotify wrapped stats today and the tech meme ride home shows up on there. Take a screenshot and tweet it at me at Brian MCC. Not only will I retweet it, but I think last year we tried to track who had listened to the most hours of the show. So see if you can become this year's most mutant member of the podcast army. Talk to you tomorrow.