Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 8/29 - Updates To Wear OS Hint At...

Episode Date: August 29, 2018

A bunch of new laptops from Dell, Amazon might jump into the free tv game, Google updates Wear OS, and why the world’s oldest blockchain has been hiding in plain site since 1995. Links:Dell tempts Pixelbook lovers with premium $599 Inspiron Chromebook 14 (ArsTechnica)Dell shows its fall lineup of Alexa-ready Inspiron, XPS, and Vostro laptops and 2-in-1s (VentureBeat)Amazon Plans New Video App, Latest Step Into TV Ad Market (The Information)Google is revamping the Wear OS smartwatch user interface (TheVerge)The rise of giant consumer startups that said no to investor money (Recode)'World Computer' Project Dfinity Raises $102 Million (Fortune)The rise of crypto in higher education (Coinbase Reports)The Hot New Subject on Campus? It's Blockchain (Fortune)The World’s Oldest Blockchain Has Been Hiding in the New York Times Since 1995 (Motherboard) 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, August 29th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a bunch of new laptops from Dell.

Amazon might jump into the free TV game. Google Updates WearOS. And why the world's oldest blockchain has been hiding in plain sight since 1995. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. A whole slew of new computers were announced by Dell today. Let's start off with the... the premium $599 Insperon Chromebook 14

with a 14 inch touchscreen display, core I3 processor, Intel U.HD 620 graphics, and 4 gigabytes of RAM. This is not some cheap Chrome OS convertible with a crappy processor and a plastic shell. Let me have ours sing its praises.

The new Inspiron Chromebook looks and feels similar to Dell's Windows-based Insperon machines. It has an all-metal body and somewhat flattened hinges that allow it to rotate into tablet mode. Even with its metal design and 14-inch Ph.D. touchscreen, the new Chromebook weighs under four pounds and doesn't feel as hefty as other 14-inch machines. By going with better specs and a more attractive design, Dell wants to attract an aging generation of Chromebook users, those who have grown comfortable with Google's OS after using it for years in school. Some may want a ChromeOS device that looks better, and it. works harder than the $300 devices they're accustomed to using, and one that doesn't break the bank like Google's Pixelbook does, end quote.

Dell also announced updates to the whole range of convertibles in its Inspiron 7,000 and 5,000 lineups, and they all feature a new thermal design that puts vents behind the hinges. You won't even see the vents, but Dell claims they're way better at heat management. You can customize these 7,000 and 5,000. Bad Boys to suit your needs, core I-5 or I-7, up to 32 gigabytes of RAM, and the 13-inch convertible can even support up to one terabyte of SSD storage. The Chromebook 14 will be available October 23rd. The Inspiron 7,000 and 5,000 convertibles will be available October 2nd with the higher-end 7,000 starting at $849. And the XPS brand has an XPS 13 model that Dell claims is the smallest and most powerful laptop in its class available today starting at $900.

There's also an XPS 13, 2 in 1 coming in September for $1,000. Quoting from Venture Beat, quote, it offers 15 hours of battery life and an ultra-sharp QHD plus Infinity Edge display. It also has a machined aluminum chassis. and a Corning Gorilla Glass 4 screen. Dell says the Infinity Edge display makes it the smallest 13-inch 2-1 on the planet, and it's quiet as it has no fans. It has options for 8th-gen Intel Core I-5 and I-7 processors, and a battery life of up to 15 hours.

It comes with 4 gigabytes of main memory. Intel integrated graphics, 128 gigabytes or more of storage, and weighs 2.7 pounds, end quote. The annual IFA is kicking off in Berlin, which is where these announcements came from. So expect a slew of new hardware announcements, laptops, of course, but also some phone stuff. We'll keep you posted over the coming days. Back to the streaming wars. The information is reporting that Amazon is planning to launch a free ad-supported video service

for its around 48 million Fire TV streaming video device users. So this would be a complete. separate thing from Prime Video, which is, of course, ad-free. Tentatively called Free Drive, Amazon is in talks with major studios to license older TV shows and the sorts of things that you, you know, would see in reruns on cable. But just as on cable, which is free to watch, you'd have ad breaks to compensate. So, TLDR, imagine a free Amazon Prime Video, but with ads. That'll be called Free Drive.

There's a bunch of interesting angles to this, in my opinion. This is exactly what Roku has found success with recently. Quote, FireDrive will be similar to what Roku offers with its Roku channel, a free ad-supported app on Roku-powered devices and smart TVs. The people said Roku has publicly championed the ad revenue from the Roku channel as a key driver of its growing platform business, which brought in $90 million last quarter. Roku recently announced it was going to be distributing the channel on the web

and other devices that are not powered by Roku software. Roku is FireTV's biggest rival in the streaming device market. This year, it is expected to have 59 million users ahead of the FireTV's 48 million e-marketer estimates, end quote. So this is Amazon taking a strategic shot at Fire TV's biggest rival by copying its game plan. But it's also about gobbling up that traditional TV advertising market. Remember, we talked about how Amazon has recently turned on the advertising tap and to great effect. So this is another grab at that ad money, which offers Amazon fatter margins than the 5.6% margins it reported last quarter.

And this is in a vertical where Google and Facebook aren't really even players. The last time we spoke about Amazon going into the ad game, I hadn't really thought it through in a strategic way. but subsequently I've read a lot more stuff recently and things are starting to make sense to me. Remember that story yesterday about Amazon stripping item purchasing data from email receipts because it didn't want rivals to share in the consumer spending data points that it has an absolute mountain of? And I think we did a segment recently about traditional retailers finally waking up to the big data possibilities of keeping track of consumers' spending habits. So put the pieces together here. Who has more granular info about more consumers and their spending than Amazon does?

Some of us use Amazon to buy literally everything in our lives, and they have decades or more of data on some of us. TV advertising is largely brand advertising. It's a lot of consumer goods stuff. So are you getting it? What could be more powerful to brands than knowing who tends to order what brand of laundry detergents say. And who knows that better than Amazon? So Wowsers put that together,

and there's a huge opportunity here that I think Amazon clearly sees as well. Quote, Amazon has very good data, and if I could track back sales actively to the actual Amazon account and target those people, it would be very powerful, said Andrew Sandoval,

a media buyer with New York-based The Media Kitchen. One more little detail from this story, and this is news to me, but the new free drive service is reportedly being developed by Amazon's IMDB subsidiary. Maybe I'm dumb to have missed this, but Amazon has already introduced ad-supported shows on IMDB. So what you might have thought of as a sleepy corner of the Amazon Empire might actually quietly be becoming a player. What is Goodreads quietly working on its own publishing arm too? Google has revamped the UI of its WareOS. So if you have a newer WearOS smartwatch sometime in the next few months, you'll see some changes that will include revamped notifications,

new information coming from Google Assistant, and one swipe access to Google Fit. There's a bunch of new swiping and gesture changes in the OS. Basically, the way you interact with your smartwatch will be completely different. Check out DieterBone's rundown that I've linked to if you're interested in the change, But what I'm interested in is what Dieter is saying when he says the following, which is watch this space. Forgive the pun. Quote, for both Android and iPhone users right now, WareOS has a ton of different watches you can choose from, but none of them are very good.

There are a bunch of signs that Google is looking to change that. This software update, the upcoming Qualcomm processor, the revamped Google Fit, and a new emphasis on increasing the quality of WareOS apps. all signs that point to a more serious attempt to take on the Apple Watch, end quote. As Owen Williams tweeted, Google, you have my attention. Now make a pixel watch. Well, Owen, that's what a lot of people think is coming down the pike. We do segments all the time on startups that raise this million dollar round or that series whatever round of VC money,

hopefully on the way to big dollar exits eventually. but in Recode, Jason Delray has a profile of some of those startups who reach successful exits without taking much outside investment or, in rare cases, any VC money at all. For all the talk of lean startups, few actually practice the philosophy to the nth degree. But if you do go the mostly bootstrapped route, there are advantages, of course. You're more disciplined with your spending because you don't have much to spend. or your spending can be aligned with your actual revenue growth because that's where you're going to get the money that you can spend anyway. And of course, when you do exit, you as the entrepreneur get a lion's share of the payday because you've held on to the equity. Del Rey's piece looks at a handful of these mostly bootstrapped startups,

and they tend to have been coming recently in the consumer startup space, companies like native, movement watches, and Tufton Needle. Quote, when Native sold to Procter and Gamble last year for $100 million in cash, just two and a half years after launching, Ali, one of the founders, could laugh last. He still owned more than 90% of his business and was worth a fortune. As important to him, he kept a strong grip on the brand's identity by remaining its CEO. I wish Silicon Valley didn't glorify those massive funding rounds as much as they do, Ali said. People don't respect how much one person can do, end quote. Direct-to-consumer has been a hot investment space for a few years now. Think of Harry's or Casper.

In the first months of this year alone, investors have put $1.2 billion into the direct-to-consumer space. It turns out, though, that just this last year or so, there have been a bunch of direct-to-consumer startup acquisitions of companies that have raised little or no venture capital. Movado snapped up movement for $200 million. movement's 40 employees owned 100% of the company. Serta Simmons just snapped up foam mattress maker Tufton Needle, which had reached $170 million in revenue with zero outside investment, just $6,000 of founder equity and a $500,000 loan. I'd encourage any entrepreneurs out there to read this piece.

I'm not saying the examples in it would work in every vertical or be the right move for even most startups, but at the same time, in the age of unicorn valuations, situations, Big Rays one-upmanship and Big Rays envy has become an end in it of itself, I think. And that can cause problems of its own, as one of the movement founders says in the piece of mega VC raises, quote, once you do it one year, you have to do it next year. It becomes this bad cycle. I think having the discipline and flexibility was just the secret for us all along, end quote. And as the piece points out, if your mega rounds get to be too big, that actually

narrows the universe of potential acquirers and thus potential exits for you. You can actually raise your way into a stratosphere that makes it too expensive for someone to swoop in and give your investors the returns they want. Again, read the piece. It's not a polemic against VC or anything like that, but it is, I think, something to think about. A bit of a palliative for the My Round is bigger than your round game, which in the end can be a chump's game. Finally, today, a grab bag of interesting crypto stories. Andresen Horowitz's crypto fund has made its biggest investment yet

by participating in a private token sale from Cloud Computing Project, DFINITY, which raised $102 million in its token sale. DFINITY, as Fortune puts it, wants to reinvent computing by replacing large platforms like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce with a cheaper, decentralized alternative. alternative, end quote. Fortune also notes that the hottest new courses in college this fall are all about the blockchain. According to research Fortune got from Coinbase, there are 172 classes this fall in cryptocurrency at the top 50 universities that Coinbase looked at. And these

aren't just at computer science schools either. Business schools, economics departments, even law departments were offering various coursework related to the crypto space. 70% of colleges Coinbase looked at had at least one crypto class on offer. And diving into that Coinbase research for a few more nuggets, according to a survey of college students done by Coinbase, 26% of them

would want to take a course on cryptocurrencies. Maybe that's because fully 18% of college students claim to own some crypto themselves. And finally, guess where the world's oldest blockchain is? It's been operating

since 1995, hint him. Well, you won't guess. It's actually in the New York Times classifieds section. You'll need to read the article to understand the ins and outs of how all this is possible. It's the last link in the show notes, the motherboard link. But here's the long and short of it. Stuart Haber and Scott Strannetta are cryptographers whose work directly inspired Satoshi Nakamoto. In fact, he cites their work in the Bitcoin white paper.

Haber and Strannetta created a time stamping service in 1995 called Sureity that cryptographically seals digital documents. Before there was a public digital ledger, surety needed to make public a copy of its cryptographic hashes in order to prevent anyone from backdating timestamps. So every week since 1995 in the Times classified section under the heading notices and lost and found has run an ad placed by surety that, is essentially the up-to-date cryptographic hash value. Thus, the oldest public blockchain has been running in plain sight in the New York Times, 13 years before Bitcoin ever hit the scene. That's all for today, guys. I know that we New Yorkers get a lot of stick for our New York weather tweets.

Anytime the weather is unusual in New York City, God forbid, you follow any of us on Twitter because you'll hear about it. Blizzard in the City, get ready. for an avalanche of tweets from all of us grousing about it. Well, at the risk of doing New York City weather potting, the weather report from the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge today, it's hot A.F. And I grew up in South Florida,

so I know from hot and humid better than most. It's bad out there. Hopefully a tad cooler tomorrow. Talk to you then.