Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, Apr. 25, 2018 - The Gmail Revamp

Episode Date: April 25, 2018

Facebook earnings, Twitter earnings, the Gmail redesign arrives, Alexa for children, a possible solution for law enforcement accessing encrypted phones, and drones are helping first responders in Europe. Stories from: @mm_maack and @StevenLevy Links:DJI launches a new emergency drone program in Europe (TNW)Cracking the Crypto War (Wired) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 Ride Home for Wednesday, April 25th, 2018. Today, Facebook earnings, Twitter earnings, the Gmail redesign arrives, Alexa for children arrives, a possible solution for law enforcement accessing encrypted phones arrives,

and drones are helping first responders in Europe. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It's the heart of tech earnings season, everybody. Facebook's numbers just hit the wires mere minutes ago. Facebook's Q1 earnings per share were $1.69 versus $1.35 per share, which was the consensus estimate. This means that Facebook attained $4.98 billion in quarterly profit. Revenues were $11.97 billion versus $11.41 billion, according to consensus.

That represents a 49% increase from the $8 billion. Facebook reported for quarter one last year. This is the first earnings report after the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke, so people were wondering if the hashtag delete Facebook movement had any impact. It seems like it didn't. Facebook's daily active users hit $1.45 billion, up 3.57% from last quarter's 2.18% growth. Monthly active users were $2.2 billion, a 3.28% growth over last quarter. But year over year, Facebook's daily and monthly user numbers are up 13%. The first line from Facebook's earnings report read, quote,

Facebook's business is off to a strong start this year, despite a challenging last few months, end quote. At the time of this recording, 4.20 p.m. Eastern Time, Facebook shares were up around 4% after hours. Obviously, this is an evolving story, so check Techmeme.com all evening for more analysis and headlines. Twitter announced its earnings

this morning before the bell. The company beat Q1 estimates with revenue of $665 million, up 21% year over year, and more than the $605 million consensus estimate. With social networks, it's all about active users,

and Twitter said its daily active users were up 10%. The company doesn't give a hard number for daily active users, but does break out monthly active users, which came in at $336 million versus the $334 million that was estimated. That represents a 3% year-over-year increase. Twitter posted profits of $91 million or $0.16 a share.

This was Twitter's second quarter of profitability in a row and its second ever profitable quarter. But there were some cautious headlines as well. The company said its growth rate would probably slow down back to its 2016. pace. Twitter analyst Richard Greenfield told Bloomberg, quote, Twitter is still in rebuilding credibility mode with investors and advertisers, so it's important they keep demonstrating momentum relative to expectations. They are continuing to position themselves, so expectations don't get out of control. Twitter's main growth is coming from overseas, it seems. International monthly active users grew to 267 million users from 262 million, and

and international revenue increased 53%. Monthly active users in the U.S. increased by only 1 million last quarter, and U.S. revenue only increased by 2% year over year. There was a whole bunch of Google News this morning that long-anticipated update to Gmail began rolling out today to the approximately 1.4 billion users of Gmail. It's a phased rollout, so if you haven't seen the changes in your own account yet, don't worry, they're coming.

A lot of the changes will be useful for almost every user. You can now snooze emails by hovering your mouse over them and selecting when you want to see the email pop back up in your inbox. There's also what Google calls nudging, which is when Gmail will resurface an email, even if you don't ask for it because Gmail knows that there is something time-sensitive about the email that would require some action.

And Google now has an offline mode for checking your mail without an internet connection, as well as one-tap unsubscription features to quickly cease annoying emails. But plenty of the changes have power and business users in mind as well. There is now a confidential mode that allows the sender to set an expiration date for the email to be opened. You can also block the forwarding, copying, downloading, or printing of specific messages, and you can even use two-factor authentication on an email-by-email basis. Tying into all of this, Google Annanese,

announced a new dedicated mobile app called Tasks that lets users manage tasks created in Gmail or Google Calendar. This integrates with the new Gmail redesign, and when you access Gmail on the web, you can view tasks in a new side panel interface. Google says tasks is now a fully-fledged member of its G-suite of productivity services. Switching over to Google Play, the website DroidLife is reporting that Google Play Music, Google's rival to Spotify and Apple Music, will soon be replaced by YouTube Remix, the long-rumored YouTube music subscription service. Remix will supposedly include Spotify-like on-demand streaming of songs, while also, of course, incorporating video clips.

It seems that several outlets had been tipped to the possibility that remix would be taking over, and Google Play Music would be subsumed into it, but it seems that Droid Life is the first to nail down the rumor. A YouTube spokesperson reached out to Droid Life with this statement, quote, we've previously announced the combination of the YouTube music and Google Play product teams. Music is very important to Google, so it's critical that we have one offering that meets the needs of consumers and artists. Nothing will change for users today, and we'll certainly provide plenty of notice before any changes are made, end quote. As Droid Life says, make of that what you will.

Amazon has created a version of Alexa just for kids. The e-tailer today announced an echo dot kids edition priced at $79, that is for all intents and purposes, an echo dot, but with additional parental controls, specific child-friendly content, and a slightly cuter design. The device will come bundled with a one-year subscription to Amazon's free time unlimited service,

which has things like kid-friendly audiobooks, kid-centered radio stations, and playlists and content from the likes of National Geographic and Nickelodeon. The echo dot kid edition will have a parental dashboard, accessible from the web and the Alexa app that will allow monitoring of a child's activity on the device, cursing filters for songs on Amazon music, and time limit settings to restrict when and for how long Alexa can be used.

Amazon says the kid edition will be more forgiving to younger users' speech patterns. In our house, she's very much known as Awexa, and there will be an Easter egg in the programming that will thank kids when they say, please. If you have kids at home with an echo device, you know how popular it is with the little ones. So this sort of feels like an inevitable move on Amazon's part. Tony Reid, who runs product development for Alexa and Echo devices, told BuzzFeed News, quote,

I love watching kids use the device because they are unencumbered and they just keep asking. They just expect things to work, end quote. But obviously, this is a whole potential can of worms for Amazon to wait into in terms of age-appropriate content. and data privacy fears. Amazon told BuzzFeed unequivocally that there would be no data collected on kid users that wouldn't be viewable by parents. By the way, starting May 9th,

parents with existing echo devices can sign up for a free time unlimited on Alexa subscription to get all of the kid-specific content I mentioned. It will cost $3 a month for existing prime members. Seemingly, everyone is changing their terms of services recently in order to complete.

comply with the upcoming European GDPR law. But Axios noted that Oath, which is the unit of Verizon that now encompasses the remains of Yahoo and AOL, is changing its terms of service in a way that will mean users who continue to use those services will have to give up their rights to class action lawsuits in the U.S. You might remember that Yahoo was the victim of one of the largest data breaches in history. In a summary page describing the changes, Oath writes, hopefully disputes will never be an issue, but in the case of one, this allows a third-party arbitrator to help us resolve them. We've also added a class action waiver.

These provisions are an important part of our relationship with you, so please read them carefully, end quote. The service changes go into effect immediately for any new users of oath, and if you're an existing user, if you continue to use the services after May 25th, you'll have to agree to the terms of service as well. As I mentioned, Oath is a division of Verizon, and there was an interesting little nugget in Verizon's own recent earnings report, which came out yesterday. Verizon told Wall Street that subscription numbers increased in the quarter by 260,000, topping the 159,000 analyst estimate.

But Verizon also said it lost phone customers in the quarter. In fact, phone customers went down 24,000 subscribers. Verizon also lost 75,000 tablet customers. customers. So what makes up the difference? It turned out that Verizon added about 359,000 subscribers last quarter who were using watches, wearables, or other devices. Watch customers pay $10 a month as a subscription fee compared with the $40 or more that phone subscribers typically have to pay for data plans. So it's not exactly a win-win, but Wall Street seemed to be pleased that the new devices were helping Verizon make up for that subscription churn.

Shares of Verizon were up as much as 3.6% yesterday. Verizon's earnings came in at $1.17 a share, up from $0.95 a year earlier. Analysts had been forecasting $1.11 a share. Revenue grew to $31.8 billion, beating Wall Street projections of $31.3 billion. How many times have we done pieces about data privacy and recently about law enforcement wanting to unlock iPhones and find ways to overcome encryption in their criminal investigation? Over at Wired, the legendary tech journalist Stephen Levy has a piece up about a possible solution to this problem. Ray Ozzie, the creator of Lotus Notes and formerly Microsoft's CTO and chief software architect,

thinks that he has a solution that would please both law enforcement and privacy rights activists. The problem is no one seems to want to use it yet. I'll let the author of the piece himself explain it. So Ray Ozzy has been a long-time technologist and also an activist in arguing for encryption. And he's been bugged that one argument against what's called exceptional access or what some people call a backdoor into encrypted information has been that if you try to do a scheme like that, it'll automatically blow off the security of the system so it don't even go there. So Rays come up with a system called Clear, which is a way that if the police or a federal fed or whoever are in possession of a device, they can get the encrypted files from it with the cooperation of the company that made a device. This would actually protect user data broadly because instead of building in a permanent back door into software or hardware, this would be sort of a one-off. The information requires a separate key to unlock it, and that key is only in the possession of a company which guards it with the same security that they use to use the keys they use to protect their operating system, which, you know, the consequences of keeping that key safe are the same as keeping all your information safe.

So his argument is that we're no less safe by using this scheme than we are to begin with. Ozzie has pitched this scheme to law enforcement, and they seem to be on board, but when he's pitched it to the usual suspects, Facebook, Apple, Google, at all, they are seemingly not on board, at least not yet. The companies, you know, there's nothing in it for them to sign on to this if they don't have to. There's no upside for them. But, you know, what it would require is, you know, frankly, legislation to say the companies must do it. In which case, you know, Ray thinks that they would be likely to look at a scheme like his as the least painful way to satisfy a government demand to say, we can't have, you know, systems where, you know, no one to read it,

including information, including the manufacturer, that makes a system. Why is this a cause that Ray Ozzie has taken up? He's retired. He theoretically has his FU money. So why tilt at this windmill? Yeah, I kept the air. right, why do you want to do this? Why buy this trouble? Because it really is, you know, wandering into a flum. People are going to criticize them. And he just says he was bugged that people were using a scientific argument to move a policy issue. He's saying, let's debate the policy, but don't say the mathematical gods make this not happen, will prevent this from ever

happening. Let's take science out of it and just argue the policy. It seems too good. good to be true, a solution to encrypted devices that would seemingly satisfy both law enforcement and privacy activists. The piece is online at Wired and in this month's issue of the magazine. Its title is Cracking the Crypto War, and there's a link in the show notes. Stephen Levy has been on this beat longer than anyone. He wrote a whole book, Crypto, how the Code Rebels beat the government saving privacy in the digital age all the way back in 2001, recounting the privacy wars of the 90s. He says revisiting this issue has been interesting to him to say the least.

It's a little frustrating that we haven't gone past this. We thought this has been resolved, but it's a super important issue and it really deserves a lot of discussion. The next web is reporting that DJI, the drone maker, has a new joint pilot project with the European Emergency Number Association or EENA to test the use of drones as assistance to emergency services and first responders in Europe. in Europe. The pilot, which will take place in Ireland and Wales, comes after previous tests with the EENA that took place in 2016 and 2017. Romeo Dersher, Director of Public Safety Integration at D.J.I, told the next web what sort of future the tests were hoping to prove out, quote, what if the firefighter on the ground could also tap into all the available data and see an

incident from various different perspectives? What if algorithms helped providing suggestions during large-scale events for next steps or to give incident command data that would normally take hours to get. One thing is clear, both hardware and software solutions will continue to develop based on needs and the capabilities for first responders will increase, end quote.

Previous tests were with firefighters, where drones were able to use their cameras to sniff out hotspots in a fire, and also search and rescue teams on rescue missions where time is obviously a serious factor. But these new tests are designed to go further, gathering incident data and performing post-incident forensics. The examples given were aerial mapping of levee breaches or even levy analysis to prevent future flooding. Also, 2D and 3D mapping of car accident scenes that might allow teams to clear the road and get traffic moving faster.

Finally today, a weird story also out of Europe. Quartz is reporting that last week, stock exchanges across northern Europe were not. knocked out of commission by a loud noise. It seems that NASDAX servers at Didiplex Data Center in Sweden were rendered temporarily inoperable when a fire prevention system in the facility went off, knocking out systems that forced the shutdown of trading on the stock markets for Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania.

So they had a fire right, and the sprinklers came on and shorted out the servers? Actually, no. Data centers tend not to use water in fire suppressant systems, for obvious reasons. Instead, discharging inert gas, which displaces the oxygen in the air, thereby starving any fire of fuel. In this case, when the fire suppressant systems came on, the release of the gas was so loud that it caused vibrations that upset the alignment

of the disk drive reed right heads inside the servers. Apparently, noise louder than 110 decibels can do this to disk. drives. Ironically, in this case, there actually was no fire. The system just went off due to a malfunction. Nasdaq was forced to fly in emergency backup servers. So for all the ways, our G-Wiz Digital Society can sometimes feel fragile. I guess we need to add computers don't like loud noises to the list. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me at Brian MCC and check techmean.com all this evening for the evolving story of Facebook earnings. More on those, I'm sure, tomorrow.