Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, June 13, 2018 - Major Twitter Changes

Episode Date: June 13, 2018

Today was major revamp day. Twitter’s ringing in big changes. Microsoft is putting a new polish on Office. Also: Intel jumps into the GPU game, Bitcoin might have been manipulated, and Fortnite comes to the Nintendo Switch. Stories from: @nathanielpopper, @PatcohenNYT, @ryanshrout Tweets: @hrtbps Links:Intel makes it a three-way race with AMD and Nvidia on graphics chips (Marketwatch)Bitcoin’s Price Was Artificially Inflated Last Year, Researchers Say (NYTimes)E-Commerce Might Help Solve the Mystery of Low Inflation (NYTimes)Fortnite on the Switch is good enough to make Sony’s cross-play policy look even more stupid (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 TechMame Ride Home for Wednesday, June 13th, 2018. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Today was Major Revamp Day.

Twitter rang in some big changes. Microsoft is putting a new polish on office. Also, Intel is getting into the GPU game. Bitcoin might have been manipulated. And Fortnite comes to the Nintendo Switch. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Major changes are coming to Twitter. The company announced today that it will soon begin curating dedicated pages for events with tweets, videos, and more that will be promoted across notifications, the Explore tab, and more.

It is also redesigning moments by introducing vertical scrolling and adding multiple timelines for some U.S. moments. And Twitter is ramping up its notification system, offering some users personalized news updates, alerting them to follow events or breaking news. news based on which accounts they follow. In other words, as everyone basically summed it up, Twitter is putting more live news events into every corner of the app. This change we're working on is designed to make it as easy to follow an event as it is to follow a person. So said Twitter product VP Keith Coleman in a briefing at Twitter headquarters today. Quote, without following accounts simply by tapping one tile, you're getting the best of the conversation on Twitter, end quote.

Twitter's Shuram Krishnan tweeted, quote, The goal is to make it easy to quickly find and follow the events and breaking news you care about on Twitter, especially if you already don't have a well-cured timeline, end quote. BuzzFeeds Alex Kantrowitz wrote, quote, Twitter wants its existing users to be able to find information about events as quickly as possible, creating more situations where they feel like part of a community following an event together in real time.

For new and casual users, it can be even more useful helping them quickly dive into an event as it's happening without having to build a follow list, one of Twitter's most arduous experiences, end quote. Twitter has always been chasing those new and casual users as a way to reignite user growth. But as ever with Twitter, it needs to strike a delicate balance. What about those of us who are obsessive Twitter users already

and are the ones who are making all of those tweets that make Twitter interesting. As user heartbeeps said on Twitter, this is all fine and good, but there should be an opt-out button for people who want to see exclusively tweets from people they follow in chronological order and literally nothing else.

A podcaster Mike Hurley tweeted, one of the things I like about Twitter is my ability to follow just the things I want to see if I was forced to use the official Twitter app and they insisted on showing me breaking news events, that would be enough to get me to quit using it. All of those changes will be rolling out to users in the U.S. and Canada in the coming months. Microsoft is putting a new polish on things as well,

but this story is not so much about new features as it is about a redesign with an eye towards simplicity and usability. On its Office 365 blog this morning, the company announced changes to its entire office suite, including desktop, apps and office.com on the web, which will be rolling out over the coming months. Essentially, Microsoft is bringing that so-called fluent design system that it has been rolling out to Windows 10 over to the Office Suite. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook are all

going to see a new simplified ribbon at the top, which promises to be smaller and easier to use. And Office on the Web will now also include avatars for comments and dedicated color schemes for different users who are working on the same document at the same time. Jared Spataro, corporate vice president for Office and Windows marketing, wrote in the blog post, quote, Office is used by more than a billion people every month, so while we're excited about these changes, we also recognize how important it is to get things right. These updates are exclusive to Office.com and Office 365, the always up-to-date versions of our apps and services.

But they won't happen all at once. Instead, over the next several months, we will deploy new designs to select customers in stages and carefully test and learn. We'll move them into production only after they've made it through rigorous rounds of validation and refinement, end quote. In addition to the ribbon and design changes, Microsoft is incorporating search more deeply in Office apps to make that a, quote, much more important element of the user experience. Intel confirmed yesterday that its first discrete GPUs, will be coming out as soon as 2020. If you haven't been paying attention to the chip space, the use of high-performance graphics processors has exploded.

GPUs are chips that are dedicated to graphics processes, as opposed to your traditional CPU. The analogy that has been made is that if the CPU is the brains of your computer, the GPU is its soul. GPUs have proven better suited for gaming, of course, and VR, of course, but also certain data centers, and this is key, in autonomous vehicle operations, AI, machine learning, and cryptocurrency mining. So pretty much all of the shiny buzzwords for what people think is coming next in tech.

The current biggest players in the GPU market have been AMD traditionally, but Nvidia, more recently, as reflected in that company's stock price. Seriously, check out a five-year price chart on Nvidia to see why being in the GPU end of the business has been so important of late. Anyway, Intel has largely missed out on this market. As a stopgap, Intel had been partnering with AMD to integrate GPUs into its core processors, but this news that now they are going to get into the standalone GPU game themselves

is a big deal. Intel hired GPU Guru Raja Cordy away from AMD only six months or so ago. industry analysts note that to get a typical graphics architecture up and running from scratch typically takes about three years, so even hitting a 2020 deadline is, as MarketWatch notes, pretty aggressive. Quoting from MarketWatch, quote, Intel needs to provide a performance and efficiency level that is in the same ballpark as Nvidia and AMD within about 20% or so. Doing that on the first attempt, while also building and fostering the necessary software, ecosystem and tools around the new hardware is a tough ask of any company, Silicon Valley

juggernaut or no. Until we see the first options available in 2020 to gauge, invidia and AMD have the leadership positions. Speaking of shiny tech buzzwords, more cryptocurrency news today, that crypto index fund that Coinbase announced back in March is now officially open for business, provided you are a U.S. accredited investor. and are willing to invest between $250,000 and $2 million. If this is you, you can now spread your money around a whole basket of cryptocurrencies weighted by market capitalization. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted, Investing in Coinbase Index Fund is the easiest way to get exposure to a broad range of crypto assets,

much cheaper than 2 and 20% charged by most crypto hedge funds, and you get new assets automatically added to the fund as they become available on Coinbase, no rebalancing, end quote. Coinbase is clearly going after the larger money first, institutional investors and the like, but in a blog post announcing the news, Coinbase said, quote, we're working on launching more funds which are accessible to all investors and cover a broader range of digital assets, end quote. By limiting investment to accredited and U.S. only investors at first, Coinbase is clearly also trying to get its regulatory ducts in order. The SEC has,

rules that say companies can only sell securities that are registered with the SEC itself. Since it doesn't look like the SEC is likely to grant regulatory approval to any cryptocurrency index funds or ETFs anytime soon, sticking to accredited investors allows Coinbase to stay on the right side of the law. An individual is considered an accredited investor if he or she has a net worth of $1 million, excluding primary residence, or a consistent annual income of at least $200,000, or a combined income of $300,000 with your spouse, and a legal entity is considered to be an accredited investor if all the equity owners are themselves accredited investors.

And speaking of crypto, over at the New York Times, Nathaniel Popper, the Times' accidental crypto beat reporter, has a piece up looking at research from the University of Texas that suggests that some degree of Bitcoin's skyrocketing price surge over the last year might have come as a result of market manipulation from a few big players. Researchers looked at the flow of tokens going in and out of BitFinex, a crypto exchange registered in the Caribbean, and examined how some market participants used a secondary virtual currency known as Tether, which was created by the owners of Bitfinex,

to artificially prop up the price of Bitcoin. Quote, there were obviously tremendous price increases last year, and this paper indicates that manipulation played a large part in those price increases, so said John Griffin, the finance professor at the University of Texas, who was a co-author of the research. The research paper in question suggests that half of the increase in Bitcoin's price in 2017 could be traced to the hours immediately after large amounts of tether flowed into other exchanges, generally when the price of Bitcoin was going down. So in essence, the suggestion is that traders were using these secondary tether tokens, which are tied to the price of the U.S. dollar, to prop up the price of Bitcoin on other exchanges right when the price of Bitcoin was

beginning to sag. Some in crypto circles have long been suspicious of the flow of tether and Bitfinex generally. Bitfinex CEO J.L. Vanderveld hit back at the research telling blockchain news, quote, Bitfinex, nor tether is or has ever. engaged in any sort of market or price manipulation. Tether issuances cannot be used to prop up the price of Bitcoin or any other coin slash token on BitFinex, end quote. But my question would be, if market manipulation was happening, what occurred that made it stop? Because it certainly doesn't look like anything is propping up the price of Bitcoin at the moment. Just this week,

Bitcoin has sunk to a 70-day low of around $6,500. On June 10th, the cryptocurrency lost 10% of its value in a period of only four hours. And speaking of research, new research suggests that e-commerce might be responsible for the persistent low inflation that has been occurring in the U.S. for about a decade now. Research from a bunch of studies has shown that prices for goods sold online rise much more slowly than indicated by the Consumer Price Index and other measurements of inflation. Quoting from a piece about this in the New York Times, Online prices of personal computers fell by 12.3%, for example,

but the CPI showed just a 6.9% drop. Toy prices online slumped 12% while the CPI put the drop at just 7.8%. Online prices for photographic equipment and supplies fell 9.2% compared with the 0.6% decline registered by the official measure, end quote. And that's kind of the problem. Measuring just what sort of an impact online shopping has had on the economy is weirdly devilishly difficult, apparently. Again, quoting from the Times piece, even with thousands of price inspectors, the government can sample only a tiny portion

of goods and services sold across the country. The traditional measures are also not well suited to take account of the consistent introduction of new and upgraded products, like instapots and athleisure yoga pants. Cell phones, for example, were not included in the CPI until 1996 when about 40 million Americans or 15% of the population at the time were already using them. In many cases, prices for those new goods like computers plunge over time, but price indexes fail to capture the change, end quote. Measuring the impact of technology on the economy has always been a problem. Again, we can use the example of computers to illustrate this.

If you think about it, a computer bought today could be three times faster and therefore three times more productive than a computer from, say, five years ago. But if today's computer actually costs less because of Moore's law, then does that show up as a negative contribution to the nation's GDP growth? In the late 1990s, the stock market boom was attributed to a supposed rise in worker productivity that everyone was sure technology was making possible. The problem was, every time economists tried to nail down those productivity gains, they simply couldn't find them in the actual numbers.

There's a famous quote from Abby Joseph Cohen, the Goldman Sachs stock analyst from The Time, who told the New Yorkers John Cassidy back in 1996, quote, Take a look at Goldman Sachs, for example. We have invested heavily in sophisticated voicemail systems and word processing systems and so on. I know that the productivity of the technical staff is multiples of what it used to be. I just know that to be the case, but it doesn't get measured any place. So if you're a gamer, you probably already know this, but Fortnite, that Battle Royale game that has taken the world by storm, has come to the Nintendo Switch.

Apparently, the Switch version of Fortnite is roughly similar in graphics quality to the iOS version of the game, but with the Switch, of course, you have a bigger screen, and, of course, you have actual joysticks and controllers at your fingertips to better play the game with. According to the Verges Sam Bifford, the Switch feels like a completely new way to play Fortnite, at least in handheld mode. It's exactly the same game under the graphical downgrades, and it still looks pretty good on the portable screen.

Fortnite's cartoony, colorful art style goes a long way to flatter technical deficiencies. But with the Switch, you can play full-on Fortnite with proper controls anywhere you have internet access. Epic is even offering party chat through the headphone jack rather than Nintendo's convoluted app-based solution, though that's not coming until an update on Thursday, end quote. Fortnite coming to the Switch continues GameMaker Epic's strategy of bringing the free-to-play game to every platform under the sun. Bringing it to the current hottest gaming system is certainly a coup, but it's a coup for Nintendo as well

because it will further reinforce the idea that the Switch is not just a gimmick, but actually a desirable platform for hardcore gamers. Not all gamers are happy, however. A big component of Fortnite is how you can carry over your progress from device to device, things like level ups, stats, avatars, weapons as you move through the game. So you need to be able to log in between devices in a way that carries your progress with you. And Sony is currently blocking compatibility for users to transfer over their data to the switch

if they start playing the game on a PS4. As Bifford writes, quote, blocking the switch is short-sighted and dumb. The Switch version of Fortnite doesn't compete with the PS4 version any more than the iOS version does. If you have a PS4, you wouldn't want to play the Switch version on your TV. From a PS4 owner's perspective, the sole value of the Switch version is that it allows you to play Fortnite in situations that Sony's console isn't able to serve. Is Sony really worried about people buying V-bucks in an airport? End quote. By the way, Epic Games announced today that Fortnite now has 125 million players just one year after launch,

and 40 million people play the game at least once a month. Fortnite only came out in July of 2017, and the Battle Royale mode, which caused the game to really catch on, didn't even come out until September of 2017. So that's pretty, pretty, pretty impressive. So I'm running a quick listener poll. If you go to my Twitter page, I'm at Brian MCC. You'll see a pinned tweet at the top that asks how often you use the links in the show notes that I always mention to go ahead and actually read the stories that I mentioned on the show. If you get a chance, please go and vote and a couple of caveats about this poll.

It's a real quick one, really informal. Of course, there's going to be confirmation bias here, though. People that love the show notes and the links have a lot. more motivation and reason for voting because they love them. So please, if some of you don't use the show notes, please go vote anyway and tell me so I can get some sort of sense of reality. And also, this is not like Brexit or anything. The referendum is non-binding in this case. I don't have any intention of changing the show notes. Links aren't going anywhere. I just want to get a sense of how vital or not vital actually reading the stories is to your use case for the show. Like, is the

reason you guys enjoy the show because I read all the articles and summarize them so you don't have to? Or do you use the show as sort of a discovery tool to find out cool things to learn about? Anyway, vote if you get the chance at Brian MCC on Twitter. And while you're there, maybe give me a follow. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.