Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, June 6, 2018 - Hour-long Instagram Videos?

Episode Date: June 6, 2018

A whole slew of product announcements. New Sonos speakers. A new Motorola smartphone. A new AMD chip. Instagram may soon allow you to post hour-long videos. Plus: why Microsoft sunk a data center off the Scottish coast and why startups keep naming themselves after… people. Stories from: @DMOberhaus, @janinewolfj9, @laforgia_  Links:Facebook Gave Data Access to Chinese Firm Flagged by U.S. Intelligence (NYTimes)Instagram Could Soon Allow Users to Post Long-Form Video (WSJ)Microsoft Just Put a Data Center on the Bottom of the Ocean (Motherboard)Marcus, Casper, Oscar: Why Startups Are Obsessed With Human Names (Bloomberg) 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, June 6th, 2018. Today, there was a whole slew of product announcements, new Sonos speakers, a new Motorola smartphone, a new AMD chip. Instagram may soon allow you to post hour-long videos.

Plus, why Microsoft sunk a data center off the Scottish coast and why startups keep naming themselves after people's names. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The New York Times has continued its investigations into the partnerships that Facebook has struck over the last decade or so with phone manufacturers. Last night, the newspaper reported on the partnerships with major Chinese phone manufacturers. Quoting from the lead of the story, the agreements, which date to at least 2010, gave private access to some user data to Yahweh, a telecommunications equipment company that has been flagged by American intelligence. officials as a national security threat, as well as to Lenovo, APO, and TCL, end quote. At the time of this recording, the full partnerships with Chinese companies mentioned remain in effect, but Facebook does say that the deal with Yahweh will wind down by the end of this week.

Some elements of the U.S. government have been raising concerns recently about the geopolitical implications of Chinese technology companies, some of whom are believed to have. have close ties to the Chinese government, producing technologies for the U.S. consumer market. In a statement, Facebook insisted that all of the personal information collected via these software integrations with Chinese phones were stored on the devices themselves. But U.S. Senator Mark Werner of Virginia told the Times, quote, I look forward to learning more about how Facebook ensured that information about their users was not sent to Chinese servers.

Senator Warner is particularly concerned about Yahweh, quote, Concerns about Yahweh aren't new. They were widely publicized beginning in 2012 when the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence released a well-read report on the close relationships between the Chinese Communist Party and equipment makers like Yahweh, end quote. Over at Axios, noted Washington political observer, Mike Allen says that at this point, Facebook is playing with fire. quote, Mark Zuckerberg survived questions about Russia's election meddling largely unscathed, but the New York Times' revelations that Facebook knowingly granted for Chinese electronics companies' access to Americans' data, and didn't bother to tell Congress about it, has Washington fuming again.

Alan's Be Smart takeaway this morning was, quote, the risk to Facebook and other tech giants has never been swift sweeping regulation. It's been that the arc of regulation bends to inevitable because of a series of serious mind-changing revelations over time, end quote. It should be noted that Facebook has been banned in China since 2009. Remember the Amazon Echo look, that so-called style assistant, or essentially Alexa with a camera? That device that analyzes your clothing choices and makes recommendations based on machines. learning. Until today you were only able to order one of these via invitation, but no longer as beginning today anyone in the US can order one for the same $200 price

of the invitation period. The way this gadget works is that you stand at front of the echo look for what it calls a style check. Snap photos of yourself and the device will provide a quote second opinion on which outfits look best on you based on fit, color, styling, and current trends. If you want still more feedback, you can post outfits to Amazon Spark community for a quick poll from strangers.

Amazon has also added style tips from Vogue and GQ right in the Echo Look app. And of course, if you let the Echo Look give you fashion suggestions, chances are you can immediately order those suggested items from, you guessed it, Amazon. It's not quite their flagship device,

That would be the upcoming Motorola Power 1. But Motorola today unveiled the latest update to its very reasonably priced smartphone line with the new 6.01-inch Moto Z3 Play. This baby's got a Snapdragon 636, 4 gigabytes of RAM, dual rear cameras, and arriving this summer for, as I said, the very reasonable price of $499 unlocked. Notch? No. headphone jack no wireless charging no

but if you buy the phone unlocked you'll get one of Moto's extra battery mods for free that's right Motorola hasn't given up on the concept of modular smartphones there are now more than 20 different modular accessories for these phones now ranging from style shells to camera mods to

smart speaker add-ons with Alexa integration on yesterday's show I mentioned how Intel had announced a 28-core process But like the famous onion headline about making a razor with five blades that I was punting off yesterday, AMD has immediately one-uped Intel, or maybe four-uped them. At Competex, the company revealed its Threadripper 2 processor, which will have 32 cores based on its 12-nanometer process, coming to market later this year.

According to the Verges Vlad Savov, who was at the event, the thread ripper two, quote, straps four eight-core rise and dyes together to form a unified, humongous 32-core part. This heavy metal thread ripper can handle 64 processing threads at a time, doubling the core count and capabilities of the original thread ripper, though it can still fit in the same motherboard socket as the first generation, end quote. AMD's Jim Anderson told Engadget that the tit-for-tat competition between the chip rivals

is good for everyone. Quote, I think having Intel react to us just benefits and users. I also think it's nice to see AMD back to its heritage of pushing the industry. A lot of product announcements today.

It's almost like there's an industry conference going on. Right. Computex. This wasn't announced there, but at a special event in San Francisco today, Sonos debuted a new product

that it's calling Beam, a 300,000. $199 compact soundbar that is coming later this year with a five microphone array and full Alexa integration. Google Assistant and Airplay II support is also planned. As the Verges Dieterbone describes it, this is Sonos's most forward-looking and ambitious speaker yet. Sonos wants it to both become the de facto best smart speaker for the living room and also expand Sonos's customer base by appealing to customers who might not otherwise invest in a soundbar. It takes on other top-end smart speakers like the HomePod and the Google Home Max

by offering TV features they don't and a platform agnostic philosophy. The Sonos Beam is the company's best argument yet for why it needs to exist. In a world where every other company is trying to lock consumers into a vertical ecosystem of products, the Sonos approach is to be a neutral translator, end quote. essentially this is a soundbar for your TV, but also a full smart speaker. The Sonos Beam supports 80 plus streaming music services and basically any of the smart voice assistance you could want to use. Since it plugs into your TV with that version of HDMI that can control your TV, you can do things like turn the TV on and off with your voice, raise and lower the volume,

and depending on which app you're using, browse shows and such all again with your voice. Sonos calls it, quote, a game-changing smart speaker that delivers incredible sound for virtually any streaming content in the rooms. People spend the most time in. Over at the Wall Street Journal, Ben Mullen has a scoop up about a rumored long-form video feature that will allow users to post videos up to an hour long on Instagram. Until now, Instagram has only let you post videos shorter than a minute. This new product is far enough along that Instagram has reportedly held discussions with content creators and publishers about producing long-form videos for this new feature. Instagram has been pushing more and more into video recently, in lockstep with its sibling Facebook, especially as it has integrated video into its wildly popular stories product, which is now used by about 300 million people every single day.

Mullen's piece notes that Instagram wants to focus on, quote, vertical videos, which is the format Instagram Stories is built on, where you capture video with the phone right side up instead of tilted to the side. What is not clear is whether these longer videos would be a part of the Stories product itself or postable to the main Instagram feed. No word yet from Instagram. General Motors announced today that its hands-free Super Cruise driver assistance system is coming to all Cadillac models by the year 2020.

Using LiDAR, radar, cameras, GPS, all sorts of other sensors, the Super Cruise system basically allows you to take your hands off the steering wheel when you're on the highway or freeway. It does have an infrared camera that is always watching you to make sure that your eyes stay on the road, however. The system is currently available on the Cadillac CT6 and is essentially similar to Tesla's autopilot system. Cadillac is, of course, GM's premium car brand.

GM says that the Super Cruise will come to other GM models after it fully rolls this out to Cadillacs. Slightly tangential story, I'm stretching a bit here, but Uber is working on self-driving cars as well, so I'm going to jam this in. The information is reporting that Uber plans to spend up to $500 million on a global brand marketing effort this year. This is fairly aggressive,

advertising spending, and will reportedly target the U.S. heavily. You might have seen some of these Uber ads during the NBA finals already, and this is clearly all about improving Uber's corporate image. One of the ads features Uber CEO Darikososhahi saying, quote, it's time to move in a new direction, and I want you to know just how excited I am to write Uber's next chapter with you. You've got my word that we're charting an even better road for Uber, and those that rely on us every day, end quote.

According to the information's reporting, the ads are controversial internally at Uber, as Amir Afradi tweeted, quote, yet another way, at Deco's is very, very different from at Travis K, agreeing to spend this much on a brand ad campaign. Microsoft just sunk a data center to the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland. about the size of a shipping container, but waterproofed and sort of shaped like a submarine that Jacques Cousteau might have used back in the day, the data center contained 12 racks of 864 servers attached to a large weight that will anchor the whole thing to the seabed,

about 100 feet beneath the waves off the coast of the Orkney Islands. Why did they do this? Well, you might know that data centers generate tremendous heat. Some of the biggest costs of big data come from, simply keeping your racks cool. So the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Scotland is pretty cool. The data center will be entirely self-sufficient, powered by an undersea cable and juiced with renewable energy from the Orkney Islands.

With 27.6 petabytes of storage, you could store about 5 million movies on this data center's servers. And while I can see that cutting down on cooling costs could be a big win, what would happen if you had a disc failure on a couple of those servers. Would you send a diver down there, haul the whole thing back up? That would probably be pretty costly. Startup naming conventions tend to go in cycles. In the dot-com era, everything was E-something or I-something. Remember E-toys, I-village? Then Napster happened, so for the beginning of the Web 2.0 era, everything was stir, friendster, jobster. If you couldn't register the domain name, you'd

needed, you simply dropped the letters. Flickr, drop the E. People forget this, but Twitter was originally Twitter, T-W-T-T-R. These days, it seems like every startup has a person's name. Oscar for insurance, Lisa for mattresses, Casper for mattresses, Harry's for razors, Warby Parker for glasses. Have you ever wondered why this has become such a thing? Well, Bloomberg has an explanation. It seems that in recent years, a whole body of research has sprung up to show that simple, human-sounding names go a long way to creating better, more memorable, more valuable brands. In fact, according to a 2012 study in the Journal of Financial Economics, simply by shortening a name length by just one word, companies can increase their book-to-market ratio,

which is essentially a company's market value, by around $3.75 million for even a medium-sized company. And a 2006 study found that stocks with easier to pronounce names or ticker symbols outperform companies with more complicated names over time. So names that remind you of your sister or your college roommate or that conjure up the image of a quirky optician, maybe. So when Goldman Sachs wanted to launch a personal lending startup, they settled on the name Marcus. It's all about invoking a personal connection about breaking through the brand clutter by vaguely anthropomorphizing a company. But as Jake Hancock, a brand strategy expert at the creative consultancy,

Lippincott, warns startups thinking of going this route, quote, choosing names that signal a human experience really raises the stakes for a brand to deliver it throughout the whole experience. If you name your company a person's name, the customer is going to expect every interaction to feel like they're dealing with a person. So I've always thought that the perfectly named cliche tech company was Inatech from the movie Office Space. Well, today I learned that this is a common name.

There's a New Jersey company called Inatech that does something called Custom Process Automation and Information Integration Solutions in the flavor and fragrance industries. There's also Initech Global of Grand Rapids, Michigan, NETECS services of Israel. So either these companies never saw office space or they did, and they just figured they'd take the names back from infamy. Either way, God bless you, Inatex of the world, own it. P.S. Glass Door, I have a unsolicited viral marketing suggestion for you. Why don't you have a fake entry for the Inotech from the movie Office Space so that people could post fake job and corporate culture reports? from the movie version of Inotech. That would be fun.

You're welcome. That's all for today. I've been your host, as always, Brian McCullough.