Tech Brew Ride Home - Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - Facebook's Executive Shuffle

Episode Date: May 9, 2018

A major Facebook executive shakeup, Walmart beats Amazon to Flipkart, Glassdoor gets acquired, one more chance to fight for net neutrality, and a deeper look at how Google’s Duplex technology works. Stories from: @brianstelter Tweets: @pt, @poniewozik Links:Tweet thread about using crypto for social networking (Parker Thompson @pt)Red Alert For Net Neutrality Email Your Senator Form (Do it!)Google Duplex: An AI System for Accomplishing Real World Tasks Over the Phone (Google AI Blog)FX and New York Times partner for new series 'The Weekly' (CNN/Money) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme editors 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, May 9th, 2018. Today, a major Facebook executive shakeup. Walmart beats Amazon to Flipkart.

Glassdoor is acquired. One more chance to fight for net neutrality. And a deeper look at how Google's duplex technology works. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Big shakeup slash reorg over at Facebook. in what is essentially the biggest executive shakeup in the company's history, Chief Product Officer Chris Cox will be taking over leadership of what is being called the Family of Apps Group. That group will be responsible for the core Facebook app as well as Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger.

Cox previously was only in charge of the Facebook app itself. Chief Technology Officer Mike Schrofer will now oversee a new group called New Platform, and Infra, which will encompass Facebook's AR, VR, VR, and AI initiatives, as well as a new blockchain project. More on that in a second. The third group, Central Products and Services, will encompass the advertising, security, and growth teams, and will be headed by longtime Facebook exec, Javier Olivan. There's a whole list of musical chairs shifting of other executives to other units. I could go on and on.

For example, Chris Daniels, the VP of Facebook's internet.org group, is taking over WhatsApp following the departure of Jan Kome that we discussed last week. But let's come back to that new blockchain group. Apparently, it will consist of fewer than 12 employees at start. And what will the blockchain have to do with Facebook's overall business? Well, that kind of seems to be the point, finding out if blockchain is a thing that Facebook needs to be doing. somehow. The group's remit seems to be open-ended. It will be headed by David Marcus, who has been heading the team responsible for Facebook's standalone messaging app, Messenger, which has added a billion users during Marcus's tenure. In a Facebook post announcing his new job,

Marcus himself wrote, quote, I'm setting up a small group to explore how to best leverage blockchain across Facebook, starting from scratch, end quote. But what is Facebook going to do in crypto? though. Will we see a Facebook cryptocurrency someday? I suppose that's possible. It is interesting to note that Marcus was the former president of PayPal, so he has a lot of experience with payments. And he's also on the board of directors of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. But crypto enthusiasts will tell you the blockchain can be used for anything. Data storage, data encryption, contracts. So who knows what this group might end up doing? On Twitter, Parker Thompson,

has an interesting thread on the uses of the blockchain in social networking environments. To say he's skeptical about marrying blockchain to Facebook is putting it mildly. There's a link to Thompson's thread in the show notes, if you're curious. One more detail here. If you'll remember, WhatsApp co-founder Jan Kohn, announced he was leaving Facebook last week, as I said, and was also stepping down from his seat on Facebook's board of directors. Facebook today announced that this vacant seat will be, filled by Jeff Zions, CEO of the Kranmere Group, and formerly the director of the National Economic

Council for President Obama. Zyance was the guy who fixed health care.gov after the initial rollout of that site was a fiasco. In a Facebook post announcing the appointment, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that Zyance's experience will, quote, help us navigate the challenges we face. This had been rumored for a while, but it was finally announced the... morning that Walmart would be purchasing a majority stake 77% of Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart for around $16 billion in debt and cash. Flipkart, which was founded by former Amazon employees and in fact mimicked Amazon by starting out selling books online in India,

has expanded to a wide range of products, electronics, fashion, etc., has 54 million active customers does more than half a million deliveries a day and is essentially known as the Amazon of the Indian market. So it's no coincidence that the rumor was that Amazon was also a bidder to take over Flipkart. But Walmart beat them to the punch. This is clearly a strategic move by Walmart. If nothing else, it has acquired an asset to do battle with Amazon in the Indian market where Amazon has said it intends to invest $3 billion. Walmart's president and chief executive Dylan McMillan said, India is one of the most attractive retail markets in the world,

given its size and growth rate, and our investment is an opportunity to partner with the company that is leading the transformation of e-commerce in the market. At Walmart, we're learning how to build and how to partner to build retail ecosystems around the world. India will now become a key center of learning for our entire company, end quote. In a conference call with analysts, Walmart said Mark Lour, the founder of Jet.com, which Walmart acquired for $3 billion last year, has been involved in the due diligence around the FlipCart purchase. The deal values FlipCart at $20.8 billion. The company had raised more than $7 billion since its founding in 2007 and saw net sales growth last year of more than 50% to $4.6 billion.

But Flipkart has also been suffering heavy losses by doing battle for supremacy in the Indian e-commerce market after Amazon entered that market in 2013. As for Walmart, recode notes, quote, between the Flipkart and Jet.com acquisitions Walmart has now agreed to pay more than $19 billion combined for unprofitable businesses in order to become more competitive in online commerce in the U.S. and India. That is the price the giant brick and mortar retailer must pay for treating online sales as a side hobby for so long, end quote. Walmart has been regrouping, actually, in overseas markets in the last few years. Walmart exited the Chinese market in 2016 and instead partnered with local e-commerce giant jd.com in that country. It also sold its ASDA business in the UK, suggesting that it is pulling back from that market as well. But Walmart insists with Flipkart it's not just about getting footholds in markets. On the conference call, Walmart C.O. Judith McKenna said, quote,

not only is Flipkart innovative with the problem-solving culture that they have, but they are doing some great work both in the AI space, how they are using data across their platforms, but particularly in terms of the payment platform they've created through phone pay. All of these things we can learn from for the future and see how we can leverage those around the international markets and potentially into the U.S. as well, end quote. Speaking of abandoning or entering or in this case re-entering markets, one of the investors making out well on today's news is eBay,

which is selling a $1.1 billion stake in Flipkart as part of the deal. Last year, eBay abandoned operations in India, selling its eBay India Division to Flipkart in exchange for that minority stake that is now turning around on selling. to Walmart. What is eBay going to do with this new money? Reenter the Indian market, of course. eBay says it is going to relaunch eBay India, but it won't focus on domestic sales as it did before, but instead focus on cross-border sales. Quote, we plan to relaunch eBay India with a differentiated offer to focus initially on the cross-border trade opportunity, which we believe is significant, said eBay in a statement. We believe there is huge growth potential.

for e-commerce in India and significant opportunities for multiple players to succeed in India's diverse domestic market. Another acquisition making headlines today, Glass Door, that website that lets you research companies when you're on a job search, getting insider reviews of the company culture, from current and former employees, and looking up salary data on specific positions. It's being acquired by Japanese HR giant recruit holdings for $1.2 billion. Glassdoor claims 59 million monthly active users and data on more than 770,000 companies.

Recruit Holdings also owns the job search site indeed. Quote, Glassdoor has transformed how people search for jobs and how companies recruit. That was Glassdoor CEO Robert Hoeman, who will continue to lead the company as a separate unit of recruits HR technology business segment. Joining with recruit allows Glass Door to accelerate its innovation and growth to help job seekers find a job and company they love while also helping employers hire quality candidates, end quote. The fight for net neutrality is back. If you visited sites across the web today, including Reddit, Tumblr, Tinder, GitHub, Etsy, and even Pornhub, you might have seen notices for what is being called the Red Alert for Net Neutrality Project. This is ahead of a vote in Congress where Senator Ed Markey is leading a group of senators to try to restore net neutrality rules, which the FCC rolled back last year.

Markey is making use of the Congressional Review Act, which allows Congress to reverse federal regulations with a simple majority vote. The Red Alert campaign wants you to contact your senators to urge them to support Markey's legislation. All the Senate Democrats support the bill, as well as one Republican Senator Susan Collins. That means only one more Republican senator needs to flip in order for Markey's bill to pass the Senate. It's that close. The resolution does have a tougher road ahead of it in the House, and of course President Trump could always veto any eventual bill. But look, we've got to start somewhere. If you are represented by a Republican senator who has not named Susan Kyle,

Collins, please contact them right now. I have a link in the show notes to the Red Alert Action Forum that will allow you with one click to send an email to your senators. Do it. Thanks. As I said yesterday, the thing that really wowed people at yesterday's I.O. keynote was the demonstration of Google's Duplex technology, wherein an AI virtual assistant interacted so seamlessly with humans that the system was able to make phone calls. and reservations without the person on the other end of the phone, even knowing they were talking to a machine. I wanted to delve more into this,

and if you did also, there's a link in the show notes to a blog post from the Google AI blog that explains a bit more about how Duplex actually works. Essentially, as of right now, duplex only functions in situations that have narrow constraints and outcomes, what Google is calling closed domain, So calling to make reservations, basically. The system, as of yet, cannot carry out general conversations. But even then, the system has had to allow for an amazing degree of complexity just to get this far.

Quoting from the blog post, When people talk to each other, they use more complex sentences than when talking to computers. They often correct themselves mid-sentence, are more verbose than necessary, or omit words and rely on context instead. They also express a wide range of intense sometimes in the same sentence, end quote. According to the blog post, the duplex system not only has to understand

what is being said, which often comes out non-linear and jumbled from a human mouth, but has to interact in a similar non-linear way to sound natural to our ears. And the system has to get the timing exactly right. To do this, Google used a recurrent neural network built using Google's TensorFlow extended framework. They trained the system on a corpus of anonymized phone conversations and paired that with Google's automatic speech recognition technology.

Then they added in the pauses, the ums, the hums, the ahs, that while technically extraneous to conversations are actually very key in sounding natural, and again getting the time. timing right was important. Quote, it's important for latency to match people's expectations. For example, after people say something simple, like hello, they expect an instant response and are more sensitive to latency. Interestingly, in some situations, we found it was actually helpful to introduce more latency to make the conversation feel more natural. For example, when replying to a really complex sentence, end quote. More hesitant responses, a apparently sound natural when a person say doesn't understand a question or is gathering their thoughts. For users, Google hopes this system will cut down on those short informational calls that you need to make now and again, booking appointments, as we said,

or say calling to confirm information like store hours, location, product availability, etc. You could have your Google Assistant go out and fetch that information for you by actually making the call and reporting back. But Google says it might also use the system itself to do things like confirm store open and closing hours for its Google Maps data. Google says it hopes to start integrating Duplex into Google Assistant this summer, but that doesn't mean that we'll actually see it yet. There's no firm date on that. It's a really fascinating blog post.

I highly recommend it. Check out the link in the show notes. Finally, we'll end today with a touch of podcasting news. chances are if you're listening to this, you're familiar with the New York Times' podcast, The Daily. It's been a huge hit for The Times. It was honestly an inspiration for this show. To me, a healthy podcast diet would be The Daily, or maybe MacOS Ken, in the morning. And this show, TechMeme right home in the evening, but moving on.

CNN Money is reporting that The Times has partnered with the cable channel FX and the streaming service Hulu to produce a weekly TV show based off the daily that it will call the weekly. In a joint statement with FX, the Times said the show, quote, will be a narrative documentary news program that includes one or two of the Times' biggest and most important visual stories each week.

Viewers will be with those stories and the reporters as the show brings them to life, end quote. The show is slated to debut sometime later this year, and FX has said that it is committed to a minimum of 30 episodes. The last time we checked in with The Daily, it had been downloaded more than 100 million times, and its audience had reached 3.8 million unique listeners a month.

On Twitter, New York Times TV critic James Panoazek tweeted, If the New York Times is partnering with FX, I'm hoping this means that I can swear now. That's all for today. I wanted to just give you a quick plug for my other podcast, if you've never checked it out. the internet history podcast. The latest episode was with Jason Kotke of cocky.combe.

A good retrospective of a 20-year career as a prominent professional blogger. Check that out, wherever you get your podcast, the Internet History podcast. I've been your host of this podcast as well, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. Talk to you tomorrow.