Alphabet Has Problems with Numbers
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| Alphabet Has Problems with Numbers | |
| Number | 3211 |
| Broadcast Date | FEBRUARY 1, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 33:49 |
| Hosts | Tom Merritt, Sarah Lane |
| Guests | Justin Robert Young |
Google and 3M have joined the Universal Stylus Initiative. Will this herald a new age of stylus interchangeability between hardware vendors? Plus eBay will end use of PayPal as a back-end payment system in 2020 and YouTube TV is now available on select Roku devices.
Guest
Quick Hits
- Chat platform Discord is letting users connect their Spotify accounts together to showcase listening data. Spotify Premium subscribers can "Listen Along" to songs and playlists together with other members within their Discord server. The update will be available for both the Mac and PC, browsers.
- YouTube Go, the lightweight app designed for bandwidth-constrained situations has expanded from India to 130 countries. YouTube Go is only 10MB, offers three different quality size downloads, previews before streaming and works on phones running 4.1 Jellybean and newer.
- Microsoft announced that the last three Windows releases, 1709, 1703 and 1607 will be given an extra six months of support beyond the normal 18 months. Also Office 2019 will come out later this year but be tied to the Office 2016 support schedule which ends on October 14, 2025.
Top Stories
- Amazon reported a 38.2 percent jump in fourth-quarter revenue due to holiday shopping and cloud services. Amazon is no longer the thin margin company with earnings per share at $3.75, more than double the $1.85 that analysts expected. Net sales rose to $60.45 billion in the reported quarter from $43.74 billion a year earlier. Revenue from Amazon Web Services, the company’s fast-growing cloud services business, surged 44.6 percent to $5.11 billion.
- Alphabet passed $100 billion in yearly revenue on rising ad sales but a Q4 loss of $9.9 billion due to a one-time tax charge. Fourth-quarter revenue rose about 24% to $32.32 billion. But the numbers still missed expectations and showed increasing costs for its traffic acquisition as a percentage. growth in its “other revenues” and “other bets” continues to rise year-over-year. Google also named John Hennessy as board chairman to replace Eric Schmidt who departed in December.
- Apple has pulled the Telegram messaging app from its store for breach of guidelines. Both the original Telegram app and a rebuild, called Telegram X, which the company announced for Android Wednesday — have been taken off the iOS App Store. Telegram founder Pavel Durov tweeted the move relates to “inappropriate content” and the app will be back in the App Store soon.
- You can now add a YouTube TV channel on "select" Roku devices, which include live broadcasts, a cloud DVR, program guide, and more. YouTube TV costs $35/month and is now available on Android TV, Xbox One and other platforms. Google initially promised both Apple TV and Roku support in early 2018, and says Apple TV support is also coming very soon.
- Nintendo confirmed Mario Kart: Tour for mobile is expected to be released sometime before March 2019. In addition, Nintendo Switch Online will launch this September. The service will cost $3.99 for a month, $7.99 for three months or $19.99 per year. Online play has been free up to now but when the paid service launches, Switch players will get access to classic games, leaderboards and multiplayer.
- Instagram’s newest Stories feature now includes “type mode,” which lets users add text blocks to their stories with customized colors and backgrounds, just like the Facebook feature. Users can also now create “archives” of photos and videos they've posted to their Instagram account, which hides those posts from their followers without actually deleting them.
- EBay will stop using PayPal as its back-end payments service in 2020, and move into a long-term deal with Adyen, an Amsterdam-based payments company with current customers like Uber, Netflix and Spotify and expected to IPO this year. PayPal will remain a payment option for eBay shoppers, but won't process card payments for eBay. The PayPal eBay partnership has .been in place since 2003, a few months after eBay had acquired PayPal. in a deal valued at $1.5 billion. The companies split into separate public companies in July of 2015 at which point signed a five-year operating agreement.
- Google and 3M have joined the Universal Stylus Initiative -- or USI-- which is developing an open non-proprietary active stylus standard. The idea is for manufacturers to create styluses that work with multiple touchscreen devices. The standard uses two-way communication so that the stylus can store ink colors and stroke preferences and devices can use up to six styluses at a time. It supports 4,096 levels of pressure sensitivity and 9-axis inertial measurement. Lattice Semiconductor, Maxeye Smart Technologies, MyScript, and Tactual Labs are also among the now 30 members. Apple, Microsoft and Samsung are not.
Pick of the Day
- So I got a used galaxy s2 watch... and decided to customize it.
- Submitted by John
Mailbag
- I really enjoyed the coverage of the hardware shortages caused by the crypto boom but you failed to mention a common component that impacted me in my day to day work. I support faculty at a small liberal arts college with computing as it relates to teaching and research. One of the faculty members I support uses a dual processor dual graphics card system to help teach student multi threaded coding. The PSU recently failed on that system and given the demands of the system we needed a rather large capacity unit. We had an extremely difficult time locating one and when we finally did we found interesting pricing, such as those shown below:
1 at $229.99
3 at $10,000 each
The increase if you buy 3 as well as the scarcity was explained to us as being a direct result of the cryptocurrency boom. - Sent by anonymous
- I really enjoyed the coverage of the hardware shortages caused by the crypto boom but you failed to mention a common component that impacted me in my day to day work. I support faculty at a small liberal arts college with computing as it relates to teaching and research. One of the faculty members I support uses a dual processor dual graphics card system to help teach student multi threaded coding. The PSU recently failed on that system and given the demands of the system we needed a rather large capacity unit. We had an extremely difficult time locating one and when we finally did we found interesting pricing, such as those shown below:
- In spite of my relative conservative leaning, I very much wish chairman Pai, and other members of our government truly understood how the internet works.
You see the ISP's cant directly and suddenly start bandwidth capping, and throttling as the public backlash would be extreme. What they can do is make it very expensive for other companies who serve data to their customers, and trust me they will. Netflix, amazon, come to mind quickly, but with the increase of online video deliver platforms eating directly into our profit margins it only makes sense that the ISP's wish to recoup that loss. The way they will do it, at least in the short term, is with backroom deals that closely mimic paid prioritization without directly calling it that. Sure Netflix can put their servers in our colo, if they want to pay us for the right. If hulu wants NBC locals on their platform, we can make sure nbc understands that the price they pay will be close to the price the cable company pays, or more, if they want us to keep feeding them the bandwidth that fuels their networks. While the net Neutrality laws don't specifically govern this type of transacting, it makes it much easier to do without getting caught, or at least noticed. The wars will be waged in peering agreements, and backbone pipeline costs. The initial effects will work like trickle-down economics in reverse.
Everything you watch, and listen too, is delivered over fiber at some point... And that fiber is owned by the ISP's. And the more they can charge the better it is for their bottom line. Where are they loosing market share? Video delivery! How are these services serving their video to us? Over fiber!
While I applaud the states for trying, in the end its somewhat futile. The costs for consumers will go up as a result of the repeal of Tittle II over-site, its just a matter of time. Not just the Netflix's of the world, but the HULU's and PlayStation VUE's and Sling TV's as well.
The states usually either contract with ISP's to maintain type II Dark fiber (which the ISP owns but the client lights) or straight up pays for the ISP to fully maintain an ELAN. In either case, actually canceling a contract, or even choosing not to renew it, would cost the state millions if not billions to redesign their networks, or bury their own fiber, or have another carrier build it out. So the gestures are rather symbolic. The states wont cancel anything, and the ISP's know it. This sounds bleak I know, but the silver lining is, the ISP's are probably going to be rolling in the money. and will hire plenty of new workers, and pay them well. - Sent by anonymous
- In spite of my relative conservative leaning, I very much wish chairman Pai, and other members of our government truly understood how the internet works.
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Alphabet Has Problems with Numbers |
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