Mule Fiber

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Mule Fiber
Number 2674
Broadcast Date JANUARY 26, 2016
Episode Length 36:43
Hosts Tom Merritt
Guests Lamarr Wilson

Sony’s doubling down on video games and internet of things while French cab drivers burn tires to protest Uber. Plus Tom Merritt and Lamarr Wilson follow up with your thoughts on what Twitter is good for.

Guest

Headlines

TechCrunch reports Twitter’s Periscope announced its integrating with GoPro’s Hero 4. When paired with an iPhone the Hero 4 will give users the option stream and record through the app. Users can toggle between the Hero 4 or iPhone camera. The Hero 4 can also record video separately to its SD Card while broadcasting. GoPro enabled pairing with Meerkat last year.
Sony has merged all its PlayStation efforts into a new company called Sony Interactive Entertainment. This will replace Sony Computer Entertainment which will combine Sony Network Entertainment International which runs PlayStation Network. The CEO of SIE will be current SCE CEO Andrew House, headquartered in San Mateo, California with arms in London and Tokyo. President of Sony Worldwide Studios, Shuhei Yoshida will report to former SCEA CEO Shawn Layden who will report to House.
Bloomberg reports Sony has agreed to buy Altair Semiconductor. Israel-based Altair makes chips for cellular modems that can be used to connect things like power meters, security systems and cars. So think Internet of Things type stuff.
Google Inbox will start presenting information cards not just a list of emails when you search for certain items. Examples include flight info, addresses, phone numbers, membership numbers, events, bills, and package tracking. The feature goes live today with updates rolling out gradually.
Microsoft announced it will launch the first technical preview of Azure Stack on Friday January 29th. The preview will only support one machine. Azure Stack is meant let companies run Azure cloud computing services in their own data centers. A full release is hoped to happen in the Q4 timeframe.
Waze announced a partnership today with ridesharing services Lyft, Cabify, and 99Taxis, Genesis Group, a UK emergency dispatch company, JustPark, and delivery company Cornershop. They will integrate the Waze Transport SDK into their own apps to provide routes, real-time navigation, and ETA and feed data back into Waze’s traffic database. Uber recently announced it will collect data on driving from its drivers.
Microsoft is beta testing a one handed keyboard feature in the iOS version of its Word Flow keyboard. Paul Thurrott got a look at images of the layout from an insider showing a fan style arc in one corner allowing one-handed typing. Microsoft plans to release Word Flow for iOS in the coming months with an Android version to follow.
The world lost a genius as mathematician and computer scientist Marvin Minsky died of a cerebral haemorrhage at age 88. Minsky pioneered the ideas behind artificial intelligence and cofounded the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab with John McCarthy in 1959 and wrote The Society of Mind in 1985.
Submitted by PhilipShane
Hugo Barra tweeted that Xiaomi will announced the Mi 5 on February 24th. The only confirmed spec is that it will use a Snapdragon 820 processor.
French taxi drivers burned tires on the ring road around Paris today, blocking traffic in protest against ride-sharing services like Chauffeur-Privé and Uber. 22 drivers were arrested. Prime Minister Manuel Valls met with union representatives and agreed to work on new laws. Taxi drivers must purchase a license for around €180,000. Ride-sharing drivers must take 250 hours of training and pass a test.
Submitted by KAPT_Kipper
A quick note that Firefox 44 is out with push notifications for websites, h.264 support, and the ability to choose a homepage in the Android version.
Apple Earnings - from WSJ:
Net: $18.36 billion. EPS: $3.28. Revenue: $75.9 billion.
Revenue in the lower end of what Apple had guided last quarter but more than a year ago by a hair. Less than the $76.54 analysts had expected, according to Thomson Reuters.
iPhone sold 74.8 million units. up 0.4%
iPad sales were 16.1 million down from 21 million last year.
Mac sales were 5.31 million which is less than a year ago.
Other products including Apple Watch sold $4.35 billion up from 2.7 million last year.
For overall sales, Apple grew 1.7% year-over-year.
iPhone units: +0.4%
iPad units: -24.7%
We mentioned Twitter was expected to hire a new CMO and they have. Leslie Berland will leave her role as executive vice president of global advertising, marketing and digital partnerships at American Express. And Twitter CFO Anthony Noto can stop filling in as CMO which he has done since last May.

Discussion

Feedback from Listeners

Hi Tom, Jennie and all the rest!

In regards to the discussion on Monday's DTNS about Twitter. I can't speak for anyone but me but the reason I don't like, and don't use Twitter all that often is that I can't sort through all of the posts, @ replies, retweets, etc to make anything coherent out of Twitter and I can't have a discussion with people. Whereas in Facebook I can follow a thread and have a discussion and even have sub-discussions, Twitter is great for posting a link or maybe a picture or maybe checking in that you're okay after some disaster but really not much else.

An example of this was a few years ago, Brian Brushwood was tweeting about some movie or show he saw. His post was three or four parts and as he was posting it people were replying to the various tweets as they showed up. It was almost impossible to follow the thread through the tweets.

The only other thing that I've ever found Twitter good for is complaining to a company but even that is extremely hit or miss depending on how well the company handles its customer service.
Sent by David from it's warmed up enough to snow again St. Paul


Hi Tom,

I greatly valued your conversation with Patrick and Veronica Monday about Twitter’s performance and the stock market.

I appreciate Patrick’s perspective, and the questions he raised about the difference between a company’s performance and it’s stock price. As a follower of Apple, I have come to see this distinction clearly over the years. Neil Cybart at Above Avalon did a great podcast on this (Episode 48: The Two Apples). The lessons can apply to any company. Essentially: A company can be doing very well (selling lots of iPhones, processing lots of tweets) and its stock price can still sour.

This raises the good question of “in what ways is it in a company’s interest to go public?” It was a great thing for Facebook, which has a product that fits the “exponential growth forever” story, but less of a good thing for GoPro, which fits better into the “make a few things to satisfy a few people” story. Twitter clearly has uses, one of which being that I constantly hear NPR and other news outlets reporting “The minister of defense of Indonesia announced the decision on his Twitter feed”. But this may not lend itself to exponential growth of the tool.

One challenge I would offer to Patrick centers on his comment that “300 million active monthly users on Twitter is a really big number”. It is, but so is the number 20, which is the number of guests at my daughter’s first birthday party on Sunday. The two numbers operate on different scales and different definitions of success. I have plenty of criticisms of the stock market—how individuals, companies and governments try to curry favor and appease the markets much like the ancients used to do with their fickle, violent, greedy gods and goddesses—but one good thing markets do is set a bar for success. Multiple analysts research a company and come to a consensus as to, for example, how many iPhones Apple should be able to sell this quarter. Then, when Apple announces sales figures, we can say “sure, 70 million iPhones is a lot, but it seemed likely they could have sold 75 million. It must mean something that they didn’t.”

I think too many companies rush to go public without understanding why. Hopefully Twitter can be purchased by another company that will allow they do continue to do what they do well, without forcing an exponential growth story onto them.

Best,
Sent by Tyler from very wintry New Jersey

Pick of the Day

Hey Tom & all,

My pick is a 3rd party add on for gmail called ActiveInbox that turns gmail into what I think is a powerful task manager. I've been using for almost a year now and it's actually got me to inbox zero and has helped keep me there. It's hard to explain all the things it can do in this email so checkout their overview video on their website if you're looking for a better way to manage email and your tasks.

Now for the parts I don't like so much... It's a subscription service (almost $4 / month), but they do give you a free two week trial to test it out. I went into the trial not expecting to pay for it at the end of it, but I found enough value in it to sign up for a year and I'll probably end up renewing it when the time comes. The other thing that it's currently lacking is a good mobile app. They do have a beta iOS app that somewhat works, but it's slow. They do say developing a mobile app is top priority so if/when that happens I think this will be very valuable to a number of people who want to get things done.

BTW, keep up the good work with the show! I've been a listener since day one of DTNS and am happy to be a patreon backer.
Submitted by Pat from Pittsburgh

Messages

Hey Tom, Jenny,

I wanted to send you all this story, I didn't submit it to the subreddit because I thought it needed some context since it's not a flashy story.

I live in rural eastern Kentucky where competition goes to die. I currently have a 3mb DSL connection while the other side of my county enjoys faster speeds because there's competition with the telco and cable provider. (I was recently told by my telco I wouldn't see faster until my cable provider decided to offer internet in the area, and they aren't.)

My neighboring counties which are seen as more remote and closed off to the rest of the world did something pretty awesome. They're delivering fiber to all their customers despite how remote the areas are that they live. It's also really cool they're using mules to help roll it out too!

http://www.lanereport.com/58859/2016/01/now-entering-silicon-holler/

Thanks for all your hard work, DTNS is the highlight of my mornings.
Sent by Kevin Bowman in cold and snow covered Manchester, Kentucky


Hi Tom,

You're probably going to get emails about this from every single Nigerian who listens to dtns. Lagos is pronounced "lay-gos" not "la-gos". (In other words, Patrick was right with his first guess before you and Veronica corrected him.)

The Iroko (pronounced "e-roko", not "i-roko") story is interesting. The reason Nollywood grew (since its beginnings in 1992) to such a huge industry is that it was decidedly low-tech. Back then, while Hollywood movies in Nigeria were moving to formats like laser disc and Bollywood movies were stuck in our mostly empty cinemas, VCR tapes of Nollywood movies were sold in barbershops. It's no exaggeration that you'd even have tomato sellers offering you the latest movie alongside your tomatoes. We'd buy them, watch them, throw them away, and then buy more.

When Iroko came on the scene in 2011 I had my doubts that it'd work because of this history. It has been amazingly successful thus far; it'll be fun to see how far it goes.
Sent by David (previously from boiling hot Lagos)


I am a pilot and have been following the discussion with interest drawing parallels between flying and autonomous driving.

There are too systems in this country for flying.
IFR and VFR
IFR stands for instrument flight rules, and VFR stands for visual flight rules. The airlines generally operate at high altitudes on IFR flight plans following very specific flight plans and being monitored closely by air traffic control.

Small planes like I fly recreationally, usually fly at much lower altitudes and follow VFR rules. We are responsible for looking out for each other but have much more freedom in where we can fly without being under air traffic control.

I see freeway travel more like IFR where automation could be implemented quite easily but also where travel is already quite safe due to oncoming traffic being separated.

Thanks for the great shows day in and out!
Sent by Sam In Oregon

YouTube

Links



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"Twitter Executives Migrate" 		Mule Fiber
 Followed by:
"Apple Falls Far From the Trend"
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