Podcast appearances and mentions of Andy Rubin

รู้มั๊ยครับว่า ศัตรูที่น่ากลัวที่สุดของ Apple ไม่ได้เกิดจากบริษัทคู่แข่ง… แต่เกิดจากพนักงานของพวกเขาเอง! ย้อนกลับไปในปี 1989 Apple รับชายคนหนึ่งเข้าทำงาน และตั้งฉายาให้เขาว่า “Android” เพราะเขาคลั่งไคล้หุ่นยนต์เข้าขั้นสุด ชายคนนี้เก็บเกี่ยวทุกความรู้จาก Apple ก่อนจะเดินจากไป… และใช้บทเรียนทั้งหมดนั้นสร้างแพลตฟอร์มที่พลิกโฉมโลก จนทำให้ Steve Jobs โกรธแค้นถึงขั้นประกาศจะทำ “สงครามนิวเคลียร์” ล้างบางให้สิ้นซาก เรื่องราวสุดย้อนแย้ง ที่ Apple เผลอชุบเลี้ยง คู่แข่งที่ยิ่งใหญ่ที่สุด ขึ้นมากับมือตัวเอง เกิดขึ้นได้อย่างไร? ========================= 

Dead On Arrival: What was just Hype and what was just wrong Timing? Some technologies and products get over-hyped, and never seem to come to fruition? Some just come to fruition, but years or even decades later? In this episode of Tech Deciphered, what is Dead On Arrival versus just wrong timing Navigation: Intro The Fork Cold Open General Magic The Metaverse Dead on Arrival The soon to be Resurrected… Conclusion Our co-hosts: Bertrand Schmitt, Entrepreneur in Residence at Red River West, co-founder of App Annie / Data.ai, business angel, advisor to startups and VC funds, @bschmitt Nuno Goncalves Pedro, Investor, Managing Partner, Founder at Chamaeleon, @ngpedro Our show: Tech DECIPHERED brings you the Entrepreneur and Investor views on Big Tech, VC and Start-up news, opinion pieces and research. We decipher their meaning, and add inside knowledge and context. Being nerds, we also discuss the latest gadgets and pop culture news Subscribe To Our Podcast Bertrand SchmittIntroduction Welcome to Tech Deciphered episode 78, Dead on Arrival. Was it just hype or just wrong timing? In this episode, we are going to discuss two different types of businesses that as an investor, as an entrepreneur, you want to think carefully about. Looking back, you want to understand better what happened. If we take dead on arrival, we’re talking about businesses, technologies that maybe the tech work fine, but actually no one cared about it, no one wanted it. It’s really a mismatch in terms of what consumer want versus what you are trying to deliver. It’s a classic example of a solution finding for a problem. On the other hand, will it happen but not like that, not now? It’s a type of business where we were too early. We tried to make it work, but actually the technology is not ready now, but it might become ready in the future. As an entrepreneur, as an investor, obviously, you want to make sure you are not in one of these two technologies, one of these two categories. But it’s really a useful lesson to learn which situation you might be in because it will help you make better decision and pick better industries going forward. Nuno, what’s your take on this tough analysis?Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, in hindsight, everything looks like, “Oh, of course, this wasn’t meant to work,” etc. But here we’re going to take a stab, as you mentioned, at things that are just wrong timing. They might have failed miserably in the past, but they might work in the future. The Fork To have this stake on the ground approach to it, as we’ve had in previous episodes, of defining exactly what we think will happen, but just not like that, versus the dead-on-arrival, which is a little bit more of a hardcore view on it. To your point, we want to really split between those two things because in some ways people are like, “Well, are we ever going to go and have different ways of interacting, for example, in terms of input and output, like with glasses or things like that, that really scale to become pretty pervasive?” We probably would agree that, “Yes, that will happen”. Maybe not in the way that we’ve anticipated until now, and certainly it’s going to take longer than we’ve expected. In some ways, the “will happen, not like that” is a little bit like Amara’s law or Nuno’s law, as referred to in the past. We tend to overestimate the speed at which we get to a revolution, underestimate impact. The “will happen, not like that” will probably fit into that. They will have probably bigger impact than we thought they would, but they will just take longer. Therefore, the solutions we’ve had until now are not great solutions. Whereas the dead-on-arrival, we’re saying, “Hey, we don’t think actually this works.” It’s to your point, not solving a problem that actually needs to be solved, or it’s solving it in the wrong way. Yeah, it’s basically an attempt to really frame, if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re a venture capitalist, if you’re someone who is an angel investor and is looking at the market right now, what things should you put some real money and real resources, real time behind versus not, and really share that with you guys: our audience.Bertrand SchmittCold Open I always like to go back to a company called General Magic, a company that was legendary in Silicon Valley, spun out of Apple in the 1990s. There was even a movie made about General Magic. It’s a company that tried to basically build the first modern smartphone with touchscreens, app ecosystem. The only issue was it was years before the technology existed to support it. But Nokia at the time was less ambitious and more practical with what the technology was able to do at the time. But what’s interesting with this company is that obviously the smartphone was coming, just took 10 more years, 15 more years. Interestingly enough, some of the people in the team ended up being very successful in that exact space. Tony Fadell, for instance, who ended up creating the iPhone, co-create at least, and Andy Rubin, who end up building up Android, selling that to Google and leading the charge with Google Android.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, a very successful team. Tony Fadell, obviously, later on did Nest as well. Megan Smith, who was later the Chief Technology Officer of the US. A lot of people that came out of it that did a lot of important things. To be honest, I think a lot of the technology that was developed that was in some way a capacity or that are reused later on by some of these team members. I’m not saying they were infringing on any IP, but definitely there was a lot of reuse of tech. But it was too soon, right? They were doing something that was truly ambitious too soon. But a lot of these principles, a lot of these things ended up manifesting themselves, and particularly in the iPhone later on and in that deployment. Another such example is actually the metaverse. We did two episodes back in the day, a long time ago, on the metaverse. We debunked it a little bit. Back then, I think it was a very nuanced debunking, if I recall it correctly, Bertrand, because we were saying, “Hey, it’s going to happen in some ways, but it’s an evolution, not a revolution,” not in the way that we saw definitionally. We were huge fans of Matthew Ball and his analysis around media, but somehow we disagreed, I remember, with his definition of what the metaverse is and how it will look like. There’s no doubt that there’s going to be a metaverse in the future, probably metaverses in the future before there’s any given unification. In those metaverses, we do believe. But this whole hype cycle around metaverse and what’s happening clearly didn’t work out well, as proven also by all the write-offs done by Meta on their metaverse stuff. That much must have hurt. It’s related to AR and VR as well and to the enriched reality positioning of a lot of these technologies, which we’ll talk about later. But, again, it was probably something that’s going to happen. It’s going to happen likely in a different product manifestation as the one that was anticipated by a lot of the pundits that opined on what’s happening around metaverse in the future. But it’s going to happen. It’s just going to take longer. It’s going to probably come from angles of entry that are likely not what people had anticipated earlier on. Maybe it’s from gaming, maybe from something else. But definitely it’s going to happen.Bertrand SchmittYes, and you could argue that Apple did a similar mistake with the Vision Pro. I think the Vision Pro is the worst launch of an Apple product. When we say launch, it’s been three years maybe?Nuno Goncalves PedroSince the Newton, maybe?Bertrand SchmittYes, that’s my point. You have to go back a really long time to have such a disastrous launch. I think for me, it’s very interesting because it’s really a category where on one side there is a metaverse of some sort. You should argue if you are just using Twitter, or Facebook, these are some parallel universe in parallel to your real life. But the full on metaverse where you need some extra super heavy glasses to make it work, that simply has not worked. Don’t get me wrong, there are some super small, narrow cases where your heavy VR glasses makes sense for some training, for some simulation, for some light gaming. But given the weight, the disconnection from the real world, it has really never taken fire. Even at cheaper price like Meta was able to do, at more expensive price, much higher quality like the Vision Pro did. It looks like people have an issue with putting heavy glasses on top of them. We’ll talk later about the other side: AR glasses. But the traditional metaverse, heavy glasses, VR glasses, yes, it’s not feeling right, and I don’t think it will ever be right. It needs a different form factor to go at scale.Nuno Goncalves PedroDefinitely fundamental shifts on the metaverse. Just a quick reminder, Meta actually changed their name because of metaverse.Bertrand SchmittYes. Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s not just that they’re writing off the investments, it’s their name is apparently wrong. It didn’t really happen in that way. You are saying that this persistent embodied virtual world, which was the early definitions of what a metaverse was, didn’t really happen until now. It might happen at some point, but not in that way. But, obviously, a lot of the enablement layers are still work in progress, right? Real-time 3D, presence, avatars, all of these things are moving on. A lot of these enablers will be ready once there is a time where these technologies and businesses that are fundamentally anchored around these technologies will emerge. It’s, again, right components, wrong product alignment, but at the same time, it will happen, just not yet.Bertrand SchmittAgain, I think we’re going to face a split of a virtual reality light that you can call AR with very light glasses that are not a pain to wear, that are more limited, especially today or the next 5 years. The VR glasses that will stay a niche product that are useful for some use cases. Do you want to do a flight simulation? You want to do military training? There will be use for that. But beyond that, it’s more limited. We forgot to talk about the Google Glass. This one was an early, early AR glasses. But, again, here we go back to the capabilities. Simply, we were not there at the time.Nuno Goncalves PedroDead on Arrival We’re moving to Dead on Arrival. What things do we think are relatively dead on arrival? We’ll be nuanced on a couple of these aspects. Not everything is totally dead on arrival. But maybe let’s start with a good one, which is some of the crypto summer promises, particularly around NFTs, non-fungible tokens, and the decentralization of everything, the tokenization of everything. That didn’t quite work the way people thought it would. A lot of people were very happy for a period of time that they had some NFT that was worth a ton of money. Good for them. I hope they sold it back then. Some did actually, fortunately for them, but most of them did not. As an asset and the tokenization element, we’re not questioning that tokenization itself doesn’t make any sense. But from my perspective, a lot of the elements of tokenization plus the tokenization of everything don’t make necessarily imminent sense. I think we’re going to have a world that not everything is going to be tokenized, and a world where, to be honest, having the latest ape token as an NFT is maybe not something I really need. It’s dead on arrival in some ways. What do you think, Bertrand?Bertrand SchmittIt feels like it’s a tale of two worlds. On one side, there was clearly exuberance and bullshit. All these cryptocurrencies that make no sense, have no values. The NFTs are the same: no values, no sense, no logic in them. At the same time, we can see that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and few others were significant products, invention, that have a current total market value that is significant. I would say we can see that step by step, little by little, there is some tokenization happening, but it has been much more narrow than what was initially thought, expected. But it’s happening step by step. I think there is value in tokenization, but definitely not as much value as people expected. I think for one simple reason: it’s very expensive to set up in the sense that it doesn’t work so well, actually. It requires a lot of computing power for stuff that might not justify it as simple as that. Why do you want to replace a very efficient, superfast database by something slow, expensive to maintain? Why? You need to have real reason for that. I think in most situations, there was not a real justification to make that switch. I think, again, there is a niche for tokenization. It’s getting used. Obviously, there is stablecoin as well that are working and provide value. But definitely, the use cases have narrowed. The success stories have been few and far between. It’s definitely a space, but I don’t think it has lived up to the expectations. The expectations were simply quite insane in terms of what to expect, and it failed to achieve that. I don’t think it qualifies as a true revolution. It has been successful again in our situation: in Bitcoin, in Ethereum, in some tokenization. But beyond that, it was not the dramatic change that people were picturing.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, it’s been successful and there is a security, in this case, a currency of types, that links to the value of that specific network and the utility of that specific network. But on this case, in particular, the NFT stuff, I think there were two core premises that were very valuable about it. One was the premise of digital collectibles, the element itself being collectible and the fact that I have a unique one was only minted one. It’s a unique thing out there. I think at some point people forgot that actually digital collectibles are not as valuable as people think they are. Physical collectibles are more valuable. The reason for that is just human nature. I want to have something in physicality. I want to have something that I can show people, etc, that has a physicality to it. Digital collectibles, I think there was a problem fundamentally in part of the articulation of NFTs that reside in the value of digitization of these collectibles in and of themselves. I think that was part of the problem. The second problem was really the notion of provenance, the notion of certification, the notion of “this is what it says it is, and nobody can say this is something else.” This notion of provenance. That, I think, fits more into the point you were making, which is the point around use cases. This doesn’t fit all use cases. The provenance piece and the certification piece doesn’t fit for all use cases. Probably it might fit actually even more for actual physical assets where you want to have a certificate, that thing is what it says it is, but it’s actually maybe a physical asset rather than a digital asset. Again, lo and behold, it doesn’t apply to all the use cases that relate to provenance. I don’t think we need to tokenize all the provenance ledgers in the world for this to be working well. Again, it was a little bit of an overreach. In some ways, all these players were very happy. There was a lot of bullshit. To be honest, this is an area that I do think there was actual active fraud. All due respect to a lot of the players in the market, but there was active fraud. Honestly, there was bullshit.Bertrand SchmittI agree with you. I was going to say that it’s one of the rare sector in technology where I think frauds, scams were prevalent. Yes, you might have some shitty startups in general and stuff, and there might be fraud. I think true fraud is rare. True scam is rare. But here for NFTs, for cryptocurrencies, that was the majority you could argue. That’s the part that I never really liked in all that industry. If you look at NFT, personally, I never understood the concept. For me, it made simply no sense because, yes, you can say, “Oh, I have created this rare digital token.” But sure, so what? Who cares? Who cares? You can have hundreds, thousands, millions of unique digital tokens. How does it matter? What’s the use case? What’s the connection? You can show it on your screen, but then how is it unique anymore? It’s not like people have to come to your house and check stuff on site or something like physical art. No, not at all. I don’t know. I think it was surprisingly true bullshit. Again, I’m still a believer in Bitcoin. I think there is true logic to have a separate virtual digital currency. But you don’t need hundreds of them. You just need one, maybe two for some variation. The same for tokenization, it doesn’t need to happen everywhere. Just need to happen where there is really strong real logical value. Beyond that, there is no point.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, makes sense. Maybe moving to our next one. I think we discussed this in a previous episode, which was the whole 3D TV stuff. We just don’t think that’s the product, right? It’s not going to be a 3D TV. I believe when we discussed this in the episode—I don’t want to lie too much—but I believe that’s what we came up with… It looks a bit more holographic or the manifestation comes through other mechanisms like glasses, etc. But we thought it was just dead on arrival. Nobody wanted to have glasses on the couch to watch the 3D TV, but also the 3D TVs themselves they tried to develop were very holographic, were super clunky and very heavy. In some ways, I think TV manifestation somehow is not a great manifestation for this. I put it on the dead-on-arrival pile. I have one, just to be clear. I still have one.Bertrand SchmittYeah, but it’s a weird one because if you remember, it suddenly happened. I remember being shocked as a consumer. Suddenly everyone talks about 3D TV. In a few months, 3D TVs are all out everywhere. Then after a few years, no one bothered to keep adding that because consumers didn’t care. I think one issue was, I think it has only worked with Blu-rays. I don’t think any streaming service supported that. With the rise of streaming, that was certainly a pretty big issue in the first place. Interestingly, in the movie theaters, do we still have movies being shown in 3D? I think we still have a few, but it’s really few and far between the movie theater.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, IMAX won on that format, the high-end format, IMAX won, not the 3D thing.Bertrand SchmittBut, yeah, if you’re on the TV at home, you don’t want to bother. Maybe if you’re in the movie theater, more high-end experience, you are willing to wear special glasses. I think it makes sense. I think, I guess at home, we are just too busy doing multiple things at once. Rarely sitting all around 2 hours for a movie, so you watch your phone, you check on something else. You don’t want to have these glasses on top that block you from the rest of what’s happening at home.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, it just didn’t work. I’m not sure it will work in any case, so we’ll see. But definitely, I don’t think that’s the right form factor.Bertrand SchmittIt technically worked, but practically, it was not accepted by consumers.Nuno Goncalves PedroLet me rephrase. I think it was a solution to a problem nobody thought they had. The execution of the product was the wrong one. It’s like that’s not what people wanted. Maybe we do want some 3D immersive experience, but that’s not the 3D immersive experience that we want, not manifested like that in effect, with its limitations, etc.Bertrand SchmittI want to say that we are not denigrating some of these experiments. Me, I still remember putting a Vision Pro and watching some content that is natively created by Apple for the Vision Pro. It’s an amazing magical experience, truly. But at the same time, I’m always worrying to have to think I’m going to spend 30 minutes putting my Vision Pro on my head. It’s heavy, it’s painful. Again, we go back to, I’m disconnected from everything else, and I don’t like that.Nuno Goncalves PedroWhen there was real technological development, like the case of 3D TVs, that technology development may have served other purposes. Again, we applaud those that put the money where their mouth was, the companies, the individuals that wanted to move forward some of these technology stacks, maybe less so the people that just decided to create NFTs for the sake of it with apes. No attack on those guys specifically, but just to create a specific view on that. But there’s a lot of stuff we’re talking about today which is actually great technological development. There’s stuff that came out of it that is very, very valuable technological development. Maybe to our next one on mobility, physical mobility. The Segway. Everyone’s like, “Oh, this is going to change how we move around the world, in particular for shorter distances, etc.” Well, apparently no. Apparently, it’s not super intuitive. There are still Segways out there for use by police forces, tours, and all that stuff. People say, “Oh, it’s…” No, well, it never scaled. It wasn’t changed. It didn’t change how relatively short local mobility was going to be done. I think part of it is actually the problem with the product. The product is not as intuitive as people thought it would be, and it has other issues around that in terms of security and safety. If you’re going to have a device or something that moves you around, what’s the minimum-accepted level of security that you would have. The fact that you have to incline to move it is actually not super as initially some probably people thought it’s actually not as intuitive as some might have thought it was. I think it’s a dead-on-arrival play. The vehicles of the future, I’m not sure, look like that at all. Happy to eat my words down the road, but I don’t think so.Bertrand SchmittYes, and I remember the massive hype at the start of this product. They were hiding it, but still telling you, We have seen it. That’s true. It’s going to totally change how cities are planned. I mean, the level of hype and bullshit was insane before the launch of the product and before anyone outside of a few knew what it looked like. Then we saw what it looked like, and it was on one side, an engineering marvel, the self-stabilization system was new. I mean, very few people had seen something like this before. At the same time, as you said, the issue was what happens if it loses battery? What happens if you fall from it? Quite frankly, if you look at today’s modern electric scooter, you have 95% of the value of a Segway without any of the downsides. You don’t need to learn a new way to do things. If you lose battery, it still works. I guess you can still push it. It’s not too expensive. You don’t have massive computers to just make it work. You don’t have massive robotics. It’s clearly an impressive engineering solution. But the exact example of a solution to a problem people didn’t have, when ultimately a much more simple and elegant solution was there for people who care. To be clear, you still could use a regular bike. The alternative was still your regular bike. But now you have electric scooters that are a clear, closer alternative, I guess, in spirit to what was supposed to be the Segway. Sometimes, let’s be careful. Overengineering might not be the answer.Nuno Goncalves PedroEven scooters, which are, to be honest, I would argue a much easier philosophical view of how mobility should be done and a much easier form factor, so to speak, in terms of mobility, even those won’t have wide adoption to everyone. It’s not like everyone’s going to use a scooter. The bar for a scooter is much less than a bar for a Segway.Bertrand SchmittYes. I think in a way, the electric scooter is showing us in some ways that the limit of the dream is that even well-executed, even cheap, even easy to use, even low-risk in a way, there is still only so much that people are willing to use it because it’s a pain to bring with you everywhere. Actually, in some ways, you could argue it has only worked with this distributed platform, like lime and others that let you take one and drop it when you are done using it. But that was not a model that was workable for the Segway. I totally agree. You could argue that bikes are still the gold standard or now electric bikes are still the gold standard for who want that level of mobility.Nuno Goncalves PedroWell, the next one is to be a favorite of, I guess, everyone that didn’t invest in them, which is Juicero, which was the machine that basically created Juices out of squeezing a bag. I’m going to be nice here to… There were a bunch of well-known investors. They raised, I think, 120 million or something like that.Bertrand SchmittThat’s insane.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt is insane. But maybe the vision was not that vision. It was something grandiose and the complexity around dealing with liquids and whatever. I’m not really sure we didn’t pass or invest on the company.Bertrand SchmittBig old juice bags.Nuno Goncalves PedroMaybe. You’re being facetious. Anyway, I’m not trying to attack the guys who actually invested in this, the investors that put money into this. But it was basically one of these examples that we’re trying to solve a problem that didn’t exist. It’s like a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist. I can just squeeze a bag of concentrated thing and make a juice. I can do something around the juice. As I said, maybe the big vision was well beyond that, and I’m not sure many of us will ever know what the big vision actually was. But yes, it was a solution, a $400 machine to a problem that nobody really had. That didn’t work.Bertrand SchmittI think the most crazy part of the story is that the business exploded when there was this Bloomberg reporter that showed that you could squeeze the bag with your hands without a machine and get the same juice. That’s pretty insane. That’s just so unbelievable.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe funny part of the story is MSCHF, this company that does all their on-point, slightly artistic, whatever, one-off, drops, etc, etc. Shout out to Gabriel. Gabe Wally, who was the founder there. This is funny. They actually did a collectible series of figurines of that startup toys, of which Juicero was one of them. Jibo, which I don’t think you’d appreciate. Bertrand, and the Theranos minilab. So someone is also making money on that, which is funny. So well done, MSCHF.Bertrand SchmittWhy not? Why not? Maybe we can go quickly over Lytro. This one was, I would say, brilliant technology. It was a camera able to capture light in a different way. You could actually dynamically change focus after the picture was taken. So something quite impressive, and I still remember looking at their products and thinking, should I get one? At the same time where it didn’t work, it was too limited in terms of image quality versus shooting the real picture. It was very tough to sell as an independent device because either you’re in the phone or you are in a DSLR, but there was no spot in between. In some ways, phones solved the issue not directly, but they kept adding cameras. At some point, you had not one, but two, but three, but four, but five cameras in your phone. You had a specific mode for anything you needed, and that’s it. Phone manufacturers managed to convince people they should pay for all these cameras, or provide a low-end version if you don’t want to pay for all these cameras. But yes, very interesting technology that did not manage to find a go-to market.Nuno Goncalves PedroYes, it’s falling in love with a technology solution that, as you said, was incredible, and not falling in love with what problem you are actually trying to solve. Because a lot of the elements of the problem that you’re trying to solve, either you take another picture. All due respect, instead of me trying to change the field of view, etc, and the focus, post picture taken, I take another picture. To be honest, you can take thousands of pictures now with different setups. Also, ignoring the fact that this was pre this whole AI boom. So obviously, that one I will be kind on. But with the AI boom, you can do a lot of things to pictures and changes and stuff like that. All of that changes the game in and of itself. Obviously, Lytro or Lytro, not sure how you spell them, or how you say their name, but they failed before that. So again, this was super great tech, great investors, good investors on board, but just nobody wanted that device. Why would I want this thing? A total failure on arrival. I think one also other aspect of it that may have been misinterpreted and underestimated by some of the early investors, certainly in the company, is the value chain. There is a value chain for cameras, for SLRs, DSLRs, etc, etc. They know what they’re doing, and they’re doing their own level of innovation. In some ways, that fits squarely into that value chain, which I’m sure is a complex value chain to manage in and of itself. Maybe that’s created its own dynamics as well.Bertrand SchmittI think they try to insert themselves in the value chain, but I’m not sure first that they managed to get technology as small as it should have been. They simply didn’t convince anyone. The Sony or Nikon of the world, or the Apple or Google of the world, to use their technology in their phones, because no one really saw the value, per se. One thing to keep in mind, using their technology means you had a big trade-off in terms of megapixels. Actually, you will benefit from that great effect around the focus that can move anywhere after the fact. But in exchange, you had to lose dramatically the number of megapixels. At the time, all the rage was about how do I get more megapixels for my phone with good image quality. That was all that you were selling to consumers. Consumers would not have bought 10 times less megapixels for a weird benefit that at the time no one cared about. I think you are very right to introduce the fact that, of course, they could not have guessed at the time, but today you can get for free this refocusing effect with AI, actually.Nuno Goncalves PedroThat’s exactly the point I was making on the value chain. They went into a value chain that has a lot of players in it, and they got kicked in the butt anyway, because people were like, Why would I adopt it? They didn’t serve the purpose of the use case or the user flow. They didn’t anticipate competitive dynamics to it. Then they actually went straight up into a technology plus IP logic on a value chain that would be like, “Hey, dudes, just get out of here.” What would be the incentive for people to bring them on board? It’s like in some ways, they did all the mistakes under the book in that sense. Again, I’m not trying to diss the company, the founders, the investors, but it feels that was the problem in the end.Bertrand SchmittYes.Nuno Goncalves PedroShall we do some rapid fire dead-on-arrivals?Bertrand SchmittYes. A fan favorite. Have you tried a keyboard projector on?Nuno Goncalves PedroYes. I think I mentioned that in a previous episode, I did have one of the early ones and whatever. Yes, somehow we forgot that there’s other best, better ways of input, maybe voice would be a better way of input if that’s the problem, but anyway.Bertrand SchmittThis one is interesting because you just use it for one minute, and you discover it’s horrible.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s a horrible experience.Bertrand SchmittYou have to type on it. You don’t see exactly where you type. Each time you type, you are hurting your fingers because it’s not a smooth keyboard feeling, but you are tapping a solid surface. That’s amazing that it went to manufacturing, and basically no one gave feedback. There is no way it’s working. No way technically working, but practically, no one would want to use that.Nuno Goncalves PedroIt’s bad in all aspects. The finger’s touching. It needs to be a very over-engineered experience for it to actually detect the key stroking and all that stuff. It’s an over-engineered solution by default. It’s not private because once you have the keyboard projector, you’re like, “Where am I keyboarding projecting on?” It’s something that others can see. There are other alternatives that are better. The keyboards on our phones are pretty good these days, with autocorrection in most cases, I wouldn’t say all cases. Voice can also be an interesting replacement to that. If that’s what you’re going for, voice recognition has improved dramatically over the last few years. Again, it’s one of these, “Yeah, cool.”Bertrand SchmittIt’s clear that, first, touch has replaced a physical keyboard where you need one. And two, now voice recognition is getting better for sure.Nuno Goncalves PedroThe opposite side is that voice assistants were going to take over everything, that everything was going to be voice assistant-led. Alexa is going to run your life. You’re going to have games for voice. I actually have a good friend of mine who did a startup in that space. Actually, the company got acquired, and everything’s going to be voice, which, as we know, is also not true. We need to visualize sometimes. Sometimes we still want to write because we want either the added value of privacy or of expression at some standpoint. There are a lot of things that are happening around voice that are exciting. We just mentioned voice recognition, but not everything is going to be voice. Certainly not for the foreseeable future, and so that doesn’t work. Also, as the ultimate platform, we also want some visuals. We also want to have other kinds of interactions. There are limitations to voice assistants, for example. Voice assistants were not quite the next platform that people said they were going to be. I would say they’re a channel, but they’re definitely not a platform. That’s how, at least I see them.Bertrand SchmittYes, a channel versus a platform. I would agree with you. I must say I start to feel that we could be close to the future we have seen in Her. This movie, Her, I guess you saw it as well, where these guy keep talking to his personal assistants, and it’s becoming his friend, maybe even his love. I start to feel we are getting close enough with AI that this becomes a possibility. But again, it’s not your only way to interact. You want to type, you want to see stuff. There are many situations where you don’t want to be seen talking with someone. It’s more of a channel versus a platform. Yes, Alexa, it’s quite amazing how it went to the roof and crashed and burned. It moved up very quickly. Amazon invested billions, hired thousands of people, which was the right move. I mean, you have something that seems to work well enough and could be game changer, why not? But it was quite impressive as a crash and burn. It’s pretty rare to move that fast up and down.Nuno Goncalves PedroI agree. A lot of money is put into this stuff. I mean, Google went after it as well. I think Google probably executed better. Their tools and their hub tools, etc, were better in their devices. But to be honest, it was the beginning of something, it wasn’t really there. It’s shocking because a lot of people have Alexa at home, and Google Hubs at home, and whatever at home. But it’s really not that powerful. I have a bunch of Google stuff at home, and I still use it for very basic information. It’s not really doing much for me. It’s not like magically now with AI, it’s going to be much better. It’s not. It’s a legacy device now. Maybe in the future, we’ll have some stuff that will be cool, but definitely not the voice assistant manifestation that we saw in the past. I know the next is exciting to you, so I’ll let you go for it, Bertrand.Bertrand SchmittNetbooks. If you remember Netbooks, this was a horribly underpowered PC device. I kept buying one after the other, hoping that the next one would be fast enough. Trying to be a small, lightweight portable PC, they were called netbooks. Usually, they also had a small screen, like 10, 12-inch, 9-inch, and each time it was horrible. Very poor battery life, 2-3 hours, super, super, super slow. They were equipped typically with a full Windows OS, and they were killed overnight by the iPad. After 2 years of the iPad, no more netbooks. Oh, yes, and they had this… Typically, they would be equipped with… What was this name of the CPU? It was an Intel Atom CPU, I believe, or Celeron. Again, the root cause why, it was so slow. It was horribly slow.Nuno Goncalves PedroSo netbooks didn’t work. We didn’t want to go back to that. The iPad won and all [inaudible 00:34:05].Bertrand SchmittI think it has been proven at this stage. There are some small mini PCs these days. You have, for instance, the ROG Ally for gaming. There has been some revival with some Chinese manufacturers making some small PCs. I have to admit, I bought some, so I kept trying. It’s much more powerful, no question. Better battery life also. But we go back to the fact that if you have a very limited screen size, 7, 8, 10 inch, it’s just tough to put a full desktop operating system to good use. You need something more simplified, more touch friendly for it to be really practical. Yes, you can run the full desktop Excel on it, but will you do it on an 8-inch screen? Probably not.Nuno Goncalves PedroNetbooks, and maybe we’ll end with Google Glass. I mean, obviously, we’re going to talk about AR and VR in just a bit. I think it’s a good segue to our next section, and we’re not necessarily saying AR, VR is dead on arrival. We actually think they’re going to be out there for us in the future. But Google Glass, in the way that a lot of the first wave wearables were developed, was cool, but not enough. I think even the recent ones, the Meta Ray-Bans. I see a lot of friends of mine now, you’re wearing Meta Ray-Bans, and they’re like, “Oh, this is so cool”. It’s like, “How is that different from the Google Glass, but now a little bit nicer?” It still feels to me that’s the wrong way to approach it. Either we go with a more comprehensive solution for glasses or a solution for glasses that’s a little bit more easily integrated into existing frames, etc, for those of us, like the two of us, who have actual eyeglasses, or I don’t see it quite happening this way. I think just as a formality in how it was deployed, it seems to me it’s been the wrong angle a couple of times, even, to be honest, beyond the first wave of wearables. It’s been a little bit the wrong way to approach this, the wrong paradigm.Bertrand SchmittIf you remember the Google Glass, initially, they were launched in… Again, overhyped. You couldn’t even buy them, but still, it was overhyped. You could see a marketing department going crazy when they were showcasing models wearing Google Glass, that sort of stuff, fashion shows. That was insane. How is it connected to the value proposition of the Google Glass? Absolutely not. But you remember what killed the Google Glass?Nuno Goncalves PedroThis is the Robert Scoble in the shower thing. The whole lack of privacy thing.Bertrand SchmittYou tried to have this vision of the Google Glass that models are wearing and stuff in fashion shows. You have this guy, Robert Scoble, taking his picture with his Google Glass in the show, half-naked. Oh, wow, that quickly dropped. In the interest into Google Glass.Nuno Goncalves PedroRobert’s a good guy for the most part, so we’ll let him get away with it. But yes, it was not a good moment for the use of Google Glass. But to your point, it was overhyped. I don’t even recall that I had to do so many things to actually get access to one. I still have it. Then in the end, it was just totally underwhelming. I do think the meta Ray-Ban solutions, etc, etc, now they’re doing it with other brands as well, are more elegant because it’s around voice activation and stuff like that. But still, it’s not this. The soon to be Resurrected… I think these kinds of solutions are dead on arrival, which may be a good segue to the resurrection pile, so to speak, that will happen, just not like that pile that we have to share today.Bertrand SchmittYes. That’s the question. Are we in resurrection mode with AR glasses? The Ray-Ban, Oakley glasses, are the way to go? There are also some other brands like XREAL, for instance, that are a different approach. It’s more fun to watch movies that I personally like a lot and use a lot. I know quite a few fans for this. There is a market for either the XREAL for movies, meta, or Ray-Ban, for light information on top of your glasses. There are niches. I don’t know if it’s full resurrection mode yet, but I can see again, with AI, that there is the ability to do more and more. Will it be connected to your phone, will be independent from a phone? That’s also stuff to see. I guess at this stage, connection to a phone has some value. It’s making a comeback.Nuno Goncalves PedroI think it’s suffering from being overhyped. It makes sense that the category comes back. The use of glasses, a lot of people actually have eyeglasses. The use of different mechanisms that really expand your view. We’ve seen that with the advent of foldables in mobile phones. People want bigger screens. They want to get as close as they can to the tablet experience without necessarily having to go to laptops, etc. Definitely, I think the use cases make sense. It’s just how do you deploy it, and who’s going to deploy it best? I don’t think we’ve seen anyone that’s been particularly enlightened about doing it. All the great developments with Android XR from Google, Samsung doing a bunch of things in terms of deployment out there as well at the same time. I mean, are these guys going to redefine this category and create the first ever wearable, at least AR great experience or VR category of experience, or are we going to have much of the same? In the same way, it took several years for the smartphone category to be recategorized as a smartphone category under the iPhone. That was the category-defining moment. It was the vision of a bunch of people, obviously led by Steve, but a bunch of people that went to market and said, This is how we view the market to be, and they just nailed it. We haven’t seen the guys who’ve nailed it, I think, is the issue thus far, either on the VR side or the AR side. We just haven’t seen it.Bertrand SchmittDefinitely, we have not seen that. There are, of course, rumors that Apple is ending their Vision Pro program, and at the same time, is full-on on AR glasses, an alternative to the Meta Ray-Ban. We will see. I start to think I have trouble to see Apple pull this off because it starts to feel that, yes, they are great at making more efficient supply chain these days, but I feel after 10 years plus of Tim Cook leading the business, that’s all there is to Apple these days: thinner phones, pink colors for your latest device.Nuno Goncalves PedroVariations.Bertrand SchmittMore efficient chips, for sure. They have great chips. But beyond that, they canceled their car program, the Vision Pro was not successful in the marketplace. They have trouble to find the next story and to execute on the next story, quite frankly. You could argue that their most successful recent launch has been the AirPods.Nuno Goncalves PedroI think that’s absolutely spot on. We’ve discussed it in previous episodes how much… It’s taken much longer than I thought it would. I always said after Steve’s passing, that it would take maybe 5 to 10 years for the beginning of the demise of Apple, and it is taking longer. There was definitely some gravity created. Steve passed away in 2011, right? They’ve been hanging on to their time, so it’s now 15 years. It seems that only now Apple is really suffering in terms of product lines. Probably they started 1 or 2 years ago. They have a new CEO coming in September, so we’ll see if John will do a better job, if he’s really a product guy, and that’s how he’s going to go for it. He’s going to go for a few products really nicely done that can have great experiences, which is Steve’s hallmark, instead of what you said was the milking of the cow, so to speak, under Tim Cook. There’s nothing wrong with it created in a hugely valuable company with a huge amount of still innovations around the edges, but it’s like now they need real product innovation, a new category definition, play, and is John going to be the guy for that or not?Bertrand SchmittYes. Positively, Tim increased market cap of Apple. He didn’t destroy the business. We are not trying to tell that Tim Cook was a failure, but definitely it was not Steve Jobs. It was more a caretaker, optimizer type of CEO. But to go to the next level, you need another type of CEO. Quite frankly, it’s hard to find when it’s not a founder CEO.Nuno Goncalves PedroYeah, I think it will be difficult to find, but we’ll give John a chance once his time comes in September 2026, as one would. Moving to another topic that we’ve discussed in the past, self-driving. It’s going to happen. We all are waiting for it to happen. Self-driving cars, self-driving vehicles that we don’t need to drive in this mess of traffic, in particular spending a lot of my time in Southern California where traffic is incessant. The driving is… How can I put it in a nice way? Awful. People don’t seem to know what they’re doing. I think we all want to have self-driving cars. It’s taking longer than we thought it would, but I do think it’s going to happen. I wouldn’t put a mark on the sand on how long to get this world of self-driving cars. It’s going to coexist with non-self-driving cars for sure for a period of time. But I, for one, know deeply that it will happen, and I look forward to it. I love driving, but not in horrible traffic with horrible drivers.Bertrand SchmittWe are for sure very close. I mean, now, Tesla self-driving is extremely good. I have taken Waymo many times with great experience. It’s not going too fast, it’s not going on the highway, so there are some limits. But I would say really impressive all in all. I think we are pretty close. I don’t know if you know, but Waymo is working on expanding to many, many more cities, actually. I think we might be at a tipping point there. Quite frankly, I expect that teenagers in 10 years from now are not going to bother to learn driving. I mean, we’ll see, but I think many won’t.Nuno Goncalves PedroI mean, Waymo is now doing also stuff on freeways, certainly in the Bay Area. I had a friend of mine who took one recently, and he was scared. He was scared shitless—I think that would be the right way to put it—because the car wasn’t going that fast, people are aggressive on the freeway around your car. But to your point, I’ve used it in city. In the city, it’s great, and it’s aggressive enough. That’s one of the things I was a bit afraid about Waymo, that it wasn’t going to be aggressive enough in city driving, it is pretty aggressive. Yeah, maybe we’re closer than we think. Maybe it’s a couple of years rather than a decade, which is normally where we put the stake on the ground. But it’s definitely going to happen. I think there was an overhype too soon. There were great movements around level 3 and level 4 autonomy that in some ways were misconstrued early on as full autonomy. But now we will likely get what we ask for. Then at some point someone’s saying, “Hey, but why don’t we just have the flying objects instead?” We’ll get back to that. The flying car stuff, the eVTOLs and all that stuff, we’ll see.Bertrand Schmitt10 years ago, I remember the overhyping was very, very strong with self-driving. I nearly believed the bullshit. It was so strong in 2015, 2016 that nearly everyone thought it’s here in the next 12 months, basically. I think that was a lesson for quite a lot of people. Don’t trust the Silicon Valley bullshit machine, hype machine. It can go way too strong, way too fast. You absolutely need to spend time to understand realistically where we truly are. You cannot just buy the premise.Nuno Goncalves PedroMoving maybe to robotics and humanoids. Again, it’s going to happen both for consumer and for industrial. The humanoid form, I think, at some point will be important. Just not yet. I think we’re behind now the big buzz sentence is embodied AI, where you have physical AI manifestations. AI manifested through robots and other kinds of devices. It’s going to start happening in certain beachheads. But, hey, we’ve had this offer for a long time, and I know you still have your frustrations, Bertrand, with the Sony AIBO. I won’t traumatize you more than that, but definitely it will happen. We will have humanoids at some point. We’ll have different specialty devices that will help us in activities that we do both as consumers and also in the B2B and enterprise space, even in the industrial space. The writing’s on the wall that definitely is going to happen.Bertrand SchmittYes. I think the question, as always, is how do you get there? I think the intermediate steps of your optimized robot, a physically optimized robot, like a Roomba to clean your home or some other robots to mow your grass, a good example, I think initially you have to start a small, practical, not too technology advanced and progress your way. Truly humanoid robots are very disruptive because technically, if they work, they can do everything a human could do. But practically, I don’t think it’s that true because a lot of constraints. You have to have enough weight, you have to have enough force, you have to have enough vision, you have to have enough AI to just understand commands and move around. But, again, with all the progress in AI, the progress in electric motors, I am optimistic that there is a chance for the humanoid robot, but it’s not 3 years. It’s probably not even 5. It’s probably more like 10. Let’s not forget that a lot of demos with humanoid robots today are fake. It’s a remote operator, remotely controlling a robot. It’s not a robot working by himself in many, many, many situations. That, I think, is another thing hurting the reputation of some of these companies because these fake demos, they look great, but once you dig a bit, you realize it was a fake demo because it certainly didn’t come with a warning that it’s remotely operated.Nuno Goncalves PedroMoving maybe to the next one that it will happen, but not exactly like that. Quantum computing, I think for the most, it’s been in many cases a solution looking for problems. It’s beautiful, but it’s like, “What’s the problems we’re trying to solve?” I think we’re going to start having beachheads into problem solution and apps. I’m sure a lot of people out there would say, “Well, there’s already killer apps for this, a lot of the scientific modulation, cryptography, breaking, all that stuff.” But I’m like, “Yeah, cool.” It still feels very much like a bunch of pieces and hardware in effect that is trying to solve a problem that needs to be very much defined into several problems, several areas of problem solution going forward. Will it happen? For sure. I’ve been hearing about quantum computing since I was in college, since I was 17 when I got into college. I’m sure it will happen. It will have manifestations. There’s a lot of stuff probably already residing on some of these instances. But a full mainstream view of what quantum computing can do for us is still quite ways out.Bertrand SchmittYes, I mean, there has been some reports that some key steps in the technology starts to be working and that potentially the technology could start to deliver results in the coming 2-3 years. What I mean by results, results that will dramatically change how you need to encrypt because a lot about quantum computing is actually trying to decrypt the current technologies that are used to protect your information online. This one is big. If we manage to have a limited use of quantum computing things that work in a few years, that will have a dramatic impact on how we encrypt data. That’s the one piece I’m looking for: do we really manage to solve encryption with computing? If yes, then we need to make a lot of changes how we encrypt things.Nuno Goncalves PedroFusion energy, the gift that keeps on giving, but this somehow doesn’t fully happen. I know you’re a big fan.Bertrand SchmittI would say, practically, I’m a big fan of nuclear fusion energy because in a way, it’s working. It’s solved in terms of safety. Latest Gen5 reactors are ultra-safe. They cannot go out of control anymore. China has a working reactor. In some ways, part of me would say, “Why bother with fusion when we have fission that is working extremely well, and we know how to make?” If we are efficient about the process, we could make for really cheap. Having a better source of energy today will already be great for the world. I would like to see scale with fission. It’s great to research fusion. Fusion is near a limitless form of energy. This is exciting. I think what’s interesting with fusion these days, it’s not just the big governments working on spending billions before seeing any potential returns, but there is a lot of startups that are working on it. The bar went lower in terms of researching fusion. That part gets me excited. But again, I think we should go fission first and parallel with some fission investment, fusion research, and hopefully, fusion comes at some point, but we should not wait for fusion would be my big take.Nuno Goncalves PedroGood point. Last but not the least, we’ve dedicated episodes on this, so maybe today we’ll just do the little teaser. If you guys haven’t heard our episodes on AI and the bubble and all those things. The last big one that’s just not like that, it will happen is AI itself, and in particular, AGI, so generalized AI that will be just like a human. Obviously, it’s happening. We’ve discussed in previous episodes, there’s a lot of breakthroughs in terms of methodological approach beyond the GPT curse of actual hallucinations that doesn’t seem to be solvable. There’s a lot of things happening around reinforcement learning, evolutionary computation, and other methodological approaches to AI that we think will create tremendous breakthroughs. There’s definitely a lot of funding going into it. We quantified it recently. I think 63, the number probably has changed in the last couple of weeks, but 63 new AI labs that have raised significant rounds upfront, just getting into the market, some of them as high as hundreds of millions or even over a billion dollars for the first round of funding. Obviously, there’s a lot of dramatic things happening in that space. There’s a lot of capital going to that space. It’s going to happen. It’s going to take much longer than, I think, we think it’s going to take. I just saw, I think, Marc Andreessen recently saying, AGI is already upon us. Maybe it is. Maybe he knows something we don’t know. But I suspect we’re still ways to go in a lot of the developments on AI. For now, it will continue its complications and its limitations. But definitely it will untap a lot of great productivity enhancements, technological enhancements, even in the short term that at least I’m very excited about. Then the AGI story, I think, will be a story that will be told later.Bertrand SchmittI might actually disagree on this one. I actually believe, like Marc Andreessen, that we are at AGI. We reached AGI a few months ago with the latest ChatGPT 5.5 with Claude Anthropic, Opus 4.7, 4.6 even. For me, in some specific space, let’s say coding, for instance, I truly believe we have reached AGI. It is totally replacing people for development, testing, writing, specifications, doing design. Yes, there are some use cases where it’s not working as well. But for at least the coding side, I think AGI is truly there. Is it better than the best human experts at every piece of the puzzle? No. I think if you go to some very specialized development stuff like a CUDA development, for instance, or some kernel development, it might not be at the level of the top human experts. But as we can hear about stories around security to the new versions that are unreleased yet of Anthropic and others seem to be at the level of the best human experts at cybersecurity. I think we are actually there. I think that’s why there is an acceleration the past six months in terms of investments in data centers. There was a big question in 2023, 2024, 2025, “Are we investing too much? Is it a bubble?” And so on. That was true because revenues were increasing, but not that fast. The increase in the growth in revenues for Anthropic is insane. No one has ever seen that in the whole history of technology, what happened to them the past six months. Growing so fast at such a scale, no one has seen. I think that’s truly because they have stumbled upon AGI for coding. Coding is such a huge, large market that even if we are just solving coding, even if we never solve more than that, I think it’s already one of the biggest markets in the world, full stop.Nuno Goncalves PedroBut that, for me, I think maybe it’s a definitional thing. That, for me, is still narrow AI. AGI, as defined, is a type of AI that can match or surpass human capabilities across virtually all cognitive and intellectual tasks. Coding is just one of them. I think there’s a lot of narrow AI right there, to your point, that can replace humans maybe today. Coding may be a great example of that. But I don’t think we are at the AGI. I haven’t seen any agents out there that can replace fully human beings, where I would not understand that they’re actually AI. Anyway, again, maybe you guys have seen stuff that I haven’t seen. I just feel there’s a lot of overhype on what the AGI actually is. But the ability to surpass us as human beings, I haven’t seen it yet across the board, not on a specific domain.Bertrand SchmittYes, I think my point is that I have seen it on a few domains. If you look at mathematics, for instance, and there are more and more examples of people who are using AI to solve math problems that only the very top people in the world were able to solve that are now being solved by AI. I start to feel that we are getting a few examples in different fields where AI is matching the absolute best experts in the world. I would just go back in terms of market size. Already what we got today, and today is not the limit, but what we got today, and especially AI combined with all these agents, harness agents, that’s also that specific combo that makes a difference. This is, for me at this stage, huge market. Does it solve everything? Does it replace a human for everything? No, you still need the human in the loop. You don’t let your AI go wild for weeks and just check once in a while. But you could argue very few humans are able to do that, quite frankly, to run by themselves for weeks without control.Nuno Goncalves PedroI feel there’s still a great deal of confusion because there’s dramatic impact on narrow AI domains where things are being done that weren’t done before, where there’s these great mathematical proofing, coding stuff is being done very easily, etc, etc. But still that, for me, is not the definition of AGI. AGI is a human being. It’s like someone who can really be a human being. Ideally, become top end of what a human being will look intellectually across domains. I don’t think that’s where we are. Again, maybe definitional, maybe that’s what Marc means, but I mean-Bertrand SchmittYeah, the question is, what does it mean? I would argue it’s beating 80% of humanity today pretty easily. Most of humanity doesn’t know how to code. It will be unable to do coding at the level AI is doing. It will be unable to do math at the level AI is doing. Use ChatGPT to check for medical issues and stuff. It’s not perfect for sure, but, again, it still beats most humans. I don’t know. I feel that we are reaching a level where it’s truly beating most of humans, many experts in many fields. I feel the definition of, “Hey, it has reached the level of an average human being.” I would say it passed that one. Is it the same as a human being? No. But reaching the level of your average human being, I think we are there in a lot of fields.Nuno Goncalves PedroConclusion Well, in conclusion, in episode 78 of Tech Deciphered, we went into two piles: the pile of dead-on-arrival products, technologies, businesses, and the pile of “it will happen, but not like that” or “not yet” pile of technologies, business out there as well. We went into a bunch of topics today that were of extreme importance back in the past where we thought the world was going to change, anywhere from self-driving to fusion in the nuclear space. We also went into some dramatic, dramatic mistakes like Juicero and other deployments like Segway that seem to be really very much dead on arrival. With that, I would ask you if you’re excited, and you want to share with us some of your agreements or disagreements on today’s episode, as well as your own dead-on-arrival versus merely-early examples, feel free to do so on LinkedIn, X, or via email. Thank you, Bertrand.Bertrand SchmittThank you, Nuno.

The squad is complete again! We get into AI wearables: rings, necklaces, even earrings, after Dave hints his stealth ring startup is almost ready. Waymo quietly rolls out SF–San Jose service (still no freeways), while private-jet owners email senators about the shutdown. The squad goes over Andy Rubin's humanoid robotics launch, Sam's backwards Panopticon sign, Apple's Issey Miyake iPhone “sock/pocket,” and that Slow's etiquette school is now getting international interest. We wrap with Janitor AI's romance boom, Sam building an AI kids-podcast pipeline with ElevenLabs, Brit wanting McConaughey to voice romance, Jess taking an Instagram detox, and more.Chapters:01:18 AI in interior design and AI slop; Why AI commerce still feels broken04:59 Apple week iPhone Air vs Pro08:49 Wearable AI flood Ray-Bans, rings, and other wearables15:32 Jess deletes Instagram and maybe email21:05 Multitasking vs focus23:32 Andy Rubin's new robotics company27:15 SORON reveal and home deterrence roadmap29:15 Military research to practical deterrent systems30:29 Panopticon conference room and GDPR simplification32:29 Waymo expansion and route quirks35:35 Apple Issey Miyake iPhone pocket sock38:40 Slow's Etiquette Finishing school goes global44:50 The Lessin Family AI generated kids podcast49:06 BBC scandal media bias and blowback54:12 Lawfare the financialization of lawsuitsWe're also on ↓X: https://twitter.com/moreorlesspodInstagram: https://instagram.com/moreorlessYouTube: https://youtu.be/pA20Sk63yYEConnect with us here:1) Sam Lessin: https://x.com/lessin2) Dave Morin: https://x.com/davemorin3) Jessica Lessin: https://x.com/Jessicalessin4) Brit Morin: https://x.com/brit

Préparez-vous à embarquer pour un voyage fascinant dans les coulisses d'Android avec notre dernier épisode intitulé "Android en coulisse : l'histoire d'un OS open source". Notre aventure débute en ouvrant la porte à un récit captivant sur l'ascension fulgurante d'Android. Dès les premières mots, vous serez plongés dans l'univers de ce système d'exploitation révolutionnaire.Découvrez les origines modestes d'Android en 2003, quand Andy Rubin et son équipe ont posé les premières pierres de ce qui allait devenir un géant de la technologie. Vous serez surpris d'apprendre que l'objectif initial était de révolutionner les appareils photo numériques, avant de comprendre le potentiel immense pour les smartphones. Vivez le moment crucial de 2005, lorsque Google a misé sur Android, une décision stratégique transformant l'industrie mobile. Nous vous emmènerons jusqu'au lancement historique du HTC Dream en 2008, le tout premier téléphone équipé d'Android.Mais ce n'est pas tout : nous explorons également l'évolution spectaculaire d'Android, de la version 1.0 à Android 10, en passant par les anecdotes sur ses fonctionnalités révolutionnaires et les statistiques étonnantes sur sa part de marché. Dans une série de moment, des personnalités influentes de l'industrie comme Andy Rubin, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt partagent leurs perspectives uniques sur l'impact d'Android. Ces témoignages offrent une vision sur les coulisses du secteur mobile.Nous concluons avec un résumé des points clés, rappelant comment Android est devenu bien plus qu'un simple OS, mais un pilier essentiel de la vie numérique moderne. Pas d'abonnement payant chaque mois pour le podcast, mais une offre premium pour les entrepreneurs de passer un moment pendant l'enregistrement avec nous, puis d'échanger avec l'invitée en posant vos questions après l'enregistrement. Chaque personne reçoit un NFT unique du moment ! https://plus.acast.com/s/135-grammes. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Préparez-vous à embarquer pour un voyage fascinant dans les coulisses d'Android avec notre dernier épisode intitulé "Android en coulisse : l'histoire d'un OS open source". Notre aventure débute en ouvrant la porte à un récit captivant sur l'ascension fulgurante d'Android. Dès les premières mots, vous serez plongés dans l'univers de ce système d'exploitation révolutionnaire.Découvrez les origines modestes d'Android en 2003, quand Andy Rubin et son équipe ont posé les premières pierres de ce qui allait devenir un géant de la technologie. Vous serez surpris d'apprendre que l'objectif initial était de révolutionner les appareils photo numériques, avant de comprendre le potentiel immense pour les smartphones. Vivez le moment crucial de 2005, lorsque Google a misé sur Android, une décision stratégique transformant l'industrie mobile. Nous vous emmènerons jusqu'au lancement historique du HTC Dream en 2008, le tout premier téléphone équipé d'Android.Mais ce n'est pas tout : nous explorons également l'évolution spectaculaire d'Android, de la version 1.0 à Android 14, en passant par les anecdotes sur ses fonctionnalités révolutionnaires et les statistiques étonnantes sur sa part de marché. Dans une série de moment, des personnalités influentes de l'industrie comme Andy Rubin, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt partagent leurs perspectives uniques sur l'impact d'Android. Ces témoignages offrent une vision sur les coulisses du secteur mobile.Nous concluons avec un résumé des points clés, rappelant comment Android est devenu bien plus qu'un simple OS, mais un pilier essentiel de la vie numérique moderne.Rejoignez-nous pour une conversation inspirante et enrichissante dans "135 Grammes" ! Soyez-les premiers à posséder le NFT du teaser unique, pour nous soutenir rendez-vous sur OpenSea, :) Pas d'abonnement payant chaque mois pour le podcast, mais une offre premium pour les entrepreneurs de passer un moment pendant l'enregistrement avec nous, puis d'échanger avec l'invitée en posant vos questions après l'enregistrement. Chaque personne reçoit un NFT unique du moment ! https://plus.acast.com/s/135-grammes. Hébergé par Acast. Visitez acast.com/privacy pour plus d'informations.

Democrat Grey Davis was recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger becomes the governor of the State of California on October 7 2003. That's right, just like the intro says, The Terminator became the Governator! Rising to the top of a field of candidates that included Gary Coleman from Diff'rent Strokes, Larry Flynt from Hustler Magazine and porn star Mary Carey.In tech news, still in California, company Android Inc is founded by Andy Rubin, Rich Miner, Nick Sears and Chris White. The early intentions of the company was to develop an advanced operating system for digital cameras that would make it easier to manage and share photos. However, as they worked on their project, they recognised the potential for a more versatile operating system for various mobile devices.In music we've got new albums from Aussie band Jet, Sevendust and in music news P.Diddy is in court for threatening someone with a baseball bat. We discuss whether or not you've really been threatened if the assailant's name is 'Puffy'.At the movies Jack Black classic 'School of Rock' goes to the number one spot in the US box office, while here in Australia Sean Connery makes his final live action movie appearance with 'The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen' or 'LXG' according to the marketing edgelords. If that's not enough, we've got the TV debut of Bridezillas, a fire starting dog and the worlds greatest eater. We're talking 68 hard boiled eggs in 8 minutes people!Download us! You know you want to! Hang with us on socials to chat more noughties nostalgia - Facebook (@tminus20) or Instagram (tminus20podcast). You can also contact us there if you want to be a part of the show.

In this conversation, Christine Russo interviews Andy Rubin, the executive chairman and founder of Trove, discussing the growth of the resale market and its impact on brands. Trove is a pioneering player in the resale space, helping brands create and manage their resale programs. Andy Rubin highlights that the resale market is gaining momentum, with more brands recognizing the value of retaining control over their secondary market and sustainability efforts. Andy emphasizes the importance of brands being involved in the resale of their products, especially those known for high-quality craftsmanship. Brands like Patagonia and Lululemon have successfully integrated resale into their strategies, reaping benefits in terms of customer loyalty, brand equity, and sustainability. Andy also discusses Trove's role in providing technology and tools for brands to manage their resale programs effectively. They talk about the challenges of grading and authenticating items, and how Trove's technology supports this process. Andy acknowledges the increasing competition in the resale space, highlighting the positive impact it has on the industry's growth and innovation. He mentions Trove's position as a forerunner in the industry, having gained a significant head start and considerable scale. Andy also addresses the shift in consumer behavior towards valuing pre-owned items, driven by the demand for sustainable and unique products. He talks about the evolution of branding through storytelling and customer experience in the resale market, providing brands with more opportunities to shape their narratives. Overall, the conversation explores the rapid growth and potential of the resale market, as well as Trove's role in supporting brands' efforts to navigate this evolving landscape and maintain control over their brand equity.

We've got the sauce on OSOM, the Android startup founded by a collective of former employees who worked for Essential before Andy Rubin, facing public pressure for salacious work behavior at Google, dissolved the firm. OSOM tried to mix focuses on iconic industrial design as well as privacy and performance, but had to delay and reshape its launch product as it announced that the Solana blockchain would be backing what would be its first phone. We dig into why with two people who are on the inside track through long chats with the company's executives: Android Police's Ryne Hager and Esper's Mishaal Rahman. https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/09/04/former-essential-staff-have-started-a-new-company-called-osom-products/ (Former Essential staff have started a new company called OSOM Products) https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/11/16/osom-plans-to-release-its-first-privacy-focused-product-next-year/ (OSOM plans to release its first privacy-focused product next year) https://www.androidpolice.com/osom-ov1-exclusive/ (OSOM OV1 is the new phone from the team behind the Essential Phone) https://www.androidpolice.com/osom-ov1-specs-stainless-steel-titainium-ceramic/ (The OSOM OV1, an Essential Phone 'sequel', will be made of stainless steel, titanium, and ceramic) https://www.androidpolice.com/osom-ov1-solana-saga/ (OSOM's hotly-anticipated OV1 smartphone succumbs to crypto gimmick as Solana Saga) https://android-bytes-by-esper.captivate.fm/episode/building-android-phone (How to build an Android phone (with GMS) - Android Bytes (powered by Esper)) https://techcrunch.com/2022/07/07/why-osom-went-web3/ (Why OSOM went web3 | TechCrunch) Find the team on Twitter - https://twitter.com/pointjules (@PointJules) https://twitter.com/rynehager (@RyneHager) https://twitter.com/mishaalrahman (@MishaalRahman) Reach out to us - podcast@androidpolice.com Music - "https://home96.bandcamp.com/track/18 (18)" and "https://home96.bandcamp.com/track/34 (34)" by https://home96.bandcamp.com/ (HOME) licensed under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ (CC BY 3.0)

Anatoly welcomes Jason Keats (Founder & Chief Hooligan, OSOM) to the podcast to talk about his epic career building hardware, the Solana Saga phone and all things mobile and web3. Pre-order the Saga now at solanamobile.com 00:09 - Intro00:25 - Background03:27 - Working at Apple08:07 - The Gem Phone10:15 - Privacy at Essential12:24 - Building for Mobile15:52 - Hardware he wants to build17:07 - Crypto x Cars19:02 - Do Apple or Google care about hardware and crypto?21:08 - Innovation in hardware21:56 - The saga phone22:56 - The manufacturing process26:29 - How to start building27:56 - Working with start ups29:15 - The innovation cycle in hardware30:36 - Privacy features32:42 - Working with non-crypto people36:08 - Outro DISCLAIMERThe content herein is provided for educational, informational, and entertainment purposes only, without any express or implied warranty of any kind, including warranties of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for any particular purpose. Those who appear in the content may have a financial interest in any projects referenced, and any content herein is not intended to be and does not constitute financial advice, investment advice, trading advice, or any other advice.  This content is intended to be general in nature and is not specific to you, the user or anyone else. You should not make any decision, financial, investment, trading or otherwise, based on any of the information presented without undertaking independent due diligence and consultation with a professional advisor. Anatoly (00:09):Hey, folks. This is Anatoly and you're listening to The Solana Podcast. And today, I have Jason Keats with me who's the CEO and co-founder of OSOM. Welcome.Jason (00:18):Hey, how's it going? Glad to be here. Glad to chat everything we've been working on finally.Anatoly (00:22):Yeah. Me too. It's been kind of a crazy journey. You have an awesome background. Do you mind just sharing it?Jason (00:32):Yeah. I've had a very, weird hardware background throughout my career. When I left Berkeley, I decided I wanted to go build something. I didn't want to sit in front of a computer all day. Well, my degree is in astrophysics from Berkeley. And then I went on to work on solar panels. And that was-Anatoly (00:54):Like...Jason (00:54):What was that?Anatoly (00:55):Yeah. How did you get from astrophysics to hardware?Jason (00:59):So my senior year, my professor asked me to... He knew I had access to a machine shop because I was working with the Formula SAE, which is a student racing program. So they knew I had access to a machine shop and they wanted to make parts for telescopes. So I offered and said, "Hey, I can do that." So instead of being a traditional GSI or something like that, I was the monkey who machined random parts. And that was a lot more fun. At the end of the day, instead of having a program, I was like, "I have a thing. It's built." And that was it. I wanted to build things.Anatoly (01:39):That's awesome. How did you get into astrophysics then? What was the reason for getting into astrophysics?Jason (01:48):I just wanted to be able to say, I was... It was a rocket scientist was the logic I had, 18-year-old me had. Little did I know that wasn't exactly how that worked, but it sure sounded cool. And nowadays it just sounds really cool to say, "Oh, I have a degree in astrophysics from Berkeley."Anatoly (02:05):That does sound really cool. So what happened after? You build telescopes, right?Jason (02:10):Yeah. I built little bits and bobs for telescopes. I didn't want to get a real job, so I started a motorcycle company that was a complete disaster. Not a complete disaster, but it was pretty rough. I learned a lot about running a company there. Basically, I learned all the things you're not supposed to do.Anatoly (02:29):I mean, that's the first one, right? You're supposed to do that.Jason (02:33):Yeah. I'm glad it didn't hurt me too badly. And then I ended up being a consultant for a company in Silicon Valley. It was like a design engineering consultancy and they put me on to Solyndra, which was a solar panel company. And that was a very fun couple of years building some really interesting technology and honing the skills that I use today and some of the ethos that I still use today because one of the things we were trying to do was how do you make a solar panel easier to install, because right now it's quite a time consuming process. So my goal was to design a solar array that could be installed with no tools and we were successful in that.Anatoly (03:14):That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm going to keep saying that the whole episode.Jason (03:22):Two years on of creating the name and it still doesn't get old. So eventually Solyndra went belly up unfortunately, that could be 10 podcasts probably as to what happened there. But my boss at the time was like, "Cool, we need to go over to Apple right away." So I think that was a Wednesday, the company went bankrupt and on Monday I was working on secret projects at Apple.Anatoly (03:50):Cool. So there's like a period of how many years of what you can't talk about.Jason (03:55):A few years actually. And actually I know for a fact that the program is still ongoing and is still super secret.Anatoly (04:02):Cool. That's pretty cool. What did you work on at Apple that you can talk about?Jason (04:09):So when I started Apple, my first project was on Mac PD doing the last generation of the MacBook Air, which I mean, people still review that as one of the best laptops ever made. And I'm still quite proud of that. It was a very difficult project with a very small team, but it was very successful. And at some point in between MacBook Air and the little tiny MacBook, I was asked to help on a small project with Jony Ive which was the Leica infrared camera. And it was myself and one other mechanical engineer working with the ID team, designing this, what was supposed to be a two or three-week project. And six months later, I had my own office where we were doing prototypes of little tiny bits and pieces because Jony wanted it perfect. And that really kind of made my career at Apple was working on that project with the studio directly.Anatoly (05:01):Is that camera like something you can buy now?Jason (05:03):I mean, if you got a few million bucks. No, we only made one camera and it was purchased at auction for around $2 million if I recall correctly. I think it's on display somewhere. It was super cool. It had so many bits and pieces that were just absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing was handmade. My favorite little anecdote about that is it needed to be... The tolerances were so tight that it needed to be hand assembled in a very particular way. And so if the owner who currently has it decides it needs to be repaired or refurbished, for whatever reason, if they decide to actually to use a $2 million camera, there's a little post it inside that says, "Call Jason," with my phone number.Anatoly (05:52):Eventually you're going to get like a call at 3:00 AM.Jason (05:55):Oh, yeah. I do know who has it. And we do travel in the same circle, so I'm sure there's a day where I'll be like, "Hey, I built your camera." Yeah, that was fun. And then from there I joined iPad which was a whole other journey and learning a little bit more about mobile having come from solar panels and motorcycles, and desktop products, and laptops into iPad was a lot of fun. And my first real claim to fame in iPad was leading architecture on the original iPad Pro, which is the original 12.9 inch iPad.Jason (06:31):It was a lot of fun because we got to try a lot of different things. A funny story there though, that totally you know and a lot of people who follow me know, I'm huge into racing in cars and I do a lot of silly things. We actually built in carbon fiber speaker caps inside the iPad Pro. Apple marketing made this big spiel about, "Oh, it's different. It does this, it does that." That's all BS. It's because I like carbon fiber because I like race cars and that's why we used it. I'm sure there's some marketing guy going no, but that's the honest truth is to why there are carbon fiber speaker caps in the iPad pro.Anatoly (07:07):I thought those are so cool. I ride bikes. All the cool bikes are carbon fiber.Jason (07:17):Let's see. I don't think I have one here. I had one somewhere. I had the caps and everything, but it was a lot of work and it was a lot of fun. It was really interesting, but I got really sick of the bureaucracy at Apple. It wasn't for me. One day somebody was interviewing for my team at Apple, and they told me about what was going on Playground, which was Andy Rubin's new incubator. And I thought that was super, super interesting. So I just straight up cold called Andy on LinkedIn and was like, "Hey, I've done this stuff. I'm interested in getting out of the Apple ecosystem. Let's talk."Jason (07:53):And the next day I got a call from their recruiter and I went and interviewed a week later and they were like, "Hey, we have something. We can't tell you anything about it, but can you wait, like two months and we're going to give you a job. I said, "Cool." So for that two months, I went off and worked on Apple Maps, which was everybody goes, "What the hell were you doing on Apple Maps?" I was designing all the things you see, like the rooftop boxes and the things that went in the planes and the balloons that went up in the sky. We built some really weird stuff to capture images for Apple Maps.Anatoly (08:26):That's cool. Wow. I mean, there is a hardware component to Apple Maps that people don't don't realize.Jason (08:33):Oh, yeah. All that stuff has to be captured somewhere. I mean, there's warehouses full of hard drives of people having to still go through that data and make sure it's okay to use. And warehouses and warehouses full of hard drives.Anatoly (08:49):Yeah, I can imagine.Jason (08:52):So, yeah, after Apple, I went and joined Andy Rubin at what was... What were we called? We were called Ninja Army for the first five months. And then eventually became known as Essential. I was technically the first hire, but the second employee at Essential and was there from the very beginning to the very end. It was a hell of a ride. We built the Essential PH1, which was a really, really, really exceptional piece of hardware with some pretty crap software on it, unfortunately.Jason (09:19):Particularly the camera side needed a lot of work and unfortunately was released too early. And we could argue for days about what the reason was, but ultimately that was the end result of that. And we never managed to bring another product to market despite building some really cool hardware there.Anatoly (09:38):So yeah, man, launching hardware is hard. Why did you decide to do this again?Jason (09:47):The biggest product that we built... Or the coolest product. No, that was actually the smallest. The coolest product we designed at Essential was Project Gem. And we are working on that up until the very end. And that was so revolutionary in the terms of mobile experience in which taught all of us that there was really an opportunity here. There was still things to be done and new things to be invented and new ways of interacting to be made available.Jason (10:13):So when Essential went out of business, when Andy told me that was that, it was obvious to me that I need to take this opportunity now. I'm going to do it. I have a team available that I know is now all unemployed and let's keep them together and build something really, really cool.Jason (10:29):So I grabbed the key team members and then kept a few on the back burner while we raised money, and we got to the point where we were ready to rock and start building a new phone. So while the first phone is a little more traditional device, I think in the future, we're going to have some really crazy things to build with you guys.Anatoly (10:49):Yeah. I have no doubts. The gem thing was a pretty weird piece of hardware. Right? It kind of looked almost like totally made out of glass.Jason (11:03):Yeah. So this is one of those things that I love showing off in person is that glass phone. It was a glass uni body, which has never been done in a cell phone before. The overall shape was... I mean, the best description is either a candy bar mixed with an Apple TV remote and...Anatoly (11:21):Yeah.Jason (11:22):Yeah. That's a great description. Piece of glass, size of a candy bar that kind of looks like an Apple TV remote.Jason (11:28):Yeah, exactly. But it was all one piece of glass. Even the camera bump, the flash, everything was a continuous piece of glass. And every hardware engineer I've shown that to goes, "How did you make this? And how did you manage to achieve the tolerances required to build that?" And it took a lot of work with our good friends at Corning and a third party in China. But we were able to build them. And there's a couple of them in existence. I think they're all in Andy's garage still, except for the two that are in my possession still. And they work.Jason (12:00):Some of the issues we were encountering was that GMS wouldn't... We wouldn't be approved for GMS with that device. So we were going to have to do some new and novel use cases there and come up with all new ways to interact with the device.Anatoly (12:17):So awesome you guys started with a really strong focus on privacy. Yeah. Was that your decision or something that was just you guys wanted to do at Essential anyways?Jason (12:31):No, that was definitely my decision and the decision of the team. We looked at what killed, Essential. A big part of that was a lack of focus other than building cool stuff. And that only gets you so far. There needs to be a reason why your customers want to join our adventure rather than go with a Samsung, or LG, or HTC, or Motorola or whatever was available at that time.Jason (12:54):So we realized that a big problem facing everybody today is a lack of consumer privacy. And that's when we came to the conclusion that we could actually address that as an OEM.Anatoly (13:06):And that's a really tough challenge because you still probably want to keep Google services around.Jason (13:14):Yeah, absolutely. So I mean-Anatoly (13:16):Do you think... Yeah, go ahead.Jason (13:18):No, I was going to say it's a great segue into what things that people keep asking us since we announced our partnership is when we decided to say, "Okay, we're going to build a privacy centric phone, there have been privacy centric devices attempted in the past, but they were too extreme. By cutting out GMS, by cutting out Android in some cases, you were left with a device that was so private, nobody would use it, which yeah, it works as a privacy device, but you don't sell any.Jason (13:43):I mean, I know for a fact that there are two different phone manufacturers who sold less than a thousand devices, despite putting tens of millions of dollars into it because we all use the same suppliers. So the suppliers are excellent sources of information. And so I know for a fact that one of them was like, "Oh, we only shipped a thousand speakers to that company."Jason (14:06):So what we said was, "We're going to give you control and we're going to give the user control and we're going to give them options and they can make the choice as to how much they want to share or not share." And if they want to use Twitter, and Facebook, and Instagram and every Google service, then at least they have knowledge that they're doing that and is less secure than not doing it. Or they are consciously making that decision.Anatoly (14:31):Yeah. Go ahead.Jason (14:33):And that goes to what we've talked about is we're going to do the same with all the Solana mobile stack that we're integrating into the phone. We're not taking anything away. We're giving users an excellent device, a high-end flagship device that gives them more options and more choice in how they use it and what they use it for.Anatoly (14:52):Yeah. If you've been a web 3.0 dev, you've been building applications and you've never started with like, "I need to collect a username and an email and a password." That concept doesn't exist. Right?Jason (15:09):Yeah.Anatoly (15:09):That's something that being building like in crypto for the last four years, I almost forgot how to build traditional applications. And when I had to remember, I was like, "Oh man, yeah, there just doesn't seem a way to build privacy without really starting from the ground up and building a whole new set of applications that people actually use. Right? And they deliver value to those users. People use them because they love them. But you need to start from the ground up. And that's really hard because getting product market fit, building applications and then competing with existing services is just like a uphill climb.Jason (15:54):Yeah, absolutely. Building that community, which was what made our partnership so beautiful is you have that community and you have that development group that really wants to be actively involved and emotionally involved, and that's super exciting for us to be like, "Hey, let's give you a piece of hardware that you can call home too."Anatoly (16:12):Yeah. I mean, this is the first time, honestly, I've seen anyone tweet that they will stop using an Apple product and switch to Android.Jason (16:21):That is exciting. If we can crack 5% instead of the standard 4%, I will be absolutely ecstatic.Anatoly (16:29):Yep. That would be awesome. Yeah, I remember when the iPhone launch and that was a real watershed moment. A lot of us, I was working on BREW and a lot of us were actually, like, felt really frustrated with the mobile industry because we had all these ideas. We wanted to build rich applications that are easy to code and totally different kind of UIs, dynamic UIs and stuff. And these big telcos would give us like 200-page spec of what a phone should look like because they their customers. And there was like this moment where Apple announced this thing and Steve Jobs showed, "Look, there's a browser. It's a real internet." It's just not this [inaudible 00:17:15]. It's not the mobile web that... I don't know if people remember what that even looked on a LG flip phone.Jason (17:25):I do.Anatoly (17:25):That was a big deal. I don't know if we're there yet with crypto. I don't know if there's a single application or anything like that when people open up and they're like, "Oh wow, this is it." Because obviously when Apple announced the iPhone, it was already after the internet. It was big. Right? Everybody was already using the internet and there was this obvious gap between desktop and mobile. But I think when people actually pay with tokens for their day to day stuff and all that whole loop works and it, and it's beautiful and it doesn't suck, I think that might like open up people to new ideas of what we can do with crypto on a mobile device that actually supports it natively.Jason (18:18):Yeah. The day that both of our parents can go and shop with tokens will be a watershed moment for crypto.Anatoly (18:32):Yeah. I am really excited about that.Jason (18:33):Yeah. When I think about the potential there, I mean you and I have talked about it a few times. It's immense and almost a little bit intimidating and staggering what the obvious potential is there.Anatoly (18:45):So what kind of hardware, what else do you want to build besides a phone? You don't have to announce anything, but you personally as somebody that's a super hardware nerd, if you had infinite budget, and could do whatever you want, what would you build?Jason (19:02):Number one, I want to bring back Project GEM. I loved using that phone and I'm probably the only person on Earth that used that phone regularly for a while because I wanted to make sure it was great. And that thing worked so much better than anybody ever gave a potential credit for, as a small side device, as something you could toss in your pocket, in your bag and not think about. It was beautiful. I mean, for me, designing a piece of hardware has to also be very physically attractive and I think that was the most beautiful thing I've ever designed.Jason (19:31):I do want to see the expansion of using your mobile devices, be it your watch or your phone interacting with the automotive sector. Obviously, we've chatted about it before. I have a problem when it comes to cars. Oh, wait. Nobody can see what I just pointed at. So I think the inner relationship between mobile, crypto, and automotive is even earlier than anything else in crypto, but there's a hell an opportunity there. And thankfully, a lot of the automotive companies are starting to catch on and realize there's different potential there.Anatoly (20:13):What would be like a hardware integration between mobile and cars?Jason (20:18):I mean, we've already patented this idea. So I will talk about it freely now, is the ability to track all your history of your vehicle. And when you sell your vehicle, you have everything written to the blockchain. The NFT itself will simply be a photo or a connection to the title, which is held somewhere else. But you can guarantee that if somebody sends you a NFT of a title, that it is tied to a physical object, which we've already patented that as well.Anatoly (20:47):So you want like the miles like the RPMs, like the actual raw data. I don't know what else you got. I'm not a car person.Jason (20:56):Like the service history or the maintenance history, the sales history. Do you know if the mile... You can guarantee that the miles weren't rolled back. You can know if it went through any... What do they call... Oh, when they call you to bring the car back in. Oh, recall notices. Anything with service was done. That's a real utility of that technology.Anatoly (21:24):Cool. And the kind of cars that people would really want this for like collectibles, like classic cars that you're getting what you're paying for.Jason (21:34):Yeah, I think so. But also with your average Toyota or Civic, at least you know what the history was on that car. Was it repaired? Was it damaged at any given point? There is utility across the board.Anatoly (21:45):Cool.Jason (21:46):And then especially-Anatoly (21:47):Yeah, I can...Jason (21:47):Last thing on that one, especially, if we go into the collectibles, like being able to take a cut down the road. Okay. I sell the car to you. You sell it to somebody else and I can take a fraction of a percent of that sale is pretty awesome.Anatoly (22:00):If you're the person restoring the car. Right?Jason (22:03):Yeah.Anatoly (22:03):And you did this... Yeah, that's actually like, I think been... It's weird that model has never been replicated in the real world, but works so well with NFTs.Jason (22:16):Yeah. Exactly.Anatoly (22:19):That's a use case that I think is way under explored for stuff like that, for physical art.Jason (22:26):Yeah. It's one of the things that we patented early on was the connection between a physical and digital assets.Anatoly (22:40):Do you think Apple or Google care about what we're doing right now? Is this like reached anyone's decision-making yet or is this still-Jason (22:49):I know for a fact that our name has come up in both those companies, because I know a lot of people at the highest level. One of my good friends is an SVP at Apple and he texted me. He's like, "They're talking about you in an executive meeting." I was like, "Cool. I've made it in life. Are they talking about suing me though?" I'm sure Google has people thinking about it and worrying about it. I mean, obviously Google is still a partner because we are a GMS device and they are thrilled to have us. It's like being an advocate for the Android ecosystem.Anatoly (23:26):Oh yeah, absolutely. I think if we convert people from iOS to Android, Google should be like making parades for OSOM. It's a lot of...Jason (23:37):I'm serious, I haven't asked yet, but I should ask them like, "Hey, if we convert more than the standard 4%, do I get a bonus from Google?" That'd be nice.Anatoly (23:43):Yeah. Absolutely. I'm not too worried. They're so big that it doesn't seem like there's anything to worry about because they're just like, it's like worrying about, I don't know, nation state at this point.Jason (24:02):Yeah, exactly.Anatoly (24:03):For a startup, it's such a big competitor that it's not even a competitor.Jason (24:08):Yeah. And I think the companies that people often compare us to, or talk about us, nothing or... What's it? Oppo and OnePlus. One of the things that I've tried to do is make sure I have a good relationship with those companies as well, because it's kind of silly for a bunch of startups to be fighting over the scraps instead of taking swings at Apple, Google and Samsung in terms of device sales.Anatoly (24:31):Absolutely, yeah. I mean, OnePlus made some awesome devices too. That was really cool to see them launch. When I was working at Android at Qualcomm, there was just always like this huge gap between quality and innovation in terms of like how the device looks and feels and they were able to really push the limits there. Yeah.Jason (24:53):Well, I think our next devices will be pushing some new limits, which will be a lot of fun.Anatoly (24:58):Yeah. I guess, do you think like mobile... Because it's so big, is there still room to innovate in terms of hardware?Jason (25:14):Yes.Anatoly (25:15):Besides like on the standard daily driver.Jason (25:19):Yeah. I spend a lot of time actually. Now, that I'm the CEO and I have other teams of people now working for me pushing vision, I can spend a little more time thinking about how I want to change that interaction of device, what new technologies are out there, or even what new use cases of existing technologies there are.Jason (25:38):So I have been working on something wholly new for how we interact with our devices in a way that I think people will naturally enjoy using it. It's a bit of technology that'll change how you actually touch and use your device, but it'll be done in a form factor in a manner that makes it approachable. And it's not foldable because I think that's kind of silly most of the time.Anatoly (26:06):Yeah. Foldables, not also not sure about them. I really like the steel on the Saga phone.Jason (26:14):Yeah.Anatoly (26:15):Why did you guys pick steel?Jason (26:17):Two reasons. Number one, we didn't want to go titanium like we did on the Essential phone. It was a little too exactly the same, but we couldn't go to aluminum because it just doesn't have the same touch. It doesn't have the same feel. It doesn't have the same strength. It doesn't have the same feel, which I want to feel a premium device when I pick up a phone that I engineered. An aluminum loses that a little bit. It's not stiff enough for my taste.Jason (26:41):So we landed on steel for the housing and then we landed on ceramic because we still did want a little tie back to Essential, but also because it does feel premium, it looks premium. It's not paint, it's not glass. It's real ceramic. It's incredibly tough. It's very hard and it does well and drop while also allowing to be RF transparent and just, I mean, ultimately looking and feeling super premium to your fingers.Anatoly (27:09):When you make those decisions, how many logistics need to change? How many companies, suppliers, machines, how big of a process is that?Jason (27:24):Less now than it was five years ago, but it's because I have the team behind me that is incredibly capable of making it happen where we have a ridiculous Rolodex, a contact list for everybody under 25 of people to call for different materials and different processes. The big one is, as you saw in the first EVT devices. First stainless devices, they were quite heavy. So one of the big changes we had to do was we had to optimize for aluminum on the very, very first prototypes. We switched to stainless, but we didn't change our cutter pass. We didn't change our processes. So into the current build, we've made a lot of changes to ensure that we bring the weight down just the right amount, but still have a super strong device.Anatoly (28:11):Are those separate companies like the company that makes the cutters and stamps the thing and puts on the ceramic. If you went from ceramic to glass, how big of a logistical nightmare is that?Jason (28:25):If we switched over to glass, it's a different company that would manufacture and process the material. And then because it's glass, we'd have to also find a paint shop to paint the device. Whereas ceramic has that color baked in, literally.Anatoly (28:40):Got it. That makes sense. Okay. So you have to do like a bunch of work. It's not just one company that you go to and they're like, "Sure, we can do everything."Jason (28:51):Yeah, that doesn't exist as much as we'd love to. It's all over the place in Asia. Prior to the pandemic, I probably would've spent the last 10 months living in and out of China.Anatoly (29:02):And most of the stuff is in China or all over Asia at this point?Jason (29:07):A lot of the supply chain comes out of China, but that doesn't mean we're manufacturing there. We have plants or factories both in China and in Vietnam, but it's still all in Asia.Anatoly (29:18):Got it. Is there any chance for that stuff to ever happen in the US or is it just like the world is like manufacturing shifted irreparably?Jason (29:33):I have had a few conversations with the Canadian government about this. I think the US will be still quite difficult, but in Canada might be possible. But the biggest issue is all the subcomponents are still made in Asia. So even if you were doing final assembly in North America, you'd still have to ship all the individual components from Asia. Your SOC is going to come out of TSMC, which is in Taipei. Your memory is going to come out of Korea. The display will come out of either Indonesia or China and there's no manufacturing plants for all those components anywhere in the Western world.Anatoly (30:13):Actually manufacturing those components in the Western world is impossible. Right? Why is it impossible?Jason (30:18):I mean, just the billions of dollars required would be cost prohibitive to build those plants. Those fab houses are huge and would take years to build.Anatoly (30:30):And that's because things have gotten so specialized in displays and everything that it's just like, "Yeah. It's basically Intel like level kind of commitment."Jason (30:40):Oh, yeah. I mean, you're talking massive, massive. And even the ones that are good at it already have issues now at the scales we're talking about. Like the four nanometer process, which is used to build the chip we're using in Saga is there are only two companies in the world that even understand how to make the fab devices to make those chips.Anatoly (30:59):Yeah. This is the Tungsten droplet, right?Jason (31:04):Yeah.Anatoly (31:04):You have like a droplet that refracts UV light.Jason (31:08):Honestly, I'm not that familiar with that process, but yeah, it is crazy, crazy. It's tough to explain to people how tiny four nanometers is. And then how many traces they have to put down in a tiny little chip that we're going to put in your phone and makes everything work.Anatoly (31:29):How do you find these places? How do you start? If you were like a 18-year-old that's like, "Hey, I want to build cool shit, build cool electronics," how would you start?Jason (31:44):I think if I were starting today, I would try to find the R&D team at either Google or Apple or a startup like OSOM and just go like, "Hey, I want to be your man on the ground in Asia and I want to grow my network. I want to go out there with a completely open mind and just be like everybody teach me." Which is how I really got out there. I said, "I don't know what I'm doing on some of this stuff." But I am a sponge. I will sit here and learn from the best and I will be super polite because I see... That was one of the things that used to bug me a lot is I saw Western people acting like jackasses with their Eastern counterparts.Jason (32:23):Now they get nowhere and I made it at a point to always, always, always be polite, always say, "Look, I'm here to learn. Let me help you. If I know something that I can share, I'm going to go out of my way to share it." And that has enabled me to have amazing relationships with the CEOs of all these fantastic supply companies.Anatoly (32:43):It's basically like a relationship thing and you have to know what they can build and know what they do well and stuff.Jason (32:50):Yeah. And go in there with an open mind and sometimes an open wallet. That always opens some doors and expect to try to make it a back and forth. Because you get a lot further if you can say, "Hey, let me offer you some of my knowledge in exchange for some of your knowledge."Anatoly (33:07):How open are they to startups custom work with these small scale projects? Because my imagination is that like they only work with Google and they want to sell a hundred million units or whatever.Jason (33:20):Yeah. That's the other hard part. And that comes later on once you have those relationships because it doesn't matter who you are. If you don't have that existing relationship, they're going to laugh you out of the building, if they even let you in the door.Anatoly (33:34):Yeah. Makes sense. If you're building, if you dream of building awesome hardware, I guess you got to start like work for somebody like OSOM or R&D team. That's pretty good advice.Jason (33:52):I think it's the only way to build those relationships, so you know who to call. And I think a big part of it is it's not always the CEO you need to talk to. You need to talk to his right hand guy. You need to talk to the CTO. You need to know the right person to talk to at each company, and it changes a little bit. You'll you learn who the movers and shakers are, the people who can actually make things happen for you. And that's where it gets super interesting. And it takes boots on the ground to learn that.Anatoly (34:20):So I imagine that's still true for big companies, as you get bigger, you still just need to keep those relationships going.Jason (34:29):If you want to innovate, you need to. If you just want to just keep grinding out the same BS you've been doing for 20 years, they'll usually just give you the C team and you can just grind and nobody moves anything.Anatoly (34:41):Yeah. The innovation part is hard. How long is the innovation cycle and hardware?Jason (34:50):Anywhere from days to years, right? I have been on the back side of things where it's like, "Oh, I have an idea. Actually, that was super easy to implement." Okay, let's do it. It's done. But I've also... Making the glass housing for GEM was an 18-month project to get the tolerance that we need to hold. For everybody who's listening, you need to hold 100 microns is pretty standard, which a 10th of a millimeter. Very, very-Anatoly (35:19):How many human hairs is that?Jason (35:22):Less than one. So we need to hold those tolerances on piece of glass and how glass is manufactured is that you literally take a molded part and cook it down into a shape. And you can imagine trying to hold... Like if you're baking something in your oven and trying to get it to stay within a 10th of a millimeter, it's never going to happen. So we had to help both Corning and our third party invent new technologies to achieve that result.Anatoly (35:52):That's really cool. That's pretty cool. Are people using these technologies anywhere else? Or is this something that is basically just only was built for GEM?Jason (36:06):I think they're still using... There's not a lot of applications where you need a deep draw, weird aspect ratio glass part, but I know they're using it for two and a half D or even light 3D shapes, that at least allowed them to make 3D shapes that weren't as extreme as GEM in a more factory friendly manner.Anatoly (36:28):Super goal.Jason (36:31):Yeah. I could talk about random manufacturing for hours.Anatoly (36:35):You guys also have like a pretty awesome software team.Jason (36:39):Yeah.Anatoly (36:40):And you guys did a lot of work in actually adding privacy features to the Android stack.Jason (36:45):Yeah.Anatoly (36:46):What are these privacy features?Jason (36:49):I'd love to have Gary answer that question if he were here. But mostly what we wanted to do is allow the user to just be more aware of where their data is going and how it's being treated by any webpage they go, any app they use and alert them if more data than they expect is going out and a place where they can work within their device, where they can guarantee that nothing is going out that they don't control, which we haven't named yet because somebody stole our name.Jason (37:21):And then the other one that I love that I cannot wait to use more of is what we called lockdown, but then Google used that name for what they were doing. But the ability to just turn off any module on the phone when you want to.Anatoly (37:35):And what do you mean by module?Jason (37:39):So right now, I think in lockdown mode that Google offers you can turn off the camera and mic. But we can turn off the camera, the mic, the antennas, the USB port, whatever. A module is any piece of hardware on the device we can individually completely disable that.Anatoly (37:59):That's really cool. Does the user have a physical notification that that thing is turned off? Are there like LEDs or something that light up?Jason (38:10):Yeah. We're still working on that with your team as to what those notifications will look like, what that UI and UX looks like. But yeah, there are both physical haptic feedback as well as visual feedback.Anatoly (38:22):Can you turn off GPS and things like that and other sensors. Or I guess the GPS radio. I don't know how baked in those are these days.Jason (38:32):It's actually super, super, super baked in. One of our investors is an Apple employee. And I was explaining to him like, "Look, man, you can put your phone in an airplane mode." That GPS is still working. And he's like BS. And I'm like, "No, no, no. Watch, watch, watch. Put your phone in airplane mode." And we were on a bicycle ride. "Go bike 100 yards down the road and see your phone is still tracking you." And he's like, "What the hell?" And the next day he invested.Anatoly (39:01):How has it been like getting folks like... You guys work with mostly non-crypto people, up until you met me?Jason (39:10):You. Yeah, basically.Anatoly (39:14):Yeah. What has that conversation been like? What has been their reaction?Jason (39:19):It's been all over the map. It says there were some very vocal, negative people outside of the company, which I completely expected and doesn't really bug me at all. We had surprising support within the company, to be honest. I think I told you, I fully expected 10 to 20% of the company to be like, "Ah, screw this. This is ridiculous." And we really only had one person do that. And then the counter to that, the amount of support where people were like, "No, this is exciting. This is the next generation of mobile will be built on web 3.0. And I think the definition of web 3.0 remains fairly fluid and we get to be involved with really defining what that actually means to the end user.Anatoly (40:03):Yeah. I think this is like a huge opportunity for us to set the standards and really push for privacy first and just build something that can be a really good base. The bricks that web 3.0 is built on.Jason (40:19):Exactly.Anatoly (40:21):I guess, what was like the detractors? What was like the any points that they brought up that you think were interesting or worthwhile?Jason (40:30):I think that was the biggest thing is none of the negative comments I heard were worth that much because it was the standard anti-crypto comments, which is like, "Oh, I don't believe in it. This is scam. I don't see it." And I was like, "Okay, I'm not going to try to fight anybody over that. That's fine." People thought Facebook was stupid. Frankly, I still think Facebook is a little stupid, but they sure are worth billions and billions and billions of dollars. So there is a market for it.Anatoly (40:56):Yeah. It was really hard for me too, to accept, to believe in Facebook in those early days too. But in my mind that is like the quintessential internet company, more so than Google. Because it was really like... All they're doing is connecting people. And that's a very weird thing to think about that, that could be worth half a trillion dollars or whatever it is these days.Jason (41:22):Who knows? They're probably more than that.Anatoly (41:24):I have this analogy that Facebook has a social graph where you have to hop through people. Right? You're connected through some intermediaries, but crypto, it's all public keys, super connected or like a single censorship resistant message bus. Everybody in the world is now in like a single chat, basically, which is why it's a bit chaotic.Jason (41:46):Yeah. But I also see why... It's kind of interesting because you have that community, everybody is connected, which is inherently non-private, but it is also... Everybody in that group has a strong desire to keep certain things private. And it's that ability to choose what you keep private when you don't keep private, which makes this partnership so incredibly powerful.Anatoly (42:05):So obviously, a public data structure is really strong forcing function for developers to understand that this data is public, therefore I need to minimize how much it collects. It's almost like if all your interactions are over a public database, then you really, really try to know the least amount of the users that you need. And I think that's just been kind of a design constraint on web 3.0 devs from day one. And you forget about web 2.0 that you need to create cookies and store people's passwords and stuff like that.Jason (42:46):Yeah. And I think what we're going to bring to the fore for web 3.0 is that improved user experience and that UI. I mean, you and I have chat about it almost daily lately about the issues around that. And having a piece of hardware that can bypass a lot of the frustration that's there right now is huge.Anatoly (43:05):Agreed. Well, thank you, Jason, for being here. It's been awesome talking to you.Jason (43:10):Absolutely.Anatoly (43:10):I'm super excited to work with you. It's going to be great. Folks, if you've been listening, go to solanamobile.com and pre-order the Saga.

Unique history of mobile operating system based on a modified version of the Linux kernel and other open source software, designed primarily for touchscreen mobile devices started as a small startup and became the domain OS for the mobile world. A deep dive on the different versions along the years and the future ahead.

Shishir is as ahead of the technology curve as it gets, some of his ideas have revolutionized the way that tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and YouTube operate.  Now, he's innovating again as the founder and CEO of Coda-an amazing integrated system that centers around creating Docs that are as powerful and actionable as Apps. He's also one of the most down to Earth human beings we've ever had the pleasure of sitting down with! References in this episode: Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer SNL Skit Steven Sinofsky's book-Hardcore Software: Inside the Rise and Fall of the PC Revolution Coda Doc-No Code, Just a Coda Doc: How Squared Away Saves a Thousand Hours and $100K a Year Coda Doc-Rituals for Hypergrowth: An Inside Look at How Youtube Scaled   Episode Timeline: 2:20 - Shishir's data path intersects with Rob's and the stories abound, Shishir passes on working for Google before it was Google 15:25 - Shishir has a random idea about advertising that eventually forms into some common advertising practices, Google woos Shishir back, and he ends up running YouTube! 27:25 - The value of a Computer Science degree is....debatable, an interesting definition and example of AI, and Nouns VS Verbs in naming products and features 41:00 - How Coda was formed and the amazing innovation that Coda is-it makes a doc as powerful as an app, and the importance of integration Episode Transcript: Rob Collie (00:00:00): Hello, friends. Today's guest is Shishir Mehrotra, and let me tell you, Shishir is a ringer of a guest. We met back at Microsoft in the 2000s where he was already entrusted with some pretty amazing responsibilities and was doing very, very well in those roles. About the same time that I left Microsoft to start P3, Shishir left Microsoft to go ... Oh, that's right ... Run YouTube. And he was at the helm of YouTube during what he calls the hyper-growth years where YouTube really exploded and became the thing that we know it is today. During this conversation, I discovered that it certainly sounds like he invented something about YouTube that we absolutely take for granted today and has been seen by billions, used probably billions of times per day. That wasn't enough for him, so he left YouTube after a number of years and started a new company called Coda. Rob Collie (00:00:55): And Coda is an incredibly ambitious product. You could say that in some sense, it's aimed at being a Microsoft Office replacement, but even that isn't quite right. It's in a little bit different niche than that. And, of course, we explored that in our conversation. We talk about his billion dollar mistake, quite possibly, literally, billion dollar mistake, not many people can make those. I was thrilled to discover that he and I have basically exactly the same philosophy about nouns and verbs in software. We talk about the antiquated notion that a computer science degree is somehow super important in product management roles, even at software companies. And just, in general, I couldn't get enough of it. He was super gracious to give us his time for this show, and I hope you enjoy it as much as we did. So, let's get into it. Announcer (00:01:42): Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please. Announcer (00:01:48): This is the Raw Data by P3 Adaptive podcast with your host Rob Collie and your cohost Thomas Larock. Find out what the experts at P3 Adaptive can do for your business. Just go to p3adaptive.com. Raw Data by P3 Adaptive is data with the human element. Rob Collie (00:02:11): Welcome to the show. Shishir Mehrotra, how are you today? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:15): Oh, I'm great. Rob Collie (00:02:16): Are you coming to us from Silicon Valley? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:17): I am. Well, south of California. Been in my house and in this spot for about the last year. Rob Collie (00:02:23): When did we meet? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:24): You were working on Excel and I think at the time I was working on WinFS, the early days of Microsoft. Rob Collie (00:02:31): Oh, WinFS. Just completely unexpected sidelight. It was like 1998 or maybe 1999, we're in a review with Jim [Allchin 00:02:42] and all of his lieutenants. And the whole point of this meeting is to assassinate the technology I was working on. This was an arranged hit on MSI ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:54): [crosstalk 00:02:54]. On MSI. Rob Collie (00:02:55): ... On the Windows Installer, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:02:56): Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:02:57): And there are factions in this room that have had their knives, they've been sharpening them and they've arranged this moment so they can kill us. And, at one point, one of the complaints about us was our heavy use of the registry. Just poisoning the registry. Do you remember a guy named Rob [Short 00:03:15]? Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:15): Yeah, of course. Rob Collie (00:03:16): I really liked Rob Short. I thought he was awesome. He was a tough guy, but also really fair and funny and friendly at the same time. And he's been sitting in this meeting for hours because he has to, and he's just totally tuned out. Of course he would be, right? It's not about him. And then, this mention of the registry as an attack on us comes up and Jim Allchin immediately whirls around to Rob and goes, "Now you see, this is what I'm talking about. Our storage system is such a piece of shit." And he starts ripping it to Rob and Rob's having to wake up from his trance. It's like suddenly the guns can swing so fast in those meetings. Shishir Mehrotra (00:03:55): I mean, that was a use case that Bill and Jim and so on all tried to push on WinFS, but it was one we actively resisted. It's a hard one. Rob Collie (00:04:02): It is. The worst thing in the world is to have state stored in multiple places that have to go together with each other. Right? That just turns out to be one of the hardest problems. Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:11): It's such a critical element of the operating system. And you end up with all sorts of other issues of what can run on what and ... Rob Collie (00:04:17): And it's funny. The registry was basically my introduction to the entire Win32 platform. When I was running the installer, that's all I knew about. I knew about the type library registrations and the registry. I knew it in class IDs. And I could follow those things. I could follow that rabbit's trail from one place to another without ever really understanding what a class ID was. Right? It was just the registration of an object, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:40): Right. Rob Collie (00:04:40): I didn't learn that until years later. So funny. But then we crossed paths again. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:04:45): SQL. Rob Collie (00:04:46): I remember how it happened. Ariel [Nets 00:04:49] came into my office and said, "Hey, there's someone important who's going to need some information from you." And I go, "Okay." And he said something like, "He's a real rising star here, so make sure you give him everything he needs." And I'm like, "Okay." Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:05): I don't think I know this half of the story. Okay. Rob Collie (00:05:09): And I think you were somehow involved with the potential acquisition that was going on at the time. Is that true? Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:14): You talking about in-memory BI? Rob Collie (00:05:16): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:05:16): Yeah. I was at the time ... Maybe for your listeners. So, my history, after WinFS folded and collapsed, and you can talk about that if you'd like, I ended up being unexpectedly merged into the SQL Server division. I ended up running what Microsoft called the program management team or SQL Server. And it was super interesting for me because I was never really a database guy. Everything I had worked on to that point was fairly end user-centered, infrastructure in the background. And I was surrounded by these people that really love databases. Actually, as a side note, I fell in love with databases because of Paul Flessner. Paul was on his way out. He was retiring that year and he had one last ... At the time we used to call them strategy days so that Bill and Steve and so on would post this annual review. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:01): And Paul Flessner, he decided this was going to be his last hurrah strategy, "I'm going to tell these people exactly what I think." He's in the middle of preparing for this and WinFS is folding up and he says, "While you're figuring out what you're going to do next, why don't you come help me write the strategy days presentation?" And he was really drawn to the idea of someone that actually wasn't in his organization doing it because I could speak my mind about whatever and I had no bias walking into it. And probably from his perspective, I would write whatever the hell he wanted and make it sound good. This guy, he's a database legend. He drove the Sybase acquisition that turned into SQL Server. And so, he had a list of ideas for how to think about the database market that many of which were pretty ascetical. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:44): And he spoke in very plain language when he's ... Actually, interestingly, he's retired. [inaudible 00:06:48] his woodworking. That's his thing. He builds chairs and tables are amazing. You can go buy them. As opposed to many techie database guys, he speaks in very plain language. Rob Collie (00:06:55): I love that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:06:56): And you just walk through like, "Here's how to think about the different workloads and here's what's happening in the industry and here's what's happening in data warehousing." Which wasn't really a term at the time and data warehousing was just emerging. And then, at the end of that process, we had a pretty successful strategy days and he said, "Why don't you run the PM team and help my new guy?" Ted Kummert came in to go and run SQL Server after Paul. And that's how I ended up in that spot. And as part of that, I ended up covering a lot of ... One of Paul's last statement was, "Data warehousing is not the same thing. Go do something different." And that's where people like Ariel and Amir and so on, that whole division, Tom ... And there was a bunch of people running that at that time ... Came into play. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:34): And then they had this idea that ... There's a lot of different things to know about SQL Server. SQL Server is not actually well-built for data warehouse and so most databases are not. And at the time, the raining wisdom was you needed a completely different architecture for business intelligence, which I guess we called OLAP back then. I don't know if that term is still used. Rob Collie (00:07:54): Yeah. Oh, we still do. We just hide it. It's a dirty word. Shishir Mehrotra (00:07:57): Yeah. For the geeky folks out there, and the key difference being that instead of storing things row by row, you store things column by column and you also precalculate aggregate. So, you have some sense of what, I guess, nowadays called the cube. These things are likely to be great for, "We're going to precalculate the sum of orders for customers by region or whatever it might be." And then, Ariel and his brother Amir had this idea and they said, "Hey, we've got this strategic advantage at Microsoft, which is we own the front end and the backend of this architecture. On the backend, we need to be able to scale better and we need to move to column storage and do all this fancy stuff with cubes. But if you ask anybody where all of their analysis actually gets done, what do they say? Shishir Mehrotra (00:08:38): There's 1,000 reporting tools out there but everybody lives in Excel. And so, they said, "What if we were to find a creative way to pull these together? And I think at the time you were running this part of the Excel platform. And so, I was sent in to go figure out how to make this pitch. I mean, these guys really wanted to do an acquisition space and so on. And I was sent in to try to make the pitch. And, actually, the insight there was interesting. Amir came up with this chart, which I'm not really sure where it came from but he basically went and looked at the size of cubes of OLAP instances across a wide set of customers, including all of Microsoft. He pulled all of these different ones and he figured out that the biggest cube at Microsoft was this thing called MS Sales. Shishir Mehrotra (00:09:20): It was all the customer data from Microsoft if you remember well. And he said, "If you compress this down with column storage, I'm going to get the numbers wrong." But it fit inside tens of megabytes of storage, which was previously much, much larger if you did as row storage. And he said, "This is so small that it can fit in memory on a client, which was unheard of. Usually, the whole idea behind these systems was you have to query a server. The server is really big. At that time, a lot of systems go up and scaled out. There's often very big hardware back there as well. And he said, "Hey, I bet we could move to a model where the primary way that people do this analysis actually happens in that place where they actually want to do their work in Excel. So, I think that's where the other half of that conversation from my side was coming from. Rob Collie (00:10:06): Yeah. So, like you said, with Paul Flessner bringing you into right part of the strategy days stuff, Amir was, at that point in time, still using me in the same way. I had come over from the Excel world and so he was trotting me out every time he wanted someone to talk about Excel in a way that he couldn't be criticized. I was just almost the unfrozen caveman lawyer from Saturday Night Live, this Forrest Gump figure, "Listen, I don't know much, but I do know Excel and I know the people." You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:32): Yeah. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:10:33): Usually, because on the SQL side of the house, you couldn't argue with me about Excel. If I go back to the Excel world, they'd all argue with me but on the sequel side, I was unquestioned. So, Ariel was right, he said, "This guy is a mover and shaker. He's going places." And then, an eye blink later, you're at YouTube. When did you end up at YouTube? Shishir Mehrotra (00:10:53): So, there's a personal story arc that goes along with this. I started a company out of school called [Sintrata 00:10:58]. It was an early version of what became AWS, Azure, so on, to utility computing. There's a whole generation company that started back in that '99, 2000 period. All of us were seven to 10 years too early. There was no virtualization, no containers and none of the underlying technology that actually made the cloud take off existed yet. As that was wrapping up is how I got to Microsoft but in that period, Sintrata was funded by this famous venture firm called Kleiner Perkins. Shishir Mehrotra (00:11:23): My primary investor was a [inaudible 00:11:24]. [inaudible 00:11:25] as Sintrata was wrapping up, he had suggested, "Why don't you go join another client or company?" And I said, "Which one?" And he said, "Well, you can look at all of them but the one that's really hot right now is these two Stanford guys are creating this new search engines called Google. Might want to check it out." And so this is back in 2002. And so, went over and spent some time with Larry and Sergey. And at the time, they hadn't hired a single outside product manager. And so, they wanted me to come in and start the product management team there. And, interestingly, I turned them down. My wife likes to call my billion dollar mistake. And instead I got drawn to Microsoft. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:01): As I got drawn to Microsoft, it's related to this story because I had an old boss of mine, I was an intern at Microsoft when I was in college, and he was starting this new thing called Gideon that was in the Office team actually. And the project would turn Office into a front end for business applications. So, it's had a lot of relevance to what ended up happening in that space. Rob Collie (00:12:18): Who was running Gideon? Who was that? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:20): Satya was our skip-level boss and this was much, much earlier in his career. And the guy actually running the project was a guy named John [Lacada 00:12:27]. I think he's gone now. I don't know where he is. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:12:29): I worked with John quite a bit over the years [crosstalk 00:12:32]. And this is how you know Danny Simmons. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:34): That's right. Danny was part of that team. Rob Collie (00:12:36): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:36): Yeah. Danny was on that team. I ended up working with Danny multiple times. Mike Hewitt was the one who was my intern manager who pulled me over to the project. Actually, as a fun version of fate or whatever, Mike now works at Coda. [crosstalk 00:12:48]- Rob Collie (00:12:48): Does he really? Shishir Mehrotra (00:12:49): Yeah, he's an engineer here. He's great. He lives in Idaho. Once we really started hiring distributed, I finally managed to pull him into Coda. So, I turned on Google in that period and they didn't let up. Basically, every year they would call and say, "Hey, we got something down here for you." Gideon actually didn't have a very positive outcome. I showed up to work on this thing and nine months later, Sinofsky killed it. Given the priorities Office had at the time, it made reasonable sense, but it was my first education of big company politics and that's how I ended up working at WinFS. Rob Collie (00:13:20): Sinofsky has delivered many such educations of big company politics. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:24): Yes. Yes. For sure. For sure. Rob Collie (00:13:26): One of his primary contributions. Yes. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:27): So, are you reading his history of Microsoft [inaudible 00:13:30]? Rob Collie (00:13:30): I haven't been but now I will be. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:32): Oh, you should. It's good. Steve and I didn't always see eye to eye on everything, but his sense of history is really good. I don't know how the hell he remembered so much stuff, but he's basically publishing a new thing every few days, I think, maybe every week, and it's really good. Rob Collie (00:13:44): I both loved Stephen and was terrified of him at the same time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:48): It's common. Rob Collie (00:13:49): Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:13:50): So, I'm working on SQL Server, but the reason all that matters is I was committed to Seattle. I had convinced my, at the time, fiance now wife, to move up to Seattle. She's a physician. So, she was doing her residency at Children's Seattle. And I convinced her to stay and do her fellowship and that all ran out. So, my clock ran out on Seattle. Said, "All right, now we're ready to move." And we had presumed we were going to move to the Bay area. So, it was just implied at the time, if you're going to be a techie, you got to move down to the Bay Area at some point. And I thought I was going to start another company. I was ready to do it again but Jonathan Rosenberg, the guy at Google who ended up running product there, he called me, he said, "Oh, if you're thinking about coming back, why don't you just come meet a few people?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:14:28): And I said, "No, I've been doing the big company thing for a while. I don't think I want to do that anymore." And he said, "No, no, no, no. Google is not that big a company." This is 2007, 2008. And he said, "Google is not that big of a company. Come just meet a few people and nothing else and have some good conversations." And so, I went down, met a bunch of people and this was Larry and Sergey but also Vic Gundotra was there then and Andy Rubin had just joined. And there was a bunch of ... That era of Google was being formed. And I end up, at the end of the day, in Jonathan's office and I tell him, "That was really entertaining, but it feels like a big company. I don't think this is for me." Jonathan's a pretty crass person. I won't use the same language he used but he said, "Oh, that's really effing stupid." Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:06): And I said, "Why?" And he said, "Well, look, and I'll just give you a really simple reason. All those people, they probably talk to you about Android and Chrome and all this other stuff but what they forget is that, at the heart, Google sells advertising and all the money in advertising goes to television. And nobody even watches those stupid ads." This may sound dumb, but maybe not to this group. I didn't know that. For me, I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life. And the idea that all of the money and advertising goes to television was news to me. And I got on a plane after work back to Seattle. I do a lot of my thinking on planes for weird reasons. You may be the same. I don't know. Shishir Mehrotra (00:15:40): But I get on the plane, I take out this little sheet of paper and this was a week after the Super Bowl, February of 2008, the Giants had just beaten the Pats in this epic Super Bowl. And I take out the sheet of paper, I write at the top, how come advertising doesn't feel like a Super Bowl every day? And the basic thing I was thinking about was we had our friends over for Super Bowl and while we're watching the game, the ad would come on, if somebody missed it, I would have to rewind for people to watch the ad again. It's like, "Oh, people actually like the ads in this one day of the year. What's different?" And so, I take out this sheet of paper, I end up writing this little position paper on what I think is wrong with advertising, without knowing really anything about advertising. Get home, it's pretty late. My wife's not up to tell me it was all stupid. Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:19): And then I wake up the next morning and I write to Jonathan. I say, "Hey, look, I really enjoyed the time. I don't think Google's for me, but I had some thoughts on something you said that stuck with me about why advertising sucks. And I'm sure you guys are already thinking about it, but I'm happy to send it to you if you'd like." And he's pretty early morning guy and so he read it and said, "Actually, nobody's thinking about this. Maybe you should come and I'll give you a small team and you can start running this." There were three ideas in the paper but the most simple one was how come ads don't have a skip button on them? And then, if you skip the ad, why don't you make it so that if you skip the ad, the advertiser doesn't pay? Shishir Mehrotra (00:16:50): You change all the incentives of advertising so that if the ads aren't good, then nobody gets paid if the ads are going to get better. And we're going to reset the balance and that's why it's going to feel like Super Bowl every day. He was like, "There's a lot of reward and be creative on the Super Bowl." So, J.R. convinced me. He's like, "Come down. Run this project." When I tell the story, it sounds eerily similar to how I ended up at Microsoft, like, "Oh, come run this small project." And it was this group of people, again, that misunderstood what ... This project was at the time called Mosaic. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:19): It became a product called Google TV. Chromecast, Google TV, Google Home, all comes out of that same group now. So, I showed up to work on that and very quickly in that process realized that this had actually very poor corporate sponsorship as well. In this case, Larry and Sergey thought this product was really, really dumb. I should have known as I was going through the interview process. And so, I told J.R. and I was excited about the project and I said, "Hey, maybe I should talk to Larry and Sergey about that, a bunch of ideas and other stuff if I met them." He's like, "Oh yeah, they're traveling this week." I was like, "Really? Okay." And every time I asked, he was avoiding me talking to them about the project. But, anyway, so I show up to work on that and it's very long story out, but this paper leads to me working on this project. Shishir Mehrotra (00:17:57): And then, just, basically, we decided to merge the project into YouTube. And back in 2008, to a very side door, end up initially running the monetization team and eventually running the rest of the team for YouTube and then spending six years there and growing that business, which was ... At the time, when I joined YouTube, it was the weird stepchild of Google. It was generally thought of as the first bad acquisition that Google made. Until then we had this string of amazing acquisitions led to Maps and Android and all this stuff. YouTube was a weird one, right? It was the, we lost hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It was dogs on skateboards. We had a billion dollar lawsuit from Viacom. Rob Collie (00:18:35): Mark Cuban famously said it's never going to go anywhere. Shishir Mehrotra (00:18:38): I have very fun stories with Mark Cuban. It was two years after I left YouTube where he finally wrote me and said, "Actually, I think you might've been right." He was quite convinced we were wrong about it. But, anyway, so I ended up working on YouTube. I'd never bought or sold an ad in my life, knew nothing about video and an infrastructure guy in the previous career, and ended up working on YouTube for six years. Rob Collie (00:19:02): It's a really interesting thing, right? Sometimes not knowing a lot about an industry or a topic is actually fantastic because you don't bring all the baggage and all the preconceptions. Of course, you can't just go all in on that. If you never know anything about anything, you're just someone wandering around the world with a loud voice. And so, getting the right balance between knowing what you should know and not knowing the things that will throw you off, if we could get that mix right at all times in our lives, we'd be in great shape, but it's tricky, isn't it? Shishir Mehrotra (00:19:32): You've roughly described my career. Almost every job I took was in a space I knew nothing about. And it's a very positive interpretation of this person who has to learn every piece of this. But yeah, I think a beginner's eye allows you to look at a space a little bit differently and it certainly worked out at YouTube. And we were walking the trends of the video industry in every way, how we thought about content, how we thought about monetization, and what is good content? What is not good content? Our views on these things were diametrically opposite of every assumption that had been made by every experienced person in that industry. I think we turned out to be more right than wrong. Rob Collie (00:20:07): Oh my gosh! Yeah. Now, a few things jumped out at me from that story. First of all, if we think about it with the perfection of hindsight, the clarity of hindsight, basically, Google ran this really sick reverse auction for your services where they like, "If you come here now we'll pay you a billion dollars." And you're like, "Hmm, no." Right? And then- Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:30): It wasn't obvious that it was going to be a billion dollars. Rob Collie (00:20:30): I know. Then they call you back a year later and they say, "Okay. Fine. How about 100 million?" And you're like, "Hmm, no." And they finally got it down low enough for you to take the job. I've never met anybody who has a story where you can even joke about a billion dollar mistake. So, I'll never have the opportunity to recruit you, but if I did, now I know how. Shishir Mehrotra (00:20:56): [crosstalk 00:20:56] blowing your offer. That's right. That's right. Rob Collie (00:20:59): And it's got to include the words, just come run this small, little team. Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:03): Yeah. Yeah. I get drawn to projects. I don't get drawn to the rest of it. So far it's worked out okay. But yeah, I get drawn to ideas. I mean, this is really only the fourth company I've ever worked for yet every transition was drawn by some idea that I couldn't stop thinking about. Rob Collie (00:21:17): That idea or position statement, is that in some way, at the beginning, the origin story of the skip button for ads? Shishir Mehrotra (00:21:27): Oh yeah. I mean, the skip button for ads it's now called TrueView. Back to your point on beginner's mind. So, I show up, I've got this idea around the skip button and actually it makes more sense for YouTube than it does for this Google TV thing that we were working on. So, there's totally reasonable outcome. I show up and my first meeting with the sales team, I'm maybe six weeks in, the head of sales, Susie, she says, "Can you come give a talk to sales team and just tell a little bit about your vision for YouTube." And we had a nice ... And I said, "Look, I don't think this is a good idea. I don't know anything about this part of the industry. So, I'm going to make a fool of myself." And she's, "No, no, no. You have got all these great ideas and they're fresh and different and why don't you come talk to them?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:04): And I go talk about a bunch of different ideas, and I talk about this one about skip buttons on ads. And one of the salespeople, who I've since become very good friends with, she raises her hand and she says, "Wait, I don't understand. Do you want none of us to make any money?" They thought this was the dumbest idea on the planet. You put a skip button on ads, people are going to hit the skip button. It's like that's what obviously is going to happen. And, basically, the entire sales force rejected this idea. And it took me three years to ship that feature because every person in the sales force thought it was such a dumb idea. I would get told, "You can come talk at the sales conference, but you're not allowed to talk about your stupid skip button idea. You have to talk about everything else." Shishir Mehrotra (00:22:43): And what turned out was ... This is actually another fun story in great product managers. I don't know if you still think of yourself as a PM, but I consider you to be a really strong product manager as well. But this is a story about a guy, Lane Shackleton, who actually now runs product at Coda. So, Lane was a sales guy. He was actually our primary sales guy at YouTube. And he really wanted to be a PM. And at the time, we had this really stupid policy where you weren't allowed to be a product manager at Google unless you had a CS degree. It was just part of the early, early viewpoint the founders had. Rob Collie (00:23:17): So relevant. Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:21): Right. So, you commiserate with this a lot. So, Lane comes to me and says, "I want to be a PM. How do I do it?" And I said, "Hey, look, I mean, I love you and I think you could do a great job but I've got this policy. And I got to make a really strong case if I'm going to get over the policy." And he said, "How about I just do it on the side? Do it as a trial run." He gave me an idea. I said, "Okay, I'll make a deal with you. I'll let you try to be a PM, but you have to do it in your 20% time. And not in your 80-20% time, but you got to do a great job of your sales job and then you do this part. And the second criteria is you take whatever project I give you." Shishir Mehrotra (00:23:52): And he said, "All right, deal. What's the project?" I said, "Okay, I want you to work on this thing called skippable ads." And I said, "Look, the sales team thinks it's really dumb because the way that the division work, the engineering leader was like, "I'm not allocating stuff that the sales team thinks is dumb. And so, I can give you one engineer who is a new grad and that's it." But I have a playbook for you. I think you need to go and you just go talk to the AdWords team and get this thing out of the buying experience and then work on this with the analytics and figure just these couple pieces out. And we'll be able to ship this thing and we'll slowly build up the business. It'll be fine." Shishir Mehrotra (00:24:23): And so, he goes away and he comes back a couple of weeks later for his update. And I said, "Oh, how's it going? Did you talk to the AdWords team?" And he said, "No, actually, I decided that's not the problem here." And I said, "What do you mean? That was your job. Go talk to those different people." And he says, "Well, I've been thinking about it and I think the real problem here is the name is wrong." I was like, "The name? What are you talking about? We'll name this thing later. This is not that important." And he says, "No, no, I think the problem is that skippable ad is a value proposition to an end user but who buys advertising? The advertiser buys advertising. Skippable is actually a really poor value proposition to the advertiser. Why would I want my ad to be skipped? Right? And so, the reason you're hearing so much negative reaction if people don't understand why it's helpful to the advertiser." Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:06): And so then he came up with this idea and said, "Why don't we name it TrueView?" And I'm skipping a whole bunch of parts in the story, but we call it TrueView. That's what the ad for one is actually called. You have no idea what ads are called, right? Oh, there's ads on Google. Nobody knows [crosstalk 00:25:18] from AdWord. Rob Collie (00:25:18): Yeah. It's not a feature. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:19): But what's a sponsored story? And you don't know any of that stuff. You just know it's an ad. And he said, "So, let's focus on the advertising." Came up with this name TrueView. And the idea is very simple is you only pay per true views. You don't pay for the junk, you only pay for the real ones. Right? And all of a sudden this thing went from being, I'm not allowed to talk about it at sales conferences to the number one thing on the entire sales force [inaudible 00:25:42] all of Google. Beyond anything the average team was working on. Shishir Mehrotra (00:25:45): And it was such a simple idea. And, by the way, the way the math works is very simple, it's most people do skip the ad. It's about 80% skip rates on those ads. So, four out of five times you see an ad, you probably have a skip button, but it turns out that the 20% of the time you don't is such high signal and so effective an ad that you can often charge something like 20 times as much for that view. And so, what you end up with is you end up with you just take that math and say, [inaudible 00:26:09] four times better monetization with a skippable ad than without a skippable ad. Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:13): It was not obvious that advertisers would be willing to pay that much more if they know you actually watched the ad but when you start ... But this is a good example, again, a beginner's mind and, Lane, I mean, this is one of his ... So, I've managed to convince the calibration committees and so on and turned to a product manager and turned into a great product manager. He joined me early on at Coda and now runs the product and design team here. Great example of coming fresh to a new problem. Rob Collie (00:26:36): Yeah. Well, if only he'd had a computer science degree, that idea would have been so much smarter. You know? Shishir Mehrotra (00:26:43): Yeah. The crazy part, this is one of the most technical guys I know and he's like, "I don't understand. I write this stuff on the side. Why do I need a stupid degree for that?" Right? Rob Collie (00:26:53): I know. There was one time in my first three years at Microsoft where I used one piece of my computer science education, one time. I used O notation to prove that we shouldn't do it a certain way. And when I got my way after using O notation, it's like, "This is an O of N squared algorithm." I got to run around the hallways chanting, like, "Whoa, look, my education, it worked. It worked. It worked." And that was the only time I ever used any of that. So, no, that's a silly policy. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:25): Yeah. It was funny, when I was going to college, my parents were both computer scientists and I was one of those kids who grew up with a ... I never knew what I wanted to be. One week I was going to be a lawyer, then I was going to be a doctor, then I was going to be a scary period for my mom where I really wanted to be a taxi driver. I went through all the different periods. And then, I'm filling out my college applications and it says like, "What do you want to major in?" And I said, "Oh, I think I'll write down CS." I was into computers at the time and so I write down CS. And my dad says, "If you major in CS, I'm not paying for college." What are you talking about? I thought you'd be really excited. Shishir Mehrotra (00:27:57): That's what you guys do. My dad now runs supercomputing for NASA. I thought this would be pretty exciting for you. And he says, "No, no, no. This is a practitioner's degree. I'm not paying for college unless you major in something where the books are at least 50 years old." And that was the policy. And so, I ended up majoring in math and computer science. And from his perspective, he paid for a math degree and I happened to get the CS degree for free. But his view was that ... Which is true ... Computer science changes so fundamentally every 10 years. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:22): And my classes the professors often taught out of the book that they're about to publish. The book wasn't even published yet and they're like, "Oh, here's the new way to think about operating systems." And it was totally different than what it was five years ago. I think there's a lot of knowledge in CS degrees but I actually think ... O notation is an example. I used to teach that class at school. That's math. That's not CS. Rob Collie (00:28:42): I know. Yeah. Yeah. Shishir Mehrotra (00:28:44): It's a very good way to think about isotonic functions but the actual CS knowledge is all but relevant by the time you graduate. Rob Collie (00:28:51): One thing that you said to me about your time at YouTube that stuck with me years, years, years, years later is that here we are at the tip of the spear, the head of this giant organization and YouTube eventually became giant, and with all this amazing machine learning and just so much algorithmic, not even complexity, but also just we don't even know what it's doing anymore. It's so sophisticated that we can't even explain why it's making these decisions but they're doing well, and yet every day we get together, we're looking at simple pivot tables and there's these knobs on the sides of these giant algorithmic machines that some human being has to set to, like, "Should we set it to six or seven?" And it's just this judgment call. And I just love that. That was, in a weird way, so reassuring to me that even at the absolute top of the pyramid of the algorithmic world, there's still a need for this other stuff. Shishir Mehrotra (00:29:43): The most fun example of this, backing for a moment, my dad, back to the story of me going into CS. At one point I had asked him, what is artificial intelligence? And he said, "Well, artificial intelligence is this really hard to describe field." I asked, "Why is that?" And he said, "Well, because it's got this characteristic that the moment something works, it's no longer AI." And so, AI is what's left is all the stuff that doesn't work. And so, you can use all these examples of when you have all regressions, it's like, "That's just math. That's not AI. We understand how it works." My favorite example with the kids is when you drive up to the traffic light, how does it know when to turn red and green and so on? Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:19): Oh, there's a sensor there. It just senses the cars there and so then it decides to turn red or green. That's not AI. I know how that works. I can describe it. It's a sensor. And so, we went through, I think, decades of time where the moment something worked, it stopped getting called AI. And then, some point, 10, 15 years ago, I'd say 10, we flipped it. And now, all of a sudden, anything that does math is AI. And it's amazing to me that we would look at some of these systems and it was literally a simple regression and we say, "Oh, that's machine learning." And it became very invoked. I think about it that way. Shishir Mehrotra (00:30:53): I mean, there are some really complicated machine learning techniques and the way our neural network works, which is the heart of how most of these machine learning techniques work is very complicated, but at the heart of what it's doing, it's approximation function for a multi-variable phenomenon. So, the most fun example I can tell you about your observation there is this project called DALS. DALS was an acronym for Dynamic Ad Load System where at the time, on YouTube, the rate at which we showed ads was contractually set. We would go negotiate with the creator and say, "Oh, ESPN, we want your content on YouTube." And we would say, "Look, our policy is we show ads every seven minutes." And they say, "No, our content is so good. We want it every two minutes." Shishir Mehrotra (00:31:32): And then, the Disney folks would have their own number. And so, there is this long line of contractual stuff baked into our ad serving logic that's like, "Oh, it's been two minutes. You have to show an ad." Because they all just thought they knew better of how good their content was. And so, one of the engineers had this idea and said, "This is dumb." We know our intentions are well aligned. Almost all our deals were rev share deals. We made money when the creator made money. And we know whether or not this is a good time to show an ad or not, why don't we turn this into a machine learning system and guess whether or not we should show an ad? So, it's called Dynamic Ad Load System. DALS was its acronym. So, the team goes off and this engineer goes off and builds this thing. Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:08): Lexi was his name. So, Lexi builds this thing and he brings it to one of our staff reviews. Every Friday, we had this meeting of IT staff. That's where we went through all the major stats for the business and including any major experiments that are running. If he brings something in and he says, "All right, before we launch this thing, I'd like to know what our trade-off function." The trade-off function in this case is, how much watch time are you willing to trade off for revenue? These are two primary metrics. At every moment we're going to decide, should we show an ad or not? And we have to make a guess at, "We think if we don't show an ad you'll watch for this much longer, if we do show an ad, there's a chance you'll leave but we'll make this much money. So, what's the number? How much should we trade off?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:32:45): This is a very typical question I would get in this forum. It's impossible to answer, how much would you trade off? Watch time, revenue. And so, I came up with a number and I put a slope on this chart and we decided two for one. I can't remember whether it was two points of watch time for one point of revenue. But whichever way it was, I do a slope and we got a lot of reaction. They're like, "Okay. Great." And they ran away from the room. "Okay. We have a number. We can go do our thing." And so, they come back a few weeks later and say that we're ready to launch. And I said, "Okay, so did you hit the number?" And they said, "Well, actually, we have some interesting news for you. Turns out in our first tuning of the system, we actually have a tuning that is positive on both watch time and revenue. And somehow by redeploying the system, we make more money and people watch longer." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:25): And I said, "Really? How does that happen?" And they said, "Well, we don't really know yet, but can we ship because clearly better than your ratio?" And I said, "Well, okay, you can ship but next week I want you to come back and tell me why." And so, next week they come back and I said, "Do you know why?" And they said, "Well, we don't know why, but we have another tuning and it's even better on both watch time and revenue. I was thinking we ship this one." Shishir Mehrotra (00:33:47): I was like, "Okay, but please come back next week." This went on for four weeks. Right? So every week they would come back and they'd say, "Okay, we got this thing. It's even better on both. And we still have no idea why." And, finally, they figured out why. And it turns out that basically what was happening was the system was learning to push ads later in people's sessions. If you watch YouTube for a while, early on, you'll see very little advertising. But if you sit there and watch for hours and hours and hours, the ad frequency will gradually increase with a viewpoint of, this person's not going anywhere. They're committed, which makes intuitive sense, but it wasn't an input that we handed the system. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:18): And how did we figure that out? The pivot table. I notice that the ... What did we do? We went and charted everything we could out of the experiment group and in our experiment group and we just guessed at what is the way to figure out why is this happening? Because it's not a signal that we were intentionally giving the system, it's just the system got every other signal it could. And we looked at everything. I mean, is it geography? Is it tied to content? Is it age? Is it ... How is it possible that we're showing more ads and people are watching for longer? That story is a lesson in a number of different things. I mean, I think it was a great lesson in how when people think about machine learning systems, they miss this element of ... Any machine learning system is just a function. Shishir Mehrotra (00:34:54): All the ML system does is take a very large set of inputs, apply a function to it and generate an output. Generally, that output is a decision, show an ad, don't show an ad. Self-driving car turn right or turn left. It's some decisions of, is this image a person or an animal? And that system is trained and is trained on a bunch of data. And at some point, somebody, usually fairly low in an organization, makes the tuning decision and says, "I'm willing to accept this much being wrong for this much being right." Generally called precision recall. More layman's term for it is you figured out your false positive rate versus your false negative rate for whatever system you're trying to figure out. But somebody has to make a decision. Shishir Mehrotra (00:35:30): It's usually three tunings, very deep in the system. And then, after that point, the system is unexplainable. You have no idea how this thing works. And so, what do you do then? You go look at a bunch of empirical data of what's happening and try to figure out, "What did I just do? I've got this thing and what's actually happening here?" And you try to figure out, is it doing what you actually want it to do? And all of that is done in fancy pivot tables. Rob Collie (00:35:53): Yeah. It's so funny, the AI, and you've said before, your dad, as soon as it reaches a equilibrium, it's not AI anymore. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:00): Right. Not anymore. Rob Collie (00:36:02): Now though, it seems like it's a funny thing that you built these systems that then figure things out and they seem to be working great but then they can't turn around and explain to you what they're doing. It's not built to explain. It's just built to do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:15): It makes some sense how the human brain works. Why did you do that? I don't know. I just did it. And when you're running a business, that's not an acceptable answer. I need to know why did it go that way instead of ... Why did it turn right? I need to know why. So, you end up with this interesting tuning and then you're constantly looking at charts of output, what is going on here? To try to figure out whether it's working the way you want it. Rob Collie (00:36:34): So, while we're on pivot tables for a moment, go back to your story about skippable ads. This is TrueView. Imagine how much better off we would be as a society if pivot tables had originally been named summary tables. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:50): Oh man. Rob Collie (00:36:51): You know? That one was blown. Shishir Mehrotra (00:36:53): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:36:54): I actually tried to rename it stupidly. I mean, it was too late. It was way too late. And I fought that battle for way too long. It was a fool's errand to try to rename something that had been in the world for that long but what does it mean to pivot data? No one knows. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:08): It's now the insider's club handshake. Rob Collie (00:37:12): I know. I know. I think we probably lost half of the people who would have used them just in the name. Shishir Mehrotra (00:37:17): It's interesting you say that because the way we do the equivalence in Coda, we don't use the term pivot at all. We call it grouping. We don't even call it a thing. Right? We don't give it a noun name. We give it a verb name. And it just turns out that grouping a table is a very understandable phenomenon. In Coda, our model of grouping doesn't require aggregates also turns out ... And the reason I don't love the word summary is I actually think most commonly what you want to do is you take a set of records and you say, "I've got a bunch of tasks. Let me sort them by in progress and done." And I still want to be able to see the tasks. And one of the things pivot table, I think screwed up, is that you can't see the tasks anymore. The moment you're in that world ... Rob Collie (00:37:55): Yeah. I agree. But given what was built, the pivot table implementation, right? Summary would have been the killer name, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:02): Would have been a much better name. What would you have named VLOOKUP to? Rob Collie (00:38:05): Oh, I don't know. Pivots is still relevant to me, VLOOKUP not as much. No. But like Bill Gates always pressing for the unification of grouping in Excel with pivots. And we were always like, "Hmm, no." And it became a running joke after a while, he'd be like, "To the extent that you guys on Excel ever do anything that I ask you." That would be his preamble to some of the things he would say to us. Shishir Mehrotra (00:38:33): I mean, I would say, nowadays, people use pivot for lots of things, but for our first year for the customer journey, our grouping feature was definitely the top of the list. And, honestly, there's a bunch of people who, like you said, never really understood pivot tables and could never compare the two, like, "Oh, that makes total sense to me. I drew up a table. That makes total sense." Then two, to show aggregates. Rob Collie (00:38:50): The way you zeroed in on noun versus verb, that actually has come up multiple, multiple times on this show. It's one of my things. My new hires, when they'd come to work for me on the Excel team, I would sit them down and say, "Listen, you are not allowed to introduce nouns into this product. If you want a new noun, you've got to come to me. You got to fight me for it. You can verb all you want." That was hard one knowledge. I was a noun guy coming out of computer science school. Computer science people love them some nouns. Entities. Just say the word entity and you get all gooey inside, but no, it's a verb world. Shishir Mehrotra (00:39:26): I make that specific statement, you can ask my team, all the time. You're going to add a new noun, you got to come through me. I mean, on YouTube, it was interesting because YouTube has three primary nouns, video, channel and playlist. And we spent forever ... For a long time video was the only noun that mattered. And it was a big debate over which one matters more, channel or playlist. And I made the team pick. You got to pick one. We picked channel, which is probably obvious. Playlists are these long forgotten feature of YouTube and channels are now a big deal. But that wasn't always true. Channels actually used to be a very small deal on YouTube. If you go back to what I do in 2008, yeah, you would publish a video, it's like, "A channel, whatever." Totally bit my fingers on this channel, but it has nothing else on it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:40:05): And, nowadays, all people care about on YouTube is like, "This is my channel. How many subscribers I have." And the same way with Coda, we've put a lot of energy into as few nouns as possible. We'd use common language for nouns, only brand the ones that you really, really, really want to brand. Because there are very few branded nouns in Coda. There's lots of incentives in product development that lead to it. In a lot of companies, you get promoted on it. Like, "I invented this thing. It's now Power BI. And it's now this pivot thing." And you get a lot of feedback loop because nouns are distinguishable but it doesn't help your customers. Rob Collie (00:40:37): Even the technology under the hood is screaming at you, "Noun me. Noun me." It's like, I've got this really cool data structure here. It's dying to be surfaced in the ... No, no, don't do that. That's not what we do. We do not surface the technology. That's not what we're here for, but it's a powerful instinct. Really powerful. Okay. So, Coda, that's the next chapter. And that's the next place where we crossed paths. So, I actually realized that it was six years ago. I visited you in the Valley six years ago. And the reason I know it was six years ago is because one of the people who was there in the early days with you, the very beginning. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:18): They're all still here, but yeah. Rob Collie (00:41:19): Okay. Good. So, got the feel that they will be long-timers. Yeah. It was a tight bunch. It was a tight crew. The two of you were joking to them, "Maybe we should go to Burning Man this year." And I was sitting there thinking to myself, I had been invited that year to a friend's bachelor party. He was going to Burning Man. And I didn't even speak up because I was so terrified of going. I wasn't even sure if I was going to go. Shishir Mehrotra (00:41:42): Did you go? Rob Collie (00:41:42): I did. And that was 2015. So, that's how I know. It was also, I think, the first year that the Warriors had blown up down the NBA scene. So, we were sitting and watching the Warriors annihilate people after we talked. So, six years ago, you were pretty deep into this thing that's now called Coda. It was codename something else at the time that I kept getting wrong. Was it Krypton? Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:03): Krypton. That's right. Rob Collie (00:42:05): But I kept calling it Vulcan. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:08): The team had such a laugh out of that. Rob Collie (00:42:12): I kept forgetting it was Krypton and calling it Vulcan. So, why don't you explain both to me and to our listeners what the original vision was and how and if that's evolved over time. Shishir Mehrotra (00:42:25): By the way that meeting was, hey, super entertaining. Rob came in and described this as Vulcan as been repeated many times in the story. But it also was super informative because you came and gave a bunch of perspective. I think probably one of the most relevant to our last discussion, one of your most interesting observations that stuck with the team was you described this person and you said, "Hey, I can walk into a room and if I ask them just a couple of questions I can split the room into two groups of people very quickly." You used to call it the data gene. And your questions were, do you know what a VLOOKUP is or do you know what a VLOOKUP is? What a pivot table is? Bad for many of the reasons we just talked about, but for the perspective of understanding how humans are evolving and so on, it was actually quite insightful that these people you just can't keep them away. They will eventually figure these things out. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:11): And if you have that data gene, you will some point in your life intersect with these things and figure out what they are. The Coda founding story, so I was at YouTube and an old friend of mine, [inaudible 00:43:21] Alex DeNeui, now my co-founder at Coda, he and I have known each other for 20 plus years. We went to college together. And he's part of the founding team at Sintrata as well. Interestingly, we've worked every other job together, which is a fun pattern. So, he had started this company that got acquired by Google and he had just quit. And he was starting a new company and he'd come to me and he said, "Hey, my company's not doing that well. I'm thinking about pivoting to do something different. Can you help me brainstorm a new set of ideas?" So, we started brainstorming mostly about what he should do. Shishir Mehrotra (00:43:49): I was still relatively happy at Google, but I had told him, "If you pick something interesting, I'd be happy to invest or advise or help out in some way." Said this long list of ideas and we started brainstorming and at one point, one of us writes this sentence on the whiteboard, what if anyone can build a doc as powerful as an app? And that sentence ended up becoming the rallying cry for what became Krypton and then Coda. It's a very simple statement but it comes out of two primary observations. One is, I think the world runs on docs not apps. That if you go ask any team how they operate, any business, company person, so on, if you ask them how they operate, they'll immediately rattle off all the different packet software they use. "Oh, we use this thing for CRM and this thing for inventory. And we use this thing for pass tracking and so on." Shishir Mehrotra (00:44:32): And then, if you just sit behind them and watch them work for a day, what do they do all day? They're in documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and some communication tool. That's what they live in. And this first observation was one that was very deeply embedded in us because that's how we ran YouTube. I mean, YouTube, amongst other things was born right in the start of the Google Docs generation. I got the YouTube 2008, Google Docs is just coming out and, as I mentioned, we were the forgotten stepchild of Google, so we were allowed to do whatever we wanted but we could get no help in doing it. And so, we decided, for example, we would run our task management goal-setting process. We didn't like how OKRs worked. Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:09): I actually just published a whole paper on this last week. You can take a look. But we didn't like how OKRs worked. We wanted to do a different way. And so, how do we do it? We do in a big spreadsheet? I ran compensation differently at YouTube. I had this philosophy I call level independent compensation and the Google HR team allowed us to do it, but said, "We're building zero software for it." So, we did it in a network of documents and spreadsheets. One of the most fun example is if you hit flag on a YouTube video, for years, a flag on a YouTube video would show up as a row in a spreadsheet [inaudible 00:45:37] the person's desk. That's how we ran all these systems. We used to get made fun of. People are like, "Oh, look at these people. They're duct taping together documents and spreadsheets to run what became a multi-billion dollar division." I used to say like, "I actually think this is our strategic strength." Shishir Mehrotra (00:45:49): I mean, the reason we can plan so nimbly, the reason I can hire whoever I want, the reason we can adjust our flagging and approval system so quickly is because we didn't purchase some big bulky software to do it, we design it ourselves and turned it into something that then actually met our, at the time, current value system. So, this is observation number one, it's the world runs on docs not app, which is, by the way, not obvious to people but I feel fairly strongly about it. The second observation is that those documents surfaces haven't fundamentally changed in almost 50 years. The running joke at the company is that if Austin Powers popped out of his freezing chamber, he wouldn't know what clothes to wear or what music to listen to, but he could work a document, a spreadsheet, and a presentation just as well as anybody else could. Because everything we're looking at is metaphors that were created by the same people who created WordStar, Harvard Graphics and VisiCalc. Shishir Mehrotra (00:46:39): And we still have almost the exact same metaphor, which just seems crazy to me. In that same period of time, every other piece of software stack is totally different. An operating system from the '70s versus Android and iOS is unrecognizable. Databases, which we thought were pretty fundamental are completely different than they used to be. Things like search engine, social networks, none of these things even existed and yet the way that slide decks are put together, the way you navigate the spreadsheet grid and the way you think about pages and document is exactly the same as it was in the 1970s. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:10): So, you take the two observations, you stick them together and you say, "Hey, we [inaudible 00:47:13] runs on these docs, not applications." And those surfaces haven't changed in almost 50 years. Something's broken. What if we started from scratch and built an entirely new type of doc based on this observation that what we are actually doing with our docs is a lot closer to what we're doing with applications than not? That was the thesis we started with. I got personally obsessed with it. I couldn't stop thinking about it. And this went from, hey, let me invest, let me help, to I quit Google and went and started but at the time with Krypton and then eventually became Coda. Rob Collie (00:47:44): I'm sure he recruited you at some point by saying, "How about you just come run this small team over here?" Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:48): Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. That's right. Rob Collie (00:47:51): Those are the magic words. Shishir Mehrotra (00:47:52): We won't pay you at all. That's the ... Rob Collie (00:47:54): Something silly that occurred to me is that your Austin Powers metaphor might even be more accurate than you realize. We are now farther away, in terms of time, from the premiere of that '70s show, than that '70s show was from the time it represented. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:09): I like that. Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:11): It's crazy. We passed that point six months ago. So, when did Austin Powers the first one come out? Sometime in the '90s? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:17): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:18): Right? And it represented a time probably 35 years before it? Probably 1964, maybe 1999. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:25): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:25): So, we're almost reaching the point where we're close to the Austin Powers movie as Austin Powers was to the time. So, clearly, if we rewind 35 years, we are what? We're in the '80s, right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:35): Yeah. Rob Collie (00:48:36): You're right our documents basically look like that. Shishir Mehrotra (00:48:39): Yeah. You and I can probably geek out on this. And I get asked a lot about why did that happen? Lots of industries saw a change. And the database industry is a great example, you wouldn't expect the database industry to change that much. Codd wrote his book in the 1970s that's still the book that every database engineer you can find will have the book up on the shelf for Codd's relational databases, and yet things like OLAP came out and cubes and it turned into a Power BI. I think what happened in the document industry ... Well, two things. Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:05): One, every company that wanted to innovate in that space was a platform company whose primary interest was evangelizing a platform. Microsoft didn't really want to displace Lotus and so on with a new thing, they just wanted people to use Windows. It was very important that it actually be backwards compatible with everything at Soft. The other thing that happened is we live through what I think of as a period where we're beholden to file format. And so, one of my favorite examples is Steve Jobs and Apple. I've met a bunch of people that worked on the early iWork suite. And the iWork suite, Jobs came in with a bunch of new ideas. He's like, "This is dumb. We shouldn't have a spreadsheet that's one big universal grid. We should have a bunch of separate grids that are actually a little closer to tables." Shishir Mehrotra (00:49:45): And so, that's how numbers worked, actually, it's not actually one universal grid, it's a bunch of separate ones. And the way he did it with pages was a little bit different. And then, Keynote, which is probably the most popular of the three is actually different from PowerPoint in those really critical ways and none of the three took off. And why didn't they take off? I mean, Jobs was pretty smart and [inaudible 00:50:02] were pretty good. I think it was really simple reason. If I build something in numbers and then I want to send it to you, I have to assume that you have a copy of numbers and that you run on a Mac and that's not a safe assumption. It hasn't really been a safe assumption for a long time. And then, Google Docs came out. Rob Collie (00:50:16): Which, by the way, is fundamentally what YouTube did for video. Right? Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:19): That's right. Rob Collie (00:50:19): I had all these delivery ... Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:21): Plugin. Rob Collie (00:50:21): ... And Coda and pl ... I couldn't send you a video, trust that you'd be able to watch it. Shishir Mehrotra (00:50:27): And assume you could play. That's right. That's right. I mean, in that case, it was hard to send the videos because- Rob Collie (00:50:32): Yeah. There was a file size problem and there was also a software c

An airhacks.fm conversation with Cedric Beust (@cbeust) about: Apple II was the first love, building an Apple II emulator, the C64 domination, starting with Basic, then switching to 6502 assembly, cracking games for fun, learning Pascal, starting to study Math because Computer Science was not available, working as administrator at school, switching to Amiga 1000 then Amiga 2000, joining the demo scene, the impact of remote applications as PhD, working with C++ and CORBA, C++ language involvement, meeting Bjaerne Stroustroup, evolving a language is hard, starting with Java 1996, joining Sun Labs in 1998, implementing "persona" at Sun Labs with Java, Sun was not the right place to work with Java, applying at Imprise to work on Borland Application Server, meeting the WebLogic developers at a party, joining WebLogic, C++ was hard to work with, Java was a fresh air, the EJB container team was 10 developers, writing EJBGen, working on Java annotations, the relation between EJBGen and xdoclet, the Attribute Oriented Programming with XDoclet, the metadata should be in the near of Java code, joining the JCP to create Java Annotations, starting at Google to work with Adwords, motivated by shortcomings of JUnit, TestNG was created in 2004, WebLogic vs. WebSphere, tests should depend on each other, TestNG was an exploration of a modern framework, Google's mobile team were 5 people in 2005, starting a mobile Gmail project at Google on J2ME, Java Mobile, Google Android's acquisition, working with Andy Rubin to develop a Java-based OS, a team of 5 developers started to build Android, Android was strategic for Larry Page, users should be in power-this was the spirit of Android, Android development was "Top Secret", leaving Google to join a startup, building internal tools for supervision at LinkedIn, creating a calendar assistant at a startup, starting as "firefighter" at Yahoo in Java space, starting okta, okta is an "universal" SSO, implementing SSO across companies at okta, okta's backend is written in Java Cedric Beust on twitter: @cbeust, Cedric's blog

Joe, Jerry, Ara, and Daniel discuss the last bits of Android 12 rumors, leaks, and speculation just prior to the official announcement. Pretty much everything they say holds true to the legit info, so we hope you enjoy the conversation. They also chat about Nothing scraping up the remainders of Essential. Plus, there's news regarding Xiaomi, LastPass, Sonos, and more. Links: Android 12 | Android Central Carl Pei's Nothing now owns Andy Rubin's Essential | Android Central 3 things we want to see from Nothing's purchase of Essential | Android Central The Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra camera display is the latest example of a spec masquerading as a feature | Android Central LastPass free plan will become a lot more restrictive in March | Android Central Chromecast with Google TV review, 4 months later: A love-hate relationship | Android Central Chromecast with Google TV update brings improved support for 4K60 | Android Central Google TV will finally introduce the option to create a 'Kids Profile' | Android Central Another Chromecast with Google TV bug is causing issues with speaker groups | Android Central Samsung Galaxy A72 leak reveals an affordable mid-ranger with a 90Hz display | Android Central How to turn off ads on your Samsung Phone | Android Central Sonos is announcing its latest product next month — here's what to expect | Android Central Amazon.com: COSORI Coffee Mug Warmer & Mug Set, Electric 24Watt Beverage Cup Warmer for Desk Home Office Use, 304 Stainless Steel 17oz Mug lid, Touch Tech & LED Backlit Display, Ideal for Gift, Coffee, Tea, Hot Cocoa: Kitchen & Dining

Carl Pei's new company bought the smoldering wreckage of Andy Rubin's short-lived Essential https://www.androidpolice.com/2021/02/15/carl-peis-new-company-bought-the-smoldering-wreckage-of-andy-rubins-short-lived-essential/ Equipo de grabación: RØDECaster Pro https://amzn.to/2pI0Qbr RØDE PodMic https://amzn.to/2JOB5NG dbx 286s https://amzn.to/2LzfdZI beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro 250 Ohms https://amzn.to/32p6oqD RØDE PSA1 https://amzn.to/2NcbY9z Una ayuda para mejorar el podcast https://ko-fi.com/emmanuelvq

O Android foi criado em 2003 por Andy Rubin, Rich Miner e Nick Sears. A criação da plataforma ajudou na popularização dos smartphones e influenciou na democratização da internet no Brasil e atraiu desenvolvedores de aplicativos. Apenas 13% das classes D/E tinham acesso à internet em 2010, cenário que se reverteu com a chegada do Android no país. Esse é o tema deste episódio.

Pi-hole version 5 brings many new features to the platform, Newton Mail escapes the death of Essential Products, more major Thunderbolt vulnerabilities surface, and KDE users on rolling-release distributions are experiencing some strange behavior.

The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out. Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

Bienvenidos a Así los lunes son menos lunes, un podcast semanal publicado a comienzos de la semana en el que repasamos la actualidad tecnológica de los últimos días y lo que está por venir.[Todos] Mobile cancelado https://computerhoy.com/especiales/mobile-world-congress [Jakub] Cierra Essential, la marca de móviles del creador de Android, Andy Rubin https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/cierra-essential-marca-moviles-creador-android-andy-rubin-580831 [Matu] Galaxy Z Flip, así es el móvil plegable de Samsung https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-toma-contacto-primeras-impresiones-579917 | Los nuevos Galaxy S20, S20+ y S20 Ultra https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/galaxy-s20-vs-plus-vs-ultra-comparativa-diferencias-576753 | https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-s20-primeras-impresiones-576779 | https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-s20-caracteristicas-precio-disponibilidad-576745 , además de los Buds+ https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-buds-plus-caracteristicas-precio-disponibilidad-576777 ¡Hasta la próxima semana!

드디어 1주년 방송입니다. 2020년 2월 15일 토요일 (2019년 2월 16일 토요일 첫 녹음)! 녹음 1. 조강의 4 cents - Andy Rubin의 Essential - Netflix 와 Youtube 이야기 2. Few more things - Casper 의 IPO - Airbnb 최근 소식 - 시총 1T를 넘어선 Tech 기업들 3. 이주의 픽! 지난 한해 감사했습니다. 앞으로도 더욱더 많은 성원 부탁드립니다.

Bienvenidos a Así los lunes son menos lunes, un podcast semanal publicado a comienzos de la semana en el que repasamos la actualidad tecnológica de los últimos días y lo que está por venir.[Todos] Mobile cancelado https://computerhoy.com/especiales/mobile-world-congress [Jakub] Cierra Essential, la marca de móviles del creador de Android, Andy Rubin https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/cierra-essential-marca-moviles-creador-android-andy-rubin-580831 [Matu] Galaxy Z Flip, así es el móvil plegable de Samsung https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-z-flip-toma-contacto-primeras-impresiones-579917 | Los nuevos Galaxy S20, S20+ y S20 Ultra https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/galaxy-s20-vs-plus-vs-ultra-comparativa-diferencias-576753 | https://computerhoy.com/reportajes/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-s20-primeras-impresiones-576779 | https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-s20-caracteristicas-precio-disponibilidad-576745 , además de los Buds+ https://computerhoy.com/noticias/tecnologia/samsung-galaxy-buds-plus-caracteristicas-precio-disponibilidad-576777 ¡Hasta la próxima semana!

The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out. Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

The week was packed with major project releases, we go through each of them and tell you what stands out. Plus an update from Essential, and NetBSD's first big ask in ten years.

Apple TV+ tops the list of topics in today's podcast as Dave and I talk about the newly released Mythic Quest. We also have some fun with Andy Rubin and Samsung. Brought to you by: Linode: Instantly deploy and manage an SSD server in the Linode Cloud. Get a server running in seconds with your choice of Linux distro, resources, and choice of 10 node locations. Get a $20 credit when you use promocode dalrymple2020 at https://linode.com/dalrymple/.

A bunch of things in tech got the proverbial nails slammed into their coffins this week. Andy Rubin's Essential phone company shut down, MWC got canceled due to fears over coronavirus and the Motorola Razr folding flip phone is pretty likely dead on arrival thanks to Samsung's new Galaxy Z Flip. Cherlynn is joined by senior mobile editor Chris Velazco (Devindra is off on vacation, yay!) to talk about their Galaxy phone coverage and commiserate over no longer going to Barcelona.

Welcome to TechCrunch daily news, a round up of the top tech news of the day. --The world's biggest mobile trade show won't happen this year --Andy Rubin's smartphone company shuts down --and a satellite broadband startup raises $90 million. Here's your Daily Crunch for February 13, 2020. First up: GSMA has canceled Mobile World Congress due to coronavirus concerns. Over the past few days, dozens of big name exhibitors announced they would skip this year's show.

Sera el próximo Essential 2? Redes Sociales: -Página Web bandageek.com -Colabora con el podcast a través Paypa https://www.paypal.me/desdelabarradeabel -Grupo Telegram: https://t.me/desdelabarradeabel -Twitter: @damiantiscornia Twitter @TiscorniaDamian -App para IOS https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/desde-la-barra-de-abel/id1437120851 -Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DesdeLaBarraDeAbel/ Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr62gbpQKGkgJzqDjsAaGVw?view_as=subscriber Podcast: https://ar.ivoox.com/es/podcast-desde-barra-abel_sq_f1172580_1.html

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the emergence of Google's Android operating system. Before we look at Android, let's look at what led to it. Frank Canova who built a device he showed off as “Angler” at COMDEX in 1992. This would be released as the Simon Personal Communicator by BellSouth and manufactured as the IBM Simon by Mitsubishi. The Palm, Newton, Symbian, and Pocket PC, or Windows CE would come out shortly thereafter and rise in popularity over the next few years. CDMA would slowly come down in cost over the next decade. Now let's jump to 2003. At the time, you had Microsoft Windows CE, the Palm Treo was maturing and supported dual-band GSM, Handspring merged into the Palm hardware division, Symbian could be licensed but I never met a phone of theirs I liked. Like the Nokia phones looked about the same as many printer menu screens. One other device that is more relevant because of the humans behind it was the T-Mobile sidekick, which actually had a cool flippy motion to open the keyboard! Keep that Sidekick in mind for a moment. Oh and let's not forget a fantastic name. The mobile operating systems were limited. Each was proprietary. Most were menu driven and reminded us more of an iPod, released in 2001. I was a consultant at the time and remember thinking it was insane that people would pay hundreds of dollars for a phone. At the time, flip phones were all the rage. A cottage industry of applications sprung up, like Notify, that made use of app frameworks on these devices to connect my customers to their Exchange accounts so their calendars could sync wirelessly. The browsing experience wasn't great. The messaging experience wasn't great. The phones were big and clunky. And while you could write apps for the Symbian in Qt Creator or Flash Lite or Python for S60, few bothered. That's when Andy Rubin left Danger, the company the cofounded that made the Sidekick and joined up with Rich Miner, Nick Sears, and Chris White in 2003 to found a little company called Android Inc. They wanted to make better mobile devices than were currently on the market. They founded Android Inc and set out to write an operating system based on Linux that could rival anything on the market. Rubin was no noob when cofounding Danger. He had been a robotics engineer in the 80s, a manufacturing engineer at Apple for a few years and then got on his first mobility engineering gig when he bounced to General Magic to work on Magic Cap, a spinoff from Apple FROM 92 TO 95. He then helped build WebTV from 95-99. Many in business academia have noted that Android existed before Google and that's why it's as successful as it is today. But Google bought Android in 2005, years before the actual release of Android. Apple had long been rumor milling a phone, which would mean a mobile operating system as well. Android was sprinting towards a release that was somewhat Blackberry-like, focused on competing with similar devices on the market at the time, like the Blackberries that were all the rage. Obama and Hillary Clinton was all about theirs. As a consultant, I was stoked to become a Blackberry Enterprise Server reseller and used that to deploy all the things. The first iPhone was released in 2007. I think we sometimes think that along came the iPhone and Blackberries started to disappear. It took years. But the fall was fast. While the iPhone was also impactful, the Android-based devices were probably more-so. That release of the iPhone kicked Andy Rubin in the keister and he pivoted over from the Blackberry-styled keyboard to a touch screen, which changed… everything. Suddenly this weird innovation wasn't yet another frivolous expensive Apple extravagance. The logo helped grow the popularity as well, I think. Internally at Google Dan Morrill started creating what were known as Dandroids. But the bugdroid as it's known was designed by Irina Blok on the Android launch team. It was eventually licensed under Creative Commons, which resulted in lots of different variations of the logo; a sharp contrast to the control Apple puts around the usage of their own logo. The first version of the shipping Android code came along in 2008 and the first phone that really shipped with it wasn't until the HTC Dream in 2009. This device had a keyboard you could press but also had a touch screen, although we hadn't gotten a virtual keyboard yet. It shipped with an ARM11, 192MB of RAM, and 256MB of storage. But you could expand it up to 16 gigs with a microSD card. Oh, and it had a trackball. It bad 802.11b and g, Bluetooth, and shipped with Android 1.0. But it could be upgraded up to 1.6, Donut. The hacker in me just… couldn't help but mod the thing much as I couldn't help but jailbreak the iPhone back before I got too lazy not to. Of course, the Dev Phone 1 shipped soon after that didn't require you to hack it, something Apple waited until 2019 to copy. The screen was smaller than that of an iPhone. The keyboard felt kinda' junky. The app catalog was lacking. It didn't really work well in an office setting. But it was open source. It was a solid operating system and it showed promise as to the future of not-Apple in a post-Blackberry world. Note: Any time a politician uses a technology it's about 5 minutes past being dead tech. Of Blackberry, iOS, and Android, Android was last in devices sold using those platforms in 2009, although the G1 as the Dream was also known as, took 9% market share quickly. But then came Eclair. Unlike sophomore efforts from bands, there's something about a 2.0 release of software. By the end of 2010 there were more Androids than iOS devices. 2011 showed the peak year of Blackberry sales, with over 50 million being sold, but those were the lagerts spinning out of the buying tornado and buying the pivot the R&D for the fruitless next few Blackberry releases. Blackberry marketshare would zero out in just 6 short years. iPhone continued a nice climb over the past 8 years. But Android sales are now in the billions per year. Ultimately the blackberry, to quote Time a “failure to keep up with Apple and Google was a consequence of errors in its strategy and vision.” If you had to net-net that, touch vs menus was a substantial part of that. By 2017 the Android and iOS marketshare was a combined 99.6%. In 2013, now Google CEO, Sundar Pichai took on Android when Andy Rubin was embroiled in sexual harassment charges and now acts as CEO of Playground Global, an incubator for hardware startups. The open source nature of Android and it being ready to fit into a device from manufacturers like HTC led to advancements that inspired and were inspired by the iPhone leading us to the state we're in today. Let's look at the released per year and per innovation: * 1.0, API 1, 2008: Include early Google apps like Gmail, Maps, Calendar, of course a web browser, a media player, and YouTube * 1.1 came in February the next year and was code named Petit Four * 1.5 Cupcake, 2009: Gave us on an-screen keyboard and third-party widgets then apps on the Android Market, now known as the Google Play Store. Thus came the HTC Dream. Open source everything. * 1.6 Donut, 2009: Customizeable screen sizes and resolution, CDMA support. And the short-lived Dell Streak! Because of this resolution we got the joy of learning all about the tablet. Oh, and Universal Search and more emphasis on battery usage! * 2.0 Eclair, 2009: The advent of the Motorola Droid, turn by turn navigation, real time traffic, live wallpapers, speech to text. But the pinch to zoom from iOS sparked a war with Apple.We also got the ability to limit accounts. Oh, new camera modes that would have impressed even George Eastman, and Bluetooth 2.1 support. * 2.2 Froyo, four months later in 2010 came Froyo, with under-the-hood tuning, voice actions, Flash support, something Apple has never had. And here came the HTC Incredible S as well as one of the most mobile devices ever built: The Samsung Galaxy S2. This was also the first hotspot option and we got 3G and better LCDs. That whole tethering, it took a year for iPhone to copy that. * 2.3 Gingerbread: With 2010 came Gingerbread. The green from the robot came into the Gingerbread with the black and green motif moving front and center. More sensors, NFC, a new download manager, copy and paste got better, * 3.0 Honeycomb, 2011. The most important thing was when Matias Duarte showed up and reinvented the Android UI. The holographic design traded out the green and blue and gave you more screen space. This kicked off a permanet overhaul and brought a card-UI for recent apps. Enter the Galaxy S9 and the Huawei Mate 2. * 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, later in 2011 - Duarte's designs started really taking hold. For starters, let's get rid of buttons. THat's important and has been a critical change for other devices as well. We Reunited tablets and phones with a single vision. On screen buttons, brought the card-like appearance into app switching. Smarter swiping, added swiping to dismiss, which changed everything for how we handle email and texts with gestures. You can thank this design for Tinder. * 4.1 to 4.3 Jelly Bean, 2012: Added some sweet sweet fine tuning to the foundational elements from Ice Cream Sandwich. Google Now that was supposed to give us predictive intelligence, interactive notifications, expanded voice search, advanced search, sill with the card-based everything now for results. We also got multiuser support for tablets. And the Android Quick Settings pane. We also got widgets on the lock screen - but those are a privacy nightmare and didn't last for long. Automatic widget resizing, wireless display projection support, restrict profiles on multiple user accounts, making it a great parent device. Enter the Nexus 10. AND TWO FINGER DOWN SWIPES. * 4.4 KitKat, in 2013 ended the era of a dark screen, lighter screens and neutral highlights moved in. I mean, Matrix was way before that after all. OK, Google showed up. Furthering the competition with Apple and Siri. Hands-free activation. A panel on the home screen, and a stand-alone launcher. AND EMOJIS ON THE KEYBOARD. Increased NFC security. * 5. Lollipop came in 2014 bringing 64 bit, Bluetooth Low Energy, flatter interface, But more importantly, we got annual releases like iOS. * 6: Marshmallow, 2015 gave us doze mode, sticking it to iPhone by even more battery saving features. App security and prompts to grant apps access to resources like the camera and phone were . The Nexus 5x and 6P ports brought fingerprint scanners and USB-C. * 7: Nougat in 2016 gave us quick app switching, a different lock screen and home screen wallpaper, split-screen multitasking, and gender/race-centric emojis. * 8: Oreo in 2017 gave us floating video windows, which got kinda' cool once app makers started adding support in their apps for it. We also got a new file browser, which came to iOS in 2019. And more battery enhancements with prettied up battery menus. Oh, and notification dots on app icons, borrowed from Apple. * 9: Pie in 2018 brought notch support, navigations that were similar to those from the iPhone X adopting to a soon-to-be bezel-free world. And of course, the battery continues to improve. This brings us into the world of the Pixel 3. * 10, Likely some timed in 2019 While the initial release of Android shipped with the Linux 2.1 kernel, that has been updated as appropriate over the years with, 3 in Ice Cream Sandwich, and version 4 in Nougat. Every release of android tends to have an increment in the Linux kernel. Now, Android is open source. So how does Google make money? Let's start with what Google does best. Advertising. Google makes a few cents every time you click on an ad in an advertisement in messages or web pages or any other little spot they've managed to drop an ad in there. Then there's the Google Play Store. Apple makes 70% more revenue from apps than Android, despite the fact that Android apps have twice the number of installs. The old adage is if you don't pay for a product, you are the product. I don't tend to think Google goes overboard with all that, though. And Google is probably keeping Caterpillar in business just to buy big enough equipment to move their gold bars from one building to the next on campus. Any time someone's making money, lots of other people wanna taste. Like Oracle, who owns a lot of open source components used in Android. And the competition between iOS and Android makes both products better for consumers! Now look out for Android Auto, Android Things, Android TV, Chrome OS, the Google Assistant and others - given that other types of vendors can make use of Google's open source offerings to cut R&D costs and get to market faster! But more importantly, Android has contributed substantially to the rise of ubiquitious computing despite how much money you have. I like to think the long-term impact of such a democratization of Mobility and the Internet will make the world a little less idiocracy and a little more wikipedia. Thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

H. Claire Brown: How an FDA Algorithm is Killing Bodegas (Ep. 169) The New Food Economy's Claire Brown joined Joe Miller to discuss how an FDA algorithm is killing bodegas by flagging otherwise legal transactions as fraud. Bio H. Claire Brown (@hclaire_brown) is a staff writer for The New Food Economy focusing on food policy and the environment. Her reporting has won awards from the Newswomen's Club of New York and the New York Press Club. She is based in Brooklyn. Resources New Food Economy How an Algorithm kicks small businesses out of the food stamp program on dubious fraud charges by Claire Brown Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger by Rebecca Traister News Roundup Federal officials worry about shutdown's effect on cyber security Federal security officials are worried about the short and long-term harm to the nation's cybersecurity during the shutdown. They're worried about losing furloughed talent and about criminals and foreign actors taking advantage of the shutdown to launch cyberattacks. Illinois Congresswoman Robin Kelly issued a strong rebuke against Trump for the shutdown saying it's immoral and unnecessary. She noted that when she served as the ranking member of the IT subcommittee in the last session of Congress, the subcommittee repeatedly discussed the federal government's inability to attract top IT and tech talent. She said the shutdown makes federal IT jobs seem even less attractive than they were before. Motherboard paid $300 to a bounty hunter to access customer location info from carriers Remember in 2017 when the Republican-controlled Congress repealed the Obama-FCC's privacy rules that would have required carriers to obtain opt-in consent from customers before sharing their data? Well, Motherboard's Joseph Cox reported last week that he paid just 300 bucks to a bounty hunter to identify the location of a phone. This is exactly the kind of harm the privacy rules were designed to prevent. The Motherboard investigation found that all the bounty hunter had to do was purchase the location data that ultimately came from T-Mobile, AT&T, and Sprint and voilá – here's your phone … or the phone of that person you're stalking … So House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Frank Pallone demanded an emergency briefing from FCC Chairman Ajit Pai … Pai declined, citing the shutdown --- claiming that the issue wasn't a "threat to the safety of human life or property." AG nominee Barr to recuse himself from AT&T/Time Warner merger appeal Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar announced last week that Trump's attorney general nominee William Barr assured her in a private meeting that he would recuse himself from the AT&T/Time Warner Merger. The Justice Department is appealing a lower court's decision to approve the $85 billion merger of the two companies. Barr's Senate confirmation hearing takes place today, Tuesday, January 15. Google shareholder sues for $90 million Andy Rubin payout Google shareholder James Martin filed a lawsuit against the company last week for its $90 million payout to former executive Andy Rubin after he left the company amidst sexual harassment allegations. The complaint alleges a "multi-year scheme to cover up sexual harassment and discrimination at Alphabet" and claims the board, including Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, breached their fiduciary duties as board members and as executives who set the internal tone that enabled extramarital affairs at the company. Thune/Wicker switch roles on the Senate Commerce Committee South Dakota Republican John Thune has stepped down as Chair of the Senate Commerce Committee and now heads up the Communications Subcommittee. Mississippi Republican Roger Wicker now Chairs the full committee. Trump administration proposes to allow drones to fly at night The Federal Aviation Administration issued proposed rules Monday that would allow small commercial drones to fly over cities at night. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao says she's keenly aware of the safety concerns.

Llega un nuevo episodio de METADATA, el podcast de Tecnología de RPP! En esta sesión hablamos del escándalo de acoso sexual reportado en Google. Durante 2 años, casi 50 colaboradores fueron despedidos por conductas inapropiadas con colegas dentro de Google, incluyendo a Andy Rubin, padre de Android. Hablamos de Pokemon GO y las actualizaciones, que te tentarán a jugar de nuevo. Hace 10 años salió a la venta el primero teléfono con Android, y hacemos un recuento con Nicolas Fischman, de "Suprapixel", y Carlos Santa Engracia de "Topes de Gama" de los primeros equipos con Android que conseguimos. Esto y más en eta sesión de METADATA Recuerda buscar las noticias más relevanytes de tecnología en la secciónd e tecnología de RPP: rpp.pe/tecno

Llega un nuevo episodio de METADATA, el podcast de Tecnología de RPP! En esta sesión hablamos del escándalo de acoso sexual reportado en Google. Durante 2 años, casi 50 colaboradores fueron despedidos por conductas inapropiadas con colegas dentro de Google, incluyendo a Andy Rubin, padre de Android. Hablamos de Pokemon GO y las actualizaciones, que te tentarán a jugar de nuevo. Hace 10 años salió a la venta el primero teléfono con Android, y hacemos un recuento con Nicolas Fischman, de "Suprapixel", y Carlos Santa Engracia de "Topes de Gama" de los primeros equipos con Android que conseguimos. Esto y más en eta sesión de METADATA Recuerda buscar las noticias más relevanytes de tecnología en la secciónd e tecnología de RPP: rpp.pe/tecno

Google reportedly covered under sexual misconduct during Andy Rubin's tenure, Alphabet published its Q3 2018 earnings report, and more news you need to know.

Los temas del día: Youtube experimento la caída mas importante de toda su historia https://infosertec.com.ar/2018/10/17/youtube-experimento-la-caida-mas-importante-de-toda-su-historia/ Samsung y sus nuevos micros para el sector automotriz https://infosertec.com.ar/2018/10/17/samsung-y-sus-nuevos-micros-para-el-sector-automotriz/ Xiaomi a punto de lanzar el Mi Mix 3 con 10 GB de RAM https://infosertec.com.ar/2018/10/17/xiaomi-a-punto-de-lanzar-el-mi-mix-3-con-10-gb-de-ram/ El creador de Telegram dispara contra WhatsApp https://infosertec.com.ar/2018/10/17/el-creador-de-telegram-dispara-contra-whatsapp/ NM Card la propuesta de Huawei para reducir las MicroSD NBA 2K19 disponible para iOS y Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.t2ksports.nba2k19and https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/nba-2k19/id1412321065?mt=8&at= Otro bug de la última actualización de Windows 10 genera problemas con el brillo tras cada reinicio https://www.genbeta.com/windows/otro-bug-ultima-actualizacion-windows-10-genera-problemas-brillo-cada-reinicio Qualcomm esta trabajando para elevar la velocidad del WiFi https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2018/10/16/qualcomm-dramatically-extends-wi-fi-experiences-5g-era-60ghz-80211ay Se actualiza Spotify para Android Wear https://newsroom.spotify.com/2018-10-17/hello-wear-os-by-googletm-spotify-here/ Essential la empresa de Andy Rubin, despide al 30% de sus empleados https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-17/andy-rubin-s-startup-essential-products-cuts-about-30-of-staff También estamos en Anchor: https://anchor.fm/radiogeek APOYANOS DESDE PAYPAL https://www.paypal.me/arielmcorg APOYANOS DESDE PATREON https://www.patreon.com/radiogeek Podes seguirme desde Twitter @arielmcorg (www.twitter.com/arielmcorg) También desde Instagram @arielmcorg (www.instagram.com/arielmcorg) Sumate al canal de Telegram #Radiogeekpodcast (http://telegram.me/Radiogeekpodcast)

Branch, the deep-linking startup backed by Andy Rubin's Playground Ventures, will enter the unicorn club with an upcoming funding round. The four-year-old company, which helps brands create links between websites and mobile apps, has authorized the sale of $129 million in Series D shares, according to sources and confirmed by PitchBook, which tracks venture capital deals. The infusion of capital values the company at roughly $1 billion.

In the early days of Android, co-founder Andy Rubin set the stage for the fledgling mobile operating system. Android's mission was to create smarter mobile devices, ones that were more aware of their owner's behavior and location.“If people are smart,” Rubin told Business Week in 2003, “that information starts getting aggregated into consumer products.

El pasado viernes grabamos con @Amonal_ un programa especial, el cual va ser muy polémico como todos los que grabamos juntos. Los temas tocados fueron: Andy Rubin abandono su nueva empresa; Los Pixel de Google; el asistente de Google; archivos en formato mp3 vs flac; seguridad; Knox de Samsung y muchos temas mas que pueden escuchar en el siguiente audio. Podes seguirme desde Twitter @arielmcorg (www.twitter.com/arielmcorg) También desde Instagram @arielmcorg (www.instagram.com/arielmcorg) Sumate al canal de Telegram #Radiogeekpodcast (http://telegram.me/Radiogeekpodcast)

Los temas del día: Andy Rubin abandona Essential; https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/29/16714264/andy-rubin-leaves-essential-google-inappropriate-conduct Instagram estaría trabajando en un botón de "repost"; https://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2017/11/29/instagrams-secretly-testing-regram-button-many-big-new-features/ Samsung tendría listo el micro para el Galaxy S9; Samsung registro una patente para el lector de huellas en toda la pantalla; #Radiogeek – Especial con @amonal_ Noviembre 2017 – En Vivo; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/11/29/radiogeek-especial-con-amonal_-noviembre-2017-en-vivo/ Claro Argentina, anuncia WhatsApp gratis para los clientes con modalidad Prepago y Control; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/11/29/claro-argentina-anuncia-whatsapp-gratis-para-los-clientes-con-modalidad-prepago-y-control/ Movistar Argentina, brinda WhatsApp gratis para todos sus clientes; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/11/29/movistar-argentina-brinda-whatsapp-gratis-para-todos-sus-clientes/ Personal Argentina anuncia su nueva propuesta Gigas Compartidos; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/11/29/personal-argentina-anuncia-su-nueva-propuesta-gigas-compartidos/ Turno de Apple, que demanda a Qualcomm por infracción de al menos ocho patentes; https://www.xatakamovil.com/apple/turno-de-apple-que-demanda-a-qualcomm-por-infraccion-de-al-menos-ocho-patentes Se viene el juego "The X-File Deep State"; https://youtu.be/Zw31jbyy50E El Bitcoin supera los 11.000 dolares y va en aumento; Otro hackeo a la NSA: filtrados 100 GB de datos de alto secreto. https://www.adslzone.net/2017/11/29/nsa-hackeo-red-disk/ Podes seguirme desde Twitter @arielmcorg (www.twitter.com/arielmcorg) También desde Instagram @arielmcorg (www.instagram.com/arielmcorg) Sumate al canal de Telegram #Radiogeekpodcast (http://telegram.me/Radiogeekpodcast)

When I met Andy Rubin, the founder of Android, earlier this year to talk about his new company, he showed me a PowerPoint deck from 2009. His team put it together just before the debut of the Motorola Droid, Android's first real chance to take on the iPhone. The campaign slogan was “Droid Does,” and Motorola planned to harp on all the things the iPhone couldn't do. It crowed about multitasking, “real keyboards,” and interchangeable batteries.

AT&T announces a new DirecTV promotion for wireless subscribers, Andy Rubin announces the premium PH-1 handset, and Qualcomm announces Quick Charge 4+. How to Contact us: 650-999-0524   How to Listen:

Neste episódio, nossos apresentadores abrem o coração e comentam tudo o que eles adorariam que a Apple anunciasse na WWDC. Antes disso, eles comentam os anúncios da Essential, nova empresa de Andy Rubin.

On TalkCentral this week, Duncan McLeod and Regardt van der Berg chat about the looming restructuring at Telkom. Also this week, they look at Cell C's new tariff plans (are they a response to Telkom's FreeMe?), Iflix expanding on its Africa launch plans, Intel announcing the Core i9 processor and Andy Rubin's smartphone. Plus, we're excited to announce that TechCentral is getting a fresh and exciting new look. Podcast website

In this episode, Mike looks at Andy Rubin's new smart home platform, Essential Home. Rubin believes he can eliminate all the friction and fragmentation consumers face today with all the various platforms by focusing on integration. He's created a smart home platform that plans to play nice with other platforms and hopefully get us out of a seemingly endless world of smart home apps and interfaces. Our guest in this episode is Pawel Orzechowski, the Director of Systems Software at Neato Robotics. We talk about how Neato's robots work with the smart home, how they are working towards new features and we look at why they decided to integrate their robots with a Facebook Messenger chatbot. http://knit.audio/podcast-advertising (via Knit)

Los temas del día: Western Digital primeras unidades SSD con tecnología 3D NAND de 64 capas; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/05/30/western-digital-primeras-unidades-ssd-con-tecnologia-3d-nand-de-64-capas/ Andy Rubin y su smartphone Essential Phone; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/05/30/andy-rubin-y-su-smartphone-essential-phone/ El Gobierno Argentino se endure con los smartphones robados; ?Samsung y su video de la pantalla flexible; https://youtu.be/_EMBTHbkXnE Reddit se actualiza añadiendo ubicación; https://conectica.com/2017/05/30/reddit-ubicacion-foursquare/ Se dejo fabricar oficialmente la PlayStation 3 en Japón. Podes seguirme desde Twitter @arielmcorg (www.twitter.com/arielmcorg) También desde Instagram @arielmcorg (www.instagram.com/arielmcorg) Sumate al canal de Telegram #Radiogeekpodcast (http://telegram.me/Radiogeekpodcast)

Los temas del día: Residis en Argentina – ¿Te gustaría tener un MotoG5 libre de origen? participa en nuestro sorteo; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/05/25/residis-en-argentina-sorteo-motog5/ 059. 2 Aplicaciones de Notas alternativas que utilizo; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/05/25/059-2-aplicaciones-de-notas-alternativas-que-utilizo/ Cómo proteger a nuestros hijos de Internet y Redes Sociales; https://infosertec.com.ar/2017/05/25/como-proteger-a-nuestros-hijos-de-internet-y-redes-sociales/ Los LG V10 se va actualizando Nougat; http://www.lg.com/es/posventa/microsites/movil/lg-bridge-actualizar-dispositivo Así va a evitar WhatsApp próximas caídas; https://www.adslzone.net/2017/05/25/asi-va-evitar-whatsapp-proximas-caidas/ Samsung afirma que será la primera en lanzar chips de 7 y 4 nm; https://www.adslzone.net/2017/05/25/samsung-afirma-que-sera-la-primera-en-lanzar-chips-de-7-y-4-nm/ Andy Rubin lanzaría un smartphone el 30 de mayo; https://twitter.com/essential/status/867780192890044417 Se burlan de Mark Zuckerberg por el discurso que brindo en Harvard; Facebook quiere incursionar en las películas; Dubai ya tiene su robocop. https://youtu.be/QZyjCrZj4HM Podes seguirme desde Twitter @arielmcorg (www.twitter.com/arielmcorg) También desde Instagram @arielmcorg (www.instagram.com/arielmcorg) Sumate al canal de Telegram #Radiogeekpodcast (http://telegram.me/Radiogeekpodcast)

Android co-founder Andy Rubin told the Bloomberg Technology Conference this week that quantum computing and artificial intelligence research will become so advanced that it will control nearly every device around us. He's probably right -- but that's not necessarily a good thing. Also: World Economic Forum discusses how to control killer robots; Promobot escapes his testing grounds; new dieting procedure sucks food out of your gut before it's fully digested; and the latest on the Zika virus. Special thanks to Amy W. and Zulu the Parrot for today's "SCIENCE!"

Temas del día: #EDENOR miente y nadie lo controla en #Argentina; http://arielmcorg.blogspot.com.ar/2014/11/edenor-miente-y-nadie-lo-controla-en.html Más movimientos en Google, esta vez renuncia Andy Rubin; http://www.infosertec.com.ar/blog/?p=51889 #BBM anuncia nuevas características de privacidad y control; http://www.infosertec.com.ar/blog/?p=51886 Xiaomi podría buscar inversores pronto y alcanzar una valoración de hasta 50.000 millones de dólares; http://www.xatakamovil.com/otras/xiaomi-podria-buscar-inversores-pronto-y-alcanzar-una-valoracion-de-hasta-50-000-millones-de-dolares La actualización Android 5.0 Lollipop comienza a habilitarse; http://www.cnet.com/es/noticias/actualizacion-android-5-0-lollipop-descarga El primer Lumia sin Nokia; https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&calledFromFrame=N&application_id=168241&fcc_id=PYARM-1090 Steve Jobs predijo problemas que Apple tiene actualmente; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZBma82g3Uag La tableta Nexus 9 ya está disponible en la Play Store; http://www.cnet.com/es/noticias/nexus-9-comprar-play-store Nuevo diseño y funciones para algunas de sus aplicaciones de Google favoritas; http://tecnologiayproductosgoogle.blogspot.com.ar/2014/11/nuevo-diseno-y-funciones-para-algunas-de-sus-apps-de-google-favoritas.html Google trabaja en su propio AirDrop para Android: reportes; http://www.cnet.com/es/noticias/google-trabaja-en-su-propio-airdrop-para-android El código fuente de los nuevos Moto X y Moto G es liberado; http://andro4all.com/2014/11/moto-x-g-2014-codigo-fuente-descargar HP lanzaria un smartwacht; http://www.gilt.com/sale/men/mm/michael-bastian-x-hewlettpackard-1 Angry Birds Transformers disponible; https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rovio.angrybirdstransformers LG Display se saca de la manga una pantalla Full HD con los biseles más finos del mundo; http://andro4all.com/2014/10/lg-display-full-hd-biseles-finos Samsung presenta un informe financiero bastante negativo; http://www.androidsis.com/ventas-samsung-2014/ Tor desde Facebook. https://facebookcorewwwi.onion/ Revista de Infosertec en Flipboard. https://flipboard.com/section/infosertec-bFdf1E Seguime desde twitter @arielmcorg www.twitter.com/arielmcorg

Wal-Mart Straight Talk cell phone plan, removing CyberCob malware, TreeSize to analyze disk usage, Apple vs Google maps in Dublin, Profiles in IT (Stephen Wolfram, creator of Mathematica software application), first domain name registered 28 years ago (March 15, 1985, symbolics.com), thunder and lightning (rainstorms vs snowstorms), Senate votes to include Internet sales taxes in budget (a bad day for online purchasing), Mac trojan in the wild (Trojan.Yontoo.1, requires user to download installer), Apple patches iForgot Password Reset (accounts could be hijacked with only AppleID and birthday, users advised to activate two-step verification), Andy Rubin no longer leading Android (Andoid will be under Chrome developer, Google vows to keep them separate for now), Google self-driving car (64-beam laser rangefinder, four radar units, camera, GPS, inertial measurement, wheel sensors, onboard computers, US$100K worth of equipment, better than human on open road, limitations to full deployment). This show originally aired on Saturday, March 23, 2013, at 9:00 AM EST on WFED (1500 AM).

Temas del día: Se presentó el BlackBerry 9320 en Argentina; Se viene Twitter Music; Facebook actualiza el Timeline para dar relevancia a los intereses de los usuarios; Google I/O agota sus entradas en 48 minutos; Intel publica una versión inicial de Android 4.2.2 para x86; WhatsApp vuelve a ser gratis en Android; El iPad mini llega a Argentina el 29 de Marzo; Disponible WhatsApp para BlackBerry 10; Más datos filtrados del Samsung Galaxy S4; Argentina es el líder en exportación de software de América Latina; Un desconocido smartphone Android de Motorola asoma por sorpresa; Andy Rubin abandona el liderazgo de Android; Sundar Pichai, jefe de Chrome OS, será su sucesor; Llega TeamViewer 8 a Linux. Seguime desde Twitter @arielmcorg www.twitter.com/arielmcorg

Andy Rubin testifies, reviews of Galaxy Tab 2 and HTC One S, location-aware tasks, and more. Hosts: Jason Howell, Eileen Rivera, and Ron Richards Guest: Matt Macari Download or subscribe to this show at https://twit.tv/shows/all-about-android. We invite you to read, add to, and amend our show notes at wiki.twit.tv. Thanks to CacheFly for the bandwidth for this show. Sponsors: Audible Netflix

Interviews with the winners of the 2006 Sydney Taylor Book Awards for Jewish children's literature, and a conversation with Andy Rubin, founder of the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band.