Posted by msmash from the shape-of-things-to-come dept.
Amazon is testing a new way to bolster its relationship with startups and possibly bring in more capital to the ecosystem. From a report:The fledgling effort, known as the Amazon Web Services Pro-Rata Program, is designed to link private investors with companies that use AWS, as well as venture funds whose portfolios are filled with potential cloud customers. Amazon is not investing money through the program.
The Pro-Rata program is being run by Brad Holden, a former partner at TomorrowVentures (founded by ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt), and Jason Hunt, who are both part of AWS's business development team focused on angel and seed relationships, according to an email they sent to investors in January. "The Pro-Rata Program is a new pilot intended to connect family offices and venture capitalists for specific investment opportunities from the AWS ecosystem," according to the email, which was viewed by CNBC. "Pro rata" refers to the rights investors have to put money in subsequent rounds.Mike Isaac, a reporter at The New York Times, writes, "If Amazon is using its direct knowledge of startups' health based on the fact that Amazon literally owns and operates the servers, how is this at all ethical? If that's not the case, Amazon should make that crystal clear (even though i'd have a hard time believing it). It's like Facebook's years of insights into [various] apps' data with the Onavo team, only instead of ripping companies off (which FB did), they invested in them."
The question of quality over quantity is a no brainer. Would you rather win a three-week vacation to the Somerset, New Jersey, Comfort Inn or three nights at the Hôtel Ritz Paris? Would you rather eat at Panera Bread twice a month, or have dinner biannually at Eleven Madison Park? Would you rather be in possession of an army of thousands of mercenaries or a dragon?
The choice seems pretty clear, not the least because, after three weeks, Somerset begins to lose some of its charm, you eventually get sick of ordering the same sandwich from Panera all the time, and repeatedly losing to Daenerys Targaryen gets boring. The important part of this equation, though, is the fact that you do get a choice; in many facets of our lives, we still get to pick if we want lots of little things or one really nice thing. For fans of television, though, that choice is narrowing as HBO, the longtime bastion of "prestige television," creeps closer and closer towards Netflix's tantalizingly profitable "quantity" model.
The first sign of trouble came last summer, just after AT&T completed its acquisition of Time Warner Inc., and with it, Warner Bros., HBO, Turner, and brands like Bleacher Report and the beloved streaming service FilmStruck. In a July 8 company meeting with HBO employees, AT&T executive John Stankey announced: "I want more hours of engagement." As he put it, HBO needed "hours a day. It's not hours a week, and it's not hours a month … You are competing with devices that sit in people's hands that capture their attention every 15 minutes." By October, AT&T had shuttered Filmstruck for being too niche; by winter, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was reassuring he had no plans to turn HBO into "another Netflix." But yesterday, after the government's final antitrust challenge against the merger failed in court, the longtime chairman and CEO of HBO, Richard Plepler, announced he was resigning.
ADVERTISEMENT
You may not know Plepler's name offhand, but you'll be familiar with the phenomenon he is credited for: the so-called "Golden Age of Television." Shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex and the City, Veep, and more recently Westworld and Game of Thrones, all came during his tenure; HBO won more than 160 Emmys while Plepler was at the helm, The New York Times reports. But Plepler's exit — for which he offered no direct explanation — not only threatens the Golden Age of Television, but the very philosophy that allowed its rise. It is a symbolic end to what Plepler summed up to The Wall Street Journal in 2017 as "more is not better. Only better is better."
The creeping Netflixification at hand represents an about-face from Plepler's understanding of HBO's role in the increasingly crowded streaming marketplace. In 2018, Netflix put out more than 90,000 hours in original content, including some 58,000 hours of original series; to keep up, Quartz found, would be an entire part-time job. That's not to say there haven't been great Netflix TV shows — the platform is home to Orange Is the New Black, House of Cards, and Russian Doll — but there is a downside to trying to give users an endless ocean of exactly the content they want. One need look no further than the example of the multi-film deal Netflix inked with Adam Sandler, whose terrible The Ridiculous 6 (0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) was also the streaming service's most-watched film ever in its initial 30 days back in 2015 (it has likely since been surpassed by Bird Box, although Netflix famously doesn't reveal its viewership). In the TV realm, this means dozens of shows, binged one week, are forgotten the next. When's the last time you heard someone talk about Altered Carbon, Haters Back Off, Girlboss, or Between?
While HBO wanted to make the best television in the world, Netflix went for global domination. Opening the Netflix app is almost a painful process, with autoplay trailers hawking the next it TV show with as much boisterousness as the holograms in Blade Runner. Finishing one episode of TV, another immediately begins; Netflix even allows users to skip show intros to further streamline binging. Netflix wants to be in front of your eyes at all times. HBO, by contrast, is a destination, an app you open specifically to finish Big Little Lies.
Fascinatingly, there doesn't need to be an either/or dynamic here at all. Despite how AT&T is treating it, HBO is profitable; a year ago in February, the premium network added the most subscribers in its history. In 2017, more than 60 percent of people who subscribed to HBO Now also subscribed to Netflix, indicating there are different demands being fulfilled for users by both services. That is likely only to grow; by 2020, 62 percentof Americans are expected to subscribe to at least two streaming services. But as one particularly prickly exchange between AT&T's Stankey and HBO's Plepler went last June:
... Mr. Stankey said, "We've got to make money at the end of the day, right?"
"We do that," Mr. Plepler responded.
"Yes, you do," Mr. Stankey said. "Just not enough." [The New York Times]
The mistake here is in likening HBO and Netflix as true competitors. There is nothing wrong with the Netflix model, just as there is nothing wrong with eating at Olive Garden or reading movie tie-in paperbacks. What is a problem is determining that, due to the success of quantity, there is no point in continuing to invest in quality.
With Plepler's exit, HBO looks to already be past the point of no return. The bigwigs at AT&T peered in their pocketbooks and made their call: More is, in fact, better.
Posted by EditorDavid from the out-of-the-office dept.
Inc. magazine explains a unique feature of GitLab. "Every employee of the San Francisco-based startup, which offers tools for software developers, works from home."Three years ago, that was nine people. Today, GitLab's 350 employees across 45 countries use video calls and Slack chats to stay constantly connected.... GitLab meetings and presentations are uploaded to YouTube. Its employee handbook -- over 1,000 pages long when printed -- is publicly available online as a resource, so employees can get questions answered without waking up co-workers in a different time zone.
The biggest advantage to an all-remote team is obvious: Your hiring pool is gigantic, and you don't need to convince top talent to move for you. GitLab's percentage of quality job applications is similar to other companies -- its dramatic number of recent hires is due to how many applications it receives, 13,000 in the second quarter of 2018 alone. On the other hand, maintaining a culture is really difficult. "To be honest, I was definitely a bit concerned," says Dave Munichiello, a general partner at Alphabet's venture capital arm, GV, which invested in GitLab in 2017. "What happens when the all-hands meeting isn't a bunch of folks hanging around the water cooler listening to the CEO articulate the vision and the mission?"
GitLab's leaders constantly think about it. Co-founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij even hired away Netflix's vice president of talent, Barbie Brewer, to serve as chief people officer. Virtual coffee breaks, where employees talk about their lives outside GitLab, are built into everyone's schedules. Senior leaders hold office hours in video chat rooms that anyone can join. When GitLab meets its monthly goals, everyone gets a free dinner. "What we've learned from GitLab," Munichiello says, "is that when you have a leadership team that's as committed to remote-only as they are, and as communicative and transparent as they are, and as insistent on documentation as they are, it can work."
HTC is about to unveil a flagship phone that nobody will want to buy, the U12 handset the company teased using iPhone 6 parts not too long ago. But it turns out that, on its road to what appears to be inevitable doom, HTC is trying one more thing that nobody else has: The world’s first native blockchain phone. What’s even stranger about the HTC Exodus is that the phone did not get any teasers or leaks. Instead, HTC’s Phil Chen quietly dropped the news on Medium.
HTC has been struggling for many moons now, when it comes to selling phones, and many of us thought the mobile division will soon disappear given that Google already bought most of it.
But we’re not quite there yet. And, once again, the phone maker is first at something. HTC made the first Android smartphone in the world and the first Google Nexus handset soon after that. It also created the first Facebook phone in the world, and the company had not one, but two different 4G-ready phones when 4G LTE and Wi-Max technologies debuted a few years ago. It also introduced a dual-lens camera long before it was actually cool to do it. And then it was tapped to make the first Pixel phones in the world.
So in a way, we should not be surprised to see the HTC Exodus arrive out of the blue, a first device of its kind.
Chen said on Medium that he’s returning to HTC to focus on blockchain and cryptocurrencies:
The HTC Exodus is the first native blockchain phone dedicated to bringing end consumers the best decentralized application (DApp) experiences, including a built-in secure hardware enclave, and helping underlying protocols expand their base of dedicated nodes, thus expanding the total blockchain ecosystem.
The Exodus will support various blockchain technologies, including Bitcoin, Lightning Networks, Ethereum, Dfinity, and others.
What’s interesting about the initiative is that Chen wants to seemingly reinvent the mobile experience:
I want to see a world where the end consumers can truly own their data (browsing history, identity, assets, wallets, emails, messaging, etc) without the need for central authorities. There is a lot of work ahead of us, but I believe the mobile hardware layer can contribute significantly to our new decentralized world.
In other words, this device isn’t running Android.
That’s pretty much all we know about the Exodus, for the time being, so we’ll have to wait for HTC to announce more details about this iPhone and Android competitor in the future.
The test -- which coincides with the annual meeting of China's parliament in central Beijing -- underscores a major push by China's leaders to leverage technology to boost security in the country... Wu Fei, chief executive of LLVision, said people should not be worried about privacy concerns because China's authorities were using the equipment for "noble causes", catching suspects and fugitives from the law. "We trust the government," he told Reuters at the company's headquarters in Beijing. This weekend while China's President Xi Jinping is expected to push through a reform allowing him to stay in power indefinitely, Reuters reports that the Chinese goverment is pushing the use of cutting-edge technology "to track and control behavior that goes against the interests of the ruling Communist Party online and in the wider world... A key concern is that blacklists could include a wide range of people stretching from lawyers and artists to political dissidents, charity workers, journalists and rights activists...
"The new technologies range from police robots for crowd control, to drones to monitor border areas, and artificially intelligent systems to track and censor behavior online," Reuters reports, citing one Hong Kong researcher who argues that China now sees internet and communication technologies "as absolutely indispensable tools of social and political control."
A chemical bath and a hot-press can transform wood into a material that is stronger than steel, researchers report. The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings.
“It’s a new class of materials with great potential,” says Li Teng, a mechanics specialist at the University of Maryland in College Park and a co-author of the study published on 7 February in Nature1.
Attempts to strengthen wood go back decades. Some efforts have focused on synthesizing new materials by extracting the nanofibres in cellulose — the hard natural polymer in the tubular cells that funnel water through plant tissue.
Li’s team took a different approach: the researchers focused on modifying the porous structure of natural wood. First, they boiled different wood types, including oak, in a solution of sodium hydroxide and sodium sulfite for seven hours. That treatment left the starchy cellulose mostly intact, but created more hollow space in the wood structure by removing some of the surrounding compounds. These included lignin, a polymer that binds the cellulose.
Then the team pressed the block — like a panini sandwich — at 100 ºC for a day. The result: a wooden plank one-fifth the thickness, but three times the density of natural wood — and 11.5 times stronger. Previous attempts to densify wood have improved the strength by a factor of about three to four2.
Scanning electron microscopy showed that the latest process crushes the cellulose tubes together until they crumple and interlock. “You have all these nanofibres aligned in the growth direction,” says Hu Liangbing, a materials scientist at the University of Maryland at College Park who was part of the team.
To test the toughness of the material, the team fired pellets at it from a ballistic air gun normally used to test the impact resistance of military vehicles. Five layers of the material laminated together — just 3 millimetres thick in total — was able to halt a 46-gram steel projectile travelling at roughly 30 metres per second.
That’s much slower than the several hundred metres per second at which a bullet travels, says Hu, but it is comparable to the speed at which a car might be moving before a collision, making the material possibly suitable for use in vehicles.
A question of strength
Some researchers say they are underwhelmed by the group’s improvements over previous densification methods. Fred Kamke at Oregon State University in Corvallis says that even without removing lignin, other techniques — such as applying higher temperatures, steaming the wood before treatment, and treating it with resins — can achieve most of the reported increase in performance. “These other methods are probably much less expensive than a 7-hour boil in a caustic solution,” he says. In his own tests, 24 layers of densified wood untreated by chemicals was able to halt a 9-millimetre bullet from a handgun.
Michaela Eder, a plant biomechanics researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, Germany, notes that compressing the wood to increase its density should naturally improve its strength — but it was unclear how much the entanglement of the nanofibres contributed. Hu and Li say their team’s simulations suggest that the increase in strength is consistent with the effects of hydrogen bonds forming when the nanofibres tangle.Further evidence, they say, is in previous work4 in which they extracted wooden nanofibres to make paper 40 times stronger and 130 times tougher, but with only a modest increase in density. This suggested the cellulose fibres were bonding to achieve the superior strength, they say.
The latest study also follows work3 published in January in which researchers removed all of the lignin and compressed the material at room temperature — resulting in a threefold increase in strength.
Hu says that his study’s main finding is that removing the right amount of lignin is key to maximizing performance. In his team’s experiments, removing too much of the polymer resulted in less-dense, brittle wood, suggesting that some leftover lignin is helpful in binding the cellulose fibres when they are hot-pressed. The wood was strongest when roughly 45% of the lignin was removed.
“I see a lot of potential in this direction,” says Eder, referring to both papers. “What I like is that they’re trying to make use of the inherent properties of the wood itself. It’s a fantastic material to work on and improve.”
Google and the country’s biggest brick-and-mortar retailers have one main problem in common: Amazon. Now both sides are acting like they are serious about working together to do something about it.
On Thursday, Target and Google announced that they are expanding what was a years-old delivery partnership from a small experiment in a handful of cities to the entire continental U.S.
The expansion will allow Target to become a retail partner in Google’s voice-shopping initiative, which lets owners of the Google Home “smart” speaker order items through voice commands like owners of the Echo can do from Amazon.
Voice commerce was the core of these recent announcements, and it may someday become popular for types of shopping like reordering household staples. But that’s not what is most interesting here to me.
Instead, it’s the promise that Target is also beginning to work with Google “to create innovative digital experiences using ... other cutting-edge technologies to elevate Target’s strength in style areas such as home, apparel and beauty.”
“Target and Google teams are working on ... building experiences that digitally replicate the joy of shopping a Target store to discover stylish and affordable products,” Target’s digital chief Mike McNamara said in a press release.
If I were a betting man, I’d wager that augmented reality will be one of the areas where the two sides will seriously explore a way to work together. A Target spokesperson said it’s too early to provide details on future partnerships between the companies.
One reason for my guess: The use of the phrase “digitally replicate the joy of shopping” above, which sounds like a hint at either augmented or virtual reality.
Another reason: Just this week, at the Shoptalk Europe conference, Google’s director of augmented reality, Greg Jones, pitched retailers in the audience on working together, and made the case why Google and retailers’ interests are aligned.
While nodding to the obvious threat Amazon poses to retailers, Jones admitted that the e-commerce giant is “also a threat to Google, since a lot of people are going to Amazon first when it comes to product search.” There is plenty of data to back that up.
And the tech giant has also worked with Pottery Barn on an augmented-reality app that lets shoppers get a visual idea of what a new piece of furniture will look like in their home. Ikea, Houzz and Wayfair have built similar solutions in their apps.
Jones also told the audience that Google would be building its own augmented-reality apps focused on the retail world. In a brief interview after his presentation, Jones said one goal of this initiative is to give a wide range of shoppers the benefits of AR features without requiring them to download a different app for every retailer they frequent.
To be sure, one voice-shopping or augmented-reality partnership won’t be the difference between thriving or failing in an increasingly Amazon-led world. But a series of smart partnerships over several years between Google and big retailers will give both sides the best chance at fighting back. They sure need each other.
Updated June 16, 2017: We've revised our “upgraded” build to address our original motherboard’s incompatibility with 4K UHD HDR Blu-Ray playback.
Microsoft’s Xbox One X presents an interesting challenge for PC builders. Sure, if you want raw power, nothing beats the PC. But can you put together an Xbox One X equivalent for $500?
At that price point (and outside of that golden window of Black Friday sales and stellar combo/bundle deals on PC components), you're pushing the limits of what’s possible, particularly if you want to completely replicate the same experience Microsoft is promising hardcore console fans. Given today’s high RAM prices, the low availability of certain GPUs, and the dearth of 4K UHD drives, the results don’t come out cleanly in favor of a DIY PC.
Retailers chosen with shipping costs in mind—and the assumption most people have an Amazon Prime account.
Cheap AM3+ motherboards like the ASRock 970 Pro R2.0 lack on-board Wi-Fi, so if you want wireless connectivity, prepare to shell out for either a Wi-Fi adapter or a better motherboard.
The price for this ASRock motherboard is after a $20 mail-in rebate.
See the Build Summary section for notes on availability.
This price is after $20 mail-in rebate.
Build breakdown
When comparing our build to the Xbox One X piece by piece, each platform’s advantages are clear. Our PC has more flexibility and muscle, while the Xbox One X is both highly compact and set in stone.
For the Xbox One X’s CPU, GPU, and memory, Microsoft chose a custom AMD APU that features eight 2.3GHz custom x86 cores, 40 Radeon compute units running at 1,172MHz, and 12GB of GDDR5 memory. AMD doesn’t have an equivalent APU available for DIY build purposes, so I chose to walk the line between the Xbox One X’s specs and recommended specs for a smooth PC gaming experience. In our build is the eight-core 3.3GHz AMD FX-8300, 8GB of DDR3/1600 RAM, and an 8GB Radeon RX 580. (My GPU choice does have one catch, which I’ve noted in the Build Summary below.)
Brad Chacos/IDG
This configuration nets you a (faster) eight-core CPU, enough RAM to avoid bottlenecks in system performance, and a GPU capable of 4K gaming at a minimum of 30 fps on Medium settings. However, some Xbox One X games may end up running more smoothly or with better visual fidelity on console than on this homebrew 4K machine. Unlike with the PC, developers can fine-tune their games for Microsoft’s console through a low-level API.
For storage, Microsoft hasn’t yet shared details on drive speed, type, or interface. All we currently know is what Digital Foundry revealed in its April 2017 preview: The Xbox One X will have a “1TB hard drive with a 50 percent increase in bandwidth.”
Without knowing how Microsoft arrived at that 50 percent figure, we could spend a lot of time speculating on what it means. (Do they mean a shift from SATA II/3Gbps to SATA III/6Gbps? Use of a solid-state hybrid drive? A larger cache?) Instead, I chose to keep this exercise simple and selected a SATA III 7200rpm Western Digital hard disk drive. While it’s possible that the Xbox One X's $500 price tag includes a SSHD, like in its now-discontinued Xbox One Elite model, that raises the price of this build without explicit cause.
Adam Patrick Murray/IDG
The Xbox One X hard drive, as shown at Microsoft’s Xbox showcase at E3 2017.
The final pieces of this build are straightforward. In fact, you can use any reputable 500W power supply (the minimum you’ll need for this build), ATX case, and Blu-Ray drive—the ones listed in our build were chosen for how cheap they were at the time of publication.
Speaking of that Blu-Ray drive, it’s a far step down from the Xbox One X’s 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive. To stay even remotely near a final total of $500, you have to ditch support for playback of 4K UHD discs. So that means you can’t play your collection of 4K UHD movies in HDR on a compatible TV, if you already own one.
As for the operating system, we can’t go as cheap as the Xbox One X’s included variant of Windows 10, but we can get a W10 Home license at a heavy discount. How? By using a trick that Brad Chacos has mentioned to our staff for a while now: Buying a product key through Kinguin. It works, but be sure to get the Buyer Protection—the site functions like an eBay for software, and that insurance will protect you from shady sellers.
Build summary
As mentioned above, we wanted to replicate both the functionality and the price of the Xbox One X as closely as possible. You can’t do an exact 1:1 duplicate, thanks to a mix of Microsoft’s custom hardware design and slow release of specs, but this build is a fairly decent compromise between Xbox One X’s main features and the cost of PC components. This rig should play games in 4K at a minimum of 30 fps on a Medium graphics setting, support HDR, and play optical discs.
However, it’s more expensive than an Xbox One X by $152 (or more, if you’re bad about filing mail-in rebates). It lacks support for 4K UHD Blu-Ray discs. It uses a GPU that’s extremely difficult to find right now, so currently you’d have to pay more for a used RX 580 or buy a graphics card with less memory (Nvidia’s 6GB GTX 1060 instead of a 8GB Radeon RX 580). It doesn’t have built-in Wi-Fi support. And it’s not nearly as compact or small.
Build #2: The upgraded 4K/30-fps gaming PC
Our second build swaps out the standard Blu-Ray drive for a 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive—and changes the CPU and motherboard configuration as well.
Retailers chosen with shipping costs in mind—and the assumption most people have an Amazon Prime account.
The price for this ASRock motherboard is after $10 mail-in rebate.
See the Build Summary section for notes on availability.
This price is after $20 mail-in rebate.
Build breakdown
For the most part, this build shares the same approach as our first one. The key difference is the addition of Pioneer’s 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive to closely match what the Xbox One X has.
That 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive makes this build quite a bit more expensive than an Xbox One X. The BDR-211UBK itself is $130, and its highly restrictive system requirements also require a more expensive CPU and motherboard. The cheapest compatible processor is a $187 Kaby Lake Core i5-7400, and since only a few motherboards support the draconian DRM specifications for 4K UHD Blu-ray disc playback, the lowest-cost option is $149.
Pioneer
For the moment, you can’t get around this painful jump in cost. Pioneer has the only options for a 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive currently—and this one we’ve picked is the cheaper of the two.
Build summary
This upgraded rig nails the Xbox One X’s main features: It should run games in 4K at a minimum of 30 fps on a Medium graphics setting, support HDR, and play 4K UHD optical discs.
However, like the first build in this article, it has its downsides. First of all, if you build this PC at this very moment, you’ll have a rough time finding an RX 580. You’ll end up paying more or purchasing a GTX 1060 (which has less memory) instead.
It’s also much more expensive than the Xbox One X. At $944, you could buy the Xbox One X almost twice over.
Final thoughts
For the moment, Microsoft’s created a machine that the DIY PC crowd can’t currently match—not when you try to copy both its feature set and cost at the same time, at least. The 4K UHD Blu-Ray disc drive really throws a wrench into this build challenge, and even without it, the Xbox One X holds its own. This situation might be a first, given how often PC gamers tout benefits that console fans miss out on.
Adam Patrick Murray/IDG
Still, it’s not a complete victory for the Xbox One X. PC gaming doesn’t require an optical drive, after all, so you can enjoy 4K gaming, 4K video content, and HDR through digital downloads. (The RX 580 will handle all that just fine.) That already drops the cost of the cheaper build we priced out.
Beyond that, these builds could change the closer we get to the Xbox One X’s launch date. When AMD’s Ryzen 3 line launches, it might offer even better CPU performance for the same price as the FX-8300. Prices might come down for RAM and Pioneer’s 4K UHD Blu-Ray drive. Availability for the RX 580 may increase again. And of course, the holiday shopping season should yield some sweet deals on at least some of these build components. By November 7th, the Xbox One X may be far easier to reproduce as a punchy $500 PC.
Posts
/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/11515649/media_landscape_June_11_2018_01.png)
@chris_writes
Share
Tweet:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/57122301/Bezos_Jeff.0.jpg)
