Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 01/17 - Jack Dorsey Asked Elon Musk How To Fix Twitter

Episode Date: January 17, 2020

No ads in WhatsApp… for now. We have all the details on the Peacock streaming service. The other streaming wars are taking their toll on Twitch. Jack Dorsey asked Elon Musk how to fix Twitter. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.co Links: Facebook Backs Off Controversial Plan to Sell Ads in WhatsApp (WSJ) NBC’s Peacock streaming service will launch on July 15th with three different price tiers (The Verge) Twitch's loss of top streamers impacts hours watched and streamed in Q4 2019, report says (TechCrunch) Huawei P40 Pro leak shows off five-camera bump and ceramic body (The Verge) Jack Dorsey Asks Elon Musk How to Fix Twitter (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How Mormons Built the Next Silicon Valley While No One Was Looking (Marker) All the money in the world couldn’t make Kinect happen (Polygon) The Promise of Cloud-Native Games (A16Z/Jonathan Lai) The Metaverse: What It Is, Where to Find it, Who Will Build It, and Fortnite (MatthewBall.vc) Islamic fintechs are on the rise — but how viable is this tailored offering? (Sifted) The Big Question Now Facing Apple (Above Avalon) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the TechMeme right home for Friday, January 17th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. No ads in WhatsApp for now. We have all the details on the Peacock Streaming Service finally. The other streaming wars are taking their toll on Twitch. Jack Dorsey asked Elon Musk how to fix Twitter and of course the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Facebook has put off its efforts to build ads in technology. to WhatsApp. Apparently, Facebook is now going to focus instead on B2C communications inside WhatsApp,

but they still maybe will want to sell ads in WhatsApp's status at some point. Quote, WhatsApp in recent months, disbanded a team that had been established to find the best ways to integrate ads into the service, according to people familiar with the matter. The team's work was then deleted from WhatsApp's code, the people said. Facebook's push to sell ads in WhatsApp was a big factor in the decisions by Jan Kohn and Brian Acton, who created the messaging service to resign from the company leaving on the table a combined $1.3 billion in deferred compensation, the Wall Street Journal previously reported, end quote. The piece does go on to note that ads could still come to the status section in the near future.

But what does it mean to instead focus on business-to-consumer communications exactly? quoting again, in the U.S. and many European countries, WhatsApp is used largely for interpersonal communication, but many users in developing nations, who are the majority of WhatsApp users, have also adapted the platform to commerce and customer service, and the company has sought to accommodate them. In addition to helping businesses respond to simple customer service requests, WhatsApp's tools allow for sorting and responding automatically to customer service queries. They also let businesses display in-app product catalogs. Advertisers on Facebook and Instagram can choose to shuttle users who click or tap on ads in those platforms directly into chats in WhatsApp.

WhatsApp also has said it is testing projects related to payments in India, where the service is hugely popular, end quote. Well, I think we finally have the last of the major players ponying up to the table in the streaming wars sweepstakes. because last night NBC, which of course means really Comcast, held an event at Rockefeller Center to announce the details of its Peacock streaming service. There will be three tiers of Peacock, a free tier with limited programming, and two premium tiers, one with ads and the more expensive one without ads. Quoting Julia Alexander in The Verge. Peacock Free consists of 7,500 hours of programming, including next day access to current seasons of first-year NBC shows, Universal Movies, and curated content such as SNL, Vault, and Family Movie Night. The two premium tiers come in at $4.99 per month with ads and $9.99 per month with no ads. Both of these tiers will include live sports and early access to late night shows.

Peacock Premium will include non-televised Premier League soccer games beginning in August. Comcast and Cox Cable subscribers will get free access to Peacock Premium with ads, or they can just pay $5 per month for an ad-free version. Comcast's Xfinity X1 and Flex customers will get access to Peacock Premium on April 15th. The streaming service will launch nationally on July 15th. This means that for some 20 million households that use Comcast's pay TV service, services, Peacock will be a free service designed to give them a streaming option for some of NBC Universal's most iconic shows, end quote. So a few additional points here. First, Comcast probably really

wants to cut some deals with other cable companies to offer the Peacock services on their systems for free as well. We'll see how that goes. Also, you'll note that the official launch is just in time for the 2020 summer Olympics. So expect the Olympics to be Peacock's version of Baby Yoda, luring people in to give it a try. Peacock viewers will get to watch The Tonight Show and late night with Seth Myers early at 8 p.m. and 9 p.m. In terms of new content, there will be a Battlestar Galactica reboot from Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail, a new saved by the bell, and a new punky Brewster. But we didn't get what I thought would be the one, oh my God, announcement that I was kind of expecting. A friend's

reunion of some form or another, even if it was just like a two-hour special or something like that. I mean, come on. You know that that is being discussed. You know, throw $30 million at each of the cast. This is an absolute no-brainer, I think. Probably inevitably going to happen at some point. And then also note that the office reruns that everyone is expecting will be a big draw will not be showing up on Peacock until 2021 because of various rights issues. So, on the one hand, The pitch here is, it's free, mostly, and for most people, kind of. But it's free for everyone, too, if you can just tolerate the ads. But then, on the other hand, ads.

I think how Comcast slash NBC got to this point is best summed up by Peter Kafka, who tweeted, quote, Comcast's projections for Peacock are quite modest compared to Disney. Think of this more as a way to hedge against declining TV biz while keeping that biz intact for as long as possible. And also, a way to replace what Comcast used to have when it owned a third of Hulu. And also, leverage with YouTube and Facebook, end quote. Quick check in on the other streaming wars, the game streaming wars. A new report says that all of that jockeying to get popular streamers to defect from one platform to another, something that

actually will talk about on this weekend's bonus episode, that has actually had an effect. on the erstwhile leader in the market Twitch, quoting TechCrunch. While the Amazon-owned streaming site is still by far the leader in terms of hours of content both watched and streamed compared with rivals with a market share of 75.1 percent, the number of hours watched on Twitch declined from Q3 to Q4 in 2019 by 9.8%. This resulted in the lowest number of hours watched on the platform, $2.3 billion. Since, Q3, 2018, when it was at $2.28 billion. That being said, Twitch overall is still growing,

with a 12% increase in total hours watched on the platform in 2019 compared to 2018. The high-profile losses are also now impacting the hours streamed on Twitch, the report found. The platform in Q4 2019 saw the lowest number of hours streamed, 82.7 million, since Q2 of 2018, when it had 86 million. Again, though, the trend on a year-over-year basis is still climbing upwards, with a 16.1% increase in total hours streamed in 2019 versus 2018, end quote. But it is interesting to note that the same report notes that YouTube Gaming Live was the only

streaming platform to see increases in hours watched, streamed, and concurrent viewership in Q4 of 2019, with hours watched increasing by 46%. Man, it's been a week for phone leaks, for sure. Renders of Huawei's anticipated P40 Pro appear to show a camera bump with LICA branding that has five lenses at the back and two selfie cameras at the front, quoting the verge. The most prominent design feature revealed in the images is the colossal camera bump that houses five lenses, one of which is a periscope-style telephoto lens. The Lika branding and technical details describe the array as covering 18 to 240-millimeter equivalents,

which between the ultra-white and telephoto should amount to more than 3x zoom reach. It's likely, though, that Huawei is relying on software enhancements to arrive at that figure. On the front of the phone, you can see a notchless screen with a hole punch cut out for two selfie cameras. The power button and volume rocker on the right edge. The top and left sides are essentially blank, and there's a USBC port and speaker on the bottom. No headphone jack, unsurprisingly, end quote. If last year is any indication, you can expect to find out if these rumors are true in March when the official launch of this phone is likely.

Jack Dorsey has asked Elon Musk how he would fix Twitter if he were in charge, and Elon responded by saying essentially, find the bots, kill the bots. The exchange took place at a Twitter off-site meeting that Musk participated in, quoting Bloomberg. Quote, give us some direct feedback, said Dorsey, who spoke to Musk via a video call from a company meeting in Houston. Musk was projected onto a giant screen as thousands of Twitter employees watched the two executives chat. If you were running Twitter, Dorsey continued, what would you do? I think it would be helpful to differentiate between real and fake users, Musk replied, according to a video posted to Twitter by an employee. Is this a real person, or is this

a botnet or some sort of troll army or something like that? Basically, how do you tell if the feedback is real or someone is trying to manipulate the system, or probably real, or probably trying to manipulate the system, Musk continued. What do people actually want? What are people actually upset about versus manipulation of the system by various interest groups? End quote. Of course, Musk has personally had a feud with some interest groups, including a group of Tesla shorts who run Twitter accounts that Musk has accused of being bots in the past, the so-called called Tesla Q folks. Time for the weekend long-rease suggestions.

First up, Marker has a piece up looking about the startup scene in Utah. Sometimes people are surprised that there is a startup scene in Utah. But it turns out, if you didn't know it, that the so-called Silicon Slopes scene actually has a long and storied history. The University of Utah had one of the first four nodes of the internet when it was the ARPANET. basically the computer graphics industry was born in Utah. Evans and Sutherland, the first ever computer graphics company was founded there.

Silicon Graphics, Adobe, WordPerfect, Novell, even Pixar are just a few of the big tech names to have roots in Utah. And actually, I got an in-person introduction to the startup scene there back when I was doing promotional travel for my book. Marker checks in and finds that, just as I found a couple years ago, everything is going again. bang busters, quote, podium is just one of at least a dozen fast-growing early-stage companies clustered in an area called Point of the Mountain, halfway between Salt Lake City and the BYU campus in Provo. That has become the epicenter of the Silicon Slopes Tech Boom. A decade ago, there was nothing but farmland and a state prison here. Today, it's a chaotic scene of road detours, industrial equipment, and cranes throwing up black glass monoliths along I-15.

Out-of-state giants like Adobe, Microsoft, and Amazon have established significant outposts here, and Utah is now producing more jobs than it can fill with in-state talent. In the first three quarters of 2019, companies here attracted $829 million in venture funding. According to data from CB Insights, in 2017, the number of unicorns in Utah put the state behind only California, Massachusetts, and New York, end quote. Next, when I was at CES last week, I was reminded that the last time I had attended the show, I saw the Microsoft keynote, and it was all about Connect. This was the height of Connect fever. Well, earlier this week, Polygon dropped a piece about Connect and why, despite all the hype and promise and all the money in the world, Microsoft just couldn't make Connect happen. and yet, as often with stories like this, Connect does live on in other guises, quote,

Amazon has sold more than 100 million Alexa devices, which use voice recognition to register user commands like the Connect did. New iPhones come with a forward-facing camera that uses depth sensing technology to scan a user's face, allowing it to unlock their phones or access sensitive materials such as passwords. Connect was one of the first mass-produced depth cameras for consumer use. Connect has been used for stroke recovery to translate sign language by NASA to control a robotic arm and in the demilitarized zone between North Korea and South Korea to monitor for objects crossing the border. It might have died in the game industry, but Connect has lived on through other alternative uses, end quote. And every now and then, Andresen Horowitz has one of their folks publish an essay that's a brilliant take on the state of things in one corner of the tech world or another.

Jonathan Lye has a piece up looking at the true promise of cloud native gaming. The logical progression of this trend will be cloud natives, games written specifically for the cloud in which client and server are hosted in the same architecture. This next generation has the potential to yield entirely new gameplay experiences and business models. These native games, exclusive to and solely playable within the cloud, will be the ultimate driver of cloud gaming. The following are just a few ways. cloud native games are likely to revolutionize the entertainment industry, end quote.

The things he goes on to list, among others, he thinks cloud native MMOs will grow like social networks. He thinks click-to-play games will be the new marketing hook for all of gaming. You know, here, play an hour or so for free, that sort of thing. And he thinks that cloud games will enable AI-powered real-time content generation. And you know that. that whenever Matthew Ball writes a new essay, it's required reading for me, at least. How many times have I joked that Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash has been responsible for more VC investments made over the last 25 years than almost any other single thing? Well, Matthew himself got around to reading Snow Crash and asks the question, who is the closest to actually

creating the metaverse described in the book? Read the piece for, at the very least, It will give you a crash course on what the Metaverse concept actually is without having to read the whole book yourself. Then Matthew goes on to rate all of the players chasing the Metaverse dream from Amazon to Google to Oculus to yes, Fortnite. Next, Sifted takes a look at the rising Islamic fintech startup scene. Companies that are trying to help the world's 1.8 billion Muslims go digital with their money while still staying on the right side. of religious law. Quote, Sharia law forbids Muslims from earning or paying interest, engaging in unequal transactions, or supporting unethical investments. Most European financial institutions, therefore, do not cater to halal or permissible trading, savings, insurance, or mortgages,

and brick-and-water Islamic banks like UK-based Al-Rayan have been slow to catch up. The new ecosystem includes Islamic online wealth managers like Wahed and streams of Islamic mobile first banks, including the UK's NIA and Germany's insha. The banks guarantee users that their assets won't be invested in so-called dirty industries, including arms, tobacco, alcohol, betting, porn, or pork, speaking to a wider trend of alternative investment needs, end quote. And finally, over above Avalon, Neil Seibart looks at what he says is the big question facing Apple in 2020. In a way, it's the big question facing every major tech juggernaut this decade. Where will the next billion customers come from? But Neil floated an interesting idea that I

hadn't heard before for Apple. Basically, if Apple can make its devices more durable, then theoretically, they could have more owners per device over the lifetime of the device, and Apple could thus reach customers at lower price points, thereby broadening their user base. Quote, It may be easy to think that Apple can just cut product pricing in order to grab its next billion users. However, the situation ends up being more complicated. Socioeconomic trends will contribute to tens of millions of people moving into Apple's addressable market each year. In addition, relying on the gray market for allowing gently used Apple products to flow to lower price segments is a more effective strategy for Apple. Not only does the gray market reduce the need for Apple to come up with low-price products, lacking in features,

but Apple can also benefit from continued product focus in terms of its supply chain and manufacturing apparatus. By giving Apple devices longer lifespans via more durable hardware and additional years of software updates, devices will be able to have more owners over time. This will have a direct benefit on the gray market for Apple devices as more devices are recirculated and eventually able to reach customers in lower price segments, end quote. Very interesting idea. That's all. all for today, but not quite all for this week, because we have one weekend bonus episode coming at you tomorrow, delving into a corner of the tech universe that I want to know more about this year. Sports Tech. And by the way, it's a holiday weekend here in the U.S., so there will be no show on Monday,

which means I will talk to you again on Tuesday.