Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 02/21 - Libra Gets A (Shopify) Win!

Episode Date: February 21, 2020

Shopify joins the Libra Association, Facebook will pay you for your data in one specific instance, Google is cutting down on apps using background location, more Coronavirus cancellations and the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.co Podcorn.com (promocode: "ride" at checkout) Links: Shopify joins Facebook's cryptocurrency Libra Association (TechCrunch) Google Resists Demands From States in Digital-Ad Probe (WSJ) Facebook will now pay you for your voice recordings (The Verge) Google is cracking down on Android apps that track your location in the background (The Verge) PlayStation and Facebook cancel GDC appearances citing coronavirus concerns (GamesIndustry.biz)  Weekend Longreads: Did the Early Internet Activists Blow It? (Slate) Wikipedia Is the Last Best Place on the Internet (Wired) How the BBC’s Netflix-killing plan was snuffed by myopic regulation (WiredUK) Could micro-credentials compete with traditional degrees? (BBC) Debt is Coming (AlexDanco.com) The New Business of AI (and How It’s Different From Traditional Software) (A16Z) Aircraft, Big and Small, Are Changing Our Relationship With Flight (NYTimes) Classified Ad info: Email: [e-mail] 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 Tech Meme Right Home for Friday, February 21st, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Shopify joins the Libra Association.

Facebook will pay you for your data in one specific case. Google is cutting down on apps using background location, more coronavirus cancellations, and the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Shopify has announced that it will be joining the Libra Association, ponying up the $10 million entry fee. as is required, but also agreeing to operate a node that will process transactions for Facebook's stable coin. Of course, this is very good news for Libra, after eBay, Visa, Stripe, MasterCard,

a ton of folks abandoned the crypto collective recently. If you're familiar with Shopify's strategy of basically being the rebel alliance to Amazon's Galactic Empire in terms of e-commerce, this makes a ton of sense, quoting TechCrunch. If Libra manages to assuage international regulators' concerns, which are currently blocking its rollout, Shopify could gain a way to process transactions without paying credit card fees. Libre is designed to move between wallets with zero or nearly zero fee. That could save money for Shopify and the one million merchants running online shops on its platform. Shopify stressed that bringing merchants reduced fees and bringing commerce opportunities to developing nations as reasons it's joining the Libre Association.

quote, much of the world's financial infrastructure was not built to handle the scale and needs of Internet commerce, Shopify writes, end quote. By operating as a validator node, Shopify also gets one vote on the Libra Association Council and can earn dividends from the interest earned by Libra's reserves. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Google might be resisting efforts to surrender emails, texts and other documents sought by state investigators probing alleged anti-competitive behavior surrounding Google's digital ad practices. Google says, it doesn't like the way the state investigation is being run. Quote, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who is leading the

investigation by 48 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and Guam, said the company's actions suggested it is withholding information that could be damaging. Quote, every indication right now is they don't believe that they're clean because they don't. don't act in any way like they are, Mr. Paxson said in an interview. A Google spokeswoman said, the company has cooperated with the probe and that such discussions over access to information are common during investigations. She also raised concerns that the Texas-led investigation has been advised by outside business consultants who could potentially share confidential information from Google with rival companies. Quote, to date, Texas has requested and we have provided

over 100,000 pages of information, the spokeswoman said, but we're also concerned that. We're also concerned with the irregular way this investigation is proceeding, including unusual arrangements with advisors who work with our competitors and vocal complaints, end quote. Interesting tweet from Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, quote, text messages and chats and emails are not the sort of documents that contain trade secrets about Google's proprietary algorithms. They are the sort of documents that show intent, motivation, and schemes. And Ken Paxton is. And Ken Paxton is. right to push for them, end quote. Robert Stevens snarked, quote,

To be fair, Google has at least 12 to 15 messaging apps, end quote. Now see, maybe this is how folks should have been doing it all along. Facebook says it will pay users up to $5 for voice recordings via its viewpoints app in order to improve its speech recognition tech. And the recordings will not be tied to user profiles. quote, Facebook will let you make voice recordings as part of a new program called pronunciations in its Viewpoints Market Research app. If you qualify to be part of the program, Facebook says you'll be able to record the phrase

Hey Portal, followed by the first name of a friend from your friends list. You'll be able to do this with the names of up to 10 friends, and you have to record each statement twice. Facebook won't be paying much for your recordings, though. If you complete one set of recordings, you get 200 points in the viewpoints app, and you can't cash out in the viewpoints app until you earn at least 1,000. points. That only translates to a $5 reward via PayPal. However, Facebook says users may be offered the opportunity to make up to five sets of recordings, so there is the potential to meet that

thousand point goal and get paid, end quote. Yeah, it's not much, but, you know, actually paying us for using our data instead of just taking it without even asking. And Facebook is the first company to do this. What a world. Google says that beginning August 3rd, all new Google Play apps that access background location will need to pass review from Google. And on November 3rd of this year, that new rule will expand to all existing apps, not just new ones, quoting the verge. Google says that this review process will look at whether an app's core functionality actually justifies this background location access. A social networking app that lets users opt in to continuously sharing their location with friends would be okay. Google says, however, it would be

harder to justify this for a store locator app, since this would work just as well if it only got location access while the app is in use. Clearly informing the user will help an app's chances of getting approved, Google Ads. The changes were announced as part of a wider crackdown on location tracking in Android 11, which follows in iOS 13's footsteps by letting you grant sensitive permissions on a one-time basis. Apple's operating system also offers reminders that apps are tracking your location in the background. However, these policies seemingly don't apply to some of Apple's own apps like Find My in a move that's been criticized by some developers. In contrast, Google says its policies will apply to its own apps, which is reassuring

given the company's less than perfect approach to location tracking in the past, end quote. And one more big conference looks to be in trouble. Both Sony and Facebook say they will not be attending the game developers conference this year due to coronavirus concerns. Facebook at least says it will be making its expected Oculus announcements online. Quoting games industry.biz. PlayStation has already pulled its planned appearance at Pax East next week, where it was expected to show playable code of the Last of Us 2. China-based exhibitors have also had to either cancel their presence at GDC

or send North American staff to run their booths. GDC said last week that this has impacted around 10 of the 550 companies participating at the show. Like most event organizers, GDC are following government guidelines and protocols around the situation. It said that it is enhancing its sanitation procedures, including adding more hand sanitizer stations, using disinfecting electrostatic sprayers in high traffic areas and cleaning the facilities more frequently. GDC organizer UBM is also working with the San Francisco Travel Association to ensure hotels are similarly expanding their hygiene protocols, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, Slate offers a provocative question, did the early internet activists actually blow it? Mike Godwin of Godwin's law looks at his own efforts,

a career's worth of time spent in the activism space and asks, did they blow it? What did they miss? What did they not anticipate that the future actually brought to pass? Quote, the story goes that we were so short-sighted in our focus on things like, like internet free speech and digital privacy, that we overlooked a whole spectrum of long-term threats posed by digital technologies, the companies that sell them, and the governments that deploy them. This perspective suggests that the internet freedom my colleagues and I champion has instead chained us all by corrupting democracy and poisoning relationships. It's interesting to hear how Godwin's own views have evolved apparently over the years.

In a similar vein, Wired says that Wikipedia is the last best place on the internet, the one place where the dream of the 90s is still mostly alive. Quote, in an era when Silicon Valley's promises look less gilded than before, Wikipedia shines by comparison. It is the only not-for-profit site in the top 10 and one of only a handful in the top 100. It does not plaster itself with advertising, intrude on privacy, or provide a breeding ground for neo-Nazi trolling.

Like, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it broadcasts user-generated content. Unlike them, it makes its product D-Trofencerated. personified, collaborative, and for the general good. More than an encyclopedia. Wikipedia has become a community, a library, a constitution, an experiment, a political manifesto. The closest thing there is to an online public square. It is one of the few remaining places that retains the faintly utopian glow of the early World Wide Web, a free encyclopedia encompassing the whole of humanity's knowledge, written almost entirely by unpaid volunteers. Can you believe that was the one that worked, end quote.

And Wired UK has a story that I had never heard before. Did you know the BBC almost launched a streaming competitor to Netflix back in 2008? It came really tantalizingly close, too, until myopic regulations scupered the project. When the broadcaster set up kangaroo, which was the code name for this project, with Highfield as its CEO, there was significant excitement. Internally, the BBC began developing the project in earnest using the basis of the I-player infrastructure, but scaling it up. Quote, we'd taken all the learnings from the eye player, says Highfield. We had built a pretty impressive user interface and entire system. The team Highfield assembled had moved into its own offices on Houston Road in London and

built the product with the help of a team of 40 to 50 contractors. They were testing the final product and clearing the final rights for content to be broadcast on Kangaroo. quote, it was pretty much ready to go when they shut us down, he says, end quote. And next from the BBC, ironically, could microcredentials soon start competing with traditional degrees? Developers are familiar with, you know, things like certifications for specific skill sets as opposed to overall degrees. Quote, while higher education and human resources experts all have slightly different interpretations of what they are, many agree that the concept has emerged in response to the skills gap caused by new technologies. Essentially, microcredentials are bite-sized chunks of education, whether an online course,

boot camp certificate, or apprenticeship from a traditional university, specialty provider or online learning platform like Coursera, edX, or Udacity. Many individuals already use microcredentials to broaden their skill sets. Still, some have suggested that in the future a prospective employee might be able to stack these credentials together in place of a university degree. The idea is that it would be more accessible and provide a more affordable, perhaps more targeted, path into employment, end quote.

Next, a piece that I actually read a while ago but forgot to include last week, it's called Debt is Coming. It's by Alex Danko, and I really want you to read this whole thing. It's absolutely mind-altering, if you care about VC and startup funding in that whole process.

in essence, you know how everyone is chasing our annual recurring revenue? What does that mean? Well, it means throwing off regular reliable cash, even early on in a startup's life cycle. What can you do in a situation like that? Well, you could package that cash. You could raise debt with it. When you acquire some customers and they start yielding revenue, that behavior sounds an awful lot like buying a fixed income instrument. And there is a lot of sophistication around how to value those cash flows. In some sense, what we've seen over the last decade is that software enables a whole new business model, recurring revenue, which is both good for customers and is good for investors. It's good for investors because it becomes more predictable in the sense that it starts to look more like a fixed income yielding asset and thus more amenable to traditional financial techniques and thus potentially in scope for a wider set of investors, end quote. So imagine raising capital without having a give away equity.

Now, there's all sorts of dangers with going the debt route for startups, as Alex himself anticipates, and the VCs are super skeptical about all this, of course. But I tend to agree with Alex. Some form of this, for some specific cases at least, is probably inevitable. And another one of those change how you look at things, essays from Andresen Horowitz. As AI becomes a new business model in its own right, how does it compare, as a business to traditional software as we've understood it for decades, or at least compared to SaaS companies as we've understood them for the last decade. Well, the comparison is maybe not good,

according to Martin Casado and Matt Bornstein, quote, we are huge believers in the power of AI to transform business. We've put our money behind that thesis, and we will continue to invest heavily in both applied AI companies and AI infrastructure. However, we have noticed in many cases that AI companies simply don't have the same economic construction as software businesses. At times, they can even look more like traditional services companies. In particular, many AI companies have lower gross margins due to heavy cloud infrastructure usage and ongoing human support, scaling challenges due to the thorny problems of edge cases, weaker defensive modes due to the commoditization of AI models and challenges with data network effects.

anecdotally, we have seen a surprisingly consistent pattern in the financial data of AI companies, with gross margins often in the 50 to 60% range, well below the 60 to 80% plus benchmark for comparable SaaS businesses. Early stage private capital can hide these inefficiencies in the short term, especially as some investors push for growth over profitability. It's not clear, though, that any amount of long-term product or go-to-market optimization can completely solve the issue, end quote. And finally, from the New York Times, delivery by drones, robo-hillicopter taxis, even the return of supersonic flights, the skies are on the cusp of becoming super-crowded. And figuring out how that's going to work is currently a big unknown. Quote, there's excitement about those developments and thorny policy discussions, said Melinda Pegliorello,

senior director of environmental affairs for the Industry Group Airports Council International. Aside from Jetson's like, look at that cool technology, there are policy discussions that have to be had, end quote. That is easier said than done. Even those with a financial stake in these emerging technologies are not sure how everything will play out, end quote. A hallmark of a lot of science fiction for decades has been imagining the skies of the future filled with vehicles as jam-packed and maybe also traffic jammed as our roads currently are. well, we're about to get what we dreamed of, so we're also about to find out if this is what we really wanted after all. That's all for today and for this week, but guess what? Two bonus episodes coming at you this weekend.

On Saturday, we'll do our somewhat regular check-in on the world of Elon Musk with Rob Mauer with the Tesla Daily podcast. Tesla has had quite the month, if you've not been paying attention. And Sunday, I'm excited about this one. we'll be talking to the dean of Stanford University's medical school about his prescription for how tech and startups can disrupt medical care in a good way. Enjoy those. And don't forget, of course, to check out our new gaming ride home podcast. And when you do so, mash that subscribe button. It's a great show. Talk to you on Monday. Are you a visionary data scientist? Are you interested in joining a startup at the co-founder level? It would be a new.

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