Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/04 – Disney+ Now With Ads!

Episode Date: March 4, 2022

Twitter’s return to the office is a real covid era milestone. Ok, how about Disney+ but with ads? Is crypto usage in Russia actually falling? Something something, wasn’t this the original use case for crypto? Are NFT prices falling? And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Links: Twitter to reopen offices March 15, though remote work remains an option (CNBC) Disney+ to launch cheaper ad-supported tier later this year (CNBC) Ethereum Companies Suddenly Ban Users In Certain Countries (Motherboard) SpaceX sent Starlink internet terminals to Ukraine. They could paint a ‘giant target’ on users’ backs, experts say (CNN Business) NFT Mania Show Signs of Cooling as Average Price and Sales Decline (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: How shunning Russia could offer the U.S. tech giants an easy win (Politico) Tech Companies Are Reopening Their Offices, but Tech Work Has Changed Forever (WSJ) The Role Of Turkish Drones In Ukraine's War (NDTV) These women are staking their claim to Web3 and the metaverse (Fast Company) The ‘Incredible Treasure Chest’ of Homestar Runner (Vulture) 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, March 4th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Twitter's return to the office is a real COVID-era milestone. Okay, how about Disney Plus?

But with ads. Is crypto usage in Russia actually falling? Something, something wasn't that the original use case for crypto? Our NFT prices falling as well and, of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Twitter was the first tech company to shut down offices. when COVID struck, and now Twitter has officially announced it will reopen its offices on March 15th. CEO Parag Agarwal touted the advantages of returning for the culture while honoring previous CEO Jack Dorsey's work from home forever, promise, at least for now, quoting CNBC.

It's been almost two years since we closed our offices and travel, and I'm excited to announce that we're ready to fully open up business travel and all our offices around the world. Agrawal wrote in a note that he posted to Twitter on Wednesday. Business travel is back effective immediately, and office openings will start on March 15, end quote. Agrawal, who was promoted to CEO of the San Francisco-based company in November, is taking a slightly different approach than Jack Dorsey, his predecessor and Twitter co-founder. Dorsey told employees in the early days of the pandemic two years ago that they could work remotely forever if they wanted to. Agriwal said he'll still honor that policy, but he warned that, quote, distributed working will be much, much harder, and said, quote, there will be a lot of challenges. The decision about where you work, whether you feel

safe traveling for business, and what events you attend should be yours, Agrawal wrote. Agrawal touted the advantages of having employees together in the same physical space, where they can experience the company culture and said office visits, meetings, and events will, quote, bring that culture to life in such a powerful way, end quote. Reading between the lines there, I think this is the stance that we can expect most companies in tech will take, at least going forward in the near term. Yeah, keep working from home. It's fine. We're cool with it. For now, but are you sure you don't want to come back to the office? Come on. Come back to the office. It'll be great. Look at what you're missing out on. This is super interesting. Disney has announced a new ad-supported tier

for Disney Plus, which will launch later this year, though they didn't specify the date in the U.S. and will expand internationally in 2023, quoting CNBC. The company said in a press release that the new offering would be a building block in achieving its goal of reaching 230 million to 260 million Disney-plus subscribers by 2024. Adding an advertising-supported tier will allow Disney to boost average revenue per user, a metric that currently trails most rivals. Comcast's chief executive officer Brian Roberts said last quarter, NBC Universal's Peacock had ARPU of nearly $10 per month per user,

driven largely by advertising. The average revenue per user per month for Disney Plus in the U.S. and Canada was $6.68. last quarter. WarnerMedia's HBO Max, Paramount Glob's Paramount Plus and Discovery's Discovery Plus are among the streaming services that already offer advertising-supported streaming options. Hulu, majority owned by Disney, also already offers an ad-supported product for $6.99 per month compared with its ad-free service priced at $12.99 per month. Disney is streamlining back-end technology to enable selling advertising on all of its streaming products,

according to a person familiar with the matter, end quote. War News rundown for the day. Google has stopped selling online advertising in Russia, including on search, YouTube, and outside publishing platforms following similar moves recently by Twitter and Snap. CEO Brian Chesky says Airbnb is suspending all operations in Russia and Belarus, but apparently that thing people have been doing where they book Airbnbs in Ukraine without ever intending to show up as a way to get everyday people in Ukraine money is apparently, it seems, still going to continue. Microsoft has suspended all new

sales of its products and services in Russia, saying it is working with the U.S. EU and UK to comply with sanctions on Russia. OpenC confirms that it is banning users in order to comply with U.S. sanctions after some users with Iran-based IP addresses say their accounts and NFTs have been deleted. Quoting motherboard. Metamask and Infura, two core elements of the Ethereum ecosystem, including NFTs, have stopped serving users in, quote, certain jurisdictions due to legal compliance, according to a Metamask page that was updated on Thursday. Metamask is the most popular crypto wallet for Ethereum users, including NFT traders. It is owned by the same parent company as Infura, which is a centralized API that feeds Metamask data from the Ethereum blockchain.

The Metamask blog post appeared to place the blame for the blockchain. The Metamask blog post appeared to place the blame for the block on certain users on infura. As for which countries are affected by the ban, reports began flooding through social media on Thursday morning that users in Venezuela were no longer able to use Meta Mask. Motherboard downloaded Metamask and set it up from scratch while using a VPN routing through Venezuela and experienced no interruption, although we stopped short of actually sending a transaction. There are also reports on social media of users from Iran being blocked on OpenC, end quote. Obviously, that's not Russia-related. yet, but I figured it might be soon. According to chain alias, rubble denominated crypto activity

was just $34.1 million on March 3rd, down from $70.7 million on February 24, and the all-time record of $158 million on May 20, 2021. Again, the question here is, you know, your country becoming an international pariah, your national currency, going in the toilet, being worth essentially toilet paper. Isn't this the perfect use case as originally designed for crypto? And yet in practice, outside of Russia, Apple Maps and weather apps now display Crimea as part of Ukraine. After displaying the region as not part of any country starting in 2019, ICANN has rejected Ukraine's request to cut Russia off from the global internet, saying the proposal is need. either technically feasible nor within its mission. And experts are warning that Russia can use

satellite signals to geolocate and target Starlink users in Ukraine. Elon Musk says, quote, the probability of being targeted is high. Quoting CNN. If an adversary has a specialized plane aloft, it can detect a satellite signal and home in on it. Nicholas Weaver, a security researcher at the University of California at Berkeley, said via email, it isn't necessarily easy, but the Russians have a lot of practice on tracking various signal emitters in Syria and responding. Starlink may work for the moment, but anyone setting a Starlink dish up in Ukraine needs to consider it as a potential target, end quote. In short, quote, it may be useful, but for safety's sake you don't want to set it, or really any distinctive emitter, up in Ukraine anywhere close to where you would not want a Russian bomb dropping,

Weaver said. Shortly after this story was originally published, Elon Musk also weighed in on Twitter saying, quote, important warning, Starlink is the only non-Russian communication system still working in some parts of Ukraine, so probability of being targeted is high. Please use with caution. He went on to advise users in Ukraine to, quote, turn on Starlink only when needed and place antenna as far away from people as possible, and to quote, place light camouflage over antenna to avoid visual detection, end quote. According to non-fundgible, the average NFT selling price has declined to around $2,000 after an all-time high of $6.9,000 back on January 2nd, with a 40% drop just since Russia attacked Ukraine. Hard to say if this is war-related or just a general cooling off in the

NFT market, quoting Bloomberg. The average selling price of a non-fungible token has declined to under $2,000 compared with an all-time high of almost $6,900 on January 2nd, according to industry data tracker non-fundable. The daily total total. sales average was about $26.2 million on March 3rd, the data show. The tally was $160.2 million on January 31st. Since February 24, when Russia attacked Ukraine, the average selling price has dropped about 30%. What I would say is the last week or so has seen a significant decline, perhaps as much as 40 percent, in floor prices for the most desirable NFTs, said Aaron Brown, a crypto investor who writes for Bloomberg opinion. Another possible contributor to the decline is the likelihood

of increased regulation. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is scrutinizing creators of NFTs and the marketplaces where they trade to determine if some of the assets run afoul of the agency's rules. Bloomberg reported Wednesday. Sales of some of the most popular brands are falling fast. NBA top shots are down 26% in the past week, while Axi Infinities are down 15% according to data tracker DAPR radar. While those flagship NFT sales are off, the decline isn't across the board. Sales of Board Ape Yacht Club NFT are up 59% in the past seven days, while Cryptopunk sales are up 118% DAP radar data show. Many NFT marketplaces have experienced trading volume declines.

OpenCase trading volume is down 30% in the last seven days per DAP radar. Rival platform Lux Rare's volume is down 16%. Even popular game Axi Infinity's volume is down 21% per DAP radar. Trading volumes are down in general, but the demand measured by the number of unique traders and sales count is increasing. said Pedro Herrera, senior analyst at DAPR radar. So while we're seeing less volume, there's more activity, even though Ukraine's conflict is definitely driving away the attention from trading, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, with all these companies stopping business

in Russia, what might that do to their bottom line? Well, for the tech industry, at least, according to Politico, not that much. Quote, Apple, Google, meta, and Netflix combined, would lose between one to two percent of their multi-billion dollar revenues if they were to remove all of their services from Russia, according to an analyst estimate. Amazon's presence in Russia involves limited use of its cloud services. Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon are all facing intense bipartisan backlash in Washington as lawmakers scrutinize their market dominance and role in spreading disinformation worldwide. Taking action on Russia could help them to gin up some goodwill with the policymakers who have criticized them. There are political points to

be one for the tech companies if they demonstrate that they take their human rights obligations, seriously, said Stephen Fettlstein, a senior fellow focused on democracy and technology at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Standing firm against Russia and being public about their pushback is important to them and outweighs whatever small revenue they derive from the Russian market, end quote. And with tech companies throwing the doors back open to their offices, as we've seen this week, what can returning employees expect? The Wall Street Journal, takes a look at how office work for tech companies might be slightly different now. Quote, enter asynchronous work, where employees get to set their hours in part by what schedule best suits their lives.

Slack has core hours where team members are supposed to be available to jump on a call or huddle with their teams. Slack parent Salesforce encourages employees to set their Slack status to focus time when they're handling individual work or connecting to signal their availability to collaborate. Salesforce recently tried its first async week, where 20,000 of its nearly 70,000 employees canceled routine meetings to make more time for solo work, said Carolyn Gus, a spokeswoman. Of those who participated in the experimented, 72% said it made them more productive and 70% reported it made them less stressed. Two more async weeks are planned for this year. Twitter is adopting a similar approach where teams come up with common hours that work for them to collaborate. It also recently experimented with a company-wide focus week, where the majority of meetings were canceled and people could catch up on things like backlogged assignments, end quote. Then it doesn't seem like drones have had that much of an impact on the Ukraine war so far, though, you know, early days, fog of war, all of that. It turns out that Turkey is the world leader in developing cheap weaponized drones that military experts are calling the new AK-47, quoting NDTV. Several conflicts in recent years have offered a shop window for Turkey's drones. They were a determining

factor in Nagorno Karabakh in November 2020, giving Azerbaijan's forces the edge over Armenia in the disputed region. In Libya, a year earlier, they were crucial to repelling a protracted offensive by rebel commander General Khalifa Haftar against the government in Tripoli. Turkey has also deployed drones against Kurdish militants and government forces in Syria, the latter backed by Russia. Hardy, reliable, competitive, gushes a Western competitor speaking on condition of anonymity. Turkey has reinvented the Kalevian. Turkey has reinvented the Volitionikov of the 21st century, they added, a reference to the AK-47 rifle created by the Soviet Union that flooded war zones around the world due to its ease of use and cheap price tag. The TB2 is 6.5 meters long and half the weight of its U.S. counterpart, the Reaper, carrying four laser-guided munitions.

Its maker Bekar says it can fly for 27 hours at up to 220 kilometers per hour and is operational between 18,000 and 25,000 feet, end quote. Fast Company takes a look at something that I've noticed too. Quote, right now, many of the people showing the most excitement about Web 3 are the tech bro types you probably envision, but there's also a cadre of women taking up their pickaxes and heaving them into the fertile new internet. They're creating incentives to draw more women to Web 3 so they can have a say in the next web. Much of the current effort to bring women onto futuristic internet platforms is as content creators rather than engineers of the underlying technology. Web 3 is in some ways like the early 1990 iteration of the web, free and open to whomever is willing to develop in it. The goal of these various efforts to attract

women to these new platforms is to ensure that they have the same opportunity to capitalize as men do. It's becoming clear that in the next version of the online world, having technical skill may be less important than being able to attract a band of devotees. I'm a big proponent of saying, in the metaverse, we're all world builders. Now is your time to build, said tech futurist Kathy Hackle, while giving women a chance to build out the next big internet space is undoubtedly important. There is a question as to whether this will necessarily lead to a safer and more inclusive internet for all. Much of that will depend on who controls the technology that the content is built on top of, end quote. And finally today, I know I've shared Strongbad before,

but from Vulture and from comedian Krister Johnson, another in Commium to the early 2000s pioneering web comedy that was Homestar Runner. Quote, I still don't understand why it or those characters or those guys didn't become Titans of Industry. In my head, it should have been paired with South Park on Comedy Central for 15 seasons. I did a little research, and they seemed to have resisted all that, and I don't know why. The sense that I got was they didn't really have an interest in turning it into a linear story or a TV show. I can't fault them for their choice. That's what they wanted, and it allowed them to keep doing it exactly the way they wanted. But it just feels like this crazy thing that showed up, feeling fully formed, and then kind of disappeared.

Life moved on. It just feels weird. Like a wild time capsule of the time when I was trying to figure out how to do something that I didn't know how to do. And I had discovered these people who have found a way to do exactly what I wanted to do and on their own terms. So it was both depressing and kind of exhilarating, end quote. Here's a tiny little sample of Homestar humor. I got the email. You got the email. I got the email. You got the email. You got the email. You got the email. Earth Plus, Y-76P. All you ate... What is this? Did the quadratic formula explode?

I see a strong bu in there, but it's getting eaten by some Linux or something. Wait a minute. Is this one of those virus emails? Like the kind that moms and offshore casinos send you? I'll take care of this. What? I said deleted. No, wise guy, eh? Maybe I should introduce you to my main man, Edgar. All right, Edgar. Now drop a train on him.

That is not a small number. That is a big number. What am I going to do? Computer over. Virus equals very yes. That's not a good prize. Boom. And the compi.

Just peed my... A bunch of important housekeeping. First up, I know you're going to get... at least one bonus episode this weekend. It's going to be a portfolio profile episode dropping tomorrow on Saturday. And this is one that I'm super excited about. This is the exact sort of episode that I hope these portfolio profile episodes will become. It's a chat with one of our portfolio companies that is in the current batch at Y Combinator. And beyond just telling you about what they're working on, they're very open and honest about what it's like to be such an early

stage company. They go into mistakes they've made, challenges they've faced. They talk about how they've pivoted even in the months since we invested in them just in order to find product market fit. This is how I conceived of these episodes originally as learning and inspiring episodes about what it's really like to be a startup in real time. How cool would it be to watch a company evolve over the years? We're going to have the privilege to see that up close with this company, Round, round.io. And also, in the second half of the episode, the team goes really deep on what it's really like to go through White Combinator, to give you advice on how to apply and get in.

Hopefully very inspirational to those of you out there right now building. And there might be a second bonus episode on Sunday as well. I'm not sure yet. It would be a regular bonus episode because Chris Messina is here in New York City this weekend, so we're going to do another episode where we sit down in person at my kitchen table and mix it up. We're going to be joined by the great Charlie O'Donnell of Brooklyn Bridge Ventures as well. So given that we might talk about some timely stuff from this week, I might not want to hold that for a week before releasing. We'll see. Keep your eyes peeled to the feed all

weekend. And finally, tomorrow, March 5th, marks the four-year anniversary of this podcast. So I wanted to note that for friggin years. As of this episode, 1,155. total episodes. Seems like yesterday we started. And yet, when I look back at the news we were covering four years ago, seems like a million years ago. As ever, thank you for making me part of your routine every day. This continues to be the best job I've ever had. Four more years, four more years than another four, another four. Who knows? Talk to you on Monday.