Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/05 – Eyes Emoji On Tim Wu Joining The Biden Administration

Episode Date: March 5, 2021

Tim Wu joined the Biden administration and that sound you hear is a big collective gulp from Silicon Valley. A tweet undo button has been unearthed. Turntable.fm has resurfaced. New data suggests the death of silicon valley has been exaggerated. And of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Audible.com/techmeme or text techmeme to 500-500 Links: A Leading Critic of Big Tech Will Join the White House (NYTimes) Here’s what Twitter’s rumored ‘undo send’ feature could look like (The Verge) Turntable.fm is back from the dead — and now there are two (The Verge) Survey finds that the reported exodus of tech companies from San Francisco's Bay Area is 'greatly exaggerated' (Insider) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The problem for Paramount+ (and every other streamer)? Everyone already has Netflix. (Recode) Who Really Writes Twitter’s ‘Trending’ Summaries (OneZero) Blockchain, QR codes and your phone: the race to build vaccine passports (Protocol) How a tiny startup is reinventing the DVR for the cord-cutter era (Fast Company) China’s Tencent Becomes an Investment Powerhouse, Using Deals to Expand Its Empire (WSJ) I have one of the most advanced prosthetic arms in the world — and I hate it (Input) 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 5th, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Tim Wu joined the Biden administration and that sound you hear is a collective gulp coming from Silicon Valley. A tweet undo button has been unearthed. Turntable.fm. has resurfaced. New data suggests the death of Silicon Valley might be slightly exaggerated.

And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. I've said before that Tim Wu has been one of the most influential people in terms of shaping how I think about tech, both its history and its economics and its culture. But beyond that, he's also been known for years now as being a big proponent of various antitrust ideas relating to the tech industry. He literally coined the term net neutrality. So regulation, antitrust, all that stuff has been on his plate for years. And thus, eyebrows are being raised, no doubt, in the highest levels of the tech oligarchy today by the news that Tim Wu is joining the National Economic Council as a special assistant to President Biden for tech and competition policy. Quoting the New York Times.

The appointment of Mr. Wu, 48, who is widely supported by progressive Democrats and anti-monopoly groups, suggests that the administration plans to take on the size and influence of companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, including, including working with Congress on legislation to strengthen antitrust laws. During his campaign, Mr. Biden said he would be open to breaking up tech companies. Mr. Wu has warned about the consequences of too much power in the hands of a few companies and said the nation's economy resembled the gilded age of the late 1800s. Extreme economic concentration yields gross inequality and material suffering, feeding the appetite for nationalistic and extremist leadership. Mr. Wu wrote in his 2018 book, The Curse of Bigness, Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.

Most visible in our daily lives is the great power of the tech platforms, especially Google, Facebook, and Amazon, he added. His role with a focus on competition policy will be a new one in the National Economic Council. Mr. Wu will also focus on competition in labor policy, such as non-compete clauses enforced by companies and concentration in power in agriculture and the drug industry. The job does not require Senate approval. Mr. Wu is best known for advocacy against powerful telecom companies and for coining the term net neutrality, the regulatory philosophy that consumers should get equal access to all content on the internet. More recently, he has turned his attention to the gatekeepers like Facebook, Google, and Amazon that dominate

speech, search, and retail online, end quote. As many have said on Twitter this morning, I think we just got our biggest indication yet about how the new administration might be thinking about tech and antitrust. Some big news broken today by one of your fellow listeners to this very podcast. Jane Mansion Wong, hello Jane, unearthed an undue feature that Twitter is apparently working on. People have long asked Twitter for the ability to edit tweets. This is not that. But it does look like a mechanism for folks to really consider if they want to put that tweet out into the world. In other words, this looks like an undo feature that has sort of a ticking countdown tied to it, quoting the verge. A potential animation

for Twitter's long-rumored undo send feature has been discovered by app researcher Jane Manchin Wong, giving us our best look yet at how it might work. The interface shows Twitter's familiar your tweet with sent dialogue above a new undo button. The undo button doubles as a progress bar, which appears to show you how long you have to undo a tweet before it gets sent. Gmail offers a similar option for emails where it provides a short window to stop messages from being sent after clicking the send button. Undo send has been a rumored part of a paid Twitter subscription tier after it was first mentioned in a user survey last year. It might not be the edit button that Twitter users have been requesting forever and which will probably never happen, but it would

still offer users the ability to quickly stop a tweet from posting if they spot a last second typo or bad take. Jane Mansion Wong is an app researcher who digs through code to find unreleased and unannounced features. Last year, she was among the first to spot Twitter's Birdwatch initiative to allow users to root out misinformation on its service, and she also spotted Twitter's overhaul of its verification system prior to its official announcement, end quote. This probably makes sense in a world where suddenly audio rooms are all the rage. Turntable.fm has relaunched with involvement, from its founder, and also a new site, turntable.org, is expected to launch into beta in April

with a subscription fee, quoting the verge. It's rare that apps come back from the dead, but it seems like that may be what's happening with turntable.fm, a site that lets users create their own radio stations and DJ sets with music they curated before it got shuttered in 2013. Even rarer, it seems like there are two versions involved in the revival. The original turntable.fm site is back up and running with the involvement of its original founder, Billy Chasen. But there's also turntable.org, which will reportedly be launched in beta this April. The two sites seem to be taking different directions. Turntable.org, the new version mentions there will be a subscription fee, perhaps not a bad idea given the fate of the first version, while the original seems to be

largely unchanged from the one that was shut down in 2013. While the original founder has confirmed he's involved in the dot FM version, the dot org version also has OGs working on it. The R-Team section mentions an original Turntable founding member, as well as the artist who designed the original avatars in 2011. The original app and the current Turntable FM lets you create a virtual room, then select what music you want to play for anyone listening. At the moment, the song selection seems to be limited to what's available on YouTube, so you probably won't be able to sneakily slide in your own mixtape. There appears to be a SoundCloud integration that's not yet working. Turntable. FM shut down in 2013 after a drawn-out fight for survival that we watched closely hoping that the app would make it. Every piece of news since then seemed to point to it never coming back, but today the site popped up again asking for a password to gain access.

To get access to the password, the site requests that you send an email including your favorite song. It says it'll let you in if it's a good song, so there go my chances, end quote. And on the whole topic of if Silicon Valley is over, in quotes, here's some interesting data. A new report from Telstra Ventures says that 96.9% of tech startups stayed in the Bay Area in 2020. Of the 3.1% that up and moved, 21% of them moved here to New York, 21% moved to other parts of California, and 12% moved to Texas. quoting the former business insider now, apparently, just known as insider, quote, notably Austin, Texas was not the city with the most significant growth in startups.

Denver, Colorado was at 21% growth. Despite the financial stressors of the pandemic, the survey found that venture capital investment in 2020 was up over 2019 by 4%. And Telstra added, it was, quote, Dallas and Fort Worth that had VC's attention with a 66 percent boost in the number of VC investments made in 2020, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, some analysis from Vox on this concept of the streaming wars and how many seats may or may not be left when the music actually stops.

This kind of runs counter to what we've been hearing, quote, Antenna, a subscription analytics startup says U.S. consumers subscribe to just one and a half streaming services in January of 2021 on average. Two years ago, when streaming services still pretty much meant Netflix and Hulu, that number was at 1.25, which means that even though we've seen a slew of services debut recently, most people still aren't paying for them. And even if they do take out their credit card to sign up, they're likely to stop paying for them after sampling. Antenna, which says it uses data sampled from online bill payment services to assess what people are actually spending money on, has laid out the challenge facing Viacom's CBS and pretty much every other.

streamer pretty clearly in the datasets below. But the easiest way of summing it up may be this way. Just about everyone already has Netflix. And Netflix customers were less likely than other streaming subscribers to pay for anything else, which presumably has something to do with the fact that almost everyone has Netflix. It's the streaming starter package. You get it first, and then maybe think about adding something else, end quote. In other words, the people who are, at least as of right now, willing to subscribe to three or more services, are very much in the minority. Everybody else, including your mother, has Netflix, and that's probably enough for them. The problem will be if the fight for that last seat in our musical chairs analogy is about convincing

someone to drop Netflix in order to give another streamer a try. Next, people on Twitter like to dunk on the so-called Twitter summaries guy, whoever it is that ends up writing those descriptions of Twitter's trending topics. Well, it turns out it's not a guy. It's a team, and it's a team led by Joanna Gary, who spoke to Will Aramis at 1-0. Quote, our really specific role is to make sure people understand what it's about when they see what's trending. We're attempting to, I'm trying to find kind of a polite way of putting it, we're attempting to remove the WTF from the trending tab. We want you to know that Betty White is just having her birthday. We don't want you to think, oh, no, she has died.

Our goal is to give you the gist so you're not spending five minutes looking at the trend, trying to figure out what it even means, end quote. And Mike Murphy at Protocol takes a look at the race to build vaccine passports. If the prognosticators are right, and at least here in the U.S., the supply ramp-up is going so well that hopefully every adult that wants a vaccine can get one by June, the next question will become, well, summer vacations. How can you prove that you have a vaccine in order to get on a plane or go to a a concert or do whatever. Should it be a piece of paper, an app on your phone, QR codes, maybe

something on the blockchain? Mike looks at all these possible solutions, quote, it's entirely possible that as more people start to get vaccinated, vaccine passports start to become the norm. You walk to work, still masked, of course, scan a QR code reader in the lobby and are let in. You go out for lunch and your loyalty card app has a discount for in-store shoppers verifying they're vaccinated. Your concert ticket is also tied to health pass information that you shared earlier in the day with Ticketmaster, but there are more than a few hurdles ahead of the companies rushing to turn these concepts into realities, end quote. Something I learned from this piece is that places like Hawaii are considering requiring visitors from the mainland to have some form of vaccination

passport, so keep that in mind when considering your summer plans. Fast Company has a new spin on rebuilding the cable bundle. What if I told you we need to rebuild the DVR? Quote, in theory, you shouldn't need to record anything when services like Netflix and Amazon Prime make everything available on demand. But now that every big media company has its own streaming service, all that instant gratification has come at a cost. Watching TV now means bouncing between dozens of different apps, each with its own separate menu system, catalog, and watch list. Say what you will about the stodginess of cable. At least it put everything in one place. That's why a tiny company called Fancy Bits, founded by a pair of former GitHub employees,

is bringing the DVR back. The company's $8 per month channels service takes video from a wide range of sources, online cable, channel feeds, live streaming apps, over-the-air broadcasts, and even on-demand services like Netflix, and puts it all into one menu. It does this primarily by letting users create their own personal copies of the content, just like an old-school DVR. In doing so, channels is performing an end run around streaming TV's thornyest problem. While tech titans like Google, Apple, and Amazon are racing to build their own unified TV guides with the blessing of major streaming services, channels is achieving the same goal by ignoring those companies entirely. It's funny, right? Because what we're building towards is something that was sort of built 20 years ago,

says John Maddox, one of Fancy Bits co-founders. Really, we're just trying to make this single place for people to go and watch their TV that everybody is looking for, end quote. Right, I just want a playlist for just the shows that I have in mind to watch, my own personal mental cue, if you will, even if that spans across several different services. Next, the Wall Street Journal takes a look at Tencent, China's largest tech company, and also the one that maybe still has the biggest overlap with U.S. consumers, quote, Tencent is best known for WeChat, its ubiquitous do-everything app in China, and is the world's largest video game company by revenue with hits such as League of Legends and Honor of Kings. Listed in Hong Kong, Tencent's own stock has been driven up by the strong performance of

its core activities as the coronavirus pandemic sped up the adoption of digital services in China. Its market capitalization is now close to $900 billion, making it China's most valuable company. The company has also bet extensively on Chinese and overseas startups in areas such as gaming, social media, entertainment, and electric vehicles. That strategy has paid off handsomely as investors have bid up stocks in fast-growing tech companies and last-growing tech companies and last up initial public offerings. Quote, I half seriously call it China's best venture capital fund, said Robin Zhu, an analyst at Stanford C. Bernstein. His team estimates that Tencent listed and unlisted investments were

worth some $259 billion as of March 2nd, end quote. And finally, in the interest of exploring spaces that most of us might not have experience with, in input magazine, Britt Young takes a look at being a cyborg, the actual reality of having prosthetics from a first-person perspective. And at least from their point of view, there's a lot still to be done. Being a cyborg might be cool right now because of all the G-Wiz media coverage, but actually having a bionic limb is not all it's cracked up to be. Quote, Don't get me wrong. I have been psyched about a new arm too. But the media's coverage of these new kinds of prosthetics has so focused on the initial joy or the incredulity on the idea that

lives are changed, that they forget to ask if these hands are actually useful and what happens in the weeks and months after the unboxing? Because every upper limb amputee, acquired or congenital, has a unique body. Their experiences with prostheses and the prosthesis who provide them very dramatically, making user experience especially difficult to study. Upper limb prosthesis user dissatisfaction is generally very high, with the majority of users in one recent study reporting very negative experiences. Recent studies report rejection rates, those at which people discontinue using their prostheses entirely, as high as 44%. End quote. A whole bunch of housekeeping items to mention for you today. First, I got access to Twitter spaces last night and was able to run a test

room. Yes, we are able to get our audio in there, so the next room experiment we do will probably be on spaces, not on Clubhouse, which means in theory everyone should be able to participate. I'll give you plenty of warning before we try it, but it might not be for a week because Chris, I believe, is going to be busy for most of next week. And next, we have one weekend bonus episode this weekend available to everyone. It's the much-needed explainer slash educator episode on NFTs with Brady Dale from Coin Desk. Brady has been covering NFTs since the very beginning. So probably no one better to make it all accessible to us. No, there is not going to be a Right Home Plus exclusive episode this weekend, though,

because I'm still writing the Elon Musk stuff, and also I just need a bit of a break. But it's coming. More exclusive Right Home Plus content is always coming. It's just a matter of getting it through the production pipeline. And finally, I did want to make note of the fact that today is the third anniversary of this podcast. It's our birthday. The tech meme right home is three years old, 855 episodes old. Though, of course, that number could be debated.

Some of the episodes might have been special announcement episodes or one-offs. And we are approaching 40 million lifetime downloads, but it's harder for me to pin down the exact numbers there, because if you've been with us for the whole time, then you know that we switched hosts a bunch. And especially when we were on anchor, those numbers were suspect and we lost a lot of them. So we're definitely north of 30 million lifetime downloads for sure, but how much north there's a gray area of about four or five million downloads.

So, you know, anyway, all of that, all of those impressive numbers are, of course, thanks to all of you bringing me into your ears and heads and lives every single day. So thank you so much for being listeners, being members of the mutant podcast army. A year ago when it was our second birthday, the whole world was just teetering on the edge of blowing up. So let's hope for a much nicer trip around the sun on our way to birthday number four. Talk to you on Monday.