Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/18 - $APE GMI?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 18th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Australia sues meta for alleged cryptocurrency scam ads. Bored Apes Yacht Club had what we might call a busted IPO if that were the terms we were using.

Starting point is 00:00:50 Amazon is now officially the proud owner of James Bond and, of course, the weekend long-rate suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Australia's competition and consumer commission has sued meta for allegedly publishing scam cryptocurrency ads on Facebook that used photos of real Australian public figures, quoting Reuters. The advertisements which endorsed investment in cryptocurrency or money-making schemes could have misled Facebook users into believing they were promoted by famous Australians, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission or ACCCC, said. The lawsuit filed in the federal court also alleges Facebook, quote, aided and abetted or was knowingly concerned in false or misleading

Starting point is 00:01:37 conduct and representations by the advertisers, the ACC said in a statement. The essence of our case is that meta is responsible for these ads that it publishes on its platform. ACC Chair Rod Sims said it is alleged that meta was aware. Scam ads were being displayed on Facebook but did not take sufficient steps to address the issue, end quote. Meta said any ads that scammed people out of money or misled users violated its policies and the company uses technology to detect and block such posts, adding it had, quote, cooperated with the A-Triple C's investigation into this matter to date. We will review the recent filing by the A-Triple-C and intend to defend the proceedings.

Starting point is 00:02:16 A meta-spokesperson said in an emailed statement, declining to comment further as the case was before court. The A-T-T-C said the ads used images of several Australian business leaders, TV hosts, and politicians, and contained links to fake media articles that included quotes attributed to the personalities. Users who signed up were contacted by scammers to convince them to deposit funds into the fake schemes, the regulator said, end quote. That bored ape yacht club ape token I told you about started trading yesterday, and it hit a peak of $39.40 per token during its air drop, but later sank as low as $7.50. Sort of sounds like when an IPO closes down on its first day of trading, right?

Starting point is 00:03:04 So to use the parlance, is Ape going to make it? Although, worth noting, when a stock IPO's, you don't. get airdropped shares for free. Quoteing to Crypt. Ape coin, the Ethereum token built for the expanding BoredApe Yacht Club NFT ecosystem, launched this morning and rapidly rose in value before shedding much of its initial momentum. The token, which Bored Ape and Mutant Ape NFT holders can claim for free, initially hit a peak of $39.40 per token, according to data from Coinbase and coin market

Starting point is 00:03:36 cap. However, it quickly sank and has been hovering below the $10 mark over the last. few hours. Sales and price points of the popular board ape yacht club NFT collection also both jumped significantly yesterday following the announcement of ApeCoin. According to data from floor prices, the cheapest available board Ape Yacht Club NFT listed on secondary markets Wednesday morning was about 91.9th or about $248,000 at the time. Overnight hours after the ape coin announcement, the floor price had jumped to 105.9th or more than $292,000, as a of then. Along with that 15% increase in ETH in a matter of hours, the cheapest available mutant ape

Starting point is 00:04:18 yacht club similarly rose 15% from 20.3Eth to 23.3Eth during the same span. Listing prices alone do not paint a full picture of demand for an NFT collection, but Bored Ape Sales indeed also shot through the roof yesterday. More than $45.5 million worth of Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs have been sold over the last 24 hours per data from CryptoSlam, with the majority of that action coming after ape coin's launch was announced yesterday afternoon. That's a 1,316% rise in trading volume over the previous 24-hour span. Meanwhile, mutant apes generated $30.5 million worth of sales in the same span, up 558% from the previous 24-hour window, with the companion board ape kennel club dog NFTs, up 825% at a total of $12 million. All told, that's $88 million worth of NFTs from the wider

Starting point is 00:05:10 board ape franchise sold in the past day. Interestingly, the floor prices for all those collections sank dramatically over the last couple hours. That may be because board ape holders have claimed their respective ape coin tokens and are now trying to sell the connected NFTs, which will not yield tokens for any new owners who purchase them on secondary markets. For example, the cheapest board ape yacht club NFT currently on the market as of this writing is priced at just 86th, while the cheapest mutant ape is listed at 16 and a half eath. That's still a lot of money, but it removes the premium added since the ape coin announcement and then some, end quote. Sources say that the FTC will not challenge Amazon's MGM Studios acquisition,

Starting point is 00:05:58 as FTC Chair Lena Kahn decided not to call for a vote anticipating opposition from GOP commissioners. Quoting Politico, Khan never called for an official vote on a complaint against Amazon, anticipating that the agency's two Republicans would oppose it two of the people said, Instead, the agency allowed a statutory deadline for the deal's review to expire, which let Amazon close the acquisition. The people spoke anonymously to discuss internal agency deliberations. The U.S. has never challenged a merger by Amazon, even as the company has expanded beyond its original focus on books and online retail into dozens of industries, including advertising, healthcare, connected devices, and autonomous vehicles. Progressives, including Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and union groups,

Starting point is 00:06:42 had urged the FTC to challenge the MGM acquisition, which will allow Amazon to combine its own Amazon studios with the company that owns the James Bond and Rocky franchises. Even if the FTC had opted to sue, it would face tough challenges under current antitrust law, in large part because Amazon and MGM are not major competitors. U.S. courts tend to favorably view so-called vertical deals, those between companies that make products like MGM and those that distribute them, such as Amazon. The Justice Department lost its most recent lawsuit in that type of case in 2018 when a federal court blessed AT&T's acquisition of Time Warner. European authorities also cleared the MGM deal this week, finding that Amazon faces strong competition from other video streaming platforms like Netflix,

Starting point is 00:07:27 and that MGM is among the smaller production studios, despite its control of a few key franchises, end quote. So, congratulations to Amazon, I guess, on your brand-new $8.5 billion movie studio. I saw someone on Twitter suggests that now that Amazon owns James Bond, Jeff Bezos should be the next Bond villain, which you might think is tongue-in-cheek, but I actually think is smart. I mean, bald is often a prerequisite for Bond villainy. Bezos looks like he's in good enough shape to do some on-screen action scenes, and Bezos seems to like the Hollywood lifestyle these days.

Starting point is 00:08:04 Plus, if he played a deranged tech billionaire bent on world domination, nation, it would show he had a sense of humor, right? Time for the weekend long read suggestions. This first one is one you'll want to read for the bonus episode that's coming out this weekend. It's from the Divinations blog, and the title is Substack's Ideology, and we'll talk to the author about his contentions in this piece this weekend, quote, the thing I didn't understand going into it was that Substack wasn't just about an economic trend of power flowing to individual writers, thanks to the leverage technology gives them.

Starting point is 00:08:43 it was about creating a morally superior playing field that could help heal our minds from the damage done by social networks. The substack model wasn't just a business strategy, it was a political philosophy, and I loved it, end quote. Next, are we really going to kill the password for good? Wired takes a look at the decade-long work the Fido Alliance has been doing to bring us a password-free future, hopefully. Quote, beyond just acclimating people, though, Fido is looking to get to. get to the heart of what makes passwordless schemes tough to navigate. And the group has concluded that it all comes down to the procedure for switching or adding devices. If the process for setting up a new phone, say, is too complicated and there's no simple way to log into all of your apps and

Starting point is 00:09:29 accounts, or if you have to fall back to passwords to reestablish your ownership of those accounts, then most users will conclude it's too much of a hassle to change the status quo. The passwordless Fido Standard already relies on a device's biometric scanners, or a master pin you select, to authenticate you locally without any of your data traveling over the internet to a web server for validation. The main concept that Fido believes will ultimately solve the new device issue is for operating systems to implement a FIDO credential manager, which is somewhat similar to a built-in password manager. Instead of literally storing passwords, this mechanism will store cryptographic keys that can sink between devices and are guarded by your devices

Starting point is 00:10:08 biometric or passcode lock, end quote. Then have you been waiting for a deep dive on RazlCon to learn the story about how a YouTube rapper became a suspect in that $4 billion Bitcoin fraud? The Forbes cover story this week has got you covered. Quote, as Morgan's relationship with Lichtenstein grew, she often used MixRanks office space on Townsend Street in San Francisco, a former Mix-Rank employee recalled, and would consult Lichtenstein on running salesfolk. One morning in 2015, Hildago received a call from Morgan telling her that after consulting with Lichtenstein, Morgan was firing her because, quote, business was going slow.

Starting point is 00:10:48 Hilago was among several friends who cut off contact with Morgan around this time. Lichtenstein also began to withdraw from his professional responsibilities. In May 2016, he abruptly left MixRank. It was baffling, said a former employee, considering the upward trajectory of the business. We were all trying to figure out why did he walk away now. We were really doing well. Our revenue was jumping pretty quickly, the person said. MixRanks's other co-founder Scott Milliken didn't respond to request for comment. As it turned out, the couple would become involved in something way beyond internet marketing, end quote. Rest of World has a check-in on how things are going in El Salvador with that whole

Starting point is 00:11:25 make Bitcoin your sovereign currency experiment. And well, quote, it is difficult to get a picture of the scope of Bitcoin adoption in the country. In January, the government endorsed a report that at least 4 million users, nearly the country's entire population, had been verified as authentic users of the government's wallet over the past several weeks. But in March, a survey released by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of El Salvador reported that 86% of the businesses contacted said they had never conducted a transaction using Bitcoin. Interviews with dozens of Salvadoran citizens, economists and technology developers reveal cracks in the project. Since launching, the initiative has been plagued with technical glitches, while tensions have

Starting point is 00:12:06 arisen from the mismatch between Bitcoin's decentralized ethos and El Salvador's authoritarian government, end quote. One more thing to worry about, well, the lead from this story in Vox sums it up quite nicely, quote, neon, a colorless and odorless gas is typically not as exciting as it sounds, but this unassuming molecule happens to play a critical role in making the tech we use every day. For years, this neon has also mostly come from Ukraine, where just two companies purify enough to produce devices for much of the world, usually with little issue. At least they did until Russia invaded. Faced with the devastating reality of war, Ukraine's neon industry halted production. One of Ukraine's two primary neon companies in gas is based in Maripole, which has been repeatedly

Starting point is 00:12:53 bombed by Russian forces and is currently under siege. The other company, Kroyon, is based in Odessa, where citizens are currently preparing for an assault. And amid terrifying conditions and a mounting number of civilian casualties, the safety of the people who work at these firms is the priority, not the potential impact on tech manufacturers. There will be ripple effects, though. Semiconductor manufacturers rely on neon to control the specialized lasers they use to make computer chips. Right now, it's not clear whether they have enough time to find and develop new sources of this gas before their backup supplies run out. Chip companies and industry analysts say there's anywhere between one to six months' worth of neon in reserve. If that runs out,

Starting point is 00:13:33 these companies won't be able to make semiconductors. This means that the worldwide chip shortage, which was expected to end sometime in the next year or so, could draw out even longer, leading to higher prices, delivery delays, and shortages of critical technology, end quote. And finally, I intend to start Eldon Ring this weekend, but the open world game that has really held my fascination recently is Genshin Impact. And the new. New York Times looks at how a Chinese game studio basically copied Zelda's Breath of the Wild, with a reproduction of Japanese fantasy role-playing tropes layered on top of that to beat the Japanese at their own, well, game.

Starting point is 00:14:11 Released in late 2020, the game is the first bona fide international smash hit for China's video game industry. In its first year on the market, it raked in $2 billion, a record for mobile games, according to Censor Tower, a firm that monitors mobile apps. And unlike other popular Chinese games, it is believed to have done. generated most of its revenue from overseas. The game's success points to a shifting balance of power in the $200 billion a year global video game industry, which has long been dominated by Japan and the United States. Chinese developers, flush with cash from the country's vast domestic market,

Starting point is 00:14:43 are looking abroad for growth. They see Japan, the world's aging video game superpower, as a ripe target, and Chinese companies have begun buying up Japanese talent and applying lessons learned from years of imitating Japan's industry leaders, end quote. Okay, so my apologies, I forgot to tell you yesterday that we were doing a Twitter space last night, but we did it. We talked to Nathan Batchez and Dan Shipper, the founders of the media startup Every. Nathan, at least, has been on the show in the past. We talked to them about the realities of being two years in as a modern from the ground-up media company, the shifting landscape in the creator economy, remember that.

Starting point is 00:15:32 and a lot about Substack and its business model and philosophy. Thus, the long read that I mentioned a minute ago, so enjoy that. And then at around the hour mark, Chris and I have a lengthy conversation about the Mac Studio, my purchasing of one, my canceling of my order for a studio display, for reasons we didn't get into yesterday on the show, but probably should have. And also, Chris has a very interesting eighth-dimensional chess theory about where Apple might be headed as a company. Enjoy that tomorrow afternoon.

Starting point is 00:16:05 As for now, I'm off to test out those new Mario Kart tracks with my kids. Talk to you on Monday.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 03/18 - $APE GMI?

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