Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 05/27 – An Xbox Gaming Dongle

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

Microsoft is creating an HDMI dongle to turn any tv or monitor into an Xbox gaming console. Now the lawsuits are popping off in the whole Elon/Twitter thing. If even high profile startups like Substack are having trouble raising rounds, what does that mean for run of the mill startups? And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: HubSpot.com Masterworks.io/ride Links: Exclusive: Microsoft continues to iterate on an Xbox cloud streaming device codenamed 'Keystone' (Windows Central) Twitter shareholders sue Elon Musk and Twitter over chaotic deal (CNBC) Twitter director Egon Durban won’t leave the board after shareholders voted to boot him (CNBC) Substack Drops Fund-Raising Efforts as Market Sours (NYTimes) Weekend Longreads Suggestions The big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere (MIT Technology Review) In India’s Mobile-Payments Boom, Even Beggars Get QR Codes (WSJ) The Collison Brothers Built Stripe Into A $95 Billion Unicorn With Eye-Popping Financials. Inside Their Plan To Stay On Top (Forbes) THE UNSTOPPABLE MACHINES BEHIND THE GAME CONSOLE SHORTAGE (The Verge) Made to measure: why we can’t stop quantifying our lives (The Guardian) 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, May 27th, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Microsoft is creating an HDMI dongle to turn any TV or monitor into an Xbox gaming console. Now the lawsuits are popping off in the whole Elon Twitter thing.

If even high-profile startups like Substack are having trouble raising rounds, what does that mean for run-of-the-mill startups? And of course, the weekend long-read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Microsoft has confirmed it is developing an HDMI device codenamed key. Keystone that connects to any TV or monitor and offers Xbox game streaming on that screen, quoting Windows Central. For a few years, rumors have persisted that Microsoft was exploring building some form of streaming stick to offer Xbox cloud gaming via a more affordable dongle, similarly to Chromecast and Google Stadia. The first hint was Project Hobart. More recently,

a codenamed Keystone appeared in an Xbox OS list, lending fire to rumors that Microsoft was continuing to explore additional hardware for the Xbox lineup. We can now confirm that that is indeed true, and it pertains to a modernized HDMI streaming device that runs Xbox GamePass and its cloud gaming service. Microsoft is, however, exploring additional iterations of the product before taking it to market. In a statement provided to Windows Central,

a Microsoft spokesperson described its commitment to lowering boundaries to Xbox content via low-cost hardware, while acknowledging that the existing version of Keystone needs a little more time to bake before going live. from what we understand Keystone has been in development for a couple years, with Microsoft continuing to finalize the product's feature set. To speculate, Keystone could eventually run some sort of slimmed-down Windows or Xbox OS, given that Keystone originally appeared in an OS list alongside the different Xbox platforms like

Era and Game OS. Utilizing Windows instead of alternatives like Android would allow Microsoft to offer its own streaming media apps like Microsoft movies and TV, although using Android OSP would potentially be a quicker route to market, leaning on apps like Netflix and perhaps Spotify. The exact timeline for Keystone remains unclear, but I wouldn't expect to see it anytime soon, particularly not at the Xbox and Bethesda showcase coming up on June 12th.

A low-cost streaming device makes obvious sense from a business perspective as Microsoft pushes to bring Xbox GamePass to more households who perhaps aren't interested in owning a full-blown console. Microsoft has also previously hinted at bringing TV apps for Xbox Cloud Gaming as well, which would lower the barrier. even further, end quote. A Twitter shareholder is suing Elon Musk and Twitter over the handling of the proposed acquisition, saying Musk engaged, quote, in conduct designed to create doubt about the deal, quoting CNBC.

In a proposed class action lawsuit filed on Wednesday, Twitter shareholders allege that Musk violated California corporate laws on several fronts and in doing so engaged in market manipulation. In one potential violation, they claim that Musk financially benefited by delaying required disclosures about his stake in Twitter and by temporarily concealing his plan in early April to become a board member at the social network. Musk also snapped up shares in Twitter, the complaint says, while he knew insider information about the company based on private conversations with board members and executives, including former CEO Jack Dorsey, a longtime friend of Musk's, and Silver Lake co-CEO Egon Durbin, a Twitter board member whose firm had previously invested in Solar City before Tesla acquired

it. The proposed lawsuit also contends that Musk broke California laws by sewing doubt, about whether he would complete the deal after signing the contract to buy it, end quote. Speaking of Durbin. Also, a filing has revealed that Twitter has rejected Elon Musk ally Egon Durbin's resignation from Twitter's board two days after shareholders blocked his reelection at an annual meeting. Also, CNBC, quote, Twitter director Egon Durbin won't leave the board even though he offered to resign after shareholders voted to boot him from the position, the company said in a regulatory filing on Friday. Twitter said its board believes Durbin, failed to receive shareholders support because of his director role on several other public

company boards. Twitter noted Durbin serves on the board of six other publicly traded companies, but said he agreed to reduce the number of public company boards he serves on to five by May 25, 2023. While the board does not believe that Mr. Durbin's other public company directorships will become an impediment if such engagements were to continue, Mr. Durbin's commitment to reduce his board service commitment to five public company boards by the remediation date appropriately addresses the concerns raised by shareholders, with regard to such engagements, the company said in the filing. Accordingly, the board has reached the determination that accepting Mr. Durbin's tendered resignation at this time is not in the best interest of the company, end quote.

We've had layoffs, we've had down rounds, now we're seeing even high-profile companies unable to raise new money. Sources are telling the New York Times that Substack has dropped efforts to raise new money, after talks to raise between $75 and $100 million at a $750 million to $1 billion valuation went nowhere, during which the company revealed 2021 revenue was only around $9 million, quoting the Times. The decision is another sign of the stark shift from the recent go-go years of free-flowing cash for young startups, particularly buzzy consumer-facing ones like Substack, which has raised at least $86 million over three rounds of funding, according to Pitchbook, which tracks funding. A Substack spokeswoman Lulu Cheng, Misservi, declined to comment on the company's financials or any funding

conversations. She said the company remained in growth mode, pointing to a web page with more than a dozen job listings, including head of growth. My comment is www. www.ubstack.com slash jobs, she said. The investment terms under discussion for Substack would have represented a leap in the company's valuation, which was said to reach $650 million last year after the company closed a $65 million funding round from investment. including Andriesen Horowitz. Substack has told investors that it had revenue of about $9 million in 2021, the people with knowledge of the fundraising talk said, meaning that the discussions valued the company at a hefty premium relative to its financial results. Such a high valuation for a company with relatively small revenue was more common in the later months of 2021 when the stock market was booming and venture firms were more bullish on startups, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. First up, what if we've been going about this whole self-driving car thing all wrong? MIT Technology Review takes a look at the big new idea for making self-driving cars that can go anywhere.

Quote, four years ago, Alex Kendall sat in a car on a small road in the British countryside and took his hands off the wheel. The car equipped with a few cheap cameras and a massive neural network veered to the side. When it did, Kendall grabbed the wheel for a few seconds to correct it. The car veered again. Kendall corrected it. It took less than 20 minutes for the car to learn to stay on the road by itself, he says. This was the first time that reinforcement learning, an AI technique that trains a neural network to perform a task via trial and error, had been used to teach a car to drive from scratch on a real road. It was a small step in a new direction, one that a new generation of startups believes

just might be the breakthrough that makes driverless cars in everyday reality. Wave and other autonomous vehicle startups like Wabi and Ghost, both in the U.S., and autobrains based in Israel are going all out on AI. Branding themselves as AV2.0, they're betting that smarter, cheaper tech will let them overtake current market leaders. Here's the new idea. Instead of building a system with multiple neural networks and wiring these together by hand, Wave, Wabi, and others are each building one large neural network that figures out the details by itself. Throw enough data at the AI and it learns to convert input, camera or light our data about the road ahead, into output,

turning the wheel or hitting the brakes, much like a kid learning to ride a bike. Going straight from input to output like this is known as end-end learning, and it's what GPT3 did for natural language processing, and Alpha Zero did for Go and chess. In the last 10 years, it's caused so many seemingly insolvable problems to get solved, says Kendall. End-to-end learning pushed us forward to superhuman capabilities. Driving will be no different, end quote. From the Wall Street Journal, thanks to India's mobile payments boom, even street beggars, now use QR codes. Quote, a beggar in the eastern Indian state of Bihar strolled through a train station one recent weekday, toting a metal pail for cash and a tablet computer with a QR code stuck on the back. Regu Prasad began accepting donations via mobile payment

apps a few years ago. The 42-year-old said his takings have almost doubled to about 300 rupees a day. That is roughly $4, and more than the average daily wage for a farm laborer in Bihar, India. is poorest state. Many travelers now zap over five or ten rupees with a few taps on their smartphones instead of digging out their wallets. People used to shoo me away saying they didn't have cash, said Mr. Prasad, who makes much of his money from passengers arriving at Bataea Station from big cities like New Delhi and Mumbai. Now they scan my QR codes and happily give whatever small amount they want, end quote. The fact that beggars and their donors are all part of India's digital finance revolution helps explain the explosive growth in mobile payments. By the second quarter of

2020, mobile payments had eclipsed ATM withdrawals to account for 30% of Indian private consumption, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. Mobile payments more than doubled to almost $1 trillion in 2021 from the year before. Bangalore-based phone pay now has around 165 million monthly active users and 48% of India's mobile payments by value, says S&P Global. Google's share is 40% and paytams is almost 9%. India's 48.6 billion digital payments last year were more than double those in next ranked China, according to an April report by Payment Systems Company ACI Worldwide, which said volumes could top $200 billion by 2026, end quote. Then our friend Alex Conrad over at Forbes has a check-in with the Collison Brothers and

Stripe. Quote, Stripe's eye-popping financials explain why investors, including Fidelity and Ireland's sovereign development fund, poured an additional $600 million into Stripe in March 2021, raising its total funding to date to $2.4 billion and valuing it at $95 billion. That puts stripe behind only TikTok owner BiteDance, Chinese e-commerce juggernaut Shee and Elon Musk's SpaceX, for the title of the world's most valuable startup. Forbes estimates Patrick and John Collison each own about 10% of stripe, making them worth $9.5 billion each. The company, dual headquartered in San Francisco and Dublin, processed $640 billion in payments last year across 50 countries. Its gross revenue, still mostly the 2% to 3% it collects on such volume, reached nearly $12 billion in 2021, according to sources, knowledge of its financials, up about 60% year over year. Net revenue, which excludes the cut,

Stripe passes along to partners like Visa and Chase, reached nearly two and a half billion. And unusually for a unicorn that's still growing fast, Stripe finished the year with hundreds of millions in profit on an EBITDA basis to sources ad. Stripe declined to comment on its figures, end quote. I had another friend this week who gave up and paid up on the secondary market just to get his hands on a PlayStation 5 since years now after the launch. PlayStation 5s are still almost impossible to get your hands on normally at normal retail prices. I understand you could wait basically half a console lifecycle at this point just to, you know, participate in this generation of gaming.

Life is short. By the time you get to play Eldon Ring, if you, you know, play by the rules, everyone else will be long past it. So from the verge, another look at the unstoppable machines behind the game console shortage. In short, resellers aren't the problem. The bots are, quote, dozens of what are known as

AIO resale bots have popped up in recent years, offering prospective flippers an all-in-one service that can snatch up tons of sneakers, graphics cards, and consoles in order to power their own black market businesses. They offer a suite of tools that allow users to pass through the digital checkout infrastructure of retailers like Walmart and

Best Buy in an instant with a heavy load of plunder in tow. Most of these bots are saddled with an upfront payment and a recurring usage fee, which means they're simply the middlemen for the scraping industry writ large. The programmers all believe that they're fighting the good fight. After all, what's more American than supply and demand? What's more bizarre is that nobody can buy a lot of these bots right now, or most of the other bots on the market. Any prospective flipper must instead linger on a waiting list for an indefinite amount of time

before finally being offered the chance to license the software. This is remarkably common across the entire scene. In fact, I didn't encounter a single botting company that allowed me to purchase their automation service off the rack without first signing up for an interminable queue. Just like the sneakers and game consoles they're designed to buy, these apps are offered only in a limited supply to a lucky few buyers, end quote. And finally from The Guardian, an excerpt from a new book looking at the history of measuring things, specifically standardized measurements, quote. If anything exemplifies the power of measurement in contemporary life, it is standard reference peanut butter. It's the creation of the U.S.

National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, and sold to industry at a price of $1,069 for 170-gram jars. The exorbitant cost is not due to rare ingredients or complex production processes. Instead, it is because of the rigor with which the contents of each jar have been analyzed. This peanut butter has been frozen, heated, evaporated, and saponified. Also, it might be quantified and measured across multiple dimensions. When buyers purchase a jar, they can be certain not only of the exact proportions of carbohydrates, proteins, sugars, and fiber in every spoonful, but of the prevalence down to the milligram of dozens of different organic molecules and trace elements from copper and magnesium to, I can't even pronounce those. Hardly an atom in these jars has

avoided scrutiny, and as a result, they contain the most categorically known peanut butter in existence. It's also smooth, not crunchy. The peanut butter belongs to a library of more than 1,300 standard reference materials or SRMs created by NIST to meet the demands of industry and government. It is a Bible of contemporary metrology, the science of measurement, and a testament to the importance of unseen measures in our lives. Whenever something needs to be verified, certified, or calibrated from the emissions levels of a new diesel engine to the optical properties of glass destined for high-powered lasers, the SRM catalog offers the standards against which checks can be made. Most items are mundane, concrete and iron,

for the construction trade, slurred spinach and powdered coca for food manufacturers, but others seem like ingredients lifted from God's pantry. Ingets of purified elements and pressurized canisters of gases available in finely graded blends and mixtures. Some are just whimsical, as if they were the creation of an overly zealous bureaucracy determined to standardize even the most peculiar substances. Think domestic sludge, whale blubber, and powdered radioactive human lung, available as SRMs 2781, 1945, and 4351. Each has a purpose, however. Domestic sludge, for example, is used as a reference by environmental agencies to check pollutant levels in factories. Standardized whale blubber help scientists track the buildup of chemical contaminants in the ocean, end quote. Hey, y'all, holiday weekend here in the U.S., so I will not be doing a regular show on Monday. I'll be taking that day off, and we have no Twitter space to share this weekend. What I will post on Sunday night or Monday morning is a portfolio profile episode.

One of our founders zoomed me the other day to do a check-in and tell me they had successfully closed their round, even with all the turmoil out there. This was the same company that also went through Y Combinator, so he was telling me about the struggles his fellow startups are seeing and what actually presenting a demo day was like, and I stopped him and was like, hey, let me record this. This is good information. So we'll have that on Monday. and then I will talk to you again for a regular show on Tuesday. Be good in my absence.