Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 07/22 – Not Great, Bob! Snap And Twitter Edition

Episode Date: July 22, 2022

Well, things weren’t so rosy with Twitter earnings, and downright abysmal over at Snap. The Feds bring the first ever case for insider trading in the crypto space. Your next smart lock might draw its power from your phone as you use it. And, of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Storyblok.com/ridehome Work Check podcast Links: Twitter misses earnings expectations, partially blames revenue drop on Elon Musk takeover bid (CNBC) Snap shares dive 35% following poor earnings report (CNBC) Ex-Coinbase Manager Arrested in US Crypto Insider-Trading Case (Bloomberg) Your next smart lock could ditch the battery by harvesting energy from your phone (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Chiplets helped save AMD. They might also help save Moore’s law and head off an energy crisis. (Protocol) Meta’s next big bet: The ‘metaversity’ (Protocol) Amazon C.E.O. Andy Jassy Breaks From the Bezos Way (NYTimes) The Great Fiction of AI (The Verge) The Re-Reinvention of the Travel Agent (Skift) 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, July 22nd, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Well, things weren't so rosy with Twitter's earnings, and they were downright abysmal over at Snap. The feds bring the first ever case for insider trading in the crypto space. Your next smart lock might draw its power from your phone as you use it.

And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Not great, Bob. Twitter this morning announced that they missed Wall Street Revenue. expectations by 11%. Also, they had a net loss of $270 million, which was down from a $66 million net income recorded last year. Monetizable daily active users were up 16.6% year over year, but there's also, shall we say, headwinds to face, quoting CNBC. The company partially blamed the revenue drop on ad industry headwinds, tied to the broader challenging macroeconomic environment, as well as, quote, uncertainty related to the pending acquisition of Twitter by an affiliate of Elon Musk, end quote. Given the pending acquisition by Musk, Twitter said it will not provide

forward-looking guidance for the third quarter. It's also not hosting a conference call with analysts to discuss the earnings results. Twitter said costs related to the acquisition were approximately $33 million in Q2 alone, end quote. As David Lurie tweeted, quote, Elon Musk is a material adverse event, end quote. Twitter stock is only down marginally this morning because performance at Twitter right now doesn't really matter. It's the trial that matters, but things are much worse at Snap, where the stock fell more than 25% overnight after its earnings yesterday afternoon, quoting CNBC again. In its investor letter, Snap said it's not providing guidance for the third quarter because, quote,

forward-looking visibility remains incredibly challenging, end quote. The company said that revenue so far in the period is approximately flat from a year earlier. Analysts were expecting sales growth of 18% for the third quarter, according to Refinitive. We are not satisfied with the results we are delivering, regardless of the current headwinds, the company said in the letter. It's the latest chapter in a tough year for Snap, whose stock has lost almost two-thirds of its value in 2022. In May, Snap said it wouldn't meet the second quarter guidance it set the prior month, leading to a 43% plunge in the share price. At the time, Snap cited a macroeconomic environment that was deteriorating faster than expected. Even with the reduced guidance, Snap still missed estimates. Revenue increased 13% from a year ago, while analysts were expecting growth of 16%.

The second quarter of 2022 proved more challenging than we expected, Snap said in the investor letter. The company said it now plans to, quote, substantially slow our rate of hiring, as well as the rate of operating expense growth, end quote. Snap attributed its disappointing results to slowing demand for its online ad platform. Additionally, a challenging economy, Apple's 2021 iOS update and increased competition from companies like TikTok have led marketers to pull back on their spending. Snap said that even some relatively healthy businesses were curbing their commitments because of the, quote, input cost pressure due to inflation.

In certain high growth sectors, businesses are reassessing investment levels amid the rising cost of capital, which is further reflected in campaign. budgets and the level of bids per action, Snap said. Snap also announced a stock repurchasing program of up to $500 million, and for their new employment contracts, the founders Spiegel and Murphy will receive an annual salary of $1 and no equity compensation, end quote. As of the time of this recording, Snap's stock is down 35%. Shares in meta and other social companies aren't having good mornings either. The U.S. Department of Justice has arrested a former Coinbase product manager for allegedly leaking insider info about tokens before they were listed on the Coinbase platform. To be clear, Coinbase isn't facing charges. This is all on the ex-employee, quoting Bloomberg.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought their first ever case for insider trading in digital coins, charging a former Coinbase global product manager with leaking information to help his brother and a friend buy tokens just before they were listed. on the exchange. The Thursday arrest of Ishan Wahi, who helped oversee listings for a Coinbase Unit focused on investment products, follows a sweeping probe involving the Southern District of New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC also alleged Wahi violated the agency's anti-fraud rules. Wahi tipped off his brother Nikil Wahi and friend Samir Romani when tokens were about to be listed by the exchange, according to charges filed on Thursday in New York. Nikil Wahi and Romani allegedly used that information to trade dozens of tokens from at least

June 2021 until April 2022 for a profit of more than $1 million, the government said. Prosecutors charged the three men with wire fraud conspiracy and wire fraud and the SEC accused them of insider trading, end quote. Interestingly, the SEC listed nine different crypto tokens as securities in that insider trading complaint against the ex-Coinbase staffer. Coinbase is using that opportunity to call on the government to bring some certainty in terms of its classification of tokens. What if your next smart lock didn't need a battery because it would be able to get juice from your phone every time you use it, quoting the verge? One of the magical things about nearfield communication technology or NFC is that tags don't need a battery to communicate.

You'll never need to buy a new coin cell for your employee badge because the badge scanner wirelessly beams enough power to the badge to verify it's legit. Now, chipmaker Infiniin wants to make the same thing happen with smart locks, ones that can be entirely powered by your phone. You can already buy fancy door locks in Europe and basic padlocks in China that do the trick with Finland's eye lock, claiming to have been the first to do it back in 2016. But today, Infinion is selling a new chip and offering a full detailed instructions PDF to anyone who wants in on the idea. It's called the NF. It's called the NF. NAC-1080, and it's designed to be a single chip that does practically the whole thing.

It's got circuits to recognize your NFC phone, harvest its power, and drive the smart locks motor. And it's got both embedded security features and a 32-bit arm cortex M0 CPU to verify that you and your phone are allowed to open and close the lock in question. All of that while running on the taincy charge your phone can provide. Manufacturers will have to supply the antenna, 3-volt mini-motor and capacitors that take the place of a battery. Locks like this need to build up a small charge before they can power a motor, but it looks like we're talking about a few seconds based on the example unlocking you can see above. Don't expect this feature to crop up in other smart locks, though, like the dead bolts you

typically mount on doors in your home. The key is the smart mechanical latch design, which can be opened and closed with very small energy use. Keyzhou, an Infinion Marketing and Business Developer director tells us. While Infinion says it could be used in a front door lock, it admits that, quote, the response time for more complex doors is longer, end quote. Infiniens' detailed instructions for designing these locks show that the motors are generally expected to turn the locks secret, not move large portions of the lock itself. In Infinion's padlock example, for instance, the lock shackle springs open after the small piece that keeps it locked moves out of the way. A video from ILOC shows the energy moving a pair of tiny pins with your finger.

doing the rest. Using these locks may also be dependent on what phone you have. Infinians Zhu says that mainstream mobile phones provide 20 kilowatts on average in the company's testing, but the NFC field strength depends on your phone's antenna, the locks antenna, and how closely you can bring them together when you're attempting to unlock, end quote. Time for the weekend long-read suggestions. One tech stock that is down from its highs but is holding up fairly well is chipmaker AMD, But that's because AMD turned to chiplets to turn their business around. What are chipplets? Well, to make chips faster, designers used to make them bigger, which is getting harder to do.

To make better chips, the industry is turning to chiplets. Quoting protocol. Engineers at AMD looked to the past, instead of trying to pack a larger number of features onto a single big piece of silicon known as a dye, they opted to break up their flagship chip into four separate parts and stitch them together. This approach is called chiplets, and it's likely to become a dominant form of chip design in the coming years. These small dye were a huge enabler for us. NAFziger said, I view this as one of the greatest engineering achievements in the industry and in recent memory because it solves so many problems at once, end quote. AMD invented chiplets out of necessity, but by breaking up a chip into smaller pieces, it reduced the manufacturing costs by 40%.

That had two consequences. First, it let AMD make a full suite of server chips, where it could add and remove chiplets, as necessary to create several performance options and target different server chip price buckets. And by moving to shiplets, AMD could reuse two of the server chiplets and design something less costly that worked for desktops too, the company's most profitable segment at the time. The plan helped save AMD. Revenue grew to $16.4 billion last year from $4 billion in 2015, and it might help save Moore's law as well, end quote.

Also from protocol, maybe Zuck can't convince you to come to work in, virtual reality, but might there be a real use case in education in so-called immersive learning? Meta is spending $150 million to find out and help kickstart the so-called metaversity. Quote, for Morris at least, who doubles as Director of Morehouse in the Metaverse, the program has been a success leading to demonstrable increases in students, final grades, and attendance. A lot of my students came away from this saying, wow, if I had this my first year, I would have been a better chemist. I would have been a little bit stronger as a a student, she said. Morehouse's success has inspired other universities, including the University of

Maryland Global Campus, to also conduct their own educational experiments. UMGC has historically provided distance education to members of the military at home and overseas and civilian adults. Unlike many other universities, it has a much longer history of providing predominantly online education, and as such, it was more prepared when the pandemic struck. But for years, Daniel Mintz, the Department Chair for Information Technology Within the School of Cybersexuals, security and information technology, said building social cohesion among his students and with faculty was challenging, causing some students to disengage from their studies altogether. Our experience is that when they become passive, they fail, they drop out, he said. Mince hopes VR technology could be the

long-term, long-sought-after fix. Even if all you had was meetings where you interacted and allowed the students to get to know each other better, we think that by itself will have a beneficial impact, end quote. I also wanted to flag the profile of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy from the New York Times because we're going to discuss this whole topic at length, the topic of where Amazon has gone in the post Jeff Bezos era. We're going to talk about it on the Twitter space next week, so read up now as prep for that, quote, Mr. Jassy has quietly put his own imprint on Amazon, making more changes than many insiders and company watchers expected. He has drilled into key parts of the business that Mr. Bezos pushed off onto deputies, especially the logistics operations.

He has admitted that Amazon overbuilt and needed to cut costs, closing its physical bookstores and putting some warehouses and warehouse expansion plans on ice. He has started a tumultuous overhaul of leadership. And while he has reiterated the company's opposition to unions, he has also struck a more conciliatory tone with Amazon's 1.6 million employees. The starkest difference with Mr. Bezos may be the new chief executive's far more hands-on approach to regulatory and political challenges in Washington, end quote. Possibly more signs of a change towards a more conciliatory tone there as well. Then we now know that AI can paint a picture with Dolly Wright, but could it write a novel?

In the world of Kindle Direct publishing, authors have to churn out new titles virtually every month or every other month, or they get left behind by their audience. The Verge looks at one author who has turned to AI to write her books, not for her, exactly, but sort of with her. Quote, the tool was called Sudorite, designed by developers turn sci-fi authors Emmett Gupta and James Yu. It's one of many AI writing programs built on OpenAI's Language Model GPT3 that have launched since it was open to developers last year. But where most of these tools are meant to write company emails and marketing copy, pseudo-write is designed for fiction writers. authors paste what they've written into a soothing sunset-colored interface, select some words, and have the AI rewrite them in an ominous tone or with more inner conflict, or propose a plot twist, or generate descriptions in every sense plus metaphor. Eager to see what it could do, Lepse selected a 500-word chunk of her novel, a climactic confrontation in a swamp between the detective witch and a band of pixies and pasted it into the program. Highlighting one of the pixies named Nutmeg, she clicked Describe.

Nutmeg's hair is red, but her bright green eyes show that she has more in common with creatures of the night than the day, the program returned. Lepp was impressed. Holy crap, she tweeted. Not only had pseudorite picked up that the scene Lepp had pasted took place at night, but it also gleaned that Nutmeg was a pixie and that Lepp's pixies have brightly colored hair, end quote. And finally today, implicit in all of these stories about these new AI tools and systems is the concern. that they're going to obsolete a lot of jobs. Well, the very first thing modern technology was supposed to obsolete, the very first thing the web was supposed to kill, was the job of the travel agent. Guess what? Travel agents are not only still around, they've become quite in demand

over recent years, quoting Skift. Travel agents, sometimes called travel advisors, have seen many changes through the years, but the pandemic altered their profession in unimaginable ways, and that upheaval's not dying down anytime soon, with booking travel becoming more complicated and advisors seeing their roles as even more necessary. When travelers started preparing to get back on the road after the pandemic halted their planned trips, many of them turned to travel agents or advisors, as some prefer to be called, for guidance, returning in many cases to professionals who had lost ground to travelers choosing to book trips themselves and online travel agencies a tremendous boost. The emphasis here on the advisor part of the job, but the increased customer

traffic is far from the only change travel advisors have seen in their profession in recent years. The metamorphosis is just a fact of life. They are being asked to play different roles to help consumers navigate an environment still replete with travel restrictions and constantly changing COVID regulations. And now, as the summer has laid bare, travel chaos at all levels, end quote. The bonus episode this weekend is last night's Twitter space. We talked the whole ecosystem of fake reviews with Saad Khalifa of fakespot.com. Chris made a compelling case for the new browser company browser arc. I try to find my way to a Brian's unified theory of what makes new social networks succeed

and some other odds and ends. Enjoy that. Talk to you on Monday.