Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 09/03 – An Alexa TV Coming Next Month?

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

It’s Rumor Friday! Are we getting an Alexa TV next month? Will Apple’s AR/VR headset need an Apple device to work? Is Reddit lining up an IPO? Also, Apple delays its controversial CSAM feature, the week in NFT madness, and, of course, The Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.com Links: EXCLUSIVE: Amazon is close to launching its own TV in the US (Insider) Apple’s AR/VR Headset Will Need Connection to Other Device Such as iPhone (The Information) Exclusive: Reddit seeks to hire advisers for U.S. IPO -sources (Reuters) Apple delays rollout of CSAM detection system and child safety features (9to5Mac) Record Doge NFT Sale Highlights Growing Demand for Fractionalization (CoinDesk) The Weekend Longreads Suggestions: The Latest NFT Fad Is a Text-Based Fantasy Game Building Block (Coindesk) Gimme the Loot! (Collisions) NFTs, DeFi Boost for Ethereum Dims Clamor of Bitcoin Maximalists (Bloomberg) Wall Street Is Looking to Reddit for Investment Advice (WSJ) Here are all the companies from Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day, Part 1 (TechCrunch) Here are all the companies from Day 2 of Y Combinator’s Summer 2021 Demo Day (TechCrunch) Today's #WorldCupOfEntrepreneurs Matchup click here to vote! 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 TechMeme right home for Friday, September 3rd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, it's Rumor Friday. Are we getting an Alexa TV next month? Will Apple's ARVR headset need an Apple device to even work? Is Reddit lining up an IPO? Also, Apple delays its controversial CSAM feature, the week in NFT madness,

and of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As I said, it's Rumor Friday. Some days I wake up, fire up tech meme, and the stories just sort of sort themselves from top to bottom. Sources are telling Insider that Amazon is planning to launch its own branded TV featuring Alexa built-in and no other third-party manufacturer branding in the U.S., possibly as soon as next month. Quote, the company already launched an Amazon Basics TV in India late last year. Amazon has also teamed up. with other manufacturers to exclusively sell TVs with its fire TV software built in, but those models have always carried the branding of the manufacturers, such as Toshiba. The U.S. launch, a closely guarded secret within the company, has been in the works for almost two years and involves teams from Amazon devices and Lab 126, according to people familiar with

the situation. They asked not to be identified discussing private matters, and Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. The release of Amazon's own TV would put the e-commerce giant in direct competition with other electronics companies, including Samsung, LG, and Sony that in many cases sell through Amazon's online marketplace. The TVs, which will be Alexa-powered, are currently designed and manufactured by third parties, one of which is TCL, a fast-growing Chinese manufacturer that has also made TVs for Alcatel and Samsung, one of the people familiar with the matter said. The models are expected to be big-screen TVs in the range of 55 to 75 inches. They are due to be released as soon as October, but the rollout has been beset with logistical bottlenecks. Amazon is also working

on a separate TV that it is designing in-house, according to another person familiar with the matter, end quote. Sources are telling the information that Apple's planned VR-A-R headset will need a wireless connection to an Apple device for full functionality, which I kind of think a lot of us figured, but also Apple actually completed work on the VR-A-R-R-CHIP research last year. The system on a chip and two other Apple-designed chips for the headset hit a milestone known in the semiconductor industry as tapeout, which means the physical designs of the chips are complete and ready for trial production. It's a key stage in development of the headset, which the information previously reported was expected to debut by next year at the earliest, though Apple could push the release back even further.

The people said Apple's longtime partner, Taiwan Semiconductor, is manufacturing the three chips, which are at least a year away from mass production, and Apple's spokeswoman declined to comment. More significant are the details of the system on a chip, which isn't as powerful as the ones made for iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks. It lacks the artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities, known as Apple's neural engine, which those devices include, one of the people said. Instead, the headset is meant to communicate wirelessly with a host device, presumably a phone, computer or tablet that will handle the more powerful computing required to display virtual, mixed, and augmented reality images, the person said.

Apple has designed its chip to perform some functions better than the more general-purpose chips made by third parties. For instance, Apple's chip is better at transmitting wireless data between the headset and the host, compressing and decompressing video, and using power as efficiently as possible to maximize battery life, the person said. These functions are likely crucial for processing ultra-high-resolution video from the headset's external cameras if Apple wants to replicate the resolution and detail of what users see in real life, while displaying digital imagery and information in front of their eyes, end quote.

And real quick, sources are telling Reuters that Reddit is planning an IPO for as soon as early 2022, following its recent $10 billion valuation in a recent round raise. By the time the IPO takes place early next year, Reddit hopes it will be valued at more than $15 billion, one of the sources said. Reddit's moved to hire advisors for its IPO was previously unreported. In a recent interview with the New York Times, chief executive Steve Huffman had said that the company was planning to go public but had not decided on the timing. The San Francisco-based company saw explosive growth as a result of retail investors flocking to its message boards at the start of the year for tips on trading GameStop and other meme stocks. Reddit had

roughly 52 million daily active users and over 100,000 communities or subreddits. As a of October last year. Huffman has said it gained millions of new users earlier this year during the height of the trading frenzy, but more recent user figures have not yet been released. The company makes most of its money through advertising. It reported $100 million in advertising revenue in the second quarter and almost threefold jump from the same period last year, end quote. But back to Apple. Apple announced this morning that it is delaying the rollout of that controversial CSAMC-SAM detection feature, saying it will take additional time to refine the feature before launching it to the public, quoting 9-5 Mac. In a statement to 9-to-5 Mac, Apple said,

quote, last month we announced plans for features intended to help protect children from predators who use communication tools to recruit and exploit them and limit the spread of child sexual abuse material. Based on feedback from customers' advocacy groups, researchers, and others, we have decided to take additional time over the coming months to collect input and make improvements before releasing these critically important child safety features, end quote. Apple's new child safety features were set to launch as part of updates to iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and MacOS Monterey later this year. There is now no word on when the company plans to roll out the features. Apple's statement today does not provide any details on what changes the company could make to improve the system, end quote.

As we've been animating all along, it has been a week of NFT madness for sure. Here's yet another example. A Doge meme, NFT, that sold for a mere $4 million back in June, is now valued at more than $225 million after it was fractionalized into nearly 17 billion tokens and sold in a one-day auction. So this makes it the most valuable single NFT, thus far in history? Quoting Coin desk. Investors were able to boost the price for the Doge NFT to a record high for NFTs in such a short time by fractionalizing it into nearly 17 billion

tokens named DOG, so I'm assuming that's Dog or Doge, but if it was Doge, it would have an E, right? So let's call it dog. With 20% of the supply for sale via a 24-hour auction ended Thursday. The event reflects investors rapidly growing demand for fractionalized ownership of NFTs, a new, easier way to participate in the increasingly pricey and volatile NFT market. The trend has been rising in recent months, although critics have questioned potential risks around this NFT innovation. In fractionalization, the NFT owner deposits the NFT into a vault on one of the NFT fractionalization platforms, which allows them to mint ERC 20 tokens. The NFT owner also determines the total supply of the ERC20 tokens, unlike NFTs which usually apply Ethereum's ERC 721 token standard,

the ERC 20 tokens are fungible and can be traded, sent, and received on smart contracts running on the Ethereum blockchain. NFT fractionalization, quote, gives wider access to the community and can help make NFT's productive assets, Delphi Digital co-founder and chief operating officer Anil Lula said, Pleaser Dow, a group of investors who bought the Doge NFT in June for 1,6-6-Ether, about $4 million at the time, auctioned 20 percent, nearly 3.4 million dog tokens of the total dog supply on the decentralized fundraising platform MISO. The group fractionalized the Doge NFT through a platform called fractional art. Pleaser Dow still retains majority ownership of dog.

The investors behind the Dow or decentralized autonomous organization include high-powered venture capital Su Zhu, the Three Arrow's Capital, Dragonflies, Tom Schmidt, and compounds Robert Leshner. Fractionalized NFTs have sold at staggeringly high prices before. Another Doge meme-related NFT sold for more than $86 million in late August after it was fractionalized into tokens called Feisty Doge NFT or NFD, end quote. Time for the weekend long read suggestions. We've got two guests on the Twitter space bonus episode that we're going to to release tomorrow who were involved in recent NFT projects that got a lot of attention this week. In fact, we spoke to one of them while bidding was live on their project. The NFT space, as I've

said, has exploded in so many directions these past two weeks. It would be impossible for anyone to keep track, much less me, since I'm not very deep in the space, but I still got to try. Just told you about that project that got fractionalized. Well, I've got two stories here about another project, Dom Hoffman's Lute, quoting Coin Desk. In just five days, loot for adventurers, a text-based NFT side project from social media network Vine co-founder Dom Hoffman, has managed to attract $46 million in sales and a total market cap well in excess of $180 million. Perhaps even more impressively, the loot community now counts among its ranks an all-star list of Web3 founders, builders, and investors, including executives from projects including Ave, Axy Infinity, and fractional

art, many of whom are building new projects on top of the original drop in an effort to expand the Luteverse. While some believe the project signals the genesis of an open-source fantasy metaverse, others, including the founder himself, are worried the sky-high prices might be the latest sign of an unsustainable NFT bubble and could end up deterring more would-be players than not, end quote. So good timing on that project, combining NFTs with the Metaverse, though it should be noted that that has always been one of the promises of NFTs, that they would literally become the building blocks, if not the currency of the Metaverse. Quoting from the Collisions newsletter talking about this same loot project, quote, if NFTs, gas, and minting sound unintelligible to you, the short version is that this

project lets you spend some money to create a unique list of items that you could keep in the same wallet, an app like Rainbow, where you'd keep cryptocurrencies or other digital collectibles, typically art, or as skeptics gleefully note, JPEGs. I repeat, a unique list of items. No artwork, stats to compare quality, or even game rules that could inform such stats. People spent money to get those unique lists, thousands. And as happens in NFTs, a market quickly formed around those unique lists of items, the floor or minimum price to buy into a loot bag, shot two thousands of dollars worth of Ethereum. Certain kinds of items in these lists sounded cool and were found to be rare upon analysis of the entire set, and so bags containing them rose in value to extreme heights,

end quote. Next, and I'm taking a risk by even pointing you to this argument and this article, but I have to say this is a sentiment that I've been hearing since at least the late spring, summer by a lot of folks in the crypto space, quoting Bloomberg. Surging demand for NFTs and DFI apps is allowing backers of Ethereum to dampen the cacophony of Bitcoin maximalists who have long claimed that only the original cryptocurrency matters. Quote, the innovation at play in the smart contract arena had been defeating maximalist mantras for quite some time, said Mardi Greenspan, founder and CEO of Quantum Economics. Still, because a lot of the advancements, particularly in DFI and NFTs are so new, it's difficult to say exactly how much more growth there will be or what other

new sectors might arise, he said. The case for ether surpassing Bitcoin, has been a constant theme in crypto since the alternative blockchain was created. Bitcoin maximalists maintain that it remains the purest form of digital money and point out that the original cryptocurrency has a market value of about $900 billion, or more than double that of ether. August marked Ether's second consecutive month advance and its best monthly performance since April. The coin is up more than 350% this year compared with Bitcoin's 60% gain. On Wednesday, it rose about 5% to $3,558. Well, Bitcoin gained around 1% to $47,400.

Ethereum is seen as a better store of value. That's why it has been preferred by institutions for a while now, said Matt Malley, chief market strategist for Miller Tebek and company. It is now becoming preferred among all. investors, end quote. And it's not just ether that's been in the limelight recently, said Olet, Solana and Cardano represent projects with a similar focus and both have rallied, end quote. From the Wall Street Journal, you had to know this was happening. Wall Street institutions are increasingly tracking amateur traders on sites like Reddit, Twitter, and Discord to find

trading opportunities following the meteoric rise of the meme stocks. Quote, the activities of these everyday investors is now under close scrutiny at New York-based Syndicator Capital, which has two traders spending the bulk of their days looking for trading opportunities on Reddit and Twitter, according to Nodari Komakazdi, the firm's chief financial officer. In February, Syndicator even posted a job for a sentiment trader that required a refined taste for memes and membership on Wall Street bets that spanned at least a year before deciding not to fill the post. The firm uses a mix of survey data and artificial intelligence. to track sentiment. Mr. Kamahadzi said he first noticed GameStop being mentioned in August 2020 on a

Discord chat the firm created for retail traders, but that he paid little attention at the time. He says now that he views everyday investors as a force likely to shift markets for the foreseeable future, creating an opportunity to bet for or against assets favored by the crowd, end quote. And finally today, as I try to do every time, there are two pieces in the Long Reads notes from TechCrunch, that run down the list of all of the companies that presented this past week at Y Combinators Demo Day. Enjoy. Wow. So we had our first major upset in the hashtag World Cup of Entrepreneurs contest.

In our biggest day of voting yet, Jack Dorsey beat Mark Zuckerberg, 70.9% to 29.1% did not see that one coming. I guess people just don't like Zuck very much. As I said, there's no real rhyme or reason for the voting rationale in this contest, but still, Facebook has to be one of the biggest companies of my lifetime. So you would think that Zuck would win hands down. Maybe it's because Jack invented two different companies, and Zuck maybe just had this one good idea. Anyway, today's contest will pit multi-time founder Elon Musk of PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, however many other companies. against Katrina Lake of Stitch Fix, one of the exemplars of both the direct-to-consumer and the

subscription box spaces, buy-the-by. And I have a lot of admin to get through right now. Monday is Labor Day here in the U.S., so I will be taking the day off. No regular news show on Monday, but since you won't hear from me, keep your eye on the at TechMeme podcast Twitter account every day because every day around noon, I will post the next matchups in the hashtag World Cup of Entrepreneurs. And there are some big contests coming that you're not going to want to miss putting your two cents in on. On Saturday, Oprah Winfrey will go up against Patrick Collison. Sunday, Bill Gates will go up against Whitney Wolf Hurd, founder of Bumble. And Monday, Larry and Sergei of Google will go up against Larry Ellison of Oracle. Battle of the Lairies.

Don't want to miss that. Vote, vote, vote. and I'll have all of the results wrapped up for you on Tuesday. Also, yes, we will have the Twitter space bonus episode that we recorded Wednesday night come out tomorrow, Saturday, so you don't want to miss that. We interviewed two prominent people in the NFT space to talk about this week's madness. And I should say not only prominent in the space,

but people that are actually doing projects right now, live projects that you could bid on and such. And since there will be no normal episode on Monday, I've got a special internet history bonus episode for you, an interview with Cherish Nadkarni, who joined Microsoft way back in 1987, led the launch of Microsoft Mail, led the development of Microsoft Visual C++, launched the MSN portal, oversaw the acquisition of Hotmail, created the startup that eventually became Blackberry Internet Mail, and launched the MSN portal, oversaw the acquisition of Hotmail, created the startup that eventually became Blackberry

Internet Mail, and a lot more. It's a great conversation, so enjoy that. I also, although I haven't decided on this yet, might have another announcement for you that if I do do it, I'll put it out on Sunday as a sort of standalone announcement thingy. So look for that, although I reserve the right to not do it if I don't have the time this weekend. Enjoy a long holiday weekend if you've got one and talk to you on Tuesday.