Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/08 – Share To TikTok

Episode Date: November 8, 2024

Some interesting moves over at Block. Share to TikTok could be something major for the music industry. Amazon’s offer to invest again in Anthropic comes with some interesting strings attached. More signs that the smartglasses category is coming now. And, of course, the Weekend Longreads Suggestions. Sponsors: LegalZoom.com promocode Techmeme Links: Block reports revenue miss but a slight beat on earnings (CNBC) Jack Dorsey's Square to Invest More in Bitcoin Mining and Shut Decentralized 'Web5' Venture (CoinDesk) TikTok’s latest feature lets music fans ‘Share to TikTok’ from Spotify and Apple Music (TechCrunch) Amazon Discussing New Multibillion-Dollar Investment in Anthropic (The Information) Baidu Readies AI Smart Glasses to Rival Meta’s Ray-Bans (Bloomberg) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse. (ArsTechnica) What I Learned From Destroying Myself at the NYC Marathon (Intelligencer) 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, November 8th, 2024. I'm Brian McCullough today. Some interesting moves over at Block. Share to TikTok could be something major for the music industry. Amazon's offered to invest

in Anthropic again. Comes with some interesting strings attached. More signs that the smart glasses category is coming now. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Weird stuff going on at Block, formerly known as Square. They had earnings that were mixed, a revenue miss, but a slight beat on earnings. But it's the restructuring that is going on over there that is making headlines. First, summing up the earnings, quoting CNBC, the cash app business of the company's popular mobile payment platform and a significant contributor to overall profitability reported $1.31 billion in gross profit, a 21% year-over-year jump. Block run by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey

said monthly active users of its cash app card increased 11% from a year earlier to more than 24 million. Going into earnings, analysts were focused on the company's buy-now, pay-later unit. Block acquired the Australian buy-now pay-later firm Afterpay for $29 billion in 2021. CEO Dorsey devoted his quarterly shareholder letter to explaining the company's lending products, including Square Loans, After Pay, Buy Now, Pay Later, and Cash App Borrow. He said the company is looking to transform cash-app cards, quote, into a better alternative to credit cards when it launches after-pay on Cash-Up card. But there are extensive cost-cutting measures. The company said in its shareholder letter that it was scaling back its investment in Title, the mutual, the mutual, the

streaming service founded by Jay-Z, and entirely winding down TBD, the Bitcoin-focused arm of Block. The company went through layoffs earlier this year. Dorsey said on the earnings call that when it comes to Bitcoin, the company is focused on making it more accessible, which it does through Cash App. Additionally, Block holds Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The company said it had 8,300 Bitcoin at the end of the quarter, which is currently worth about $630 million. End quote.

But as you'll recall, I mentioned restructuring, as mentioned briefly there, quoting coin desk. Jack Dorsey's payment firm Block plans to renew focus on building equipment for Bitcoin miners and its self-custody crypto wallet, funded partly by giving up on creating a new decentralized internet dubbed Web 5 and investing less in music streaming app title. The decision was revealed the same week that Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election promising a far-friendlyer environment in the world's largest economy for crypto. Bitcoin mining was an industry he pledged while campaigning to foster likely welcome news to a business suffering from dramatically lower profitability following the so-called halving earlier this year,

which cut mining rewards by 50%. We are scaling back our investment in Title and winding down TBD, the business developing Web 5. This gives us room to invest in our Bitcoin mining initiative, which has strong product market fit and a healthy pipeline of demand and BitKee, our self-custody wallet for Bitcoin, the company said in its third quarter shareholders letter. The restructuring isn't a complete surprise, as Block said earlier this year, that it plans to cut headcount by as much 10% by the end of 2024, explaining that the growth of our company has far outpaced the growth of our business and revenue. Block doesn't mine Bitcoin but sells equipment to firms that do. Its initiatives include building its own mining computer. The payments firm said in April

that it completed the development of a three nanometer mining chip, which it had been working on since April 2023. In July, one of the largest Bitcoin miners' core scientific said it will use Block's mining rigs for its operations. Square is also focusing more on its self-custody wallet Bitkey, company started shipping in March. At the time, the company said that BitKee will not only provide standard wallet functionality, but also connect to Block's payments, platform, cash app, and crypto exchange Coinbase to allow buying and selling BTC. TBD was started by Block in June 2020 to create Web5, not to be confused with the better known notion of Web 3 as a, quote, group of technologies that enhance the web with decentralized identity, personal data storage,

and verifiable data exchange capabilities. Meanwhile, the company bought Title, a music and entertainment platform in 2021 for nearly $300 million, end quote. TikTok has launched Share to TikTok, which lets users directly share music from Apple Music and Spotify in a post to their TikTok feed or in DMs via TikTok messages. Quoting TechCrunch. The shared content can include tracks, albums, playlist, and more, and will link back to the music streaming service. This allows users to move between their preferred music app and TikTok to further engage

with the content. In doing so, TikTok gains an increased ability to connect users with their favorite songs and artists. This is something it was already doing due to the nature of its app, which allows music clips to be added to users' videos where they end up driving TikTok trends. With Share to TikTok users will now be able to post to TikTok's feed or stories and then use the popular green screen feature to showcase the content or make advantage of photo mode, TikTok says. On Spotify, users can share music, podcasts, or audiobooks by Tap. the share button, or they can access the share icon in the bottom right corner of the now playing screen. A similar feature is available through Apple Music's share sheet, where users will be presented

with the different options to post a video, post a photo, or share the music in a message. Over the years, TikTok's growing popularity drove its ability to change the music industry overall and how people discover new music. As Business Insider recently reported, songs that trend on TikTok tend to end up in the Billboard 100 or Spotify viral 50, and 67% of the app's users are likely to seek out music after hearing the songs on TikTok. The company's relationship with music labels, artists, and marketers also helps to keep the app flooded with new releases. For a time, TikTok parent company ByteDance considered taking advantage of TikTok's power more directly

by going ahead-to-head with Apple and Spotify with its own streaming app, TikTok music. The app was tested in a handful of markets, but the company later decided to shut down its global efforts on this front back in September. Instead, TikTok's focus is on driving music fans to its app for discovery. Working toward this goal, TikTok has previously launched an add-to-music app feature that let TikTok users save a track they found on the app to their preferred music streaming service. The move also may help to ease tensions with streamers which saw TikTok as a potential new rival. Now TikTok will actively help move traffic both to and from their apps instead of trying to steal their customers, end quote. The information says that Amazon is discussing a second multi-billion dollar investment in AI startup Anthropic,

but it's asking something quite interesting in exchange for that money. Quote, Amazon is discussing making a second multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI rival Anthropic, according to a person involved in the discussions. The new deal is similar to Amazon's initial $4 billion investment in the startup, which was struck last year. But this time, Amazon wants Anthropic to make a concession. The cloud giant is asking Anthropic, which uses Amazon's cloud services to train its AI, to use a large number of servers powered by chips developed by Amazon, this person. person said. The problem is that Anthropic prefers to use Amazon services powered by

NVIDIA designed AI chips. The size of Amazon's total investment in Anthropic could depend on the outcome of this discussion, specifically on the number of Amazon chips Anthropic agrees to use, this person said. The status of the talks couldn't be learned. The discussions are an example of the competing priorities of large cloud providers and developers of conversational AI that have formed alliances due to the high cost and complexity of producing the technology. The first such marriage in the industry between Microsoft and OpenAI has been remarkably beneficial to both companies, but has lately become fraught over OpenAI's concerns that it isn't getting enough servers from Microsoft to stay ahead of smaller AI rivals. And while Microsoft is developing its own AI server chip, which it hopes OpenAI will want to use,

OpenAI hasn't been interested in it, said a person with direct knowledge of the situation. Open AI is also developing a chip of its own to run its AI models. Shifting to the Amazon server chip could be technically challenging for Anthropic because the Amazon software that developers must use with the Traneum chips isn't as mature as NVIDIA's KUDA software, which AI developers have become accustomed to. Such a move could also lock Anthropic into using Amazon Traneum servers, making it more difficult for the AI startup to use other cloud providers or to lease its own data centers in the future, as Amazon doesn't make its hardware available to facilities run by other companies. Amazon, though, has good reason to get Anthropic to use its own chips, known as Traynium.

The cloud giant could reduce the number of Nvidia chips it has to buy if it can get its cloud customers to agree to use Tranium-powered servers. It won't need as many Nvidia chips. As part of Amazon's initial deal with Anthropic, the startup agreed to use some Traynium servers, but mainly relied on Nvidia servers in Amazon Data Center, said the person who has been involved in the discussions involving the companies. Anthropic recently sought funding from investment firms at a valuation of $30 to $40 billion, and any investment deal with Amazon could come in the form of convertible notes that become equity after Anthropic raises capital from other investors. In addition to the investment, the companies are negotiating a cloud deal in which the companies

share revenue from the sale of Anthropics model to Amazon cloud customers, such as DoorDash and Goldman Sachs, and Anthropic agrees to rent out specialized servers from Amazon to develop its technology, end quote. Several times this week, we've suggested that Apple might soon pivot to. from building out the Vision Pro line and instead move toward the Orion-style smart glasses form factor. The idea is that that product might end up being closer on the horizon for mainstream adoption than a face computer is. Well, more evidence of that, because Bloomberg says that Bidu plans to unveil smart glasses

with cameras and voice commands built atop their AI model Ernie next week, launching as soon as early 2025, for under $299.9. quote, the push to monetize AI has found expression in a series of hardware introductions this year from the humane AI pinflop to Microsoft's better-received copilot plus PC range. The meta-platforms smart glasses designed in collaboration with Raybanmaker, SLOXOTica are an older product that's grown in features, capabilities, and popularity this year. Meta said demand has outpaced its ability to supply new units, and SLRLUXOTA has singled them out as a product driving new sales.

Beijing-based Baidu is likewise working to capitalize on more than a decade of AI development and its smart glasses will connect to a suite of products such as Baidu Maps and its online encyclopedia bikee. Sales of the product, which will likely cost less than Meta's $299, could start as soon as early 2025 the person said. The AI glasses have been developed by Baidu's hardware division, Zhao Doe, which in 2020 raised funding from investors including IDG capital at a value of $2.9 billion. $1. Its key products include voice-activated speakers and wireless earbuds that also connect with Bidu's content ecosystem. A slew of Chinese upstart hardware makers have introduced AI glasses with cameras and open-ear audio already, while others have focused on narrower functionality like translation and

pathfinding. And across the Pacific Apple is exploring a push into the category with an internal study of products currently available on the market, Bloomberg News has reported, end quote. Time once again for the weekend. Long read suggestions. Starting out this This week, Ars Technica takes another look at how crifty the whole smart TV segment has gotten. Quote, success in the TV industry used to mean selling as many TV sets as possible, but with smart TVs becoming mainstream and hardware margins falling, OEMs have sought new ways to make money. TVOS providers can access a more frequent revenue source at higher margins, which has led to a viewing experience loaded with ads.

They can be served from the moment you pick up your remote, which may feature streaming service ads in the form of physical buttons. Budget TVs are the leaders in this trend, often offsetting cheap hardware prices with ads and data collection. Some people seek out the latest display developments, but many consumers merely want the cheapest TV they can buy within a certain size range. Various brands lower budget shoppers with low prices, but often force them to pay through heightened ad exposure, either immediately or after a future software update. In recent months, we've seen budget brands test users limits when it comes to ads, and this is all happening amid a global shift to streaming services that are also increasingly added. ad-driven. Roku OS is constantly trying to fit more ads with stronger targeting into its UI, whether that's on the menu or screensavers or delivered via Roku TV channels. Earlier this year,

Roku OS introduced home screen video ads. Roku has also tested a feature that, quote, would force viewers to sit through effectively a mid-roll ad when clicking from the Roku City screensaver to return to the home screen, Digidae reported in May. Additionally, Roku filed a patent for showing ads over anything you plug into your TV. It's possible that neither capability will roll out, but interest in these sorts of developments illustrates the value Roku puts in advancing its ad services. Moving off an Android fork, Amazon reportedly started deploying its own OS to run on its TVs in November. Amazon Fire TV users are subject to full-screen video ads and OS ownership gives Amazon more control and greater potential for earnings from advertising services. Amazon's advertising business was

thought to be its most profitable in 2020, and FireOS is becoming a bigger part of that, end quote. Lastly, from New York Mag, a piece with the title, what I learned from destroying myself at the New York City Marathon. Quote, buoyed by the cheering hordes, I was cooking for the first 18 miles of the race, actually going at a faster pace than my usual training runs. I felt as if I were floating above the ground, as if the crowd were carrying me along through the air. It turns out it wasn't. It was my legs that were doing that, and my legs were mad at me for it. At around the mile 19 mark, out of nowhere, I suddenly began to suffer severe leg cramps. It felt as though every step I took landed my foot on a two-foot-tall iron pole sticking out of the ground. I instantly pulled over to the side of the road, sat down and began massaging my calves and thighs furiously, just trying to get them to work again. See if you can tell where on my race graph this happened. I stood back up, leaned over the railing, and tried to stretch out. my screaming calves. Terrified I'd gone all this way and done all this work just to fall short in the final stretch. Then I noticed a group of young people making eye contact with me. I was in as serious pain as I'd been ever in my life, and I'm sure I looked it. But they did not behold me with pity or concern.

They just screamed, almost in unison. You got this man. And you know what? It really helped. Their enthusiasm didn't loosen up my cramping muscles, but it pushed me to keep going anyway to reward their unalloyed, holy sincere excitement to make their effort as worth it as mine. Much has been written about the joyous love fest that is the New York City Marathon, but I'm not sure it can be emphasized enough. People can be mean and cruel and inconsiderate. We all see it every day. But this was something basic and elemental. Human beings supporting other human beings simply because they are other human beings.

I could barely walk for the last two miles of the race, but after that there was no way I wasn't going to finish that effort. and I did, end quote. I have got a bonus episode for you this weekend, a portfolio profile episode of a company with a simple pitch. What if you could use your extra garage space, your basement space, Airbnb style, to serve the last mile of package delivery gig economy style. It's very interesting and it's very early. Listen to that. Talk to you on Monday.