Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/20 - Now Apple Joins The Space Race?

Episode Date: December 20, 2019

Does Apple have a secret team to do an end run around telecom carriers, Google buys a game studio, IAC buys Care.com, Ripple is an interesting raise, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Tiny Capital GetQuip.com/ride Booknotesapp.com (or on iPhone and Android) Links: Apple Has Secret Team Working on Satellites to Beam Data to Devices (Bloomberg) Google buys triple-A game dev Typhoon Studio to beef up Stadia (VentureBeat) Care.com shares surge after Barry Diller’s IAC agrees to buy online caregiver marketplace (CNBC) Ripple Raises $200 Million as Part of Bid for XRP Adoption (Fortune) Robocall fines rise to $10,000 per call under newly passed law (The Verge) Labels & Publishers Win $1 Billion Piracy Lawsuit Against Cox Communications (Billboard) The Booknotesapp.com Weekend Longreads Suggestions: SoftBank Vision Fund Employees Depict a Culture of Recklessness (Bloomberg Businessweek) Shopify: A StarCraft Inspired Business Strategy (Non-GAAP Thoughts) IKEA 2.0 (The Verge) State of the Stream 2019: Platform Wars, the New King of Streaming, Most Watched Game and More! (Stream Elements) Meet the Mad Scientist Who Wrote the Book on How to Hunt Hackers (Wired) I created my own deepfake—it took two weeks and cost $552 (Ars Technica) The 100 Memes That Defined The 2010s (Buzzfeed News) 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, December 20th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Does Apple have a secret team to do an end run around telecom carriers?

Google buys a game studio, IAC, buyscare.com, Ripple is an interesting raise. And of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It's been a while, but we have an honest to goodness Mark German Scoop Friday on our hands. sources are telling German in Bloomberg that Apple has a secret team of around 12 engineers who are tasked with working on satellite tech and other related wireless tech in an effort to find ways to beam data directly to devices. Forget about Wi-Fi, forget about 5G. And this team hopes to have some form of productive results in as little as five years.

quote. Apple's work on communication satellites and next-generation wireless technology means the aim is likely to beam data to a user's device, potentially mitigating the dependence on wireless carriers, or for linking devices together without a traditional network. Apple could also be exploring satellites for more precise location tracking for its devices, enabling improved maps, and new features. It's not clear if Apple intends to pursue the costly development of a satellite constellation itself, or simply harnesses. on-the-ground equipment that would take data from existing satellites and send it to mobile devices. Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Boeing are some of the biggest satellite makers. And Apple spokeswoman declined to comment. The team is led by Michael Trella and John Fenwick, former aerospace engineers who helped lead satellite imaging company Skybox imaging before it sold to Google in 2014.

The pair led Google's satellite and spacecraft operations until leaving together in 2017 to begin a new initiative at Apple, Bloomberg News reported at the time, end quote. Hmm, maybe Amazon's planned satellite constellation could someday get some neighbors. Here's a mind-blowing thought. What if one day iPhones and all I devices didn't need carriers at all? You could do all your everyday phone stuff directly with Apple, paying them the monthly fee for data on top of the price of the device. and then think about that future world where AR devices and smart glasses are the next platform out in the real world.

Yeah, 2019 was the year that I at least realized that space tech is the next frontier for all of tech, and the future is now. Google has acquired Montreal-based game development house Typhoon Studios as a part of its plan to create exclusive content for Stadia, quoting Venture Beat. Typhoon Studios founders are Reid Schneider, former head of production for Warner Brothers Games Montreal, and Alex Hutchinson, former creative director for Assassins Creed 3 and Far Cry 4, and their first game is the upcoming Journey to the Savage Planet. Typhoon Studios has built a team of industry veterans who are committed to the player experience. The Typhoon team will become part of another stadia games and entertainment studio that is based in Montreal with Sebastian Puell as the lead.

He's another Ubisoft veteran, end quote. IAC is acquiring online caregiver marketplace care.com in a deal valued at nearly $500 million, quoting CNBC. IAC, a holding company for dozens of digital brands, will pay $15 per care.com share in an all-cash transaction, a 13.2% premium over where care.com stock closed on Thursday at $13.25 per share. Shares of care.com were indeed gaining more than 13% on the news at the open. However, care.com shares cratered earlier this year from March all-time highs of nearly $26 each after a Wall Street Journal investigation questioned the online marketplace's vetting process for its caregivers. The company's founder, Sheila Lerio Marcello, resigned as CEO in August five months after the journal's story.

Following Marcelo's decision to step down, hedge fund engine capital and activist investor urgedCare.com to pursue a sale, end quote. I did not know this, but care.com was founded all the way back in 2006. It has made more than one and a half million matches with families and caregivers since then and currently has 374,000 paying families. Worth noting that this comes one day after IAC outlined its plans to spin off its match group into a separate company. Interesting raise from the crypto file. Ripple has raised a $200 million series C. led by global investment firm Tetragon at a $10 billion valuation, quoting Fortune.

Ripple controls an enormous reserve of XRP, which is the world's third most valuable cryptocurrency, and emerged in 2011 as an early competitor to Bitcoin. In recent years, the company has bet its business on persuading financial institutions to use XRP as a bridge currency on cross-border transfers. In an interview with Fortune, CEO Brad Garlinghouse said Ripple, currently has more than 300 customers. He expects Ripple's customer base to grow 30 to 40% in 2020 and says transaction volume on the company's network will increase more than 600%. The $200 million investment, which was also backed by SBI and Route 66 ventures, may help

Ripple refute skeptics who say its technology is a solution in search of a problem and question why banks should adopt it, end quote. And I know that we are about to turn over a new decade here, but this headline is straight out of 2002. A jury has found Cox Communications liable for its customers' piracy of more than 10,000 musical works and awarded $1 billion in damages to Sony Music, EMI, Universal, and Warner Music. Voting Billboard The labels and their publishing entities filed the lawsuit in July 2018, accusing the cable and internet service provider of turning a blind eye to pirates on its network.

They alleged that Cox, quote, deliberately refused to take reasonable measures, end quote, to combat copyright infringers even after the company became aware of specific acts of infringement by its customers. Cox was also accused of imposing an arbitrary cap on the number of infringement notices it would accept from copyright holders, thereby allowing said infringement to continue, and of failing to permanently terminate customers who were found to have pirated. The complaint noted that at least $20,000 Cox subscribers could be categorized as repeat infringers. Cox was found guilty of infringement claims on 10,017 pieces of work, the full amount charged by plaintiffs, and find $99,830.29 per work, end quote. According to Billboard, the record companies and the RIA have ramped up their targeting of ISPs recently.

Charter Communications, aka Spectrum, faces a suit filed in March, and in August, another suit was filed against RCN Corporation. Congress has officially passed the Traced Act, enabling fines of up to $10,000 per call for anyone making robocalls. The act will also require carriers to deploy stir-shaken protocols to identify spoofed numbers. as the verge says, a holiday gift to anyone who owns a phone. Quote, the House voted overwhelmingly to approve the measure earlier this month and Thursday's unanimous Senate vote means the bill only requires President Trump's signature to become law. Representative Mike Doyle said that the bill should be signed into law within the next week or so. I have yet to meet someone who says they enjoy receiving those unwanted and illegal robocalls that plague our phones, Senator John Thune said in a statement.

This bill represents a unique legislative effort that is not only bipartisan at its core, but it's nearly unanimously supported in Congress, end quote. Quip, makers of the Quip Electric toothbrush, want you to know the one single discovery that matters most for your dental care. It is simply this, that if you have good habits, you are time for the weekend long read suggestions this week brought to by book notes. you've got a stack of books growing on your nightstand, right? Books that you've never quite found the time to read, right?

I get that. With book notes, you can read or listen to 15-minute summaries of all the books you want to read for a fraction of what you'd pay to, well, continue building that book pile of shame. Hundreds of 15-minute summaries of the best books highlighting the key insights and ideas of each title. Book notes. All the information from your favorite titles in a fraction. of the time. Get a free seven-day trial right now at booknotesapp.com. That's booknotesapp.com. First up for the long reads, you know that I can't resist. Here's another deep dive behind the scenes

at SoftBank. It paints a picture of sycophancy, recklessness, hubris, lots of things. Too many juicy anecdotes to read. So let me just pick one detail that I've heard a couple times now, but maybe haven't mentioned before. Quote, SoftBank's investment in Oyo demonstrates an accounting practice that worries investors. When the fund takes a stake in a startup, then invest again at a higher valuation, it often books a profit on its original holding. This is legal, even though no actual cash has flowed into its coffers. Much of the Vision Fund's profit in the second quarter of 2019, for example, was on paper, the result of valuation spikes for Oyo, DoorDash, and Communications App Maker Slack Technologies. Quote, it may pass the

accounting standards test, but it doesn't pass the common sense test, says Aswath de Maderon, a professor of finance at the New York University Stern School of Business and author of four books on valuing businesses, end quote. The newsletter, Non-Gap Thoughts, had an analysis of Shopify and its overall strategy in the e-commerce market through the lens of the game Starcraft. Shopify CEO Toby Luckie has said, quote, I firmly believe that I learned more. about building businesses from playing Starcraft than I've learned from business books, end quote. So the newsletter takes him at his word. It's a really super detailed and interesting analysis,

actually. Quote, Shopify has turned independent e-commerce sites into an online retail swarm capable of taking on much bigger players. The Shopify ecosystem makes it very easy for entrepreneurs to spawn sites and gives them the tools to be nimble and competitive online. One thing about Zerg gameplay that I haven't mentioned is that many non-Zerg Starcraft players get frustrated in long games because Zerg is extremely difficult to beat in late game. This means once a Zerg player has established their macro economy and upgrades, they can pretty much win any read-and-respond situations as long as they build appropriate countermeasures in a timely fashion. Consequently, in order to win, you have to beat Zerg early in

the game, or you will likely lose a long game of attrition, all else being equal. In my opinion, Shopify is well past the early game stage of online commerce, so it will be interesting to see how things play out for Shopify long-term, end quote. Shopify CEO Toby Licki tweeted in response saying, quote, that's a frighteningly good read of my psyche, end quote. More strategic analysis. IKEA's smart home initiative is actually called Home Smart. The home comes before the smart.

And IKEA says that's on purpose. The verge has a deep look at IKEA's smart home strategy, quote, IKEA can easily enter homes with inexpensive solutions. It's in plenty of them already. That's an advantage in smart home products, since the first one is usually the ecosystem that a consumer sticks with. Compatibility between systems continues to be a problem. You start with a cheap IKEA smart bulb and wireless dimmer kit,

and soon you've got a house full of IKEA speakers, lights, blinds, and accessories because they all work together. The cheapest IKEA smart LED bulb costs $12, when it launched in 2017. Today it costs $8.99 compared to $13.99 for the cheapest comparable Phillipshew smart bulb. Which do you think most people would choose? On a long enough timeline, the survival rate of any IKEA competitor could drop to zero, end quote.

From stream elements, a pure data analysis of the streaming wars, but the other streaming Wars, the video game streaming wars, and no, not that one either, not stuff like Stadia. I mean, the competition between the likes of Twitch, YouTube gaming, mixer, etc. Just go look at the data because, again, I can't quote it all. Who's up, who's down among the platforms, all that stuff. But also note that League of Legends has taken the number one spot in terms of hours watched back from Fortnite over the course of 2019. From Wired, meet the mad scientist who wrote the book on How to Hunt Hackers.

Thirty years ago, Cliff Stoll published The Cuckoo's Egg, a book about his cat and mouse game with a KGB-sponsored hacker. Today, the internet is a far darker place, and Stoll has become a cybersecurity icon. And friend of the show, Timothy B. Lee, created his own deepfake, a melding of Mark Zuckerberg with data from Star Trek the next generation. it only cost him two weeks and $552. Quote, what's remarkable is that a neophyte like me can create fairly convincing video so quickly and for so little money. And there's every reason to think deep fake technology will continue to get better, faster, and cheaper in the coming years. In this article, I'll take you with me on my deep fake journey.

I'll explain each step required to create a deep fake video. Along the way, I'll explain how the underlying technology works and explore some of its limitations, end quote. And finally, another end of decade list. BuzzFeed takes a look at the memes that defined the 2010s. There's a hundred of them. They're all here. There's Crying Jordan, the This Is Fine Dog, distracted boyfriend, damn Daniel. Doge.

Remember Doge? Maybe the most 2010 thing about the 2010s is that this sort of list somehow seems now like maybe the most important and relevant cultural look back that we can do for the decade. That's all for the long reads brought to you by book notes. Looking to better yourself in 2020, book notes makes this easy and possible. Learn from some of the most successful leaders, entrepreneurs, doctors, or relationship experts in any field. Read or listen to over 100 titles for less than $100. That's over 20 times less expensive than buying the actual books.

Start your free trial of booknotes, available. on iOS and Android. Get a free seven-day trial right now at booknotes app.com. That's booknotes app.com. Well, forget the Google Civil War. The Civil War that I'm here for and fully expect this weekend is the bloodbath of takes once everyone has gotten to see Rise of Skywalker. I'm personally not going to see it so that I can neutrally just observe all the bickering.

Anywho, as you might be aware, where next week is a holiday week, so there will be some time off on the show. There will be shows on Monday, Thursday, and Friday next week, but no shows Christmas Eve or Christmas Day, the 24th and 25th. So I will talk to you on Monday, and then after that, on Thursday and Friday. If you're traveling and being festive next week, be well, and hug those that you love. Talk to you on Monday.