Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/21 - Facebook Goes Crypto

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

Facebook is developing a cryptocoin for WhatsApp, Blind was not quite anonymous enough, which is the most accurate voice assistant and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: Metalab.co The Internet of Things Podcast Links: Facebook Is Developing a Cryptocurrency for WhatsApp Transfers, Sources Say (Bloomberg) At Blind, a security lapse revealed private complaints from Silicon Valley employees (TechCrunch) Apple AI Chief John Giannandrea Gets Promotion to Senior Vice President (MacRumors) Annual Smart Speaker IQ Test (LoopVentures) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: Software Defined Talk (Podcast) Apple Computers Used to Be Built in the U.S. It Was a Mess (NYTimes) Inside Shenzhen’s race to outdo Silicon Valley (Bloomberg) The 2019 IPO class headlined by Uber will create a ton of new wealth. Will the billions go to mansions or missions? (Recode) Venture Capital Blind Spots: The Top 7 Reasons Why VCs Miss Billion-Dollar Outcomes (645 Ventures) Prime and Punishment (The Verge) 7 Modern BBSes Worth Calling Today (PCMag) 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 Ride Home for Friday, December 21st, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook is developing a crypto coin for WhatsApp.

Blind was not quite anonymous enough. Which is the most accurate voice assistant and, of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. According to Bloomberg, Facebook is developing a cryptocurrency for, money transfers on its WhatsApp platform with the idea to first focus on deploying this in the remittances market in India. Notably, this would be a so-called staple coin, a type of cryptocurrency pegged to an existing currency like, for example, the U.S. dollar. This helps minimize volatility in the currency's valuation. Quoting from Bloomberg, WhatsApp, the company's

encrypted mobile messaging app is popular in India with more than 200 million users. The country also leads the world in remittances. People sent $69 billion home to India in 2017, the World Bank said this year, end quote. Now, as you can imagine, because this is Facebook, there has been a metric ton of snark about this news. Comments to the tune of, oh, sure, Facebook is exactly the company that I want to trust with my money, or I want to trust with the economy at large. But I got to say, this actually makes a ton of sense to me. We see, especially in Asia, that these next generation mobile and chat apps can be pretty

amazingly valuable at commerce and financial functions. And look, for all of crypto, one of the problems is that no one has, as of yet, been able to graft a crypto project onto a useful or productive. or popular platform. But look, WhatsApp is just such a popular and useful platform. So what I'm saying is this makes a ton of sense for WhatsApp to actually do, especially in an emerging market like India, where financial systems are not exactly calcified. And it might make a ton of sense for blockchain technology in general. Just indulge me with a little reverie for a second. Imagine if Facebook internally had gotten super hot on blockchain back.

in, I don't know, 2012 right after IPOing. I mean, that whole hustle to find a business model that could scale. When they were doing that, Facebook tried all sorts of different things. They tried payments. They tried finance. They only settled on ads as the overarching solution, ads and strip mining personal data, because they realized that personal data is the most valuable commodity of the modern era, and they just happen to be sitting on the mother load of it.

but what if they had gotten the blockchain bug back then in 2012? And they hadn't essentially given up on their micro payments and finance efforts in favor of ads. And then when they acquired WhatsApp, an app which, by the way, is famously averse to monetization, when they acquired WhatsApp, which had its strong encryption, they married it to a public ledger blockchain. And then WhatsApp took off around the world like it did. But it did so with this cryptocurrency baked into it for payments, remittances, commerce, all that good stuff. This is how, by now, blockchain could already have gone mainstream in a major way. I mean, this is the dream of overlaying a commerce platform overtop a digital platform.

The same dream that everyone has had going back to the early 90s, going back to things like cybercash, going back to when Nathan Merville tried to sell Bill Gates on the dream of Microsoft, quote, taking a Vig on every digital transaction in some imagined information superhighway future. But yes, that little reverie assumes that Facebook could have done all this and avoided doing its usual bumbling, venal, aggressive stuff. And yes, maybe they can't do this now because they will have a hard time talking anyone into trusting them to do this. As I said before Facebook, you might have disqualified yourself from certain markets because of your bad behavior. And that sucks.

But I'm saying that if that's true, if you are disqualified, it sucks because in this case, it really does make a lot of sense to me to marry the blockchain to something like WhatsApp. Blind is a social network slash anonymous community chat app that allows people to dish dirt about their current employers. or company without fear of being identified by said employer or company. Blind got a fair bit of press when allegations of sexual harassment at Uber surfaced on that platform. Uber later blocked Blind on its corporate network. But employees at any company you can name in Silicon Valley still use the app. And Blind just last month secured a new $10 million round of funding. But hey, anonymous chatting, ratting on your employer, what could go wrong, right?

Well, a security researcher claims that from November 1st through December 19th, quote, Blind left one of its database servers exposed without a password, making it possible for anyone who knew where to look to access each user's account information and identify would be whistleblowers, end quote. Now, Blind says that there is, quote, no evidence that the database was misappropriated or misused. But, I mean, how many times do we have to hear about companies whose services or whole product offering, whose whole basic premise is security, is anonymity, is keeping stuff safe? How many times do they end up failing at that one core skill set? insert you literally had one job animated jiff here i've said before that i don't tend to cover tech

executive musical chairs you know the back and forth of this tech executive goes to that company or left that company or whatever but i did make an exception earlier this year when artificial intelligence guru john gendrea was poached from google by apple back in april well late yesterday apple announced that Gianna Andrea has been promoted to Apple's vaunted executive team as a senior vice president reporting directly to Tim Cook. The joke at the time of Gianna Andrea's hiring by Apple was that maybe he would be the one to finally get Siri to be, you know, useful and accurate. But by now putting all of Apple's efforts in the machine learning and AI space under Gianendra's portfolio and elevating that portfolio, and elevating that portfolio,

to a lofty height in the Apple org chart. I think we can read the tea leaves pretty confidently to see that Apple thinks that efforts in these areas are likely to become a crucial aspect of Apple's product development going forward for the next several years. Speaking of Siri, Jean Munster and the gang at Loop Ventures ran a test in order to see who was the most accurate

among the current crop of Voices. They ran all of the big voice assistants through roughly 800 different voice commands, and the winner turned out to be Google Assistant, who answered 88% of the inquiries or commands correctly. And then, for all its negative press about being inaccurate and unreliable, Siri came in second getting 75% of queries right. Alexa was accurate only 73% of the time, and surprising to me at least, Cortana had a poor showing coming in forth at only 63% accuracy. Loop Ventures tested various types of queries, things like, where is the nearest coffee shop, versus asking the device to contact someone, versus asking, you know, to order more paper towels or some sort of commerce request. quote, Google Home has the edge in four out of the five categories, but falls short in Siri in the command category.

HomePod's lead in this category may come from the fact that the HomePod will pass a full Siri kit request, like those regarding messaging, lists, and basically anything other than music to the iOS device paired to the speaker. Siri on iPhone has deep integration with email, calendar, messaging, and other areas of focus in our command category. Our question set also contains a fair amount of music. related queries, which HomePod specializes in. The largest disparity exists in the commerce section, which conventional wisdom suggests Alexa would dominate. However, the Google Assistant correctly answers more questions about product information and where to buy certain items, and Google Express is just as capable as Amazon in terms of actually purchasing items or restocking common goods

you've bought before, end quote. Time once again for the Betterment Weekend Long Reads suggestions. Want some extra peace of mind this holiday weekend? After you knock out these weekend long reads, check out Betterment and see how they can help you set and achieve financial goals for the new year and for your future. First up, though, today's podcast recommendation is for software-defined talk. Software-defined talk focuses on enterprise software, cloud computing, and software development, all that good stuff. They cover the cloud computing news of the week, but they do so without taking themselves too seriously. If you work with Kubernetes, Cloud Foundry or AWS Lambda, then this is the podcast for you. As I mentioned,

it's a weekly show with three fun hosts who keep things free, flowing, and entertaining. So if that sounds like something up your alley, subscribe to the podcast by visiting softwaredefined talk.com or by searching for software-defined talk in your favorite podcast app. Software-defined talk. First up for the long reads, remember when Apple announced its new campus in Austin, Texas, recently to great fanfare and said it was all part of their big master plan to increase their U.S.-based workforce. But unless you know your Apple history, you might not be aware that there was a time when Apple tried to have a major manufacturing presence in the U.S. as well.

The first long read from the New York Times looks back at a time in the early 1980s when Steve Jobs tried to launch a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant in California to make Macintoshes. Let's just say things did not work out so well. And it didn't work out so well either when he tried a similar thing with an advanced new factory for his next company next.

And that apparently learned Steve his lesson because when he returned to Apple in the late 90s, Tim Cook came on to master the art of global supply chains once and for all for Apple, and the rest is history. Quote, when I started my career, all my flights were to Japan, said Tony Fidel, one of the hardware designers of the iPod and iPhone at Apple. Then all my flights went Korea, then Taiwan, then China, end quote. So check out that Times piece to remember the bygone dream of domestic tech manufacturing,

but then check out the next link from the MIT Technology Review because it almost makes for a perfect compliment. This story takes a look at where all of that manufacturing went. Shen Zhen in China has flooded the world with cheap gadgets now for the better part of 20 years. However, going forward, it wants to do what Silicon Valley failed to do when it outsourced all of its manufacturing to China. Shen Zhen wants to keep manufacturing local,

but it wants to also build itself into a global hub for innovation, for entrepreneurship, to rival Silicon Valley itself. In other words, it's tired of just doing the dirty work of manufacturing cheap gadgets. It wants the glamour and riches of developing those gadgets, too. Quote, instead of just hardware, like hoverboards, it's making sophisticated products that combine hardware with software, Just in time, bookable electric scooters, app-controlled drones, and increasingly artificial intelligence, translation devices, toy robots, semi-autonomous vehicles. Moving beyond its reputation for developing cheap rip-offs of other people's ideas, it's become more of a hub that connects innovation, manufacturing, and knowledge all over the world.

This means Shenzhen could become something that Silicon Valley, for all its extraordinary concentration of money and talent, has never quite been. a technology hub with products available for every country and almost any budget. The question is whether it can keep adapting and growing in the face of three combined threats, burgeoning barriers to globalization and increasingly authoritarian Chinese government, and the cost of its own success, end quote. Next, we talked this week about those flood of IPOs that are expected in the next six months, Uber, Slack, Lyft, Airbnb, and now Pinterest. It is expected that together these.

companies will now publicly be worth considerably north of $100 billion. So there's an incredible amount of wealth about to be created, an incredible amount of fortunes about to be unlocked, and in a very real way, the Bay Area especially is preparing for it. Already, the real estate market is preparing for big all-cash-home purchases, and money and wealth managers are already circling. Quote, if you're one of the first 100 employees at a place like Uber, for instance, you've likely been hounded by the Morgan Stanleys and Goldman Sachs of the world. Top wealth advisors tell Recode that they track stock rich to be millionaires, starting as far back as three years before a so-called liquidity event like an IPO and as close to 18 months before.

So this bonanza does not begin when the largest shareholders are revealed on an S-1 filing just a few weeks before the actual IPO, end quote. That's from the recode piece looking at what happens when big IPOs hit like this. It's also a bonanza for charities as well, of course, so check out the recode link for what happens when Silicon Valley makes it rain. Of course, among those who will be benefiting

from the IPOs and the raining will be the VC firms that were savvy enough to have backed these companies. But what if you were a VC that missed out? What if you passed on Airbnb, as some people have publicly regretted doing? 645 Ventures has a piece up on Medium looking at the top seven reasons that they say VCs miss billion-dollar outcomes. They start with a famous quote from the legendary Howard Marks. The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological, end quote.

Next, The Verge has a really interesting long read looking at the cutthroat world of the 6 million sellers who operate on Amazon Marketplace, the system that lets third parties sell via Amazon's platform. This really is cutthroat competition. There are instances of industrial espionage and sabotage. There are fake five-star reviews. There's tampering with trademarks. All of this to get that little edge that will let you sell one more widget on Amazon's

platform. Oh, and don't run afoul of the rules, if you can understand them, because, quote, for sellers, Amazon is a quasi-staffir. date. They rely on its infrastructure, its warehouses, shipping network, financial systems, and portal to millions of customers, and pay taxes in the form of fees. They also live in terror of its rules, which often change and are harshly enforced. Sellers are more worried about a case being opened on Amazon than in actual court, says Dave Bryant in Amazon seller and blogger. Amazon's judgment is swifter and less predictable, and now that the company controls

nearly half of the online retail market in the U.S., its rulings can instantly determine the success or failure of your business, he says. Quote, Amazon is the judge, the jury, and the executioner, end quote. And finally today, this is not an actual long read, but just a list, and it's not a long list at that even. But again, like I did around Thanksgiving, this will give you something fun to do during the holidays. In PC Magazine, the great Benj Edwards has a list of the seven

best modern bulletin board systems or BBSs that are still operating and thus are still worth calling into even today. So hit up the very last link in the Long Reads show notes. Learn how to telnet if you've never heard of what tell net is. But if you're old enough to remember, you can spend the weekend getting your late 80s and early 90s on. And if you're too young to remember, well, check it out because this is how we did it back in the day. Before there even was a a web. Trust me, it was a heck of a lot of fun. That's been the weekend long

reads brought to you by Betterment. Investment involves risk, but TechMeme ride home listeners can get up to one year managed free. For more information, visit betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Betterment, outsmart Average. Yeah, so

if you've been seeing a lot of weirdness in your podcast feed for this show, we are finally in the midst of making that transition to a new podcast host. So that's why old episodes have been popping up and redownloading and whatnot. Remember, there will be no shows on Monday or Tuesday next week. For obvious reasons, the first new show will be on Wednesday. But if you don't get a show on Wednesday or Thursday or Friday, then maybe check into that. Maybe re-subscribe, maybe

research for the tech meme right home and resubscribe. I am. hoping, of course, that this all goes completely painlessly for all of you, but it is always a hassle. Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate, and I will talk to you hopefully on Wednesday, the 26th Boxing Day, as the British call it.