Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 12/27 - All Hail Baby Yoda!

Episode Date: December 27, 2019

A late holiday gift for YouTube creators, an important new rule for drone operators, to what degree has the Chinese government enabled Huawei’s success, and of course, the weekend longreads suggestions. Sponsors: GiveWell.org/ridehome Mealime Links: YouTube gives creators more control over copyright claim disputes with new update (The Verge) New rule would make it possible to track and identify nearly all drones flying in the U.S. (CNBC) State Support Helped Fuel Huawei’s Global Rise (WSJ) Inside Documents Show How Amazon Chose Speed Over Safety in Building Its Delivery Network (Pro Publica) Weekend Longreads Suggestions: Where Are the Tech Zillionaires? San Francisco Faces the I.P.O. Fizzle (NYTimes) Netflix was the best-performing stock of the decade, delivering a more than 4,000% return (CNBC) 11 Lessons from the Success of Disney+ (MatthewBall.vc) Tuvalu is a tiny island nation of 11,000 people. It’s cashing in thanks to Twitch. (WSJ) How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars (Fast Company) THE 84 BIGGEST FLOPS, FAILS, AND DEAD DREAMS OF THE DECADE IN TECH (The Verge) 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 27th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. A late holiday gift for YouTube creators.

An important new rule for drone operators. To what degree has the Chinese government actually enabled Huawei's success? And, of course, the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Creators have been asking for something like this for a long time now. So in something of a festivist miracle, there must be some rejoicing across the land as YouTube has updated YouTube studio with new tools to give creators more ways to handle copyright disputes, including an assisted trim tool to edit out claimed copyrighted content, quoting The Verge. The new update now lets creators address copyright disputes directly from their digital back-end workspace and gives them the option to trim out the claimed content in question.

The assisted trim option is the biggest feature rolling out with the new studio update, with the, quote, endpoints of the edit preset to where the claimed content appears in the video, according to a Google product blog. The team is working to allow adjustable endpoints so creators can cut out the specific portion of their video that makes the most sense, but that isn't available just yet. Creators can also filter through their video feeds in studio to specifically see which videos were hit with copyright claims, leading to demonetized statuses or blocked videos entirely much more easily. In an effort to be more transparent, the YouTube team is also showing copyright strikes,

which are different and far more severe than copyright claims, directly on their studio dashboard. We're also providing more transparency about the content of the copyright takedown than ever before, now surfacing the specific description of the copyrighted work provided by the claimant in the takedown notice. a YouTube blog post reads, end quote. The FAA has issued a new rule requiring most drones to implement remote ID systems that will allow for tracking by law enforcement, saying that it expects compliance by all drone owners within three years. Obviously, this is designed to help law enforcement identify drones doing stuff they shouldn't. Remember how Heathrow Airport was shut down by rogue drones a year ago?

but also this sort of system might actually pave the way for greater commercial drone adoption. Once an ID system like this is in place, it's possible that a more comprehensive organization of usage of the skies could be in the offering. Companies looking to implement drone fleets like Amazon and UPS are apparently all in favor of the new rule. Quoting CNBC, this is an important building block in the unmanned traffic management ecosystem, the rule reads. all UAS, which stands for unmanned aircraft systems operating in the airspace of the United States, with very few exceptions, would be subject to the requirements of this rule, end quote. Such a rule has been in the works for several years. Congress first directed the FAA in 2016 to publish guidance regarding remote tracking by July 2018.

The FAA requested multiple extensions on the deadline drawing Iyer from Congress, end quote. This has been a matter of speculation for a while now. we've spoken about it before on this podcast. Yes, some people think Huawei, like other Chinese tech companies it is alleged, are merely fronts for various Chinese government interests. But even if you don't go full conspiracy theory on this front, other people have long wondered to what degree Huawei specifically has been at least financially propped up by Beijing. Well, the Wall Street Journal has investigated, and according to them, over the last 25 years, Huawei has been the recipient of around $46 billion in loans from the Chinese state,

saved $25 billion in taxes from state incentives, got $2 billion in land discounts, and full-on received $1.6 billion in grants. Quoting the journal, A Wall Street Journal review of Huawei's grants, credit facilities, tax breaks, and other forms of financial assistance. Details for the first time how Huawei had access to as much as $75 billion in state. state support as it grew from a little-known vendor of phone switches to the world's largest telecom equipment company, helping Huawei offer generous financing terms and undercut rivals

prices by some 30 percent, analysts and customers say. Huawei is vying to build next generation 5G telecom networks around the world. While financial support for favored firms or industries is common in many countries, China's assistance for Huawei, including tax waivers that began 25 years ago, is among the factors stoking questions. about Huawei's relationship with Beijing. Quote, while Huawei has commercial interests, those commercial interests are strongly supported by the state,

said Michael Wessel, a member of a U.S. congressional panel that reviews U.S.-China relations in an interview. The U.S. has raised concerns that use of Huawei's equipment could pose a security risk should Beijing request network data from the company. Huawei says it would never hand such data to the government. Huawei's official grants disclosed in annual reports total $1.6 billion since 2008. In the five years to 2018, they were 17 times as large as similar

subsidies reported by Nokia of Finland, the world's second largest telecom equipment maker. Sweden's Erickson, the third largest, posted none in the period, end quote. There have been plenty of deep dives recently into Amazon's build out of its own delivery network, not just the expected leapfrogging of FedEx and UPS, not just the huge investment in getting things to one-day delivery timelines, but also repeatedly how Amazon allegedly has delayed or scrapped investment in common industry practices around safety, like safety training and working their delivery personnel to the bone in the service of unrealistic delivery schedules. Again, allegedly. Actually, there was a really big,

deep dive into this this week, a co-production from ProPublica and BuzzFeed. Read the piece for greater details, but I want to point you to this anecdote, which I actually ran across when I was researching my book a couple years ago, quote, time after time internal documents and interviews with company insiders show Amazon officials have ignored or overlooked signs that the company was overloading its fast-growing delivery network while eschewing the expansive sort of training and oversight provided by a legacy carrier like UPS. One such incident hit particularly close to home. Just as the company began to build its delivery network six years ago,

a delivery van carrying Amazon packages struck a cyclist in a San Francisco suburb. The cyclist was Joy Covey, Amazon's first chief financial officer. She was killed leaving behind a young son. But for all the heartbreak among her former colleagues, the fatal crash did not alter the course the company was charting on delivery. delivery. Indeed, the system Amazon was creating would come to rely on low-cost contractors like the one involved in the crash that killed Covey. Covey's death made the risks of last-mile delivery more obvious and more personal. In Amazon's early days, it was Covey who persuaded Wall Street

to buy into Bezos's long-term vision when the company was losing money. After leading Amazon through its initial public offering, Covey left in 2000 to become an investor and philanthropist. When Bezos spoke at her November 2013 memorial service, he choked up, the author Brad Stone wrote in his book, The Everything Store. Quote, Joy and I talked often about a day in the future when we would sit down together with our grandkids and tell the Amazon story, Bezos said. The crash could have caused Amazon to rethink the way it handled safety issues, but it didn't. Senior managers and the logistics division at the time regarded the death as just another traffic accident, according to three people familiar with their conversations. In a statement, Amazon rejected the notion that it had put speed ahead of safety,

calling the new investigation, quote, another attempt by ProPublica and BuzzFeed to push a preconceived narrative that is simply untrue. Nothing is more important to us than safety, end quote. Amazon said that in the U.S., it provided more than one million hours of safety training last year to its employees and its delivery contractors, though it did not say how many people in its vast workforce, which numbers well in excess of 250,000 employees in the U.S. alone, received training. Amazon also said that last year it implemented safety improvement projects totaling $55 million, which would represent about one-fifth of one percent of the $27.7 billion the company spent on shipping last year, end quote. Time for the weekend long-rate suggestions. First of all, remember earlier in the year when I shared a long read about how real estate agents in the Bay Area were basically licking their lips,

awaiting what they were expecting would be the boom time to come. All of those unicorn companies were going public, right? That would mean a ton of newly minted millionaires and thus a bunch of Dreamhouse purchases, right? Well, if you haven't checked the stock market lately, a ton of those unicorn stocks are underwater today vis-a-vis their IPO prices. So, quote, San Francisco has been left as a slightly more normal town of tech workers who got rich-ish, maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars, but that doesn't go far in a city where the median cost of a single-family home is about 1.6 million. Everyone that came back post-IPOs seemed to be the same person. I didn't see any Louis Vuitton MacBook case covers or champagne in their Yeti thermos,

said J.T. Forbrus, a tax manager at Bogdan and Frasco in San Francisco. Private wealth managers are now meeting with a chastened clientele. Developers are having to cut home prices, unheard of a year ago, party planners are signing non-disclosure agreements to stage secret parties where hosts can privately enjoy their wealth. Union organizers are finding an opportunity, end quote. Well, maybe if you put some significant money into Netflix stock at the beginning of this decade, you would be able to afford that dream home. CNBC looks at the top performing stock of the 2010s, which is Netflix, which returned 4,000 percent to investors over the decade. quote, a $1 million bet on Netflix stock placed on January 1st, 2010, would be worth close to $43 million today.

The 4,181 return as of Friday's close, beats all current members of the S&P 500, which Netflix joined in December 2010, replacing the New York Times. The index as a whole is up 189% over the past 10 years. Far from its mid-cap days of the late aughts, Netflix now has a market cap of close to $148 billion, making it one of the 40 most valuable U.S. companies, end quote. Netflix only had 12 million paying subscribers a decade ago. Today, just under 160 million. Another brilliant analysis piece by the chief correspondent of the streaming wars, Matthew Ball, although he hates that term, streaming wars.

Anyway, Matthew has a piece looking at the lessons learned from the seemingly right out-of-the-gate blockbuster success of Disney Plus, Among other things, all hail Baby Yoda. Quote, Nothing solves for hits other than hits. Even though Disney launched with many of the most popular films of all time, it's clear that without the Mandalorian and the erroneously named Baby Yoda, the services overall popularity, cultural impact, and total viewership of all of its titles

would otherwise be much lower. This doesn't mean its subscribers will stay, continue to talk about, or watch Disney Plus after the Mandalorian, but there's nothing that marketing, technology, or back catalog can do to substitute for having great must-watch hit originals. In the streaming video on-demand era, the value of a show grows exponentially with popularity. In the linear world, viewership and revenue were fairly linear. As a result, it doesn't matter that the Mandalorian is one of the five most expensive shows ever made. It is good enough to affect a binary decision. Get Disney Plus versus skip Disney Plus and

lift the service's entire portfolio each week until the poorly named streaming wars conclude, no one will ever regret overspending on a hit, end quote. And I think most people know the story of the tiny Pacific Island nation of Tuvalu, which has been making money for years off of its dot TV top-level domain, but it turns out that Twitch TV and other streamers have only supercharged Tuvalu's good fortune, end quote. Thanks to the rise of live-streamed programming and competitive video gaming, Tuvalu earns about one-twelfth of its annual gross national income, or GNI, from licensing its domain to tech giants like Amazon-owned streaming platform Twitch

through the Virginia-based company Veracine. And in 2021, when Tuvalu's contract with Veracine expires, that percentage figures to push significantly higher, end quote. The great tech historian Benj Edwards has a piece in Fast Company, looking at how Atari took on Apple in the early 1980s in the home PC wars, and with the Atari 400 and 800 machines created arguably the best PCs of the era. Quote, idiot-proof and rugged Atari's home computer system machines, I'll call the platform HCS for short, represented a huge leap in consumer-friendly personal computing. Unlike many PCs of the time, the Atari machines exposed no bare electronics to the consumer. Unique keyed connectors meant that all

of the machine's ports, modules, and cartridges couldn't be plugged into the wrong places or even in the incorrect orientation. The 400 even featured a flat, spillproof keyboard aimed at fending off snack-eating children. And due to restrictive FCC rules that precluded the open expansion slots on the Apple 2, Atari designed a suite of intelligent plug-and-play peripherals linked together by a serial I.O. bus that presaged the ease of much later USB. In some ways, the Atari computers even exceeded the state-of-the-art from a, Atari's coin op department. In 1979, most Atari arcade games shipped with black and white monitors, using translucent gel overlays to generate pseudo color. The Atari computers played games in color from the start, if the consumer provided the color TV set, of course. At launch, the Atari 800

retailed for $999 with $16K of RAM, about $3,387 when adjusted for inflation, and the Atari 400 with 8K retailed for $549 or about $1,861 today. Compared to a game console such as the Atari VCS at $190, that was expensive, but it undercut the $16K Apple 2's $1,195 retail price in 1979, end quote. And finally, one more end of the decade list from the verge, a list of the biggest tech flops of the decade. Tech flops. Theranos is on there.

The fire phone is on there. 3D TVs are on there. Jucero is on there, too. The Connect is on there, too, which I know it didn't take over the world, but I still think the Connect was cool. Anyway, eat your heart out. It turns out there was a bunch of crap over the last 10 years in tech. That is all for this week.

Hope the season is treating you right. I'll be talking to you again on Monday. I think I know I will be doing one more episode in 2019, and it will be probably Monday, though, maybe Tuesday, depending on a couple of factors, including how much news actually happens between now and then, but probably Monday. So talk to you that.