Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 8/17 - The Secret Netflix Subcategories

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

A Google smart speaker with a screen, the crypto mining fad is fading, Silicon Valley has lost a piece of its history, the secret Netflix categories and the weekend longreads suggestions. Links:Google to debut display-equipped AI speaker before holidays (Nikkei Asian Review)APNewsBreak: Google clarifies location-tracking policy (The Associated Press)Crypto crash: Despite a strong quarter, Nvidia shares fall on disappointing forecast (SiliconAngle)Wish, an Internet Dollar Store, Struggles to Keep Customers (The Information)Silicon Valley is dismantling a priceless piece of its history (Fast Company)The Netflix ID Bible – Every Category on Netflix (What's on Netflix) The Betterment Weekend Longreads:VIRGIN GALACTIC’S ROCKET MAN (The New Yorker)Inside Evernote’s brain (Fast Company)LET’S ALL GO BACK TO TUMBLR (The Outline)Why Can’t Europe Do Tech? (Bloomberg Businessweek)To Get Ready for Robot Driving, Some Want to Reprogram Pedestrians (Bloomberg) 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 ride home for Friday, August 17th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, a Google smart speaker with a screen.

The crypto mining fad is fading. Silicon Valley has lost a piece of its history, the secret Netflix categories that no one ever knew about, and the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The Niki Asian Review is reporting that Google is preparing to launch its own smart speaker with a display, similar to the Amazon Echo Show, and they're planning to do so in time for the holiday season this year.

Apparently 3 million units are planned for the first production batch, and this is despite the fact that, according to analyst estimates, sales of the Echo Show have actually been underwhelming. Quote, Google's upcoming model with the display is still likely to rely on voice commands, but users should be able to play YouTube videos, check their calendar, and view maps. Some industry executives predict more smart speakers will hit the market with displays as image and video recognition features catch on. For all of 2017, 35 million smart speakers were shipped worldwide. Amazon took the top market share at 63% last year while Google controlled 32%

on other players fought over the scraps. Google, however, accounted for 36% of around 9 million units shipped in the January to March period of 2018, with, Amazon's share falling to 28%. Remember that scoop from the AP earlier in the week that Google is probably still tracking your location even when you seemingly have turned location tracking off in settings. Well, Google pushed back on that story, but actually reading back at Google's responses this morning,

they didn't actually deny the story either. Well, yesterday, Google revised the help page that describes how the so-called location history setting actually works. The page in question now reads, quote, you can turn off location history at the account level at any time, but this setting does not affect other location services on your device, like Google Location Services and Find My Device. Some location data may be saved as part of your activity on other services,

like search and maps. When you turn off location history for your Google account, it's off for all devices associated with that Google. account, end quote. So the AP scoop was correct then. We have been updating the explanatory language about location history to make it more consistent and clear across our platforms and help centers. Google told the AP in a statement today. One of the reasons the stock of Nvidia has been on a tear over the last 18 months or so is because of GPUs, which is it's bread and butter. GPUs have become so central to where modern computing is going. Self-driving cars, AI, deep learning, cryptocurrency,

all make use of GPUs as opposed to the CPUs that we're also familiar with. But there's an interesting note in Nvidia's earnings report yesterday. Real quick, blah, blah, blah, Q2 revenues of $3.12 billion, up 40% year-over-year versus $3.1 billion, estimated net income of $1.1 billion, gaming business revenue of $1.81 billion, and data center revenue of $760 million. But what caught my eye was that NVIDIA reported that cryptocurrency-specific revenue only came in at $18 million in Q2, which was below NVIDIA's own $100 million estimate for the quarter, and also down from the $289 million that NVIDIA earned in cryptocurrency-specific revenue, just in Q1.

Going forward, Nvidia says it expects no meaningful contributions to revenue from cryptocurrency at all. What's going on here? Just a few months ago, crypto was contributing something like 10% to Nvidia's earnings. Now it's basically nil

is one of the wide-open growth markets for GPUs suddenly drying up. I mean, the crypto market is back in slump mode, so it seems like maybe the crazy bull market for ICOs is over too. Is mining also a fad that's over? AMD, one of Nvidia's main competitors, also recently commented on a drop in revenue from crypto mining.

So either the mining craze is ebbing or everyone is maybe shifting to other mining-specific silicon. Remember the news that Crypto Mining Unicorn BitMain has filed for one of the largest tech IPOs of all time. I tried to look around this morning for some definitive analysis on this and found little, but I guess it looks like if you're an investor who was hunting for an angle to play the mining space, Bitmain might maybe be the better bet going forward, better than Nvidia or AMD at least. A couple of startup narrative updates here. Wish is a startup that is

trying to triangulate two hot investing feces, dollar stores and mobile e-commerce. On Wish, you can, for example, buy women's boots for $5, rice cookers for $4. There's a lot of really cheap Chinese merchandise on the platform. But, hey, dollar stores have done well for investors over the last decade or so, and mobile commerce is, well, mobile commerce is the future, right? So investors have rewarded Wish with an amazing $8.5 billion valuation. But the information was reporting last night that Wish is actually struggling to hold on to customers.

customers. According to a report from credit card transaction tracker second measure, only 8% of people in the U.S. who bought something from Wish for the first time were still shopping on Wish a year after their initial purchase. In contrast, Walmart.com retains 14% of first-time shoppers and Amazon 31%. Now, numbers like this don't exactly mean disaster. Quote, as a relatively young e-commerce business founded only seven years ago, Wish can churn through customers now as long as it attracts new shoppers. But the ability to retain customers will become more important as it matures. Wish's app was the number two shopping app on iPhones by downloads last week, according to App Annie, and the number one shopping app on Android's. According to one former employee, Wishes' annual sales are approaching the double-digit billions of dollars. And Wishes customers spent an average of about 40,

each on the site in June, a figure that has held steady over the last two years, according to second measure. And DoorDash is now valued at $4 billion, as it is raising a new $250 million round led by Kautou Management and DST Capital. This comes just five months after the company raised $535 million at a $1.4 billion valuation in a round led by SoftBanks Vision Fund. So a $1.4 billion valuation to a $4 billion one in less than a year. Why is this? DoorDash had the usual refrain of, we're doing so well. We didn't even need the extra money,

but hey, if they were going to throw it at us anyway. DoorDash CEO, Tony Zhu, said DoorDash has already met or exceeded most metrics set during the Series D round in March and is currently seeing 250% year-over-year growth in delivery volume. Quote, we were only growing at 150% in January, for example, which means our growth rate is actually accelerating, which isn't what you typically see as a company gets bigger, Zhu told Axios.

So that might explain the rapid increase in valuation. DoorDash is an on-demand restaurant delivery service that competes with the likes of Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Caviar. This story is right in my wheelhouse. Harry McCracken and Fast Company is reporting that Silicon Valley is dismantling a priceless part of its history. If you've ever driven down the 101 around Redwood City, you've no doubt seen the Apex sign. It looks exactly like a sign from the Go-Go-1960s, and that's because it is. The Apex sign had beautifully evocative white-on-black lettering from a time when computers were as big as a room,

and Silicon Valley wanted to project Cold War. era seriousness because half of its money still came from defense contracts. But Stanford University owns the land. The sign has been sitting on for 60 or so years now, and it has decided to take the sign down. The sign is currently going into storage, apparently, after the town of Redwood City concluded the sign with not a historic landmark. Here's why that's a mistake. And as Harry says, everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves. Quote, only a few companies can claim to have been a part of Silicon Valley before the term Silicon Valley came into use, and the legendary Apex is one of them. Founded in 1944 by Alexander Paniatov, it introduced the first

commercial videotape recorder in 1956, thereby ushering in a new era in communications. It's easy to connect the dots between Apex's legacy and other key accomplishments in tech history. It gave Atari founder Nolan Bushnell, his first job in the valley, for example. example, Bushnell in turn gave Steve Jobs, his first job at Atari. Though Ampex still exists as a maker of digital storage systems, it no longer occupies its historic headquarters alongside Highway 101, but its vintage sign remained a wonderfully evocative reminder of the valley's roots, which you could appreciate even if you were stuck in traffic.

A little bit of news you can use, especially tonight and this weekend. This might actually be old news to some of the same. of you, but I just discovered this today, so I'm sharing it with you. Did you know that Netflix has tons of hidden categories beyond the usual action, drama, sci-fi, etc., that they serve up to you normally? Netflix actually has over 30,000 subcategories, subcategories like, I don't know, independent comedies. Documentaries you can find easily, but mockumentaries. They have their own category, if you know how to find it. Dramas based on books is another one. Deep Sea horror movies. You want granular? They've got granular. There's a New Zealand movie subcategory. It turns out that

anyone can hack into this sort of version of the in-and-out secret menu. You just have to go to a web browser and type in www.netflix.com forward slash browse, forward slash genre, forward slash, and then you need to the secret code for the category you want. As I said, there are more than 30,000 of them, and you can break it down into any micro-neesh you could possibly imagine. In the show notes, I have a link to the master list of subcategories along with those secret codes, as compiled by the What's on Netflix blog. So there you go.

I've got your weekends entertainment lined up. And on that note, now it's time for the... weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Some settle for average investing. Others like Tech meme ride home listeners demand better. Check out Betterment to see what the new modern way to invest is all about. The first suggestion this week is the very definition of a great long read. Precisely the type of story I'd like to hunt for and save for you guys. It's from the New Yorker and it's about the ace pilot who is risking his life as a tech. pilot for Richard Branson's Spaceship 2, the Virgin Galactic

craft that will hopefully someday ferry tourists into outer space. When it comes to things like this, yes, at some point you still need to put an actual human being in an actual cockpit and test if your stuff works, basically by finding out if the test pilot lives or dies. This is full-on Tom Wolfe, the right stuff sort of thing. Check it out. It's great. Next, I just mentioned that piece about the Ampex signed by Harry McCracken.

Well, here's another Harry piece from Fast Company. This one about Evernote. I feel like we've all been seduced by Evernote at one point or another, and imagined moving our whole organizational life over to it, only to be disappointed by either a redesign or a feature creep or actually lack of feature innovation, depending on how you dreamed you would use the product. Well, Evernote is desperately trying to refresh its brand, and here's how it thinks it can.

can finally nail the promise of, quote, remember everything. Harry has the full history of Evernote, which most people don't know actually goes back to the pre-smartphone era. It's the story of one of the earliest unicorns, going back to its original vision to try to refine its relevance and also maybe its reason for being. Over at the outline, Jeremy Gordon wants us all to go back to Tumblr, and I've got to admit it's a convincing argument. quote, Tumblr. Do you remember Tumblr? Of course, because the site is still objectively popular, according to Alexa's metrics. It's nearly one of the 50 most popular websites in the world. But you're not there. Our president is not there. I'm not there. Not anymore, end quote. In short, Gordon argues that Tumblr made room for nuance, for context, and crucially for community. So maybe it's the sort of social network we should be using. if social networks like Twitter and Facebook are doing nothing but pissing us off these days. Quote, the sum of this was thoughtful, personalized content, for lack of a better word,

consumed at a slower, more natural pace where eventually everyone would lose interest in being mean to each other. Also, memes and animal gifs and political solidarity and all the good things. Wow, doesn't that sound great? Wouldn't Twitter be better if it was more like that? Well, Twitter was like that once, but that was so long ago I personally can barely remember. Quote, Tumblr's irrelevance in the digital economy is a problem if you invested in the company, but not so much if you're a user who never drifted away. The platform remains full of the potential it once had, theoretically.

So why not come back? Why don't we all go back? End quote. Finally, two pieces from Bloomberg. The first is titled, Why Can't Europe Do Tech? quote, the good news for Euro startups is that they've got their best chance in a good long while to make something of themselves. China's national champions are struggling to expand in markets for which they haven't adequately tailored their services, and Silicon Valley is two years into a string of unforced errors.

Europe's tech ecosystem has the talent, ambition, and velocity to produce companies of comparable scale to the Facebooks and Ubers of the world, says Manish Madvani, managing partner of GP Bullhorn LLP, a tech-focused. investment advisor. And still, many of the continent's best efforts keep flaming out or selling out too early. It's worth taking a tour through this lovely land of walkable cities and missed business opportunities to figure out what's gone wrong and what might finally be going right, end quote. And this is going to piss a lot of people off. Trust me, it kind of pisses me off on some level too. But as the last piece, the second Bloomberg piece notes, one of the main impediments for self-driving cars in the real world is simply the unpredictability of pedestrians.

Cars can eventually talk to each other, and if they're all fully automated, they can eventually be relied on to behave rationally. But a J. Walker jumping into the street halfway down the block or someone stopping in the middle of a crosswalk, checking their phone, not so much. Humans are essentially the problem in a self-driving car scenario. So some people are beginning to to ask if we need to regulate how pedestrians can behave in a self-driving car world. Quote, driverless proponents like Ing say there's one sure-fire shortcut to getting self-driving cars on the streets sooner. Persuade pedestrians to behave less erratically.

If they use crosswalks where there are contextual clues, pavement markings, and stoplights, the software is more likely to identify them. But to others, the very fact that Ing is suggesting such a thing is a sign that today's technology simply can't deliver self-driving cars as originally envisioned. Quote, the AI we would really need hasn't yet arrived, says Gary Marcus, a New York University professor of psychology who researches both human and artificial intelligence. He says Ng is, quote, just redefining the goalposts to make the job easier, end quote. And that if the only way we can achieve safe self-driving cars is to completely segregate them

from human drivers and pedestrians, we already had such technology. trains, end quote. That's been the weekend long reads brought to you by Betterment. Investing involves risk, but TechMeme ride home listeners can sign up to Betterment today and get up to one year of your money managed for free. For more information, visit Betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash R-I-D-E. Remember what I told you about IKEA on yesterday's show? I take it all back.

I will never do business with IKEA again, and I implore every single one of you listening to the sound of my voice right now. Never, ever give IKEA a single dime, ever. Oh, ha, ha, bright. No, no, no, I'm not joking. I say this without reservation. Never buy from IKEA ever. They're horrible. IKEA will be like Voldemort, the name that shall never be uttered again.

That's all. Have a good weekend, everyone. Thank you.