Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, July 6, 2018 - Memes Are Safe! For Now...

Episode Date: July 6, 2018

Sonos files for an IPO, Netflix sunsets movie reviews, the iPhone is getting new colors, the memes are safe for now, and the weekend longreads suggestions. Links:MEPs vote to reopen copyright debate over 'censorship' controversy (TechCrunch)Kuo: New 2018 iPhone models to come in gold, grey, white, blue, red and orange colors (9to5Mac)Amazon Takes a Page From Toys ‘R’ Us With a Holiday Catalog (Bloomberg)Reddit — one of the world's most popular websites — is trying to cash in through advertising (CNBC) Longreads Suggestions:Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s tech empire goes way beyond smartphones (Quartz)SELF-DRIVING CARS ARE HEADED TOWARD AN AI ROADBLOCK (The Verge)How to Make Piles of Money Using Instagram (Bloomberg)Ice Poseidon’s Lucrative, Stressful Life as a Live Streamer (The New Yorker) 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, July 6, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Sonos files for an IPO, Netflix Sunsets movie reviews, the iPhone is getting new colors, the memes are safe for now, and the weekend long read suggestions.

Here's what you missed in this second half of the week in tech. Wireless speaker company Sonos has filed for an IPO to raise $100 million and begin trading on the NASDAQ under the symbol S-O-N-O. The fun of any IPO filing is, of course, the S-1, which gives us a look at the underlying business of a private company for the very first time. Sonos, which has been around since 2002, reports that it has sold 19 million products

to nearly 7 million households around the world. If you do the math on that, that means that Sonos has sold an average of three speakers per customer, which is a good indication that once people try Sonos, they tend to double down. As far as its most recent numbers in the six months from October 2017 to the end of March of this year, Sonos said it generated $655.7 million in revenue and reported net income of $13.1 million. But the downside, as Sonos carefully notes in its filing, is that the company does not have its own smart speaker system, instead choosing to integrate other systems

a la Alexa. So the problem would be if someone like Amazon decided to someday revoke access to their smart assistant software, something that definitely could happen someday. And one other interesting detail, Sonos made note that a full-on trade war with China could be a big risk factor in the very near future, which, as Tony Tassel notes on Twitter, could be the type of warning that we see from a lot more IPO candidates going forward. Here's an odd little story. Beginning July 30th, you will no longer be able to post reviews on Netflix.

And by mid-August, Netflix will remove all existing user reviews of movies and TV shows, etc. Earlier this year, Netflix actually removed its longtime one-to-five-star rating feature and replaced that with a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down metric. Thumbs-up and thumbs-down will be remaining as your only option to register your impression of a piece of content. Netflix reports that the use of all rating systems has declined over time, and they would tell you, of course, that their vaunted recommendation engine can do its work better on its own anyway by simply registering what people have watched and not watched. But several people on Twitter noted that if ratings and reviews are declining in usage, that's actually because Netflix has been deemphasizing them. As James Belcher tweeted, hey, Netflix, no need to go all alternative facts on this. you eliminated bylines and star ratings and emphasized your own recommendations. So yeah, usage declined. Own it.

It's okay. There are other sources for movie reviews. And what the Electronic Frontier Foundation is calling a huge victory, the European Parliament has voted against the Article 11 and Article 13 copyright reform proposals, the regulations that we've spoken about recently, that have been described as laws that would effectively outlaw memes on the the internet, among many other things. By a 318 to 278 vote, members of the European Parliament voted to reopen debate on the proposals. So this is good as it means that they won't be

fast-tracked towards becoming law, but it also does not mean that we're out of the woods yet because the measure is not dead, merely open for further debate and amendments. Both articles are controversial, but much of the activism against the measures have focused on Article 13, which would make Internet platforms hosting large amounts of user-uploaded content directly liable for copyright infringements by their users. Article 13 was the target of an open letter of opposition from the likes of Tim Berners-Lee, Vince Cerf, Jimmy Wales, and Mitch Kapoor last month, and an online petition calling for the articles to be amended, gathered more than 850,000 signatures, and localized versions of Wikipedia in Europe went dark just this week to protest these proposals.

I want to pause here and just quote from a tech crunch piece that featured quotes from EU legislators when they were debating this proposal the other day, just so that we can hear perspectives from both sides of this issue. This is what Member of Parliament Axel Voss had to say before the vote, saying that this was a measure designed to end quote, the exploitative. of European artists on the internet, Voss said, quote, we're talking about the major U.S. platforms like Google and Facebook that have been making huge profits at the cost of European creatives. We need to prevent that.

We should be standing at the side of our European creators, and otherwise there's a risk of creative insolvency. Why would we be against wanting to prevent copyright violations? Why would we be against fair renumeration of creatives and getting these large platforms to take more responsibility? the campaign that we're subject to from Google, Facebook, that are meeting with the children of members of parliament. All of this is based on lies. There are no limits being put for individual users.

Every person can continue to set up links and carry out their uploads with legal certainty, unquote. To which member of parliament, Catherine Stiler, responded, quote, We are all united in our shared mission to protect artists and cultural diversity in Europe, but there are real concerns about the effects of Article 13 on freedom and expression. raised by experts ranging from the UN Special Reporter David Kay to the inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. And real concerns voiced by our citizens. Just yesterday I received a petition signed by almost a million people against the jury committee mandate. And although there is consensus, and I do believe there is consensus about the goals behind this law, huge controversy still exists about the methods proposed. Something's not right here.

We owe it to the experts, stakeholders, and citizens to give this to the experts, stakeholders, and citizens to give this directive the full debate necessary to achieve broad support, end quote. And that's the point, because after the expected debates and amendments, another vote is expected sometime in September. So keep an eye on this one. Here's an iPhone rumor that's not generated by Mark Gurman for once. Former KGI Securities and current TF International Securities analyst Ming Chi Kuo, who many feel is a reliable prognosticator when it comes to Apple, is out with a report that says that the forthcoming new iPhones will include a 6.5-inch OLED iPhone that will cost around $1,000 a la the current iPhone 10 price, but will come in three colors, black, white, and gold.

The 6.1-inch LCD model, on the other hand, should come in at around $700, but could come in as many as five colors, gray, white, red, blue, and orange. The LCD model will also reportedly mimic the design of the iPhone 10 on the front, but will not have the dual cameras on the back. Quoting from 9 to 5 Mac's assessment of all this, quote, To recap, we are expecting three new iPhones to launch in the fall. A spec bump upgrade to the 5.8-inch iPhone 10, a new 6.5-inch OLED iPhone 10 plus, and a slim bezel 6.1 inch LCD iPhone with face ID. The LCD iPhone will hit around $700 in terms of price points by skimping on some premium features.

No stainless steel frame, no dual camera, maybe no 3D touch, but retain the main design elements of the iPhone 10 line. The 6.5 inch iPhone 10 will seemingly take the $999 price point, which means we should expect the 5.8-inch iPhone 10 to become $100 cheaper in a cost. couple of months, end quote. Quo also upped his iPhone unit shipment estimates to 70 million new iPhone units in Q4 of 2018. Will the addition of new colors be enough to juice sales? Stranger things have happened, of course, but as Thomas Fuchs said on Twitter, quote, great, but does anyone actually use their phone without a case? Two quick Amazon items. First, this was of course expected, but Amazon is apparently planning to expand its Amazon Go checkout line-free retail concept

with a larger store, also in Seattle, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2018 at 925th Avenue in its home city. At approximately 3,000 square feet, the new Amazon Go store will be close to double the size of the existing 1,800 square foot location. Earlier this year, Amazon disclosed that it would soon be bringing the Amazon Go store, concept to Chicago and San Francisco, and of course, someday one would expect the whole concept to go nationwide. One interesting thing I learned today, the existing Amazon Go location has a 4.5 star rating on Yelp. So apparently once people try it out, people seem to love the idea of Amazon Go. The second item is a bit of a surprise, to me at least. According to Bloomberg, Amazon is planning to send out a physical holiday toy catalog to millions of U.S. households later this

year. Many will be mailed out directly, but you'll also be able to pick one up at any of the Amazon owned Whole Foods locations. Many of the articles about this toy catalog tie the news to the fact that Toys R Us went bankrupt earlier this year, so maybe Amazon is merely rushing in to fill what it sees as a market void. But then think about all the things that Amazon has been doing lately to seemingly ape traditional retail strategies. Amazon Go, Whole Foods, now catalogs. maybe 20 years from now, when there's an Amazon go on every street corner like so many Starbucks locations, we'll look back and realize that this whole e-commerce is just superior commerce thing was nothing more than a long con on Jeff Bezos's part,

sort of a Trojan horse to get all of his competitors to bankrupt themselves trying to match Amazon in online commerce, only to just move into everyone's vacated positions in the real world. We've been checking in on a few players recently that I don't get to read stories about that often. So I wanted to point you to an interesting check-in with Reddit. We all know Reddit, right? One of the most popular websites in the world. It's been around for nearly 15 years. And yet for all the massive success, Reddit has achieved in recent years in terms of audience, Reddit, the company is actually in a weird place. If you'll remember, Reddit was bought

early on by Kande Nast, then spun out as a sort of independent entity in its most recent funding raise, Reddit was valued at a $1.8 billion valuation. And yet in all that time, Reddit has never really turned on the money-making spigot. Despite the fact that the site has 330 million monthly active users and more than 18 billion page views a month, insiders tell CNBC that Reddit will only make about $100 million in revenue this year. As CNBC's own Jay Yarrow pointed out, Twitter has a similar number of users, and it generates around $3 billion in sales. And all of this is despite the fact that Reddit has a unique value proposition. Not only does it have incredible scale, but it has a really unique universe of niche audiences,

all self-organized in a way that you would think advertisers would kill to advertise against. Here's how CNBC puts it, quote, not only is Reddit's audience massive, but the company says users spend over 16 minutes a day on the site in niche communities ranging from makeup artists to Toyota RAV4 enthusiasts. That gives Reddit the kind of engagement that big brands relish, especially as they look for places to diversify their ad spending away from Google and Facebook. The online duopoly controls a combined 57% of the U.S. digital ad market, according to e-marketer, end quote. According to the CNBC article that I'm quoting from and is linked to in the show notes, Reddit is finally ready to begin wooing major advertisers in a serious way. Problem is, of course, large parts of Reddit are, shall we say, a little bit dicey.

So it's not that Reddit is promising some sort of new type of ad unit a la Snapchat, so much as they are trying to convince brands that today in 2018, it's time to get over the squeamishness, and Reddit is willing to help them do that. Again quoting from the CNBC story, the company will launch topics in relevant subreddits or subcategories, so ads reach the most specific audience possible. After that, it will widened sponsored posts to other related subreddits. The ads that perform the best will then be extended more broadly on the site. To tie everything together, Reddit has a brand strategy team that helps write Reddit-friendly posts, so sponsored content is placed in the proper subreddits with the right language, end quote. As Amanda Parker, a digital marketing executive says in the piece,

quote, it's almost a little strange why marketers and advertisers are so apprehensive about Reddit. Marketers chase scale and Reddit has it. I think they have an old-fashioned view of who Redditors are. Time for the Friday long-read suggestions. This first one is not really a long read, but since we spoke about the upcoming Zhaomi IPO recently, I wanted to point you to this quick little summary of

Xiaomi's founder, Le Jun, and his and Xiaomi's combined web of commercial ambitions. Like a lot of Chinese companies and a lot of Chinese entrepreneurs, June, through Xiaomi, as well as his personal investments, has his fingers in not just one pie. Xiaomi is, of course, known for smartphones, but in all the pies. June and Xiaomi are invested all over the place

in energy utilities, in software companies, even, for example, quote, in 2014 when Xiaomi then just four years old announced it would invest in Medea, a Chinese maker of air conditioners and kitchen appliances founded in 1968. The bet paid off. About three years after the deal closed, the value of Xiaomi's steak increased more than 200%. Next, it's your regular reminder to take things with a grain of salt. In this case, we hear. all the time that self-driving cars will actually be on our roads in just a matter of two or three

years, tops. But as I regularly hear from my friends in the automotive industry and not just those with an axe to grind, maybe not so fast. I want to point you to a piece in The Verge, which throws a lot of cold water on the self-driving car maximalists and echoes a lot of what I've been hearing from people that are a little skeptical of self-driving technology. In this case, because, as the Verge points out, AI systems maybe just aren't quite there yet, quoting from the piece, but the dream of a fully autonomous car may be further than we realize. There's growing concern among AI experts that it may be years, if not decades, before self-driving systems can reliably avoid accidents.

As self-trained systems grapple with the chaos of the real world, experts like NYU's Gary Marcus are bracing for a painful recalibration in expectations. a correction sometimes called the AI Winter. That delay could have disastrous consequences for companies banking on self-driving technology, putting full autonomy out of reach for an entire generation, end quote. By the way, I'm not coming down on this in either direction. I have no skin in this game. I'm just pointing out that for all the hoopla, one should always watch out for vaporware.

It's worth reading the piece to weigh the probabilities for yourself, of course. Next, Bloomberg has a piece up about the classes that Instagram is offering for brands to help them promote themselves better on the social network. Quote, Birchbox, a seller of makeup and bath products that's raised $100 million and jump started the subscription box craze, sent six representatives. Another group from Madewell, Jay Cruz's sister brand, sits up front. Big names from denim brand, Iyer and Saludos, take their seats. Even famed designer Cynthia Rowley makes an appearance, along with the president of her label. So does her daughter, Kit Keenan, an Instagram influencer who has been featured in Teen Vogue and Refinery 29, end quote. Apparently, this finishing school for Instagram is not being put on by Instagram out of just the goodness of its heart.

It's actually part of a calculated strategy on the part of the company to learn how to turn Instagram into a commerce powerhouse. Finally, a nice long piece in The New Yorker. and a nice long piece in The New Yorker is the very definition of a long read. Adrian Chen has a great piece up looking at the life and lifestyle, and perhaps lack of both, for an online video streamer. In this case, the subject is 23-year-old Paul De Nino, who has moved beyond simply streaming his video games on Twitch to streaming his entire life online in real time.

If you thought the fad for living your life online went out with the likes of Justin Hall, or Jennifer Ringley, get ready to meet the new wave, the IRL streamers. If living your life online in the Web 1.0 era seemed exhausting and soul destroying, well, imagine attempting this in the modern internet era of trolls on top of trolls all the way down. And now imagine that they can follow you around every minute of the day and do things like SWAT you. Quote, there was a time when he was swatted every day for a month. things reached a crisis point when someone called in a bomb threat on a plane he had just boarded in Phoenix on his way to a video game convention and several of the airport's runways had to be closed. The episode led to Danino's permanent banishment from Twitch, which is why he now streams on YouTube.

Most of the swattings turned out to be the work of an anonymous hacker. At the peak of the epidemic, Danino posted a video titled, A Terrorist is Trying to Ruin My Life, in which he tearfully asked for help tracking down the swatter. Eventually, a group of sympathetic hackers gave Danino the swatter's supposed name and address, which belonged to a teenager in Poland, and Danino gave the information to the FBI. The FBI denied to confirm this. He does not know what happened to the teenager, but the sweatings have slowed to a trickle. Today, Danino says that he has a liaison in the Los Angeles Police Department who contacts him anytime the cops get a 911 call to his address.

Yet whenever a siren sounds on his stream, you can see the street. fear flash across his face, end quote. As always, links to all the long reads are in the show notes. I hope those of you in the States had an excellent Fourth of July. Yes, those were fireworks that you heard in the background during the segments I recorded about midnight last night. Have a great July weekend, no matter where you're at, and we'll talk at you again on Monday.