Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, June 1, 2018 - What to Expect From WWDC

Episode Date: June 1, 2018

The end of an era in venture capital, the end of Facebook’s trending news feature, what to expect from WWDC next week, some new ARM chips and the weekend longreads suggestions. Stories from: @joshuarothman, @deborahgage, @meliarobin Links:New Arm Cortex-A76 and Mali-G76 target laptop-class performance (Android Authority)Angry Facebook shareholders challenge Zuckerberg over 'corporate dictatorship' (The Guardian)Apple Is Set to Unveil AR Upgrade, Software to Manage iPhone Use (Bloomberg)Apple’s WWDC 2018: iOS 12, macOS, and what else to expect (The Verge)WWDC 2018: What to expect from Apple’s big event (MacWorld) Weekend Longreads:Obama's US Digital Service Survives Trump—Quietly (Wired)The Search for Women Who Want Cybersecurity Careers (WSJ)How Futures Trading Changed Bitcoin Prices (Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco)The Growing Emptiness of the "Star Wars" Universe (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, June 1st, 2018. Today, the end of an era in venture capital. The end of Facebook's trending news feature.

Some new armed chips. What to expect from WWDC next week and the weekend long read suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sort of an end of an era story from the world of venture capital. S.V. Angel, the storied seed stage investment. Fund run by Ron Conway and his son Tofer will no longer be raising money from outside investors for new funds. Instead, the Conways will invest their personal money going forward, continue to manage their existing funds, and limit their future investments to only $25,000 to $100,000 per company.

Ron Conway is legendary in the Valley for being a pioneer of modern seed stage investing. He made early investments in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Pinterest, and he's been called the godfather of Silicon Valley. Many wags are blaming Conway's decision to exit the seed stage game, at least on the professional level, on the ballooning size of seed stage investment rounds. Business Insider notes that just last week, women's health startup modern fertility raised a $6 million seed round,

a level of seed money that was basically unheard of. of even 10 years ago, though it should be noted that SV Angel participated in that modern fertility investment. When SV Angel launched in 2009, there were only a handful of firms that specialized in seed funding for startups, and now the field is quite crowded. In a post on medium, Conway wrote, Seed investors are raising larger funds becoming more ownership-focused and investing primarily on adoption and traction.

The amount of money in seed rounds has doubled and valuations. have increased significantly. As this dynamic materialized more, we realized there were diverging interests between what's best for founders and what's best for our investors. For this reason, we have decided to go back to basics and invest as individual angels

instead of raising a new fund. Facebook today announced that it is shutting down its trending topics feature over the next few weeks. In a blog post announcing the news, the company said, quote, we're removing trending soon to make way for future news experiences on Facebook. We introduced trending in 2014

as a way to help people discover news topics that were popular across the Facebook community. However, it was only available in five countries and accounted for less than 1.5% of clicks to news publishers on average. From research, we found that over time, people found the product to be less and less useful, end quote. Depending on your point of view,

trending was either a really dumb feature that never seemed to have a clue about what news might actually be interesting to me, or it was a democracy-threatening feature that had the power to sway elections. Perhaps the best eulogy for this product was the one that I saw from BuzzFeed's Craig Silverman, who tweeted, quote, RIP to Facebook trending, the least-used yet most controversial Facebook product, and a case study in how a platform product can go wrong and become such a political football that the only solution

is the sweet release of death. So yesterday, Facebook held its annual shareholder meeting, and well, it was contentious, to say the least. As various outlets are reporting, angry shareholders confronted CEO Mark Zuckerberg and activist investors, forced votes on six proposals to change Facebook's governance and corporate structure.

According to accounts in The Guardian and Bloomberg, one activist shareholder labeled Facebook's shareholder voting structure as a, quote, corporate dictatorship. Mr. Zuckerberg, take a page from history. Emulate George Washington, not Vladimir Putin, the shareholder said. Another shareholder said, quote, if privacy is a human right, as stated by Microsoft's CEO, then we contend that Facebook's poor stewardship of customer data

is tantamount to a human rights violation. A plane was apparently flying overhead outside the meeting, trailing a banner which read, you broke democracy. And another woman said, shortly before her mic was turned off, quote, shareholder democracy is already lacking at Facebook.

And that's kind of the point because of Facebook's stock structure. Management was assured that it would have its way, no matter what sort of tumult among shareholders took place, given what the Guardian calls the unequal voting structure among the company's shareholder classes. To a large degree, when faced with questions from shareholders, CEO Zuckerberg and C.O. Cheryl Sandberg repeated a lot of the same mantras they've been using for several months now, acknowledging mistakes and promising greater transparency.

As Bloomberg's Sarah Fryer reported, quote, The last questions came from a shareholder who said his wife used to work in Facebook marketing. Why was the company on the defensive so often? Why was everyone always blaming Facebook? Zuckerberg said, when he sees negative news coverage, I don't agree with all of it. but I think some of it is very fair. Arm just announced next generation CPUs and GPUs for future smartphones and possibly some laptops. The Arm Cotext A76 is the new flagship mobile chip,

replacing the Cortex A75, and boasting what Arm says is 35% better performance and a 40% improvement to energy efficiency. As Android Authority reports, quote, Despite the seemingly minor change to ARMS CPU nomenclature, the Cortex A76 is very different from the A75. It's a completely new high-performance micro-architecture design made from scratch by Arm to target higher performance points than ever before. Laptop class was the term used during our briefing with Arm, but the flexible nature of the design means there's plenty of performance gains up for grabs in a smartphone form factor two, end quote. arms lead processor architect Mike Philippo told CNET, quote,

We're building for sustained performance. The A76 is the biggest leap we've taken in our annual roadmap since we started in 2014. The company also announced the Arm Molly G76 Next Generation System on a chip, which boasts improved graphics performance that should be able to power 8K resolution displays. Expect to see these chips show up primarily. in Android phones, which is ironic, historically. If you weren't aware, Arm was actually co-founded by Apple in 1990, and its earliest silicon powered the star-crossed Apple Newton product

that pioneered the very concept of handheld computing. Last year, Arm Holdings was purchased by, guess who, Masayoshi Son's SoftBank Group and his $100 billion Vision Fund. A whole bunch of rumors were making the rounds this afternoon, so I'm just going to throw them all at you in a single segment because they're still just rumors and no actual news has been confirmed, at least at the time of this recording.

Business Insider is reporting that Microsoft has held talks to buy GitHub. Business Insider sources say that on and off discussions have been taking place between the companies over the years, but the talks have grown more serious in recent weeks. Sources are telling the information that Lyft has agreed to acquire bike-sharing company Motivate, which operates city bike here in New York City and Ford Go Bike in San Francisco,

among many other cities. So more movement among the ride-sharing players to own the future of transportation from end to end. Finally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple is working on a new ad network for app promotion and has been in talks with Snap, Pinterest, and others to distribute search ads for apps. Apple's last ad experiment,

its iad service, launched in 2010, failed and was shut down in 2015. But as the journal notes, advertising is a high-margin business, so probably worth taking another crack at, especially as smartphone sales plateau. So next week, the big news will be Apple's worldwide developers conference, which kicks off Monday,

June 4th at 1 p.m. Eastern and 10 a.m. Pacific time. What can we expect from WWDC? Well, everyone is hazarding a guess. In Bloomberg, Mark German says that a big focus this year will be on managing your time on your devices. Do you feel like you're addicted to your phone? German says that he expects that Apple will announce what it's calling a digital health initiative, which he describes as a series of tools to help users monitor how much time they spend on their. devices and inside of certain applications. Of course, we can expect the release of iOS 12, but lots of pundits are predicting that this will not be one of those years where the entire look and feel of the operating system will get a full repolish. As Axios is reporting, quote, Apple has shaken up its iOS software plans for 2018, delaying some features to next year in an effort to put more focus on addressing performance and

quality issues, end quote. But we will see. some improvements, of course. The Verge says to expect new gesture controls in anticipation of the entire iPhone lineup moving in the direction of the iPhone 10 later this year. The information has been reporting rumors that Apple might open up NFC on its devices to more developers, allowing features like, say, the ability to pay transit fares. Mark German says to expect new AR features to debut and is predicting AR Kit 2.0 for developers that might allow things. like users to have the ability to play augmented reality games against each other in the same virtual space.

What about MacOS? The rumor mill has been quieter on this front, but Apple has been moving in recent years to greater unity and integration between Mac and iOS apps. So a lot of people are expecting something along those lines. Meanwhile, John Groover has written that he's nearly certain that the rumored integration project codenamed Marzapan will actually not debut at WWDC this year. It's a 2019 thing, Gruber says. WatchOS5 is coming, and Mac Rumors is claiming that Spotify might be coming to the Apple Watch as a part of a new StreamKit API.

And as per usual, I'm sure we can expect some new watch faces. People are literally crying out for Siri to get a major new upgrade, lest it risk falling behind in the digital assistant arms race behind the likes of Alexa and Google Assistant. This would sure be the time for Apple to show the world that Siri can, you know, actually be useful for something other than setting alarms. As Macworld writes, quote,

if Apple goes through WWDC and does not detail really big improvements to Siri, it's in trouble. But whether or not we get a major new Siri revamp or just some chinty new features remains to be seen. The Apple TV never gets that much of a showcase, but at some point that will have to change. Like everyone else, it seems that Apple is preparing to get into the over-the-top video streaming service game,

and though that's not expected to launch in 2019, perhaps Apple will begin to lay the groundwork for it this year. What about hardware? A lot of people seem to be expecting a new MacBook air that will either be cheaper or finally get a retina display, but then a lot of those same people have been telling me for years that the MacBook Air was a dead platform walking. We'll probably get some MacBook Pro refresh,

but whether or not that will extend beyond merely faster processors to include some sort of tweak to the troubled butterfly-style keyboards is unclear. Home pods could certainly get some sort of tweak, probably in conjunction with whatever is announced for Siri. Mark German thinks that any new Apple Watch hardware would probably come later this year and has been hinting at models with a larger edge-to-edge

screen, but he doesn't expect that the new watches would be announced next week. The second generation iPad Pro was announced at WWDC last year, and there are rumors of a new iPad Pro model that might take some cues from the iPhone 10's design

and maybe feature a bigger screen and thinner bezels. I know I'm probably alone in this, but would it kill Apple to announce some refresh, any refresh to the iPad mini line. That's still my favorite form factor. And what about the iPhone SE, which is still my wife's preferred phone form factor? The Verge notes that Apple hasn't launched a new iPhone model in June since the iPhone 4, but some sort of update to the SE is long overdue, if indeed it's ever to come at all. Finally, will we ever hear anything about air power?

Apple's wireless charging mat that was announced last year and then seemingly went into the witness protection program. We'll find out on Monday when we can all watch the live stream of the keynote on our iOS devices or on Safari on our Macs

or on the edge browser on our Windows PCs. Time for the weekend long reads suggestions. First up, Wired has posted an interview this morning with Matt Cuts, formerly the SEO outreach group guru at Google, and currently the head of the United States Digital Service.

The interesting angle to this story is discovering how Cuts is shepherding the USDS, which was an organization started in the Obama administration, through the current Trump era. Quoting from the piece, Cuts argues that the core of USDS's work is bipartisan, saving money and preventing screwups like the healthcare.gov launch that make it hard for citizens to get services they need. And he claims that USDS's way of doing things is catching on as agencies witness its successes and through programs like one announced this month that trains government staff in how to buy digital services more effectively. The Wall Street Journal has a piece up about the various strategies, non-profits, and tech companies are employing to get young girls

interested in careers in cybersecurity. The piece talks to Sarah Larby, who has a job in cybersecurity for Liberty Mutual Insurance, but who also moonlights by teaching at cybersecurity camps for children in the summer. Quote, one exercise the girls will be asked to perform, using an add-on to the Firefox browser, find the websites with the most third-party trackers, which seek to keep tabs on the websites people visit, often to provide relevant ads.

It's an inspiring thing to see girls not feel like they have to be quiet, that it's okay to be curious and learning, says the 22-year-old Ms. Larby. It's a bit dense, but if you were curious about how the introduction of futures trading affected the price of Bitcoin, the Federal Reserve of San Francisco has an interesting post up that looks at the Bitcoin market before and after futures entered the picture. Quoting from the piece, from Bitcoin's inception in 2009 through mid-2017, its price remained under $4,000. In the second half of 2017, it climbed dramatically to nearly $20,000, but descended rapidly starting in mid-December. The peak price coincided with the introduction of Bitcoin futures trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

The rapid run-up and subsequent fall in the price after the introduction of futures does not appear to be a coincidence. Rather, it is consistent with trading behavior that typically accompanies the introduction of futures markets for an asset, end quote. Finally, the New Yorker has a piece up about the disappointment of the recent Hans Solo movie and the increasing narrative bankruptcy of the Star Wars films generally. I think when the Force Awakens came out, we were all kind of okay with the fact that that movie was basically a plot point-by-plot-point remake of a new hope because we assumed that the next films would kick on and begin to tell new stories. Well, it's several years on, and it's clear now that even when we get it, get new characters and new stories or even new backstories, as in the case of Hans Solo.

The formula is frustratingly the same over and over and over. Kid, most likely an orphan, but with unresolved mommy and daddy issues, discovers their true destiny, and then the movie ends by blowing up some giant planet-destroying mega weapon. Wash, rinse, and repeat. Here's some free unsolicited advice to Kathleen Kennedy. you bought a whole narrative universe. You spent $4 billion to do so. Maybe start telling other stories in this universe?

You didn't buy just a single final draft screenplay template, you know. I kind of agree with Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald over at the ringer. Hans Solo was a layup. You just had to show how he became a robe and then tee it up to fit into the narrative where he becomes a rogue with a heart of gold in a new hope. The fact that they've fumbled that, layup suggests that they're out of ideas for this franchise over at Disney, or at least not listening to the people who have new ideas.

Happy Friday, everybody. It's not a three-day weekend, but it is a weekend in June, so go out there and get some sun. Unless, of course, you're listening to this in the Southern Hemisphere, in which case, I don't know, burr, I guess. If you're listening to this somewhere where there's snow on the ground right now, send me a picture. I'm at Brian MCC on Twitter.

Talk to you next week.