Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, June 29, 2018 - All New Apple Maps

Episode Date: June 29, 2018

Xiaomi’s IPO disappoints, Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up, the state of the ICO market, the weekend long reads suggestions, and the NES is back, baby! Stories from: @panzer, @tomwarren Tweets: @elonmusk Links:Apple is rebuilding Maps from the ground up (TechCrunch)Microsoft details secret ‘pocketable’ Surface device in leaked email (The Verge)Digital currency sales hit $13.7 billion in first five months of 2018: report (Reuters)The NES Classic is back: here’s where you can pick one up (The Verge) Weekend Longreads Suggestions:I Delivered Packages for Amazon and It Was a Nightmare (The Atlantic)HOW THE STARTUP MENTALITY FAILED KIDS IN SAN FRANCISCO (Wired)Despite Caution Over Cryptocurrency, Investors Are Bullish (NYTimes)The Biggest Digital Heist in History Isn’t Over Yet (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. guys, Brian here. Be sure to listen to the end of the show today for a quick programming announcement about next week. TLDL, too long didn't listen. Due to the holiday week in the U.S., we will only have two episodes next week, Tuesday and Friday. More info at the end of the show.

Welcome to the TechMeme ride home for Friday, June 29th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Jaume's IPO disappoints. Apple is rebuilding maps from the ground up. the state of the ICO market, the weekend long-read suggestions, and the NES is back, baby. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Chinese phone maker Shomi will raise $4.7 billion after pricing its Hong Kong IPO at the low end of its target range, valuing the company at about $54 billion or roughly half of the company's original goal. Zhaomi had hoped to raise up to $6.1 billion, and earlier this year there was talk that the company could achieve a $100 billion valuation. Jomi's shares will begin trading in Hong Kong on July 9th.

Why will this IPO be a swing and a miss? Well, Chinese stocks have had a rough go of it recently due to the escalating trade war with the U.S., and it's been an especially tumultuous time for Chinese tech stocks. Also, there was some muddiness in the company's messaging. Xiaomi insists that it is primarily an internet company, but most analysts and investors seem to view it as a hardware manufacturer. Hardware companies get lower multiples generally. James Yan, an analyst with counterpoint research in Beijing, told Bloomberg, quote,

Shomi's exceedingly thin margins from hardware significantly drags down its valuation for potential investors. I expect it to invest more in the smartphone unit, especially on international expansion. It also needs cash to beef up its ecosystem in markets like India. All those fronts are extremely capital intensive, end quote. Jomi had wanted to list at least half of its shares in Shanghai on the mainland, but for various regulatory reasons, that was shelved. In May, Jomey reported that its 2017 revenue grew 68% to 114.6 billion. yuan reported a net loss of about 43.9 billion yuan, though excluding one-time charges, its profit was about 5.4 billion yuan. Some big tech names were quick to voice support for ShowMe, despite

the disappointing debut. Benedict Evans noted on Twitter, Showme's IPO values it at $54 billion. Reminder. Microsoft bought Nokia's phone unit and Google bought Motorola's phone unit for a combined 20 billion, end quote. And Bill Gurley tweeted, this will sound trite, but 54 billion is 54 billion. Li Jun is a remarkable entrepreneur, end quote. And late last night, Elon Musk retweeted TechMem's original tweet on this post by saying dot, dot, dot, dot the money, which I assume refers to the fact that the tweet excerpt got cut off. If you're listening to this, Elon, feel free to tweet segments of the TechMeme ride home anytime you want. Apple is reportedly throwing in the towel and is in the midst of rebuilding Apple Maps from the ground up.

The goal in the very near future is for Apple to own its entire Maps stack from top to bottom, no longer relying on any third-party data for its maps. Apple and current Apple Maps guru Eddie Q swear they are going to get it right this time. At least that's what they are telling Matthew Panzerino at TechCrunch. Q tells TechCrunch, quote, Since we introduced this six years ago, we won't rehash all the issues we've had when we introduced it. We've done a huge investment in getting the map up to par.

When we launched, a lot of it was all about directions and getting to a certain place, finding the place and getting directions to that place. We've done a huge investment of making millions of changes, adding millions of locations, updating the map and changing the map more frequently. All of those things over the past six years, end quote. Apple is rebuilding maps by collecting its own data, but doing so with what it says is a privacy-first methodology.

The new Maps product will launch first in the San Francisco Bay area with the next iOS 12 beta, and we'll cover all of Northern California by fall. Apple Maps currently draws data from partners like TomTom, OpenStreetMap, and general geodata brokers. But, well, as you can tell, by Apple Maps poor reputation in the real world, world. That hasn't exactly been working. Quote, we decided to do this just over four years ago. We said, where do we want to take maps? What are the things that we want to do in maps? We realize that given what we wanted to do and where we wanted to take it, we needed to do this ourselves, Q said. The new Apple Maps project starts just like every other Maps project does with specially designed

vehicles, which actually hit the road and photograph and map everything. And Apple is also using high-resolution satellite data, of course, and also human editors. Once again, Apple using human editors as a differentiator. But, and this is the really interesting part, all of that is then combined with route data from actual iPhone users who are navigating using their phones. Apple believes that by using location data for millions of iPhones, it can build better, more up-to-date, more granular maps. But Apple stresses again and again and again in this article, it is using location data from millions of iPhones, it is heavily encrypted and heavily anonymized data. Rotating identifiers are assigned to all data, and Apple never collects information about the beginning or end of the user's trip, just the in-between parts. The details of this are particularly fascinating, so I highly recommend reading this piece that's linked in the show notes.

Your phone and everyone's phones will be used to make Apple Maps better. It's sort of like that scene in the Dark Night, when Bruce Wayne makes use of everybody's cell phones. This is what Apple is doing, but again, really, they really want to stress this. It's doing so in a completely privacy-friendly way. They cannot emphasize that enough. This is not creepy.

It's cool. It's useful. And of course, if you don't opt in to location services or toggle them off in the settings for maps, then you don't have to be helping Apple do this. The new Better Apple Maps will be rolling out section by section in the U.S. over the next year. And will they really be as amazing a step forward as Q would have you believe? Well, you would think that Apple would have to get this right eventually,

as Paul Throt snarked on Twitter. 2011, Apple Maps sucks. 2012, Apple Maps still sucks. 2013, Apple Maps sucks a little bit less. 2014. Seriously, you should give Apple Maps another shot. It's way better than it used to be. And then radio silence. 2018. Apple is rebuilding maps from the ground up. Change happens quickly. So I'm going to read you this segment, but you're really going to have to check the link and look at the photos in the story to really appreciate what I'm going to tell you.

Various places have been reporting for a while now that Microsoft has been working on a mysterious new surface device with the code name Andromeda. But the Verge has gotten its hands on some internal Microsoft documents that it says reveals that Andromeda will be a pocketer. surface device. Essentially, you can imagine a book-like device with a hinge. You would open it up, and the display would bridge the gap of the hinge to create a single panel, but then you could fold it up and even take both sides apart and slip it in your pocket. The verge notes that Microsoft could discontinue work on the Andromeda at any stage, Microsoft Courier, anybody, but then the courier was in a different era and under a different regime. at Microsoft. The Verge says, and I quote,

Microsoft views Andromeda as a unique response to its failures with Windows phone devices. It will blur the lines between mobile and stationary computing, reads one internal document describing the device. Microsoft is tentatively planning to release Andromeda in 2018, with similar devices from some of Microsoft's top OEMs to, quote, follow afterwards, end quote. All I know is, if the renders in the this verge piece are anywhere close to reality, then Microsoft, take all my money. According to a report from Pricewaterhouse Cooper's initial coin offerings raised $13.7 billion in the first five months of 2018, which is up from $7 billion in 2017.

There were 537 ICOs so far this year, and the United States is home to a lot of them, with 56 token sales raising 1.5.3. billion dollars so far this year. In Europe, notably, Switzerland is the ICO capital, but the UK is catching up with 48 ICOs of its own so far this year, raising $507 million. Overall, the ICO market is catching up to the IPO market. IPOs in the U.S. raised $15.6 billion in the first three months of this year, and that was considered a real banner period. So in normal times, it's not hard to see that on this trajectory, ICOs could soon pass traditional IPOs sometime soon in terms of total dollars raised. One other notable statistic from the report,

however, of the 3,470 ICOs since the first token offering took place in 2013, only 30% have closed successfully. The rest have been delayed, the project lost momentum, or were, well, scams. The way it works for an ICO is if the money raised in a sale does not meet the minimum funds required for the project to go forward, sort of like a failed Kickstarter project, then the ICO is a bust and the money is theoretically returned to investors. The hope for investors is that a project successfully launches is useful and the underlying value of the token rises. The classic example is the Ethereum project, which sold the Ether token at around 47. per ether. The project went live in 2015, became the fundamental framework for a lot of the current crop of ICOs, and at the time of this recording, ether is worth $413.55. Time for the weekend Longreed's suggestions. We talked yesterday about how Amazon announced its new mutant package delivery army, and we mentioned that a similar scheme, sort of like an Uber for Amazon delivery, known as Amazon Flex, where people can use their cars to deliver Amazon packages,

has been in operation for several years now. Well, Alana Samuels at the Atlantic, signed up for the Amazon Flex program and tested it out. It was not, shall we say, a rewarding experience for her. Quoting from the piece, until then, I had been, like them, blithely ordering things on Amazon, so I wouldn't have to wait in line at a store or go searching for a particular product. even though I knew from talking to warehouse workers that many of the jobs that get those packages to my door aren't good ones. But now technology was enabling Amazon to hire me to deliver those packages with no benefits or perks.

If one of these workers put the wrong address on the package, the buyer would get a refund while I was scurrying around trying to figure out what they meant when they listed their address as fifth floor, and there was no fifth floor. How could these two different types of jobs exist in the same economy? End quote. Wired has a piece up about a middle school in the heart of Silicon Valley that was the most expensive new school in San Francisco history. It cost $54 million to build, was going to focus on a STEM curriculum, and would be tricked out with all of the latest technology. Apple TVs in every classroom, Google Chromebooks for students, high-profile technologists like Ev Williams, and Mark Benioff contributed funds. It was supposed to be a model school

built on a Silicon Valley ethos of how education could be better, more efficient. But then, quote, On opening day in August of 2015, around two dozen staff members greeted the very first class. That's when the story took an alarming turn. Newspapers reported chaos on campus.

Landache was later quoted in the San Francisco Examiner. The first day of school, there were like multiple incidents of physical violence. After just a month, Principal Hobson quit and an interim took charge. In mid-October,

less than two months into the first school year, a third principal came on board. According to a local newspaper in these first few months, six other faculty members resigned. The district disputes this figure. In a school survey,

only 16% of the Brown staff described the campus as safe. Parents began to pull their kids out. By August of 2016, as Brown's second year started, only 70 students were enrolled for 106 grade seats. Few wanted to send their kids there. The school was in an enrollment death spiral, end quote. Much, much more in the piece, of course.

We mentioned statistics earlier relating to ICOs. Why, though, are people still so eager to invest in ICOs when the price of crypto has been so depressed across the board recently? The New York Times' deal book has a piece looking into the psychology behind the continued bullishness in the space. Quote, the attraction for some companies is simple. It's a potentially bigger version of a Kickstarter campaign, raising money from backers without giving up any voting control by selling stock. The tokens that investors receive differ from traditional company shares in that they offer no say in how the company is run, so buyers are betting that their value will rise as the digital currencies get used more.

and the process for selling a coin offering is relatively simple, where companies create their own cryptocurrency, write a document known as a white paper to describe the service that they're building and hope enough people are interested in buying into the sale, end quote. Finally, want to kick back with a real gripping crime yarn? What if I told you the biggest digital heist in history is still ongoing? Quoting from the Bloomberg piece about this, since late 2013, this band of cybercriminals has,

penetrated the digital intersanctoms of more than 100 banks in 40 nations, including Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and the U.S., and sold in about $1.2 billion, according to Europol, the European Union's law enforcement agency. The String of Theths, collectively dubbed Carbonac, a mashup of a hacking program and the word bank, is believed to be the biggest digital bank heist ever. In a series of exclusive interviews with Bloomberg Business Week, Law Enforcement Officials, and computer crime experts provided revelations about their three-year pursuit of the gang and the mechanics of a caper that's become the stuff of legend in the digital underworld, unquote. Finally, better act fast. NES classic consoles are back on sale. Maybe you'll recall a limited number of NES classics went on sale back in 2016,

and ever since there's been a hot secondary market for these at places like eBay and Craigslist. The consoles went on sale at Amazon at 8.15 a.m. Eastern and places like GameStop, Best Buy, and Target also have them. Best Buy is handing out tickets so that you can queue up to grab yours. eBay has a 15% coupon until midnight eastern tonight. The offer code is perfect day. If you weren't aware, this NES classic looks just like the original system console from the 1980s, a little smaller. updated hdMI connections of course and you can't load cartridges into it because the whole thing comes preloaded with 30 classic games like super mario brothers metro donkey kong the legend of zelda pacman and many more but the advantage to this new system is that you have safe states now so you don't have to do mario all in one massive run being careful to make no mistakes like we had to do

back in the day. Of course, we also had to walk 12 miles uphill and in the snow just to play the damned Nintendo. And we had to play it blindfolded and left-handed, but we didn't complain because we liked it. So there's a big holiday week coming up next week in the U.S. As I said, we're only going to do two shows next week, a Tuesday show and a Friday show. A couple of reasons for this. Yes, I admit I want to go on vacation, but also around holidays. days, the tech news is generally kind of slow. If everyone is on vacation and nothing is really happening, there simply isn't enough news to constitute a decent show sometimes. The slowdown actually already began this week, if that news about Bird's latest VC round hadn't come through

in the afternoon yesterday. I was actually thinking about going with a story about The Rock endorsing a brand of headphones. So by spacing it out a little bit, I should be able to gather up enough interesting stuff to make for two interesting episodes. And one other quick note, I won't be in my usual studio. I'll be in Northern Michigan with my family next week, so things might sound a little bit different, but not so much. Anyway, if you're vacationing as well next week, enjoy, and I will talk to you on Tuesday.