Tech Brew Ride Home - Friday, Mar. 16, 2018 - Apple Takes a Field Trip

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

Apple takes a field trip, a small town bans bitcoin, Rihanna doesn't accept Snapchat's apology, Adobe transforms itself, and Lyft tests subscriptions. Stories from, @DMOberhaus and @oliviasolon; tweet-analysis from @ow Weekend long-read suggestions:'They'll squash you like a bug': how Silicon Valley keeps a lid on leakers (The Guardian)When an AI finally kills someone, who will be responsible? (MIT Technology Review)The Perfect Selfishness of Mapping Apps (The Atlantic) Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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, March 16th. Today, Apple takes a road trip, a small town bans Bitcoin. Rihanna doesn't accept Snapchat's apology, Adobe transforms itself, and lift test subscriptions.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Apple this morning sent out media invitations to a March 27th event in Chicago, which it said will focus on, quote, creative new ideas for teachers and students. The event will be held at 10 a.m. Central Time at Lane Tech College Prep High School in Chicago. This, of course, set off a flurry of speculation as to what Apple might be announcing. Apple has been rumored to be working on cheaper MacBooks and iPads recently. And Apple has been trying to position the iPad as a classroom tool for several years now,

and some rumors have suggested that Apple wants to bring the entry-level model of the iPad down to a $250 price point, which would be lower than the $329 price point that iPads currently begin at. Additionally, the graphic on the announcement certainly has a hand-drawn feel to it, possibly hinting at the Apple Pencil. Current entry-level iPad models do not support Apple Pencil use. Aside from the graphic, the only information that can be gleaned from the announcement was the statement, let's take a field trip, and the invitation to, quote, join us to hear creative new ideas for teachers and students, to which Casey Newton tweeted creative ideas including buy a MacBook and buy an iPad. Mac rumors noted that Apple hosted a similar education-focused event in New York City back in January 2012, where it announced iBooks 2, with interactive textbooks, iBooks,

iBooks author, and a new version of iTunes U for iPad. If you remember last Friday, I suggested a long read to you about what happens when Bitcoin miners descend on your small rural town to take advantage of your cheap electricity. Well, there's been a real-world follow-up to this story.

Motherboard reported that on Thursday evening, Plattsburgh, New York, became the first municipality in the U.S. to explicitly ban Bitcoin mining in its jurisdiction. The city of Plattsburgh voted unanimously to impose an 18-month moratorium on Bitcoin mining, which had been proposed by Plattsburgh Mayor Colin Reed earlier this month after residents began reporting wildly fluctuating electricity bills. Interestingly, the ban only extends to new Bitcoin mining operations, existing miners will be grandfathered in and can continue what they're doing. According to Mayor Reid, Plattsburgh has some of the cheapest electricity in the world

due to it being located near a hydroelectric dam on the St. Lawrence River. Residents of Plattsburgh only pay $4.5 a kilowatt hour, while the average U.S. resident pays slightly over $0.10 per kilowatt hour, and industry in the town only pays $2.0 per kilowatt hour. This low rate was originally set in an attempt to encourage factories and other industrial operations to locate in the town. But as Bitcoin mining is a hugely energy-intensive endeavor, Bitcoin miners were also strongly incentivized to set up shop in Plattsburgh in order to lower their costs. I've been hearing a lot of complaints that electric bills have gone up by $100 or $200,

Mayor Reid told Motherboard, you can understand why people are upset. According to Motherboard, a single Bitcoin mining operation owned by a Puerto Rican company called CoinMint, used up roughly 10% of the city's power budget in January and February. The problem is, Plattsburgh itself only has an allotment of 104 megawatt hours of electricity per month. So when Plattsburgh goes over the allotment, as it did in January, it has to buy electricity on the open market and then pass the cost on to consumers and residents. That's why people were reporting higher utility bills seemingly out of the blue. The 18-month moratorium might be something of a cooling off period as city officials have pledged to work with local Bitcoin miners to develop a long-term solution. And the local miners, though they opposed the ban, said they were with. willing to work with the city to come to some sort of an equitable arrangement, possibly including paying directly for energy overages.

Snap had to apologize for running an ad that many people found offensive. The ad was for a smartphone game called Would You Rather that appeared inside Snapchat over the weekend. The ad asked users if they would rather slap Rihanna or punch Chris Brown. If you weren't aware, Popstar Chris Brown was a bit of. arrested in 2009 for physically assaulting pop star Rihanna. Snapchat pulled the ad on Monday, blocked would you rather, as an advertiser, and said, quote, the advert was reviewed and approved in error as it violates our advertising guidelines.

And in a statement to e-news on Thursday, a Snap spokesman said, quote, this advertisement is disgusting and never should have appeared on our service. We are so sorry, we made the terrible mistake. of allowing it through our review process. We are investigating how that happened so we can make sure it never happens again, end quote. But that apology was not enough for a lot of people, not the least of whom was Rihanna.

Chelsea Clinton tweeted, Just awful, awful that anyone thinks this is funny, awful that anyone thinks this is appropriate, awful that any company would approve this. Chris Brown responded through his lawyer, Mark Garagos, who told e-news, quote, whoever posted this at Snapchat needs to be slapped. And Rihanna refused to accept any apologies, taking to Instagram stories with the following statement.

Now, Snapchat, I know you already know you ain't my favorite app out there, but I'm just trying to figure out what the point was with this mess. I'd love to call it ignorance, but I know you ain't that dumb. You spent money to animate something that would intentionally bring shame to domestic violence. violence victims and made a joke of it. This isn't about my personal feelings, because I don't have much of them, but all the women, children, and men that have been victims of domestic violence in the past, and especially the ones who haven't made it out yet, you let us down.

Shame on you. Throw the whole app apology away. Of course, the fact that Rihanna took to Instagram stories, which many consider to be a copycat product of Snapchat, to release this statement. had to provide a little extra sting. Adobe announced after the bell yesterday that it beat estimates on its Q1 revenue numbers, seeing sales of $2.08 billion up 24% year over year. Now, 24% growth is impressive, but companies announced earnings beats all the time.

So why am I highlighting it? Well, I'm taking note of it for the same reason that other people did overnight, because Adobe's example represents a rare instance of a company almost totally successfully transitioning itself to a new business model. Inside Adobe's numbers is an interesting metric. Adobe's total revenue was up 24% year over year, but subscription revenue of $1.79 billion was up 29.6%. So subscription revenue was the vast majority of Adobe's overall revenues, with product revenue only coming in at $171 million, a drop of 6%. What this all means is that Adobe has successfully transitioned to the cloud.

Like any other software company, 10, 15 years ago, Adobe was all about developing software, putting it on disks, packaging it in shrink-wrapped boxes, and selling it to consumers that way. Over the last several years, however, Adobe has changed that model to a yearly subscription one where Adobe apps can just show up on whatever device you're using, all your files can be stored in the cloud, and can follow you around from device to device. It's a completely modern software-as-a-service, platform agnostic strategy,

and it seems to be working. Adobe's stock has jumped 25% so far this year, and that's after surging 70% last year. On Twitter, former consultant Rob Adele said, quote, Adobe's successful transition from a perpetual license to a software-as-a-service model will be taught in business schools for decades. Tyler Hogi tweeted, Adobe completely reinvents itself over the last six years and just crushes.

And the great Owen Williams at OW tweeted, What's fascinating about this is Creative Cloud is barely software. as a service, and definitely not good, but it still earns dollar signs, dollar signs, dollar signs, dollar signs. Lyft is apparently testing a monthly subscription plan for heavy users of the ride hailing service. The price of the subscription seems to vary from city to city, ranging from $199 a month to $399 a month, and some of the plans were for 30 standard Lyft rides, while others seemed to be for 60 standard rides a month.

Uber has tested a similar subscription service in the past, and the true ride-sharing service via currently offers a similar weekly or monthly pass, at least in the Manhattan area. The idea is that ride-hailing services want to replace whatever your monthly commuting cost is. Again, using New York City as an example, since I'm familiar with it, a monthly unlimited ride Metro card from the MTA is currently $116.50. So for about $100 more, I could commute in basically every day using Lyft's monthly subscription plan, and though it would cost more, it would, theoretically at least, be more comfortable, convenient, and most definitely more reliable than the subway. I've got to admit that's certainly tempting.

Lyft CEO Logan Green discussed the subscription plans during a press event Wednesday to announce a partnership with Auto Parts producer Magna to build self-driving cars, but invitations to users to try this new subscription service only started showing up in people's phones yesterday, said the Lyft CEO, quote, we are going to move the entire industry from one based on ownership to one based on subscription. He said that someday you could, quote, rely on the Lyft network for all of your transportation needs. The question is, what sort of scale would Lyft need to achieve with a subscription product to make it economically feasible to drivers? Surely in this testing phase, Lyft would be subsidizing the payment to drivers for the individual rides in question. Finally, even though I mentioned a whole bunch of long reads over the course of yesterday's show, I also wanted to collect some for you to peruse over the weekend. Links to all of the stories that I'm about to mention will be in the show notes,

so you can just tap on over and find them on your phone right now. First up, Olivia Salon over at The Guardian, has a piece that, a lot of people who work in the tech industry have been discussing today, titled, They'll Squash You Like a Bug, How Silicon Valley Keeps a Lid on Leakers. The piece quotes anonymous workers at Facebook, Google, and other tech firms about the degree to which they are monitored by internal security. Most companies, and high-tech ones in particular, obviously try to internally police the illegal leaking of intellectual property and the like, But the piece wonders if some tech companies are also trying to prevent things like working conditions, internal debates, and even political views from being made public.

The piece describes tech employees doing things like turning off their phones for fear their employers are tracking their location, and the practice of security teams leaving, quote, mouse traps lying around, which would be USB keys that look like they might contain sensitive company data as a means of testing staff loyalty. One anonymous Facebook employee was quoted as saying, quote, You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of, we're changing the world and we care about things, but you get on their bad side and all of the sudden you are face-to-face with Mark Zuckerberg's Secret Police, end quote. Hyperbolic, maybe, but it did seem to ring a bell with a lot of tech workers on Twitter today.

Next up, a piece in the MIT Technology Review titled, When AI finally kills someone, who will be responsible? It outlines the pioneering work of John Kingston at the University of Brighton and the UK, who is studying the nascent field of artificial intelligence legal liability. For the whole history of jurisprudence, criminal liability usually has required an action and a mental intent. Would AI have either of those if an accident were to occur? or would the blame fall on the people who program the AI? It's a fascinating question, I think.

Finally, and perhaps somewhat relatedly, the Atlantic has a piece by Alexis Madrigal called The Perfect Selfishness of Mapping Apps, which looks at the increasing evidence that apps like Waze, Google Maps, and Apple Maps make traffic conditions worse overall because by default, each app is trying to get individual user to a given location in the fastest period of time.

In essence, it's making each user on the road into a selfish actor. When everyone is rushing for the same shortcut, it can have the result of jamming that shortcut closed. Quote, this problem has been vastly overlooked, Alexander Bayan, the director of UC Berkeley's Institute of Transportation Studies, told Madrigal. It's just the beginning of something that's going to be much. worse. Hey, it's Friday, everybody, so go enjoy that. The TechMeme Ride Home was produced by Brian McCullough and the TechMeme editors. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC, and TechMeme.com is there for you anytime you need it. Have a good weekend.