Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/22 – Spotify’s New “HiFi” Subscription Tier

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 right home from Monday, February 22nd, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Spotify's new hi-fi subscription tier. Clubhouse has security concerns. Apple is king of the smartphone hill once again. Maybe the biggest survival story of the COVID-19 era is about to IPO and is the

Starting point is 00:00:52 Facebook newsband pushing Australians into the arms of the news publishers themselves. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As I'm recording this, Spotify has just wrapped up It's Spotify stream on event in which it announced a bunch of stuff, including new tools for creators, new monetizing options, even an ad marketplace for podcasts, which might be too in the weeds for our purposes, although I reserve the right to reassess that later. What is probably more interesting for normal consumers for us at the moment is the fact that Spotify is launching a new subscription product later this year called HiFi that will offer CD-quality lossless audio, quoting the verge. Spotify has done small tests of higher quality

Starting point is 00:01:41 streaming in the past, but now it's going to launch the feature more widely, with the caveat that it will be available only in select markets, and pricing is yet to be announced. Higher quality streaming has apparently been among the top requests from its customers. As it stands today, Spotify tops out at 320 KBPS audio. Amazon rolled out Amazon Music HD in 2019, the lossless plan costs $14.99 per month, or $12.99 per month for prime customers, a premium over the standard Amazon Music Unlimited Service. Title, which has supported high-resolution audio since its very beginning, is priced slightly higher at $19.99 per month for the high-fi plan. Title offers what it calls Title Masters that go up to high-resolution 96-kilhertz, 24-bit audio.

Starting point is 00:02:29 Smaller services like Kubas have also sought to appeal to audio files with lossless streaming. Apple Music, on the other hand, still lacks any kind of lossless streaming tier, despite Apple selling the very high-end AirPods Macs headphones, end quote, which you have to figure might be about to become an untenable situation. Clubhouse has announced that it has added security safeguards and banned a user after some clubhouse audio and metadata from Clubhouse rooms was found on a third-party website, quoting Bloomberg. An unidentified user was able to stream Clubhouse Audio feeds this weekend from multiple rooms into their own third-party website,

Starting point is 00:03:14 said Rima Bonise, a spokesman for Clubhouse. While the company says it's permanently banned that particular user and installed new safeguards to prevent a repeat, researchers contend the platform may not be in a position to make such promises. Users of the invitation only iOS apps should assume all conversations are being recorded, the Stanford Internet Observatory, which was first to publicly raise security concerns on February 13th, said late Sunday, quote, Clubhouse cannot provide any privacy promises for conversations held anywhere around the world, said Alex Stamos, director of the SIO and Facebook's former security chief.

Starting point is 00:03:50 Stamos and his team were also able to confirm that Clubhouse relies on a Shanghai-based startup called Agora to handle much of its back-end operations, While Clubhouse is responsible for its user experience, like adding new friends and finding rooms, the platform relies on the Chinese company to provide its data traffic and audio production, he said. Clubhouse's dependence on Agora raises extensive privacy concerns, especially for Chinese citizens and dissidents under the impression their conversations are beyond the reach of state surveillance, Stamos said, end quote. In a statement to the verge, Ogora said it, quote, does not have access to share or store personally identifiable end-user data and that it does not route, quote, voice or video traffic from non-China-based users

Starting point is 00:04:33 through China, end quote. As for this particular hack, I have been told by a researcher I trust, that at least as of recently, you could use Clubhouse's back-end to directly siphon audio out of any Clubhouse room and record it. I believe Clubhouse has been aware of the situation, but as Darabasancho tweeted, quote, There is a mistaken assumption by some people that Clubhouse audio can't be recorded. It's just an app with an internal API. Anyone can reverse engineer it and interact with the service with their own client. And even if not, Ted Cruz's group chats leaked.

Starting point is 00:05:14 Any participant can leak, end quote. Yes, that's a lesson for all of us on Clubhouse. anyone that's in the room where it happens can potentially talk about what happened when they leave the room. We've been doing a lot of numbers watches recently, and I couldn't avoid doing this one as well. Gartner is reporting that in Q4 of 2020, Apple sold 80 million new iPhones globally, thereby allowing Apple to overtake Samsung as the world's number one smartphone vendor, a crown that Apple has not been able to claim since 2016, quoting Mac rumors. Compared to 2019, Apple sold more than 10 million extra iPhones in the fourth quarter

Starting point is 00:06:03 and saw its global smartphone market share increased by almost 15%. Samsung, the closest rival to Apple, saw its market share decrease by 11.8% and sold around 8 million fewer devices compared to just one year ago, according to the market data. Apple's near 15% increase in market share yielded it an upgrade super cycle, according to Annette Zimmerman, the lead analyst for Apple at Gartner, quoted by the Financial Times. In Q1 of 2021, Apple saw its largest number of iPhone upgrades ever, according to CEO Tim Cook. The iPhone alone generated more than $65 billion in revenue for the first quarter of the year. For the greater picture, however, global smartphone sales decreased by 12.5% in 2020. Out of the top five smartphone makers,

Starting point is 00:06:53 Apple and Xiaomi were the only two unscathed by the global decline in sales. Apple's growth comes despite the fact that it launched its iPhone 12 series out of the normal September time frame due to the global health crisis, end quote. Speaking of our pandemic year, I've got an IPO rumor that will allow us to do some interesting reflection on succeeding in COVID times. Toast is a cloud-based restaurant management software provider, and according to the Wall Street Journal, it is planning an IPO that could value it at around $20 billion. Now, back in February of last year, right before COVID went worldwide, toast was valued at $4.9 billion, quote, in going public, toast, a 10-year-old company whose valuation has leapt several fold in the past year,

Starting point is 00:07:44 would join a red-hot IPO market fueled lately by the high-profile debuts of companies, including a firm and Bumble. Shares of both are trading far above their IPO prices, as are those of 2020 predecessors, including Airbnb and DoorDash. Founded in 2011 by Amman Naurang, John Grimm, and Steve Freddett, Toast provides payment processing hardware and cloud-based software for restaurants. Aside from core point-of-sale offerings, its products include payroll processing and email marketing, and it also lends to restaurants through Toast Capital. Competitors include Square and PayPal. Toast's business initially took an extreme hit from the pandemic and associated lockdowns. In an April blog post, Toast chief executive Chris Comparado said,

Starting point is 00:08:27 it planned to reduce staff by roughly 50%, citing a drop in revenue of more than 80% in March in most cities. By mid-year, however, Toast's business started to rebound with new demand for its software as restaurants transition to takeout services and other offerings amid lockdown restrictions, end quote. So the point I want to make is this. When I say, as I've done many times recently, that anyone remotely close to plausibly being able to hit public markets is going to try to do so right now, this is what I mean. I cannot possibly think of an industry harder hit this year than restaurants, maybe the cruise industry. So the fact that Toast serving those restaurants could possibly for-exits valuation in just a year, and in this year of all years, is just incredible. Now it does sound like Toast was able to pivot successfully to help.

Starting point is 00:09:16 restaurants when they needed to pivot themselves to take out. But also, I think this reflects number one. Just what I said, that investors are starving for any tech IPOs right now. So get while the getting is good. But also to SaaS. Are you tired of hearing about SaaS? That is all anyone can talk about right now. Now that we've been collecting the interesting raises in a scientific way, I can tell you that like half of the interesting raises lately have been SaaS plays for different industries or different competencies. Like, I could do a whole episode and do nothing but tell you about enterprise SaaS raises so much so that some startups have been popping up to help companies manage their dozens of SaaS subscriptions and platforms all in one

Starting point is 00:10:03 dashboard. I need to do a catch-up story now on something that has been rolling on for months at this point. When at first surface, it was one of those things that I figured was just a one-off, and then it became this whole big thing, and now we've missed it, so here's a catch-up. Back in December, Timney Gabriel was fired as the co-leader of ethical AI at Google. The reasons behind the firing have been controversial and much debated. Was it because Gabriu authored a paper that was underlying the risks of large language AI models, models which Google leans on itself for its AI research, i.e. was she fired for being too critical of Google's own practices, or was she fired for some of the

Starting point is 00:10:52 cultural reasons that others have alleged go on inside of Google in recent years? Quoting Gabriel herself in an interview with Venturebeat, they paint me as this angry black woman because they put you in this terrible workplace, and if you speak up about it, then you become a problem, and then they start talking about de-escalation strategies. You write emails, they get ignored, You write documents and they get ignored. Then you discuss how it's being done and then they talk about you as if you're some angry black woman who needs to be contained, end quote. So whatever the truth here, more than 1,200 Google employees and 1,500 AI leaders in academia and industry signed a petition condemning the termination of Gabrew. And now, over the weekend, Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of Google's ethical AI team, said she had been fired.

Starting point is 00:11:44 Quoting Axios. Mitchell has been locked out of the corporate email since last month after what a source says was her effort to search corporate correspondence for evidence to back up Gabrew's claim of discrimination and harassment. Mitchell also posted a tweet critical of Google's handling of Gabru and a subsequent meeting between CEO Sundar Pichai and historically black college and university leaders. Quote, say you have a problem with consistently alienating black women and have caused serious

Starting point is 00:12:10 damage in their lives, you could, A, try to undo that damage, or B, try to find more black people to like you, the tokenism approach. Good luck, end quote. That was Mitchell in a July Twitter post. Google in a statement to Axios said, quote, after conducting a review of this manager's conduct, we confirmed that there were multiple violations of our code of conduct, as well as our security policies, which included the exfiltration of confidential business sensitive documents and private data of other employees, end quote. Now, what is even more bizarre is that that all went down the same day that Google's AI head, Jeff Dean, had apologized in an email about how Timit Gabor's situation was handled, saying his team should have managed the situation,

Starting point is 00:12:56 quote, with more sensitivity, end quote. So, wow, as Jason Snell tweeted, quote, that feeling when your Friday afternoon news dump non-apology about your previous messed-up AI ethics firing gets in the way of your Friday afternoon news dump about your latest messed up AI ethics firing, end quote. And as Daisuki Wakabeashi tweeted, quote, I really can't think of how Google could have handled this thing worse. They've let it drag on for weeks with a drip, drip, drip, drip of ugly headlines. In the end, they've gutted the leadership of their AI ethics team, which is, to put it generously, worrying, end quote. Finally today, a bounce back from that whole Australian law controversy from last

Starting point is 00:13:44 week. According to App Annie, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's news app was briefly the most downloaded app on the Australian App Store after Facebook's news ban announcement, quoting the verge. Facebook's ban dramatically shrunk the audience for some Australian news outlets sending traffic down 93% the day after the ban was put in place, according to Neiman Lab. But ABC News responded by adding a banner to its homepage that said, Missing Our News on Facebook, get the latest news and live notifications with the ABC News app. Since then, the app has risen from the high 400s to its current spot at number two. Whatever the reason, readers heading directly to news sources over the social media sites that

Starting point is 00:14:25 cannibalize them seems like a positive, and other news organizations could potentially take advantage of the ban in similar ways. It's an unintended effect of Facebook's hardline approach compared to its competitor, Google, which struck a partnership deal with three of Australia's largest media companies, Seven West Media, Nine Entertainment, and News Corp for its News Showcase, end quote. Again, remember when this all started and Google said it might shut down in Australia completely, and then Microsoft said, no worries, we've got Bing. Bing is here, ready and willing to take up the slack. I said at the time that I wanted both sides to just do it, just call each other's bluffs,

Starting point is 00:15:03 because I figured this would be like running a real-world full-on-controlled experiment. Do the big platforms have unfair moats and people would be just as fine in a world with only Bing? Would this prove the ways that incumbents do or do not have an unfair competitive advantage in tech? So yeah, maybe we've got a similar real-world experiment running here. Has social media intermediated the relationship between news producers and their consumers? Yes or no? Why or why not? and to what degree? Like so many of the things that we argue about with these tech oligarchs, we could get some definitive data from this on this Australian example, maybe.

Starting point is 00:15:47 Hey, everybody, Chris and I will be doing a clubhouse room once again tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. Just search for a room called TechMeme Experience. We'll be talking about some of the news you just heard on this very episode. So please, please, come in the room and raise your hands and ask some questions. We want to bring some of you on stage. So don't be shy, people. We also hope to talk about Dispo and Non-Fungible Tocons. So yeah, fungible tokens. So yeah, fun stuff. Join us. Talk to you tonight, hopefully, and definitely tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 02/22 – Spotify’s New “HiFi” Subscription Tier

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