Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/01 – Instagram Launches Live Rooms For Group Broadcasts

Episode Date: March 1, 2021

Instagram launches Live Rooms for group broadcasts, which, depending on how you use it is either basically FaceTime for Instagram, or another shot across the Clubhouse bow. Is the micromobility space revving up to roar back to health? Are US-based drone makers about to step into the void left by DJI? And Chris Dixon tries to contextualize NFTs for us. Sponsors: SmartAsset.com/techmeme TinyCapital.com Links: Instagram launches ‘Live Rooms’ for live broadcasts with up to four creators (TechCrunch) Verizon support says you should turn off 5G to save your phone’s battery (The Verge) Lime says it will spend $50 million on a huge e-bike expansion (The Verge) Skydio valuation raises American hopes in drone war with China (Financial Times) Klarna Valued at $31 Billion After U.S. Growth Stoked Investors (Bloomberg) As BNPL startups raise, a look at Klarna, Affirm and Afterpay earnings (TechCrunch Extra) NFTs and a Thousand True Fans (Chris Dixon/Andreessen Horowitz) 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 TechMean right home for Monday, March 1st, 2021. I'm Brian McCullough today. Instagram launches live rooms for group broadcast, which, depending on how you use it, is either basically FaceTime for Instagram or another shot across the Clubhouse bow. Is the micro-mobility space

revving up to roar back to life? Are U.S.-based drone makers about to step into the void left by DJI? And Chris Dixon tries to contextualize NFTs for us. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Instagram has launched what it is calling live rooms, which allows users to broadcast live together, up to four people at a time, up from just two people at a time, and also says it will roll out new audio features in coming months. So is this just Instagram FaceTime, or is it a step toward making a clubhouse competitor just with video?

I guess it doesn't really matter, because like everything else, all of a sudden, it's largely all about allowing creators to make more money. Quoting TechCrunch. Previously, the app only allowed users to live stream with one other person similar to Facebook Live. The company says it hopes live rooms will open up more creative opportunities in terms of live broadcast formats to allow for things like live talk shows, expanded Q&As or interviews, jam sessions for musicians, live shopping experiences, and more. In addition to the ability to live stream with more people, Instagram also touts how the new feature can help creators to make more money.

Last year in the early days of the COVID-19 crisis, Instagram introduced badges as a way for fans to support their favorite creators during a live video. Once purchased, the badges appear next to a fan's name throughout the live video, helping them to stand out in the comments and unlock other special features like placement on the creator's list of badge holders and access to a special heart. With live rooms, fans can buy badges to support the hosts, one badge per person, as well as use other interactive features like shopping and live fundraisers. The company says it's also now developing other tools like moderator controls and audio features that will roll out in the months to come. To start a live room, you'll swipe left and select the live camera option, then title the room, and tap the room icon to add guess. Here you'll see a list of people who've already requested to go live with you and you'll be able to search for other guests to add.

When you start the live room, you'll remain at the top of the screen while guests are added. The guests can be added all at once or individually depending on your preference. This allows for opportunities to add surprise guests to live streams to keep fans engaged. The ability to add more guests to a live stream can also help a creator grow their follower base as all the guests followers are notified about the live room in addition to your own, end quote. This is cute. Of course, all the phone companies have been hyping the hell out of 5G, its benefits and promises, and especially the amazeballs awesomeness of their own 5G networks, right? So funny then that Verizon Support recently advised some users to turn on LTE, which would, of course,

stop your phone from searching for 5G connections in order to preserve battery life. This advice came in the form of a customer service tweet that has subsequently been deleted, quoting the verge. In a Sunday morning tweet, Verizon Support helpfully suggested that, quote, one way to help conserve battery life is to turn on LTE if users found their batteries were, quote, raining faster than normal, end quote. That step would, of course, turn off 5G in a phone that has it available. It's also worth pointing out that you don't actually turn on LTE when doing this step. LTE is always enabled as a fallback for the 5G network, but Verizon is obviously

being cautious so as to not actually tell its customers to turn off 5G. Twitter users naturally pointed out that switching to LTE only would mean turning off 5G, which is available in some newer phones. But the helpful support person said it was important to troubleshoot, quote, steps to find the root cause of any issues with speed, end quote, adding that Verizon is, quote, quickly launching more 5G areas and making updates constantly to improve speeds, end quote. Verizon's nationwide 5G network uses a technology called DSS, which in many instances is

actually slower than the LTE network it is trying to replace, end quote. One thing that COVID for sure put the brakes on in terms of the hype machine was the whole e-scooter, e-bike, e-mobility sector. I'm not saying that COVID times and lockdowns killed the industry by any means. In fact, I'd argue the pandemic has converted tons of folks into micromobility believers, e-whatever converts. Certainly it's done so for me. But remember, 2019 was all about the huge round raises of lime and bird and lifts acquisition of city bike. In fact, it seemed that this space was playing out in a mirror image of the whole Uber Lyft and slash everybody else battle royale that we saw in ride hailing. Well, that's been hella quiet for about a

year, hasn't it? So it's notable to me that like the birds chirping and the leaves budding on the trees, maybe this sector is preparing for a spring-like rebirth. Lime says it will spend $50 million to expand its network, doubling the number of cities in which it operates, and even rolling out a whole new e-bike, quoting the verge. Lyme got its start with shared bikes, only to quickly pivot after Byrd first introduced the concept of dockless electric scooters in 2017. The company dropped the bike from its name and started phasing out its bikes in 2019. But the following year, Lyme acquired bike-sharing company Jump from Uber, and suddenly bikes were back on the menu. Now the company is doubling down on shared electric bikes with plans to launch in, quote,

a dozen new cities in North America by the end of the year, as well as dozens more in Europe and other markets. In total, the company plans to have its bikes in 50 new cities by the start of 2022, roughly quadrupling its fleet size. The $50 million investment will largely go toward designing, manufacturing, and assembling its next generation bike, which will start rolling out this summer. The new model will come with a more powerful 350-watt motor and a swap. capable battery capable of up to 25 miles of range. The battery is also interchangeable with the ones that

power Lyme's Gen 4 electric scooters, allowing for a standardized battery charging operation. A two-speed gear shifter will help those hill climbs and an integrated electronically controlled hub lock will keep the bike from theft and vandalism. There are other new features on the bike. The handlebars are being replaced with one similar to Lyme's scooters. There's a phone holder in the front basket, and the bike will be able to hit speeds of up to 20 miles per hour, depending on local regulations. It weighs 72 pounds, which is heavier than the 65-pound electric city bikes, end quote. So what if the actual lockdown period was terrible for the micromobility space, but like with video conferencing, it actually taught a lot of folks the utility of the space

at the exact same time? Might micromobility come roaring back as a hot space once we're in a post-vaccine? environment. The drone space was also a once hot space that went through some tough times last year for other reasons, largely because some of the biggest players in the space were Chinese-based companies, and in fact, the de facto leader of the space, DJI, was blacklisted by the U.S. So it's interesting to see Skydeo raise $171 million at a greater than $1 billion valuation in a round led by Andrieson Horowitz. This marks the first significant fundraising by a U.S. drone maker in a little while, and it might be because of those industrial use cases that I've

been banging on about for years now, quoting the Financial Times. This is the first significant fundraising since Washington placed China's DJI, the world leader in drones, on the entity list prohibiting U.S. companies from supplying it with components. That move is widely expected to propel growth in America's drone sector as the products evolve from flying cameras designed for consumers to more sophisticated tools for enterprise and government. Skydeo had been consumer-oriented in its early days, making drones for hobbyists who might want an aerial shot of themselves cycling down a mountain. To avoid trees while maintaining high resolution, it developed obstacle avoidance software that later became critical in its shift towards

commercial applications, now the industry's fastest growing segment. It turns out that developing all the software and hardware to do that has set them up to be best in class at competing in the enterprise markets, said David Olivich, general partner at Andresen Horowitz. Until recently, China's DJI beat its competitors on performance and price. Its estimated market share in the consumer market is north of 70%, an overwhelming dominance that caused the likes of GoPro and 3D robotics to exit the consumer market years ago. But as drones are increasingly using software to create real-time 3D models of infrastructure like bridges, then uploading them to the cloud for analysis,

US companies led by Skydeo, American Robotics, Teal, and Dragonfly believe they will have a second shot in the booming market. The potential for drones has really caught people's imaginations in the consumer world, capturing amazing video, and in the industrial world for inspecting, mapping, and monitoring, said Adam Brice, Skydeo's chief executive officer. But the paradigm is still this manually flown world, he added. The real shift that's happening in the market is this transition to fully autonomous operations, where the drone lives in a dock, it's connected to the internet, and it flies itself on demand whenever it's needed, end quote. This is also an interesting raise for so many reasons.

Swedish Payments startup Klarna has raised $1 billion at a valuation of $31 billion, triple the valuation of its last funding round just this past September when it was valued at only around $10 billion. This is interesting because this makes Klarna Europe's most valuable startup, but also because this is FinTech, which is white-hot, and also because, yes, people might be tempted to use this as a proxy for valuing Stripe, which, let's face it, is the one startup. Everyone in Silicon Valley is looking at to potentially be the Grand Slam unicorn of this generation,

or maybe really any recent generations of startups. If Coinbase is going to be worth X and Klarna is worth Y, then what bazillionty dollars would Stripe end up being worth, quoting Bloomberg? Europe's most valuable startup initially set out to raise $500 million. Klarna Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Simatowski said high investor demand led to this doubling, but could have gone as high as $3 billion. It had been valued at $10.65 billion as recently as September. What definitely has accelerated and changed is the success in the U.S. markets,

Simatowski said, in an interview. Investors are seeing Klarna getting ahead of its competitors, he said. I think that has changed. perspective and change the view on our valuation, end quote. The company has about 90 million users worldwide, and the U.S. is on track to overtake Germany as its biggest market by the end of 2021. It said last week it signed up 20 of the top 100 brands in the U.S. and attracted a million new customers a month there in the last quarter of 2020. Klarna competes with PayPal and Square as well as traditional credit cards. It lets customers buy now and pay later in four interest-free installments when they

shop online or in store with brands such as Abercrombie and Fitch, H&M, Adidas, and Lulu Lemon. Retailers give it a cut of purchases to cover costs. It also offers savings accounts and other banking services, end quote. Now over at TechCrunch, Alex Willem got a look at Klarna's recent quarterly earnings and reports and says, quote, logistas that Klarna had a super solid 2020. In its Q3 update, Klarna wrote that it saw 43% growth in gross merchandise volume, during the first nine months of the year. In its Q4 report, it noted a full year number of 46% GMV growth. For that, we can intuit that Klarna had a great fourth quarter. Turning to the U.S. market, Klarna first reported 10 million total consumers by the Q3 period and 11 million by the end of

October. And for the full year, it wrote that it had seen 15 million consumers choosing the shop with Klarna by January 2021 in the United States. Again, those look pretty great. For the full year, Klarna made more money than ever with its operating income rising to just under $1.1 billion off of $46 billion in GMV or goods sold via the Klarna financing system, end quote. Finally today, as we just did a couple of interesting raises sort of organically because they're newsy, let's throw in something that I could have held for the weekend long raids, but it's kind of newsy, so let's do it now. Over the weekend, all anyone could talk about, continue to talk about was NFTs. As someone said on Twitter, I've not seen a topic take over my timeline so completely, so

quickly, basically ever. And to that end, a lot of people were reading and talking about Chris Dixon's essay about NFTs called NFTs and a thousand true fans. Basically, Chris says that NFTs are great for creators because they remove intermediaries, enable granular price tiering, and eliminate customer acquisition costs by making users owners. So again, is Satisfiated. So again, is Satoshi's original promise of the blockchain of decentralization first and at long last bearing fruit in the form of NFTs, quoting Chris Dixon. There are three important reasons why NFTs offer fundamentally better economics for creators. The first already alluded to is by removing rent-seeking intermediaries. The logic of blockchains is once you purchase an NFT,

it is yours to fully control, just like when you buy books or sneakers in the real world. There are and will continue to be NFT platforms and marketplaces, but they will be constrained in what they can charge because blockchain-based ownership shifts the power back to creators and users. You can shop around and force the marketplace to earn its fees. Note that lowering the intermediary fees can have a multiplier effect on creator disposable income. For example, if you make $100,000 in revenue and have $80,000 in costs, cutting out a 50% take rate increases your revenue to $200,000, multiplying your disposal. income 6x from $20,000 to $120,000. The second way NFTs change creator economics is by enabling granular price tiering. In ad-based models, revenue is generated more or less uniformly regardless of the fan's enthusiasm level. As with substack, say, NFTs allow the creator to cream, skim the most

passionate users by offering them special items, which costs more. But NFTs go farther than non-crypto products in that they are easily sliced and diced into a descending series of pricing tiers. NBA Topshot cards range from over $100,000 to a few dollars. Fan of Bitcoin, you can buy as much or as little as you want, down to eight decimal points depending on your level of enthusiasm. Crypto's fine-grained granularity lets creators capture a much larger area under the demand curve. And the third and most important way NFTs change creator economics is by making users owners, thereby reducing customer acquisition costs to near zero, end quote.

He then quotes a great tweet by Eva Baylon, which says, quote, buying an NFT is like angel investing in culture, end quote. And then Chris concludes by saying this, quote, NFTs are still early and will evolve. Their utility will increase as digital experiences are built around them, including marketplaces, social networks, showcases, games, and virtual worlds. It's also likely that other consumer-facing crypto products emerge that pair with NFTs. Modern video games like Fortnite contain sophisticated economies that mix fungible tokens like Vbucks with NFTs and virtual goods like skins. Someday, every internet community might have its own micro-economy, including NFTs

and fungible tokens that users can use, own, and collect. The Thousand True Fans thesis builds on the original ideals of the internet. Users and creators globally connected, unconstrained by intermediaries, sharing ideas and economic upside. Incumbent social media platforms sidetracked this vision by locking creators into a bundle of distribution and monetization. There are correspondingly two ways to challenge them. Take the users or take the money. Crypto and NFTs give us a new way to take the money. Let's make it happen, end quote. Nothing really to report to you today other than the fact that it finally got warm enough here in Brooklyn that the snow is finally gone.

which is super, because it reveals all the things that have been rotting underneath the snow for a solid month. Talk to you tomorrow.