Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/05 - Amazon Checking Accounts

Episode Date: March 5, 2018

Amazon checking accounts, Apple noise canceling earphones, Google sells Zagat, Facebook posts a cringeworthy user survey, and VCs take a road trip! Sources: Amazon is in talks with big banks including JPMorgan Chase about a checking-account-like product that would appeal to those without bank accountsWall Street JournalNew York Magazine Sources: Apple is planning to launch high-end headphones with noise canceling and wireless pairing as early as end of 2018, but has faced development challengesBloomberg9to5Mac Google is selling US restaurant review guide Zagat, which it bought for $151M in 2011, to restaurant review company The Infatuation for an undisclosed sum New York TimesEater LAEater NY Facebook admits it was a mistake to run a survey this weekend that asked users what its policy should be for when adults ask underage girls for sexual images The GuardianJonathan Haynes TweetsTechCrunch Some VCs say travels outside the Bay Area, including to Midwest, have helped them see downsides of Silicon Valley, as SF faces high levels of outward migration New York Times 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 podcast for Monday, March 5th, 2018. Today, Amazon checking accounts, Apple noise counseling headphones, Google sells Zagat, Facebook posts a cringeworthy user survey, and VCs take a road trip.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Are you ready for an Amazon-branded checking account? That's what the Wall Street Journal asked this morning when it reported that Amazon, is in talks with big banks, including J.P. Morgan Chase and Capital One, to build a, quote, checking account-like product, end quote, that Amazon would offer its customers directly. The effort is in its early stages, and the request for proposals only went out to banks this past fall. No word yet on which bank is likely to win the partnership, if it goes forward at all, though J.P. Morgan has issued Amazon branded credit cards since 2002,

and the journal piece noted that J.P. Morgan's CEO James Diamond called Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, a, quote, friend of the family in an investor presentation just last week. The primary motivation on Amazon's part for this latest move appears to be its never-ending quest to lower fees that it pays to payment processors. Offering a product similar to a checking account would mean lower fees that Amazon has to pay to credit card companies as an example. It would also give Amazon more data about its user's spending habits and, of course, encourage customer loyalty. But another motivator is the seemingly unending quest to appeal to millennials, or those customers who do not have banking relationships. In fact, the New York Magazine Post discussing this news, was headlined,

Hello, fellow kids, would you like to bank with Amazon? It's unclear if customers would be able to pay bills directly using the service, or if users would have access to the ATM network. And the journal article stresses that Amazon is not going to become a bank, to which many people on Twitter said, yeah, right. Considering Amazon is building a FedEx competitor, got into groceries with its Whole Foods acquisition, and is even teaming up with no less than JP Morgan,

to offer some sort of health insurance product, there's hardly an industry that isn't looking over its shoulder wondering if Amazon is going to enter its market. On Twitter, Financial Times Banking Editor Martin Arnold tweeted, quote, not sure banks should be so pleased about this. And even the journal piece noted, quote, bank executives have been asking with increasing worry, when will Amazon show up on their turf?

Perhaps this is just the case of keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Early this morning, that man, Mark Gurman, was back in Bloomberg with another, Apple rumor scoop. Apple is reportedly working on noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones, which would compete with existing offerings from the likes of Bose and even Apple's own Beats by Dre brand. The headphones are slated to launch later this year, but development issues might push that back a bit. The headphones would specifically target the high end of the

headphone market, probably in the $3 to $400 range, that premium headphones from the likes of Bose, Senheiser, and Sony all sit at now, but would feature the same wireless connectivity that the current AirPods earbuds have. It was previously rumored that an upgrade to the AirPods would add water resistance and additional Siri functionality later this year. This headphone news followed a rumor reported in 9-to-5 Mac this weekend that Apple is considering the launch of a new 13-inch MacBook Air model that would sport a, quote, lower price tag.

Rumor of a new MacBook Air was met with a degree of skepticism because most Apple Watchers have assumed that the MacBook Airline itself was destined to be discontinued. On Twitter, tech journalist Lance Olenov said that Apple was seemingly moving away from the Air brand, quote, I would sooner expect a 13-inch MacBook. The 9-5 Mac story was reporting on an analyst note, from Ming Chi Kho of KGI Securities, who also noted that sales of Apple's newly released HomePod smart speakers was seeing, quote, mediocre demand so far.

The New York Times announced that Google is selling restaurant rating brand Zagat to restaurant rating startup, the infatuation. The purchase price was not announced. Google bought Zagat for $151 million back in 2011, apparently one of the last deals championed by Marissa Meyer before she left Google to head Yahoo. The idea was initially to integrate Zagat's database of restaurant recommendations and ratings with Google's maps and local search products. At the time, the deal was seen to be a Yelp killer.

But over the years, Google has been depreciating Zagat information in its search products in favor of its own database information. For years, Zagat. Zagat rated restaurants on a 30-point scale, but in 2016, Google switched to a more simplified scale of 1.0 to 5.0. Google had apparently been shopping Zagat around to potential buyers for several months now. The infatuation is a restaurant review upstart, founded in 2009, and is known for writing the wave of social media to build its own brand of dining critiques. It coined the popular hashtag E, or hashtag eats with five E's.

And that willingness to play in social media waters has come with the requisite controversy now and again. The infatuation caused a stir with a savage Instagram stories review of an L.A. restaurant called Vespartine in August of last year. And in 2016, Eater, New York called an infatuation review of a Chinese restaurant, quote, casually racist. But Google said in the same, statement to the Times that, quote, the infatuation is an innovative company that will be a terrific home for the Zagat brand. And original founder Nina Zagat told the times, quote, Tim and I are very excited for Zagat's next chapter with the infatuation. And the infatuation co-founder, Andrew Steinfall, tweeted, quote, when you acquire the company that inspired your own.

Two stories today in the continuing saga of Facebook tweaking things. First, Facebook had to apologize today for an insensitive survey it ran for some users over the weekend. Facebook admitted to The Guardian that it was, quote, a mistake to ask users whether pedophiles requesting sexual pictures for minors should be allowed on its website. The network ran the survey on Sunday, and Jonathan Haynes, digital editor of The Guardian, happened to see it, and subsequently posted a photo of the Sunned, survey on Twitter. One question asked, quote, how would you handle a private message in which an adult man asks a 14-year-old girl for sexual pictures? Possible answers provided by the survey included, this content should be allowed on Facebook and I would not mind seeing it. This content should be allowed on Facebook, but I don't want to see it. This content should not be allowed on Facebook and

no one should be able to see it, and I have no preference on this topic. Not provided was an option saying, that's illegal. Someone should call the cops, preferably you, Facebook. The survey continued on asking about what rules Facebook should set for such a situation. Among the options for this question were Facebook decides the rules on its own, and Facebook decides the rules with advice from experts, and Facebook users decide the rules by voting. Again, not provided was an option reading,

Hey, Facebook, maybe you should find some way to prevent pedophiles from talking to children on Facebook. Haynes concluded by tweeting, quote, I mean, this is not the kind of topic you should be determining policy on by surveying your readers. Facebook is so out of touch with the real world, end quote. In the subsequent Guardian article, Facebook VP of product Guy Rosen,

said, quote, we run surveys to understand how the community thinks about how we set policies, but this kind of activity is and will always be completely unacceptable on Facebook. We regularly work with authorities, if identified. It shouldn't have been part of this survey. That was a mistake. End quote. Facebook has reportedly stopped running the survey. On an unrelated topic, but perhaps not unrelated algorithmically,

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook is today giving publishers a breaking news label that can be used to draw attention to breaking news items in news feed posts. This breaking news tag test started in November and today is rolling out to 50 additional publishers. Publishers can add the tag on one post per day and set it to appear for a limited period of time before automatically going away once the news is no longer. Well, breaking. Among the publishers using the tag is the Washington Post, who had an executive quoted in the TechCrunch piece. And of course, after the recent algorithm tweaks, Facebook users are theoretically seeing less news these days.

But as Josh Constine says in the piece, quote, if Facebook wants to keep its users loyal, it can't just show the best content. It needs to understand what is most important in the moment. Finally today, Kevin Ruse has a column in yesterday's New York Times, provocatively titled Silicon Valley is over, says Silicon Valley, which people continue to discuss and tweet about today.

Ruse accompanied a bus tour through the Midwest, organized by Ohio Representative Tim Ryan, which took Silicon Valley venture capitalists to visit the startup scenes in Youngstown and Akron, Ohio, Detroit and Flint, Michigan, and South Bend, Indiana. The tour was called the Comeback Cities Tour. Bruce writes that the tour was pitched as a kind of rust belt safari

that would give Silicon Valley investors the chance to, quote, meet local officials and look for promising startups in overlooked areas of the country. And he goes on to note in the piece the recent very big Silicon Valley names who have been expressing disillusionment with the Valley recently, including Mike Moritz and Peter Thiel, of course, who is famously flat out leaving. And many of you might be aware of the AOL founder Steve Case's similar Rise of the Rest bus tour last year, as well as the $150 million rise of the rest investment fund

that case has raised with J.D. Vance of Hillbilly Elegy fame. The piece notes data from Redfin that claims that Silicon Valley lost more residents to outward migration than any other housing market in the U.S. last year, as well as a study from a public relations firm that found that 49% of Bay Area residents and 58% of millennial respondents were open to moving away from the valley. The reactions to this piece have ranged from the exactly this variety to the usual snark. Many tweeted how much they too were thinking of leaving the valley. Patrick McKenna tweeted, quote, alternative locations for innovation and growth are real. Journalist Chris Siakia tweeted,

Detroit has been a burgeoning hotspot for tech for about eight years. Glad to see it's finally getting its due. But David Uberti of Splinter News tweeted, A Midwestern Urban Safari with venture capitalists might be the setting of forthcoming dystopian novel. The Wall Street Journal's Christopher Mims tweeted, Amazing how much this Silicon Valley VC luxury bus tour of America's dying heartland feels like Westerners just discovering some exotic location on another continent.

And Friendster and Nuzzle founder Jonathan Abrams simply tweeted the old line usually attributed to Yogi Berra. Quote, nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded. And that's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. The theme music was composed by Justin Swinghammer,

and the show was produced by myself and the entire team at Techmeme.com. Talk to you tomorrow.