Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 03/18 - MySpace Loses All Your Stuff From 2005

Episode Date: March 18, 2019

An iPad mini refresh and a new iPad Air, MySpace has lost basically all your stuff, details of the Lyft IPO and the state of Seed Investing. Sponsors: Legacybox.com/ride Metalab.co Links: Apple launches new iPad Air and iPad mini (TechCrunch) Inside YouTube’s struggles to shut down video of the New Zealand shooting — and the humans who outsmarted its systems (Washington Post) Myspace player won't play songs, and I want to download them if possible (Reddit thread on the Myspace news) The Internet Archive is working to preserve public Google+ posts before it shuts down (The Verge) Lyft Aims for Valuation Near $20 Billion in Biggest U.S. IPO (Bloomberg) Ride-hail service Juno is seeking a buyer (Quartz) Why Has Seed Investing Declined? And What Does this Mean for the Future? (Both Sides) Decade in review: Trends in seed and early-stage funding (TechCrunch) Apple’s Big Spending Plan to Challenge Netflix Takes Shape (NYTimes) Google Spent Years on a Secret New Plan to Attack a $140 Billion Industry. It All Starts Tomorrow (Inc.)  Subscribe to the ad-free Premium Feed inside your podcast app here! 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 Monday, March 18th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. An iPad mini refresh and a new iPad air.

MySpace has lost basically all your stuff, details of the Lyft IPO, and the state of seed investing. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So Santa Tim did answer one podcaster's wish, at least. I'm still holding off on replacing my busted IMac in hopes that they do a quiet refresh thingy next week. But via tweet this morning, Tim Cook himself announced that the iPad Mini has been refreshed for the first time in three and a half years. Here are the details.

The refreshed iPad minis look identical to old iPad minis. They're keeping the same rear cameras. They're retaining the fingerprint scanner and the big thick bezels and the headphone jack and the lightning port for charging. But they are getting A12 chips, which are the same systems on a chip chips, used in the iPhone 10. The 7.9-inch display is now reportedly 25% brighter and works with true tone. It comes in silver, space gray, and gold. It is also getting support for the Apple Pencil, though note only the first-generation Apple Pencil. You can order the refreshed iPad minis today, beginning at $399 for the 64-gigabyte model.

Now, there was lots of snark on Twitter about how, hey, who even needs this anymore? But feel free to at me, y'all. the iPad Mini is still the best form factor for a tablet. I don't want to use a tablet as a computer replacement like MG does, and I like being able to comfortably use a tablet in one hand. Yes, I did an Insta purchase right before I sat down to begin writing these words. I'm willing to die on this particular gadget hill. But wait, there's more.

A completely new 10-5-inch iPad Air was announced as well, quoting TechCrunch, While the name sounds familiar, this is a new device in the iPad lineup. This new iPad Air is a bit cheaper than the 11-inch iPad Pro and looks more or less like the previous generation 10-5-inch iPad Pro. I know it's confusing. The iPad Air now features an A-12 chip, which should represent a significant upgrade over the previous generation iPad Pro

that featured an A10X. The iPad Air works with the smart keyboard. You can buy the device today for $499 with 64 gigabytes of storage, You can choose to pay more for 256 gigabytes of storage and cellular connectivity. It comes in silver, space gray, and gold, end quote. FYI, the $329 iPad with a 9.7-inch display was not updated today. So to sum up, that is the bottom end of the iPad market now. The mini comes in above that.

The new iPad Air comes in above the mini with the same specs, but a bigger screen and the keyboard connector. It gets support for the first-generation pencil as well in case I forgot to mention that. And then above that, well, you're in iPad Pro territory. Quick follow up to last week's tragic events. Facebook says that it removed one and a half million uploads of the Christchurch attack in the first 24 hours. Over 1.2 million of those videos were blocked at the moment of upload. The Washington Post has a piece up describing the efforts of the. the incident crisis team at YouTube.

Quote, the team worked through the night trying to identify and remove tens of thousands of videos, many repackaged or recut versions of the original footage that showed the horrific murders. As soon as the group took down one, another would appear as quickly as one per second in the hours after the shooting.

Neil Mowen, YouTube's chief product officer said in an interview, as its efforts faltered, the team finally took unprecedented steps, including temporarily disabling several search functions and cutting off human review features to speed the removal of videos flagged by automated systems. Many of the new clips were altered in ways that outsmarted the company's detection systems. Quote, this was a tragedy that was almost designed for the purpose of going viral, Moen said in an interview with the Washington Post that offered YouTube's first detailed accounts

of how the crisis unfolded inside the world's largest video site. Quote, we've made progress, but that doesn't mean we don't have a lot of work ahead of us. And this incident has shown that, especially in the case of more viral. videos like this one, there's more work to be done, end quote. MySpace has lost your stuff, all of it. According to a thread on Reddit, MySpace has lost all of the photos, videos, and music that users uploaded to the site between 2003 and 2015 due to data corruption during a server migration project.

About a year ago, apparently, all music on MySpace, 2015 and older stopped working. MySpace had told users they were working on a fix, but in the Reddit thread, it looks like MySpace has fessed up that they lost all the data, and there was no backup system in place. This news rocketed around the web at the speed of snark. The tech meme tweet of this headline got picked up at about 10 times the rate of our normal tweets.

And yes, much mirth was made, along the lines of at Luke is Amazing's tweet, which said, quote, no, 800,000 uploads of broken social scenes, anthems for a 17-year-old girl snuffed out, just like that, end quote. But seriously, if you're of a certain age and you had college or high school memories or maybe the only recordings of that emo punk band you did with your brother 15 years ago on MySpace, I'm sorry, they're gone. timely reminder your data on any platform is not permanent this will happen to any of your memories on any platform eventually speaking of the internet archive and the archive team say they are working to preserve public google plus posts before that platform shuts down in april quoting the verge in a post on reddit the sites announced that they have begun their efforts to archive the post using scripts to

to capture and backup the data in an effort to preserve it. The teams say that their efforts will only encompass posts that are currently available to the public. They won't be able to backup posts that are marked private or deleted. They also urge people who don't want their content to be archived to delete their accounts and pointed to a procedure to request the removal of specific content. They also note that they won't be able to capture everything. Comment threads have a limit of 500 comments, quote, but only presents a subset of these as static HTML.

It's not clear that long discussion threads will be preserved, end quote. They also say that images and video won't be preserved at full resolution, end quote. Folks finally got a look at Lyft's regulatory filings ahead of its IPO, and it looks like the company is seeking to raise as much as $2.1 billion at a valuation of upwards of $18.5 billion. Quoting from Bloomberg, The number two U.S. ride hailing giant is offering $30.8 million shares at $62 to $68 each, it said in a regulatory filing Monday. At the top of that range, and including a potential over-allotment of shares to investors, the market valuation would reach $19.6 billion based on the

total number of shares outstanding after the IPO, as detailed in the filing. At the targeted range, the San Francisco-based company's offering will be the biggest from a tech upstart since Snap went public two years ago. And the largest in the U.S. so far this year, after the partial U.S. government shutdown, put a damper on first quarter listings. quote. But a different ride-hailing player looks like it's throwing in the towel. Quartz is reporting that Juno is looking for a buyer to buy it for a nominal price. Quote, the company has been circulating a short pitch deck headlined unique opportunity to consolidate NYC market. The document which was reviewed by Quartz describes Juno as the number three player in the

New York City ride hail market with 14 million rides in 2018. It says Juno had a run rate of 270 million in sales and about 40 million in commissions from those sales as of January, though it doesn't specify the period of the run rate. Crane's previously reported Juno was losing a million dollars a day and for sale at a nominal price, citing a person familiar with the matter. It's unclear what a buyer would gain from Juno, other than its list of riders and drivers, many of whom also use competing ride hail apps like Uber and Lyft, end quote. There was a medium piece from Mark Suster that made the rounds last month,

moaning the fact that seed investing was in double-digit decline and had been declining at that rate for many years now. Problem is, there's not been a commensurate growth in early stage funding above seed to make up for the shortfall, thus what some people have been calling the Series A Crunch. Plus, as we've talked about on this show, there's been an explosion of supermassive rounds and venture funding overall is at an all-time high. I've linked to that original medium piece in the show notes if you want to check it out. but also TechCrunch followed this up this weekend, breaking down the numbers from their own crunch-based data, and here's what they found.

Yes, over the last decade, sub-million-dollar rounds are down. Seed rounds have declined 41% from 2014. From 2008 to 2014, the amount of seed rounds grew every year by around double digits before now beginning the decline by double digits every year. And according to CrunchBase, 1 million to $5 million rounds are flattening. But above that is where the growth is. In fact, what is essentially the middle ground, the series A and B rounds, the five to ten million dollars rounds, are up 17% since 2015 and 18% by total dollars invested. And rounds of $10 to $25 million are up 73 percentage points for total number of rounds and 78 percentage points for amounts of money over the last decade.

So a summary of the VC market from the data in these two pieces goes like this. The explosion of seed, which came part and parcel with the revolution of cloud computing, which made it infinitely cheaper to start a startup, is slowing. It's not going away, but let's say it's maturing, quoting from TechCrunch. Seed investors report putting more dollars into fewer deals, or as they raise more substantial subsequent funds, they are putting more dollars into the same number of transactions. seed funds need to get enough equity for a meaningful stake should a startup survive to raise

subsequent rounds. Seed funds are investing in fewer startups for more equity. Seed is its own class that is here to stay. Indeed, pre-seed, seed and seed extension all seem to have specific dynamics. Of the 600 plus active seed funds who have raised a fund below $100 million, close to half have raised more than one fund. In the last three years, in the U.S., we have not seen a slowing of seed funds raised for $100 million and below, end quote. Apple's big its showtime event is a week from today, and as evidenced by today's iPad refresh, they're clearing the decks to focus uniquely for Apple on content. Well, content and services, of course.

John Koblin at the New York Times has more details about the content that should be announced with the new streaming services next week. apparently five new original shows are already wrapped. About half a dozen more will finish filming in the next few months. The number of shows produced for this new Apple service is expected to increase next year. But that's when the culture clash begins. Players expect to be kept in the loop. But many of the people working with Apple said they have received little or no information on how exactly their shows will be released,

or even when they will be released, other than a vague assurance of Apple. later this year, probably fall. They also don't have a clear idea of Apple's marketing plans for the shows or what their colleagues in the newly built Apple stable are up to. Apple's entertainment team has not been totally opaque. It has provided feedback to individuals

involved in the shows, but it has been tight-lipped about the marketing and rollout plans. The March 25th event may allay Hollywood's concerns, but several people involved in the new programs have interpreted the lack of communication as a sign that there may not be a clear game plan, end quote.

The piece goes on to have a detailed rundown of the shows that we know about for this new Apple service, including two JJ Abrams shows, one starring Jennifer Gardner, an amazing stories reboot from Steven Spielberg, a Ronald D. Moore sci-fi series, a fantasy series with Jason Momoa, an M. Knight-Shammalon joint, a comedy from The It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia people, and an anthology series from the Big Sick Husband and White. team Kumail Nanjani and Emily V. Gordon. And speaking of upcoming events, finally today,

sort of news you can use if you get to it quickly. Tomorrow, Google is going to give a keynote at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, and they are expected to announce their new gaming service, whatever that might end up being. And again, I'm late to this, but apparently this is something that Google's been going after in a big way for a little while now. Quote, If Google lives up to the hype, it could be about to launch the equivalent of a Netflix for video games, in the words of one observer, which could truly upend the entire market. But quite a few analysts think it will be almost impossible for Google to pull this off, given the complexities and the strength of its competition, end quote. So if you want to get hype for tomorrow, last link in the show notes is to a quick piece from Bill Murphy Jr. at Inc. Rounding up the rumors of what we know thus far.

If you want to get hype, though, you have about 18 hours to do so. We'll be telling you about whatever it is Google announces tomorrow. Real quick, with the launch of the premium ad-free feed, if you'll remember, I got a lot of people getting in touch with me telling me, hey, I want to support you, so I'm going to subscribe, but I don't want to lose the ads entirely. The ads are funny enough, super useful, to me, at least. So my original suggestion to those people telling me that was,

Why not just subscribe and don't delete the old feed? Well, one of the premium subscribers got in touch this morning with another suggestion that had never occurred to me. Why not just put the links to the advertisers in the show notes to the premium feed? Don't strip those out. The ads themselves will still be stripped out, but if you want to see what was advertised on the other show, there you go. So I'm doing that today. Links to the sponsors are in the show notes for both feeds. Premium subscribers, get in touch, and list.

let me know if this is a dumb idea or not. Maybe no ads should mean no ads full stop, not even links in the show notes. Honestly, I'm open to strong opinions either way on this. I'm just trying to find a happy medium for everyone. Maybe that's a fool's errand. Anyway, if you are curious about trying out the ad-free feed and you haven't yet, remember, it's kimberlite.fm. slash ride home, but there's a link in the show notes at the very bottom that will allow you to sign up and get the ad-free feed right inside your podcast app itself. Talk to you tomorrow.