Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 04/08 - About Those iPhone Triple Camera Rumors...

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Pinterest’s IPO looks set to make it an “undercorn,” the UK has some more ideas about regulating internet platforms, about those iPhone triple camera rumors, Netflix dumps AirPlay and Snap opts not to beat ’em; instead, plan’s to join ’em. Sponsors: PaintYourLife.com: Text the word TECH to 48-48-48 Tiny.website Links: Pinterest sets IPO range at $15-17, valuing it at $10.6B vs previous valuation of $12.3B (TechCrunch) iPhone rumors now claim two OLED models with triple-camera arrays for 2019 (The Verge) New report claims that the triple-camera iPhones in 2019 will feature 6.1-inch and 6.5-inch OLED screens, tweaked chassis thickness (9to5Mac) Netflix confirms it killed AirPlay support, won’t let you beam shows to Apple TVs anymore (The Verge) ‘CHANGE MY VIEW’ REDDIT COMMUNITY LAUNCHES ITS OWN WEBSITE (Wired) To stop copycats, Snapchat shares itself (TechCrunch) Microsoft launches first Chromium Edge builds for Windows 10 (VentureBeat) Subscribe to the premium ad-free feed! 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 time. Meem Right Home for Monday, April 8th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Pinterest's IPO looks set to make it an undercorn. The UK has some more ideas about regulating internet platforms,

about those iPhone triple camera rumors, Netflix dumps airplay, and SnapOps not to beat them, instead plans to join them. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Pinterest is going to be the next of the big name Unicorns to Go. public it looks like. And normally I hold off on talking about things like the setting of price ranges and valuations until the day of the actual IPO because these things are always in flux. But this is interesting. Pinterest is setting its IPO price range at between $15 and $17 a share, implying a valuation of around $11.3 billion if it achieves the top end of that range. And what's interesting is that Pinterest's valuation, the last time it raised private money, was $2.3 billion.

So that would be less, a billion dollars less than the high point of its private valuation, which means, as Aaron Griffith tweeted, Pinterest is starting its roadshow as a, quote, undercorn. If you were an investor in that final Pinterest raise, you're already starting off underwater, potentially. Companies and investors do not like to see that happen. Is this some sign that investors are beginning to understand that notion that we talked about earlier that these companies are coming to market in largely mature states that the days of easy growth might in fact be behind them? Our tech IPO is not the reasonably exciting investment opportunities that they used to be,

at least if you're not one of the fortunate few. able to get in on the private funding rounds. At the very least, these unicorns, at least on an individual basis, are not looking like slam dunks, especially if, as many of them are, they are coming to market, still losing money a decade or more into their existences. Of course, though, at that range, Pinterest would still be raising somewhere between $1.12 and $1.27 billion. $1.5 billion in venture capital since it was founded in 2009. And since I don't know if I ever

mentioned the underlying financials of Pinterest before, let me quote from TechCrunch. In the original S-1, Pinterest revealed that it had revenue of $755.9 million in the year ending December 31st, 2018, up from $472.8 million in 2017. It has $7.755 million in 2017. It has, roughly doubled its monthly active user count since early 2016, hitting 265 million late last year. The company's net loss, meanwhile, shrank from $62.9 million last year from $130 million in 2017. In total, Pinterest has posted $1.525 billion in revenue since 2016, end quote. In a new white paper, British regulators are proposing what they're calling a code of best practice. for how internet platforms should deal with what they're calling harmful content.

Among the proposals, a suggestion of expanding liability to executives running those tech platforms. Quoting from the BBC, the paper suggests establishing an independent regulator that can write a code of practice for social networks and internet companies, giving the regulator enforcement powers, including the ability to find companies that break the rules, considering additional enforcement powers, such as the ability to find company executives, and force internet service providers to block sites that break the rules. Outlining the proposals, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright said, quote, the era of self-regulation for online companies is over. Voluntary actions from industry to tackle online harms have not been applied consistently or

gone far enough, end quote. Now, the harmful content in question, according to the law, white paper includes child exploitation, false news, terrorist activity, and extreme violence. And again, the proposal is that companies that do not take down such offending content to the government's satisfaction in time could be fined or have their sites blocked by ISPs or the sites removed from search engines. And individual company executives could be fined or face criminal charges. Let me just share two tweets about this with you. First from the UK home office.

Quote, all five terrorist attacks in the UK during 2017 had an online element. Under our new statutory duty of care, companies will be responsible for taking action to tackle terrorist use of the internet. Hashtag online safety, end quote. And Kyle Orton tweeted, allowing the British government to ban what it decides is, quote, hate crimes, harassment, and fake news, end quote,

seems like a policy that can't go wrong. It seems like it gets started earlier every year, but it looks like iPhone rumor season is already heating up. I've not mentioned them, but there have already been some photos and leaks of cases that suggest the next iPhone will have three cameras on the back in a roughly triangle configuration. Now, Japanese Apple blog Makotakara is claiming

that the triple camera iPhones mean we will get even more iPhone models than just the expected direct successors to the 10R, 10S, and 10S max. Quoting from 9 to 5 max rundown of this report, today's report citing reliable Chinese

supply chain sources suggest that in addition to spec bumps to the 10R and 10S, there will be two new 2019 iPhone models with 6.1 inch and 6.5 inch OLED displays. These models would be specifically designed to accommodate the rumored triple camera system. The justification for the expansion of the iPhone lineup appears to be related to the triple

lens component. The lenses will apparently be the largest ever for an iPhone and feature a bigger sensor size, which should enable higher quality photography. However, this means the camera module is a physically larger component than any that has come before it too. For these new 2019 iPhones, according to the report at least, Apple is making the chassis thinner to partially offset the increase in size of the triple lens camera bump, the main body of the 6.1-inch OLED model will be about 0.15 millimeter thicker

than the current iPhone 10S chassis, but the camera bump will protrude less by about 0.5 millimeter, end quote. That would line up with a separate report from our old friend Ming Chi Quo that claimed all the 2019 iPhones will have bigger batteries, along with. bidirectional wireless charging. So there might be a use for those wireless charging AirPods cases yet. This sort of fell through the cracks because of the weekend, but over the weekend,

people started reporting that the Netflix app for iOS was no longer supporting Airplay. Later on Saturday, Netflix actually confirmed that it has pooled Airplay support because, according to Netflix, it is technically unable to ensure a good enough user experience on third-party devices now getting AirPlay 2. Airplay and the latest generation Airplay 2 is of course that super simple way to basically sling video from your device to some other screen.

This is Sean Hollister from The Verge, quote, You see, Apple recently partnered with most of the major TV brands to allow Airplay 2 to send shows directly to their 2019 TV sets with a firmware update later this year. But a Netflix spokesperson tells me, Airplay 2 doesn't have digital identifiers to let Netflix tell those TVs apart. And so the company can't certify its users are getting the best Netflix experience when casting to those new sets. So now it's throwing out the baby with the bathwater and pulling the plug on Airplay, period. Quote, we can't distinguish which device is which.

We can't actually certify the devices. So we've had to just shut down support for it, a Netflix spokesperson says, end quote. So what's Hollister's take on all of this, quoting again, without a fuller explanation, it's hard to resist thinking that Netflix is intentionally snubbing Apple, for some reason, perhaps to build a wall around its subscribers, or perhaps to gain more negotiating leverage. Netflix, by the way, denies this, quote, it's not a business competition play, end quote. But both Apple and those TV manufacturers want to be able to use Netflix to sell fancy new Airplay to enable TVs to users. So it's in their interests to make things work.

Why aren't they? And a follow up on something I've mentioned previously. One of the weekend Longreeds Fridays some time ago, I suggested checking out that Change My View subreddit, where more than 700,000 subscribers debate hot-button issues in a highly controlled way in an effort to prevent the usual breakdown into invective and shouting and bad feelings and trolling, to try to get people to, you know, actually have their minds changed on a given topic.

Well, the founder of that subreddit, Cal Turnbull, has launched a dedicated website called ChangeAVue.com, which will have paid moderators, thanks to some funding from Alphabet's jigsaw. There's also a public mod log so you can see when moderators took action in a given conversation, and it's using Jigsaw's comment ranking algorithm called Perspective API. Also, there will be no DMs on change of view.com in an effort to cut off the direct vector of online animus. Quoting Wired, for now, Change of View is just a website with a narrow use case. But Turnbull sees a future where Change of View serves as a framework for all kinds of conversations online. Maybe the change of view model could work to replace the comments below online articles, facilitating more productive discussions about a piece of news.

Maybe it could promote better conversations in the classroom. We're really hoping there's a model in providing our structure to private groups, Turnbull says. Maybe schools or organizations who want to have the kinds of conversations we're hosting in their own area of the site. We'd like to work with them to build that experience, and that would be a subscription-based model. For now, we are just building the public forum in the perfect way, and there's a bit of a leap of faith in that, end quote. Starving the trolls as a service. That's a business model I think we can all get behind. I included coverage of Snapchat's big event last Friday, even though a lot of the tech press, including even the tech meme editors, kind of sort of ignored it.

I'm not sure if most people have just thrown in the towel when it comes to something. Snap or what. But I find Snap interesting still as basically the only major sort of independent social media platform out there for certain things, along with Twitter, I guess, and now Pinterest maybe, and at least in North America, of course, also caveat, caveat. But I find them interesting also because there's that whole idea of, and I genuinely believe this, Snap being a true innovator when it comes to product and features. And of course, there's also the whole idea that they've been laid low by competitors just coming in and cloning those features. Over the weekend, Josh Constine echoes that, essentially, with a piece up that thinks about what I called Snap's new platform play,

what they're calling SnapKit. Constine says that with SnapKit, Snap is moving on from being, quote, a camera company to become a camera platform. developers to embed, not copy, its best features going forward. As Josh writes, StoryKit will implant Snapchat stories into other apps later this year. They can display a more traditional carousel of your friends' stories or lace them into their app in a custom format. House parties' stories carousel shares what your buddies are up to outside of the group video chat app. Tinder will let you show off your Snapchat story alongside your photos to seduce potential matches, but the camera stays inside Snapchat with new options to share out to

these app stories, end quote. Josh says that the analogy here is to how Facebook many years ago colonized basically the entire web with the like button. Quoting again, each outpost makes your Snapchat account a little more indispensable, grants its camera new utility, and reminds you to visit again. It's another reason to stick with Snap rather than straying to other versions of stories. Josh also writes, quote, Snapchat's new strategy is a rallying call for the rest of the social web that's scared of being squashed beneath Facebook's boot.

It rearranges the adage of, if you can't beat them, join them, into to beat them, join us. As a unified front, Snap's partners get the infrastructure they need to focus on what differentiates them, while Snapchat gains the reach and entrenchment necessary to weather the war, end quote. So in a funny way, we might be in a situation where if Facebook is moving to ephemorality and messaging and privacy, essentially three of the biggest things that Snapchat brought into the social media conversation, snap, meanwhile, is moving in Facebook's direction in terms of broader strategy around creating things like competitive advantages and strategic moats. as at DB tweeted, quote, Snap has been moving in this direction for a while.

They realize that when they are a product, they can be copied. But when they are a distributed platform, others are beholden to them, smart move, end quote. And finally today, quick note that Microsoft has made both developer and canary builds of its first ever chromium-based edge web browser, available for Windows 10, 64-bit editions, and Microsoft says that builds for MacOS are coming soon.

Here's Emil Prodolinsky from Venture Beat. Microsoft gave us access last week to an early build of Chromium Edge. The browser feels snappy and stable for a preview. That said, don't expect it to outperform Chrome or even the old edge. In these first builds, we are very much focused on the fundamentals and have not yet included a wide range of feature and language support that will come later. Joe Belfiorei, corporate vice president in Microsoft's operating systems group said in a statement, quote, we look forward to people starting to kick the tires and we'll be refining the feature set over time based on the feedback we receive, end quote.

I don't know if you can hear it in my voice, how raspy it is, but I think I've taken a glancing blow from a cold for the first time this cold season. It is mostly in my throat. I only had a serious cold once in the year. so since I've started doing the show. But that one time was enough to earn a review on iTunes where the reviewer was like, the host doesn't seem to care about doing the show today. Seems checked out. And I was like, yeah, because I was checked out. I was seriously illen. Anyway, picking up some Airborne on the way home and maybe some Zycam and talk to you tomorrow.