Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 09/17 - The Benioffs Buy Time

Episode Date: September 17, 2018

Another Billionaire bails out a major media brand, social network Path is no more, Amazon employees are allegedly taking bribes, Linus Torvalds apologizes for being a jerk, and Steve Jobs had a weird notion about what actually constitutes pizza. Stories from: @cgartenberg Tweets: @laura_nelson, @BuzzFeedBen Links:Are there any other billionaires out there to buy Fortune or Sports Illustrated? (Recode)Mobile social network Path, once a challenger to Facebook, is closing down (TechCrunch)Here are over 150 new features and changes in iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad (Apple Insider)Amazon Investigates Employees Leaking Data for Bribes (WSJ)Amazon Storefronts is a new retail hub exclusively for US small businesses (The Verge)Linus Torvalds apologizes for years of being a jerk, takes time off to learn empathy (Ars Technica)AN ORAL HISTORY OF APPLE'S INFINITE LOOP (Wired) 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 right home from Monday, September 17th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, another billionaire bails out a major media brand.

Social network path is no more. Amazon employees are allegedly taking bribes. Linus Torvalds apologizes for being a jerk, and Steve Jobs had some pretty weird notions about what actually constitutes pizza. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Late last night, big news broke in the media world that has a pretty strong tech flavor to it. Salesforce founder Mark Benioff and his wife, Lynn Benioff, bought Time Magazine from Meredith Corp. The purchase price is reportedly $190 million.

Note, the Benioffs are buying the magazine as individuals, much as Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post as an individual. The Washington Post is not a part of Amazon. The Benioffs say they don't intend to have a role in the day-to-day operations of the magazine or its editorial decisions. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Benioff said, quote, we're investing in a company with tremendous impact on the world, one that is also an incredibly strong business. That's what we're looking for when we invest as a family, end quote. Ms. Benioff said, quote, the power of time is its unique storytelling of the people and issues that affect us all and connect us all, end quote. So as you can imagine, both tech Twitter and media Twitter were all a flutter about this news.

Laura Nelson tweeted, quote, this falls must have accessory for billionaires, an esteemed publication that's recently had a rough go of it, end quote. Tren Griffin broke down the economics tweeting, buying 2 million Time Magazine subscribers for 190 million means the price per subscriber was $95. Purchase price was around two times revenue. Time once proudly hauled in 100 million a year in profits was said to be marginally profitable at best these days. The average price per subscription was only 59 cents per issue

on a $49 annual subscription average, end quote. And lots of people were analyzing the horse race angle to this. It's well known that Meredith Corp has been shopping around time, fortune, money, and Sports Illustrated magazines hoping to find just such a buyer as Ben, The rumors were that Beniof was probably going to buy fortune. Peter Kafka tweeted, either the Beniof time deal took the most logical billionaire buyer off the table for Fortune and Sports Illustrated or the Benioff time deal shows perceived value of big legacy brands or both.

Both Sports Illustrated and Fortune money got lots of tire kickers. Lots of people are interested in well-known brands. Question is who will pay for them and how much. Meredith told bidders this summer it would get at least 150 million for Sports Illustrated, end quote. Writing in Recode, Kafka floated Dan Gilbert's name as a possible acquirer for Sports Illustrated now. Quote, and while Time Inc. managers expected deals to get done months ago, the fact that they have yet to be announced is viewed as a sign that there's a gap between what Meredith's bankers are asking for and what sober buyers are willing to pay, end quote. He pointed out that for Sports Illustrated as an example, For example, print ad revenue fell from $100.1 million in just 2015 to $57.4 million last year. Digital ad revenue is growing from $39.4 million to $49 million, quote,

but the digital ad business is getting harder, not easier. Ask anyone who isn't Google or Facebook, end quote. Also, someone said this on Twitter last night. I've forgotten who, that when he was just getting Salesforce off the ground, Mark Bennoff personally made a sales visit to Time Inc. Headquarters to pitch the product. So life is funny sometimes. Can come full circle and all that stuff. We should maybe set up an official podcast Deadpool over the years so that we can do a special in-remorium section for stories just like this.

Remember Path. Didn't know they were still around? Well, Path is only going to be around for about one more month because they're shutting down October 18. I'll let John Russell at TechCrunch eulogize. Quote, Path was founded by former Facebook product manager Dave Morin, an ex-Naptor duo Dustin Mero, and Sean Fanning. The company burst onto the scene in 2010

with a mobile social networking app that was visually pleasing and, importantly, limited to just 50 friends per user. That positioned it as a more private alternative to Facebook with some additional design bells and whistles, although the friend restriction was later lifted and then removed altogether. At its peak, the service had around 15 million users, and it was once raising money at a valuation of $500 million. Indeed, Google tried to buy it for $100 million when it was just months old.

All in all, the startup raised $55 million from investors that included top Silicon Valley names like Index, Kleiner Perkins, and Red Point, end quote. Back in 2015, PATH was actually purchased by Korea's Kako, which is a huge messaging company in that country, if you weren't familiar. And Kako only purchased PATH because, for some reason, PATH was hugely popular in Indonesia. Isn't it funny how that happens with social networks? They become popular in weird places, even if they don't take off everywhere else. Does anyone know if Okrout was still popular in Brazil when they shut that down?

Anyway, pour one out for PATH, everybody, as BuzzFeed's Ben Smith called it, the sweet alternative social network that was too good to live. At the time that I am recording this, it hasn't popped up on my phone yet, but then I have it on airplane mode right now and my head is in a box, so I'm sure when I get out of here and turn airplane mode off, maybe it'll be there. But by the time you're listening to this, you should be able to download iOS 12 for iPhone and iPad,

quoting from Apple Insiders Summation, quote, the biggest feature for iOS 12 for most, users will likely be the huge increase in performance on older devices. We tested this ourselves on a variety of devices and saw a substantial increase in speed in many aspects, but not all, and not on all devices. Other huge features include the focus on digital health and a new set of tools cumulatively known as screen time, end quote. But wait, there's more. Even the regular old apps like stocks, weather, news, and voice memos are getting an improvement with, with iOS 12. And there's a new stock app called Measure, which uses AR Kit to measure things

IRL. The app store is getting a small facelift. There's new wallpaper. You can now set up two different faces to work with face ID so you can now share a device. There will be new information on battery usage. Grouped notifications are coming. You can now silence notifications from appearing on the lock screen after bedtime. CarPlay now supports other navigation apps. like Waze and Google Maps. New accents are coming to Siri. All sorts of new animojis and memojis. Group FaceTime is here.

You can now search for music using actual song lyrics. Gestures are coming to the iPad, and I could go on and on. Apple Insider has a list of 150 new features in iOS 12. There's a link in the show notes if you feel like diving that deep. A couple of Amazon stories. First, the company has announced that it It is investigating claims that some employees in China and the U.S. have been accepting bribes from outside parties in exchange for internal data and confidential info on Amazon merchants.

What have we been saying about Amazon sitting on the motherload of consumer spending and purchasing data and how valuable that could be? Well, here you go. We can actually put a dollar figure on it. Quote, employees of Amazon primarily with the aid of intermediaries, are offering internal data and other confidential information that can give an edge to independent. merchant selling their products on the site, according to sellers who have been offered and purchase the data, as well as brokers who provide it and people familiar with internal investigations. The practice, which does violate company policy, is particularly pronounced in China, according to some of these people, because the number of sellers there is skyrocketing.

As well, Amazon employees in China have relatively small salaries, which might embolden them to take risks, end quote. Apparently just $80 could get you internal sales metrics and reviewers' email addresses, as well as the ability to delete negative reviews and even restore banned accounts. Amazon said in a statement, quote, we hold our employees to a high ethical standard, and anyone in violation of our code faces discipline, including termination and potential legal and criminal penalties, end quote. And this, Amazon has added a new section to its website called Amazon's storefronts, a retail hub designed to be a place for small and medium-sized businesses to hawk their wares. It was launched today with more than a million products and around 20,000 companies.

There will also be curated collections and promotion for specifically chosen companies, including even Amazon produced and paid for commercials that will soon be running. The Verges Hyam Gartenberg snarked. Some of the smaller companies that will receive high-profile attention from Amazon are sure to be glad for the extra PR and the dedicated section. But it's hard to shake the air of, gee whiz. Aren't small mom-and-pop U.S.-based business is great? We're a relatable company that helps people run their companies better, not one that is slowly killing off smaller retail stores

that can't possibly compete with Amazon's superior and cheaper supply chain management and replacing them with Chinese merchants. That's not Amazon, end quote. Want to see the page for yourself? Search for Amazon's storefronts. Linus Torvalds is apologizing for being a jerk. Seriously, that's the whole story, but it's still an interesting one. For years, the Linux creator has been famous, or I guess infamous,

for his expletive-filled rants and outburst directed at fellow Linux contributors on the Linux kernel mailing list. In the past, he's actually said that being nice is merely an American ideology. But it seems that he's had a change of heart. in a post on that same Linux kernel mailing list last night, not only did Torvalds apologize for his past behavior, he says he is temporarily stepping away from Linux maintenance in order to work on himself and his temper.

Quoting from the post, This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person, and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody, least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize for years how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. This week, people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions.

My flipping attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for, especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not okay, and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that, hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely, end quote. On Twitter, Anil Dash said, quote, this is quietly a major milestone in tech culture. Linus Torvald's, the leader behind Linux, Git, and so much of open source culture reflects on how he's, been hostile to community members. I hope he follows through.

That would be his biggest commit ever. It's slow and it's painful, but the developer culture that shapes tech culture really is evolving. Finally today, I could have saved this one for the Friday Long Reads, but, you know, why do that? In Wired, the great Stephen Levy has a long oral history up of Apple's campus and headquarters, Infinite Loop. He's got contributions from basically everyone from Eddie Q to Tony Fidel to John Scully. Nothing particularly newsmaking in the piece, just some fantastic stories and historical color. For example, let me pick these two nuggets. The first is from Mike Slade, who has actually been on the Internet History Podcast twice,

with great stories like this one. One day in Steve's office, we were talking about some gadget. It was like in 98 or early 99, and he just went and bought it on Amazon. He was in awe about how cool it was to buy things with one-click. So he called up Amazon and said, hey, this is Steve Jobs, and licensed that one-click patent for a million bucks, end quote. And this one is from Eddie Q, quote, my first memory of sitting in a meeting in Infinite Loop 1 was with Steve.

It was just the two of us up on the fourth floor in the boardroom. We started at 10. I was working on the online store. and we were trying to come up with all the things associated with it. By one, he says, hey, are you hungry because I am? Six pizzas came in. I'm like, okay, they must have not known which kind we wanted, so they provided a bunch.

I took the first one, and it was pizza dough with tomato sauce and onions, no cheese or anything else. The next one, same thing. So I'm like, all right, now I get it. The first three are his. I opened the fourth one, same thing. Six pizzas, all dough and tomatoes and onions. That's how I discovered that his idea of pizza and my idea of pizza were definitely something different, end quote.

That's all for today. I've been Brian McCullough. Speaking of my other podcast, the Internet History Podcast, check out this week's episode. An episode devoted to the history and behind the scenes stories about a forgotten Silicon Valley giant, Silicon Graphics. Check it out. The Internet History Podcast, available wherever fine pods are cast.

Talk to you tomorrow. I'm a geek. I actually really enjoy the social interaction. I enjoy cursing at people when they make mistakes.