Tech Brew Ride Home - Mon. 12/09 - An Interesting Raise From... Us?

Episode Date: December 9, 2019

China orders its own crackdown on foreign tech, Google is bringing “feature drops” to Pixel Phones, the Mac Pro is here but Wunderlist is exiting stage left, Magic Leap seems to be having issues, and an interesting raise from, well… us. Sponsors: Ashford.edu/ride Netgear.com/bestwifi Links: Beijing orders state offices to replace foreign PCs and software (Asian Financial Review) Making Pixel more helpful with the first Pixel feature drop (The Keyword) New Mac Pro and Pro Display XDR orders start on December 10, Apple announces (9to5Mac) Amazon blames Trump for losing $10 billion JEDI cloud contract to Microsoft (CNBC) Microsoft to finally shut down to do list app Wunderlist on May 6, 2020 (TechCrunch) Dented Reality: Magic Leap Sees Slow Sales, Steep Losses (The Information) Amazon leases Hudson Yards office space less than year after HQ2 debacle (Curbed NY) This podcaster wants to catch you up on the news on your ride home, no matter what you’re into (Fast Company) Ride Home Media Raises $1M To Build “Summary-As-A-Service” Podcast Network (CrunchBase News) The Daily Podcast Revolution (Medium) 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 for Monday, December 9th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. China orders its own crackdown on foreign tech. Google is bringing feature drops to pixel phones. The Mac Pro is finally here, but WonderList is exiting stage left. Magic Leap seems to be having issues and that big news that I promised you from last week at the very end of the show.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. China has ordered all government offices and public institutions to remove foreign PC equipment and software within three years in favor of creating an environment where only Chinese-made tech is used. Before you jump to the conclusion that this is more trade war stuff, it's probably a little more sophisticated than that, more national security stuff. More along the lines of, we've got to use our own tech because of it's made in another country, there could be back. doors and spyware in it and stuff like that. Basically, this is the new geopolitical reality. Countries don't feel like they can trust computer hardware from other countries, just like they don't want telecom network equipment from other countries, quoting The Guardian. This is the first known public directive from Beijing setting specific targets limiting China's

use of foreign technology, though it is part of a wider move within China to increase its reliance on domestic technology. The Financial Times reported that the directive would result in an estimated 20 million to 30 million pieces of hardware needing to be replaced and that this work would begin in 2020. Analysts told the FT that 30% of substitutions would take place in 2020, 50% in 2021 and 20% in 2022. The order had come from the Chinese Communist Party's central office earlier this year, the analyst said. Two employees from cybersecurity firms told the paper that government clients had described the policy. Replacing all the devices and software in this time frame will be challenging, given that many products were developed for U.S. operating systems such as Windows.

Chinese government offices tend to use desktop computers from the Chinese-owned company Lenovo, but components of the computers, including processor chips and hard drives, are made by American companies, end quote. As I've said, many times before, the internet is splintering into a Chinese version and a Western version, or more likely many different national internets. But really, we probably need to amend that thought to imagine how tech more broadly is fracturing along similar lines as well. We're used to phone operating systems updating on the regs, but Google wants to expand this idea beyond. just tinkering around the edges. With regular what it is calling feature drops coming exclusively for pixel phones.

Actually, with the first one coming this month. What new features will be dropping? Well, for the pixel four, get ready for call screening to weed out robocalls better. A post-snap portrait mode, i.e., you can blur the background in photos even after you've hit the shutter button. and improved video calls on Duo and more than that. For other Pixel phones, quoting Google itself, the recorder app is now available on older generations of Pixel. Pixel 3 and 3A users will get live captions.

Digital well-being is getting updates to. Focus mode is rolling out to help you stay productive and minimize distractions by pausing apps you selected in a single tap. You can now set an automatic schedule, take a short break, or end focus mode early without disrupting your schedule. Flip to sh will also join the digital well-being features on Pixel 2 and 2xl. If you use a Pixel 4 in the UK, Canada, Ireland, Singapore, and Australia, you'll soon get the new Google Assistant, English only, which is even faster and more helpful, end quote.

And we finally, finally know when we are going to be able to get our hands on the new Mac Pros. Apple says the updated pros as well as the Pro Display XDR will be available to order tomorrow, December 10th. Here's a reminder of what that means exactly from 9 to 5 Mac. Quote, the new Mac Pro starts at $5,99, while the Pro Display XDR starts at $4,99. For that $5,99.99 base price, you get an 8-core Intel Zeon processor, 256 gigabytes SSD, 32 gigabytes of RAM, and more. The new chassis will allow for the machine to be incredibly powerful for build-to-order configurations, featuring up to a 28-core CPU, four GPUs, and 1.5 terabytes of RAM. Apple hasn't yet disclosed how much the build-to-order configuration.

of the Mac Pro will cost, presumably that information will be made available on December 10th when orders begin. It's also unknown when the orders placed on December 10th will ship and arrive to customers, end quote. Also, no word on the configuration options for the Pro Display XDR, but remember, that wonderful pro stand will still cost an additional $999. Remember when I told you about that protest that Amazon made disputing the reasons why it lost its bid for that Jedi cloud computing contract from the Pentagon. Well, the filing of that protest has been made public.

And it turns out that Amazon, as many people guessed, is pointing the finger directly at the top, quoting CNBC. AWS claims it didn't win the Jedi contract, which could be worth as much as $10 billion, as a result of President Trump's repeated public and private attacks against Amazon and specifically its CEO Jeff Bezos. Quote, the question is whether the president of the United States should be allowed to use the budget of the Department of Defense to pursue his own personal and political ends, the filing states. Quote, DOD's substantial and pervasive errors are hard to understand and impossible to assess separate and apart from the president's repeatedly expressed determination to in the words of the president himself, quote, screw Amazon, end quote. Basic justice requires reevaluation of proposals and a new award decision, end quote.

AWS is now calling for the Defense Department to terminate the award and conduct another review of the submitted proposals, end quote. Microsoft announced today that it will indeed finally be shutting down the to-do list app, Wonderlist on May 6th of next year, after years of prioritizing its own to-do app over Wonderlist, which it acquired in 2015. Microsoft has been telling users that they were going to do this eventually, but based on the Twitter response today, that doesn't make it hurt any less for the fans of the app. Here's Sarah Perez and TechCrunch. Some WonderList users may be disappointed, but to be fair, Microsoft,

allowed WonderList to operate far longer than expected compared with how most acquisitions of this nature tend to go. And the company prepared WonderList's users for the app's inevitable closure as far back as April 2017. In the meantime, Microsoft has been working to ensure that users' favorite features like list groups, aka folders, steps, aka sub-tasks, file attachments, sharing, and task assignments made their way over to Microsoft to do, end quote. A couple of items from the weekend here. According to our report in the information, Magic Leap, that augmented reality unicorn that raised an astonishing $2.6 billion in investment to date

and was last valued at $6.4 billion is, well, I don't know what else you can call this in trouble, I suppose. Magic Leap released its $2,300 Magic Leap One headset a little over. a year ago. CEO Ronnie Abavits told investors then that the goal was to sell one million units in the first year. That goal was later revised to 100,000 units shipped in the first year. But according to the information, the actual units sold were only around 6,000 in the first six months. Because of this, the company has reportedly resorted to layoffs, quoting the information. The slow sales aren't the only signs of strain at Magic Leap, which was losing tens of millions of dollars per month throughout last year, said two people with knowledge of its finances. Dozens of employees across various departments have been laid off in recent weeks.

A marquee member of its board, Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, a large Magic Leap investor, quietly stepped down from that position last year in a previously unreported departure. sure. Another Google executive replaced him. Two top Magic Leap executive, CFO Scott Henry and Senior Vice President of Creative Strategy John Gata left those posts last month. Their departures were reported by Business Insider, end quote. Magic Leap is reportedly seeking fresh funding in a series E round, hoping for a mixture of equity and debt. I want to quote from Bill Gurley on Twitter on Friday with some possible behind-the-scenes details.

Quote, there are some super interesting lessons here. My favorite is a combination of fear of missing out and what I call proxy due diligence. Many famous people, companies, and investment banks were all promoted this opportunity and a surprisingly large number of them jumped at the opportunity. Even though the ask was way above average, these executives approached the situation with blind optimism rather than normal investor skepticism. Many have viewed this as a promote all along. And the fact that other high-profile names were involved made them want it more. But this desire didn't result in more due diligence. It actually resulted in less.

They probably felt like they would miss out if they asked too many questions or they simply assume that the other reputable players around the table already did the work. Proxy due diligence, end quote. What is HQ2 can never die? Curbed New York is reporting that Amazon is leasing 335,000 square feet of office space in the Hudson Yards neighborhood of Manhattan here in New York City without any tax incentives. This comes less than a year after Amazon pulled out of its larger HQ2 deal. And note that the original deal was larger, the HQ2 campus, which was going to be in Queens, was going to have between 6 and 8 million square feet of office space

to house 25,000 jobs over 15 years. This new office space will reportedly only house 1,500 workers, and the current Amazon offices in New York City are home to 3,500 workers. A reminder of this entire back and forth from Curbed, quote, under the HQ2 deal, which was brokered by Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, Amazon said it would bring $27 billion in tax revenue to New York. The effort faced fierce pushback from some community advocates and elected officials who criticized the roughly $3 billion in subsidies, a combination of tax incentive programs from the city and state, the company would receive in exchange for setting up shopping queens. Vocal critics of the deal included city council member Jimmy Van Brammer and state Senator Michael

Gianaris, who represent Long Island City. and Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. The Congresswoman took to social media Friday to point out Amazon's continued interest in New York City, quote, Won't you look at that? Amazon is coming to NYC anyway without requiring the public to finance shady deals. Helipad handouts for Jeff Bezos and corporate giveaways, she wrote in a Friday night tweet. Quote, maybe the Trump administration should focus more on cutting public assistance to billionaires instead of poor families, end quote.

which, of course, got a bunch of pushback on Twitter over the weekend, even from New York one's own Pat Kiernan, aka the true mayor of New York City, who called AOC's tweet, quote, misleading Amazon bashing, end quote. I don't remember if I told you about this, but, FYI, Facebook recently signed a lease for more than one and a half million square feet of office space in Hudson Yards back in November and is also reportedly looking for 700,000 additional square feet in Midtown Manhattan. Finally today, interesting raise news from us. As promised, this is why I've been so busy lately.

We raised a seed round for Ride Home Media to launch yet more Ride Home podcasts, beginning with the launch of today's new Ride Home, the Celeb News Ride Home, podcast. A couple of things to come clean about with this news. No, this has nothing to do with TechMeme. As some of you know, Ride Home Media is a separate entity and we merely license the TechMeme brand to produce this show. And I should probably acknowledge that our sole investor for this Seed Round is Tiny Capital, which you probably know has been a sponsor of this podcast from the very early days. Obviously, there were other. investment routes that were open to us since podcasting is a hot space these days.

But if I'm being honest, we were really only ever interested in working with Tiny. Why? Well, because of Tiny's reputation for being reasonable and flexible, that's not just something that I tell you about in the ad reads all the time. The long and short of it is this. Had we gone the traditional venture capital route, we could obviously, have worked with some great folks, but we would have been tied down to specific outcomes, i.e., we'd have investors that would want us to commit to follow-on rounds, to achieving venture scale, to getting a 10 or even 100X exit within a few years. Tiny allows us the flexibility to grow a profitable business full stop. That's all Tiny cares about, a profitable, healthy

business that wins in its market. So, by going with Tiny, we are free to grow this new podcasting business to a size that makes sense, which I should point out is something that investors in the media space seem to have forgotten is important. It's also especially important for a business in the creative space, where product market fit means something entirely different than what everyone seems to think it means these days. Don't get me wrong, of course. We'd be thrilled to 10x or 100,000. X someday, but we don't have to get there right away. And thanks to Tiny, that doesn't have to be our only aim. We can focus on doing good work, making good money, and paying creative people well for doing what they do best. So, what sort of takeaways do I have for you about this news?

First, give the Celeb News Ride Home podcast a try. Like our other show, the election ride home. I think it will make a good compliment to this show on a daily basis. It's hosted by the talented comedian Kate Raft out in L.A. And also, if you read any of the pieces that I've linked to about this in the show notes, as I've said before, we are looking for people to pitch us new ride home shows. In fact, we hired Kate thanks to a shout out that I did on this podcast a few months ago. We'd love to do, for instance, a gamer ride home. I still have not found the right voice for that yet. We're mauling a nerd news ride home. You know, everything from games to Star Wars to Marvel, movies, or comic books and whatnot. We'd love to do a broad sports

right home. And actually, I'd be interested in seeing if a sort of dev slash hacker news ride home would work, you know, more deeper in the weeds than what I do because I'm not a developer. News that would be useful for those of you in the trenches doing software development and design as opposed to the broader industry news that I do on this show. Maybe a mix of software and languages and platform stuff and security and tools and all that. Anyway, if you think you could do a show like that for us, get in touch at Pitch at ridehome.info. So if you know somebody that would be great for any one of those shows, pitch on their behalf.

A listener pointed us to Kate, after all, and we're so glad they did. So, you know, if you're interested in maybe doing a show for us, get in touch and talk to you tomorrow.