Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, June 25, 2018 - Noise-Cancelling AirPods?

Episode Date: June 25, 2018

New noise cancelling AirPods might be coming, AT&T buys AppNexus, more Trump and Chinese tech rumblings, and what is the future of Benchmark Capital? Links:Apple to Unveil High-End AirPods, Over-Ear Headphones For 2019 (Bloomberg)The US now officially has the world's fastest supercomputer, knocking China off the top spot (TechSport)Is there a next act for one of Silicon Valley’s top investors after Uber? Benchmark and Bill Gurley are about to find out. (ReCode)Here’s How That Tablet On The Table At Your Favorite Restaurant Is Hurting Your Waiter (BuzzFeed) Book Recommendation:eBoys 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, June 25th, 2018. I'm your host, Brian McCullough. Today, new noise-canceling AirPods might be coming.

AT&T buys app Nexus, more Trump and Chinese tech rumblings, and what is the future of benchmark capital? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. As one of the tech meme editors joked on Slack this morning, Mark German did his Monday thing again. in Bloomberg this morning, German did his usual Apple rumor drop, this time relating to AirPods.

According to German next year, 2019, Apple will unveil some high-end earpods, which will be over-the-ear wireless headphones with noise cancellation and water resistance. It's also possible that some biometric sensors could be coming to the AirPods someday, something like a heart rate monitor. And Apple is also working to increase the range

with which AirPods can work away from an eye device. With an over-the-ear design and noise-canceling, these new earpods would compete with high-end earphones from the likes of Bose and Senheiser, but German believes they will be Apple-branded, so they'll also be competing with higher-end devices from Apple's own beats headphone lineup.

And these will definitely be higher-end, as German believes they will definitely come in at a higher price point than the current $159 that the existing AirPods go for. But German says the existing iPods go for. airpod lineup will be refreshed this year with a new chip and support for hands-free Siri activation. Oh, and German says that a new version of home pods could be coming as early as next year as well. More moves on the consolidation chessboard today. AT&T confirmed

this morning that it will buy AppNexis for an undisclosed amount of money. AppNexis is a programmatic advertising marketplace that competes with the likes of Google and Facebook. In fact, it's one of the biggest competitors to those two for certain types of ads. AppNexis says that it helps 34,000 publishers and 177,000 brands connect ads with ad inventory and audiences, but they also have some robust ad tech, which is essentially the myriad ways audiences can be sliced and diced and delivered to. It's all about allowing advertisers to hyper-target ads to very, very specific audiences, i.e. specifically you. So think of what AT&T can do with AppNexus. They just bought Time Warner, of course, so there's a ton of content that they can now monetize in a better, more modern way,

and think about how much they know about the approximately 170 million subscribers they have to their various voice and data products. By purchasing one of the biggest ad players not named Facebook or Google, AT&T is positioning itself to become perhaps the third big digital app. alternative besides those two. AT&T's CEO Brian Lesser said in a statement, quote, AdTech unites real-time analytics and technology with our premium TV and video content. So we went out and found the strongest player in the space. AppNexus has scale of infrastructure, advanced technology, and diverse talent.

The combination of AT&T advertising and analytics and appNexis will help deliver a world-class advertising platform that provides brands and publishers, a new and an innovative way to reach customers in the marketplace today. The Trump administration is, according to the Wall Street Journal, considering new rules to block firms with greater than 25% Chinese ownership from buying U.S. firms with, quote, industrially significant technology. The new rules will reportedly be announced by the end of the week

and may come in tandem with other new rules that will block some technology exports to China. The journal writes, The White House intends to use a national security, rationale to justify these new actions, just as the recent steel and aluminum tariffs were recently put into effect on national security grounds. This allows the administration to act unilaterally without needing to get authorization from Congress. The president has made clear his desire to protect American technology, said Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in a statement to the Wall Street Journal. Quote, all possibilities that would better protect American technology, including

potential changes to export controls, are under review, end quote. This will largely affect tech companies, which is why we're talking about it, but there are also growing concerns that the administration's actions against China could have a blowback effect on U.S.-based technology firms as well. The administration is reportedly finalizing around $250 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports on items including batteries, capacitors, and touch screens. Quoting from a piece about this in The Verge, that looming trade war has particularly severe consequences for gadget startups. Often borne out of crowdfunding campaigns, these companies have typically played American demand against Chinese manufacturing know-how,

focusing on emerging products like smartwatches, VR controllers, and the Internet of Things. The incoming tariffs make that approach both riskier and less profitable, potentially requiring an entire industry to rethink where it makes its goods. Everyone's thinking about it and what's a solution that's sustainable and legal, says NEMA CEO Shirene Yates. Her company which manufactures a portable gluten tester is a prime example of the kind of small hardware venture that could suffer as trade barriers go up.

Our distributors are thinking about it. Everyone in the supply chain is aware of it. It's too early, but the uncertainty of it is daunting, end quote. Making the iPhone more expensive is one thing. Apple seems to feel that it has the ability to shield its supply chain, and probably Amazon and others do as well, but the concern is for smaller companies and startups, like the ones just mentioned. The fear is that without access to bespoke manufacturing processes,

you could see a freeze develop in the truly innovative side of the gadget ecosystem. Certainly for some components you could easily locate sources in other countries, but the main sticking point is for components for which there is high demand. And specifically, there seems to be a lot of concern over capacitors. I'll leave you with this quote from Sean Chang, a vice president at a manufacturing consulting firm called Dragon Innovation. Quote, everything from Tesla cars to the Internet of Things devices we use every day to our cell phone, all of it is eating up capacitors enormously.

It's really hard to buy capacitors right now, and it doesn't help to have 25% tariffs on top of that. Speaking of Chinese and American tech competition, the U.S. has officially become home to the world's fastest supercomputer. taking the title from a Chinese computer. China has had the world's fastest supercomputer since 2013, but it has been supplanted by IBM's 200-petaflop Summit supercomputer, housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Inside 5,600 square feet of cabinet space, the summit has 27,648 Volta TensorFlow Core GPUs, and 9,216 CPUs and can perform 200 quadrillion floating point operations per second, flops. The title for the world's fastest supercomputer used to belong to the 93 petaflop Sunway Taihu Light. The list of fastest computers in the world is compiled by the Top 500 project, and while the U.S. holds the crown right now, that doesn't mean that the Chinese are seeding the field. far from it in fact China has more machines in the global top 500 than the US

and the gap is widening China now has 206 of the fastest supercomputers in the world up from 201 the US only has 124 on the list down from 143 but it's all good news for invidia no matter how you slice it if you know your chip makers

then you know that invidia makes the tensor core GPUs and Nvidia chips power five of the machines in the top seven. Recode has an interesting piece up about benchmark capital. Benchmark is in the midst of raising its next fund, likely to be in the range of $425 million, like most of its other funds. But questions have been swirling about changes at one of Silicon Valley's most respected and successful VC firms. There have been questions about generational change, questions about strategic change, change, questions about a change in focus. And all this comes at an inflection point for the firm,

which endured a brutal year last year involving the drama at Uber, one of Benchmark's biggest investment wins of all time. What my firm and I went through in 2017 was probably the least enjoyable experience of my life, said Benchmarks Bill Gurley in February. The Recode piece speculates that Gurley, who's largely seen as the face and de facto leader of Benchmark, will probably sign on for another 10-year fund. Though, since he's currently 52, that would mean that Gurley would be managing that fund into his 60s. Benchmark has something of an unwritten tradition that general partners start to fade into

the background a bit once they reach their 60s. And as the recode piece notes, Benchmark's deal-making pace has slowed considerably over recent years. Benchmark did 39 new deals in 2018 and just seven last year. In the era of SoftBanks, 100 billion. billion vision fund in the age of competing with sovereign wealth funds for deals. All of VC is reconsidering where it fits in the fundraising ecosystem. So it's probably logical that benchmark is too at this point.

And of course, there's the whole Uber Bruhaha to consider. By essentially pushing Travis Kalanick out of his company, has benchmark gained a reputation as being founder unfriendly or is Uber thought of as a special unique case? In some circles, I think Benchmark is seen as having done what it had to do to protect its investment. Recode notes that Benchmark has already sold $900 million of Uber stock, which is enough on its own, to have doubled the most recent funds value. If you're not familiar with Benchmark, they made early investments in companies ranging from Uber, of course, and Zillow and Twitter and Snap, among many, many others.

The firm was founded in 1995, right at the dawn of the web era. And its early investment in eBay is considered by a lot of people to be among the best VC calls of all time. But they were also around for the dot-com era, so they made a lot of dot-com investments that didn't work out, including a particularly Starcross investment in web van. Speaking of long-reads suggestions, if you've never read the book, E-boys, Look It Up. Author Randall Strauss spent a year embedded in Benchmark's offices as a fly-on-the-wall right at the height of the dot-com mania. It's really an amazing read. I'll put a link to that book, E-boys, in the show notes.

Finally today, no doubt you've noticed that more and more restaurants are increasingly deploying tabletop tablets to not only allow you to peruse the menu, but actually make orders and pay up right on screen. Super great, right? Super convenient. But what about from the other side of this equation? Is it making life easier for servers and waitstaff as well? Not so much. There's a story in BuzzFeed about Ziosk tablets, which have been added to dining tables at more than 4,500 restaurants across the U.S.

You've seen them in places like Chili's and Olive Garden and TGI Fridays, and there's a competing company called IlaKart that has a tablet system called Presto Prime that's in more than 1,800 restaurants. The problem for servers is that on both of these platforms, after you complete your order, you're asked to rate your server's service. And companies are increasingly tying the ratings your waiter gets to his or her pay or even ability to work shifts. See your ratings drop and suddenly you might find yourself left off the schedule. Wait staff complain that they are having to endure a deluge of inaccurate rankings, unfair scores, and even inappropriate comments that diners leave. As the piece says, quote, Ziosk and Presto sit at the nexus of two major consumer trends, the idea that every product, service, piece of content, and interaction, whether encountered online or in real life, should be rated on a scale of one to five, and that these ratings in aggregate become an invaluable data set, helping managers achieve growth and make money. Technologies like Ziosk are attractive to the restaurant industry, which faces a rising minimum wage because the tablets promised to make workers more efficient and in turn lower labor costs.

But in interviews with BuzzFeed News, more than two dozen current and former servers described Ziosk as a source of financial. and emotional anxiety, a vector of discrimination and harassment in the workplace, and an added layer to the economic and psychological precariousness that already defines restaurant work, end quote. So yeah, on the one hand, it's about making things more efficient, right? Better ratings for better service. But as the piece points out, it creates a world, a la Uber ratings and the like, where anything less than five stars can essentially be counted as an insult. If you've seen that episode of Black Mirror where everyone walks around with five-star scores hovering above their head that are affected by every interaction and thereby

create essentially a walking hell or every minute you're walking on eggshells terrified of even mildly annoying anyone. Yeah, this is like that. As one server says in the piece, quote, the way the scoring system works is flawed. The only way they can get a good score is if someone puts highly satisfied. Unless they get that, they don't get a good score. Another server said, quote, satisfied should not be. considered a bad score, but that drops you down 10% immediately, end quote.

Worth a read and worth remembering, a good rule of thumb for going through life is to just always give service workers of every stripe the benefit of the doubt. Unless they do something truly egregious, how would you like it if every action at your job was evaluated minute by minute? Of course, read the piece. Maybe that's where we're all headed. Hey, you want to rate my job? I actually encourage it, especially if you want to try to bury some of the bad reviews I get occasionally. Rate and review the tech meme ride home on iTunes, Google Podcasts, wherever. Oh, and a quick plug for my other podcast, the Internet History podcast. On this week's episode, I have an interview up with someone I've been dying to talk to for years now.

Netscapes Roseanne Sino. Want to hear a real fly on the wall slash bird. eye perspective of the first ever web startup. Check out the latest episode. Again, that's the internet history podcast. And lastly, shout out to listener Imran Hayter in Pakistan, who, if he hears this, is just now starting his morning workout. Hope it was a good one, Imran.