Tech Brew Ride Home - Monday, Mar. 12, 2018 - Apple Buys Texture

Episode Date: March 12, 2018

Apple acquires Texture, details on the Dropbox IPO, drone deliveries might be coming soon, Twitter attacks tweetdecking, more on the Broadcom/Qualcomm story, and an interesting story out of the bitcoin world. Here's what happened today in tech. Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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 TechMame Ride Home for Monday, March 12th, 2018. Today, Apple acquires texture, details on the Dropbox IPO, drone deliveries might be coming soon, Twitter attacks tweet decking,

more on the Broadcom Qualcomm story, and an interesting story out of the Bitcoin world. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple today announced it was buying the app company Texture. texture. Texture is known commonly as the Netflix for magazines, offering unlimited access to around 200 magazines for $10 a month. Quote, We're excited texture will join Apple, along with an impressive catalog of magazines for many of the world's leading publishers,

said Apple's eddy Q. We are committed to quality journalism from trusted sources and allowing magazines to keep producing beautifully designed and engaging stories for users, end quote. Apple is reportedly going to allow the entire company to operate independently, with no current plans for changes, and also will continue to produce apps for the full slate of platforms, including Android, Kindle Fire, and Windows, not just for iOS. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though texture had raised around 90 million in venture funding.

Discussion of the strategy of this deal centers around whether and in what ways Apple will move deeper, into publishing. The obvious idea would be to use texture to supplement Apple's own Apple News app. Others noticed how companies like Facebook seem to be distancing themselves from publishing in recent months, while Apple, with this move, is clearly moving in the other direction. Some speculate that by working with trusted magazine brands, Apple could position itself to differentiate its offerings inside the morass of fake news. Others focused on the hope that this would allow Apple to finally fulfill the promise of its Newsstand app

or perhaps the promise of iOS itself as a platform beneficial to journalism long term. Apple blogger and iOS developer Benjamin Mayo tweeted, quote, texture is basically what everyone thought Apple was going to do to save publishing with the Apple tablet. They never did it. Newsstand was a different presentation of app folder and clearly a flyer. dropboxes amended S-1 dropped this morning. Dropbox is seeking to raise almost $648 million in an IPO next week. Dropbox plans to sell 36 million shares at a price range between $16 and $18 a share, which would represent a valuation of about $7.5 billion. As a part of the IPO, the venture

arm of the company's Salesforce has agreed to buy $100 million worth of Dropbox stock. Dropbox is the latest in the new round of so-called unicorn companies that is filing to go public, following hot on the heels of Spotify, which announced its own IPO plans a couple weeks ago. Dropbox and Spotify looked to be the vanguard of this wave of companies debuting on public markets, paving the way for the expected IPOs from companies like Airbnb and Uber. Interestingly, the $7.5 billion valuation that Dropbox is seeking would be less than the, $10 billion the company was valued at in previous rounds of private investment. Dropbox has more than 500 million users of its cloud storage services and reported $1.1 billion

in revenue in 2017, but also reported a loss of $112 million over that same period. Losses have been decreasing over the years, but of its 500 million users, only 11 million of those are paying Dropbox customers. The rest use the free storage product. The IPO market has been healthy this year with 29 companies making their debut already, though this news does follow the uneven performance from Snap, whose shares have fallen 34% since its own IPO. Dropbox will trade on the NASDAQ next week under the ticker symbol DBX. You've been hearing about drone delivery for years,

but perhaps you thought you'd never actually see the day when a drone dropped a package at your front door. Well, get ready to be surprised, maybe. A report in today's Wall Street Journal says that drone deliveries might start happening as early as this summer. There are at least 10 FAA-approved pilot programs for drone delivery slated to begin this May. Earl Lawrence, who heads the FAA's drone integration office, told a recent gathering of industry parties that the agency is processing applications and they would like to move forward as quickly as possible. Airborne delivery of packages may be, quote, a lot closer than many of the skeptics think, Lawrence said.

Amazon, Alphabet, and a host of other tech companies are involved in drone delivery tests, and though none would comment on their own individual plans, it is assumed in the industry that Amazon's program is the furthest along, and Amazon has admitted before that its long-term goal is to deliver packages weighing a maximum of five pounds by drone to customers living within a 20-mile radius of its distribution centers. The federal government at large is credited in this piece as being behind the aggressive attempt to roll out the drone programs. But the hold-up might be state and local municipalities

who are concerned about issues like noise, privacy, and general security fears. State and city authorities could still block drone rollouts since local laws would trump federal statutes on the ground. ground or in the immediate air over your head, if you will. A big story over the weekend was that Twitter had suspended some pretty big accounts, many of which had followers in the millions, including at Dory, at girl posts, at so damn true, and at common white girl, either for stealing other people's tweets or engaging in the practice known as tweet decking.

BuzzFeed broke the news on Saturday and shared several tweets from your users who seemed to be celebrating the move. Twitter's terms of service forbid the posting of, quote, duplicate or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts, or attempting to artificially inflate account interactions. Tweet decking is the practice of several users pulling together to retweet each other in an attempt to manually juice up a given tweets virality. Some of these tweet-decking operations were highly organized and involved money-changing hands in exchange for broadcasting exposure.

After BuzzFeed first reported on this practice in January, Twitter announced a crackdown and the tweet-deckers had to go underground. But the practice has persisted, and the latest move seems to be aimed at the highest-profile practitioners. Remember last week when I said that the seemingly boring story about Shipmaker Broadcom's attempt to acquire Qualcomm was not so boring after all because of the national security issues that were suddenly being raised. Well, over the weekend, things in this story continued to get more interesting. First, Broadcom, which is a Singapore-based company, confirmed on Monday that it would redomicile, in other words, move its base of operations to the U.S., in an attempt to reassure the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which was considered.

considering blocking the merger. But also over the weekend, rumors began flying that chip powerhouse Intel was looking at ways to block the Broadcom-Qaul-com combination itself. The Wall Street Journal reported that Intel was actually looking into acquiring Broadcom. If you're trying to keep this straight,

Broadcom is trying to buy Qualcomm, and now Intel might try to swallow up Broadcom itself, in order to keep Broadcom from eating Qualcomm. Got it? Over the weekend, Jean-Louis Gassé had a really interesting analysis of this whole back and forth on his Monday Note website. Gasset called the idea of Intel buying Qualcomm, quote, suicidal, but went on to note in great detail how Intel probably doesn't have any good options at this point.

All of this stems from the fact that Intel has largely missed the explosion of the smartphone market over the last several years. Intel remains heavily reliant on its x86 chip architecture, which accounts for 80% of Intel's revenue and most of its profits. But those chips are legacies of the old desktop and server universe that the mobile smartphone world has largely left behind. Intel infamously declined Steve Jobs's offer to design the original iPhone CPU, and over the last decade, smartphone chips based on the arm architecture, have gotten a stranglehold on the mobile market. Chips like, for example, the Snapdragon CPUs made by Qualcomm.

In Gassay's words, quote, Intel passed on the biggest product wave the industry has seen, bigger than the PC, end quote. Subsequently, Intel has spent billions of dollars to try to butt its way back into the smartphone market, but has seen limited success. Intel currently supplies some wireless modems for the most recent iPhones, but Qualcomm manufactures some iPhone CPUs. Intel fears that if the merger were to be consummated, its tenuous beachhead inside iPhones would go away.

Thus, says Gase, quote, Intel sees the Qualcomm plus Broadcom combination as an existential threat, an urgent one. The Wall Street Journal's Dana Matioli also noted that a combined broad and Qualcomm would have a strong presence in data centers, as well as in chips for self-driving cars, two areas Intel has targeted for growth. Industry analysts are skeptical that buying Broadcom would be a good structural fit. I don't think there's any benefit to Intel, Handel Jones, a consultant at international business strategies, told the journal. The problem is Intel might not have any choice strategically. Gassay concludes his piece this way. What would

be worse for Intel? Quote, being pushed further away from the mobile feast by a Broadcom Qualcomm combination or led to an organization and product morass by fee-hungry bankers. He means the bankers' intel is likely engaging to gin up a Broadcom takeover bid, which would be extremely expensive. Gassay goes on, quote, in the end, Intel's best hope might lie in a stalemate. No broadcom transaction, no suicidal broadcom acquisition. Finally today, a story from the Bitcoin world. Last week, Bitcoin traders started to suggest that part of the reason that the cryptocurrency had dropped from its high of near 20,000 was because a big-pocketed Bitcoin, Bitcoin whale had been dumping a large amount of Bitcoin on the market, thereby depressing prices.

It all goes back to the early but now defunct Bitcoin exchange Mount Gox. Mount Gox filed for bankruptcy in 2014 after a hack of 850,000 Bitcoins then valued at nearly half a billion dollars. The company later recovered about 200,000 of those stolen bitcoins. in order to attempt to make investors whole after the hack, a Tokyo attorney Nobuaki Kobayashi was appointed the bankruptcy trustee in charge of liquidating Mount Gox's remaining assets in order to pay investors back. So Kobayashi has been selling Bitcoin, a lot of Bitcoin. Kobayashi reported to creditors recently that he had sold about $400 million worth of Bitcoin

and Bitcoin Cash on the open market. Because the blockchain is open and visible to all, traders could see these transactions, and some of them aren't too happy about it. Business Insider reported on some of this chatter on Twitter, Reddit, and other places. For example, Twitter user Alistair Milne asked, Want to know who was selling the bottom? 18,000 of Mount Gok's BTC were transferred the day before we hit 6,000 on February 6th.

A popular thread on the Bitcoin subreddit questioned why the sales were happening in the first place. Quote, why didn't he sell the BTC at auction like other assets often get sold during bankruptcy? If he sold on the spot market, only an idiot would think you wouldn't suffer slippage, one user said. Another Reddit user commented, quote, just give people their money in BTC and let them decide what to do with it. This is hoarse, you know. Though it's controversial, a lot of traders feel that such a large amount of Bitcoin hitting the market all at once is depressing prices or at least keeping a ceiling on Bitcoin's price. On David Gerard's popular blog, the Bitcoin analyst wrote, quote, The important takeaway is that Bitcoin is still ridiculously, thinly traded and trivial to manipulate.

market cap is still a completely bad and bogus number. Here we see hundreds of millions of dollars in imaginary value disappearing because a single large holder needed to cash out. The bad news for Bitcoin traders is that Kobayashi reportedly has another $1.9 billion in Bitcoin to unload. And that is the tech meme ride home for today. It's been produced by me. Brian McCullough. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC. And I worked on it with the dozens of

wonderful tech meme editors worldwide. We'll be back again tomorrow. See you then.