Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 01/24 - Your Flying Car Is Here

Episode Date: January 24, 2019

Bing’s Schrodinger-style China Ban, headphones from Sonos, flying cars from Boeing, layoffs for project Titan, and the serious ongoing layoffs in the digital media world. Sponsors: Lightstream.com/ride Metalab.co DatadogHQ.com/ridehome Stories from: @pkafka, @markgurman  Tweets: @stroughtonsmith Links: China Appears to Block Microsoft’s Bing as Censorship Intensifies (NYTimes) Sonos Plans Headphones in Move Outside the Home (Bloomberg) Boeing’s ‘flying car’ lifts off in race to revolutionize urban transport (VentureBeat) The U.S. Government Shutdown Has Delivered A Surprise Blow To Bitcoin (Forbes) Apple just dismissed more than 200 employees from Project Titan, its autonomous vehicle group (CNBC) Verizon Media Group is laying off 7% of its staff (CNBC) BuzzFeed is laying off more than 200 people, its second round of cuts in 14 months (Recode) 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 tech meme ride home for Thursday, January 24th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Bing's Schrodinger-style China ban, headphones from Sonos, flying cars from Boeing,

layoffs for Project Titan, and the serious ongoing layoffs in the digital media world. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. All last night, it looked like Microsoft's Bing search engine had been blocked. in China, despite the fact that Microsoft self-censors search results in that country. Now, this morning, it looks like Bing is back, and Bloomberg News is reporting that Bing was blocked due to a technical error rather than any sort of attempt at censorship. So, ends up being a non-story, right? Just a mistake, no harm, no foul, except note that all night long everyone saw this news

and no one was surprised. Quoting the New York Times, Beijing has carried out several waves of increasingly intense crackdowns on internet freedoms as the Communist Party has cemented its control over more aspects of Chinese life. That includes cracking down on foreign internet products, including blocks on Instagram and WhatsApp in recent years, end quote. As the Times noted last night, Bing has tried to play by China's rules. quote, for example, a search for the Dalai Lama, the religious leader, would turn up state media accounts within China that accused him of stirring up hatred and separatism. Outside the country, it would point to sites like Wikipedia, end quote. So the point here is, everyone was like China just blocked bang. Big deal. I feel like people have come to expect that China is building its own parallel internet and doesn't need or want outsiders, especially.

Western companies to compete in their home market. And even if you're one of these non-Chinese companies, and even if you jump through all of China's hoops, who's to say they won't add new hoops or take down the old ones to really torture a metaphor? China is an awfully big market. I get it. But especially if it's a market that maybe you're coming too late because you left it a while ago, or you have to invest heavily just to even begin to be competitive there. It is also potentially a market that can be taken away from you on a whim. Don't forget that. So word of warning to you, Google, you might want to get back into the Chinese search market,

but that doesn't mean the Chinese search market has to welcome you back, nor if they do, and you be sure that they won't just change the rules on you overnight. Sonos went public just this past August, and it hasn't exactly been a home run. Sonos' stock has lost about a quarter of its value since IPO day. And that kind of makes sense. Sonos' native market of digitally connected speakers is a crowded one these days, shall we say. So investors have been wondering if there are other markets Sonos can move into to find growth, or at least find some sort of defensive positioning.

Well, according to Bloomberg, Sonos is planning to debut wireless over-the-ear headphones next year that will probably retail for around $300 or more right in the sweet spot of the high-end headphone market. What will be the differentiator of the Sonos headphones? Apparently, they will work with multiple digital assistants. So almost a United Nations for your smart assistant buddies. Quote, Sonos is focusing on audio quality and the ability to work with multiple music services and digital assistance like its latest internet connected speakers. The Santa Barbara, California-based company has begun approaching overseas manufacturers about producing the headphones.

One of the people said, Sonos spokeswoman Laura Moriarty said the company doesn't comment on future product plans, end quote. So that's a differentiator that plays to existing strengths, right? Sonos speakers have always had the advantage that pretty much any service you might want to use, and lately any assistant you might want to use, They tend to work on Sonos. So why not do the same thing for headphones? Although high-end headphones are not exactly an empty market,

Bose, Senheiser, Beats, Skull Candy. In all of the talk of self-driving cars, Boeing, the airplane maker doesn't want you to forget about your original dream, the dream of flying cars. a couple of days ago Boeing invited journalists to watch the maiden flight test of what it says is its flying car prototype

a prototype that it swears it is dead serious about manufacturing eventually, unlike all those other flying car demos that we've seen over the decades but you need to modulate your thinking about this a little bit. Don't imagine that this is a plane that can just land on the highway and then keep going like a car or vice

versa. This is Boeing's autonomous passenger air vehicle, or PAV. It's a 30-foot-long aircraft that looks more like a drone, though it does have fixed wings as well. The idea is that this will be an air taxi of the future, a craft that can take off and land vertically, then fly like a plane, and crucially, fly autonomously. Quote, Boeing is working with startup Spark Cognition and the U.S. Federal Aviation administration to develop a traffic management system for three-dimensional highways, as well as the regulatory framework that will allow waves of autonomous vehicles to zip safely around buildings, the company has said. Boeing bought Manassas-based Aurora Flight Sciences last year to speed development of a fleet of autonomous air vehicles. With Aurora, Boeing is also working on Uber's Uber Air service

for flights that are planned to be available for order via smartphones around 2023. Boeing is looking to achieve a range of 50 miles with two flying car variants capable of carrying two and four passengers each. Tests are planned for later this year on a package hauling version that can lift up to 500 pounds, end quote. In this nascent market, Boeing is competing with its old foe airbus and numerous other startup firms apparently, quote, the future of mobility, moving goods, moving cargo, moving people. That future is happening now and it's going to accelerate over the next five years, and ramp up even more beyond that. Dennis Mullenberg, Boeing's president, chairman, and CEO told a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Wednesday, end quote.

So new wager, I guess. Air taxis by 2024? Still trying to track how the U.S. government shutdown is affecting tech. This time, you might be surprised to learn. The government shutdown might just be one of who knows how many factors that have been conspicuble. to hold down the price of Bitcoin. Quoting Forbes, the ongoing U.S. government shutdown has forced the withdrawal of a closely watched proposal

to list a Bitcoin Exchange traded fund or ETF on the Chicago Border Trade BZX Exchange, dealing a blow to those who hoped the long-awaited Bitcoin ETF would bring a fresh round of investment into the stagnating market. The Bitcoin ETF proposal brought by a. investment firm Vanek and financial services provider Solid X has faced an uphill battle for approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission due to concerns the Bitcoin price is susceptible to market manipulation. The decision to withdraw the application amid the U.S. government shutdown announced in an SEC filing saw the Bitcoin price dip slightly, though it remains around the $3,500 it's been training at since early January, end quote. Sources were telling CNBC that Apple

laid off 200 plus employees just this past week from Project Titan, what we assume is Apple's self-driving something initiative. And an Apple spokesperson then confirmed the news, sort of, by saying, quote, we have an incredibly talented team working on autonomous systems and associated technologies at Apple. As the team focuses their work on several key areas for 2019, some groups are being moved to projects in other parts of the company, where they will support machine learning and other initiatives across all of Apple. We continue to believe there is a huge opportunity with autonomous systems that Apple has unique capabilities to contribute and that this is the most ambitious machine learning project ever, end quote. So nothing is more frustrating than trying

to read the tea leaves to figure out if Apple is serious about autonomous vehicles in what capacity they are and even if such an initiative is extant or not from moment to moment. Some Sometimes we'll hear stories like this and think, ah, Apple has thought twice about this whole thing. But then we hear rumors that they are like, no, they're still serious. They're serious all the way to the extent of doing their own car. It was just in August that the pendulum had swung seemingly all the way back in that direction to serious when I told you about Tesla engineering vice president, Doug Field, returning to Apple from Tesla to lead the Titan team. So maybe, as CNBC suggests, this is just a logical restructuring of the Titan team as Field gets it together and gets all the people he wants in place.

But then one remembers Apple's revenue restatement from earlier this month. Apple might need to free up some cash somewhere to make their quarterly numbers look good for investors going forward. As Shirovide tweeted, feels like it's time to start asking how Apple is spending. that $14 billion in annual R&D, which has nearly doubled in three years, end quote. Steve Trotton-Smith was a tad more harsh, shall we say, tweeting, quote, they need to add an Ick suffix to this project name while they're rearranging the deck chairs once more. If you don't get it, if you add an Ick to Project Titan, it becomes Project Titanic. And it gives me no pleasure to segue thematically like this, but layoffs have been all anyone has been talking about in the media world over the last 48 hours.

Verizon Media Group, which owns Yahoo and AOL, so A.K.A. Oath, plans to cut 7% of its global workforce. That represents about 800 journalists, media producers, etc. news of these layoffs came from Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowerpon, who emailed employees yesterday to say, quote, I want to be clear that we will continue to scale, launch new products, and innovate. We are an important part of Verizon. Now is the time to go on the offensive, go deep on our big priorities, and do everything we can to advance the business, end quote. And at almost the same time last night news broke that BuzzFeed is laying off 15% of its employees, a cut-th that could hit 225 of BuzzFeed's 1,450 employees.

This news came in an email from CEO Jonah Peretti to staff, which noted that BuzzFeed's business grew double digits over the past year, but, quote, the restructuring we are undertaking will reduce our costs and improve our operating models so we can thrive and control our own destiny without ever needing to raise funding again, end quote. Now, I feel like I haven't been sufficiently covering what can only be described as the bloodbath in the digital media space

over the past 18 months or so. But there are two tracks here. First, bringing AOL and Yahoo under the Verizon Media umbrella was the brainchild of Tim Armstrong, who has frankly been trying to create his own media company for years now. He sold what eventually became oath

as a possible third wheel competitor to the digital advertising duopoly of Facebook and Google. But sometimes third wheels are just that. And so last year, Armstrong was out at Verizon. The whole idea of germinating a media company inside Verizon seems to have fallen out of favor. And Verizon took a $4.6 billion right down on its media business. I'm sorry, I forgot who it was, but I saw someone on Twitter talking about Flickr and Tumblr,

also owned by Verizon this morning. And their suggestion was, look, anything you use or care about that Verizon owns, that's a media, property be very, very nervous. Again, whomever it was was suggesting that Verizon might not even think of some of its media assets as worth going to the trouble of finding an outside buyer for. So there's that, but the other track of this is the fact that starting about a decade ago, a whole bunch of startups in the wake of BuzzFeed's success came out of the woodwork and raised a ton of venture capital and promised that they would be the media companies of the

21st century. I'm thinking of your vices, your voxes, your mics, your refinery 29s, your cheddars even. The promise was that in the age of social, why couldn't a media brand reach scale two? Why couldn't someone reach a billion or so eyeballs every single day? Well, then, there were those Facebook algorithm changes, there were those pivots to video, that whole sorry saga. And while some of the upstarts claim that they're still doing very well, thank you very much, there has been this steady drip, drip, drip of layoffs and worse. Mike recently sold itself and kind of sort of shut down just a few months ago, Refinery 29 had its own round of layoffs. BuzzFeed has spoken of missing revenue targets. So the bottom line is the promise scale

that all of these media companies thought they were going to achieve. seems to have been ephemeral. And guess what? The endless pot of VC money has gone dry. So there is increasingly serious concern that over the next year or so, the entire digital media landscape, as we know it, well, some portion of it might be on the verge of extinction. It's that dire, according to some folk.

Hmm. I smell a bonus episode coming to do a deeper dive into all of this. Check your feeds on Saturday for a conversation with a Mr. Rafat Ali. That's all for today. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Another reminder to check out the podcast subreddit at R slash Ride Home, where you can discuss the stories that we discuss on the show

and also chat with other listeners. There was a cool chat on there last night from a listener in Saudi Arabia who wanted to reach out to other overseas listeners to compare notes. And yes, I know for a lot of you, it's a ride-in or a wake-up or even a taking-a-shower podcast as much as it's a ride-home podcast. I don't care, listen whenever, however you want. Oh, and the conversation last night also included that dot dot dot icon.

Remember, I asked if that had a name, like the hamburger icon does. Someone said that they had heard it referred to as the shish kebab, though another listener proposed the term ellipsis, which, while it makes sense, is less catchy, I think, than a food-based moniker. So at this point, dot, dot, dot, dot, unresolved. Talk to you tomorrow.