Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 07/21 – Did Tesla Trigger The Crypto Crash?

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Amazon is acquiring actual doctors offices. Facebook splits the newsfeed to make it more TikTok-y. Minecraft foreswears NFTs. The big tech platforms are pausing hiring now too. Did Tesla cause the crypto crash? And DALL-E 2 is now more widely available. Sponsors: Storyblok.com/ridehome KeeperSecurity.com/techmeme Links: Amazon is buying primary care tech provider One Medical for $3.9B (TechCrunch) Facebook doubles down on algorithms in the main feed (The Verge) Minecraft team says NFTs and blockchain are, well, blocked (Polygon) Microsoft Cuts Many Open Job Listings in Weakening Economy (Bloomberg) Google Announces Hiring Pause (The Information) Elon Musk’s Tesla Has Sold 75% of Its Bitcoin Holdings (Decrypt) @CryptoKaleo Tweet TextExpander, which lets users build shortcuts to speed up business communications, raises $41.4M, its first-ever funding (TechCrunch) OpenAI expands access to DALL-E 2, its powerful image-generating AI system (TechCrunch) 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 right home for Thursday, July 21st, 2022. I'm Brian McCullough today. Amazon is acquiring actual doctor's offices. Facebook splits the news feed to make it more TikToky, Minecraft for swears NFTs. The big tech platforms are pausing hiring now too. Did Tesla cause the

crypto crash? And doll E2 is now more widely available. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Well, geez, after weeks of slow summer news days, all the news has dropped all at once this morning. Let's get to as much as we can without hopefully doing a two-hour episode. First up, there have been a lot of signs lately that Amazon is exploring healthcare as a growth industry to get into. No bigger sign than this. Amazon announced this morning that it will acquire primary health care provider one medical for about $3.9 billion in an all-capable. deal, quoting TechCrunch. Amazon's interest in health care and being a major player in that industry is taking one big step forward today. The company has just announced that it intends

to buy one medical, a primary care provider that leverages in-person digital and virtual interactions in its services. One medical went public in 2020, and Amazon said it will be paying $18 a share for the company, working out to an enterprise value of $3.9 billion. Amazon is so far not saying much at all about how its plans for One Medical under the wing of Amazon. It's not clear, for example, if it will remain an independent company or whether it will be integrated into Amazon's wider healthcare strategy. The e-commerce and cloud services behemoth has been making a number of inroads into the field under its own steam, including launching an online pharmacy and building an on-demand health care services platform. But the rise of services like

one medicals notionally fit very closely into a wider vision of digital service. services, replacing those same services delivered by more traditional and often analog means, as played out by Amazon across a number of other verticals. One medical works on both a direct-to-consumer model, as well as by selling services via companies in their health plans for employees. It has more than 8,000 organizations as B2B to C clients currently. Amazon has been making inroads and laying out its ambitions in health care for a number of years already. It has made acquisitions toward online pharmacy services such as pill pack and launch products off the back of that. It's also built out its own on-demand health care services, which is where one medical may be

situated in the bigger company long term. And it's been looking at health care as an enterprise opportunity as well, for example, exploring integrations of Alexa into health care environments, end quote. So, Amazon doing another brick and mortar play, but for clinics, super interesting. I enjoyed this from Joanna Stern on Twitter, quote, I mean, Amazon primary care seems pretty obvious to me, end quote. Facebook is splitting newsfeed on iOS and Android into a TikTok-style home area with recommended content. And then there's a secondary feeds area now, which is a chronological feed of pages and people that you follow. Quoting the verge, Facebook's almighty news feed is.

getting split into kind of. Today, it's announcing two feeds that will now be found in its iOS and Android apps. Home is the new name for the tab you see when you first open the app and is designed for algorithm-based discovery with Reels, Stories, and other personalized content. Then there's an entirely new feeds tab, which contains recent posts from friends, groups, Facebook pages, and favorites with no suggested for you posts in sight. The two tabs will be accessible from both the iOS and Android versions of the Facebook app where they will start to appear in the shortcut bar today. Meta's press release says the contents of this bar are designed to change based on which tabs users spend the most time in, but tabs can be pinned to ensure their positions

don't change. The company expects the updates to be rolled out globally over the coming week. Splitting the feed like this appears to be an attempt to balance Meta's desire for Facebook to become more like TikTok, which recommends content from across its platform based on what its algorithms think you might be interested in, and its historical approach to focusing on the accounts and pages that people actually follow. But making the newly renamed Home Feed, the default shows where meta's priorities for Facebook lie, and Meta says that the feed is set to become more of a discovery engine going forward. It's important to note that the Home tab will still show posts from friends and family, but they'll be surrounded by recommendations chosen by a machine learning ranking

system. There will also be ads in the feed tab. So it sounds like there will still be some overlap between the two, end quote. I've passed on doing about half a dozen stories about various game platforms and game developers, either quietly announcing they are doing user-owned content, but making sure they're not in the form of NFTs, or else actively and loudly coming out against NFTs for their platforms. Apparently, the sentiment among gamers is such that you can score points by not jumping on the NFT bandwagon. Well, count Mojang. among those actively and purposefully eschewing NFTs, quoting Polygon. Blockchain technologies and NFTs are not welcome in or around Minecraft.

Developer Mojang said Wednesday in a statement that outlined the developer's stance on how users can and for the most part cannot use their game. Mojang cited numerous concerns related to NFTs and using Minecraft to create and distribute them, including security issues, fraud, and establishing a precedent of haves and have-nots on Minecraft servers. On the official Minecraft website, Mojang addressed players and creators, quote, actively involved in the buying, selling, or trading of NFTs that make use of Minecraft, like skins or worlds, to explain its stance on blockchain and NFTs in its game.

The developer message was clear, quote, blockchain technologies are not permitted to be integrated inside our client and server applications, nor may Minecraft in-game content such as worlds, skins, persona items, or other mods be utilized by blockchain technology to create a scarce digital asset, end quote. The developer points out that some third-party companies are already trying to utilize Minecraft as the basis for creating and distributing NFTs, either through direct purchases or by earning them in or out of the game. That's a non-starter for Mojang, which says third-party NFTs, quote, may not be reliable and may end up costing players who buy them, end quote.

The developer cited fraudulent sales and artificially inflated prices of digital goods and says rarity or exclusivity in Minecraft runs counter to its inclusive philosophy. and quote. Given that along with Roblox, Minecraft is the biggest functional and actually functioning manifestation of the metaverse that we have right now. Them coming out against NFTs in gaming suggests that the most obvious and trumpeted use case for NFTs, i.e. their skins and digital property you can take with you from game to game

world to world. That whole idea, shall we say, now looks like it's facing an uphill climb. We need to talk about hiring freezes, even at the biggest companies. Over the weekend, Mark German was reporting that sources were telling him that Apple plans to slow hiring and spending growth in 2023 in some divisions to cope with a potential economic downturn. The changes won't affect all teams and are not across the board, however, but they're not alone. Microsoft is eliminating many open job listings, including in its Azure and security units, but plans to honor job offers and make exceptions for critical roles, says Bloomberg this morning. Microsoft had already disclosed a hiring slowdown in May for its Windows office and teams groups, but Google is going

even farther. Google says it will pause hiring for two weeks entirely, except for offers that have already been made after saying last week it would slow hiring for the rest of 2022. Now, predicting or prognosticating a recession is a chumps game, and I'm nowhere, near qualified to attempt to do it. So take what I'm about to say with a grain of salt. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, among them, they have pretty good insight into consumer spending, the global advertising market, and enterprise spending, again globally. If the three of them are battening down the hatches, and if you believe that in modern times, big tech is the biggest proxy for the overall economy, then I don't know. Seems like they see storm clouds

definitely on the horizon. Tesla beat earnings yesterday once again. Stock is up this morning. There's not really enough there to talk about really, nothing narrative changing. But I do want to note this. Tesla did have to admit a Bitcoin impairment negatively impacting its Q2 profitability numbers and also admitted that it sold 75% of its Bitcoin this quarter worth approximately $936 million, quoteing to Crypt. The electric vehicle company invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin in February 2021 after changing its investment policy in January to allow it to hold digital assets. This was seen as a very bullish move at the time, so much so that BTC hit what was then a new all-time high of $43,000 a coin. Then in May 2021, Elon Musk seemed to sour on BTC as he announced that Tesla would stop accepting it as

payment, citing concerns over the environmental impact of Bitcoin mining. In its 2022 first quarter report filed in April, Tesla wrote that it believes in Bitcoin's, quote, long-term potential of digital assets, both as an investment and also as a liquid alternative to cash, end quote, but it also warned shareholders that price changes tend to impact its profitability, which now seems like a Harbinger for Wednesday's announcement. For example, in the first quarter of 2021, we recorded approximately $27 million of impairment losses resulting from changing to the carrying value of our Bitcoin and gains of $128 million on certain sales of Bitcoin by us, the company wrote in its April 25th SEC filing, end quote. So, Elon buying high and trying to sell low once again, but if you want some galaxy brain

level speculation here, what if Tesla selling its Bitcoin bags, again, this is pre-speculation by people, not by me, what if it actually triggered the crypto-melmelt? down that in turn triggered the crypto insolvency crisis that we've been going through. I've got a link in the show notes to a tweet from at Crypto Calio, who has charts to back up his case. He wrote, quote, Tesla sold 75% of their Bitcoin for an average price of $28,88, nearly a 9% discount from their average entry of $31,620. That price also happens to coincide with the breakdown of the initial support level that led to cascading liquidations across the market in mid-June, end quote. Interesting raise, because it's always interesting to me when someone raises around for the very

first time, even though they've been around for more than a decade. Text Expander, which lets users create customized shortcuts to trigger text-based actions, has raised $41.4 million, its first ever funding since launching all the way back in 2007, quoting TechCrunch. PA and companies like UiPath swooped into the world of work a few years ago as a catchy way for organizations to help teams automate and speed up repetitive business activities, such as processing information on forms. Today, a company called Text Expander, which has identified and built a way to fix a similar gap in another repetitive aspect of business life communications by letting users create customized shortcuts to trigger longer text-based actions, such as specific phrasing around a topic calendar, events, emails, messages, CRM systems, and many other environments is announcing $41.4 million in funding to expand something else. It's business. As a bootstrapped and profitable startup, TextExpander today has some 100,000 monthly active users. Within the last year, some

560 million expansions have been carried out using its platform, essentially text snippets or keyboard shortcuts created by organizations or individuals to trigger longer text passages, useful when companies say want to keep messaging consistent, or, e.g. in sales or customer service, when they want people to use wording that has been successful in the past, or simply to speed up work for a person going through a repetitive process. Now the plan will be to use the funding to build completely new products around those existing operations. They will include tools to help suggest and build new snippets, analytics to determine which snippets are most popular and which are leading to desired outcomes, and more ways of using using.

these snippets in a wider set of use cases. Today, for example, although there is an API available, it doesn't necessarily feed into chatbots or other services that use natural language, nor does TextExpander work beyond text. So there's an opportunity, potentially, to build services for audio-based interactions as well, end quote. Finally, today, the doors have been thrown open. OpenAI has made Dahl E2 widely available in beta through a credit-based fee structure. users will get free credits every month and can buy more in $15 increments, quoting TechCrunch. The company announced in a blog post that it will expedite access for customers on the waitlist

with the goal of reaching roughly 1 million people within the next few weeks. With this beta launch, Dolly 2, which had been free to use, will move to a credit-based fee structure. First-time users will get a finite amount of credits that can be put toward generating or editing an image or creating a variation of an image. Generations return four images, while edits and variations return three. Credits will refill every month to the tune of 50 in the first month and 15 a month after that, or users can buy additional credits in increments of $15. The successor to Dali, Dali 2 was announced in April and became available for a select group of users earlier this year, recently crossing the 100,000 user threshold. OpenAI says that the broader access was made possible by new approaches to mitigate bias and toxicity in Dolly 2's generations, as well as evolutions in policy governing images created by the system. For instance, OpenAI said it this week deployed a technique that encourages Dolly 2 to generate

images of people that, quote, more accurately reflects the diversity of the world's population when given a prompt describing a person with an unspecified race or gender. The company also said that it's now rejecting image uploads containing realistic faces and attempts to create the likeness of public figures, including prominent political figures and celebrities while improving its content filters accuracy. Broadly speaking, OpenAI doesn't allow Dolly 2 to be used to create images that aren't G-rated, or that could cause harm, e.g. images of self-harm, hateful symbols, or illegal activity, and it previously disallowed the use of generated images for commercial purposes. Starting today, however, OpenAI is granting

users full usage rights to commercialize the images they create with Dolly 2, including the right to reprint, sell, and merchandise, including images they generated during the early preview, end quote. So my friend that has had access to Dolly has a great idea for a series of images that we want to do. It's such a good idea that I don't want to share it with you until we do it, assuming it works, of course. As I said, the more creative you get with Dolly, sort of the worse it does. Also, by the way, Twitter space tonight at the usual time, 9 p.m. Eastern, 6 p.m. Pacific. us after our long holiday and COVID-related sabbatical. Talk to you tomorrow.