Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 08/22 – The Mike Lynch Saga

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

As Mike Lynch’s body is recovered off Sicily, a deeper look at what was a roller coaster of a life. More cross posting for Meta’s apps. We have a date for the re-release of Recall. Interesting executive shuffle at Apple. And more data showing the degree to which free streaming is upending the Streaming Wars. Sponsors: QualiaLife.com/ride Links: Bodies of Mike Lynch and four yacht guests pulled from Bayesian wreck (Financial Times) Mike Lynch’s journey from tech founder to long legal battle (Financial Times) Meta lets you cross-post from Instagram and Facebook to Threads. Here’s how to do it. (TechCrunch) Microsoft’s Recall AI feature won’t be available for Windows testers until October (The Verge) Neuralink Says Second Brain Device Implant ‘Went Well’ (Bloomberg) Apple’s App Store Head to Leave in Reorganization Amid Global Scrutiny (Bloomberg) Report: “FAST correcting issues that VoD created” (Advanced Television) 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, August 22nd, 2024. I'm Brian McCalla today. As Mike Lynch's body is recovered off Sicily, a deeper look at what was a roller coaster of a life. More cross-posting for meta's apps. We have a date for the re-release of recall, interesting executive shuffle over at Apple, and more data showing the degree to which free streaming is upending the streaming wars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. According to Italian officials, UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch's body has been recovered from the wreckage of that super yacht Bayesian, which sank three days ago off the coast of Sicily, quoting the Financial Times. Six people, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, have been missing since Monday when Bayesian went down in an intense storm near Palermo.

A fifth body was pulled from the sunken yacht on Thursday morning. Divers searching the wreck off the coast of Port. are still looking for the sixth missing passenger whom the Italian Coast Guard said is a woman. That suggests that the other bodies recovered are likely to include Christopher Morvillo of the law firm Clifford Chance and Jonathan Blumer, chair of insurance group Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International, who were also on board Bayesian when it sank. Their wives, Netta Morvillo, and Judy Blumer, were also on the vessel, end quote. Yeah, it turns out there were other prominent people on this boat. And from the reading I've been doing, it seems like this was a real Black Swan event, a water spout, which is, of course, a tornado in the water, just decided to come down on them.

No real way to anticipate or avoid that. But also, since I alluded to this yesterday, I thought it was worth bringing up in greater detail, the degree to which Mike Lynch experienced some of the most extreme career highs and lows of any British tech entrepreneur selling autonomy for $11 billion before a 12-year legal ordeal about that sale, which I believe we did cover once or twice on the show, filling in the gaps here from the Financial Times again, quote. A self-made software success story, Lynch went on to become a prominent investor in and voiciferous champion of the UK tech startup scene. The $11 billion sale of his company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard in 2011, was at the time the biggest ever of a European IT concern cementing his position as the rarehead of a British

tech company to make it on the global stage. But a year later, HP claimed Autonomies leaders had fraudulently inflated the value of the acquisition by $5 billion, leading to a 12-year legal ordeal. Lynch lost a long battle against extradition to the U.S. on fraud charges and spent more than a year under house arrest in San Francisco ahead of a trial. He was eventually cleared by a jury on all charges in June of this year. Lynch founded Autonomy in 1996, just as an explosion of digital data was starting to engulf companies and other large organizations, presenting huge challenges in sorting through unstructured data or information not held in easily searchable databases. The sale to HP confirmed Lynch's success at carving out a globally recognized position in one of the most strategically important

technologies of the time. However, HP boss Meg Whitman accused Autonomies leaders of having falsely inflated the company's revenues in the years before the sale through tricks such as round-trip deals, where Autonomy paid customers in return for them buying its software. Lynch threw himself into his defense in the years that followed, turning the battle into a personal vendetta against Whitman, whom he accused of inventing the fraud claim to cover up her own mismanagement of the founding U.S. tech company. Autonomy's former chief financial officer Sashoven Hussein was convicted of fraud

over the autonomy sale in the U.S. in 2019, and HP won a civil fraud claim against Lynch in the U.K. in 2022. Despite these successes, U.S. prosecutors stumbled when trying to prove that Lynch, as the company's chief executive, was criminally responsible for the alleged fraud. The jury was presented with two very different versions of the software boss. Prosecutors painted him as a domineering micromanager, while the defense depicted him as a big-picture tech strategist who did not pay attention to the complex accounting issues at the heart of the fraud claims. I'm not an accountant and I'm not a salesperson, Lynch said, successfully persuading the jury that he was not familiar with the convoluted financial dealings presented in court. I've sat and watched a parade of witnesses that I've never met, and a series of transactions I had no involvement in and not much else, end quote. Though he was

ultimately cleared, the indictment in the U.S. cast a long shadow over Lynch's career, along with a personal fortune, he reaped more than $800 million from his stake in the company. Autonomy had earlier provided him with a platform to champion the cause of tech startups and take a prominent role in public life. Lynch served as a non-executive director of the BBC. and a member of then Prime Minister David Cameron's Council for Science and Technology, where he advised on the importance of the coming wave of artificial intelligence. He was granted in OBE in 2006 for services to enterprise. After charges were brought in the U.S. in 2018, he stepped back from many of his public roles.

However, he continued to make investments through Invoke Capital, the venture capital firm he set up after the sale to HP. Recently, in his first public comment since the trial, Lynch told the Sunday Times that he wanted to provide support for people who had been wrongly convicted of crimes and to fight against what he believed was the injustice of extraditions, such as the one that had forced him to face trial in the U.S., end quote. Meta has confirmed that users can now cross-post from Instagram and Facebook to threads globally. This comes after the company rolled out Instagram and Facebook cross-posting back in 2021,

quoting TechCrunch. The new cross-posting capability is part of a larger strategy by meta to get the most out of the content people share on its family of apps. Meta has done this with Instagram and Facebook for years now, allowing users who are active on both platforms to share Facebook posts to Instagram and vice versa. The company also played around with cross-posting in 2023 when it automatically displayed suggested threads posts on Instagram and Facebook. You can now turn that option off, by the way. Connecting threads more closely to Mehta's larger app ecosystem and its billions of users could also help boost threads app, which recently surpassed 200 million active users, even more. The new cross-posting feature on Instagram, which first became available as a test in early May,

is an opt-in experience and requires users to toggle on the threads sharing button when posting an image. Once users cross-posts their Instagram posts, the caption becomes text for the threads and hashtags convert into plain text. Users can either choose to use the cross-post option once or set up automatic sharing to always cross-posts to threads. The feature is available to all users globally on iOS and Android devices. However, there's no option to cross-post Instagram Reels to Threads. The feature only applies to text and link posts, not videos. The feature is available on Android, iOS, and in all countries where Threads is available. The ability to cross-posts from Instagram and Facebook to Threads could simplify the

posting process for content creators, social media managers, and business owners, saving them valuable time and effort. Instead of creating different content for each platform, they can reach multiple audiences simultaneously with the same post, end quote. Microsoft says recall will be available to Windows Insiders beginning in October. This comes after they delayed the launch of that AI feature in June over security concerns, quoting the verge. At the time of the delay on June 13th, Microsoft promised the feature that screenshots nearly

everything on your PC would be available for Windows Insiders, quote, in the coming weeks, but that's now more like the coming months. Quote, with a commitment to delivering a trustworthy and secure recall preview experience on co-pilot plus PCs for customers. We're sharing an update that recall will be available to Windows Insiders starting in October, said Microsoft in an updated blog post. The feature uses local AI models built into Windows 11 to screenshot mostly everything you see or do on your computer and then give you the ability to search and retrieve items you've seen. An explorable timeline also lets you scroll through all these snapshots to look back at your work on a particular day. While Microsoft

has always maintained that recall is secure, local and private on-device security researchers found that the database wasn't encrypted and malware could have potentially accessed the recall feature. Microsoft is now working on major changes to recall, including making the AI-powered feature an opt-in experience instead of on by default, encrypting the database, and authenticating through Windows Hello. Microsoft doesn't explain why recall has been pushed back further, but a spokesperson does say that security continues to be our top priority, and when recall is available for Windows Insiders in October, we will publish a blog with more details. It's likely that Microsoft simply needs more

time to fully test its security changes to recall. This could mean we won't see a full launch of recall this year, though. Microsoft typically test Windows features with its insider program for weeks or months at a time before shipping them out more broadly. That timing may well depend on exactly when Microsoft manages to ship the test version of recall in October, end quote. Neurrelink says surgery for its second human implant went well, and the patient who had a spinal cord injury can do things like designed 3D objects and play CounterStrike 2, quoting Bloomberg. The procedure also appears to have successfully averted an issue that dogged the experience of the first patient, Nolan Arbaugh, who had the unexpected complication of electrode threads

retracting from his brain. To reduce the probability of thread retraction in our second participant, we implemented a number of mitigations, including reducing brain motion during the surgery and reducing the gap between the implant and the surface of the brain, the company said in a blog post. In the case of Arbop, Neurrelink made post-surgical software tweaks that also mitigated the issue. The company said it was working on new capabilities for its brain interface device, dubbed Link, which for now allows patients to control on-screen cursors and digital devices click-by-click. In the future, it said, Link would be able to decode multiple simultaneous movement intents and recognize handwriting intent to help patients write faster. These capabilities would not only help

restore digital autonomy for those who are unable to use their limbs, but also restore the ability to communicate for those who are unable to speak, such as people with neurological conditions, Neurrelink wrote. For now, the link device is designed for patients with quadriplegia and other conditions that severely limit movement. Musk has said Neurrelink implants could eventually help augment the abilities of healthy people, such as assisting with memory recall. The blog post gave the patient's first name Alex and identified him as a former automotive technician that suffered a spinal cord injury. He left the hospital, the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, one day after undergoing the surgery.

Alex is now able to use computer-assisted design software to design a custom mount for his Neurrelink charger, the company said, end quote. This is potentially interesting given what's been going on with the App Store lately. Sources say Apple App Store Vice President Matt Fisher is leaving the company in October, and that the App Store group will be split into two teams, one for its own store and one for Alt-App Distribution. Quoting Mark Ehrman. Phil Schiller, the executive who is ultimately responsible for the App Store, is making the changes in response to regulators forcing Apple to allow alternative stores and payment methods for apps on the iPhone iPad and the company's other devices.

Carson Oliver, a longtime senior director, will run the App Store group, while Ann Tye, a director in charge of App Store features like Search and Discovery, will lead the new team responsible for alternative distribution. Both managers will report to Schiller. Apple's App Store business has been under pressure from developers and regulators for the past several. years. Earlier in 2024, the company had to revamp its operations to conform with new laws from the EU. Apple recently changed its commission structure in the EU and opened up its devices to third-party marketplaces. The business generates about $20 billion in revenue per year as part of Apple's services segment. Services have become especially critical for Apple in recent years since growth of its main hardware products, including the iPhone, has stalled. In addition to overseeing app stores

for all of Apple's devices, Fisher has run the company's arcade service, a gaming platform that launched in 2019. Schiller, meanwhile, was named an Apple Fellow in 2020 when he stepped down from his role as marketing chief. He also remains in charge of Apple's product launch events, end quote. Finally today, more data showing how free streaming is changing the Streaming Wars landscape. According to a new survey, 66% of US TV viewers are two and three people, use fast platforms. Fast stands for free ad-supported television. Also, this comes on top of the fact that 53% of people have apparently cut down on paid streaming spending generally, quoting advanced television. 2B, Pluto TV, free V, YouTube, and Roku are the top used fast networks by consumers surveyed in the study.

The report, which tracks the evolution of the pay and free TV streaming, internet, and mobile environment, reveals the impact of the emergence of fast services on the TV ecosystem. On one hand, more than half, 53% of fast users say they have cut down on their paid streaming services now that they have adopted fast. On the other hand, 43% of fast users tell us they have still, quote, subscribed to a pay service to continue watching a show they started watching on a fast channel. These data underscore the important opportunity to leverage fast strategically with smart windowing and content promotional strategies. Indeed, the study finds that the lean-back experience of channel surfing was sorely missed by consumers who cut the cord and just relied on

on-demand streaming options. Over seven and 10, specifically 73% of fast users, agree that TV is more enjoyable now that they can turn on these free services and watch whatever is on. Specifically among cord cutters who no longer have a cable or satellite subscription, nearly 6 in 10 or 58% say free services are like having cable TV again. As the fast space matures, it does feel like a correction of many of the issues that on-demand streaming created for both consumers and the industry. Notes Adriana a Watterson, EVP, and Insights and Strategy Lead for Horowitz Research, a division of M-A-R-C research. On the consumer site, Fast is helping mitigate the challenges of TV viewing in the on-demand space,

in which consumers had to work pretty hard to find content to watch every time they sat down in front of the TV, not the most relaxing viewing experience. It is also creating opportunities to generate both ad revenue and revenue from syndication, which will help put the business model back into balance, end quote. which is, you know, if you think about it, pretty true. Like, I'm starting to watch the bear at long last, but that's a choice. That's appointment viewing. I've got to find out where to watch it first. I have to set aside time to watch it properly. I want to pay attention. This isn't casual. And that's not exactly work, but it's not exactly lean back casual watching, is it? What if I just want to sit down and watch something mindless? The hundreds of channels of the cable television universe, served that sort of instinct with a plumb. What do I do if I want to tune in for something mindless now lately? I think I've said is the free Price is Right episode channel from the 1980s that Roku somehow serves me up. And that's ad-supported, of course. Nothing more for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.