Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 10/22 – Quibi QUIckly BItes The Dust

Episode Date: October 22, 2020

Quibi’s dead baby. Quibi’s dead. Jony Ive is going to design stuff for… Airbnb? The Mate 40 Pro is the best flagship smartphone you’ll probably never want to buy. What if Snapchat conquers India? The Bahamas launches the first official cryptocurrency for an entire country. And look out cause Tesla is turning on the self-driving beta starting now… Sponsors: Monday.com/ride NewYorker.com/techmeme Links: Quibi's Open Letter Quibi Is Shutting Down Barely Six Months After Going Live (WSJ) In defense of Quibi (Recode) Airbnb announces multi-year partnership with Jony Ive, a year after leaving Apple (9to5Mac) Huawei’s Mate 40 Pro is another powerful flagship that you won't buy (Engadget) Snapchat doubles down on India with new original series, games (The Economic Times) Central Bank of Bahamas Launches Landmark ‘Sand Dollar’ Digital Currency (Coindesk) Tesla is putting ‘self-driving’ in the hands of drivers amid criticism the tech is not ready (Washington Post) 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 right home for Thursday, October 22nd, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Quibby's dead, baby. Quibby's dead. Johnny Ive is going to design stuff for Airbnb. The Mate 40 Pro is the best flagship smartphone you'll probably never want to buy. What if Snapchat conquers India? The Bahamas launches the first official cryptocurrency for an entire country. And look out because Tesla is turning on the self-driving beta starting now. Here's what you miss today in the world. of tech. So Quibi is no more. That was fast. Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg last night confirmed Quibi is shutting down and returning the money. In a blog post, they said the following,

quote, Quibi was a big idea and there was no one who wanted to make a success of it more than we did. Our failure was not for lack of trying. We've considered and exhausted every option available to us. With the dedication and commitment of our employees and the support we received from our investors and partners, we created a new form of mobile first premium storytelling. And yet, Quibi is not succeeding, likely for one of two reasons, because the idea itself wasn't strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing. Unfortunately, we will never know, but we suspect it's been a combination of the two. The circumstances of launching during a pandemic is something we could have never imagined, but other businesses have

faced these unprecedented challenges and have found their way through it. We were not able to do so, end quote. Over at the Wall Street Journal, Ben Mullen is reporting that Quibi decided to shut down because it still had about $350 million in the bank that it could return to investors, and it chose to do that rather than trying to prolong the life of the company of VIA, seeking out another big investment, though I wonder if the writing was on the wall. They might have been unlikely to even get any further investments from anyone. So maybe this was a question of bleeding out or pulling the plug, and they elected to do the latter. Why? wisely. Now, thank you, all of you who pinged me about this on Twitter last night, but as I've

said repeatedly on the show, I take no joy in this happening to Quibi. Doing a startup, any startup, is hard. Doing a media startup is triply hard. And I tend to agree with folks that say that someday, likely, maybe three to five to ten years down the line, we're going to see someone else succeed with some version of this exact idea. The history of the internet era is replete. with examples of something that fails spectacularly in one era, but ends up being perfectly viable in another. Something like six different startups failed in the dot-com era because they couldn't find an economic way to deliver heavy bags of dog food to your home, and that's obviously a problem that has been solved. But also, look, I agree with this take from Peter Kafka. Quibi was a bad

idea, poorly executed, but that doesn't mean it was a dumb idea, quote, I would like to see more quibbies in the future, not the concept or the execution, again, see above, but the model. Running a media business, the old-fashioned way, where you ask people to make something, you pay them for it, and then try to resell that work to someone else, because there's another version of running a media business, what YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook do, and I don't feel great about that one in 2020. To recap, Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, the CEO he hired away from Hewlett-Packard, paid Hollywood Studios, TV networks, and digital shops like Vox Media to make short videos. They then tried selling subscriptions to those videos to you. That's one way, the old way,

to run a media business. There is also the new and often much more successful way to run a media business. Get people to give you stuff for free, get people to consume that stuff for free, and sell their attention to advertisers. You may not want to call yourself a media business for strategic valuation or legal reasons, but you are most definitely in the media business. This has worked really, really well for YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. But as we spend a lot of time discussing these days, it's not clear that the model that YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook use, which is dependent on ingesting as much free content as possible, and distributing as widely and quickly as possible with as little input from the people who run

those businesses as possible is good for the rest of us. And at the core of all the proposals to fix those businesses is the idea that they should act a lot more like traditional media businesses. These proposals call for the people who run these platforms to pay attention to what they distribute, and even make judgment calls about whether that stuff should be distributed. And yes, it also involves paying people who make some of the stuff they distribute. I don't want to belabor this thought, and I don't want to oversell it. Quibi would have likely struggled using any model because it didn't have stuff people wanted to see,

and it didn't have the distribution it needed to get it in front of them anyway. But if you're going to dunk on Quibi for failing so big so fast, at least give them this. They failed the old-fashioned way, which still has an upside. end quote. Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky says that Johnny Ive will collaborate with Airbnb as a design consultant, part of a multi-year partnership with Ives design firm, Love From, which he formed after leaving Apple, quoting 9 to 5 Mac. Although the announcement is a surprise, it is true that Ive has long held Airbnb in high praise. Back in 2015, I've wrote the Time 100 entry for Airbnb's CEO Brian Chesky, calling the company a, quote, remarkable startup. In Airbnb's statement today,

Chesky said that he and I have been good friends for many years. The Airbnb release says that Love From has amassed a creative team, including designers, architects, musicians, writers, engineers, and artists. It's not entirely clear what Airbnb has planned. It seems unlikely Airbnb is going to start creating consumer hardware gadgets, signaling a departure of Ives' interests from what he is best known for at Apple. That is helping to create the most popular consumer electronics gadgets of all time. Obviously, I've has a passion for architecture and Airbnb rents homes. And of course, in his final years at Apple, he did lead the design work on the Apple Park campus and the new look of Apple stores, end quote. Lots of jokes on Twitter about this,

like this one from Mike Murphy, quote, all properties will now be required to have brushed aluminum bed frames with camphored edges. Light switches will be activated by force touch, and there will only be one outlet available in the bathroom." I don't know why crypto has suddenly been making all the headlines this month, but here we are. The Central Bank of the Bahamas has officially launched Sand Dollar, a national digital currency for that country, becoming the first of its kind in the world to be fully developed and rolled out, quoting Coin Desk.

Issued by the country's monetary authority as a central bank digital currency or CBDC. The announcement of the launch came via a tweet on Wednesday. The project is designed to bring more, quote, inclusive access to regulated payments and other financial services per the central bank's FAQ. CBDCs have been a hot topic this year. China, for instance, appears to be close to launching its digital yuan, which in recent days has seen its biggest public trials. Others like the U.S., Russia, and the European Union are looking into their respective CBDC launches. As reported by Coin Desk, the first phase of the Bahamas rollout sees private sector players such as banks and credit unions, ready and compliance checks for personal and enterprise wallets to support the sand dollar.

The digital wallets will be secured with multi-factor authentication security and will be mobile-based, servicing the 90% of the population with smartphones, end quote. The Bahamas is a tiny nation, an archipelago of hundreds of islands, so traditional physical infrastructure is fraught there, shall we say? so this seems like a useful tool. And if 90% of the population is on smartphones, hey, the sand dollar is backed one to one by the Bahamian dollar, which is in turn pegged to the U.S. dollar. So good as good can be, one would hope, right? It might feel like a lifetime ago, but there was a time when we were wondering if

Huawei was poised to make a run at Samsung's crown as the premier Android phone maker. This show is not yet three years old. And yet I remembered in the first year or so doing many stories about Huawei's mate lineup and how it was getting to be so good and so competitive that one day people thought it might conquer the world. Well, Huawei is still making great phones, apparently, whether or not you will be able to or will even want to buy one of them is another story. Say hello to the Mate 40 Pro, Huawei's latest flagship phone that, of course, can't run Android apps because of the trade war of the last two years. quoting and gadget. We'll start with the one reason to conceivably buy a Huawei phone since it got cut off from Google. The camera co-developed with Laika. Huawei's more is more approach crams as much raw power into their phones as possible. There's no single lens and let the CPU figure it out here,

but four lenses arranged in a space ring formation on the back of the phone. That includes a 50-machixel F1.9 primary sensor, a 20 megapixel F1.8 ultra-wide Cine camera, and a 12-mepixel F3.4 periscope telephoto sensor with optical image stabilization. When it comes to video, the company claims you could shoot a real theatrical film with its cameras. On an overcast October day in the UK, my footage wasn't very romantic, but what it lacks in romance, it makes up for with detail and clarity. You can attach live filters to the footage to give it a different tone, including sepia and monochrome filters, even as you record. I'm not sure that you'd want to publish this as a movie without a lot of post-processing, but there is something here to work with, end quote.

Also, the phone ships with Huawei's newest, most powerful system on a chip, the Karen 9,000, an octacore system supported by 8 gigabytes of RAM, a 24-core Mali G78 GPU, a 5G modem, and the 4,400 mill-amp hour battery apparently can get you two whole days of use before needing to recharge. All this, and it starts in the $1,000 range, 899 euros, to be exact. Can you see why this could have been a global contender? Of course, quote, Huawei runs a skinned version of the open-source version of Android, EMUI 11, and its own app store, the Huawei App Gallery. There are some pretty substantial gaps in the list of apps most people in the West consider to be essential in that store. In the U.S., the most popular mobile apps on iOS and Android include YouTube, Instagram,

TikTok, Zoom, Disney Plus, Tinder, Facebook, Snapchat, and Netflix. The top charts for Huawei's app gallery include Pixar, photo editor, dingtone, offering free calls, and podcast addict, a podcast client. In terms of the big apps, Huawei can boast Snapchat and TikTok, but that's about it. Partly this is because a lot of these big companies can't work with Huawei without consequences like Facebook, which has blocked Instagram and WhatsApp from the platform. Other developers may not see the point of porting their Android apps over to an ecosystem with a smaller user base. Huawei's looking to remedy that with a wish list where when users find a missing app,

they can add it to a list. Periodically, the most popular selections will apparently be contacted by Huawei and asked if they can help bring it over to the app gallery. But for users in the West, this situation makes a Huawei phone a very hard sell. It doesn't help that there's no easy, simple, and reliable way for users to circumvent the ban and install Google services on there themselves, end quote. In other words, in the West, no Instagram, no deal. Remember how I said just yesterday that Snap has executed a hell of a turnaround this past 18 months or so? Well, to that end, one more thing to keep an eye on

there. The Economic Times is reporting that Snapchat's daily active users grew up. 150% year over year in India, as Snap also announced a slate of new India-specific original series and mini-games, quote, India is a critical market for Snapchat's long-term growth strategy due to its cultural diversity, a top executive told E.T. as the company is witnessing rapid growth in the country. Localization and local experiences are a big part of our India growth strategy. We are currently focused on making sure that we are culturally relevant and local for Indians, said Nana Muruggesen, managing director of international markets at Snap, the parent company of Snapchat. After ignoring the country in its earlier years, Snap has been lately focusing on the Indian

market by rolling out localized versions of its offerings. This includes a re-engineered Android app with support for nine Indian languages and an India-specific version of its content discovery platform, Discover. Localization has made us look much more like a local app for the Indian community, and it has really helped us to continue our growth and momentum in the country, he said, end quote. So they can crack India, look out. We started today with me saying that I took no joy in observing the death of Quibi, something we had speculated about for months on this show, and I'm ending today by saying, look, I hope nothing bad happens here, because with this story, it would mean people getting hurt or even dying. But from my keeping my eye on things file,

reminder that Tesla is finally starting to roll out its full self-driving beta. Elon Musk stresses that Tesla is doing it in an extremely slow and cautious way. Nonetheless, they're basically going to do the beta on public roads with real people involved. And critics have long been worried about that. And Tesla's bet against deploying LiDAR for its self-driving system, quoting the Washington Post. This week, a group of drivers was selected to receive a software update that downloaded automatically into their cars, enabling the vehicles to better steer and accelerate without human hands and feet. According to Tesla, hundreds of thousands of its cars will be able to drive themselves as soon as this year,

probably making them the first large fleet of vehicles build as autonomous owned by ordinary consumers. Tesla is forging ahead despite skepticism among some safety advocates about whether Tesla's technology is ready and whether the rest of the world is ready for cars that drive themselves. An industry coalition consisting of General Motors' Cruise, Ford, Uber, and Waymo, among others this week, criticized the move by Tesla, saying its vehicles are not truly autonomous because they still require an active driver. A point of contention among Tesla's critics is that the company is moving ahead without a key piece of hardware.

Nearly all self-driving carmakers have embraced LIDAR sensors, which are placed on the outside of vehicles, and can detect the precise size, shape, and depth of the company. of objects in real time, even in bad weather. Instead, Tesla is trying to achieve full self-driving with a suite of cameras and a type of radar that are constantly connected to an advanced neural network. Tesla's technology can detect vehicles and pedestrians in the road and some objects such as trees, but it cannot always see the true shape or depth of the obstacles it encounters, according to some safety experts. That might not allow the car to distinguish between a box truck and a semi as it approached the rig from behind, for example. Tesla CEO Elon Musk,

has described LiDAR as expensive, redundant, and quote, a fool's errand, calling anyone who relied on it, quote, doomed. In response to an analyst question during the company's analyst call on Wednesday, Musk said he would not equip the company's vehicles with LiDAR even if it were, quote, totally free, end quote. In addition, unlike autonomous vehicle companies such as Waymo and Cruz, which have been testing their self-driving cars and controlled pilot programs, Tesla has decided to put its self-driving technology into the hands of consumers. That means the risks of malfunction will be absorbed by ordinary drivers, end quote. Yeah, another way to say that is,

we're the guinea pigs, even those of us not behind the wheel of Tesla vehicles, since we'll be on the road with these vehicles. For all of these reasons, this all seems like a nutso-but-so kind of risk to me, and again, I do hope it all works out, but reminding you all about this ahead of time, so you can be on the lookout for this story, too.

That's all for today. I still haven't had the time to stream a walkthrough, but if you check out my Twitter feed, I posted a picture of the current state of my Crusader Kings 3 game. I'm Savoy. I'm technically also the king of Burgundy, but I have to reconquer that from my brother once I can put a peasant revolt down. Just like in real life, historically, primogenitor is not a thing yet in my game, so every time my king dies, the kingdom gets split among my heirs,

and I have to fight to get it all put back together. I'm maybe 50 to 100 years away from having enough crown control to pass a prima genitor law. And because I'm mostly in the south of France, I've been dealing with a major outbreak of catharism that triggers an endless series of peasant revolts. I'm assuming some form of Abigensian crusade

will happen soon and wipe out catharism once and for all. And once I unify my crowns, I'm switching the name of the country to Burgundy because that was my goal for this game to reconstruct and enhance the burgundy that could have been. There's a whole alternate history where there could have been a strong burgundy in between France and Germany, stretching from the North Sea to the French Riviera. Something, something Charles the Bold.

Imagine how things could have been wildly different in the 20th century if there was a strong buffer state in between France and Germany. But anyway, you'll notice I'm also slowly eating northern Italy too, so it's all very exciting. I'm a nerd about a lot of things, but as you know, I'm a history nerd first. Talk to you tomorrow. It's a chopper, baby. Who's chopper is this?

Zeds. Who's Zed? Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.