Tech Brew Ride Home - Thu. 8/02 - Apple Hits A Trillion!

Episode Date: August 2, 2018

Apple hits a trillion, a midwestern unicorn cashes in, the Surface Go reviews are in, there are no perfect tools for making memes, and Tesla is adding video games to its cars. Links:Cisco to acquire Ann Arbor-based Duo Security in $2.35 billion deal (Crain's Detroit Business)Surface Go review: The ideal cheap Windows tablet... almost (Engadget)The tiny Microsoft Surface Go is available now, and it’s an overachiever (The Verge)Microsoft Surface Go review: Barely better than a netbook (Mashable)The Microsoft Surface Go Is Practically Perfect (Gizmodo)RideOS raises $25M to become the traffic control center for self-driving cars (TechCrunch)As Memes Evolve, Apps Are Struggling to Keep Up (The Atlantic)How Software Ate the Point of Sale (The Atlantic) 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 2nd, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Apple hits a trillion.

A Midwestern unicorn cashes in. The Surface Go reviews are in. There are no perfect tools for meme making. And Tesla is adding video games to its cars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. So Apple finally did it, y'all, by briefly trading at 207. dollars and five cents earlier today. Apple officially became the first company in the history of the world to be valued at more than a trillion dollars. There's not really that much more to say other than that,

but everyone had to do a piece on it today, so everybody had to find an angle. As is my want, I'm going to go with the history angle. Most people believe adjusted for inflation that John D. Rockefeller's standard oil would have been worth a trillion dollars in today's money, back when it was at its height. The very first publicly traded company that went public on the world's first ever stock exchange was the Dutch East India Company. I saw some estimates today that said

it would be worth $7.4 trillion in today's money. But most people feel like the most valuable company of all time was the British East India Company which once owned all of India. Had its own army, which was larger than the British Army, and collected its own taxes. Yeah, if you own the entire subcontinent, that's probably worth quite a bit more than just a trillion dollars.

Cisco is buying Duo Security for $2.35 billion in cash. Duo Security is a vendor of cloud-based two-factor authentication services. Duo lets employees use their own devices for what is known as adaptive authentication. Instead of key cards or security codes, workers can use their own phones or whatever device they have on them at the time. One of the things notable about this acquisition is the fact that it's headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Crane's Detroit business notes that when it raised a $70 million series D round in 2017, duo made history with the largest funding raise in Michigan history. Quote, Duo Security founded in 2010, reported more than $100 million in annual Rewon,

recurring revenue for 2017, up from $73 million in 2016. It has around 700 employees and 12,000 customers, including Facebook and Paramount Pictures. In addition to its Ann Arbor and Detroit hubs, it has offices in Austin, Texas, San Mateo, California, and London, end quote. As Twitter user Startup MN Jackson, who claims interestingly to be the artist formerly known as Startup L Jackson, tweeted, quote, Jackson's Law, You can absolutely build a multi-billion-dollar startup in the upper Midwest. It just can't be sexy, like at all. Since he's been in the headline so much recently, one more quick update on Facebook's departing chief security officer Alex Stamos.

Stamos is officially now leaving Facebook on August 17th, and his new gig will be to become an adjunct professor at Stanford, where he will also be part of a faculty working group called Information Warfare, the remit of which is to examine the role of security and technology in society. Interestingly, Facebook apparently does not plan to name a successor to the chief security officer position. On Twitter, Stamos wrote, quote, Silicon Valley faces many challenges, and I am encouraged that there are so many dedicated, thoughtful, and skilled people continuing to tackle these challenges at Facebook. I will miss everyone, but I look forward to collaborating with them in the future.

Preliminary reviews of the Surface Go are in, and they're a bit of a mixed bag. Over at Engadget, Devendra Hardewar says that the Surface Go is the ideal cheap Windows tablet, almost. It's not quite an iPad killer, but it's still useful. I'll admit the Surface Go is full of compromises. It's slow, and it's limited by Windows 10's slim tablet app selection. But it also has a keyboard that blows away any other tablet. and it can run normal Windows software if necessary. It's not meant for everyone,

but if you're in the niche it's targeted at, it could be the Windows tablet you've been waiting for, end quote. At the verge, Dieter Bone says it's better than he expected, but it does have its flaws. Quote, after using the Surface Go for the past couple days, I realized I've been overthinking it. The Surface Go is simply a very small surface with everything that entails. It's a little less powerful and probably not the right thing

to be your only computer, but as a secondary machine for Windows users, it could have a real place, end quote. At Mashable, Raymond Wong is way more critical, giving it a 3.25 stars out of five. He said the Surface Go is painfully slow to use, barely better than a netbook. Quote, I've been struggling to figure out who Microsoft's Surface Go is actually good for. If you already own Surface Pro or any laptop, why would you buy a smaller, tablet with huge bezels that often chokes Windows 10 up due to its underpowered Intel Pentium processor. Why would you want to type on a cramped little keyboard? But then it hit me. The answer's right in the name. The Surface Go is good for when you're on the move and that's really it, end quote.

Contrast that with Alex Krantz at Gizmodo, who calls the Surface Go practically perfect. If you have the money and you want a solid Windows machine that's primarily for browsing email, mailing and word processing, the Surface Go is it, the device you need to buy. Looking for a second computer, it's a no-brainer. Splurge on this one. There might be faster budget laptops, and there might be cheaper ones, but the Surface Go feels like a perfect representation of what laptops at this price should be, end quote. So I don't know.

I have links to all the reviews and the show notes. I guess it's up to you to figure out who to believe. If autonomous cars are coming, then you need to obviously build the cars first. But then the vision is we won't need to have our own vehicles anymore. There will simply be fleets of autonomous cars roaming the streets and you will just get in one when you need one. So, okay, think of the next couple moves on this chessboard. You'd need a system to manage, keep track of, and route your fleet of cars to serve demand in the most efficient and cost-effective way. That's exactly what a company called RideOS is trying to build. Real-time routing and

dispatch software for autonomous car fleets. And it's just raised a $25 million series B round to do just that. The company is only 11 months old, but has raised a total of 34 million so far and has a partnership with Ford's autonomic subsidiary. Here's TechCrunch describing what the founders of RideOS are up to. Blumenberg and Ho contend that unless there's a coordinating layer that can communicate information between all automated vehicles, like, say, how air traffic control works in aviation, there will be traffic congestion and accidents. The founders who met at Uber's Advanced Technologies Group have developed a cloud-based fleet management platform that pulls mapping, traffic, and detection data to suggest to all

self-driving vehicles operating in a given geography the safest, most efficient routes. The aim is to be an independent platform that can orchestrate communication between self-driving vehicle services that may even be competitors, end quote. Over at the Atlantic, Taylor Lawrence has a piece up about the great meme industrial complex. As memes become more complex, creators are complaining that they have to rely on several different apps in order to craft their means. There's no single app that does everything they want. Quoting from the piece, I use four apps to make a meme, says Andy, who runs the Instagram

meme page, Heck Off Supreme. There's not one app I can go to for everything I need, not even close. It's ad hoc, says Terry, who runs the page Social Practice Mafia and has used a slew of photo and video editing apps to make his memes. You know the term bricolage? It's basically making do. It's like that, end quote. It seems that the problem is basically that memes are way more complex now, but the platforms that serve them up were designed for. for maximum impact on consumption, and no one has given much thought to production. There's no Adobe Creative Suite of apps

for making the perfect Instagram post. Why won't someone think of the meme creators? Well, apparently, in recent months, a sort of mini gold rush has ensued as various developers try to corner the market in meme creation software, something that can adapt to different platforms and formats and allow essentially meme mass production.

If you're a meme creator, check out this piece to see the range of new options that are popping up. But if you're an entrepreneur looking for a niche problem to solve, get busy. There's probably still time. Also at the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal writes about something that's been bothering me lately, too. Why has simply paying for something gotten so complicated? Quoting from the piece, I'm standing at the counter of a Vietnamese restaurant in Berkeley ordering a pork bun. There was a time when I knew exactly what would happen next.

I'd hand over my card, the cashier would swipe it, a little receipt would curl out of a machine, I'd sign it, and I'd crumple the bottom copy into a pocket. Easy. Now, all kinds of things can happen. I might stick my card directly into a point-of-sale system. Maybe I swipe, maybe the cashier does, perhaps a screen is swiveled at me. I could enter my pin on a little purpose-built machine, I could sign with my finger on a screen, I could not have to sign or enter a pin at all.

I could tap my phone on a terminal to pay. Usually there's a chip reader for my no longer new chip card. When I put the card in one of the machines, sometimes it takes four seconds. Other times I have to pull out my phone and stare at it, which means I forget about the card until the reader begins to beep at me, at which point I pull it out,

mildly flustered, as if I'd cause too much ice to pour out of a soda fountain. Ah, okay, sorry, I say, end quote. Madrigal says that the root of the problem, the reason that simply paying for something has gotten so complicated, is that while software is eating the point-of-sale system, bringing us all sorts of supposedly efficient wonders like paying with your phone or watch, because the entire payments ecosystem of banking and financial systems still has to play ball with all of the legacy systems designed 50 or more years ago, the result is that for the moment it's all of the money. all just a big Rube Goldbergian complicated jumble of solutions. If you want a deep dive into the history of how our payments system evolved, check out this piece. We still make 90% of our purchases in real life, by the way. Silicon Valley is dying to platformize that and get their hands on all of that juicy consumer behavioral data. But for the moment, as Madrigal concludes, quote,

This is a crazy world that requires hundreds of thousands of small businesses to work. through hundreds of vendors to reach thousands of banks. Finally, today, Tesla's shares are trading up around 10% after it announced earnings yesterday. Most of the chatter this morning was about Elon Musk's apologies on the earnings call. Quote, I'd like to apologize for, you know, being in polite on the prior call, he told Tony Sakhanagi of Bernstein, source of some of his ire in the previous conference call. I think there's really no excuse for bad manners, and I was kind of violating my own rule in that regard. There are reasons for it in that I'd gotten no sleep and had been working sort of 110 hour, 120 hour weeks, but nonetheless, there's still no excuse.

My apologies for not being polite on the prior call, end quote. If you'll remember, the previous earnings call, Musk all but called the various Tesla analyst idiots for the questions that they were asking him, questions that he said were, quote, killing me. By the way, Tesla reported a record net loss of $718 million more than analysts were expecting, but revenue came in at $4 billion, which was slightly above expectations. And Tesla said that it was meeting its goal of producing 5,000 Model 3 cars a week, and that the company would be gap profitable starting in the third quarter. The company also revealed that it has been working on developing its own chips for self-driving car technology over the last

two years. But that's not what I want to leave you with. I want to leave you with the story that Tesla is adding a whole slew of classic Atari video games to its cars. If you've ever sat in a Tesla, you've seen that big touchscreen panel that replaces basically everything on the dashboard. Well, as a part of the upcoming version 9.0 software update coming to Tesla's in about a month, classic Atari arcade titles including Missile Command, Pole Position, and Tempest. At least we think, titles haven't actually been confirmed, will be included as Easter eggs. But the rumor is that

to play pole position, you can actually use the car's steering wheel. Elon Musk also suggested that there might be more to come, tweeting, if you're into video game development, consider applying to Tesla. We want to make super fun games that integrate the center touchscreen,

phone, and car in real life. Please send examples of prior work when applying, looking for max playability and creativity. end quote. As Engadgett said, although you probably wouldn't jump into your Model 3 just to play a game, this could be an entertaining way to pass the time while you're waiting for a friend in the parking lot. That's all for today. Speaking of milestones, on Apple Podcasts, we've been sitting 12 reviews short of 200 reviews for a while now. If you enjoy the pod, please be the one to put us over 200. That's a long way from a trillion, I know, but it'd still be a nice milestone to hit.

By the way, I did belatedly think of a better punny summary for the intro for that story about making better tools for meme making. How about memes of production? We need better memes of production. Get it? Whatever. I've been Brian McCullough, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.