Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 01/22 - Munchery Enters the Deadpool

Episode Date: January 22, 2019

Munchery bites the big one, Foxconn considers moving production to India, Netflix wants a seat at the adults table, and, yes, even guitar tech is now tech. Sponsors: Metalab.co DatadogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Munchery closes on-demand meal-delivery business (San Francisco Chronicle) Foxconn Looks Beyond China to India for iPhone Assembly (WSJ) Apple Supplier in Japan Looks to Taiwan for Bailout After iPhone XR Letdown (WSJ) Apple Pay coming to Target, Taco Bell and more top US retail locations (Apple Newsroom) Netflix in advanced talks to join major Hollywood lobbying group (Politico) Rosetta Stone for iPhone adds AI to identify objects for live translations (VentureBeat) FENDER'S NEW ACOUSTIC GUITAR HAS A MILLION DIFFERENT VOICES (Wired) 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 Tuesday, January 22nd, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, Munchery Bites the Big One. Foxcon considers moving production to India. Netflix wants a seat at the adults' table, and yes, even Guitar Tech is now Tech. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. I've jokingly referred once or twice in the past to possibly creating a Deadpool for the podcast, for companies,

especially in certain sectors that seem to be imperiled. I think we've mentioned Evernote, and I know we've implied that we're watching movie pass pretty closely. But one space that has been struggling mightily that I'm not sure we've talked about is the meal kit delivery space. Yesterday in an email to customers, Munchery officially entered the Deadpool, saying it will end operations effectively immediately and will refund any outstanding orders. Munchery had raised a total of more than $125 million from venture capitalists, including Menlo Ventures and Sherpa Capital. As I say, the meal delivery space has had its issues.

Blue Apron IPOed in 2017, and since then its shares have fallen by more than 80%, closing Friday at $1.40. But Blue Apron is one of the meal delivery startups that was a true meal kit. They sent you a box containing the pre-portioned ingredients of your meal. You still had to cook it up yourself. But Munchery, like Sprigg, created its own kitchen for chef-produced pre-made meals. All you had to do was heat them up and eat them. No prep on your part.

A similar service, as I said, Sprig shut down in 2017 after burning through $57 million in funding. Quoting the San Francisco Chronicle, Munchery was among a crop of on-demand food delivery services that tried to do it all, make chef prepared meals in their own kitchens, handle delivery and create their own brand names. But they couldn't match the economics of companies like Uber Eats, Doordash, and Postmates, offering deliveries from existing restaurants that already had kitchens, chefs, and brand awareness. Munchery's gleaming kitchens in South San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, and New York

reportedly produced many more orders than they sold, resulting in massive food waste. In November 2016, James Barricker, a former Yahoo! Replace co-founder Treat Tran as CEO. Tran left the following year, end quote. Interesting that meal delivery itself is doing just fine. In fact, it's supposedly propping up Uber's plans for its IPO. Only a certain type of meal delivery is seemingly failing. In that vein, interesting tweet from Peter Merholtz, quote,

somehow these meal delivery service failures are also a failure of lean slash minimum viable product startup thinking. They all started small, proved product market fit, but couldn't hack it. Studying these would shed light on what truly prepares organizations for success, end quote. A couple of somewhat obvious Apple-centric rumors to mention, both from the Wall Street Journal. First, Foxconn is apparently considering producing iPhone. in India. Why? Well, for reasons that you can guess, reasons we've discussed at length, quoting the journal, Foxcon's look at India comes as sustained friction between Washington and Beijing over trade and technology is pushing many companies to consider diversifying their supply chains

away from China, a global center of assembly for smartphones, computers, and other electronics, end quote. But remember, that's only one part of the equation, because Apple's struggles to break through in the Indian market have a lot to do with price and production in India would help with that as well. Quoting again, Foxconn is currently considering producing higher-end, pricier iPhones in India, including models with organic light-emitting diode or OLED displays, the people familiar, said. The relatively high price of iPhones compared with those of other brands has hampered Apple in the Indian market, analysts say manufacturing its high-end iPhones in India could help lower prices by allowing Apple to avoid a tariff that adds 20% to devices imported from China, end quote.

And speaking of OLED from that other journal piece, sources say Apple is likely to drop LCD displays entirely in its 2020 iPhone lineup, in favor of going all in on OLED displays. That little tidbit comes in a larger story about the struggles of major Apple display supplier Japan display. Quote, more than half of Japan display. revenue in the year ended March 2018 came from Apple. But in the latest lineup of iPhones, only the 10R uses liquid crystal displays, the type in which Japan display specializes, and that model has fallen far short of Apple's expectations, end quote.

Thus, Japan display is apparently in discussions with Taiwan's TPK holdings and the Chinese state-owned Silk Road Fund about a major investment stake. Quoting again, heavy investment by Chinese and Korean. companies in displays has eroded Japan Display's edge and turned LCDs into a commodity product. Nonetheless, Japan Display may still have some value to an Asian

buyer, given its experience in mass production and close ties to Apple. The U.S. company is still making older iPhone models and iPads that use Japan Displays LCD panels, end quote. I mean, moving to all OLED for iPhones

seems like an obvious move that was probably inevitable. even if Apple needs to keep a lower-cost iPhone model in its lineup. But moves like this in the supply chain, either show such a transition to OLED is inevitable or else it might make such a change inevitable. Before we leave the topic of Apple, one tiny bit of news you can use. Just going to quote from the press release,

Apple Pay is rolling out now in Target stores and will be available in all 1,750 locations across the U.S. in the coming weeks. customers can use Apple Pay today at more than 245 high V stores in the Midwest and inside the stores at all of Speedways, approximately 3,000 locations across the Midwest, East Coast, and Southeast. Apple Pay is also rolling out to more than 7,000 Taco Bell and 2,200 Jack-in-the-box locations in the next few months, end quote. With these additions, Apple pay, according to Apple, can now be used to pay for goods and services at 74 of the top. 100 U.S. merchants. And even now, I guess, when you make a run for the border as well. There's been a lot of interesting Netflix moves recently that I guess we can only chalk up to

Netflix preparing for the competition soon to be flooding into their turf. I mentioned how Netflix is finally sharing audience and viewer numbers. They did so during their last earnings call. And that was probably an attempt to let Hollywood creative types know that Netflix as a platform is meaningful, maybe more meaningful than they thought. Come create for us. And remember, we have that Brinks truck of money to back up to your house if you do so. But there were also comments during the earnings call that a lot of people parsed as being directed at the other Hollywood studios.

It seems to be as if Netflix was trying to make nice with them. Hey, this is a big enough market for all of us. So no need to hate us or be afraid seemed to be the implication. a how do you do fellow kids meme we're not just the upstart that leveraged your library of content to disrupt the whole studio system business model you rely on in fact we're studios too just like you kids we can all be friends well another move today that speaks to that i think word from politico that netflix is in quote advanced talks to join the motion picture association of america if they were to join netflix would be the first internet based service ever to do so

And if that sounds weird, think of what joining the MPAA does for Netflix. It gets them into the exclusive club of movie studios. It gets a seat at the big kids table. And heck, they are a big kid now. They already produce more hours of content every year than a lot of studios. And as such, their interests are increasingly aligning with the traditional interests of traditional movie studios in the form of the MPAA. interests such as piracy. Until now, as Politico notes,

quote, Netflix's alignment with the tech sector, particularly in Washington, made joining MPA seem unlikely. MPA, for instance, has argued that digital piracy threatens its members' businesses and that internet firms fail to adequately police illegal activity on their platforms, a direct swipe at Facebook, Google, Twitter, Reddit, and others, shielded by the United States' liberal content moderation laws. 2017, Netflix and fellow internet giant Amazon have advocated for anti-piracy measures alongside MPAA members and a coalition of other content creators through the Alliance for Creativity

and Entertainment. The online streaming service also departed the Internet Association this month, as Politico first reported, exiting one of Silicon Valley's most prominent voices in Washington. Netflix first joined the trade group in 2013, in part to align with other internet companies in the fight to preserve net neutrality, end quote. So in a lot of ways, Netflix doesn't want to be thought of or think of itself as a tech company

that just happens to do media. It's a media company. And as we've been saying, media is now just tech like everything else is. A couple of smaller but neat product and feature items. First, the Rosetta Stone app for iPhone has added onboard AI to help identify objects for live translation. Quoting from Venture Beat,

historically, language translation apps were confined to whatever developers could store in their onboard databases, limitations that were surpassed with internet connections and AI-assisted text recognition tools. Today, language teaching developer Rosetta Stone is taking the next step by adding augmented reality and machine learning to its iPhone app, enabling users to identify and translate the names of real-world objects. The first time object recognition technology has been used in a language app in this manner. The machine learning technology is a new component of Rosetta Stone's dynamic immersion feature, which lets the user simulate being in a foreign language environment, surrounded by new words, phrases, and native speakers' voices.

A scavenger hunt-like game called Seek and Speak, has the user, point the iPhone camera at an object and see the vocabulary word in a chosen language, then practice a conversation using the word. Seek and Speak is launching in beta for English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, with plans to add additional languages and challenges during 2019, end quote. We've seen Google adding real-time translations to its Google Assistant devices recently, the ability to parse language using your smartphone camera, and an app has been around for a while now,

the ability to point your phone at a sign, say, and have it translated in real time. I've said this before in other places, but do this thought experiment with me. Imagine someone had come out with a handheld universal translating device in, say, 1985. It would have made the cover of every newspaper in the world. The inventor would have become the most famous person in the world. Might have won the Nobel Prize even. almost 15 years later, this sort of functionality is just an iterative feature add-on to a not-even super popular app on your smartphone. It barely makes headlines even in gadget blogs or tech podcasts.

And if last week I covered shoe tech for the very first time, guess what? Today we're going to end with some guitar tech. Let me quote from the lead of this wired piece because it's kind of poetic. Quote, few guitars carry more historical weight than the Fender Telecaster. With its compact body and brash, incisive twang, the telecaster, first introduced by Fender in the 1950s, played a pivotal role in the evolution of country music, electric blues, and most of all rock and roll. Bruce Springsteen, Keith Richards, and Joe Strummer are all teleguise. And when Bob Dylan mounted his first tour as an electric act, he did it with a telecast.

around his neck. But if the Fender American Acoustasonic telecaster had been around when Bob was breaking hearts and blowing minds back in 1966, he would have been able to play both the acoustic and electric portions of his concert on the same guitar, end quote. The Fender Acousticonic is a normal acoustic guitar, but inside is a bunch of gadgetry so that when you add amplification, the guitar can switch its tonal characteristics to become different styles of acoustic guitar, even solid body and hollow body electric guitar. The Acoustasonic has a 20-hour battery, which you charge via USB, but where you normally would use the selector switch to switch between pickups, the selector switch on the acoustic sonic,

lets you cycle between, quote, digitally modeled tones that mimic different guitar types. Flip the switch forward to get the forceful base of a big spruce top dreadnought acoustic, move it into the middle to find the finger-style friendly mid-range tones of a small-bodied mahogany guitar or the propulsive drone you'd get from a flat-top acoustic with a hot pickup in it. Push the selector all the way back and you can even make the thing sound pretty close to an electric guitar, end quote. How does it sound? According to Michael Colore in Wired, it sounds more than passable for each guitar tone profile. So for $2,000, you can have one guitar to mimic a bunch of guitars. Of course, as Kallori notes in his piece, that would preclude you from doing that

cool move of switching guitars on stage in between songs, but oh well, we said it earlier in the show, and it's worth saying again, there is no tech industry anymore. There's nothing, no product that you can't add silicon to these days, even shoes, even guitars. There's not a single market or industry that if you squint just a little bit hasn't been turned into basically the tech industry. But I can see how you went there. I have a criminal skull shape. Len. Commissioner Kelly and I are friends. We have competing columns in Irish arguments, weekly, America's Only, all caps magazine.

But Ray hasn't returned my phone call. and I know that you were once a police officer. I was part of a special task force of very young-looking cops who infiltrated high schools. How do you do, fellow kids? What? So I'm glad you call me, Mr. Donaggie. I checked with my contacts on the...