Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/07 – A TikTok Paywall

Episode Date: March 7, 2023

TikTok launches a paywall, but it’s all about the creators. Salesforce has its own generative AI product. More layoffs coming for Meta. Another autonomous driving startup bites the dust. Why Twitter broke yesterday, and new speakers from Sonos. Sponsors: This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/techmeme and get on your way to being your best self. Links: TikTok Launches ‘Series’ Feature, Which Lets Creators Sell Premium Episodes Up to 20 Minutes Each (Variety) Apple reveals a yellow iPhone 14 and 14 Plus (The Verge) Salesforce follows Microsoft in launching A.I. tools for salespeople with help from OpenAI (CNBC) Meta Plans Thousands More Layoffs as Soon as This Week (Bloomberg) Embark Trucks lays off workers, explores liquidation of self-driving truck assets (TechCrunch) How a single engineer brought down Twitter on Monday (Platformer) Apple First to Capture 8 Spots in List for Global Top 10 Smartphones (Counterpoint) Sonos Era 300 and Era 100 first look: you’re gonna want to hear these speakers (The Verge) 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 TechMe right home for Tuesday, March 7th, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. TikTok launches a paywall, but it's all about the creators. Salesforce has its own generative AI product, more layoffs coming from meta,

another autonomous driving startup bites the dust, why Twitter broke yesterday, and new speakers from Sonos. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. TikTok today launched a program called Series, letting select creators sell collections of content of up to 80 videos, each up to 20 minutes long. Creators will initially get 100% of earnings from this new product. So this is essentially a paywall model made and sold by creators on TikTok. Quoting variety. TikTok is opening up a new monetization spigot for creators on the popular short form video app.

With the series feature available initially only to select creators, users can post collections of premium content behind a paywall that viewers can purchase. Each individual series can include up to 80 videos, each up to 20 minutes long, giving the TikTok community, quote, a new longer format to watch their favorite creators and content, the company said. TikTok creators can select the price for their series, the content can be purchased via direct-in-video links, or through a creator's profile page. The company noted that, like all content on TikTok series videos must adhere to its community

guideline standards. According to TikTok series is currently available to select creators, but in the coming months, the company will open up applications for others to enroll. For a limited time, creators will receive 100% of their series earnings after platform and processing fees, according to a TikTok rep. It's unclear what the revenue split may be in the longer term. Additional TikTok initiatives aimed at compensating creators include the creator fund, which pays creators of innovative content on the platform,

the TikTok creator marketplace for brand and creator collaborations, and the recently announced creativity program beta, currently an invitation-only program that pays creators of, quote, high-quality original content, longer than one minute, a share of ad revenue, end quote. Not the biggest news, but here you go if this is what floats your boat. Apple this morning announced a yellow finish for the iPhone 14 and 14 plus, the latest new spring color. After last year's alpine green, the yellow iPhone is shipping on March 14th, quoting the verge. Apple has released a new iPhone color every spring for a few years now, revealing an

Alpine Green iPhone 13 and 13 Pro last spring, with the year before seeing a brilliant purple iPhone 12 and 12 Mini. The new models don't otherwise come with any changes, but might help Apple continue to sell more phones during what would otherwise be a slower period following the holiday rush, end quote. Another day, another one of these, Salesforce has announced Einstein GPT, bringing OpenAI-based generative AI to Customer 360, Slack, Tablo, and its other products, using data from its data cloud. Quoting CNBC. One feature Salesforce is rolling out in service cloud will be a chat box with technology

that can write an answer to a question based on information already stored in Salesforce. Agents can edit the automatically generated response or hit the send button. Salesforce has taken various steps to keep Einstein GPT's capabilities from misinforming people. In addition to the involvement of the human agent, the company has narrowed the field of data that can influence the answer. Both Salesforce and Microsoft are showing off services that can write marketing emails. Microsoft calls the new AI parts of its dynamics applications copilot. It's not autopilot, said Charles Lamana, a corporate vice president at Microsoft. It gives me options, but I am the editor.

I choose the option that goes into the campaign, end quote. Salesforce is taking a similar tack and is also touting a new chat GPT app for Slack that can display information derived from Salesforce. OpenAI built the app and has been using it for the past. few months, a spokesperson said during a Monday media briefing, people can sign up to join a waitlist for the Slack app, a Salesforce spokesperson spokesperson said. Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff is in on the hype. He mentioned AI 14 times on the company's earnings call last week. In combination with our data cloud and deeply integrated with customer 360, including Tableau, Mulesoft and Slack, Einstein, GPT will

open the door to the next level of intelligence and drive digital transformations in our new AI World. Benioff said in a statement about the new offering. Clara Shee, CEO of Salesforce's service cloud business, said in an interview, Salesforce started working with Open AI's language models over a year ago, but the excitement in the space sped up the timeline for giving early access of the new features to customers, end quote. Another day, another one of these. Sources say that meta is planning to cut thousands more jobs as soon as this week. after eliminating 13% of its staff or 11,000 jobs back in November. Quoting Bloomberg. The company has been working to flatten its organization,

giving buyout packages to managers and cutting whole teams it deems non-essential. Bloomberg News reported in February, a move that is still being finalized and could affect thousands of staffers. The imminent round of cuts is being driven by financial targets and is separate from the so-called flattening, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing internal matters. Meta, which has seen a slowdown in advertising revenue and has shifted focus to a virtual reality platform called the Metaverse, has been asking directors and vice presidents to make lists of employees that can be let go, the people said. This phase of layoffs could be finalized in the next week, according to the people. Those working on the plan are hoping to have it ready before Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg goes on paternal leave for his third child,

which may be imminent, one person said. The November cuts were a surprise, but another round of firings has been widely anticipated by the meta workforce. Zuckerberg has dubbed 2023 meta's year of efficiency, and the company has been communicating that theme to employees during performance reviews, which were completed last week, the people said. Workers at the Menlo Park, California-based company described heightened anxiety and low morale among colleagues lately. Some employees expressed worry about whether they'd receive their bonuses, which are set to be distributed this month if they lose their jobs beforehand, the people said, end quote. Another day, another one of these, Autonomous Trucking Company,

Embark has laid off about 70% of its employees and says that remaining staff will only be remaining to focus on winding down day-to-day operations. So the autonomous driving startups continue to drop like flies lately. Quoting TechCrunch, Embark Trucks, the autonomous trucking company that went public in a 2021 merger with a special purpose acquisition company or SPAC is cutting 70% of its workforce and shutting down two offices. And the pain may not be over as CEO Alex Rodriguez noted in an email to employees that the remaining 30% of workers will focus on winding down operations. Unfortunately, after thoroughly evaluating all alternatives, we have been unable to identify a path forward for the business in its current form, Rodriguez wrote, later adding, quote, today having exhausted all

alternatives, we are taking the incredibly difficult step of laying off around 70% of the company and shutting down our SoCal and Houston offices, end quote. The layoffs come more than a month after banking advisory firm Evercore met with various AV companies to explore selling and Barks assets, to one source, a sale of assets appears to be the next order of business, according to a regulatory filing posted Friday and Rodriguez's email. Embark Trucks was founded in 2016 by CEO Alex Rodriguez and CTO Brandon Moke and quickly got the attention of investors. Rodriguez and Moke met while working on self-driving technology at the University of Waterloo, where both completed mechatronics engineering degrees. By 2018, the startup had raised about $47 million,

but it was the SPAC boom that really delivered the capital, at least for a short time. In 2021, the company agreed to merge with Special Purpose Acquisition Company, Northern Genesis Acquisition Corp 2, and a deal valued at $5.2 billion. Today, Embark Trucks is running short on capital, like other companies trying to develop and commercialize autonomous vehicle technology. The company's market capitalization is about $90 million at the end of the third quarter. The most recent quarterly report the company has filed said it had about $190 million in cash and cash equivalence left, end quote. Another day, another, well, you get the pattern here. You might have noticed that Twitter was down for a while yesterday, and in Platformer, which somehow has carved out a niche for itself reporting on Twitter chaos, Twitter broke after the only site reliability engineer assigned to a project for migrating to a paid API made, quote, a bad configuration change, quote, the change in question was part of a project to shut down free access to the Twitter API. platformer can now confirm. On February 1st, the company announced it will no longer support

free access to its API, which effectively ended the existence of third-party clients and dramatically limited outside researchers' ability to study the network. The company has been building a new paid API for developers to work with. But in a sign of how deep Elon Musk's cuts to the company have been, only one site reliability engineer has been staffed on the project, we're told. On Monday, the engineer made a bad configuration change that, quote, basically broke the Twitter API, according to a current employee. The change had cascading consequences inside the company bringing down much of Twitter's internal tools, along with the public-facing APIs. On Slack, engineers responded with variations of crap, and Twitter is down the entire thing

as they scrambled to fix the problem. Elon Musk was furious, we're told, end quote. I know we spoke of this recently, but there's an emerging body of thinking that the iPhone is in the early stages of gobbling up market share that, at least according to a substack I was reading over the weekend, has some folks questioning the longer-term viability of Android as a platform. Like, the assumption was always that essentially the smartphone market had settled into something like the PC market, which, sure, Apple had share, especially at the high end and among specific demographics, but the majority of people would be on Android, just like the majority of people use Windows, not MacOS. Well, now people are wondering if Apple's slow march

downmarket might send the Android platform into a death spiral where it is only a low-end option. Here's one new data point for this argument, quoting Counterpoint Research. In 2022, Apple became the first brand to capture eight spots in the list of the top 10 best-selling smartphones, according to Counterpoint Researcher's global monthly handset model sales tracker. The remaining two spots were taken by Samsung. The top 10 list contributed 19% of the total global smartphone sales in 2022, the same as in 2021. Apple's iPhone 13 was the best-selling smartphone of 2022, contributing 28% of iPhone sales. It was the best-selling smartphone in major markets such as China, the U.S., UK, Germany, and France. Further, the iPhone 13 remained the number one smartphone

each month from its launch in September 2021 until August 2022. Price cuts after the iPhone 14 series launch further drove the iPhone 13 volumes in developing markets. The iPhone 13 sales were two times more than that of the iPhone 13 Pro Max, the second best-selling smartphone of 2022. With its entry-level models, Galaxy A-13 and Galaxy A-O-3, Samsung took two spots on the list, one more than the previous year. The two models were the only LTE smartphones to make the list. The regional contributions of these models was spread more evenly than in the case of iPhones. We believe the share of the top 10 smartphones will increase in 2023 as brands focus on clearing inventory and optimizing their launches. We also expect brands to continue making their portfolios

leaner in 2023 to minimize cannibalization. The number of active smartphone models in the global market has already fallen from over 4200 in 2021 to around 3,600 in 2022. At the same time, brands will focus on their portfolio's premiumization to translate volumes into profitability, end quote. Finally today, new speakers from Sonos, quoting the verge. After months of leaks and some recent coordinated teases from the company itself, Sonos is finally officially announcing the Era 300 and Era 100 speakers. Both devices go up for pre-order today. The Era 300 costs $449 and the Era 100 is $249,

and they'll be available to purchase in stores beginning March 28. As its unique design makes clear, the Era 300 represents a completely new type of speaker for the company. It's designed from the ground up to make the most of spatial, audio music and challenge competitors like the HomePod and Echo Studio. The Era 100, meanwhile, is a follow-up to the Sonos One smart speaker that should offer substantially better sound quality at a slightly higher price. Both products support Bluetooth playback and USBC line-in audio via an adapter, providing Sonos customers with more flexibility and how they listen. Having seen it up close, I think the Era 300 plays better in person than in marketing photos, where it has a way of

appearing bigger than it really is, measuring 6.3 inches high, 10.24 inches wide, and 7.28 inches deep. It fits just fine on a bookshelf without calling much attention to itself. A little large for a bedside table, perhaps, but between these two things, you get the idea. Inside the Era 300 are six drivers. The speakers' four tweeters point forward, left right, and up, while a pair of angled woofers handle low-end output. That architecture is meant to spread sound over the room regardless of whether the current track is in stereo or spatial audio. Thankfully, Sonos won't be forcing virtualized spatial mixes on your stereo content. The Era 300 respects whatever original format is being played,

though it does use the added drivers for greater stereo presence. Sonos will support spatial playback from both Apple Music and Amazon Music at launch. That makes it the first third-party smart speaker to natively play Dolby Atmos tracks from Apple. As for home theater, two Era 300s can serve as multi-directional rear surrounds and that includes upwards-firing at most height channels for the first time. At $900 for a pair, it is an expensive proposition, but if you're willing to invest in an arc, sub, and two-300s, Sonos says you'll end up with a 7.1.4 system.

The $249 Ero 100 is an improved Sonos 1 on multiple fronts. It's slightly larger and more rounded, but bigger changes await inside. It now has two tweeters for proper left-and-right stereo reproduction. Obviously, you can't expect miracles in touch. terms of separation from a speaker this small, but at least you shouldn't notice anything getting lost in the mix, which could happen with the one. Sonos tries to enhance sound dispersion further with custom wave guides, and the woofer has been enlarged for more powerful base response than the one was capable of. The Era 100 is technically replacing the Sonos

one in the company's product lineup, but the latter isn't being discontinued immediately. Sonos wants to give current owners more time to buy another one for a stereo pair, for example. and since there's a physical switch for shutting off the mics on both new eras, Sonos isn't yet offering a cheaper SL model of the Era 100, so the one SL will retain some unique value while supplies last, end quote. Hey, I totally forgot to mark our five-year anniversary yesterday. Actually, March 5th was our five-year anniversary, so happy birthday to this podcast. 1,446 episodes counting this one. That means somewhere north of 65 million downloads lifetime,

though the numbers are somewhat murky because of the number of times we changed hosts. But, you know, thank you. Thanks, as always, for spending a half a decade with me. Here's to five more years or more. Talk to you tomorrow.