Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 03/12 - The Web Is 30 Years Old!

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Facebook self owns by taking down Senator Warren’s ads, Spotify will now give you Hulu for free, why the Bay Area is no longer the best place for startups, and the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Sponsors: Tiny.website DataDogHQ.com/ridehome Links: Facebook backtracks after removing Warren ads calling for Facebook breakup (Politico) Apple’s March 25th event is official: ‘It’s show time’ (9to5Mac) Spotify Premium now includes Hulu for no extra cost (The Verge) Amazon’s Alexa has 80,000 Apps—and No Runaway Hit (Bloomberg) Peak California (Byrne Hobart) Goodbye, Silicon Valley, hello, Atlanta: Black entrepreneurs part of new migration to South (USA Today) 30 years on, what’s next #ForTheWeb? (Tim Berners-Lee) The original Web proposal 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, March 12th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Facebook self-owns by taking down Senator Warren's ads.

Spotify will give you Hulu for free, why the Bay Area is no longer the best place for startups, and the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Look, I'm sympathetic to the views of some Facebookers when they say they feel like they are the scapegoats and punching bag for everyone's fears and anxieties around big tech, often unfairly. But at the same time, as I've said before, it's hard to argue that to some degree,

Facebook has brought the attention on itself, either through specific strategies and decisions that we can chalk up to culture. Read here, I think, aggression and arrogance. But also, it sometimes feels like they are almost comically tone deaf to how certain things they do will come across to people. And that's either a cultural problem also, or maybe it's just actual incommission. This story is all wrapped up in what I've just said, but as to where on the spectrum this falls, I couldn't say. Bottom line, if a sitting U.S. Senator posits as a part of their platform when running for president that tech platforms have too much power,

maybe you shouldn't do a thing like take down the ads that that candidate is running on your very same platform. That's exactly what Facebook did. Senator Elizabeth Warren's presidential campaign was running Facebook ads calling for the breakup of Facebook and other big tech companies. Facebook removed the ads, citing policy violations, but has now reversed course. Some of the ads in question read in part, quote, three companies have vast power over our economy and our democracy, Facebook, Amazon, and Google. We all use them, but in their rise to power, they've bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted. the playing field in their favor, end quote. A Facebook spokesperson told Politico, quote,

We removed the ads because they violated our policies against use of our corporate logo. In the interest of allowing robust debate, we are restoring the ads, end quote. Yeah, kind of has a bad look when you take down ads that are critical of you, right? Sort of makes it look like you have too much power to stifle things like robust debates?

Senator Warren said as much by tweeting, Quirious why I think Facebook has too much power? Let's start with their ability to shut down a debate over whether Facebook has too much power. Thanks for restoring my posts. But I want a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single sensor, end quote. I mean, look, everybody, you don't have to be a genius PR person to see that Facebook just made the most obvious boneheaded mistake and essentially gave credence to the very thing that people are saying about it.

if it was a lone ads moderator who had the latitude to go rogue and be like, screw you, we're Facebook, you can't say that about us, then that's arrogance, arrogance and a lack of organizational discipline. But also, Facebook wants us to believe that it can protect our democracy and manage things like political advertisements on its platform with a sophistication and discernment that will assure us. They won't be putting their thumbs on the scale and that they'll be able to spot obvious manipulation of said ads.

And yet they didn't even have the ability to manage the ads around the political topics that directly affect them. There's no team in place at Facebook to make sure they don't get PR egg on their face when people are talking about them. Then that's just incompetence. Maybe Facebook doesn't think ads are important and they're just telling us that they do. But even if that was the case, wouldn't they at least care enough to C-Y-A cover their own

how can we believe that Facebook can do any of this stuff well or even truly care about it if they can't even C-Y-A effectively? Mark your calendars for a week from this Monday. Apple has officially sent out invitations for a special event on March 25th at the Steve Jobs Theater,

where it is expected to announce a streaming video service and a news subscription service. Now for the Kremlinology, the invites included in animation of a film strip counting down four, three, two, Apple logo with the words, It's Showtime. So, yeah, I think it's safe to assume what the big news will be. And folks on Twitter noted that the last time Apple used the tagline, It's Showtime, was

2006 when it first previewed Apple TV. Though, in 2006, showtime was one word, it's Showtime. And this year it's two words. It's showtime. Don't know what that means, but look, this is the level of detail folks get into in trying to parse this stuff. As 9 to 5 Mac notes, quote, we also expect to learn more about iOS 12.2's release, which includes support for new HomeKit TVs that work with Siri and Apple's home app, end quote. Although Santa Tim, special personal request for me, I just had the hard drive on a 4-year-old IMac die on me,

so I need to get a new one, but I've been holding it. off for an iMac refresh. So I'm hoping for, you know, one of those quiet chip boosts to the iMac lineup. Nothing fancy. And the Mac Rumors buyer's guide says that regular IMAX were last updated 645 days ago, which is the longest span ever between updates. So you know, Tim, pretty please. Spotify Premium now includes a free subscription to Hulu's ad-supported streaming video service. offer is available to all new and existing Spotify users in the U.S. from now until June 10th. You just have to go activate Hulu on the Your Services pages within account settings. Hulu recently lowered the cost of its ad-supported plan down to $5.99 a month following

Netflix's recent price increases. And you could already subscribe to Hulu through Spotify for $3.99 a month. So for a limited time, if you subscribe to Hulu through Spotify, you won't even have to. have to pay that. Though if you subscribe to Hulu standalone, you would need to cancel your Hulu account there and then sign up again through Spotify to take advantage of this offer. Someone pointed this out on Twitter, and I don't know why this never occurred to me. Eventually we'll see some sort of similar Apple music, Apple video, or whatever they're going to call it, bundle, right? Maybe an I bundle? Something else I had never thought about, but is pretty obvious now that I have.

that smart speakers generally have been a hit and that the Alexa platform is pretty successful. There are now 80,000 skills in the Alexa marketplace. But think about it. As of yet, there has been no breakout hit. No Angry Birds, no Pokemon, not even an IFART app like in the early iPhone days. And no killer app like spreadsheets were for PCs. Can you even think of one skill that everyone's been telling you, about that you figure you've got to try for yourself someday. Me neither. In fact, survey after

survey keeps showing that most people use smart speakers just to listen to music or make simple requests like, tell me the weather, or set a timer. Bloomberg has poked into this a bit to try to see why there has been no breakout Alexa skill. This despite the fact that Amazon boasts 10,000 employees are working on Alexa software and devices, and they pay as much as $5,000 a month for developers to create new skills via a program called Alexa Developer Rewards. What are the possible problem areas that are holding developers back? Well, according to the piece, it's just a general lack of expertise for developing for voice recognition. And while you can charge for skills and even charge for subscriptions on the skills platform,

you can't monetize on the platform using ads at all, which is great, right? I agree with you. But ad-supported stuff is often the low-hanging fruit that gets early developers into the game. Quote, look at the Internet in 1995. The first websites were not moneymakers, says Brandon Kaplan, chief executive of skilled creative, a marketing startup that has worked on voice software projects with Pepsi and CBS. Quote, people are still playing around, figuring out what they can build, end quote. This is a topic that has been discussed all over the place, ad nauseum.

but there is a new medium piece by Byrne Hobart that has gotten a lot of chatter looking at things in a slightly different way. Hobart says, as others have done before, quite simply, the Bay Area is no longer the best place to start a tech company because it's so expensive. And one of the problems is the high cost of living is pushing workers to eschew startups and instead join established companies with high market salaries

because, well, you could starve waiting those years for your stock option ship to come in. even if you're at the hardest startup in the world. In other words, startups can't compete for talent in the Bay Area anymore. Forget about the big tech companies kneecapping every promising startup as soon as they get traction. They're also hoovering up all the talent because that's the only way talent can afford to live in the Bay Area right now. You should really read the piece because Hobart goes into great detail about things like landlords and a municipal government that has effectively been captured by the current incumbents. And it's this angle on the self-perpetuation of the problem that I find interesting.

Quote, As long as higher rents raise the cost of starting a pre-revenue company, fewer people will join them, so more people will join established companies where they'll earn market salaries and continue to push up rents. Earlier in the piece, he sums it up this way. There are three related problems that make California economically tenuous and a fourth that makes the situation worse.

One, it's no longer the best place in the world to start a startup. Two, the gains from the existing tech industry increasingly accrue to passive investors and lucky landlords. Three, the state government is a levered bet on tech compensation. Four, these three problems, which are interrelated, won't show visible symptoms until well after they're terminally unfixable, end quote. Hobart's conclusion is that the big tech companies won't be the first to leave the Bay Area because the network effects are so strong for them. and the status quo is essentially a moat protecting them from the usual disruption of startups coming up from below. But if you're a startup, if you've not already planted routes elsewhere, it's probably time to think about doing so. As the market for talent gets more efficient and the supply of housing remains constrained, the required burn rate for startups will rise,

making them an increasingly expensive indulgence. Rewind the Airbnb story, but with higher rents, and it's a story about three guys who ran a novelty website for a while before they all got jobs designing marketing microsites for Oracle. California's politicians will always be able to say, we're so happy to be the home of companies like X, Y, and Z. It will take them a long, long time to notice that X, Y, and Z used to change every five years. Then it was every 10. Then it was the same companies for a generation.

By the time they figure out that the big new companies aren't being founded nearby, the next big startup cluster will already have had its first round of exits. And Austin or Portland or Raleigh will be full of angel investment. and small VC shops itching to perpetuate the local startup cycle. Californians will end up like the landed gentry in interwar England. Lovely houses, illustrious history, and no conceivable way to pay their bills, end quote. Perhaps related story from USA Today. A look at the emergence of Atlanta as the nation's so-called black tech capital.

A startup scene where about 25% of tech workers were reported to be African-Americans. American in 2016. Some of the same issues still abound in Atlanta. African Americans only make up 5% of executives and 11% of management roles at ATL tech companies. And venture capital dollars are no easier to come by for black entrepreneurs than it is anywhere else. But maybe that might be changing. Around $1 billion in investment money was raised by Atlanta startups in both 2017 and 2018, four times the amount invested in the area a decade ago. And here's a quote from serial entrepreneur and Silicon Valley transplant Tristan Walker, who made headlines when he moved his latest startup to Atlanta from the Bay Area.

I can't count how many articles have been written on the death of diversity in Silicon Valley, yet the problem's not getting better. And why? He lets the question hang in the air. There's no reason why it shouldn't or wouldn't, end quote. Silicon Valley may have the nation's great. density of genius per square mile, he says, but Atlanta lays claim to the greatest density of black genius.

Quote, the feeling I get when I go to Atlanta now, he says, is the same feeling I got in 2008 when I moved to Silicon Valley, end quote. And finally today, it is the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. 30 years ago today, Tim Berners-Lee sent his boss at CERN, a memo titled, Information Management, a Proposal. at the time Berners-Lee was calling his proposed information management system mesh. But over the course of the next year, as he began actually coding it up, he changed the name to World Wide Web. Bernersley's boss, Mike Sendle, jotted a note on the top of the printed-up paper memo, quote, vague but exciting,

which still kind of sums up the web today, if you think about it. I've included a link in the show notes. if you want to read the original proposal from 30 years ago. In honor of the anniversary, Berners Lee wrote to commemorate the moment by saying, while the web has created opportunity, given marginalized groups of voice, and made our daily lives easier, it has also created opportunity for scammers, given a voice to those who spread hatred, and made all kinds of crime easier to commit.

Against the backdrop of news stories about how the web is misused, it's understandable that many people feel afraid and unsure if the web is really a force for good. But given how much the web has changed in the past 30 years, it would be defeatist and unimaginative to assume that the web, as we know it, can't be changed for the better in the next 30. If we give up on building a better web now, then the web will not have failed us. We will have failed the web, end quote. He concludes by writing, The web is for everyone, and collectively we hold the power to change it. It won't be easy, but if we dream a little and work a lot, we can get the way.

web we want, end quote. Several of you got in touch with me overnight to register your appreciation for my, it's been a while joke on yesterday's show. So I wanted to quickly point out that it's not my joke over at Comedy Bang Bang, the podcast. Scott Ackerman has been making, it's been a while jokes for years now. Yes, we're referring to stained. And the problem is once you get the joke in your head anytime anyone says it's been a while in your head all you want to do is be like there's actually a related joke about saying it's been anytime someone says the phrase it's been yes that's bare naked ladies again i'll warn you once you start hearing this you'll hear it all the time and anytime a friend or loved one uses those phrases see if you can resist pulling out and

It's been for been a while every single time. You'll drive everyone crazy. You're welcome. Talk to you tomorrow.