Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 07/28 – Instagram Is Making TikTok-ers An Offer (They Hope) They Can’t Refuse

Episode Date: July 28, 2020

What to expect from tomorrow’s Big Tech Congressional testimony. Instagram is trying to woo TikTok stars. Qualcomm has some amazing new quick charge tech. Roblox continues to look like the next big thing. And Deadspin—the true Deadspin—lives to fight another day. Sponsors: Metalab.co Harrys.com/techmeme Links: Their Businesses Went Virtual. Then Apple Wanted a Cut. (NYTimes) Google’s Top Search Result? Surprise! It’s Google (The Markup) Congress has battled airlines, banks, tobacco and baseball. Now it’s preparing to clash with Big Tech. (Washington Post) Facebook Offers Money to Reel In TikTok Creators (WSJ) Qualcomm’s Quick Charge 5 refuels phones 50% in 5 minutes, 100% in 15 (VentureBeat) Roblox jumps to over 150M monthly users, will pay out $250M to developers in 2020 (TechCrunch) After Quitting Deadspin in Protest, They’re Starting a New Site (NYTimes) 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 Tuesday, July 28th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. What to expect from tomorrow's Big Tech congressional testimony. Instagram is trying to woo TikTok stars. Qualcomm has some amazing new quick-charge tech. Roblox continues to look like the next big thing. And Deadspin, the true Deadspin lives on to fight another day. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. As mentioned, the big congressional grilling of the big four big tech CEOs is tomorrow, and things like this might get brought up, you would think. Sources are telling the New York Times that Airbnb and Class Pass were two companies that never had to worry about paying that 30% Apple App Store commission.

But then the pandemic hit, and both companies began offering more online virtual experiences. and guess what? Apple came calling and asked for its cut. Quote, ClassPass built its business on helping people book exercise classes at local gyms. So when the pandemic forced gyms across the United States to close, the company shifted to virtual classes. Then Class Pass received a concerning message from Apple. Because the classes it sold on its iPhone app were now virtual, Apple said it was entitled to 30% of the sales up from no fee previously, according to a person close to Class Pass who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

for fear of upsetting Apple. The iPhone maker said it was merely enforcing a decade-old rule. Airbnb experienced similar demands from Apple after it began an online experience's business that offered virtual cooking classes, meditation sessions, and drag queen shows, augmenting the in-person experiences it started selling in 2016, according to two people familiar with the issues. Both Airbnb and Class Pass have discussed Apple's demands with House lawmakers offices that are investigating how Apple wheeled its control over its app store as part of a year-long antitrust inquiry into the biggest tech companies, according to three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private

conversations, end quote. Also, this little tidbit about Google might come up. The markup did a study that came out today of more than 15,000 of the most popular queries on the Google search engine and found that Google devoted fully 41% of the first page search results on mobile devices to its own properties and services. Quote, Google's decision to place its products above competitors and to present answers on the search page has led to lawsuits and regulatory fines. A number of websites said it killed their revenues and their companies. Founders of both innovative startups and companies that had been around for a decade or more

told the markup that once Google started placing its product first, they didn't stand a chance. travel research firm Skift wrote in November that the entire online travel industry is suffering. The fact that Google is leveraging its dominance as a search engine into taking market share away from travel competitors is no longer even debatable. The choice to highlight its own products has been deliberate. Internal emails unearthed by the European Commission in an antitrust investigation show Google staffers discussing the need to place its comparison shopping product at the top of the search results to garner traffic. An email the following year noted traffic to the retooled product had more than doubled from 4 million to 10 million visits, end quote, most of this growth is improved Google.com integration, and quote. Sally Hubbard, an expert on antitrust and technology companies with the Open Markets

Institute said Google's decisions in search have huge implications, quote, imagine you go to the library and the card catalog is picking and choosing what book to get based on what makes the library the most money, end quote. And we've discussed previously the idea of Facebook acquiring competitors, quoting the Washington Post. Some of the evidence lawmakers have amassed is set to be furnished publicly for the first time Wednesday. Representative Pramila Jayapal, one of the panel members who will question the companies, said a few of the documents events a copy-acquire kill strategy on the part of tech companies to buy or suppress potential rivals. The Democratic lawmakers said the committee has seen some, quote, very specific language

from top-level executives about that, but she declined to offer specifics, end quote. And of course, we've discussed at length questions about Amazon competing with other companies that operate on its very own marketplace platform. So all of this is a taste of what I think we're going to hear tomorrow. I think the overall thing to understand about these hearings is not that all of these companies are venal, though they all are to one degree or another. some might argue, it's that when you're as big as they are, even a small Twitch can be felt by your competitors in the broader marketplace as throwing around elbows. For example, the combined market cap of Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, and Amazon is $5 trillion. Their combined 2019 revenue was

$773 billion. And they have a combined reserve of $420 billion in cash. They could effectively buy out all of their competition. That is not each other, of course. And through June 30th, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook, and the not present Microsoft have announced 27 acquisitions, up 29% year over year, the fastest pace of acquisitions by these companies since 2015. With great power comes great scrutiny. As we said with the whole Libra debate, power is jealous of being usurped. Sovereign governments can feel, when a rival power source is present. Quoting one last time from the Washington Post, the four tech giants often assert that they are responsible for decades of U.S. economic gains

and a bevy of digital apps and other tools that help people communicate, shop, and travel more easily than ever. But that meteoric growth has come at times with immense costs. The data they collect puts users' privacy at risk, the services they offer can harm the very workers they employ, and the content they permit online carries the potential to destabilize democracy, end quote. Expect to hear about all of this and more tomorrow. Sources are telling the Wall Street Journal that Instagram has made lucrative offers, some in the neighborhood of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to some of TikTok's most popular creators. Enticing those creators to possibly jump over and post on Instagram's upcoming TikTok

competitor known as Reels, quote, Facebook is planning to unveil reels next month. Instagram has, quote, approached a diverse range of creators about Reels in several of the countries where it's currently being tested. Company spokeswoman Sarisa Throher said, quote, we remain committed to investing in both our creators and their experience, end quote. The move is the most significant sign yet that Facebook intends for its Instagram Reels service to directly compete with BiteDances, TikTok. Reels is an Instagram feature that, like TikTok, allows users to share short form video and is scheduled to launch in the U.S. and several other countries. next month. The Instagram overtures to creators are the latest in a continuing back and forth between the two social media giants. In recent years, TikTok has flooded Facebook and Instagram with ads, targeting their users on the home turf of the social media company. To counter the Instagram push,

TikTok announced a $200 million fund on Thursday that will help creators on the platform, quote, realize additional earnings that help reward the care and dedication they put into creatively connecting with an audience that's inspired by their ideas, end quote. Facebook also isn't alone in seeking to offer its own alternative to TikTok, which has skyrocketed in popularity among younger users with 70% of 10-year-old girls with smartphones in the U.S. using the app in 2019, according to Jimmy, an app for parents that measures the smartphone habits of children. YouTube also said last week that it is testing new features that resemble video options

available on TikTok, end quote. Qualcomm has announced what it is calling Quick Charge 5, a new wide. charging technology that has the ability to refill smartphone batteries to 50% in just five minutes and 100% in a mere 15 minutes, which sounds amazing. And even more good news, this tech is likely to start showing up as soon as the next few months, quoting Venture Beat. Earlier this month, Chinese phone vendor Vivo unveiled super flash charge 120 watts using a custom USBC cable and charger to deliver similar recharge times. A 4,000 MAH battery could go from 0 to 50% in 5 minutes or 0 to 100 in 13 minutes. The real-world value of such a solution could be fantastic, enabling phone users to quickly refuel their devices at public charging stations before flights or at other times when they'll be away from outlets, assuming special cables are available.

By comparison, Quick Charge 5 uses a standard 3-amp USBC cable. and promises the aforementioned speeds when recharging the larger 4,500 MAHs batteries found in plus-sized phones. Moreover, unlike Vivo's proprietary and yet-to-be-commercialized solution, Quick Charge 5 is widely available to Android OEMs now and should start showing up in phones over the next two months. That's why Qualcomm is billing Quick-Charge 5 as the, quote, first commercially viable fast-charging platform to support more than 100-watt charging power in a smartphone. The chipmaker is obliquely referencing both Vivo solution and the Zhaummi developed 100-watt alternative that was announced in 2019 but never released, which Zhaum blamed on thermal issues

and rapid battery degradation. Interestingly, Qualcomm says, Zhaummi is one of Quick Charge 5's first customers and suggests it has solved the thermal issues, delivering 70% greater charging efficiency than Quick Charge 4, while running cooler by a full 10 degrees Celsius. Some of the performance improvements come from delivering twice the voltage at twice the speed. Accessories will support a range of 3.3 to 20 volts, and they should be safe. There are now eight levels of voltage protection, three levels of current protection, three levels of thermal protection, and three levels of timer protection within the charging subsystem, enabling quick

charge five to adjust for voltage behavior and ranges, as well as different electrical current and power behaviors, among other factors. The platform can work with one or two internal batteries at once and is compatible with USBPD power delivery and USBC standards, while also performing checks to confirm the power input and output characteristics of potentially ultra-fast devices. Quick Charge 5 accessories will be able to deliver top speed recharging for Quick Charge 5 phones, initially including Snapdragon 865 and 865 plus devices, while also supporting the prior peaks offered by Quick Charge 2.0 through 4 plus platforms and other Snapdragon mobile chips.

In each case, the wired charging speeds should be multiple times faster than current Chi-based wireless charging, end quote. Yeah, let me underline that. This is a wired charging standard, not wireless, so if phones go all portless in the future, then this won't be as useful. Also, Qualcomm notes that Quick Charge 5

will primarily benefit Android phones, but iPhones 7 and later will be able to take, take advantage of faster charges, just not full-on quick-charge speeds when connecting to these new quick-charge accessories. From the keeping our eye on possible next big things department, gaming platform Roblox says it now has more than 150 million monthly active users up from the 115 million mouths that it announced just back in February. So maybe this is also from the helped by COVID-19 department.

Also, there's this. Remember how Roblox is a developer platform and a gaming platform all at once? Yeah, well, Roblox also said its dev community is on track to earn more than $250 million this year, up from the $110 million earned in all of 2019. I'll let TechCrunch remind you about how all of this works. Quote, Roblox, to be clear, doesn't build the games that run on its platform. Instead, it offers a platform for developers to build upon similar to the App Store. Many of its most popular games are free, monetizing as players spend on in-game items using virtual cash called Robux.

Some of the company's larger individual games before the pandemic would average over 10 million monthly users, and over 10 games as of February claimed more than 1 billion total visits. Thanks to the pandemic, however, these gaming milestones have significantly increased in size. During the first part of the year, the Roblox game Adopt Me reached 1.615 million concurrent users over 10 billion visits. A new game called Piggy launched in January 2020, now has over 5 billion plays. Jailbreak surpassed 500,000 concurrent users during a live event held in April 2020. In total, there are now 345,000 developers on the Roblox platform who are monetizing their games, and over half of Robux being spent in catalog is now being.

spent on user-generated content items in less than 12 months after the UGC catalog program began. The more than doubling of Roblox developer's earnings year over year is related to a combination of factors, including the platform's growing game catalog, new development tools, international expansions, and of course a pandemic that has locked kids indoors away from their friends, forcing them to go online to connect. One notable factor driving the increased developer earnings, however, was Roblox's recent introduction of premium payouts, which, pays developers based on the engagement time of premium subscribers in their game. Through this system launched earlier this spring, developers earned $2 million in June 2020 as part of this program alone,

end quote. And finally today, a resurrection story. I don't know if we ever covered this, but a few months ago, the entire staff of the sports and pop culture website, Deadspin, resigned en masse when their evil corporate overlords, GEO media and the private equity firm that now runs Gio told Deadspin to just stick to the sports and not cover other cultural and political topics. But if you were, of course, a reader of the good, old version of Deadspin, then you know that that was the stuff that made Deadspin great. In this era of podcast enterprises, of newsletter enterprises,

where small teams, even one person bands, can have a decent audience and a decent business all of their own without any need for corporate overlordship and meddling. There was a lot of speculation in digital media circles as to how the departed Deadspin talent might land on their feet. Well, it looks like they landed on their feet exactly in the way that a lot of us had hoped, quoting the New York Times. Now Deadspin's former writers and editors, 18 of the roughly 20 who quit last year, have reunited to start a digital media company, Defector Media, that they will own and operate themselves. Defector media is scheduled to start a podcast next month and roll out its website in September, its founder said. Tom Lay, a former features editor at Deadspin, will be the editor-in-chief. The business side will be led by Jasper Wang, a former Bain and Company employee who said he had been an avid Deadspin. readers since age 19. Defector's founders said the company had no outside investors and each employee

has taken a stake of roughly 5% in the venture. Unlike Deadspin, a free site that relies on ads, Defector will offer subscriptions at $8 a month with an annual subscription available at a discount. The 19 staff members will be paid as the money comes in and they can vote out the editor-in-chief with a two-thirds majority. They will also own their own intellectual. property, meaning they will get the money if Hollywood shows an interest in their work for defector. If you're going to take a moonshot, you might as well do it exactly the way you want to, said Kelsey McKinney, a former deadspin writer who has joined the new company, end quote. Ah yes, workers of the world, at least the digital media world, unite and take over the means of

production. Can't help but root hard for these folks. An easy subscribe for me once this all gets rolling because deadspin, the good deadspin at least, was always a must read for me. Ah yes, I forgot how many things a puppy can get into, how many things a puppy can destroy. Yes, it is like having a brand new baby in the house once again, and I'm sleeping like I did when we had a newborn, but still it's fun all in all. Talk to you tomorrow.