Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 09/24 - Adam Neumann Out of (We)Work

Episode Date: September 24, 2019

Adam Neumann out as WeWork CEO, Facebook acquires CTRL-Labs to deliver computing controlled by your brain, Kik officially shuts down its app, and is Microsoft preparing to let users control and monetize their own data? Sponsors: Metalab.co AirMedcareNetwork.com/tech code: tech Links: WeWork CEO Adam Neumann to step down amid controversy and retain chairman role (CNBC) Facebook to Buy Startup for Controlling Computers With Your Mind (Bloomberg) KIK CHAT APP SHUTS DOWN AS COMPANY GOES “ALL IN” ON KIN (Betakit.com) SEC sues Kik for running an unregistered Initial Coin Offering (Engadget) Google wins landmark right to be forgotten case (BBC News) AMAZON CREATES A HUGE ALLIANCE TO DEMAND VOICE ASSISTANT COMPATIBILITY (The Verge) Amazon plans Alexa wireless earbuds with fitness-tracking built in, bigger Echo with better sound, source says (CNBC) Microsoft's new 'Data Dignity' team could help users control their personal data (ZDNet) 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, September 24th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. Adam Newman is out as WeWork CEO. Facebook acquires control labs to deliver computing controlled by your brain. Kick officially shuts down its app and is Microsoft preparing to let users control and monetize their own data.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. WeWork co-founder, Adam Newman is resigning his position as that company's CEO, according to several, outlets. This just broke so I can only give you the facts as they are known at the time of this recording, although I'm sure we'll have plenty more color tomorrow. Quoting CNBC, Vice Chairman Sebastian Gunningham, a former Amazon executive and CFO Arty Minson, formerly of AOL and Time Warner Cable, will take over as co-CEOES while Newman will be non-executive chairman, the company said. The new CEOs are not taking over on an interim basis, but rather are expected to remain in those roles, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC.

Quote, while our business has never been stronger in recent weeks, the scrutiny directed towards me has become a significant distraction, and I have decided that it is in the best interest of the company to step down, as Chief Executive Newman said in a statement. Newman's voting shares will be reduced in power from 10 to 1 to 3 to 1, a source confirmed to CNBC, meaning he will no longer have majority voting control. Newman is the company's largest individual stakeholder with about 115 million shares, and the ownership structure gives him a tremendous amount of control. The vast majority of his shares are Class B and Class C, which each have 10 votes per share, while Class A is one vote per share. Softbank chairman Masayoshi Son, who has invested billions of dollars in WeWork, led the charge to remove Newman.

CNBC has reported, end quote. Facebook has acquired Control Labs, which develops non-invasive neural interfaces for computing for between $500 million and $1 billion, though some of the chatter I've seen this morning says that the size of the deal is probably closer to the latter number than the former. Quoting Bloomberg's description of Control Labs, the closely held four-year-old startup, which has dozens of employees and has raised tens of millions in venture capital, uses a bracelet to measure neuron activity in a subject's arm to determine movement that person is thinking about, even if they aren't physically moving. That neuron activity is then translated into movement

on a digital screen. Facebook declined to comment on the price of the acquisition. Technology like Control Labs might someday be a crucial part of products like augmented reality glasses where a user might want to control a computer without the need for buttons or a keyboard. Your hands could be in your pocket behind you, explained Thomas Reardon, chief executive officer of control labs at an industry conference last December. It's the information to move, not the movement itself that controls the avatar, he said, end quote. Here's how Facebook's Andrew Bosworth described Facebook's motivation for this deal in a Facebook post. Quote, we spend a lot of time trying to get our technology to do what we want rather than enjoying the people around us.

We know there are more natural, intuitive ways to interact with devices and technology, and we want to build them. It's why we've agreed to acquire control labs. They will be joining our Facebook Reality Labs team, where we hope to build this kind of technology at scale and get it into consumer products faster. The vision for this work is a wristband that lets people control their devices in a natural extension of movement. Here's how it'll work. You have neurons in your spinal cord that send electrical signals to your hand muscles, telling them to move in a specific way, such as to click a mouse or press a button. The wristband will decode those signals and translate them into a digital signal your device can understand,

empowering you with control over your digital life. It captures your intention so you can share a photo with a friend using an imperceptible movement or just by well intending to. Technology like this has the potential to open up new creative possibilities and reimagine 19th century inventions in a 21st century world. This is how our interactions in VR and AR can one day look. It can change the way we connect. end quote. So once again, Facebook really seems to believe in the ARVR space, and I think we said

recently everyone in tech seems to as well to one degree or another, but also, hey, man, that just sounds like some really cool tech. So, you know, why not buy really cool tech? But also, well, someone had to say it. So I'll let Aaron Griffith from the New York Times say it, quote, Facebook doing any acquisitions, let alone billion-dollar ones at this moment, seems bold, end quote. Yes, interesting that Bloomberg also had this in its piece about the deal. Quote, Control Labs and Facebook are not competitors. Facebook does not currently have or make this technology, a Facebook spokeswoman said of the deal announced on Monday, adding that the company will work with regulators to secure any needed approvals. quote, control labs technology is an innovative input that Facebook hopes will be used to significantly improve the upcoming Facebook AR VR experiences a few years down the road to fundamentally improve the user experience, end quote. A couple of Amazon related stories. First, Amazon has announced the voice interoperability initiative to improve voice assistant compatibility.

More than 30 high-profile companies have signed on to the initiative. more on that in a second, but noticeably missing from the initiative, Google, Apple, and Samsung. So essentially all of the major voice platforms that aren't Alexa. Anyway, interoperability. What might that mean? Quoting Deeter Bone. For example, you could talk to either Alexa or Cortana on the same smart speaker simply by saying the appropriate wake word. As much as people would like the headline that there's going to be one voice assistant that rules them all, we don't agree, says Amazon's senior vice president of devices and services Dave Limp. This isn't a sporting event. There's not going to be one winner, end quote.

Limp argues that if there will always be multiple voice assistants, they should work together better. The idea these companies hope is that there will be two kinds of assistance. One type will be broad in its knowledge and capabilities, think Alexis, Siri and Google, but others will be narrow and deep, context specific to their domain of knowledge. The goal is to to make it possible to directly talk to any of them on a smart speaker without the need for an intermediate skill. It's a strategy already playing out on PCs. Amazon's voice assistant is being more tightly integrated into Windows 10, allowing locked PCs to respond to general queries when someone shouts Alexa from across the room. Microsoft Cortana is being refocused on interactions with the company's

software and services, end quote. It is, as I said, an impressive list of companies that have signed on to this, including Baidu, BMW, Bose, Harmon, Logitech, Microsoft, Salesforce, Sony, Spotify, Tencent, Intel, Qualcomm, plenty more. This is a shot across the bow of any sort of strategy to make voice assistance some sort of ecosystem lock-in. And sort of related, CNBC is reporting that Amazon is developing Alexa-enabled wireless earbuds that would also have fitness tracking built in. quote, the new earbuds, code named Puget, are expected to come with a built-in accelerometer and be able to monitor things like distance, run, calories burn, and pace of running, a person directly involved in the project said.

Separately, Amazon is also working on a bulkier echo device with better sound quality, this person said. It's unclear when these devices will be released. Amazon is expected to showcase a number of new products at its annual hardware event in Seattle on Wednesday. Amazon declined to comment on its plans, end quote. Wednesday mentioned is tomorrow Wednesday. So we might have some more details on this very shortly. Kick is no more. The messaging app, Kick, says it is officially shutting down its messaging app and will reduce its headcount to 19 people. So there's one aspect to this news because there was a time that Kick was a contender to be one of the great messaging platforms in the world. Around May of 2016, Kik Messenger had 300 million users, and among them a reported 40% of U.S. teenagers.

So this is a little bit of a story of could have been a contender slash how the mighty have fallen. But I've also seen various numbers that suggest KIC might still have around 100 million users. So why shut down? Well, that's the other aspect of the story that is interesting, quoting in Gadget. When KIC's user base began to shrink in 2017 and the company started running out of money, it launched an ICO, an initial coin offering. This is where investors received digital tokens instead of traditional stock. Kik called its tokens KIN, but according to the SEC, Kik's offer and sale of kin was not registered with the SEC, which considers tokens, with the exception of Bitcoin and Ether, to be essentially securities. Furthermore, the SEC says, Kik should have revealed the trade.

troubled state of its finances to potential investors, which it did not, end quote. So this past June, the SEC filed a lawsuit against KIC for the token sale, which raised $100 million, calling it illegal an unregistered securities offering. So now it seems that KIC is shutting down the app to retrench its workforce all the better to deal with that lawsuit. In a post-announcing the move, company chief Ted Livingston revealed, that KIC worked with the SEC to resolve the issue for 18 months. Unfortunately, the agency told Kik that it'll take the company to court unless it labels its

cryptocurrency can a security. Becoming a security would kill the usability of any cryptocurrency and set a dangerous precedent for the industry, Livington said. So with the SEC working to characterize almost all cryptocurrencies as securities, we made the decision to step forward and fight, end quote. Livingston also said that Kik, quote, underestimated the tactics the SEC would employ, including, quote, drawing out a long and expensive process to drain its resources, end quote. By downsizing, KIC will have the money to be able to face the lawsuit.

Going forward, Kik will focus on its cryptocurrency and will make an effort to turn KIN users into KIN buyers. The remaining employees will prepare the KIN blockchain to be able to support a billion users making a dozen transactions per day. They'll also build a mobile wallet that will make it easy to buy the cryptocurrency, end quote. So I wondered this, and apparently several other people did, quoting Dovie Wan on Twitter, what's the point of kin when the Kik app gets shut down, end quote? So I reached out to Brady Dale at KynDask, and it turns out Kik just really did do a full-on pivot to crypto. Brady told me that the plan was for the popularity of Kik to be the driving force in the adoption

of KIN, the cryptocurrency. but KIC, the messaging app, was never necessary to use KIN, because KIN is merely a currency for buying and selling digital property or experiences. Good legal news for Google, who has won a landmark right-to-be-forgotten case in Europe. An EU court has ruled that Google does not have to apply the so-called right to be forgotten globally. Quoting Reuters, the ruling means that Google, quote, only needs to remove links from its search results in Europe and not elsewhere after receiving an appropriate request.

The ruling stems from a dispute between Google and a French privacy regulator. In 2015, CNIL ordered the firm to globally remove search result listings to pages containing damaging or false information about a person. The following year, Google introduced a geoblocking feature that prevents European users from being able to see delisted links. But it resisted censoring search results for people in other parts of the world. And the firm challenged a 100,000-euro fine that CNIL has. had tried to impose.

Quote, currently, there is no obligation under EU law for a search engine operator who grants a request for dereferencing made by a data subject to carry out such a de-referencing on all the versions of its search engine, the European Court of Justice ruling said, end quote. So chalk up a win of sorts for the fight against the balkanization of the web into independent silos. I mean, yes, this reaffirms different search results based on where you search, but, at least, my search does not get affected by some decision made in France. Notable that Google was supported in this case by Microsoft, Wikipedia, Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press,

and the UK Freedom of Expression Campaign Group, Article 19. Finally today, you know that this is something I have spoken about before. When I use the term surveillance capitalism, I don't mean it as pejoratively as some people do. Mining my data to make money off my activity is, okay-ish to me, the thing that I most object to, really, is that I don't get anything in the way of consideration for it. In other words, why do you get to strip mine my valuable data without paying me? You can't use a photo of me or my name or the words I write or say without paying

me. So why can you use any of the data I slough off every day without paying me? Well, Amazon is rumored to be creating something to address this. What they might. They might. They might be calling a data dignity initiative, an attempt to help users control their own personal data, possibly to the point of being able to buy and sell it. In ZDNet, Ace Microsoft Watcher, Mary Joe Foley, says Microsoft has been banging the privacy drum for a while now, hoping to brand itself in opposition to the likes of Facebook and Google and others. According to Foley, quote, today, September 23rd, the New York Times is running an interactive feature about Jaron Lanier that is focused on data privacy. Lanyar is a very very

virtual reality pioneer and a chief scientist at Microsoft. The central arguments in the Times piece are that users have been tricked into giving away their most valuable assets, their data, and that users should get paid for their personal data. He uses the term data dignity in describing his plan for writing these wrongs. A quick search on data dignity leads to a site called the art of research.org. That site says the art of research organization is embedded in the Microsoft CTO office under the leadership of Lanier. The About page also notes that here at Microsoft, we have a brand new data dignity team headed by Christian Leansberger. Leensberger is a principal PM manager and advisor to Microsoft's CTO, Kevin Scott. He describes his current role in his

LinkedIn profile as managing a multidisciplinary team of program managers, designers, and developers to incubate disruptive MLAI products that are directly sponsored. by Microsoft's senior leadership team. This includes a set of key cross-company initiatives and projects to evolve the approach to the machine learning and AI and data at Microsoft and throughout the industry, end quote. Well, he reached out to Microsoft about data dignity and got a nothing to share response. Still, she sees the Microsoft PR team revving up to do something. Hmm. A completely new definition of the term data management. as a service.

Would be into that for sure. That is all for today because of the late breaking news. I'm just going to leave you with my stock sign-off. Hat tip to Jerry Springer and Bill and Ted. Be excellent to yourselves and each other. Talk to you tomorrow.