Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 8/14 - Is Kevin Durant teaming up with Marc Andreessen?

Episode Date: August 14, 2018

NVIDIA announces its next generation GPUs, Apple wants developers to get SaaS-y, what if we just rebuilt the cable bundle with streaming channels, Tinder founders file suit and is Kevin Durant teaming up with Marc Andreessen? LinksNVIDIA Reveals Next-Gen Turing GPU Architecture (AnandTech)How an invite-only meeting at Apple's luxury loft in New York set the stage for one of the biggest subscription businesses in the world (Business Insider)Banks and Retailers Are Tracking How You Type, Swipe and Tap (NYTimes)Netflix, Amazon Video, and Xfinity are accidentally re-creating cable TV (The Verge)Kevin Durant, Will Smith Top the Lineup for a New Venture-Capital Fund for Black Investors (WSJ) 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 TechMeme ride home for Tuesday, August 14th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Nvidia announces its next generation GPUs. Apple wants developers to get sassy. What if we're just rebuilding the cable bundle, but now with streaming channels?

Tinder Founders FileSuit. And is Kevin Durant teaming up with Mark Andresen? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. NVIDIA is doubling down on GPUs being the new frontier for all types of computing. Late yesterday, the company announced its Turing GPU architecture, which it says includes AI-based capabilities and real-time ray tracing. Nvidia claims that the fastest Turing parts can cast 10 billion rays per second, a 25x improvement in ray tracing performance and essentially can render graphics six times faster than Nvidia's Pascal architecture from 2016.

Now, I'm not going to pretend to understand what that means, so I'm going to let these smarties at AnandTech explain it to those of you who can grok this sort of thing. Quote, so what does Turing bring to the table? The marquee feature, at least for Nvidia's Provis crowd, is on hybrid rendering, which combines ray tracing with traditional rasterization to exploit the strengths of both technologies.

This announcement is essentially a continuation of Nvidia's RTX announcement from earlier this year, so if you thought that announcement was a little sparse, well, then here is the rest of the story. The Turing architecture also carries over the Tensor cores from Volta, and indeed these have even been enhanced over Volta. The tensor cores are an important aspect of multiple NVIDIA initiatives. Along with speeding up ray tracing itself, NVIDIA's other tool in their bag of tricks is to reduce the amount of rays required in a scene by using AI denoising to clean up an image, which is something the TensorFlow

Cours excel at, end quote. So designers, filmmakers, enterprise folks, start rubbing your hands together because you've got some cool new toys coming your way. Gamer's, this will eventually bubble down to you, but not overnight. These first graphic cards that will use the Turing architecture are all part of NVIDIA's highest end lines. The cheapest, the The Quadro RTX-5,000 will retail for $2,300. The high-end RTX 8,000 will cost $10,000. As PC magazine states, How Turing will translate into gaming graphics isn't clear.

But NVIDIA is expected to make a big announcement at the Gamescom conference in Germany later this month. I did a segment recently about how Comcast's Xfinity cable TV service has been partnering with the lights of Netflix and Amazon. so that those streaming services are now just channels in your channel guide, not something that you have to switch to an external box to use. Over at The Verge, Graham McMillan says, this is just the beginning.

We might be rushing headlong towards a future of streaming bundles, which would, in essence, rebuild the cable TV subscription bundle. Quote, end users are growing fatigued with the dizzying number of choices they have for watching. multiple video services over a myriad of devices. At one point, switching from traditional television to streaming was a simple proposition that involved one or two online subscriptions with Netflix and Hulu as the hubs for the majority of available content. These days, small niche streaming services like Shutter, Filmstruck, Fandor, Crackle, and Mooby

are proliferating, while major studios are moving to establish special subscription services for their own content. That's likely to change the audience's attitude toward and relationship with streaming content moving forward. The digital landscape is already fragmented and it's continually fragmenting further as content creators choose to become content providers. In the process, it's beginning to resemble cable television. Each new app or content library looks like a different channel to consider. And each one is essentially a premium cable offering that requires a separate subscription to view, end quote. So, with all of this fragmentation, consumers would naturally look for some unifying service to put all their entertainment in one place.

Gee, the cable companies could do that for you, for a price, of course. Quote, with each separate streaming option requiring individual logins, passwords, and payment options, it feels like just a matter of time before some internet service provider starts offering bundled streaming subscriptions that require one payment and one login, a la the traditional bundled cable subscription model, end quote. As McMillan says, that's just a variation on what cable has always been offering you, their basic value proposition for decades. Turn your TV on, find the content you want to watch, and put the remote down. How frigging hilarious will it be if in 10 years we're just all the way back at where we started?

The New York Times has a crazy story about how banks and retailers are using biometrics to build user profiles on you. They're doing it ostensibly for security purposes. If you're someone logging into your banking app, your bank wants to make sure you're you. But at the same time, it's not just about getting your password right. It's also about how you swipe, how you tap, how you use your phone or your keyboard or whatever device. The way you press, scroll and type. on a phone screen or keyboard can be as unique as your fingerprints or facial features. To fight fraud, a growing number of banks and merchants are tracking visitors' physical movements

as they use websites and apps. Some use the technology only to weed out automated attacks and suspicious transactions, but others are going significantly further, amassing tens of millions of profiles that can identify customers by how they touch, hold, and tap their devices. The data collection is invisible to those being watched. Using sensors in your phone or code on websites, companies can gather thousands of data points, known as behavioral biometrics, to help prove whether a digital user is actually the person she claims to be, end quote.

So, for example, the Royal Bank of Scotland uses biometrics and records more than 2,000 interactive gestures, the angle at which you hold your device, quickly you scroll, the rhythm of your keystrokes on your keyboard. Apparently its system can detect imposter's with 99% accuracy. RBS had one wealthy client who apparently never used the scroll wheel on his mouse. When the bank detected a login from someone who was not only using the scroll wheel for the first time, but also typing using the number strip at the top of his keyboard and not the one on the side, as he usually did, RBS blocked cash.

from leaving his account and later confirmed that the account indeed had been hacked. As the Times piece notes, businesses like to call these sort of security features frictionless, but privacy watchdogs call them dangerous because once someone has amassed a digital profile on you just based on how you hold your phone or how you type or how you even just jiggle your mouse around, what's to stop them from tracking you wherever you go? you do. Makes the user tracking enabled by browser cookies seem downright quaint. According to Business Insider, Apple is concerned about downward pressure on the price of apps in the App Store. Back in the early days of the App Store land grab, developers got used to pricing

apps as low as possible in order to make a killing on volume. And consumers got used to, you know, $1 apps. But 10 years on, despite the App Store continuing to be the largest software distribution platform in the world, Apple is concerned that these sorts of economics don't create an environment for long-term sustainability. Once, as a developer, you acquire a customer for a dollar up front. The customer doesn't ever expect to pay again, but you, the developer, still have to pay up indefinitely for things like server costs and support for continued updates. You can get rich on dollar apps, but can you build a long-term sustainable business? Well, Apple wants sustainability. Apple wants apps that have economics that will incentivize and allow developers to invest in them long term to create high-quality apps and iterate on them and invest in them.

So according to Business Insiders Kiff Lesswing, in April of this year, Apple quietly invited a select group of 30 software developers to their luxury loft in Tribeca here in New York to pitch them on what they believe is the future. Apple wants to transition the App Store to a greater focus on software as a service, in other words, on subscriptions. Quote, developers, Apple said, needed to realize the business model of apps was changing. Successful apps tended to focus on long-term engagement instead of upfront cost. Indie developers who wanted to capitalize on this needed to move to a subscription model. And Apple representative said at the meeting that paid apps represent 15% of, of total app sales and is on the decline,

according to a person who was there, who did not want to be identified to maintain their relationship with Apple. This meant that developers needed to spend time turning free customers into high-value customers and also worry about churn, the percent of customers that used to subscribe but canceled. Apple suggested several tactics like offering two to four options

to improve conversion rate, segmenting users by price. Apple also suggested, that after a month, it was seeing 41% retention on apps that increased their prices, only slightly lower than the 61% retention that was seen when subscription prices were kept the same. The message was clear. Successful apps now focus on getting regular engagement from their users, not one-time sales. For developers, that meant embracing the subscription model. If you focus on paid apps instead of subscriptions, Apple warned, your business will eventually hit a cap, end quote. Indeed, the article has an example of this, the popular FaceTune app that improves selfies by fixing things like lighting, smoothing out imperfections on your face, that sort of thing.

As of last week, it was the number one most downloaded paid app in the App Store selling for $3.99. But there's also FaceTune 2, which is on the subscription model and has amassed more than half a million subscribers at $599 to unlock. and an annual cost of $32, plus an outright purchase price of $6999. Lighttricks, the maker of Facetune and FaceTune 2 says it's achieved a $40 million run rate and is now a, quote, real business with 140 employees after it switched to the subscription model. With just the pay-up front version, Leitrix said it was, quote, hitting a ceiling around $10 million a year in revenue, which is not. Not very much when you have serious R&D costs.

A few quick hits here in a little bit of an omnibus section. Co-founders and former executives of the dating app Tinder are suing parent firm IAC, alleging that they are owed billions of dollars because the startup's valuation had been depressed. The 10 Tinder plaintiffs allege there were written contracts between IAC and the Tinder insiders that stipulated those insiders would be able to,

exercise options beginning in 2017 and 2018. Instead, however, IAC merged Tinder into Match Group, and that allegedly intentionally undervalued the Tinder stock options. When the stock options were converted into Match stock, these insiders say they got less value. You might recall I discussed just last week how Match Group was crowing about the amount Tinder was contributing to Match Group's revenues. Also, quick check-in on Crypto.

entire crypto space is crashing this week, but this time the move down is being led by Ethereum. The market cap of Ethereum was down 10% just today at the time of this recording, after falling 17% yesterday, and more than 28% overall just since August 7th. It's the suspected reason for this price drop that I find interesting. So often when you hear about an initial coin offering, that coin has basically raised money using Ethereum as the underlying currency. That's why some people are so bullish on Ethereum. It's sort of a hybrid currency slash software layer that creates the infrastructure that allows thousands of these so-called alt-coin projects.

So what people are suspecting is happening is that all of those high-profile ICOs that we've had recently, well, once you've successfully done an ICO, at some point, you have to cash out. You have to convert all of that into fiat currency so that you can, you know, develop the product that you raise the money to work on. So over the past year, the theory goes, the price of Ethereum had been propped up by thousands of these successful initial coin offerings. Now, all of those ICOs are selling their Ethereum all at once, thus crashing the price. And finally, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that Andresen Horowitz is raising a new venture capital fund of around $15 million to be led by black celebrity investors. The goal is to boost diversity in tech investment, and among the high-profile limited partners will be Kevin Durant. Will Smith and Essence magazine publisher Rishalue Dennis, as the Wall Street Journal notes,

around 58% of venture capitalists are both white and male, and only about 3% of VC partners are black. Sorry about that sassy pun at the beginning of the show there. That's probably the grossest pun I've ever attempted. I've been your host, Brian McCullough. I sometimes try out my puns on Twitter, so follow me there at Brian MCC, if so inclined. Talk to you tomorrow.