Tech Brew Ride Home - Tue. 8/7 - Voting Via App

Episode Date: August 7, 2018

Voting via app will be tested during the midterms, Old Bitcoin Money and New Bitcoin money are in a power struggle, the truth about how we use Alexa, and a new combatant joins the fray in the Streaming Video Wars. Links:West Virginia to introduce mobile phone voting for midterm elections (CNN Tech)A Culture War Is Brewing Between Bitcoin’s Old and New Money (Bloomberg)Wall Street isn’t boosting bitcoin (Quartz)Twitter says Alex Jones and InfoWars accounts don't violate policy, will remain live for now (CNBC)The Reality Behind Voice Shopping Hype (The Information)Jeffrey Katzenberg’s ‘NewTV’ Startup Closes $1 Billion, All Major Studios Among Investors (Variety)Cloudflare Stream makes it easy (and cheap) for developers to work with video (TNW)Airbnb for Work claims 700,000 businesses as bookings tripled for second year in a row (VentureBeat) 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 7th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, voting via app will be tested during the midterms.

Old Bitcoin money and new Bitcoin money are in a power struggle. The truth about how we actually use our Alexa's. And a new combatant joins the fray in the streaming video wars. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. The state of West Virginia is going to introduce mobile phone. voting just in time for the upcoming midterm elections. West Virginia military personnel and service members overseas will be the first in the country to cast federal election ballots using a smartphone app from a company called VOTS.

Quote, there is nobody that deserves the right to vote any more than the guys that are out there and the women that are out there putting their lives on the line for us, West Virginia Secretary of State Mack Warner said. On the Votes platform, the ballots are anonymized and put on a blockchain-based public ledger. Votes' platform was tested in two counties during primary elections earlier this year, and apparently the tests went off without a hitch. But this is controversial nonetheless. Quoting now from CNN Tech, mobile voting is a horrific idea.

Joseph Lorenzo Hall, the chief technologist at the Center for Democracy and Technology, told CNN, in an email. It's internet voting on people's horribly secured devices over our horrible networks to servers that are very difficult to secure without a physical paper record of the vote, end quote. Marian K. Schneider, president of the election integrity watchdog group verified voting, was even more blunt. Asked if she thought mobile voting is a good idea, she said the short answer is no. Even if the votes app is secure, something Schneider said she could not confirm. because her organization has not vetted it. The, quote, attack area is much broader, unquote, under mobile voting,

meaning it creates far more opportunities for hacking and meddling. She also worries about the lack of a paper trail for electronic votes. Undetectable changes that could occur in transit, she said, end quote. This skepticism was shared online on Twitter by security expert Kevin Beaumont. Quote, this is going to backfire. West Virginia, our move. to mobile phone voting for this midterm election. Software is a blockchain voting system by Votes, a 2018 startup with $2 million in funding. The Votes website is running on a box with out-of-date

SSH, Apache, multiple CVSS9+, PPP, etc. Pop 3 to the internet, NTP3, Plesk from 2009. The database on Azure has an admin panel on Port 80. 80, no SSL. I'm off to bed. Speaking of the blockchain, a couple of interesting stories from that world. For years, the operating thesis in Bitcoin circles was once big institutional and Wall Street money started taking Bitcoin seriously, the cryptocurrency would gain mainstream legitimacy, big pools of money would be attracted to it, and it would seem to logically follow that the price would inevitably skyrocket.

But so far, that has not proven to be the case. Bitcoin has actually fallen 50% since December 10th when the first futures contract was launched by CBOE Global. Several different futures trading platforms have been launched subsequently, and major Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs have been launching various cryptocurrency trading operations as well. Even the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange announced a trading platform it is developing last week called Backed. And yet the price of Bitcoin remains stagnant. quoting from a court's piece about this. Kenneth Griffin, the founder of the hedge fund group Citadel, said last month that he doesn't

have a single portfolio manager who has told me we should buy crypto. In its mid-year investment research outlook, Goldman's strategists said they expect further Bitcoin declines because it doesn't fulfill the role of money. By their reckoning, it's not a medium of exchange, a unit of measurement, or a store of value, end quote. Meanwhile, Bloomberg is reporting on. on a culture war that is brewing between Bitcoin's old and new money. Many of the earliest adopters who helped move the project forward early on and who worked with Satoshi Nakamoto himself before he disappeared still sit on various

foundation boards and run original project websites like Bitcoin.org. They also cling philosophically to the hardcore libertarian and almost anarcho-capitalist views that a lot of the early Bitcoin adopters held. Oh, and they got very, very rich, thanks to their original Bitcoin holdings. The problem is a lot of people have flocked to Bitcoin over the last few years, a lot of new people who might not have gotten as rich as the OGs, and are more inclined to want to see Bitcoin adopted by places like banks and Wall Street and are less dogmatic about their philosophical vision for the cryptocurrency. Quoting from Bloomberg, a sort of hyper-libertarian outlook was common among early adopters. It's not the prevailing point of view for today's Bitcoin pragmatists.

Support from financial institutions and pension funds are believed to be key to increasing the digital currency's price. Bitcoin has a market cap of about 130 billion, and billions more have been invested in companies built around it. Quote, Bitcoin is an excellent candidate to become a global reserve currency. There's going to be some competition for control, said Bruce Rout, a mathematician who participated in the GitHub discussion. That's an enormous amount of power and an enormous amount of money, end quote. So the New Guard is trying to rest some of that power from the Old Guard. Power struggles between the idealistic Old Guard and the Pragmatic New Guard. Blockchain enthusiasts like to say that crypto is the biggest revolution since the Internet.

and whether they know it or not, this exact sort of power struggle went on briefly as the internet went mainstream. Spoiler alert, the new guard ended up coming out on top. Remember how yesterday I said that basically everyone was banning Alex Jones to one degree or another? At one point yesterday morning, we were basically just waiting around for other shoes to drop. And it turned out that one notable shoe never did. Twitter said yesterday that Alex Jones and Infowars accounts on their platform do not violate its user policies and will leave them live for now. Quote, a Twitter spokesperson told CNBC on Monday that the accounts do not violate the company's policies. The company also said it is constantly moderating content on its platform and will take action if it needs to,

and that much of the content posted to other platforms doesn't make it to Twitter, end quote. Jones himself actually took to Twitter yesterday to ask, quote, what conservative news outlet will be next, end quote. Jones also posted to Periscope, which is a video platform wholly owned by Twitter. Interesting information out of the information about the smart speaker slash smart assistant market. The information estimates that around 50 million Alexa devices have been sold to date. Amazon has been touting a whole range of uses for Alexa, of course, from playing music, obviously, to controlling your smart home. But the original use case for Alexa, at least the way Amazon originally positioned it, was as a convenient way to shop.

You know, hey, smart speaker. I'm trying not to trigger your device. Hey, smart speaker, order more milk. Well, according to the information, quote, only a small fraction of smart speaker owners use them to shop. And the few who do try it don't bother again. The information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon's Alexa Intelligent Assistant, mostly Amazon's own Echo line of speakers, have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, only 2%, according to two people briefed on the company's internal figures.

Of the people who did buy something using Alexa Voice Shopping, about 90% didn't try it again, one of the people said. A larger number, 20%, have engaged more broadly with Alexa voice shopping by using commands like, What are my deals and Where is My Stuff to track orders that were likely made on other devices? Clearly, voice shopping is not yet in the stage of being a mass market product, the person said, end quote. What do people use smart devices for? Largely answering simple questions about things like the weather or sports scores, setting timers and playing music, radio stations, and podcasts.

Patrick Givens, who develops skills for Alexa and Google Assistant on behalf of brands, told the information, quote, we've done a lot of work to manage back the expectations to say, we don't expect a high volume of purchase here right away. We would definitely think of commerce and voice today as a space to try to build learnings right now, but not a place where we expect to see meaningful purchase volume for the foreseeable future. There is a new player in the streaming video wars, New TV, a startup founded by Hollywood Uber mogul, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and led by former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, announced today

that it has raised a $1 billion seed round that basically all of Hollywood kicked in money for. Investors in New TV include Disney, NBC Universal, Vibe, Com, Lionsgate, MGM, Entertainment One, but also John Malone's Liberty Global, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, and Alibaba. What is new TV going to do differently? Quoting from Variety, New TV is aiming to launch by the end of 2019 with a premium lineup of original short-form series, comprising episodes of 10 minutes each. The service will have two subscription tiers, an advertising free plan and advertising, an advertising light option, a la Hulu, according to Whitman.

The opportunity for a service focused on mobile entertainment is huge, as the world's billions of smartphone users watch an increasing amount of video on their devices, according to Katzenberg, formerly the CEO of DreamWorks Animation and chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Quote, we don't consider this competitive with Hulu or HBO or Netflix or the networks, he said. It's a completely different use case. end quote. Of course, as variety notes, there's nothing at all to stop Netflix or others from doing short-form content as well. Edmund Lee pointed out on Twitter that New TV, which is apparently a placeholder name, BT-dubs, originally was looking to raise $2 billion, but could only get the one.

And New TV doesn't plan to own any of the content it streams, content merely to be a distributor. So that could be one reason why every studio. and town wanted in. This is, in essence, Hulu 2.0, more than it's a Netflix killer. Speaking of streaming video, if you're a developer and you've wanted to insert or integrate video into a website or application you're building,

you've basically only had a few options up till now. YouTube, Vimeo, maybe Facebook. But now you can roll your own video platform thanks to the official launch of Cloudflare Stream, announced in beta a year ago, Cloudflare Stream is the full stack of video, including encoding, content delivery, and playback. Cloudflare claims that developers can cut costs in half by moving to stream. The next web describes the product thusly. In the same way, Stripe made it easy for sites to accept credit card payments without any expertise in the complex and murky world of payment gateways.

Cloudflare wants to do the same for video, and by the company's own attestation, it's pretty easy to use, end quote. The base product costs $1 per thousand minutes of video viewed, and if you store the content using Cloudflare's infrastructure, you pay $5 per thousand minutes of video stored. Finally, today, Airbnb's expansion into business travel seems to be paying off swimmingly. The product known as Airbnb for work now boasts that 700,000 companies are using the program up from 250,000 last year. Airbnb also said that bookings on the service have roughly tripled. Quoting from Venture Beat, although business travelers may have unofficially used Airbnb to book business accommodations since its inception, in 2014, the company debuted a new business-focused product with a centralized booking platform that includes travel itineraries, billing, and other financial reporting data. This launched globally in 2015.

In the intervening years, Airbnb has doubled down on its growth while focusing on the entire travel experience as well as embracing sublets. And it recently rolled out new listings categories to allow users to find properties based on more specific criteria. It also hit its first full year of profitability and is now valued at a reported $31 billion. This means Airbnb is worth more than most of the major hotel chains and the number of listings on Airbnb now exceeds that of the world's top five hotel chains combined.

And that's all for today. As always, I've been your host, Brian McCullough. Follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC and follow the TechMeme editors for real-time headline tweets at TechMeme. And one last nudge on this. We're sitting at 198 reviews on Apple Podcasts. If you've not rated or reviewed, come on.

Help me out with my OCD, man. Be the person to put us over a clean 200. Whoever does it, I'll read your review out on the next episode. Talk to you tomorrow.