Tech Brew Ride Home - Tuesday, Mar. 13, 2018 - Trump trumps Broadcom

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Trump trumps Broadcom, Larry Page and flying taxis, alleged flaws in AMD chips, Spotify playlist payola, checking in with Lyft, ranking tech brands and WWDC dates are announced. Credits: Produced by @brianmcc and the @techmeme staff Music by @jpschwinghamer 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. Hello, welcome to the tech meme ride home for Tuesday, March 13th, 2018. Today, Trump Trump's Broadcom, Larry Page has flying taxis, alleged flaws in AMD chips, Spotify playlist payola, checking in with Lyft, ranking the tech brands, and

WWDC dates are announced. Here's what you missed when you were busy at work today in the world of tech. When I first started covering the Broadcom Qualcomm saga last week, I was almost apologetic about it. I felt like I had to assure you guys that there was more to this story than just consolidation in the chip industry. Well, I was more right than even I could have suspected. I'm sure you've heard the news by now that President Trump, in a presidential order, blocked the proposed acquisition, citing national security grounds and prohibiting all 15 of Broadcom. Com's proposed candidates for Qualcomm's board from standing for election.

For more on the buildup to this story, I would refer you to last week's show and to yesterday's show. But for even more context, if you search around, you can easily find the video of President Trump giving a press conference with Broadcom CEO, Hock Tan, only last November, where Trump called Tan a, quote, great, great executive. and Broadcom, quote, one of the really great, great companies, end quote. But as this is a story that has moved far beyond tech into the realm of geopolitics and global finance generally, I'll turn to some smarter folk than me for even greater context. In today's deal book in the New York Times,

Andrew Ross Sorkin and Michael de La Mercede reported that few dealmakers the pair had reached out to for comment can recall such a dramatic scenario taking place before. Sorkin said that he had some big questions after this brouhaha. Number one, did Broadcom, which sped up its efforts to move its headquarters to the U.S. in apparent defiance of Cephas's orders, he means the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. By doing that, did Broadcom misplay the situation?

And also, given the news, now, does any non-U.S. bidder for an American company need to worry about CFAS going forward. Scott Kennedy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies seem to agree, telling Bloomberg, quote, this decision hangs a huge not-for-sale sign on just about every American semiconductor firm. Brooke Sutherland of Bloomberg's gadfly notes that this is now at least the third prominent deal that has fallen apart under Cephas's scrutiny during, the Trump administration.

And perhaps referring to the photo op from just four months ago said, quote, this should be a warning for future dealmakers and would be friends of Trump. He's going to take America first to the extreme. Paul Therot blogged about the implications to the broader industry, saying, quote, Broadcom's hostile takeover bid for Qualcomm threatened to disrupt an industry-wide transition to the next era of mobile computing, in which speedy 5G networking will essentially erase the access speed differences

between local and remote data. The company had been writing high and innovating quickly, but its acquisition by Broadcom, which has been pushed to the sidelines, threatened to ground everything to a halt. Ben Thompson wrote that the Trump administration got this right, writing that the, quote, entire issue is that the structure of the deal itself said far more clearly than anything else

that Broadcom wanted to feast off of Qualcomm's past innovations and contribute far less to future ones than Qualcomm would on its own. And what of Intel, who was also looking to block the deal, if you'll remember, and was perhaps willing to go so far as to attempt a hostile takeover bit of Broadcom to do so? Perhaps you remember the final quote from Jean-Louis Gass piece over the weekend that prompted my segment yesterday, quote, in the end, Intel's best hope might lie in a stalemate, no broadcom-qualcom transaction, no suicidal broadcom acquisition. Well, that has come to pass.

So can Intel now breathe a sigh of relief, or is consolidation among semiconductors now pretty much inevitable? Also in today's edition of Deal Book, Andrew Ross-Serkan broke an unusual story about Larry Page and self-driving planes. On the South Island of New Zealand, since October, a company called Kitty Hawk has been running test flights of a sort of cross between a small plane and a drone. The aircraft can take off like a helicopter and then fly like a plane, and apparently it can also fly without a pilot.

Kitty Hawk is run by Sebastian Thrun, who, as the director of Google X, helped start Google's autonomous car unit. And today, Kitty Hawk is slated to announce alongside the Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardairn, that Kitty Hawk has been certified to test its autonomous planes and a network of commercial flying taxis, which will operate in New Zealand possibly in as little as three years. The aircraft, known as Cora, have a wingspan of 36 feet with a dozen rotors can fly about 62 miles and carry as many as two passengers. In addition to hopefully operating autonomously, the aircraft are completely battery powered. In an email to deal book, Prime Minister Ardairn said that the certification of these test flights was, quote,

about sending the message to the world that New Zealand's doors are open for people with great ideas who want to turn them into reality. It's probably important to note that our understanding is that Kitty Hawk is a personal investment by Page, the chief executive of Google's parent alphabet. But as you know, that famous quote from Peter Thiel, we wanted flying cars and instead we got 140 characters. Well, we now have tweets with 280 characters. And maybe thanks to Larry Page, we're going to get our Jetson's future after all with a sort of flying version of Uber-like taxis. Security researchers today announced that they have discovered 13 alleged critical security flaws in AMD's Risen and Epic processors

that could allow attackers access to sensitive data in the so-called secure part of the processor, the part where passwords and encryption keys are typically stored. The announcement was made by CTS Labs in Israeli security company and were made public after the firm gave AMD a mere 24 hours notice that, they would be publishing their report. Standard practice when vulnerabilities are found is generally to give the companies a 90-day window before going public in order to allow

for the companies to attempt to patch the given problem. AMD said it was investigating the report and needed to understand the merit and methodology of the findings before moving forward. The company said it remained committed to ensuring the safety of users and that security remained a time. top priority.

Late today, Motherboard reported that independent evaluators had tested the vulnerabilities and said, quote, each of them works as described. This report, of course, comes after the revelations of the meltdown and specter security flaws that affected Intel and arm chips. When the meltdown and specter flaws were revealed in January, AMD made note that its chips were not affected. On Twitter, Brad Sam said, Remember when AMD was smug about Intel's issues?

And at Malware Jake, security expert Jake Williams asked, Was the 24-hour disclosure timeline for new AMD hardware flaws fair to AMD? Before answering, recall that it was an AMD engineer carelessly posting to an open mailing list that broke the embargo for Meltdown and Specter. Well, we've heard of people pay. for Twitter followers, and in the distant past there was a marketplace for businesses buying likes. But with the increasing popularity of streaming music, it now seems that there is a booming black market for Spotify playlists. Over at the Daily Dot, Austin Powell reports on a sort of paula practice, whereby aspiring music artists are paying services to add their songs to influential or highly followed Spotify playlists.

and paying the curators of those playlists to do so. The reason for doing this is obvious. Spotify has 159 million active users worldwide and 71 million paid subscribers. Spotify's own analytics say that playlist account for nearly one-third of all listening on the platform, and that's up from less than 20% a few years ago. So if you get your song added to a podcast,

popular playlist, like say, rap caviar, which has 8 million followers, you can have hundreds of thousands of streams overnight. And what's more, getting added to a playlist seems to be a very strong signal for Spotify's own algorithms, which determine which songs should be suggested to listeners. Says Phil Waldorf, the co-founder of the indie music label Dead Oceans, quote, The added value of a playlist ad is multifaceted, on a basic. level, the revenue generated from extra plays is a nice windfall. But the hope is that the song performs well and then gets added on other playlists. A strong playlist ad is a building block to more editorial support, and we hope some discovery happens along the way, end quote. Spotify has

its own playlists that it curates and has a reported 150-person editorial staff to generate them, but aspiring artists and even some startup artist agencies are targeting influential playlists operated by listeners. For example, the Peace Profiles Spotlister, founded by two 21-year-old college students at New York University, one of several new services that sells access to Spotify users. Spotify is adamant that such payola or pay-to-play schemes are expressly forbidden on the service, but the practice seems to go on nonetheless. Cody Patrick, the owner of Organic Music Marketing, which manages Atlanta area hip-hop artists,

reports that often it's the operators of the playlist themselves that are the ones bringing money into the equation. Said Patrick in the Daily Dot piece, quote, I've had some curators who run multiple playlists offer me monthly retainers to be in their playlist for a certain amount of time. I've seen people offer level.

You pay this much in the top 10, this much to be in the middle, this much to be in the circulation period, end quote. And artists seem to be willing to play ball. Tommy King, in Atlanta rapper profiled in the piece, suggests that everything old is new again, at least in the music business, saying, quote, it's not really a big secret. Everything costs money. It's just part of the game. In a related music industry story, but one not related to Paola, of course, At South by Southwest yesterday, Apple's Eddie Q spoke on a panel, and let's slip that Apple music now has 38 million subscribers.

As BGR notes, Apple just last month, said it had 36 million subscribers, so that new number would represent 5% growth in just about a month. Quick check in here with Lyft for a moment. Its ride-hailing competitor Uber might get most of the headlines, but Lyft claims recently that its growth. its revenues nearly three times faster than its competitor. TechCrunch reported that in fiscal year 2017, Lyft's revenues grew to $1 billion as measured by GAAP standards, and that the company had a particularly strong Q4 with revenues growing 168% compared to Uber's reported revenue growth of 61%

over the same period of time. Lyft told TechCrunch it is performing more than 10 million rides per week across all its products and platforms, and that it expected its quarter ending March 31st would show 100% year-on-year growth, representing the 20th consecutive quarter that it had done so. Every year since 1999, the polling firm Harris has released a ranking of brand reputation. The poll asks 26,000 U.S. adults, their opinions of the biggest companies and brands in the world. in the results announced today there were some big fluctuations in the reputations of some of tech's biggest names Apple for example dropped to 29th from last year's ranking of fifth and Google dropped from last year's ranking of 8th all the way down to 28th

Apple had been ranked as highly as number two as recently as 2016 maintaining the top spot this year was Amazon for the the third consecutive year. CEO of Harris poll, John Gerzema, speculated that Apple and Google's rankings were affected by the fact that the companies hadn't released as many, quote, attention-grabbing products

as they had done in recent years, while Amazon's recent purchase of Whole Foods might have kept that company front and center in consumers' minds. Other notable tech names in the poll, Tesla climbed from number nine to number three, and Facebook was up year over year, reaching number 51.

It's notable that the highest Facebook has ever ranked on this survey was when it came in at number 28 in 2014. I guess the story here is that people love using Facebook, but they don't necessarily love Facebook the company. A full rundown of the top five in the Harris poll, irrespective of whether their tech companies or not, Amazon stayed at number one, as I mentioned. Wegman's food came in at number two. Tesla came in at number three. Chick-fil-A number four, and the Walt Disney Company came in at number five. Finally, today, Apple announced this afternoon that WWDC 2018 will run from June 4th through June 8th. And for the second year in a row, it will be held at San Jose's McArney Convention Center.

Registration for the $1,59 tickets, which will be assigned via lottery, will be open until Thursday, March, 22nd. And that's all for today. The TechMeme Ride Home was produced by myself, Brian McCullough, and the wonderful editors at TechMeme.com. You can follow me on Twitter at Brian MCC, and we'll be back with you tomorrow to do it all over again.