Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/02 – Will Poker Be The Killer App For The Metaverse?

Starting point is 00:00:00 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 Wednesday, March 2nd, 22. I'm Brian McCullough today. As of right now, you can no longer buy an iPhone in Russia. Big recall from Fitbit because their smart watches might burn you. Meta tries to be transparent in a very meta way by redacting a key detail from a transparency report. And could poker be the killer app the Metaverse has been waiting for? Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Today in Ukraine War News, through the lens of the tech industry, of course, Apple has paused all product sales in Russia, also removed RT News and Sputnik News from the app store outside of

Starting point is 00:01:16 Russia, and also disabled Apple Maps' live traffic in Ukraine, quoting Mac rumors. Apple today confirmed that it has stopped all product sales from its online website in Russia, which means customers in Russia can no longer purchase Macs, iPhones, iPads, and other Apple devices, attempting to make a purchase from the Russia's store results in a delivery unavailable result when trying to add a product to the online cart. Apple said in a statement that it has also stopped all exports into the sales channel in the country and disabled traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a safety and precautionary measure for Ukrainian citizens. We are deeply concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and stand with all the people who

Starting point is 00:01:56 are suffering as a result of the violence. We are supporting humanitarian efforts, providing aid for the unfolding refugee crisis and are doing all we can to support our teams in the region, said Apple in a statement. Apple CEO Tim Cook explained the same info in a letter sent out to employees and provided information on how Apple employees can donate. Apple will be matching all donations at a rate of two to one for eligible organizations retroactive for donations made since February 25th. As of now, App Store Access has not been eliminated in Russia, but Apple Pay has been limited and major banks in Russia are not able to use the service. RT News and Sputnik news have been removed from the App Store outside of Russia in addition to Apple's other measures, end quote.

Starting point is 00:02:39 Following Apple announcing this, Google said it too will remove RT and Sputnik apps from the Play Store after removing Russian state outlets from its news features. Meta says it will demote content linking to Russian state media outlets on Facebook and Instagram globally and has rolled out encrypted Instagram DMs in Ukraine and Russia. So now linking to Russian state content will penalize you in their algorithms, I guess. And of course, encrypted DMs, I guess the idea there is for people to organize against Russia without Russia being able to track such organization or communications. And that Maps thing continues to be an issue. Google Maps is removing newly added user content like pins in Russia and Ukraine, as well as Belarus, amid claims of that.

Starting point is 00:03:27 that sort of data being useful in coordinating Russian military activity. But how is the Ukraine war playing out on Wikipedia? Well, apparently Russian Wikipedia editors decided to call the invasion what it is, rejecting the Kremlin's narrative. Keep in mind that each country's Wikipedia is technically quasi-independent. Quoting Slate, Wikipedia editors are required to construct the encyclopedia pages using reliable sources. The policies generally prohibit Russia's state media outlets, which are seen as unreliable from being used in citations. For instance, English Wikipedia's source guidelines state the following about the publication Russia today. Quote, there is consensus that RT is an unreliable source, a mouthpiece of the Russian government

Starting point is 00:04:12 that engages in propaganda and disinformation, end quote. A few editors of the Russian Wikipedia repeated the Kremlin's position pushed without basis that Russia is on a peacekeeping mission. Quote, the Russian side does not consider this a war, but a special operation to demilitarize and denotify Ukraine, wrote Russian editor Alexander Poyodin. Other Russians argued that the word invasion was inflammatory and violated Wikipedia's policy to present information from a neutral point of view. Note how this maneuver weaponizes the concept of neutrality to conceal and mischaracterize the underlying facts.

Starting point is 00:04:48 Ultimately, Russian Wikipedia editors determined that the word invasion was accurate and reach an agreement to preserve that word in the article's title. As the Russian editor pessimist put it, quote, Russian troops invaded the territory of Ukraine. It's just a fact, not a point of view, end quote. Today's readers of Russian Wikipedia will find an article describing their country's invasion of their neighbor, end quote. By the way, I saw a news headline shortly after seeing that, that suggested that the Russian government is threatening to ban Wikipedia in the country.

Starting point is 00:05:19 What else? Roku says it will no longer offer. for RT News among its channels globally after earlier pulling the Russian state-controlled TV network from its services in Europe. Snap has halted ads in Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, pledging $15 million to relief organizations in Ukraine, and also helping relocate more than 300 Ukrainian staff of its AR platform luxury. Indeed, stories continue to abound of tech companies worried about their remote workers and staff based in Ukraine. Quote, the Ukrainian IT industry consists of over 4,000 local IT service companies and more than 110 leading global companies have established

Starting point is 00:05:56 subsidiaries in the country. Samsung, Microsoft, Ring, Snap, Magento, Plarium, Boeing, Siemens, Erickson are among the few tech companies that have established their R&D sector in Ukraine. Ukraine has been one of Europe's leading countries in terms of engineering graduates, producing twice as many annually as nations such as Britain and Poland. The country produces over 130,000 engineering graduates and 16,000 IT graduates annually. Ukraine's capital is the largest IT hub in the country and is home to over a thousand startups and product companies. The country has been the birthplace of major tech companies that have created a global impact with their products and solutions, for example. Grammarly, a grammar solution platform headquartered both in Ukraine and America, was founded by three Ukrainian entrepreneurs.

Starting point is 00:06:40 The company is currently valued at $13 billion. GitLab, a popular DevOps collaboration platform based out of Ukraine, was founded in 2014, end quote. Fitbit is recalling Fitbit Ionic smartwatches after receiving 118 reports of burn injuries. Fitbit sold around 1 million units of the ionic in the U.S. and around 693,000 internationally. Quoting in Gadget. Fitbit has issued a voluntary recall for ionic smartwatches that it manufactured and sold from 2017 through 2020. In its announcement, it explained that the model's lithium ion battery can overheat and pose a burn hazard in, quote, very limited instances. According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Fitbit received at least 174 reports of the watches battery overheating.

Starting point is 00:07:31 It received 78 reports of burn injuries that include two second-degree and four third-degree burns in the U.S., as well as 40 reports of burn injuries from other regions. The company which stopped selling the product in 2020 before being acquired by Google sold sold around a million ionic smartwatches in the U.S. While 118 reports of burn injuries might be a small percentage of the total number of units sold, Fitbit said it's taking, quote, this action out of an abundance of caution, end quote. Intel, AMD, ARMC, Samsung, and others have introduced the Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express, or UCIE Consortium seeking to standardize die-to-die designs. Sounds a bit in the weeds, but it's apparently pretty important, quoting Tom's hardware. The benefits of chiplets, like reduced costs and using different types of process nodes in a single package, are well known and essential

Starting point is 00:08:25 as chipmakers grapple with increasingly difficult scaling issues in the waning light of Moore's Law. The long-term vision for chipplets has always been for chipmakers to be able to develop their own types of specialized chiplets and then pair them with off-the-shelf chipplet designs from other companies, thus allowing them to build their own chips in Lego-like fashion to improve time to market while reducing costs. However, the lack of a standardized connection between chipplets has led to a wide range of customized proprietary interconnects, so modern chipplets certainly aren't plug-in-play with other designs. Additionally, the industry has long suffered from a glaring lack of standardized validation and verification for chiplet designs and interconnects, making an off-the-shelf chiplet ecosystem impossible. This new UCIE interconnect will enable a standardized connection between chiplets like cores, memory, and I.O that looks and operates similar to on-dye connections, while also enabling off-dye connections to other componentry.

Starting point is 00:09:20 The designs can even enable low enough latency and high enough bandwidth for rack-scale designs. and relies on existing protocols like PCIE and CXL, end quote. For the first time, last year, in the interest of transparency, meta began releasing a widely viewed content report outlining what content was shared most on their various platforms. Well, Meta went and released its report for Q4 of 2021, but there's one problem. This report shows that the most viewed Facebook page for that quarter came from a banned account, and META won't reveal what account that was. Quoting social media today.

Starting point is 00:10:09 The first listed page here, the most viewed Facebook page for the quarter in the report that META is using to show its platform isn't a negative influence, has actually been banned by META itself for violating its community standards. That's not a great look, while the rest of the listings in the report also, once again, highlight that spam. junk and random pages, a tire lettering company letters to Santa via UPS, also gained major traction throughout the period. Really, this latest report further underlines concerns with Facebook's distribution as a page that it's identified as showing questionable posts for whatever reason. Meta won't clarify the details, has gained huge traction in the app before Meta eventually

Starting point is 00:10:48 shut it down. Worth also noting that this report covers a three-month period. In this case, the period between October 1st and December 31st, which means that it's probably less likely to see news content listed anyway, as the news cycle changes quickly and major news stories only gain traction on any given day, end quote. The unknown Facebook page in question in the report received 121.8 million views. It's become clear that consolidation has come for the gaming industry, as every tech platform in the world now feels like it needs to own its own gaming arsenal, either for their cloud businesses or for their consumer businesses or what have you.

Starting point is 00:11:31 In the background, though, remember that Netflix has made noises about getting into gaming as a way to keep growing now that they seem to be hitting a wall in terms of finding new video streaming subscribers. To that end, news that Netflix has acquired Finnish game developer Next Games for around $72 million. Next Games specializes in games based on entertainment franchises such as Stranger Things, quoting Money Control. Founded in 2013, NextGames is the first publicly listed. mobile game developer and publisher in Finland, specializing in games based on entertainment franchises, such as movies, television series, or books. In October 2021, the company released Stranger Things Puzzletails, a role-playing game based on the streaming giants hit 80s horror drama series. Led by Temu Hutananin, next games reported sales of around $30.2 million in 2020,

Starting point is 00:12:19 with 95% of revenues coming from in-game purchases. Apart from Stranger Things, the company has developed games based on the popular television series The Walking Dead. It started publicly trading on NASDAQ First North Finland in 2017 and had around 120 employees at the end of 2021. Netflix forayed into mobile games in November last year and started plans in January to expand its game's portfolio across both casual and core gaming genres in 2022. One of the key ways of accelerating this process is through acquisitions to build an internal development capacity for its own game studio.

Starting point is 00:12:52 During the company's earnings conference call in January, Netflix C.O. Greg Peters had termed it as, quote, a huge long-term multi-year opportunity, end quote. That said, Netflix has traditionally been very selective about acquisitions with only four publicly disclosed deals across more than two decades, including the purchase of its first game studio, night school studio, in September 2021, end quote. Finally today, as I think I said on a recent bonus episode, these days when I get requests to be interviewed by various outlets, they tend to want to talk to me about my book and they want to ask me how the lessons of the early web and the internet era might apply to crypto and the

Starting point is 00:13:37 metaverse. In other words, they tend to want to ask me what made the web take off and could similar things make crypto and web three take off? And the answer I usually give is the web took off on its own. As soon as the doors were flung open, people just started doing things without really being asked or prompted to. Three things in particular. Porn, commerce, buying and selling things, and just talking to each other. Email at first, but also early chat and message boards, and the talking to each other was often very much tied up with the porn and commerce aspects, of course. Now, I also end up wondering in these interviews out loud why things haven't actually been the same yet for Web3. Like, VR porn is actually fairly impressive if you've seen it, and in theory, being able to

Starting point is 00:14:24 talk to loved ones like you're in the same room with them should be a killer app. And yet, well, you've heard my skepticism that what people really want to do in the metaverse is attend remote work meetings with virtual whiteboards and clunky avatars that don't have legs. But what if gambling is a killer app that could crack open the metaverse, quoting Bloomberg. One of the busiest metaverses today is Decentraland. Visitors enter the virtual space through a web browser, choose an avatar, and are transported to a vibrant digital hub, where they can tour a replica of Sotheby's London Art Gallery, attend a virtual Paris Hilton concert, or visit a J.P. Morgan and Chase company Lounge, featuring a portrait of Jamie Diamond. As it turns out, though, the place people most frequently visit into Centralland is the casino. Inside, hundreds of people dressed in streetwear and sunglasses sit around or hover above poker tables, all rendered in graphics that would have looked cutting edge two decades ago on the PlayStation 2. Every few seconds, the kaching of a cash register and a burst of hand clap emoji signal someone has won. To play, guests must buy or borrow a piece of virtual swag sold by the casino, a hat, sunglasses, shirt, cigar, that can later be sold for cryptocurrency.

Starting point is 00:15:39 The poker chips can be used to upgrade the items and boost their value. The four poker rooms in DeCentraland frequently host about half of the people in its Metaverse at any given time. Gambling has served as an accelerant for many technologies over the years, and the Metaverse may be no different. However, resting a business on gambling or anything that looks like it comes with a lot of risks. regulators have recently signaled that online betting and cryptocurrencies are two of their top priorities. In Decentraland, the poker parlors, known as Ice Poker, are run by a company called DeCentral Games, which doesn't possess a gambling license in the U.S. and argues it doesn't need one. Gamers aren't directly cashing out chips for money after they play, says Ryan D. Taboda,

Starting point is 00:16:18 the company's chief operating officer, yet experts say the system exists in a gray area. Any contest or prize predicated on buying in constitutes gambling, says Jeff Ifrah. an attorney who specializes in gambling law. If you have to buy in to participate in a contest, even if the chips are free, the purchase of a prerequisite to play is a problem, end quote. DeCentraland is a fusion of the two most sought-after themes for technology investors, the Metaverse and Web3. People buy and sell the app's custom currency, Mana, M-A-N-A, which has a market value of $4.7 billion. Some 600,000 people use the app each month, according to its creative director. DeCentraland has captured headlines for hosting

Starting point is 00:16:58 a DJ performance by Deadmouse and for persuading Barbados officials to construct a virtual embassy there. But at the heart of the Metaverse's economy are its betting parlors. The partnership between gambling and new technologies goes back decades. Bally's video poker machines were already big hits in Las Vegas by 1981 when the first personal computers hit stores. Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer in 1995 and over the next couple of years, 15 online casinos ballooned into 200, generating about $1 billion in revenue for the new online gambling moguls. The original source code for Bitcoin contained references to a virtual poker game that was never released. Crypto Faithful soon fulfilled the creator's vision.

Starting point is 00:17:37 One of the early applications for Bitcoin's chief rival Ethereum was a wagering system called Auger. The top poker rooms in DeCentraland with names like Chateau Satoshi and The Stronghold. Don't bother with that formality, anyone can play as long as their character possesses the digital swag known as Ice Wearables. Decentral Games sells them on its website for about $5,000 a piece. Each one is a non-fungible token, meaning it's unique and can't be resold on marketplaces such as OpenC. Owners can also lend them out, often taking a cut of the borrowers' winnings. The main problem with the Metaverse now, even at the outset of ice poker, is the fact that it's empty, says DeCentral Games founder Miles Anthony, so we're trying to populate the Metaverse basically with this, and it seems to have worked so far, end quote.

Starting point is 00:18:23 Quick question. Every day when I am processing the show, I open up the file in Apple Music, used to be known as iTunes, of course, to edit the metadata for each individual show file. You know, I put the date on there, assign an album, in quotes, to each file that corresponds to the month it was published. I name it, you know, TechMeme Ride Home as the artist. I've done this because I don't know how the files end up showing up wherever you end up playing them. And it's not a huge time suck to do this, maybe 60 seconds at most, but should I keep doing this? Like, for example, today's file, I did not bother with the metadata. But yesterday's show, I did. So, does this affect how the episodes showed up in your pod player or say on your car's infotainment

Starting point is 00:19:23 system or whatever? If no one notices a difference, then maybe I'll stop doing the metadata. I guess I'm just old school and I was like, well, people might be saving these. files, so helping to keep them organized via the metadata could be useful. But if there's no real utility for anybody, maybe I'll stop doing it. Anyway, you tell me, if you notice a difference between today's episode and yesterday's and you want me to keep doing the metadata, please get in touch and let me know. Otherwise, I think, as I said, I'll stop doing it. Talk to you tomorrow.

Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/02 – Will Poker Be The Killer App For The Metaverse?

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