Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 04/15 – New iPhone SE!

Episode Date: April 15, 2020

Hellooooo new iPhone SE. Airbnb raises another debt round. Amazon kneecaps affiliate marketers. Now it’s Medium’s turn to face fake news (or, at least, fake experts) scrutiny. And why Houseparty is now, officially, another unlikely winner of the Coronavirus moment. Sponsors: CognitoHQ.com BuyRaycon.com/tech Podapalooza tickets at: PLZA.org Links: Apple announces the new $399 iPhone SE for 2020 (The Verge) Airbnb raises another $1bn (Financial Times) Amazon slashes commission rates for program that gives publishers a cut of sales (CNBC) Github is now free for all teams (TechCrunch) Washington AG sues Facebook for violating state political ad law (GeekWire) How Medium became the best and worst place for coronavirus news (The Verge) Houseparty Vies With Zoom to Be Homebound Chatters’ App of Choice (Bloomberg) 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 ride home for Wednesday, April 15th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Hello, new iPhone SE. Airbnb raises another debt round. Amazon Kneecaps affiliate marketers. Now it's medium's turn to face fake news, or at least fake experts, scrutiny. And Y House Party is now officially another unlikely winner of the

coronavirus moment. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It's here. Apple this morning announced an updated iPhone SE with a 4.7 inch display, touch ID, coming in 64, 128, and 256 gigabyte storage sizes, starting at $399 and shipping April 24th. So basically, this is everything we were expecting. As Dieter Bone says in The Verge, quote, The iPhone SE is essentially an iPhone 8 with a better camera and processor and a lower price tag. Although it's a relatively old design, this iPhone SE has Apple's A-13 bionic chip, the same that's available in the latest iPhone 11 and 11 pro models. That should ensure that it has a much longer lifespan than the $449 iPhone 8 model that it's replacing an Apple's lineup, which had an A-11 chip from 2017.

There won't be a plus-sized version of the second-generation iPhone SE, but the iPhone 8 Max will continue to be sold in certain markets. The processor also lets the new iPhone SE gain some new camera features. There's a single 12-mapixel camera lens on the back, along with a flash. Apple says it's using the A-13 Bionics chips to improve its smart HDR photography, which combines multiple shots into a single photo to improve lighting and detail. It also has a portrait mode with technology Apple calls monocular depth sensing. It uses machine learning to detect depth and faces, which unfortunately means that it will only work on people, not pets.

It includes optical image stabilization, and Apple says it can do cinematic stabilization on video, as well as support 4K video at 60 frames per second. The front-facing selfie camera is a 7 megapixel, and it can also do portrait mode effects, end quote. So important caveat here, this is not the small size of the original iPhone SE. This is an iPhone SE2, if you will, basically an iPhone 8 clone. so if you were pining for the size of the original SE, you're out of luck. But this new SE does only cost at the most expensive end, $549. So since this thing has a pretty solid baseline iPhone camera,

the A-13 bionic chip, the iPS display, that all means for less than $600, you can get a phone with 256 gigabytes of storage. That's a pretty good deal. If you're on a budget, max this thing out, and you'll get a phone that should be able to last you three years easy. Also, by the by, the magic keyboard with trackpad for the iPad Pro is now available to order and will arrive next week, so slightly ahead of the original May launch date. As was hinted at previously, Airbnb has indeed raised another $1 billion debt round

from investors including Apollo Global and Silver Lake. After raising that other $1 billion debt round last week, which we discussed, quoting the Financial Times. The new five-year loan carries an interest rate of seven and a half percentage points above the risk-free rate. Translation by me, that means around 9%, and is senior to the debt that Airbnb raised last week said people familiar with the deal. The company attracted about $2.5 billion of interest from investors for the offering, one of the people said. The investors declined to comment. Brian Chesky, Airbnb chief executive, said in a statement late on Tuesday, quote, all of the actions

we have taken over the last several weeks, assure that Airbnb will emerge from the storm of the pandemic even stronger, regardless of how long the storm lasts, end quote. The debt and equity funding round announced last week followed discussions with more than a dozen investors as Airbnb's business came under pressure in March. People briefed on the deal said Airbnb agreed to pay interest rates of more than 10% in that round and granted investors equity warrants valuing the company at about $15 billion, end quote. Highly unwellable. news for publishers of all sizes, publishers already battered by the new coronavirus economy, Amazon announced that it is cutting commission rates for its affiliate program starting April 21st.

The amount of the drop in commissions is dependent on the category, but in several categories, it's pretty steep. Drops of 50% or more, sometimes a lot more, quoting CNBC. Amazon has for years operated the affiliate program, which allows members to advertise and link to Amazon products in exchange for a percentage of the sales. The program drives significant revenue for online websites who link out to Amazon products in their content. It's especially important for online publishers like BuzzFeed, the New York Times and Vox Media that publish buying guides that drive readers to buy products from Amazon for a cut of the sales. Rates are being cut for a number of affiliate product categories.

For example, the affiliate cut from purchases of furniture and home improvement products has fallen from 8% to 3% while the commission rate for grocery products has slid from 5% to 1% according to a document obtained by CNBC. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to CNBC that the company notified U.S. Associates Tuesday of the fee change.

The spokesperson declined to comment on whether the decision was a result of the coronavirus pandemic, end quote. So what I'm hearing is that some of the big names like BuzzFeed or Wirecutter, which is now owned by the New York Times, of course, weren't dumb. They were prepared for this, even though a lot of media rolled out these commerce departments to take advantage of affiliate programs to say recommend the best laptop to buy or do a listicle

involving spring fashions, the bigger companies knew the rug could be pulled out from them at any time. So a lot of them negotiated their own individual deals with Amazon, not the standard rate. So bigger publishers might be fine. Yeah, though, if you're a smaller publisher, this could be Armageddon for you, or for bloggers, or for some influencers. A lot of influencers on YouTube use Amazon affiliate links, I know. As Tom Gara tweeted, I salute Amazon for its commitment to deepening the recession in digital media. And as Josh Benton tweeted, quote, revenue gods, hey news media, you should diversify your revenue streams. Media, okay, how about events? Revenue gods. All All events are canceled forever. Media. How about affiliate e-commerce?

Jeff Bezos. L-O-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-L-O-L-L. GitHub has announced private repositories with unlimited collaborators are now free. And at the same time, they have reduced the price of the paid team plan from $9 to $4 a month. Essentially, this news means that almost all of GitHub's core features are now free and paying for GitHub is now less expensive, quoting TechCrunch. That means free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all, including teams that use the service for commercial projects, as well as up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub actions, the company's

automation and CICD platform. Teams that want more advanced features like code owners or enterprise features like SAML support will still have to upgrade to a paid plan, but those now start at $4 per month and user for the team's plans instead of the previous $9 with the enterprise plan starting at $21 per month and user. When I talked to him earlier this week, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman stressed that this move had long been on the roadmap and isn't a limited promotion motivated by the current COVID-19 pandemic. This is something we plan to do and have wanted to do for a long time since essentially we did the acquisition.

And getting to this point to do it until now when it became a high-prison. priority, Friedman said. But it's definitely something that we wanted to do, and I mean, this is a big flipping deal, end quote. GitHub has always pursued the freemium playbook, but after the Microsoft acquisition, it's just becoming clear that it's only accelerating that playbook. Remember, the angle here for Microsoft is to capture the entire developer stack for an entire generation. So as ever, with Platform Plays, price is no object when you're playing the long game. Not a good day for GitLab, though, I guess. Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson has announced that he is suing Facebook,

saying the company has violated its commitment not to sell political ads in his state, quoting Geekwire. It's the second time Ferguson has sought legal recourse from Facebook for violating a law that requires any entity selling political ads to maintain a publicly available database of those ads and details on who purchased them. Facebook settled the first lawsuit by agreeing to pay a $238,000 fine in 2018. Washington settled a separate lawsuit with Google over the same issue at the same time. Facebook said that it would stop selling political ads in Washington rather than comply with the law, though the court did not require that outcome. Ferguson's office claims Facebook continued selling political ads in Washington despite that

commitment. News reports over the past two years have corroborated the claim. The new lawsuit filed in King County Superior Court claims Facebook sold ads to at least 171 political committees in Washington State generating at least $525,000 in revenue. Those findings come from investigations by the Washington State Public Disclosure Commission and Attorney General's Office, end quote. The whole COVID era has turned over a lot of rocks that maybe we didn't expect would reveal creepy crawlies underneath all of the sudden. I mean, who would have believed me if in January I had said that Zoom would have the big privacy scandal of the year, although how many normal people had even heard of Zoom back then. And now it's Medium's turn.

Medium, that sort of blogging, sort of publishing platform for VC essays and thinly veiled press releases mostly, but also a lot of interesting stuff. Turns out that in the age of Corona, Medium is encountering the same sort of content issues that other platforms have been struggling with for years. i.e. critics say medium's opaque moderation regime and user-created content relating to COVID-19 specifically has allowed misinformation about the disease to spread because on medium it's hard to tell who's an expert and who's not. The decision to curate some content to hire professional journalists and promote verified articles has made it harder to tell fact from fiction on the platform. While user-generated pieces now have a warning at the top telling users the content isn't fact-checked, They look otherwise identical to those written by medical experts or reporters.

In some ways, this is the promise of Medium to make the work of amateurs look professional. Reading a 2000-word article that contains misinformation about COVID-19 also seems notably different than reading a few of the same ideas in a tweet. It might not have mattered when Medium was a home for productivity hacks, but coronavirus misinformation could put people's lives at risk. The situation has forced Medium to wade deeper into the waters of content moderation where big tech firms have been floundering for years. Now the platform that was built as a home for the world's unique perspectives is in the position of deciding which perspectives actually matter,

end quote. The piece goes on to highlight some of the recent controversies that you may be aware of if you've been paying attention to COVID news, viral articles taken down, other articles going viral despite the author's dubious backgrounds. But as the piece also points out, I mean, things are moving so fast right now. Two months ago, the conventional wisdom was that people shouldn't wear face masks. And so if you posted something on Medium advocating that people should wear masks, you probably have faced intense blowback. Now, of course, the CDC is urging everyone to wear face masks. I'd say that what's wrong with Medium now is exactly what's plaguing all of media full stop. It's impossible to know up from down anymore,

even if you try to stay on top of it every hour of every day and even do this sort of thing for a living. And one more winner of the coronavirus era, if it's not too gauche, to label it that way, House Party. The group video chat app has seen 50 million signups in the past month alone and has been the most downloaded social networking app in the U.S. App Store every day since March 20th. quoting Bloomberg. To many now stuck at home, House Party's rise may have come out of nowhere, but the app has been around for almost four years, and last June was acquired by Epic Games, maker of the Blockbuster video game Fortnite, after raising more than $70 million in venture capital. In a fundraising round in late 2016, investors valued House Party at around $150 million, according to Pitchbook.

At the time of the acquisition, the two companies talked about a shared vision of enabling more live interaction, an increasingly prevalent goal in the gaming industry. Connecting people is House Party's ultimate mission. And Sima Sistani, House Party's CEO and co-founder, likes to talk about creating empathy online and fixing what she considers to be a rising loneliness epidemic. But while she admits House Party is a social network, Sistani considers her business far different from social media,

where users post to an audience without necessarily interacting and where people mindlessly scroll through the feed to kill time. A sticker on Sistani's phone reads, quote, social media seriously harms your mental health, end quote. Instead, Sistani sees House Party as a more intimate alternative to those feeds, but also to intrusive phone calls that can interrupt a real life or come at unexpected times. When people are logged into House Party, others can see they're available and around to chat and then pop in to say hello. Quote, I think that's what the promise of social networks was supposed to be, Sistani said. Even Facebook, the company that created the never-ending feed, seems to agree. CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been pushing the company more toward intimate products like messaging and groups in recent years.

Quote, I always used to tell people like, hey, we're not curing cancer here, Sistani said in an interview conducted over House Party from her home in San Francisco this week. This is the first time where I feel like, wow, we have such a responsibility and an obligation right now to maintain this service because people need it. it's critical for them right now, end quote. Real quick, I wanted to share with you that we are participating in Potapalooza, which is a virtual festival to raise money for COVID relief. Think of it as a live aid, but for podcasts, if you buy a ticket, it gives you access to a special Potapalooza podcast feed where an incredible lineup of podcasters across genres will be showcasing their work.

You'll get a festival schedule and new epipelouettes. episodes will drop over the course of a weekend so you can listen as they come out or save the content for later. The festival goes live April 25th and we will have a special episode of our own in there. The money all goes to give directly, which is a non-profit providing economic relief to the families that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. There's a ton of other great podcasts on the bill as well. So you can maybe discover your new favorite podcast. Go to plzza.org. to give what you can and get a ticket for the special feed. That's plzia.org.