Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 06/26 - Apple Acquires Drive.ai

Episode Date: June 26, 2019

Apple buys Drive.ai, the days of the phone notch might be numbered, the first solar powered electric car, fighting over the streaming rights for The Office, and why streaming music hasn’t been kind to classical music. Sponsors: SVB.com/next WeWorkRemotely.com Links: Apple acquires self-driving startup Drive.ai (Axios) Oppo unveils the world’s first under-screen selfie camera (The Verge) Airbnb’s New Luxe Tier Includes a $1 Million Polynesian Island (Bloomberg) 3D printing platform Carbon raises $260 million at $2.4 billion valuation (VentureBeat) 300M-user meme site Imgur raises $20M from Coil to pay creators (TechCrunch) Lightyear One Debuts as the first long-rand solar-powered electric car (TechCrunch) NBC is removing ‘The Office’ from Netflix in 2021 and putting it on its new streaming service (CNBC) In Streaming Age, Classical Music Gets Lost in the Metadata (NYTimes) Subscribe to the ad-free feed! 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 right home for Wednesday, June 26th, 2019. I'm Brian McCullough today. The rumors were right. Apple has bought Drive AI. The days of the phone notch might be numbered. The first solar-powered electric car is here. Fighting over the streaming rights for the office and why streaming music hasn't exactly been kind to classical music. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Apple announced that it has indeed acquired Autonomous Driving Startup Drive AI. hiring dozens of Drive AI engineers and, per sources, actually taking over the operation of Drive AI's existing autonomous vehicles. Quoting Axios, the purchase price was not disclosed. Apple was

expected to pay less than the $77 million drive AI raised in venture capital to say nothing of the $200 million it was valued at two years ago after its Series B round. Axios's Dan Primack reported recently. Drive AI's Highlighter Orange Vans, ferried workers around a business park in Frisco, Texas, and shuttled fans in nearby Arlington to Cowboys games. Drive AI is laying off 90 workers in California, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, and the company employed many more in Texas, end quote. Apparently, several different companies were interested in acquiring the assets of Drive AI, which was on the verge of a bankruptcy filing. As we said before about this, this is likely, largely an aqua hire. on Apple's part to scoop up that engineering talent. Drive AI was one of the first AV startups on the

AV scene. But also, look, what can I tell you? This is noteworthy because it seems to suggest, again, that Apple hasn't given up on autonomous vehicles yet. At Mobile World Congress, Shanghai, phone maker Appo has demoed the world's first under-the-screen selfie camera with a display using custom transparent materials and says it plans to launch the technology into a commercial phone quote in the near future end quote quoting the verge opo says the display uses a custom transparent material that works with a redesigned pixel structure so that light can get through to the camera the sensor itself is said to be larger than other selfie cameras with a wider aperture lens in front the area of the screen reserved for the camera still works with touch control and appo says

display quality won't be compromised, though hands-on photos from Engadget's Chinese site suggests the camera area is visible in certain conditions. Apo does acknowledge that putting a screen in front of a camera will inherently reduce photo image quality with significant problems like haze, glare, and color cast needing to be overcome. The company says it's developed algorithms that are tuned to the hardware in order to address these issues and claims the quality is quote on par with mainstream devices. but we'll have to see for ourselves what that means once the tech ships on a commercial phone, end quote. So the long global nightmare of enduring notches on our phones might be coming to an end someday soon.

If you only think of Airbnb as a budget option to land accommodations on the cheap, or at least an option that's slightly cheaper than hotels, think again. Airbnb has officially launched Lux, a new luxury tier of more than 2,000 listings with an average price of $14,000 a week. But on the high end, you can splurge and spend $1 million to rent a private island near Tahiti that comes with a staff of 50. Quote, luxury travelers have been eyeing high-quality home rentals for a while, says Nick Guisen, Airbnb's Global Director of Portfolio Strategy. But the market hasn't offered enough security to high-profile and mega-rich clients who seek privacy, he says. Quote, I think that's some.

something that was missing, the idea of, I want to travel to a luxury home, but I'm not sure where to find it or who to trust, end quote. ACOR, SA-owned One Fine Stay, the second home rental platform, third home, and apartment rental company Paris Perfect are all established competitors in the luxury space, and Airbnb Lux itself is essentially a rebranding of luxury retreats, a Canadian company that specializes in high-quality listings and was acquired by Airbnb in 2017 for around $300 million. None of the listings on Lux are new to market. They just now sit under the Airbnb umbrella.

The company is betting on the strength of its brand to give it the competitive edge, end quote. This is all about chasing a trend on Airbnb's part, according to Skift Research. In 2017, only 36% of wealthy travelers reported staying in home rentals or other so-called alternative accommodations. That number was reported to have surged to 59% this. year. From the interesting startup, interesting raise file, Carbon, a 3D printing platform used by the likes of Adidas and Ford, says it has raised $260 million at a $2.4 billion valuation. Carbon has now raised $680 million in total, and its last raise in 2017 valued the company at only $1.7 billion. Quoting Venture Beat, founded in 2013, Carbon is one of a number of startups developing

3D printing technologies to open up digital manufacturing to more creators and companies. It operates at the intersection of hardware, software, and material science, as the company puts it, with specialized digital light synthesis technology that meshes light projection with programmable resins to transform the liquids into solid materials. Moreover, it can create complex, intricate constructions not possible with traditional mold injections while ensuring the final product is both sturdy and lightweight, end quote. Carbon got on a lot of people's radar when Adidas announced in 2017 that it was mass-producing a 3D printed shoe using Carbon's technology. Since then, Ford has used carbon to produce polymer parts for the F-150 and Mustang vehicles,

and Next Generation Football Helmets use the technology as well, quoting from Venture Beat again. There are other benefits to this speedy 3D printing technology, which allows manufacturers to offer mass customization of products and on-demand inventory, referred to as zero inventory manufacturing. In effect, companies can produce goods to match demand rather than mass-producing millions of items without knowing how much they will actually sell, end quote. And from the, you already know the company, but this is still an interesting raise file.

Image sharing platform Imger says it has raised $20 million from Coil, a micro-payments tool, that Imger will build into its service ahead of a forthcoming premium tier in order to better pay creators. As Josh Konstine rightly points out, with 300 million users, Imger has quietly been one of the largest unsung social platforms out there. How will this new investment slash partnership work?

Quote, users pay coil a fixed monthly fee, install its browser extension, the interledger protocol is used to route assets around, and then coil pays creators dollars or XRP tokens per second that the subscriber spends consuming their content at a rate of 36 cents per hour. Imger and Coil will earn a cut to diversifying the meme network's revenue beyond ads. Imger began in 2009 as a gift to the internet. Over the last 10 years, we've built one of the largest, most positive online communities

based on our core value to give more than we take, says Alan Schaff, founder and CEO of Imger. The startup bootstrapped for its first five years before raising a $40 million series A from Andresen Horowitz and Reddit. It's grown into the premier place to browse meme dumps of 50-plus funny images and jiffs, as well as art, science, and inspirational tales. With the same unpersonalized homepage for everyone, it's fostered a positive community unified by esoteric inside jokes, end quote. Founded last year, Coil's $5 per month subscription is now in open beta and it provides extensions for Chrome and Firefox as it tries to get baked into browsers natively. Unlike Patreon, where you pick a few creators and choose how much to pay each month,

Coyle lets you browse content from as many creators as you want, and it pays them appropriately. Sites like Imger can code in tags to their pages that tell Coil's web monetization API, who to send money to, end quote. There are plenty of known benefits for electric vehicles, including greater acceleration, less maintenance required because of less moving parts, but let's face it, the main selling point for EVs all along was the ability to go green. But as has been pointed out endlessly, EVs aren't truly carbon zero. If you plug in your electric vehicle to the electric grid, chances are the electricity you're using was generated by burning fossil fuels like coal or natural gas. Well,

Netherlands-based EV startup lightyear wants to change all of that by announcing, the Lightyear-1 solar electric car. Unveiled earlier this week, the Lightyear-1 prototype has a super sleek teardrop design, and the company says the car can get a range of 450 miles on a single charge. Lightyear-1 says it has already sold over 100 vehicles in pre-order and is aiming to begin mass production in 2021. There are still 500 units available to pre-order starting at $136,000. Quoting TechCrunch. Light Year 1 isn't just a plug-in electric with some solar cells on the roof.

Instead, it's designed from the ground up to maximize performance from a smaller than typical battery that can directly grab sun from a roof and hood, covered with 16 square feet of solar cells, embedded in safety glass designed with passenger well-being in mind. The car can also take power directly from regular outlets and existing charging stations for a quick top-up. And again, because it's optimized to be lightweight and power efficient, you can actually get around 250 miles on just one night of charging from a standard European 230 volt outlet, end quote. And more details from Electrek, quote, generally it's almost impossible to add any meaningful power to an electric vehicle using solar, since there's not enough surface to install solar cells in order to supply the power needed to move vehicles that often weigh over 3,000 pounds. The company focused on efficiency, leveraging their knowledge from their years designing the solar cars for the solar challenge.

They claim that they can charge an electric car at a rate of 12 kilometers per hour, which might not sound like much, but it would actually be significant if true. The startup claims that the car will produce, on average, enough energy to power itself for 20,000 kilometers per year. It can also charge on level 2, up to 22 kilowatts and up to level 3 to 60 kilowatts for faster, charging. If their claim of 12 kilometers per hour of solar charging is true, it would mean that you could drive a 30 kilometer commute to work, park your car for eight hours, have it solar charge back to full, and drive back home without ever plugging in your car, end quote. So not quite carbon zero, unless you have a commute less than 30 kilometers, but still, interesting stuff. When we talk about the streaming wars, this is what we're talking.

about. NBC has announced that it will officially remove the TV show The Office from Netflix in 2021, at which point the show will be available on NBC Universal's upcoming streaming service that will be free for traditional pay TV subscribers and $10 a month for cord cutters. Remember when there was all that brouhaha about friends leaving Netflix until Netflix ponied up $80 million a year to keep Ross and Rachel on for a few more years? Well, it turns out that the office is even more watched on Netflix. than Friends is, in fact, twice as much, making it the most watched Netflix show of 2019. Quoting CNBC, a person familiar with the negotiations said Netflix made an offer to keep it,

but the offer was rejected. Netflix was willing to pay up to $90 million a year for the rights, but NBC topped that offer and will pay $100 million. The office was produced by Universal Television, a different division of NBC Universal in association with DEDLD Productions and Revile Productions. One idea under consideration was to split the rights with Netflix being the home for ad-free watching and NBC service being the ad-supported option, end quote. And Deadline is reporting that Disney has hired away Netflix's director of original films, Matt Brodly, so he can head up Disney Plus's international content.

Brodly will have some time to hit the ground running because even though Disney Plus is rolling out in November in the U.S., it won't be coming to Europe or Asia until at least next year. Finally today, in the age of streaming music, classical music has been suffering. How come? Well, it turns out that the metadata schemes and algorithms that streaming services use are designed to favor pop music. In short, unless you try really hard, it's hard to surface Schubert, quoting from the New York Times. For most of the music on Spotify or Apple Music, a listing of artist, track, and album works just fine. but critics of the status quo argue that the basic architecture of the classical genre,

with non-performing composers and works made up of multiple movements, is not suited to a system built for pop. Search Spotify's mobile app for Mozart Requiem, for example, and a confusing list of dozens of albums follows. Since there is no special field for a composer, most of those albums designate Mozart as the artist. On Apple Music, a composer field has become standard only in recent months. classical music has always been a specialized corner of the music business with a discerning clientele

and few genuine blockbusters, but by some measures the genre has suffered in the shift to streaming. While two and a half percent of album sales in the United States are classical music, it accounts for less than one percent of total streams, according to Alpha Data, a tracking service, end quote. The Times goes on to profile two startups, Adagio and Prime Phonic, who are offering streaming services devoted specifically to classical music, quoting again, like any streaming service, Prime Phonic, and Adagio feature colorful welcome pages with new releases, custom playlists, and photos of celebrities for those who consider Matthew Barley and Dniel Trafanoff celebrities. They also offer various sorting tools to let connoisseurs

sift through the voluminous listings of, say, Beethoven's string quartets to find that one recording by that one ensemble. Prime Phonic even lets users search by opus number and key. Prime Phonic costs $8 a month and Adagio $10 a month. Both services charge more to stream music in high resolution. Neither company would disclose how many paying subscribers it has, end quote. Summer cold crisis update day two. Throat not as sore as yesterday, but I have two weekend episodes to record right after I'm done with this. So maybe I'm speaking too soon. Hall's cough drops with menthol action are a good product. Can endorse. No need for compensation. Talk to you tomorrow. I want to tell you about another short daily news podcast that will keep you

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