Snitch Tech. One of the weirdest trends in tech over the last decade has been the spread of surveillance tech for consumers. Everything from Ring doorbells from Amazon to facial recognition AI and family location tracking software has made it a breeze to film, track and trace your fellow citizens. But it goes deeper. Social networks for ratting out your neighbour. Weird Nextdoor threads. Number plate recognition software for landlords. We're coining it SNITCH TECH, and we're talking about it tod...
Oct 31, 2023•50 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. To become a member of Down Round Premium, head here . Nintendo has made some of the most popular consumer products of all time, and also invented Mario. Pretty great run! But it's also an interesting business, with a relatively unique approach within the gaming industry and beyond. As the rumoured announcement of the Switch 2 draws ever nearer, we chat about the House of Mario and what makes it tick. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Oct 26, 2023•5 min
The first iPad was released over a decade ago and pitched as a bold new frontier for consumer computing. It helped kill the netbook and spawned generations of copycat tablets from Android manufacturers and Microsoft. But it hasn't really played out all that well. In fact – despite selling a healthy number of them – the iPad sometimes seems like a mostly forgotten product range, with confusing options and not much by way of innovation. What gives? Are tablets in general a dead end? We discuss. Se...
Oct 24, 2023•45 min
Wow! We're checking in on OpenAI again. Reporting over the weekend confirmed that the company is on track to book over $1 billion of revenue this year – suggesting this whole AI thing might have an actual consumer base. Meanwhile, the company released a handful of new features for ChatGPT which demonstrate just how hard they're going for it. We discuss. Links OpenAI’s Revenue Crossed $1.3 Billion Annualized Rate, CEO Tells Staff - The Information DALL·E 3 See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy ...
Oct 19, 2023•4 min
Elon Musk may be a complete weirdo these days, but SpaceX is still a pretty cool company. Started to assist mankind in its journey to Mars, it has been the leading company in the world of private spaceflight, and the undisputed king of satellite tech. In this ep we talk about SpaceX, Starlink, the various forces which made it successful, and speculate on what jobs we will have on Mars. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Oct 17, 2023•33 min
YouTube is indisputably the king of online video, and has been virtually since it launched in 2005. It's part of the infrastructure of the internet, and has imprinted itself on the culture through a combo of its algorithmic recommendations engine and sheer scale. But in the age of TikTok, can YouTube be toppled? In this episode, we talk through YouTube's history, key points in its development, and what its future might look like. Also, sadly, YouTubers. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy in...
Oct 10, 2023•1 hr 2 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. To subscribe and get an extra episode every week, go here . These days it seems just about everyone can make professional looking video. Thanks to the video production tools available to the average user of TikTok, Zoomers are better at editing video than millennials ever were. It leaves the question: what are the classic pro video platforms like Avid, Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro doing? At the same time, music production seems like a harder prob...
Oct 05, 2023•5 min
Among the numerous announcements made at this year's Meta Connect was a new generation of its smart glasses, developed with Ray-Bans. Aside from the usual stuff about capturing photos and listening to audio, Mark Zuckerberg casually dropped that he thinks they will soon be an interface into conversational AI. It comes as there are rumours of other companies considering AI devices, like OpenAI working with former Apple design boss Jony Ive. In this ep, we dive in. See omnystudio.com/listener for ...
Oct 04, 2023•39 min
Digital identity references a simple idea: how much a computer system knows about you. But, just like everything else, it's a bit weird these days. People have increasingly fractious online identities, even as the platforms we use and our own governments collect more and more data about us. This episode, we discuss changes in digital identity, and Raph gets to go off about his deep and unabiding love of the surveillance state. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Sep 28, 2023•6 min
The smartphone camera arms race seems to be a little less intense these days, but the quality of a phone camera remains one of the major reasons people choose to upgrade – especially when most iPhone and Android devices have been basically the same black glass rectangle for a decade now. But there's only so much circuitry and lens technology you can cram into a phone. So much of the development has been software level, with machine learning and AI doing heavy algorithmic work to make your photos...
Sep 26, 2023•28 min
If you pay any attention to tech or VC Twitter, Flexport will have crossed your radar. A freight forwarding business which wants to do for supply chains what Stripe did for payments, Flexport (and its founder Ryan Petersen ) has become one of the most hyped startups among a certain flavour of tech poster. Petersen also became a well-known talking head during the COVID supply chain crisis. The company is in the news because Petersen sacked his successor, former Amazon logistics boss Dave Clarke, ...
Sep 21, 2023•5 min
Unity is one of the most popular game engines in the world, powering everything from a solid chunk of the mobile gaming universe to bigger console and PC games. Last week, it managed to annoy basically all of its customers by announcing a new, highly extractive pricing model. In this episode, we dive into what a game engine does, the rise of Unity, and why making everyone who uses your product homicidally angry is the bold marketing move of 2023. Links Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - ...
Sep 19, 2023•30 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode every week, go here . This week brought news that Clubhouse, the social audio streaming platform endlessly hyped during the early pandemic, has pivoted away from its original purpose and is now trying to become sort of a group chat for audio instead. It's as good a time as any to talk about social audio, the way people share audio online, and why it's such a tough nut to crack. Links Clubhouse rein...
Sep 14, 2023•6 min
Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on earth, and an example of a quasi-utopian internet project which has kind of worked out in the end – and managed to stick around too. Despite some evident problems, it all works surprisingly well. To help us understand Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation which manages it – and the weird world of the editors who keep it functional – we're joined by author Richard Cooke , who is currently writing a book about it. See omnystudio.com/listener for pr...
Sep 13, 2023•53 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode a week, go here . Canva is one of Australia's most successful tech companies. It has proven pretty disruptive to the global design landscape, with its template-based offering making it relatively easy for even novices with zero taste to make stuff that looks pretty good. In this ep, we talk about Canva's effect on design, and where it might go next to justify its sky-high valuation. See omnystudio....
Sep 07, 2023•6 min
MrBeast is the most popular individual YouTuber, with over 180 million subscribers. He makes a lot of sleekly produced videos where he gives away money, cars, islands and life-altering surgeries. To some, he is history's greatest philanthropist. To others, he's deeply evil in a way that is hard to articulate. Which side of the divide you fall on is mostly a generational thing. To help us understand the man, the business and the phenomenon that is MrBeast, we're joined by writer Max Read, who for...
Sep 05, 2023•52 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode a week, go here . A fun one for you this week. Over the past few weeks, we've been blessed with many news stories about Bryan Johnson , the tech billionaire who is putting his considerable wealth towards becoming functionally immortal through a weird diet, militant sleep schedule, and injecting himself with his son's blood . Pretty neat! On this episode, we discuss Johnson's quest, and where it fit...
Aug 31, 2023•6 min
Snapchat was one of the major social media platforms of the 2010s, and still remains pretty popular with the kids. It helped create much of the modern social media landscape, but hasn't been able to turn that into lasting wins -- in no small part because every innovation it comes up with is pretty quickly cloned by its biggest rival, Instagram. Now it finds itself in a precarious position, with parent company Snap Inc reporting a decline in revenue and the company trying just about every pivot D...
Aug 29, 2023•40 min
This is a preview of a premium episode. Sign up for Down Round Premium here . One of the most enduring rumours in tech markets and investing subreddits is that Apple is on the cusp of buying Disney and integrating its IP and content into Apple's tech and distribution network. It's like a sick fantasy for guys with no lives and ZERO swag. It seems pretty unlikely. But with news that returned CEO Bob Iger could be planning to break up the empire and sell off assets like ESPN, the rumour mill is ki...
Aug 24, 2023•5 min
QR code menus became popular during the pandemic, when everyone collectively decided it was much safer to have your beers delivered to the table at the pub instead of walking up yourself. Now there are a million different providers of QR code menus. But but how does it all work, and is it actually a good business? We dig in. For an extra episode each week, and no ads, subscribe to Down Round premium here . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Aug 22, 2023•30 min
Big news, WeWork fans! The company has announced that it is hurtling towards bankruptcy , with serious doubts about its capacity to continue as a “going concern”. For those who haven’t been paying attention for the past couple of years and assumed it was bankrupt and out of business anyway, this will be a shock. In today’s ep, we take a tour through the WeWork story — particularly what it has been up to since its famous IPO collapse in 2019. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share th...
Aug 15, 2023•33 min
Recent years have seen a surge in telehealth and online health delivery — from essential prescriptions to more discretionary health spending. Everyone from smaller boutique startups to Amazon want a slice of the pie. There’s a big debate in the medical community about so-called ‘asynchronous care’ — where a patient and doctor communicate through non-live online services. Pharmacists, already rattled by the retail revolution led by Chemist Warehouse, are also mad about this stuff. But many patien...
Aug 08, 2023•49 min
Twitter is no more. From the ashes rises X, Elon Musk’s cringely-named attempt to actualise one of his long term goals: building an everything app. Musk wants X to be the central place where you post, shop, send money, access financial services and do whatever else it is you do as part of being alive on the planet. In this episode we dive into the idea of the everything app, and why tech companies have been chasing that dream for at least a decade. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or s...
Aug 02, 2023•44 min
It’s been a while since we’ve done a Q&A episode, and we know your pressing questions have been accumulating for months. We’re sorry we let it get so desperate. Thank you to our subscribers on Substack and Twitter (X???) who sent in questions. If we didn’t make it to you, there’s a good chance we’ve got a whole ep planned in future. Thank you for subscribing. Leave a comment or share this episode . See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 26, 2023•51 min
Hollywood actors and writers are both on strike for the first time since 1960. Two of the primary reasons they’re hitting the picket line are core Down Round areas: the economics of streaming, and the future of AI content. Working actors are mad that they’re not being compensated properly for appearances in streaming content, where audience figures are much more opaque, and they’re staring down the barrel of having their likenesses reused with AI . Ah well. Guess it’s up to us to figure it out t...
Jul 18, 2023•37 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. Want to join? Sign up for Down Round Premium ! The rise of the consumer-available drone over the past decade has been a huge win for real estate agents and YouTube fail compilations. But what about the rest of us chumps?! In this episode, we talk about the drone — from the dominance of Chinese companies in their production, to the (possible) promises of drone delivery. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 13, 2023•7 min
At the end of last week, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take advantage of the chaos over in Twitterland by surprise dropping Meta’s own text-based social media platform, Threads . Because it leverages the Instagram social graph, it quickly exploded to over 100 million users . In today’s ep, we dig into Threads and make a series of wild predictions which are sure to never be vindicated. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, vis...
Jul 11, 2023•55 min
This is a free preview of a premium episode. To hear more, join Down Round Premium . The ongoing freakout at Twitter culminated this week in the platform limiting the number of tweets users could see per day , which Elon Musk claimed was to stop an onslaught of AI bots training themselves on Twitter data. That caused a brief exodus to Bluesky, the wonky alternative currently being hyped by Twitter refugees and former addicts. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 06, 2023•3 min
The ticket industry is one of the most confusing online industries in 2023, a rentseeking behemoth which doesn’t seem to offer much for fans or artists alike. Thanks to the suggestion of a few listeners who seem to have missed out on Taylor Swift tickets last week, we’re diving in. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit downround.substack.com/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jul 04, 2023•35 min
This is a free preview of a premium episode. To hear more, join Down Round Premium . It’s been a hot minute since we’ve checked in on the world of AI, and things have been chugging along at rapid pace in the buzziest sector of tech. This week, we dive into the current AI landscape, including the world of open-source AI. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Jun 29, 2023•5 min
