Tech News: AOL and Yahoo Might Get Sold Again

info to give. I just I really want to see one of these things working in action. From what we understand, the one he had was a prototype. It wasn't like fully machined to look like a lightsaber hilt, but it demonstrated the basic technology, which is kind of like having a pair of um tape measures extendable tape measures move out and then retract back. Only they happen to have, you know, lights that allow it to light up like

a lightsaber. Super cool. Can't wait to see it. Wish I had more to talk about about that for Star Wars Day, but don't, so instead let's move on to the actual tech news. The top story is one I'm sure many of you have already seen. Verizon is prepping for the sale of two companies that have changed hands a few times over the years, that being Yahoo and A O L. All right, let's walk through this, shall we so. Way back in the day, A O L and Yahoo were both unquestionably two of the most powerful

companies of the early days of the Internet. Uh. It was something of a running gag in the nineties that if you went out to check your mail, you had a decent shot of bringing back at least one A O L boot c D into the house. The company sent out starter kits like crazy in the nineties, and for a lot of people in the early days of the Internet, America Online was synonymous with Internet. A O

L's history dates back to the nineteen eighties. If you look at the constituent parts that made up the company, and it was an online service provider first, which meant it kind of served as like a news portal and a message board system and email for other AOLL members, but not to like the Internet at large. Even hosted

a few games. Later, it incorporated a web browser and became a gateway that a lot of folks relied upon to actually explore the world Wide Web, not just a you know, segmented version of it on a O L servers. In two thousand, Time Warner and a o L announced a merger plan which came to fruition in early two thousand one, and in retrospect a lot of people identify that particular merger as a huge mist eight. The value of AOL Time Warner went into decline, which is a

gentle way of putting it. It kind of plummeted, and Time Warner ultimately spun off a O L as a separate company in two thousand nine. Verizon would turn around and purchase a O L in two thousand and fifteen for four point four billion dollars. As for Yahoo, it started off as a web portal with curated content back in nineteen nine four. Yahoo employees would actually find cool

stuff and feature it on the Yahoo page. It mostly became known for search and also hosting and later generating content and of course the recently deceased Yahoo answers service. Yahoo was incredibly popular as a website, but it began to lose ground to Google for the search business. It was particularly susceptible to stock price inflation. During the dot com bubble, shares rose up to around a hundred eighteen dollars, but during the low point post the dot com bubble bursting,

the low was around eight dollars a share. That's an a crazy drop from eighteen dollars per share to eight dollars per share. Yikes. Microsoft attempted to acquire Yahoo in two thousand and eight, but that deal fell through. Yahoo saw leadership changes happen a few times in the two thousand's, with Marissa Meyer coming on over from Google to be the CEO of Yahoo. In two thousand twelve. Meyer oversaw a huge acquisition with Tumbler. That year, Yeah who purchased

Tumbler for one point one billion dollars. This, by the way, it would also be called a really bad business deal in tech, at least in retrospect, though to be fair, Yahoo had made an even worse deal much earlier back in when it bought geo Cities for four billion dollars. Tumbler is no longer under Yahoo, by the way, uh, Verizon, after purchasing Yahoo, would spin off Tumbler and sell it

off to a different company. Verizon announced its intent to acquire Yahoo in twenty sixteen for four point eight three billion dollars. So now Verizon, the latest company to discover that it couldn't really leverage the acquisitions it had made, is now selling off both A O L and Yahoo. The buyer is a private equity firm called Apollo Global Management, and according to The New York Times, the talks are

still in the early stages and could fall apart. In fact, who knows, maybe they've dissolved by the time you hear this. I don't know, but from what I understand, the two companies together are valued in the four to five billion dollar range. So that is effectively half of what Verizon paid for them when it made the two separate purchases in twenty fifteen and sixteen. So that's a toughie. As for Apollo, it's hard for me to get a handle on that company. It's acquired a lot of stuff already,

and it's not exactly all in the tech space. In fact, it includes the Venetian resort in Las Vegas and the retail store chain Michaels that sells, you know, hobby equipment, So it is looks like it's just an inequity company that's just investing in a very diverse group of businesses. I will follow up on this story as it develops.

The Verges. Tom Warren has a fun piece titled Sony Really Hated PS four cross Play Confidential Documents Reveal, and I recommend actually, you know, going over and reading that on the Verge. But here's the really short version. So cross play is when you've got a game that has some sort of online component and people who are playing that game on different systems can still play together online in that game. So let's use an example like Minecraft.

This game exists some pretty much every platform that exists. You can play it on PC or Xbox or Nintendo or PlayStation or mobile and friends and to like to play in the same games together online. But if I'm running Minecraft on an Xbox and you happen to have it on PlayStation, we can't play together unless the title we're playing supports cross play and more importantly, that the consoles support cross play. Minecraft did support cross play, but

needed console buy in to make that happen. Nintendo was a little slow to adopt it, possibly because Nintendo traditionally doesn't care to get involved in any experience that the company doesn't have full control over and if it should pass that kids on Nintendo were to encounter adults on Xbox, the whole world could catch on fire. But Nintendo did ultimately support cross play, Sony not so much well. Warren published an email that was written by an executive from

Epic Games. Those are the makers of Fortnite, and the letter spells out the case to support cross play for Fortnite, essentially pointing out that ultimately Sony had very little choice in the matter, considering the PlayStation popularity of Fortnite and how players wanted the chance to play with their friends

who might be playing the game on other platforms. The letter is remarkable in that the executive makes several suggestions as to how Epic could support PlayStation adoption, including several ideas all geared toward making Sony you know, some sweet sweet cash, But Sony declined to acquiesce to epics request

until Sony implemented a pretty brutal strategy. Essentially, if it's clear that Sony PlayStation gamers are making up more than a given percentage of the bottom line of a game that has cross platform play, Sony wants a royalty from developers and wants to get money if it says, hey, if we're contributing to the success of this game, we want you to pay us for it. And this is meant to quote offset the reduction in revenue end quote resulting from Sony enabling cross play. So how does enabling

cross play reduce revenue? That's an excellent question. If the games were exclusive to Sony, you'd have an easy argument, right, you would say, well, if you have an exclusive title suddenly become available on another platform, it means gamers have choice, and if they have choice, then maybe they choose something else. But if you have an online game that already is on multiple platforms, well, people already have a choice. They can go to whichever platform it's on and play it there.

So that's the whole point. They just want to be able to play with each other, you know, whether you're on Xbox or PlayStation or PC or whatever. That's the whole point. I honestly don't know where the reduction and revenue comes from. Now, I'm not saying it doesn't exist. It may very well be a factor, and I just I'm not getting it. I don't understand how it works. So maybe it's a real thing. But and I'm just looking at the wrong way. But when I look at

I think that doesn't seem to track to me. By the way, if you guys here, and I should have said this at the beginning, but if you hear any thunder or whatever, Atlanta is in the middle of some pretty nasty thunderstorms right now. In fact, we had a tornado this morning. Um didn't touch down close to where I live, but it did touch down in the city of Atlanta, so across town from where I am. I'm also in the city of Atlanta. I'm just not in

that part. But yeah, we're still getting some thunder. I apologize for the Rumbley's, but um, the show, as they say, has to keep going. I think that's I think that's how that's saying goes, all right, So sticking with Sony for just a second longer. The company also announced a

new partnership between Discord and Sony Interactive Entertainment. So. Discord is a popular social platform that grew up around gaming tho whole lot of activity and Discord doesn't involve gaming at all, and Discord allows users to create what are called servers, though these are not the same thing as like Web servers. Anyway. Servers can host chat rooms, text based chat rooms, or video and audio chat voice chat.

So a lot of gamers will use Discord as a chat tool to communicate with their friends while they play games together. You know, some games don't support in game chat. Uh some games, Oh my gosh, the storms really coming in. Some games support in game chat, but they don't have really good tools for it, and Discords meant to work

around that. According to Jim Ryan, the president and CEO of Sony Interactive Entertainment, the goal is to merge the PlayStation and Discord experiences on consoles and mobile, and it sounds like the timeline is aiming for a twenty two integration, which sounds pretty nifty, unlike the thunder outside, which just sounds intimidating. Is all get out now, I'm sure all of y'all have heard about Clubhouse, the io s app that lets people log into audio only rooms and listen

to people chat about stuff. Now, we got a lot of early buzz with lots of famous people using it to talk about famous people's stuff, or for tech executives to talk about tech executive stuff, you know, like how many islands they've bought or whatever. My own knowledge of clubhouse is pretty vague because I don't own an iPhone, so I'm not allowed in the clubhouse. It says no

androids allowed, so I'm not I'm not in there. I do know that there have been numerous concerns about the security of Clubhouse, however, but that's not what this story is about. Instead, I want to talk about Twitter because it's been slowly rolling out its own version of the same general idea, and Twitter's version is called spaces and now any Twitter user who has at least six hundred followers can potentially host an audio only chat room, and

that includes me. I've got more than six hundred followers. Maybe I'll try it out. Twitter also plans to experiment with ticketed events in the near future, so in these experiences, hosts will determine a ticket price to charge p bol who want to be part of this experience. Hosts will also get a chance to decide the limit the cap of the number of tickets that are allowed to be sold, and Twitter will undoubtedly take a cut of those sales, but the company claims that the host will earn most

of the revenue generated by the ticket sales. Now I'm not likely to try and host a ticketed event because I don't need the experience of that level of rejection. Plus, I mean, what the heck would I even do that would seem worthy of asking folks to hand over their hard earned cash just to hear me yap about stuff. I guess I could do my amazing rendition of classic Beastie Boys songs, but most of the time people pay me to stop doing that. But hey, maybe we'll do

an experiment with tech stuff at some point. Maybe I'll do like a teaser for upcoming episodes, or maybe a discussion about past topics. Who knows. Anyway, keep an eye out for spaces on Twitter. Sharman The Toilet Paper Company has done it again. A few years back at at e S the company introduced and um cheeky little robot that would fetch toilet paper for you in case you

were out. This was a little two wheeled robot had a little like bare face on it, and it could balance a roll of toilet paper on top of the robot had like a spindle on the very top that you could put a roll of toilet paper on. They were presenting this as if the robot was retrieving the paper for you. But obviously someone had to put the toilet paper roll on the robot and then it could wheel around and get to you. It also was not um autonomous, it was remote controlled. It was all like

a publicity stunt. It's very cute. But now Sharmon has swooped in to help folks who are stuck on video calls when suddenly they feel the need to visit the facilities. The company calls it the b R B butt, the b right back butt, and it's in beta right now.

And here's how it works. You start up the bot app and it actually takes video of you, and you're prompted to do a few different reactions so that the bot can learn how you respond to certain stimuli such as maybe someone makes a joke or someone says something particularly interesting. Uh. It even prompts you to make some

vocal responses, specifically I'll get right on that. Then when you feel the need to scoot off to the bathroom, you can activate the bot, which will then supposedly have an AI powered video doppel ganger of yourself sitting in your place, reacting on your behalf. The idea being that is using AI and machine learning to do this um. It works with a few different video conferencing services, and

what I've seen is pretty funny. Uh. I don't know that it's actually using AI and machine learning all that much. To me, it just looked like it was running through the various facial expressions on kind of a loop. But I could be totally wrong about that. However, the company doesn't plan to release this app to the general public. It's another kind of PR stunt sort of thing. It does seem like a real shame because I could just imagine it saving me a lot of time by having

it attend meetings on my behalf. But it looks like I'm just going to be out of luck on that one. And our final story, Apple has rolled out the iOS Update fourteen point five, which includes in it new rules regarding apps that Facebook really really hates. In fact, I think Facebook hates this more than Sony hates cross play. I mean, I'm sure other apps hate it too, but

Facebook has made it incredibly apparent. So the new rules say that apps are no longer allowed to track users from app to app, like what what other apps they're using and how they're using other apps, like tracking information outside of the apps themselves without giving the option for the users to opt out. So they have to say, hey, we want to track all your activity, but you do have the option to say don't do that. But Facebook loves to track users. I mean, that is the product

that Facebook is selling. It's your data. Facebook can take that data, your data, and use it to sell ads space. So Facebook's value proposition to advertisers is, hey, we know what our users like. We know what they look at on Facebook, we know what they look at on Instagram, and we know what they're looking at outside of Facebook and Instagram because we can track which apps they're using and how they're using and what they're doing on those apps.

So if you advertise with us, we will make sure that your ads are seen by the people most likely to act on those ads. That's the sales pitch that Facebook is giving to advertisers. It means that Facebook can charge a lot for ultra targeted ads and make billions of dollars every year. But the new Apple rules say that apps like Facebook and Instagram, which I'm sure I don't need to remind you Facebook owns have to alert users to this practice and give them the option to

opt out. Now It's clear Facebook does not want to do that, but it has to or it risks being dropped from the Apple Store. That would be disastrous. So instead, the company's opt out message says, Hey, you're on iOS fourt teen point five. This version of iOS requires us to ask for permission to track some data from this device to improve your ads, and it goes on to say that the information used helps quote keep Facebook free of charge end quote. Now the implication here is that

we're Facebook not allowed to track all your activity. If you were to say, nah, Facebook, I don't want you to do that, that maybe down the line you'd have to pay for the Facebook app, and the same would be true for Instagram. Now, I don't buy any of that for a second, because Facebook can still serve tons of ads. Even if you opt out, you're not going to an ad free experience. You're still going to get

lots of ads. It's just that those ads won't be quite as laser focused targeted on you as they would be otherwise. Trust me, Facebook is not in danger of being doubt into the cold, harsh world without a scrap of bread to eat or place to sleep. Facebook, believe me, is doing just fine. But it sure is eager to discourage people from opting out of this tracking. Oh Also, discouraging folks from opting out is technically against Apple's rules,

or at least the spirit of those rules. So we'll have to wait and see if this type of messaging sticks around or if Apple pressures Facebook to knock it off. And that wraps up the news for Star Wars Day, May the fourth. Hope you guys enjoyed it. If you have any suggestions for things I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, reach out to me on Twitter. The handle is text stuff h s W. Perhaps I'll be holding some spaces sessions at some point to chat

with folks. Don't know yet. Haven't really looked into it other than seeing the news out of We'll see and I will talk to you again really soon. Yeah. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from I Heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.