TechStuff is Older Than...

Now all full disclosure here. I recorded an episode about services and companies that are younger than tech Stuff, and I intended it to be one episode, but then when recording ended, we realized that I was creeping up over an hour and that's a really long episode, so we're breaking it into two parts. So what you are about to hear is the first part of that two part series where I really talk about some interesting things that

have happened since the launch of tech Stuff. So we're gonna start with some products that and companies that did not exist at that time. And the first thing I want to talk about is Apple's iPad. And this was a doozy. If you've are a long time listener to tex Stuff, you know what I thought about tablet computers. I remember talking with Chris Palette, the original co host of tech Stuff, about Apple's rumored tablet computer. So before

it even had a name before it launched. I was convinced that if the company came out with a tablet, it would just be a fad and after a short while it would disappear, because why would you need a tablet. I mean, I get a smartphone. I understand smartphones. You can put that in your pocket when you don't need it, you can carry it around wherever you go. And if you want something that is a more of a rich involved experience, why not use a computer like a laptop

or a desktop. I just couldn't see a good use case for a tablet. Now this was largely because I was looking at it from my own personal perspective. It just seemed like a computer made more sense for anything beyond what you would use a smart own for. And I thought the iPad will never take off, And boy was I wrong. So the iPad came out in April, and it did quite well, at least for the first

few years. But then in fourteen things started to slide and there was a year on year decline and iPad sales, with every quarter showing a decline up until the first quarter of eighteen that's the year that I'm recording this, and then we saw a modest increase of two point one in sales, so not a huge jump obviously, But maybe what that tells us is that a lot of the folks who needed or wanted a tablet got one early on. Then they saw very little reason to buy

a new one. So new ones come out and they just thought, well, I've already got one that works well enough, i don't need to upgrade yet, as opposed to a phone where you might upgrade every year or every two years at any rate. The iPad showed once again that Apple can make a market when no one else can make a market for that particular product. Because tablet computers were not brand new when the iPad came out, they did exist before Apple's iPad, they just no one had

really found a a good consumer market for them. They were all very narrow use cases, like in the medical field or for people who were on remote work locations. Uh. Now the iPad had become a must have consumer device thanks to Apple. Next, I'm gonna talk about bing as in the search engine. Microsoft launched Bing in two thousand nine.

It was a competitive search engine, really meant to go up against Google, and in fact, Microsoft would often talk about bing's search results compared to Google's, and the speed at which it would return search results, and the relevance and all that sort of stuff. According to stat Counter, Being accounts for about three point two four percent of

search engine market share in May. Google accounts for ninety point one four Now that's global data, so obviously, Microsoft being, while it does have some market share, trails far far behind Google. However, that also was a thing that did not exist back when tech Stuff first started. Venmo another product, or service rather that launched after tech Stuff did. Venmo launched in two thousand nine from co founders Andrew Cortina

and ekrom magden Ishmael. Originally, it was a service that would let you send a text message to music groups and receive an MP three via email in return, but

that changed pretty dramatically. The co founders of the company, who had attended college together back in two thousand one, ran into a bit of a problem when one of them stayed with the other but forgot his wallet, so the other one covered him, and when the the uh borrower decided they wanted to pay back their friend, he did it with a check because there was no easy way to send money to his friend, there was just no way to easily trans transmit money to him without

having access to a bank, and the two decided to pivot Venmo into a payment transaction service that could allow easy payments between individuals. A company called Braintree would buy Venmo in two thousand twelve for twenty six million dollars a princely some PayPal would then go on to acquire brain Tree for eight hundred million dollars in so Venmo is now part of PayPal. And I find that a lot of people are surprised by that. I met young folks who said, oh, no, I would never use PayPal.

I use Venmo. And I said, well, Venmos owned by PayPal, so technically you're still using PayPal. And they were surprised. But yes, Venmo is still very active. It is a useful service. It makes transit transmitting payments very very easy between individuals. Uh So I actually really like that service a lot. Four squares another thing that did not exist when tech stuff launched back in two thousand eight. Uh it was technically built in two thousand and eight, but

it did not launch till two thousand nine. Dennis Crowley and Navine Selva Durai built four Square after working on a similar project earlier called Dodgeball. This is a location based check in service. Now Google acquired Dodgeball back in two thousand five, and eventually Google chose to shut down the service, and so the co founders went on to create a similar service that would let people check into locations using a mobile device and you could share your

location with your friends. So it's kind of like a social network that was location based. But in two thousand fourteen, four Square would shift that feature to a companion app called Swarm. Was right around the time with my wife decided she was never going to use four square again, and four Square became more of a recommendation engine for restaurants, shops,

and activities based off of user location and user preference. So, in other words, you could use four Square to get a recommendation for maybe a restaurant in an unfamiliar city that happens to be near your area and it happens to fall within the certain parameters that you prefer. Maybe you really like Indian food and says, hey, there's this cool Indian place. It's two blocks over. You should go

check it out. But the check in stuff, all the stuff that you would use to check into a location and eventually acquire the the mayor position of that location if you checked in enough. All of that got shifted over to SWARM and I don't know what the numbers are right now for Swarm and four square, like, what what's the user engagement? How many people are using it? Was there a drop off or have they stayed strong?

I know that my wife and I both stopped using it right around that time, but that's totally anecdotal and therefore not at all reliable as far as analysis goes. Speaking of analysis, then we have Wolf from Alpha. We actually did an episode about Wolf from Alpha way back in the day, Chris Poulette and I did when it first launched. Wolf from Alpha is a computational knowledge engine, so it looks a lot like a search engine, but

that's not exactly what Wolf from Alpha does. It launched in May two thousand nine, and it answers factual queries by computing results from curated data. So it has access to tons of information and it can pull relevant information based upon what you ask it, and it answers the query directly. It doesn't provide you a list of search results where you'll find the answer. It will tell you

the answer. So for example, I could type in the question how far away from Earth is Polaris, and Wolf from Alpha would tell me it's four thirty point nine light years away, Plus it would give me more information in units like parsecs, kilometers, and miles. Or I could ask it what is the area of a square with fourteen foot long edges and it would tell me the answer is one square feet or eighteen point to one square meters. So, in other words, you can ask Will

from Alpha these questions. It will return the actual relev an answer instead of sending you a list of links where you could find the answer if you searched through it, which is pretty useful for very particular types of queries. It doesn't work for everything, but it works really well

for these kinds of applications. I have more to say about some of the services and companies that launched since tech Stuff became an official podcast in just a second, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. Another thing that launched after tech Stuff was Snapchat that launched in September two thou eleven, and boy howdy, the Snapchat story is one I will have to cover in

a full episode sometime in the future. Now here's the summarized Snapchat story that I will expound upon in much more detail when I do cover this company. Three college buddies get together to create an app that would allow users to send photos to each other, and the photos would only stay active for a limited time before they were deleted. And the original app was called Peek A Boo p I C A b o O and later

was renamed Snapchat. The three founders were Frank Reggie Brown, who came up with the idea for the app, but he didn't have any real business or coding knowledge. Then you had Evan Spiegel, who was sort of the business guy, and Bobby Murphy, who was sort of the coder, and

they brought this idea to life. Spiegel and Murphy would end up creating a company that shared the ownership of Snapchat between the two of them, but it left Reggie Brown out of it, and Brown would later sue the other two co founders and eventually the three would settle out of court for about a hundred fifty eight million dollars. And that was a big deal. You see, Snapchat was heading towards an initial public offering in and that had

the potential turning the owners into billionaires. But Spiegel and and uh Murphy felt that Brown really didn't contribute very much apart from that initial idea. He wasn't according to them, he was not instrumental in actually making it happen, and so they objected to the idea of him being an

owner in this company. When Snapchat did hold its ip O, it had an opening share price of twenty four dollars, which gave Snapchat a market capitalization of thirty three billion dollars based on the number of shares that were available on the day I'm researching this. However, snap the code for snapchats parent company, is trading at thirteen dollars per share or so, so a little bit more than half of what the opening price was when it first went up on So why the fall from grace, Well, there

are a lot of reasons. For one, Snapchat had a major redesign that angered a lot of US ers, and the most recent analyst reports I can find are optimistic that stock prices will continue to climb, although maybe not quite up to that two dollar per share limit, and it may be a little lower than that, but that the company as a whole is starting to rebound. In March, Pinterest launched that was founded by Evan Sharp, Ben Silberman,

and Paul Ciara. Pinterest let's users create image boards kind of like giant bulletin boards of pictures, and you can group images together in whatever way you happen to like. Maybe you have a specific interest and you want to

collect images that relate to that interest. I have friends who are costumers, for example, and they have pinterest boards that are separated into various types of costumes with representations of costumes that they find really really compelling, and they use that to help make their own patterns and their own designs for their own costumes or costumes that they get on commission. Uh. I have other friends who do this for foods. They collect various really great pictures of food.

I always see that the pictures of food tend to look better than the food tends to taste when I ever get my chance to actually try it. But I don't really object to this. So Pinterest was a very popular and different way of sharing information with a social network.

It took a little while to catch on, but in August two thousand and eleven it was named one of the fifty best websites of twenty eleven by Time magazine, and at that point it started growing rapidly with users, and by the company was valued at three point eight billion dollars. The next one I want to talk about. I just did a full episode on the Instagram story. But Instagram launched in October. Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger

launched it on iOS exclusively at first. Android got its own version a couple of years later, And it's a photo sharing service. I'm sure you're familiar with it. If not, go back and listen to those episodes that they'll tell you all about it. So I'm not gonna die into detail here, but Instagram has done pretty well for itself. It got acquired by Facebook and twelve for a billion buckaroos,

which that's not a bad chunk of change. Next, in June two thousand nine, CoA launched That's a question and answer site that aims to be a little more helpful than other similar sites like Yeah, who Answers. Adam de'angelo, who used to work for Facebook and who I talked about a bit in the Instagram episodes, was one of the co founders so was Charlie cheever Uh, and they

put together this idea, created the infrastructure. The questions supposed to Cora are curated and answered by the community of users. Users can up vote or down vote answers to help the most relevant responses rise to the top. So it's not quite to the point of necessarily experts answering your questions. It can happen. There are a lot of experts who do contribute to Cora, but it's whatever answers the community feels are really the most helpful that end up rising

to the top of the list. In two thousand eleven, Google launched Google Plus, and originally it was an invite only social network that was for the beta testing. I got one of those invitations, and so for a brief while, I felt like one of the cool kids. It was just me, a bunch of entrepreneurs and a ton of tech journalists, and it was like the best social network

ever because we were all bunch of dorks. But eventually it opened up to everybody and you would allow you to organize people into circles, so you wouldn't just have friends, You could organize your friends via specific circles. What however, you wanted to define it. So maybe you had a circle of friends who were related to a specific interest

or specific event. So for example, I work at the Georgia Renaissance Festival in the springtime, So I might have a circle that's just dedicated to people who also work at the Georgia Renaissance Festival, and then I can post to that circle and only those friends will see that that post, and that way I can keep things that are irrelevant to anyone else off their feeds. They don't get sick of me posting to just a general feed when really I just need to post to this one

specific group. You could also create a circle of people that you didn't want to see anything, so you could collect people that were problematic, you know, instead of blocking one by one, you just throw them in the same group with everybody else. Now, at one point, Google Plus

was really tightly coupled with YouTube comments. It required commoners to create a Google account with a real name if they wanted to participate and leave comments on YouTube, and Google faced a lot of resistance with that, and the

company eventually backpedaled a bit in two thousand fifteen. Now, the concept behind it was I think well intentioned The idea was that they wanted to make sure that they cut down on cyber bullying, on harassment, and they thought if users have to have their their handle associated with their real identity, they would be less likely to engage

in bad behavior. But it also meant that people who were part of vulnerable populations or had an identity that was a public facing identity that was different from their private identity, it penalized them. So that's why there was

a lot of resistance against this move. Also in analysts estimated that the active profiles on Google Plus topped out at about one eleven million users as opposed to a billion over at Facebook, and only six point seven million users had fifty posts or more, with only three point five million having fifty posts or more in the last thirty days, so it wasn't very active like that. They might have had a hundred eleven million users, but people were not using it very frequently, so it is not

a hopping place like Facebook. And then in eleven Twitch dot tv launched. It was a spinoff of the life streaming site justin dot tv. More and more users on justin dot tv. We're using the service to stream video game play sessions and so Twitch was born to port that over to another platform and kind of free up justin dot tv for other stuff. The funny thing is, eventually justin dot tv would go away and Twitch dot

tv would stick around. The service is the top live streaming video game platform in the United States, outperforming YouTube YouTube gaming, which is impressive. YouTube, of course, is enormous and has Google behind it, but was unable to dominate the live stream video game space the way Twitch has. It has fifteen million daily active users and two million

broadcasters every single month. Now, I have a lot more to say about services and companies that launched after tech Stuff did, but let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor and we're back right. So let's talk about some other companies and services that launched after tech Stuff. How about Tender. I did episodes on this recently as well, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time

talking about it. But Tender started out as an app called Matchbox, developed out of the startup incubator hatch Labs, which in itself was operated by two companies called I a C and Extreme Labs. I a C also owned match dot com, so Matchbox was kind of sort of related to the established dating service, but Sean rad and Joe Mnios and a few others turned the dating scheme into kind of an online flirting game, using just your controls of swiping to create sort of a fun, addictive experience,

and Tender was born in twent twelve. The full story of Tender is pretty interesting and filled with ups and downs, so check out the recent episodes to learn more. Then, how about Periscope? Now, I did an episode about Periscope, but that was way back in. Periscope is the live streaming service that works on Twitter, and it began as a project headed by Cavan bikepor and executive at Blackboard

Mobile Mobile, and Joe Bernstein. They founded Periscope in February and Baker bake Poor met with Jack Dorsey of Twitter, and soon Twitter made an offer to buy Periscope. Estimates for that offer range from seventy five million dollars to a hundred million dollars. Twitter acquired Periscope in January, and the app itself was still in closed beta at that time. Periscope and Twitter ended up killing a competing service called

mere Cat, which launched in February. The Periscope service is still active today and you can live stream straight from Twitter. I've done it a few times myself, although not recently. It's a very convenient way to do it. You can just use your mobile phone and you use the cameras on the mobile phone. You can use either forward facing or back facing cameras. It works on iOS and on Android, and it's kind a fun way to connect with people while you are live at some event or some some location.

Next I'll chat quickly about Discord. Jason Citron, a game development studio founder, was frustrated that there was not really a good voice over Internet protocol tool set that worked well for gamers because some games incorporate voice chat services and others don't, and some of the ones that do have lousy implementations or they have features that you might

not like. So, for example, there might be a game where you can chat using a component within the game, but if you do, then other people who aren't on your team can also hear you. Sometimes it's a proximity thing.

So let's say you're playing a squad based action game and you want to be able to coordinate with your teammates, but you don't want someone on the other team to hear what you're up to, and you use the tools in the game, and if someone's close enough to you, they can hear everything you say a and then report it back to their fellow teammates. Well, using something like Discord, you could create a server and have private communications with your team and not worry about anyone else overhearing you

if if in fact, that was your desire. And so Citron decided that he wanted to create such a tool because it didn't exist out there, and his company Hammer and Chisel secured funding to develop such a service and they called it Discord and launched it in It quickly found popularity through online communities like Twitch and Reddit, and users can communicate with other players or even audiences through Twitch,

and communication can be through voice or chat. Discord was in the news a lot over the last couple of years because it is very easy to set up a server, and users can create handles tied to throw away email addresses to protect their anonymity, so you don't have to

sign in with a real person name. You can create a throwaway Gmail account for exaus ample, and then create an associated Discord account and be completely anonymous, and some people belonging to the alt right movement, specifically white supremacists and neo Nazis begin using Discord servers to coordinate real world demonstrations, and Discord responded by shutting down those servers and making it clear the company does not tolerate hate groups.

And I'll have to do a full episode about Discord in the future because it is a pretty fascinating story. Or how about hyper Loop have done several episodes about hyper Loop. I won't go into great detail, but this is the transportation mode that was suggested by Elon Musk. He made this proposal for transportation public back in and the basic ideas you create a tube and you pump out most but not all of the air, and that

helps cut down on air resistance. You put trains inside the tube and they use pressurized air to create lift. They call like air ball bearings. It's sort of like an air hockey table, although typically you would have the train pushing air downwards to create this lift, and you would use powerful magnets to propel the train cars at incredible speeds and you can make trips in a fraction of the time it would take to drive between cities and without all the hassle and maneuvering through airports to

just take a quick flight. It's meant to be a solution to travel between locations that are really too close for efficient air travel, the expense of gas and the amount of time you would spend trying to get on the plane and off the plane. UH saying, well that that's kind of frustrating if the two cities are fairly close together but there's still too far apart for you to easily drive between. That's what hyper loop is meant

to UH, to solve that that kind of problem. So the example that was always used it was traveled between San Francisco and Los Angeles, which would take several hours to drive, more than an hour to fly just from the in an entry at the airport to the point where you're stepping off the plane at your destination, but

less than an hour using this hyperloop approach. There are a few different companies that are experimenting with hyperloop like designs, but most of them take a slightly different approach than what Must's proposal originally said. Then let's see. In two thousand and thirteen, a new service called Slack was released. Slack Well, Slack is a team communication and collaboration tool,

and it expanded from an internal utility. It was created by a guy named Stewart Butterfield, and he made it for a company called tiny Speck that was trying to develop a game, and it was a way for his team to communicate with each other in real time and also to coordinate and various tasks. And it was really effective, so it got repackaged as a product for the general use of companies and individuals throughout the world. It includes stuff like persistent chat rooms that you can associate with

particular projects. So, for example, we could have a tech stuff chat room for internal work here at how Stuff Works, or you could use direct messaging. It's got a lot of other stuff in it. It's undeniably a useful tool, and I kind of hate it. But that's not because it's a bad tool. It's not a bad tool. It's perfectly fine. I hate it because it creates yet more notifications that can interrupt me as I do research and writing, and so this is where I get all grouchy and old.

The tool is fantastic. I just wish I could lock myself away in a quiet library sometimes when I'm trying to put an episode together. The creation of so many real time communication tools creates an expectation among certain people that you should get back to them as soon as a message is sent to you. So, in other words, if someone else sends me a message, they think I should quickly respond to that, even it's supposed to be a synchronous communication and I've got a lot of stuff

going on. In other words, it's really it's really disruptive if you're working on a task that requires a lot of concentration. Plus is really messing with my pub g games in the office as sorry, you can tell you I need to work on that. She's better at it than I am and she's only played twice. Next, how about chat Roulette. This online service randomly matches up people in online chat conversations, typically through webcams, and it was designed by Andre Turnovsky back when he was attending high

school in Russia. He launched the site in November two thousand nine, and it grew steadily, and it also got a pretty dark reputation, well earned. You might say. It was a place where guys were jumping from connection to connection in a quest defined women willing to get naked in front of a camera and also had a reputation for guys exposing themselves to the camera. Not that everyone did this, mind you, but enough of them did do

it to earn the serves this reputation. A similar service called Omegel launched that very same year, several months earlier. This one was designed by Leaf K. Brooks. Omegel initially only allowed for text chat, but by also had a video chat service built into it. And I've seen creative uses both of Omegel and chat Roulette and fun ways, but sadly that tends to take a back seat to all the coverage about people who are using it to, you know, either get naked or ask other people to

get naked for them. So, you know, you can't always predict how your product is going to be used once it gets released into the wild. I have no idea if that was Andre's idea when he first decided to create chat Roulette, but it's certainly the way a lot of enough people have used it for it to get that reputation. Square was founded in two thousand nine and it launched the following year in Square is a company

that was co founded by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. So Dorsey has been in charge of a couple of companies that have made a lot of impact in the text sphere in the last decade. The concept of Square is a technology that makes it easier to accept credit cards as a form of payment. The original card readers were square in shape, and they were dongles that you would plug into a mobile devices audio jack at three point five millimeter jack. So back when audio, when your smartphones

and stuff had those. These days you need either an adapter or you have to get a different model of Square in the company introduced the Square stand, which allows for an iPad to act like a point of sale system. And I've seen these everywhere. A lot of the coffee shops I go to use these, a lot of the places downstairs here at our office building they use them as well. It's just a really convenient way to create

a point of sales system. And so what Square has done is lowered the barrier of entry for owners of small businesses to accept credit card payments for their goods or services. And I'll have to do a full episode on that company at some point as well. All right, guys, that wraps up this first part of the stuff that

came out after tech Stuff debuted. In our next episode, we're gonna talk a little bit more about some other services and companies that started up, and we're also going to take a look at some that didn't stand the test of time. They launched after Tech Stuff became a show, and they aren't around anymore. So make sure you tune in to hear that episode. If you have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, get in touch with me tell me what they are. I don't know. Otherwise, you

can do that by sending me an email. The address is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or draw me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Don't forget to follow us on Instagram and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff Works dot com. W