Author: azeeadmin

Hulu will top 23 million subscribers by year-end, according to comments made by Hulu CEO Randy Freer speaking at Business Insider’s Ignition conference this morning. While Freer didn’t state the number outright, he said that the business will have added more subscribers in the second half of 2018 than it did in the first. Based on the numbers we already know, that would put Hulu somewhere in the 23+ to 24 million range by the start of 2019.

Hulu announced at CES in January 2018 its subscriber count had reached 17 million. It then updated that number at this year’s NewFronts presentation to 20 million. If Hulu is on track to add more subscribers in the second half of the year, then it will at least top 23 million.

“I think our numbers will be really impressive,” Freer said. “But, we need to get 30, 40, 50 million homes in a way that we can scale,” he added.

The exec also spoke of the potential for Hulu’s live TV business, offering another hint of how quickly that product was growing by way of a comparison with a competitor – AT&T’s DirecTV Now.

“We think the live TV market is robust,” Freer said. “DirecTV Now announced their number in the third quarter and we grew 10x of where DirecTV Now was. We were growing in October and November. We had our best third quarter, our best October, our best November,” he added.

DirecTV Now had added 49,000 customers in the third quarter. That means Hulu’s Live TV product alone had grown by nearly 500,000 subscribers in the quarter, which would account for a big chunk of Hulu’s overall subscriber growth of 3 million-plus.

The CEO didn’t talk about what’s in store for Hulu with the change in ownership, where Disney is becoming the majority shareholder by way of the 21st Century Fox acquisition. It will take a 60% share, leaving Comcast as a 30% owner and AT&T’s WarnerMedia with 10%. (But the latter is considering selling its stake, AT&T just told investors.)

However, he did offer some hints of what’s on Hulu’s roadmap, including an international expansion.

“We’re exploring all opportunities to expand the geography…we have support from ownership to drive that drive that opportunity,” Freer said.

Freer also noted that Hulu’s ad revenue, thanks its combination of live TV and on-demand, has grown by north of 50 percent over the last year, and is continuing to grow.

“The ads business is really starting to come into its own, and our ability to generate ARPU around ad subs has been terrific,” he said.

He also painted a picture of the flexibility a digital TV service like Hulu offers, suggesting that consumers may one day be able to pay for individual shows on ad-free basis, instead of having to subscribe to an ad-free tier. Or they could toggle on live TV to watch their favorite sports games, then turn it off when they ended – effectively describing a pay-per-view sports product.

“We know sports has a tendency to drive subscriptions…so we will certainly be evaluating sports as an opportunity,” Freer noted.

This ability to personalize your TV is one of the reasons Hulu believes the cable TV era is over, the CEO added.

“The aggregated linear cable network as a business…it had a great 20 year run. I think the next decade – it’s not going to be about aggregated linear TV networks or scheduled networks,” Freer said.

Telemedicine startup Nurx — once dubbed the “Uber for birth control” — has launched a direct-to-consumer Human papillomavirus (HPV) testing kit. The addition means its customers can in the comfort of their own homes test for the most common sexually transmitted infection in the U.S. and a cause of genital warts and cervical cancer.

The Y Combinator graduate is backed with about $42 million in venture capital funding from Kleiner Perkins, Union Square Ventures, Lowercase Capital and others. It launched in 2015 to facilitate women’s access to birth control across the U.S. with a HIPAA-compliant web platform and mobile application that delivers contraceptives directly to customers’ doorsteps. Nurx’s telemedicine platform ensure its users can communicate with doctors and are provided the resources necessary in choosing the correct method of birth control.

The HPV test is free with insurance, aside from the $15 shipping and lab processing fee, and $69 for those without insurance. Beginning today, the kit is available to all current Nurx users and will be fully rolled out to new customers in 2019.

In addition to birth control and the HPV test, the company also ships PrEp, a once-daily pill that reduces the risk of getting HIV. Nurx’s expansion beyond birth control is part of the company’s goal of helping people take control of their health, especially the millions in the U.S. who live in “contraceptive deserts,” or areas where there is no reasonable access to a public clinic.

“Our mission here is to leverage telemedicine to change public healthcare,” Nurx co-founder and chief executive officer Hans Gangeskar told TechCrunch. “We are building a full-stack primary care telemedicine platform at an unparalleled cost.”

The HPV testing kit is only approved for women over 30 and is not a replacement for a Pap smear, which collects a sample of cells from the cervix to check for abnormalities. Still, the kit, which requires only a vaginal swab, is able to assess for 14 high-risks of HPV that lead to cervical cancer. The company says the test will be a game-changer for women who are not regularly able to get Pap smears or who have not had access to the HPV vaccine, like women who live in rural areas and those without health insurance.

Nurx raised a $36 million round with support from the Clinton Foundation in July. As part of the deal, Chelsea Clinton joined its board of directors. The company has used that investment to incorporate the HPV testing kit, as well as to expand into several new markets in 2018. 

Nurx is currently available in 22 states, including the District of Columbia.

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission has approved new rules that set a minimum hourly wage of $17.22 (after expenses) for drivers who work with app-based services like Uber, Lyft, Via and Juno.

Fast Company reports that the rules try to deliver that minimum wage by requiring drivers be paid according to a formula that incorporates mileage, time and utilization rate (the average percentage of time drivers have passengers in their cars). They also call a higher payment when drivers have to take passengers far outside the city (to compensate for them for the return trip).

A proposed bonus payment for drivers offering Uber Pool and other shared ride options appears to have been removed from the rules.

The Independent Drivers Guild, a labor organization that advocates for drivers, has been advocating for these changes, and it praised the TLC vote in a press release.

“Today we brought desperately needed relief to 80,000 working families,” said IDG founder Jim Conigliaro, Jr. “All workers deserve the protection of a fair, livable wage and we are proud to be setting the new bar for contractor workers’ rights in America. We are thankful to the Mayor, Commissioner [Meera] Joshi and the Taxi and Limousine Commission, City Council Member Brad Lander and all of the city officials who listened to and stood up for drivers.”

Uber and Lyft, meanwhile, criticized the decision, though with careful wording emphasizing that the companies aren’t opposed to ensuring that drivers receive a living wage.

“Uber supports efforts to ensure that full-time drivers in NYC – whether driving with taxi, limo or Uber – are able to make a living wage, without harming outer borough riders who have been ignored by yellow taxi and underserved by mass transit,” said Uber Director of Public Affairs Jason Post in a statement. “The TLC’s implementation of the City Council’s legislation to increase driver earnings will lead to higher than necessary fare increases for riders while missing an opportunity to deal with congestion in Manhattan’s central business district.”

Post argued that the rules do not account for the bonuses and other incentive payments that Uber and other companies might make. He criticized the TLC for adopting “an industry-wide utilization rate that does not hold bases accountable for keeping cars full with paying passengers.”

And here’s the statement from Lyft:

Lyft believes all drivers should earn a livable wage and we are committed to helping drivers reach their goals. Unfortunately, the TLC’s proposed pay rules will undermine competition by allowing certain companies to pay drivers lower wages, and disincentive drivers from giving rides to and from areas outside Manhattan. These rules would be a step backward for New Yorkers, and we urge the TLC to reconsider them.

Specifically Lyft says that companies would be able to essentially adopt a lower minimum wage by claiming a higher utilization rate than the industry average. It also says that it will be nearly impossible to implement the higher out-of-town payment rates in the 30-day window before the new rules take effect.

Uber Eats has effectively invented its own native ad unit. Uber confirmed to TechCrunch that a test quietly running in markets around India allows restaurants to bundle several food items together and sell them at a discounted price in exchange for promoted placement by Uber Eats in a featured section of local “Specials”. In some cases, restaurants foot the cost of the discount, while in others Uber pays for the discounts.

The Uber Specials feature demonstrates the massive leverage awarded to food delivery apps that aggregate restaurants. Users often come to Uber Eats and its competitors without a specific restaurant in mind. Uber can then point those customers to whichever food supplier it prefers. The suppliers in turn will increasingly compete for the favor the aggregators — not just in terms of food quality, speed, and review scores, but also in terms of discounts. The aggregators will win users if they offer the best deals, creating a network effect makes restaurants more keen to play ball.

TechCrunch first learned of Uber’s ambitions in the space from a mock-up of the Promoted Items Value Section feature spotted in its app by mobile researcher and frequent TC tipster Jane Manchun Wong. The fictional food items included “Best Beer” that “is made from only the finest gutter swill” and “Weird Fries” that “will so utterly decimate your sense of good food that you will be permanently reduced to a whimpering shell of your former self!” This jokey text that seemingly was never meant for public viewing also noted that the fries are so good you should “throw all your other food in the garbage right now!” Uber assured us these weren’t real.

But what it did confirm is that the discounts for promoted placement test is live in India. “We’re always experimenting with ways to make it easier to find your favorite foods on Uber Eats”, according to a statement provided by an Uber spokesperson.

The feature allows restaurants to create a bundled meal at certain price point, such as a chicken sandwich, french fries, and a drink at a price that’s less than the sum of its parts. The company tells me the goal is to take the friction out of ordering by giving people pre-set meals at a better price prominently available in the app. Attracting more customers that have plenty of other options could offset the discount. Businesses could also use it to bundle high margin items like soft drinks in with meals, or to get rid of overstock.

It’s already common for restaurants to make ‘specials’ out of food they have too much of. That butternut squash ravioli might only be featured because they can’t get rid of it. In that sense, you could think of Uber Specials as the inverse of surge pricing. When supply is too high, restaurants can offer discounts to gain more demand. It’s also not far off from Google Search’s keyword ads where business pay for more visibility.

Uber wouldn’t discuss whether it plans to bring the strategy to other markets, but it makes sense to assume it’s considering expansion. Done wrong, it could look a bit like Uber Eats is pressuring restaurants to surrender discounts if they want to be discoverable inside its app. If restaurants within Uber Eats get into heated competition to offer discounts, it could drive down their profits. But done right, Specials could look like a triple-win. Restaurants can offload surplus and bundle in high margin items while scoring new customers from enhanced placement, customers get cheaper food options, and Uber Eats becomes people’s go-to app for easy-to-order discounted meals.

Flutter, Google’s toolkit for building cross-platform applications, hit version 1.0 today. Traditionally, the project always focused on iOS and Android apps, but as the company announced today, it’s now looking at bringing Flutter to the web, too. That project, currently called Hummingbird, is essentially an experimental web-based implementation of the Flutter runtime.

“From the beginning, we designed Flutter to be a portable UI toolkit, not just a mobile UI toolkit,” Google’s group product manager for Flutter, Tim Sneath, told me. “And so we’ve been experimenting with how we can bring Flutter to different places.”

Hummingbird takes the Dart code that all Flutter applications are written in and then compiles it to JavaScript, which in turn allows the code to run in any modern browser. Developers have always been able to compile Dart to JavaScript, so this part isn’t new, but ensuring that the Flutter engine would work, and bringing all the relevant Flutter features to the web was a major engineering effort. Indeed, Google built three prototypes to see how this could work. Just bringing the widgets over wasn’t enough. A combination of the Flutter widgets and its layout system was also discarded and in the end, the team decided to build a full Flutter web engine that retains all of the layers that sit above the dart:ui library.

“One of the great things about Flutter itself is that it compiles to machine code, to Arm code. But Hummingbird extends that further and says, okay, we’ll also compile to JavaScript and we’ll replace the Flutter engine on the web with the Hummingbird engine which then enables Flutter code to run without changes in web browsers. And that, of course, extends Flutter’s perspective to a whole new ecosystem.”

With tools like Electron, it’s easy enough to bring a web app to the desktop, too, so there’s now also a pathway for bringing Flutter apps to Windows and MacOS that way, though there is already another project in progress to embed Flutter into native desktop apps, too.

It’s worth noting that Google always touted the fact that Flutter compiled to native code — and the speed gains it got from that. Compiling to the web is a bit of a tradeoff, though. Sneath acknowledged as much and stressed that Hummingbird is an experimental project and that Google isn’t releasing any code today. Right now, it’s a technical demonstration.

“If you can go native, you should go native,” he said. “Think of it as an extension of Flutter’s reach rather than a solution to the problem that Flutter itself is solving.”

In its current iteration, the Flutter web engine can handle most apps, but there’s still a lot of work to do to ensure that all widgets run correctly, for example. The team is also looking at building a plugin system and ways to embed Flutter and into existing web apps — and existing web apps into Flutter web apps.

 

Facebook was in the news a bit more than they would have preferred in 2018, but the company’s leadership will be taking to the stage to talk about its next product evolutions for consumers and developers. The social media giant has just announced its dates for its annual developer conference, Facebook will be returning to San Jose on April 30 and May 1.

In a short blog post, the company highlighted how the event will be “showcasing how technology can enable the best of what people can do together.”

This past year’s F8 proved to be a bit more of a conservative exercise for the company, leaving a defiant Mark Zuckerberg to defend his company while making concessions that there was much more to be done to protect user privacy. The event’s big announcement, Facebook Dating, is still in the testing phase. On the hardware side, the $199 Oculus Go virtual reality headset which launched at the event seemed to arrive to mostly positive reviews.

Registration for F8 isn’t open yet and likely won’t be for a couple months. In the past, tickets for developers have gone for $595. Devs can sign-up on the F8 site for updates.

We’ll see where Facebook chooses to take the direction of this year’s developer conference, but we’ve got a few more months to ponder it further. What’s next for Instagram with a new team at its helm? What’s the Facebook blockchain team working on? Will we see a new AR/VR product from Oculus?

Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building mobile Android and iOS applications, hit its version 1.0 release today. In addition, Google also today announced a set of new third-party integrations with the likes of Square and others, as well as a couple of new features that make it easier to integrate Flutter with existing applications.

The open source Flutter project made its debut at Google’s 2017 I/O developer conference. Since then, it’s quickly grown in popularity and companies like Groupon, Philips Hue, Tencent, Alibaba, Capital One and others have already built applications with it, despite the fact that it had not hit version 1.0 yet and that developers have to write their apps in the Dart language, which is an additional barrier to entry.

In total, Google says, developers have already published “thousands” of Flutter apps to the Apple and Google app stores.

“Flutter is our portable UI toolkit for creating a beautiful native experience for iOS and Android out of just a single code base,” Tim Sneath, Google’s group product manager for Dart, explained. “The problem we’re solving is the problem that most mobile developers face today. As a developer, you’re kind of forced to choose. Either you build apps natively using the platform SDK, whether you’re building an iOS app or an Android app. And then you’ve to build them twice.”

Sneath was also part of the Silverlight team at Microsoft before he joined Google in 2017, so he’s got a bit of experience in learning what doesn’t work in this space of cross-platform development. It’s no secret, though, that Facebook is trying to solve a very similar problem with React Native, which is also quite popular.

“I mean, React Native is obviously a technology that’s proven quite popular,” Sneath said. “One of the challenges that React Native developers face, or have reported in the past — one challenge is that native React Native code is written in JavaScript, which means that it’s run using the browser’s JavaScript engine, which immediately kind of move this a little bit away from the native model of the platform. The bit that they are very native in is that they use the operating system’s own controls. And while on the surface, that seems like a good thing in practice, that had quite a few challenges for developers around compatibility.”

Google, obviously believes that its ability to compile to native code — and the speed gains that come with that — set its platform apart from the competition. In part, it does this by using a hardware-accelerated 2D engine and, of course, by compiling the Dart code to native ARM code for iOS and Android. The company also stresses that developers get full control over every pixel on the screen.

With today’s launch, Google is also announcing new third-party integrations to Flutter. The first is with Square, which announced two new Flutter SDKs for building payments flows, both for in-app experience and in-person terminals using a Square reader. Others are 2Dimensions, for building vector animations and embedding them right into Flutter, as well as Nevercode, which announced a tool for automating the build and packaging process for Flutter apps.

As for new Flutter features, Google today announced ‘Add to App,’ a new feature that makes it easier for developers to slowly add Flutter code to existing apps. In its early days, Flutter’s focus was squarely on building new apps from scratch, but as it has grown in popularity, developers now want to use it for parts of their existing applications as they modernize them.

The other new feature is ‘Platform Views,’ which is essentially the opposite of ‘Add to App’ in that it allows developers to embed Android and iOS controls in their Flutter apps.

Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit for building mobile Android and iOS applications, hit its version 1.0 release today. In addition, Google also today announced a set of new third-party integrations with the likes of Square and others, as well as a couple of new features that make it easier to integrate Flutter with existing applications.

The open source Flutter project made its debut at Google’s 2017 I/O developer conference. Since then, it’s quickly grown in popularity and companies like Groupon, Philips Hue, Tencent, Alibaba, Capital One and others have already built applications with it, despite the fact that it had not hit version 1.0 yet and that developers have to write their apps in the Dart language, which is an additional barrier to entry.

In total, Google says, developers have already published “thousands” of Flutter apps to the Apple and Google app stores.

“Flutter is our portable UI toolkit for creating a beautiful native experience for iOS and Android out of just a single code base,” Tim Sneath, Google’s group product manager for Dart, explained. “The problem we’re solving is the problem that most mobile developers face today. As a developer, you’re kind of forced to choose. Either you build apps natively using the platform SDK, whether you’re building an iOS app or an Android app. And then you’ve to build them twice.”

Sneath was also part of the Silverlight team at Microsoft before he joined Google in 2017, so he’s got a bit of experience in learning what doesn’t work in this space of cross-platform development. It’s no secret, though, that Facebook is trying to solve a very similar problem with React Native, which is also quite popular.

“I mean, React Native is obviously a technology that’s proven quite popular,” Sneath said. “One of the challenges that React Native developers face, or have reported in the past — one challenge is that native React Native code is written in JavaScript, which means that it’s run using the browser’s JavaScript engine, which immediately kind of move this a little bit away from the native model of the platform. The bit that they are very native in is that they use the operating system’s own controls. And while on the surface, that seems like a good thing in practice, that had quite a few challenges for developers around compatibility.”

Google, obviously believes that its ability to compile to native code — and the speed gains that come with that — set its platform apart from the competition. In part, it does this by using a hardware-accelerated 2D engine and, of course, by compiling the Dart code to native ARM code for iOS and Android. The company also stresses that developers get full control over every pixel on the screen.

With today’s launch, Google is also announcing new third-party integrations to Flutter. The first is with Square, which announced two new Flutter SDKs for building payments flows, both for in-app experience and in-person terminals using a Square reader. Others are 2Dimensions, for building vector animations and embedding them right into Flutter, as well as Nevercode, which announced a tool for automating the build and packaging process for Flutter apps.

As for new Flutter features, Google today announced ‘Add to App,’ a new feature that makes it easier for developers to slowly add Flutter code to existing apps. In its early days, Flutter’s focus was squarely on building new apps from scratch, but as it has grown in popularity, developers now want to use it for parts of their existing applications as they modernize them.

The other new feature is ‘Platform Views,’ which is essentially the opposite of ‘Add to App’ in that it allows developers to embed Android and iOS controls in their Flutter apps.

I dig on my employer Oath, and then Tencent Music notes and a major loss for the NYC ecosystem and what it means for open source.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

My three word Oath? I’m with stupid

It goes without saying that this piece about my employer is my work alone, doesn’t reflect management’s views, and is done under the auspices of TechCrunch’s independent editorial voice. No usage of internal information is assumed or implied.

This is a piece about TechCrunch’s parent company, formerly known as “Oath:” (okay just Oath, but who am I to flout a mandatory colon?) and now ReBranded as Verizon Media Group / Oath (See what they did there? They literally slashed Oath. Poetic).

Oath is essentially the creature of Frankenstein, a middle-school corporate alchemy experiment to fuse the properties of the companies formerly known as AOL and Yahoo into the larger behemoth known as Verizon. You can feel the terrible synergy emanating from the multiple firewalls it takes to get to our corporate resources.

Oath has a problem:* it needs to grow for Wall Street to be happy and for Verizon not to neuter it, but it has an incredible penchant for making product decisions that basically tell users to fuck off. Oath’s year over year revenues last quarter were down 6.9%, driven by extreme competition from digital ad leaders Google and Facebook.

The solution apparently? Drive page views down. If that logic doesn’t make sense, well then, maybe you should fill out a job application.

The kerfuffle is over Tumblr, which is among Oath’s most important brands, in that people actually know what it is and kind of still like it. Tumblr, which Yahoo notably acquired under Marissa Mayer back in 2013, has been something of a product orphan — one of the few true software platforms left in a world filled with editorial content like TechCrunch and HuffPost (Oath sold off Flickr earlier this year to SmugMug — which also seems to be going through its own boneheaded product decision phase).

All was well and good — well, at least quiet — in the Tumblr world until Apple pulled the plug on Tumblr’s app in the App Store a few weeks ago over claims of child porn. Now let’s be absolutely clear: child porn is abhorrent, and filtering it out of online photo sharing sites is a prime directive (and legally mandated).

But Oath has decided to do something equally obnoxious: it intends to ban anything that might be considered “adult content” starting December 17th, just in time for the holidays when purity around family gatherings is key.

In Tumblr’s policy, “Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” You’ll notice the written legerdemain — “primarily” doesn’t exclude the wider world of adult-oriented content that almost invariably is going to be subsumed under this policy.

Obviously, adults (and presumably teens as well) are pissed. As users are starting to see what photos are getting flagged (hint: not the ones with porn in them), that’s only making them more angry.

Oath is attempting to compress the content moderation engineering and testing of Facebook down to a span of a few weeks. And Facebook hasn’t even figured this one out yet, which is why people are still being murdered across the world from viral messages and memes it hosts that incite ethnic hatred and genocide.

I get the pressure from Apple. I get the safety of saying “just ban all the images” à la Renaissance pope. I get the business decision of trying to maintain Tumblr’s clean image. These points are all reasonable, but they all are just useless without Tumblr’s core and long-time users.

What flummoxes me from a product perspective is that it’s not as if banning all adult content is the singular solution to the problem. There is an entire spectrum of product, policy, legal, and product cultural ingredients that could be drawn upon. There could be more age verification, better separation of “safe for children” and “meant for adults content,” and more focus on messaging to users that moderation was meant to help the product and focus audiences rather than to puritanically filter.

Or you can just kill the photos, the somehow still loyal core user base, a safe space for expression via nudity and sexuality and, well, traffic along with it. And then you look at -6.9% growth and think: huh, I wonder if there is a connection.

*Mandatory colon

Tencent Music reintroduces its IPO

Maybe the IPO markets are thawing a bit after the crash of the last few weeks and…tariffs. From my colleague Catherine Shu:

Tencent Music Entertainment’s initial public offering is back in motion, two months after the company reportedly postponed it amid a global selloff. In a regulatory filing today, the company, China’s largest streaming music service, said it plans to offer 82 million American depositary shares (ADS), representing 164 million Class A ordinary shares, for between $13 to $15 each. That means the IPO will potentially raise up to $1.23 billion.

My colleague Eric Peckham wrote a deeper dive behind the lessons of Tencent Music for the broader music industry:

At its heart, Tencent Music is an interactive media company. Its business isn’t merely providing music, it’s getting people to engage around music. Given its parent company Tencent has become the leading force in global gaming—with control of League of Legends maker Riot Games and Clash of Clans maker Supercell, plus a 40 percent stake in Fortnite creator Epic Games, and role as the top mobile games publisher in China—its team is well-versed in the dynamics of in-game purchasing.

Tencent Music has staked out a very differentiated business model from Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, etc. It has used an engagement-based product model to make live-streaming and virtual gifts huge business lines, without dealing with the product marketing logistics of subscription. Where the West always asks you to pay for access, Tencent is asking you essentially to pay to have fun and be part of an experience.

Eric asks I think a deep question: why hasn’t this model (which seems particularly obvious in music given the overall events component of that business) been back-ported from China to the Western world? He sees a world where Facebook buys Spotify (I don’t) but I think there is absolutely a gap in the market for a music platform to really own this model.

NYC loses an open-source superstar

Wes McKinney is a major open-source star and the engineer behind pandas, which is one of the fundamental Python data libraries, as well as a founding engineer of Apache Arrow, which is an in-memory data structure specification.

So it is big news that he has decided to decamp from New York City, where has has lived for ten years, to Nashville. Writing on his personal blog:

I’ve increasingly felt that open source development is at odds with the values that are driving a large portion of the corporate world, particularly in the United States. Many companies won’t fund open source work because there is no “return on investment”. This is deeply frustrating, and being surrounded by people whose actions align with profit-motive can be pretty discouraging. It’s not necessarily that people who work in NYC or SF are greedy or amorally concerned with making money. In many cases they are just responding to incentives coming from pretty low on the hierarchy of needs.

And

Full-time open source developers in many cases will make less money than their peers who work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or another major tech company. If we are to enable more people to do open source development as a full-time vocation, we need to grow supportive tech communities in places that are more affordable. (emphasis his).

I think this is a very interesting trend to watch in the coming years. It’s not just the small business and art types who want to move to lower cost locales to match their lifestyle spending to the (economic) value of their work. Software developers who want to work on more meaningful projects outside of advertising and finance will also increasingly need to consider these sorts of geographical adjustments.

As I wrote a few months ago about digital nomads:

From cryptocurrency millionaires in Puerto Rico to digital nomads in hotspots like Thailand, Indonesia, and Colombia, there is increasingly a view that there is a marketplace for governance, and we hold the power as consumers. Much like choosing a cereal from the breakfast department of a supermarket, highly-skilled professionals are now comparing governments online — and making clear-headed choices based on which ones are most convenient and have the greatest amenities available.

Economic migration — whether from cost-of-living, ecosystem or governance culture, or just for new horizons — is the watchword of this century. It’s a huge loss for NYC that people like McKinney can no longer find their work compatible with the city.

What’s next

I am still obsessing about next-gen semiconductors. If you have thoughts there, give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

Thoughts on Articles

Imagined Communities – a major classic book of social science thought, it’s amazing how well it has held up, and the lessons it holds for us in the cyber age. Intending to write a review of it for this weekend, so expect more notes later.

Quietly, Japan has established itself as a power in the aerospace industry – I love industrial policy and national economic development, and Eric Berger has done a great job on both fronts with his dispatch in Ars Technica. Japan is roaring back into space, increasing its launch capabilities and also preparing to deploy its own GPS infrastructure. An important contextual read for those who follow SpaceX.

Why we stopped trusting elites — a compelling deep dive by William Davies in The Guardian into how populism is animated by the failures of elites. Couldn’t agree more that elites have lost significant trust over the last few decades, mostly from hubris, corruption, and outright fraud (the financial crisis being just the largest). Elites need to hold themselves to much higher standards if we want to ask our fellow citizens for their support.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

• Huge long list of articles on next-gen semiconductors. More to come shortly.

I dig on my employer Oath, and then Tencent Music notes and a major loss for the NYC ecosystem and what it means for open source.

TechCrunch is experimenting with new content forms. This is a rough draft of something new – provide your feedback directly to the author (Danny at danny@techcrunch.com) if you like or hate something here.

My three word Oath? I’m with stupid

It goes without saying that this piece about my employer is my work alone, doesn’t reflect management’s views, and is done under the auspices of TechCrunch’s independent editorial voice. No usage of internal information is assumed or implied.

This is a piece about TechCrunch’s parent company, formerly known as “Oath:” (okay just Oath, but who am I to flout a mandatory colon?) and now ReBranded as Verizon Media Group / Oath (See what they did there? They literally slashed Oath. Poetic).

Oath is essentially the creature of Frankenstein, a middle-school corporate alchemy experiment to fuse the properties of the companies formerly known as AOL and Yahoo into the larger behemoth known as Verizon. You can feel the terrible synergy emanating from the multiple firewalls it takes to get to our corporate resources.

Oath has a problem:* it needs to grow for Wall Street to be happy and for Verizon not to neuter it, but it has an incredible penchant for making product decisions that basically tell users to fuck off. Oath’s year over year revenues last quarter were down 6.9%, driven by extreme competition from digital ad leaders Google and Facebook.

The solution apparently? Drive page views down. If that logic doesn’t make sense, well then, maybe you should fill out a job application.

The kerfuffle is over Tumblr, which is among Oath’s most important brands, in that people actually know what it is and kind of still like it. Tumblr, which Yahoo notably acquired under Marissa Mayer back in 2013, has been something of a product orphan — one of the few true software platforms left in a world filled with editorial content like TechCrunch and HuffPost (Oath sold off Flickr earlier this year to SmugMug — which also seems to be going through its own boneheaded product decision phase).

All was well and good — well, at least quiet — in the Tumblr world until Apple pulled the plug on Tumblr’s app in the App Store a few weeks ago over claims of child porn. Now let’s be absolutely clear: child porn is abhorrent, and filtering it out of online photo sharing sites is a prime directive (and legally mandated).

But Oath has decided to do something equally obnoxious: it intends to ban anything that might be considered “adult content” starting December 17th, just in time for the holidays when purity around family gatherings is key.

In Tumblr’s policy, “Adult content primarily includes photos, videos, or GIFs that show real-life human genitals or female-presenting nipples, and any content—including photos, videos, GIFs and illustrations—that depicts sex acts.” You’ll notice the written legerdemain — “primarily” doesn’t exclude the wider world of adult-oriented content that almost invariably is going to be subsumed under this policy.

Obviously, adults (and presumably teens as well) are pissed. As users are starting to see what photos are getting flagged (hint: not the ones with porn in them), that’s only making them more angry.

Oath is attempting to compress the content moderation engineering and testing of Facebook down to a span of a few weeks. And Facebook hasn’t even figured this one out yet, which is why people are still being murdered across the world from viral messages and memes it hosts that incite ethnic hatred and genocide.

I get the pressure from Apple. I get the safety of saying “just ban all the images” à la Renaissance pope. I get the business decision of trying to maintain Tumblr’s clean image. These points are all reasonable, but they all are just useless without Tumblr’s core and long-time users.

What flummoxes me from a product perspective is that it’s not as if banning all adult content is the singular solution to the problem. There is an entire spectrum of product, policy, legal, and product cultural ingredients that could be drawn upon. There could be more age verification, better separation of “safe for children” and “meant for adults content,” and more focus on messaging to users that moderation was meant to help the product and focus audiences rather than to puritanically filter.

Or you can just kill the photos, the somehow still loyal core user base, a safe space for expression via nudity and sexuality and, well, traffic along with it. And then you look at -6.9% growth and think: huh, I wonder if there is a connection.

*Mandatory colon

Tencent Music reintroduces its IPO

Maybe the IPO markets are thawing a bit after the crash of the last few weeks and…tariffs. From my colleague Catherine Shu:

Tencent Music Entertainment’s initial public offering is back in motion, two months after the company reportedly postponed it amid a global selloff. In a regulatory filing today, the company, China’s largest streaming music service, said it plans to offer 82 million American depositary shares (ADS), representing 164 million Class A ordinary shares, for between $13 to $15 each. That means the IPO will potentially raise up to $1.23 billion.

My colleague Eric Peckham wrote a deeper dive behind the lessons of Tencent Music for the broader music industry:

At its heart, Tencent Music is an interactive media company. Its business isn’t merely providing music, it’s getting people to engage around music. Given its parent company Tencent has become the leading force in global gaming—with control of League of Legends maker Riot Games and Clash of Clans maker Supercell, plus a 40 percent stake in Fortnite creator Epic Games, and role as the top mobile games publisher in China—its team is well-versed in the dynamics of in-game purchasing.

Tencent Music has staked out a very differentiated business model from Spotify, Pandora, Apple Music, etc. It has used an engagement-based product model to make live-streaming and virtual gifts huge business lines, without dealing with the product marketing logistics of subscription. Where the West always asks you to pay for access, Tencent is asking you essentially to pay to have fun and be part of an experience.

Eric asks I think a deep question: why hasn’t this model (which seems particularly obvious in music given the overall events component of that business) been back-ported from China to the Western world? He sees a world where Facebook buys Spotify (I don’t) but I think there is absolutely a gap in the market for a music platform to really own this model.

NYC loses an open-source superstar

Wes McKinney is a major open-source star and the engineer behind pandas, which is one of the fundamental Python data libraries, as well as a founding engineer of Apache Arrow, which is an in-memory data structure specification.

So it is big news that he has decided to decamp from New York City, where has has lived for ten years, to Nashville. Writing on his personal blog:

I’ve increasingly felt that open source development is at odds with the values that are driving a large portion of the corporate world, particularly in the United States. Many companies won’t fund open source work because there is no “return on investment”. This is deeply frustrating, and being surrounded by people whose actions align with profit-motive can be pretty discouraging. It’s not necessarily that people who work in NYC or SF are greedy or amorally concerned with making money. In many cases they are just responding to incentives coming from pretty low on the hierarchy of needs.

And

Full-time open source developers in many cases will make less money than their peers who work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, or another major tech company. If we are to enable more people to do open source development as a full-time vocation, we need to grow supportive tech communities in places that are more affordable. (emphasis his).

I think this is a very interesting trend to watch in the coming years. It’s not just the small business and art types who want to move to lower cost locales to match their lifestyle spending to the (economic) value of their work. Software developers who want to work on more meaningful projects outside of advertising and finance will also increasingly need to consider these sorts of geographical adjustments.

As I wrote a few months ago about digital nomads:

From cryptocurrency millionaires in Puerto Rico to digital nomads in hotspots like Thailand, Indonesia, and Colombia, there is increasingly a view that there is a marketplace for governance, and we hold the power as consumers. Much like choosing a cereal from the breakfast department of a supermarket, highly-skilled professionals are now comparing governments online — and making clear-headed choices based on which ones are most convenient and have the greatest amenities available.

Economic migration — whether from cost-of-living, ecosystem or governance culture, or just for new horizons — is the watchword of this century. It’s a huge loss for NYC that people like McKinney can no longer find their work compatible with the city.

What’s next

I am still obsessing about next-gen semiconductors. If you have thoughts there, give me a ring: danny@techcrunch.com.

Thoughts on Articles

Imagined Communities – a major classic book of social science thought, it’s amazing how well it has held up, and the lessons it holds for us in the cyber age. Intending to write a review of it for this weekend, so expect more notes later.

Quietly, Japan has established itself as a power in the aerospace industry – I love industrial policy and national economic development, and Eric Berger has done a great job on both fronts with his dispatch in Ars Technica. Japan is roaring back into space, increasing its launch capabilities and also preparing to deploy its own GPS infrastructure. An important contextual read for those who follow SpaceX.

Why we stopped trusting elites — a compelling deep dive by William Davies in The Guardian into how populism is animated by the failures of elites. Couldn’t agree more that elites have lost significant trust over the last few decades, mostly from hubris, corruption, and outright fraud (the financial crisis being just the largest). Elites need to hold themselves to much higher standards if we want to ask our fellow citizens for their support.

Reading docket

What I’m reading (or at least, trying to read)

• Huge long list of articles on next-gen semiconductors. More to come shortly.