Mon. 12/16 - Give Us A Name For $100MM AAR Startups!

December 16, 2019·23 min·1 clip

Music streaming has no 'House of Cards' to justify a price increase, leaving Spotify unable to raise its $10/month price after 15 years.

Chrome 79 is the first mess. Google has stopped the Android rollout, even though it was already 50% complete, after reports that many apps using Android's native web view were losing data. The bug matters because of the plumbing behind it. On most recent Android versions, Chrome acts as the system web view, so a browser update can break apps that do not look like browsers at all. Apps built with Apache Cordova, PhoneGap, and packaged web apps like Twitter Lite end up in the blast zone. From there, the show moves outward. Amazon is close to delivering more packages than FedEx or UPS on its own. Argo gets the business model treatment, and the plain version is that Argo wants to charge by the mile. Music gets a pricing power question too, starting with the cold open. CES then gives the episode its TV turn. The host uses his coming return to CES to talk about televisions, where hardware prices keep falling. The 50-inch 4K example carries the point: an 80 percent price drop from 2012 to 2017 is great for buyers, but it also changes what sellers need from the product. Cheap TVs are not a gift. The argument is that manufacturers can make money after the sale through pre-installed channels, ads, and user data once the screen is sitting in the living room. Margin has moved downstream. A smart TV becomes part cheap PC with loaded software, part connected ad surface, and part surveillance-flavored business model. The dry joke lands near the end. With only 37 percent of U.S. homes having smart TVs, the host sees plenty of money still waiting to be squeezed out of the market.

As heard by us

A brisk tech roundup that turns headlines into business-model questions.

Techmeme Ride Home spends this Monday moving from a Chrome 79 Android bug that wiped data from some apps into a broader point about where tech companies still make money once hardware gets cheap.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

For when a Chrome bug, cheaper TVs, and a few tech-business side quests all land in one daily briefing.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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