Down Round

YouTube is indisputably the king of online video, and has been virtually since it launched in 2005. It's part of the infrastructure of the internet, and has imprinted itself on the culture through a combo of its algorithmic recommendations engine and sheer scale. But in the age of TikTok, can YouTube be toppled?

In this episode, we talk through YouTube's history, key points in its development, and what its future might look like. Also, sadly, YouTubers.

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These days it seems just about everyone can make professional looking video. Thanks to the video production tools available to the average user of TikTok, Zoomers are better at editing video than millennials ever were. It leaves the question: what are the classic pro video platforms like Avid, Adobe Premiere and Apple Final Cut Pro doing?

At the same time, music production seems like a harder problem to make simple for the masses. In this ep, we dive into the current situation around audio and video production.

Links

• Bill Gates tries to install Movie Maker – Internal Tech Emails

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Among the numerous announcements made at this year's Meta Connect was a new generation of its smart glasses, developed with Ray-Bans. Aside from the usual stuff about capturing photos and listening to audio, Mark Zuckerberg casually dropped that he thinks they will soon be an interface into conversational AI.

It comes as there are rumours of other companies considering AI devices, like OpenAI working with former Apple design boss Jony Ive. In this ep, we dive in.

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Digital identity references a simple idea: how much a computer system knows about you. But, just like everything else, it's a bit weird these days. People have increasingly fractious online identities, even as the platforms we use and our own governments collect more and more data about us.

This episode, we discuss changes in digital identity, and Raph gets to go off about his deep and unabiding love of the surveillance state.

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The smartphone camera arms race seems to be a little less intense these days, but the quality of a phone camera remains one of the major reasons people choose to upgrade – especially when most iPhone and Android devices have been basically the same black glass rectangle for a decade now. 

But there's only so much circuitry and lens technology you can cram into a phone. So much of the development has been software level, with machine learning and AI doing heavy algorithmic work to make your photos pop. This ranges from automatic red eye removal and saturation adjustment all the way up to faked photos of the moon.

So we ask the bold question: where does smartphone photography go from here? And does it really matter if the photos your phone is taking don't really reflect reality?

Links

• Samsung caught faking zoom photos of the Moon - The Verge
• Artificial intelligence and the future of smartphone photography - ZDNet
• Your smartphone photos are totally fake – and you love it - Washington Post

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If you pay any attention to tech or VC Twitter, Flexport will have crossed your radar. A freight forwarding business which wants to do for supply chains what Stripe did for payments, Flexport (and its founder Ryan Petersen) has become one of the most hyped startups among a certain flavour of tech poster. Petersen also became a well-known talking head during the COVID supply chain crisis.

The company is in the news because Petersen sacked his successor, former Amazon logistics boss Dave Clarke, and has returned to the helm amid a revenue collapse. In this ep, we talk about Flexport, logistics, and what the heck's going on.

Links

• Flexport CEO Dave Clark resigns from logistics startup after one year in the role - CNBC
• Can Ryan Petersen Fix Flexport? - The Information

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Unity is one of the most popular game engines in the world, powering everything from a solid chunk of the mobile gaming universe to bigger console and PC games. Last week, it managed to annoy basically all of its customers by announcing a new, highly extractive pricing model.

In this episode, we dive into what a game engine does, the rise of Unity, and why making everyone who uses your product homicidally angry is the bold marketing move of 2023.

Links

• Unity plan pricing and packaging updates - Unity
• Unity plans to change its disastrous new pricing program - The Verge

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This week brought news that Clubhouse, the social audio streaming platform endlessly hyped during the early pandemic, has pivoted away from its original purpose and is now trying to become sort of a group chat for audio instead.

It's as good a time as any to talk about social audio, the way people share audio online, and why it's such a tough nut to crack.

Links

• Clubhouse reinvents itself as an audio messaging app - The Verge

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Wikipedia is one of the most popular websites on earth, and an example of a quasi-utopian internet project which has kind of worked out in the end – and managed to stick around too. Despite some evident problems, it all works surprisingly well.

To help us understand Wikipedia and the Wikimedia Foundation which manages it – and the weird world of the editors who keep it functional – we're joined by author Richard Cooke, who is currently writing a book about it. 

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This is a preview of a premium episode. To sign up for Down Round Premium and get an extra episode a week, go here. 

Canva is one of Australia's most successful tech companies. It has proven pretty disruptive to the global design landscape, with its template-based offering making it relatively easy for even novices with zero taste to make stuff that looks pretty good.

In this ep, we talk about Canva's effect on design, and where it might go next to justify its sky-high valuation.

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