Down Round

Twitter is no more. From the ashes rises X, Elon Musk’s cringely-named attempt to actualise one of his long term goals: building an everything app. Musk wants X to be the central place where you post, shop, send money, access financial services and do whatever else it is you do as part of being alive on the planet.

In this episode we dive into the idea of the everything app, and why tech companies have been chasing that dream for at least a decade.

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Scams are pretty bad these days. Social media is polluted with them, you can’t answer your phone without hearing a robot voice which claims your PayPal account is being debited $200, and companies everywhere are being hit with ransomware attacks.

What’s to be done? This week, we’re talking scams.

It’s been a while since we’ve done a Q&A episode, and we know your pressing questions have been accumulating for months. We’re sorry we let it get so desperate.

Thank you to our subscribers on Substack and Twitter (X???) who sent in questions. If we didn’t make it to you, there’s a good chance we’ve got a whole ep planned in future.

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The humble internet browser doesn’t get much love these days. There used to be new browser innovations coming out more regularly, as people switched between Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari as their previous one got too slow and clunky.

Turns out it’s pretty hard to innovate in this area. But companies like The Browser Company have been tryi…

Hollywood actors and writers are both on strike for the first time since 1960. Two of the primary reasons they’re hitting the picket line are core Down Round areas: the economics of streaming, and the future of AI content.

Working actors are mad that they’re not being compensated properly for appearances in streaming content, where audience figures are much more opaque, and they’re staring down the barrel of having their likenesses reused with AI.

Ah well. Guess it’s up to us to figure it out then…

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The rise of the consumer-available drone over the past decade has been a huge win for real estate agents and YouTube fail compilations. But what about the rest of us chumps?!

In this episode, we talk about the drone — from the dominance of Chinese companies in their production, to the (possible) promises of drone delivery.

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At the end of last week, Mark Zuckerberg decided to take advantage of the chaos over in Twitterland by surprise dropping Meta’s own text-based social media platform, Threads. Because it leverages the Instagram social graph, it quickly exploded to over 100 million users.

In today’s ep, we dig into Threads and make a series of wild predictions which are sure to never be vindicated.

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The ongoing freakout at Twitter culminated this week in the platform limiting the number of tweets users could see per day, which Elon Musk claimed was to stop an onslaught of AI bots training themselves on Twitter data.

That caused a brief exodus to Bluesky, the wonky alternative currently being hyped by Twitter refugees and former addicts.

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The ticket industry is one of the most confusing online industries in 2023, a rentseeking behemoth which doesn’t seem to offer much for fans or artists alike.

Thanks to the suggestion of a few listeners who seem to have missed out on Taylor Swift tickets last week, we’re diving in.

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It’s been a hot minute since we’ve checked in on the world of AI, and things have been chugging along at rapid pace in the buzziest sector of tech.

This week, we dive into the current AI landscape, including the world of open-source AI.

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