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Updated at: 2018-08-10T14:01:51Z
In the U.S., Netflix and Amazon are locked in a heated battle for customers. In India, they have more than 40 other rivals to contend with. Companies ranging from Sony-owned Liv to local firms like Reliance Entertainment’s BigFlix are competing for online viewers. And that number is likely to grow, according to Datta Dave, the American-born co-founder of Tulsea, an Indian talent agency representing writers, producers and tech firms.
In particular, Mr. Dave said, competition will come from more online video services aimed at audiences outside of urban city centers, catering to regional cultures and languages. These include low-cost services like Fastfilmz, which produces content in four South Indian dialects and costs only 40 rupees a month, equivalent to 58 cents. Netflix’s base package costs 500 rupees a month, or about $7, while Amazon Prime Video costs 129 rupees a month, or $1.88.
Greetings!
I am thrilled to announce the first round of speakers for our fourth San Francisco Subscriber Summit. For those of you new to our community, this is our biggest event of the year in which I interview newsmakers we think our subscribers need to know better. We also host unique breakout sessions with entrepreneurs, investors and tech executives. I spend most of the year preparing for this event, so I am very excited to tell you a little about what we have planned this year.
First, the important details:
Date: Thursday, October 18, 2018
Time: 8:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. (followed by a VIP evening reception by invitation only to VIP ticket holders)
Location: UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center, Robertson Auditorium, San Francisco
And here’s a little on the first round of speakers we’re announcing, and why I asked them to speak. More to come soon.
Kevin Systrom, CEO, Instagram: In case you haven’t heard, or read Facebook’s earnings, Instagram is in many ways the future of Facebook. That’s likely to put some new pressure on the always affable Systrom, who has introduced a string of strong new products in recent months. We’ll ask him for status updates on those, such as IGTV, and for a look ahead to how the app can maintain its mojo with the impending social media malaise.
Katie Haun, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz, crypto: Katie's new job, which she will be starting weeks before joining us, made waves in Silicon Valley. Andreessen Horowitz's first female partner. And a crypto legend to boot. Before jumping into venture capital, Haun hunted crypto criminals as a U.S. Justice Department prosecutor and taught a wildly popular crypto course at Stanford. We can't wait to talk to her about her investment theses, the regulatory landscape and more.
Nat Friedman, incoming CEO, GitHub: The day Microsoft made its surprise $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, Silicon Valley was abuzz with the news about who was going to run geeks’ favorite service for collaborating on code. Friedman was a bold choice: the young engineer sold his mobile development company Xamarin to Microsoft several years ago. So what are his plans for the deeply influential open-source platform, and how will it change under Microsoft?
Sara Clemens, COO, Twitch: Hired by the Amazon-owned streaming service earlier this year to help it operationalize and scale, Clemens sees the future of media through the eyes of Twitch’s millions of young users using the platform to livestream gameplay and so much more. We’ll be asking her to talk about the growth of her business and trends that will affect the industry more broadly.
I want to thank all our past speakers who have made this event a success and point you to www.theinformation.com/video where you can see past interviews.
Past speakers include:
If you are interested in being considered as a breakout speaker for the 2018 Subscriber Summit, please email events@theinformation.com.
And a word on who should attend...
Agenda:
8:00 AM Registration and light breakfast
8:30 AM Welcome and keynote, Jessica Lessin, The Information
8:45 AM General sessions start
11:45 AM General sessions conclude
12:00 PM Lunch breakout sessions begin
1:00 PM Lunch breakout sessions and event concludes
6:30 PM VIP Reception (By invitation only)
Breakout session details
An important part of our Subscriber Summits are our lunch breakout sessions, a chance for you to discuss important topics and hear straight from the big names in tech. Stay tuned for details about this year’s breakout sessions. Popular past breakout sessions include:
Thank you to our Corporate Co-Hosts
We look forward to seeing you in San Francisco on October 18.
Fees, Tickets & VIP Tickets:
$50 registration fee for subscribers.
Tickets will first be made available to All Access Subscribers, then annual subscribers, then monthly subscribers, space permitting. We recommend upgrading today (visit www.theinformation.com/upgrade or email support@theinformation.com) to an All Access subscription to guarantee access to this event.
VIP tickets are also available for purchase for $2,500 and include access to an invitation-only VIP party at the home of Jessica Lessin. VIP ticket benefits include:
Ticket Availability & Policies
As with all of our events, this event is expected to sell out quickly. Space is limited and priority is given to All Access Subscribers. Tickets will then open up to Annual and Monthly subscribers in September, space permitting.
Once we reach capacity, we will have a waitlist for this event and will notify you if a space becomes available.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
Questions or interested in sponsorships?
Contact events@theinformation.com
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If you’re not a subscriber, please purchase a subscription here.
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The battle to win over viewers online may be reaching new levels of intensity. Comcast’s NBCUniversal is considering the launch of a streaming service that would pay people to watch it.
The tentative name for the service is Watch Back and it would feature episodes of TV shows and web series from NBCUniversal’s own TV networks—like NBC, USA and Bravo—as well as those from outside web sites. To entice people to watch, Watch Back viewers would earn points that could be redeemed for gift certificates, according to several people with knowledge of the plans.
The latest entrant in the overcrowded field of online news is a 37-year-old onetime investment banker from Japan, Yusuke Umeda, co-CEO of a financial data firm called Uzabase. What he lacks in name recognition, though, he makes up in ambition.
Last month Uzabase completed the purchase of Quartz, the business-oriented news site founded by the former owner of The Atlantic, David Bradley, for $75 million in cash and stock—a price that could rise to $110 million, depending on Quartz’s performance in coming months. In an exclusive interview with The Information, Mr. Umeda says he wants to follow up that deal with other acquisitions to help Uzabase’s news app called NewsPicks expand further around the world.
Elon Musk stunned investors on Tuesday by tweeting that he might take Tesla private, using SpaceX, his private space flight company, as a model for how to treat shareholders. If he succeeds, he may set a precedent for other public company CEOs who want the benefits of public ownership without the hindrance of public scrutiny.
It’s not well understood just how much SpaceX has created a new model for corporate ownership. Private tech companies have long struggled with a need to let shareholders sell as easily as public company investors can. SpaceX, a 16-year-old company last valued at about $25 billion, has an unusual approach to that issue.
Welcome to week two of The Information's new cryptocurrency newsletter.
This week was big for institutional investment in crypto, with Goldman Sachs reportedly considering a custody product—and potentially clearing the way for more large funds to get into the sector. As a reminder, custody products make it possible for big funds to invest in crypto since there are limits on how much of any currency they themselves can hold, as well as security issues associated with holding those currencies.
The race for control of the custody market is going to be one to watch: Crypto-focused startups like Coinbase and BitGo are scrambling to earn market share, as Wall Street heavyweights decide whether to join the fray. In addition to Goldman, Fidelity, Northern Trust and J.P. Morgan are all said to be mulling a crypto custody product.
A few years ago, GoPro was grappling with an exasperating problem: Unknown sellers were offering stolen GoPro cameras on Amazon.com at a discount.
While the stolen items accounted for only a small percentage of GoPro’s total sales, the discounting created a domino effect as competitors tried to match the low price. Amazon would first cut its own price, then retailers like Best Buy and Walmart would follow, according to four people with knowledge of the situation at GoPro. The thefts, they said, undermined GoPro’s pricing strategy.
When Udit Jain, a 21-year-old Yale University student, walked into a campus coffee lounge late one night in 2016, all he wanted was a strawberry, Greek-yogurt smoothie. He walked out with what became his first venture capital investment.
In the cafe, he ran into Kevin Tan, who was busy at a laptop writing code for an app he was building to alert students to timely restaurant deals around campus. The two discussed the idea—and kept in close touch over the next few months. When Mr. Jain joined a student-run venture capital fund backed by First Round Capital early in 2017, one of the first things he did was persuade his new colleagues to invest in Mr. Tan’s app idea, which has since evolved into a food pickup service.
Airbnb’s regulatory roller-coaster ride has taken new twists as the company enters its second decade. When the home rental site sent employees updates on its talks with local governments in June, it heralded positive momentum with politicians in two of its “toughest markets,” Barcelona and Berlin. It decried a “problematic” bill passed by the Pennsylvania House that would obligate the company to take down illegal listings. Meanwhile, “regulation/supply issues” in Japanese cities have hurt key growth metrics, according to internal emails viewed by The Information.
While no city by itself has a make-or-break impact on Airbnb’s business, internally the company closely tracks how certain cities are progressing, especially those dubbed “super cities”—top urban markets including Barcelona, London, Paris, Tokyo and Osaka. Through mid-June, Airbnb saw a slight decrease year over year in new listings in so-called super cities, a likely result of new restrictions on rentals. That put it slightly behind pace to meet its annual goal in those markets, according to the internal documents.
Amazon and Google both tout voice shopping—the ability to make purchases and check on the status of orders with verbal commands—as significant features of their smart speakers. Some forecasts call for annual voice shopping sales to reach $40 billion in just a few years.
But it appears that only a small fraction of smart speaker owners use them to shop, and the few who do try it don’t bother again. The Information has learned that only about 2% of the people with devices that use Amazon’s Alexa intelligent assistant—mostly Amazon’s own Echo line of speakers—have made a purchase with their voices so far in 2018, according to two people briefed on the company’s internal figures. Amazon has sold about 50 million Alexa devices, the people said.
In 2015, then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick was under pressure. His beloved product, the food delivery service that was supposed to prove Uber could be more than a ride-hailing company, was struggling. To offer fast delivery, the company was buying a few kinds of prepared meals ahead of time and waiting for people to order them. Demand was inconsistent and difficult to forecast. Managers, led by Uber Eats chief Jason Droege, kept suggesting a change, according to interviews with people who were involved in the business.
Meanwhile Benchmark partner and then-Uber board director Bill Gurley questioned whether Uber should even stay in the market, according to people who spoke with him at the time. After six months of resistance, Mr. Kalanick agreed to Mr. Droege’s suggestion that Uber try a new approach that involved working with more restaurants to offer a dramatically broader meal selection. It was an instant success. Three years later, Uber Eats is viewed by some inside and outside the company as a crown jewel that could one day be as valuable as Uber’s ride-hailing operation.
I remember Google co-founder Sergey Brin calling me up in 2010 to tell me why Google was shutting down its censored Chinese search engine. China has "made great strides against poverty and whatnot," he told me. "But nevertheless, in some aspects of their policy, particularly with respect to censorship, with respect to surveillance of dissidents, I see the same earmarks of totalitarianism, and I find that personally quite troubling."
Eight years later, with Sergey more at the fringe of the company than ever, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is dead serious about launching a censored search engine—and products like a news aggregation app—in China again. Yet many questions remain. Chief among them, and most overlooked by the U.S. press, is why China would let the company back in. And then there is the question of why Google would want to go back.
Priya talks to Cory about how the Bay Area's high cost of living is pushing tech companies out of the area. Tom checks in with Jon Victor about the Information's new crypto newsletter.
The two German automobile executives who founded Byton, a Chinese electric car startup, are confident that they can build a reliable vehicle. But they worry that manufacturing alone won’t make their company a success.
That’s why Byton also wants a piece of China’s $30 billion ride-hailing market. The company is in talks with Didi Chuxing and other ride-hailing companies about potential collaborations, Byton co-founder and chief executive, Carsten Breitfeld, disclosed in an interview with The Information. An alliance could involve a service for riders to hail Byton cars that would recognize individual passengers and offer them personally tailored services and entertainment. In exchange, Byton hopes to get a cut of ride-hailing companies’ revenues. A Didi spokeswoman declined to comment.
Two years ago, as media mogul Shari Redstone was assuming control of her family’s cable TV firm Viacom, she asked Brian Robbins, then CEO of the popular online video company, AwesomenessTV, for his thoughts on how to fix the beleaguered company, according to people familiar with the situation. Viacom ended up installing Mr. Robbins in a new position at Viacom’s Paramount Pictures studio, the first of several former Awesomeness executives to join Viacom.
That infusion of digital new blood culminated in Viacom’s acquisition last week of Awesomeness, known for short videos aimed at young teenagers watching mostly on YouTube, for a price said to be $25 million. That’s a huge comedown from the valuation of $650 million that Awesomeness reached two years ago after an investment by Verizon. It seems unlikely that Viacom can restore Awesomeness to its former glory—like other companies making short online videos, Awesomeness has struggled to make enough money from ad revenue, and a surge of interest in its shows from streaming services has dissipated.
A more important question, though, is whether the digital experience brought by the Awesomeness team can help revive growth at Viacom.
When GitHub was acquired for $7.5 billion by Microsoft in June, friends texted Rachelle Gupta, an early GitHub recruiter, to congratulate her on what they assumed to be a windfall from her stock options.
She told them she didn’t have any options. She had unknowingly let her stock options expire, because she wasn’t aware that she had to exercise them within 90 days of leaving the firm in 2015, when she joined the White House’s U.S. Digital Service. She estimated her earnings would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars. “I recruited all these people [who] are millionaires now or have life-changing amounts of money. I have nothing.”
Google is developing a news-aggregation app for use in China that will comply with the country’s strict censorship laws, part of a plan to re-enter the world’s largest internet market in the near future, according to three people familiar with the project.
Google has been working on the app since last year and had been meeting with Chinese regulators to discuss the project, the people said. It is also preparing a mobile app for internet search in China that will comply with local censorship laws, an effort first reported Wednesday by The Intercept. The projects are part of an initiative code-named Dragonfly that marks a reversal for Google, which shut down its search engine in China eight years ago in dramatic fashion due to a growing crackdown on internet content by government authorities.
Welcome to The Information's new weekly cryptocurrency newsletter. Our mission is to deliver serious, exclusive crypto reporting and curation to business readers, and if you are wondering how this newsletter will be different than others, we’d like to highlight a few of our goals.
1) Exclusive reporting. Building on what The Information is known for, we are going to bring you new information you can’t get elsewhere. Interviews. Data. Breaking news. You’ll read it here first.
Two new names have landed on the list of executives Intel is considering to become its CEO—Anand Chandrasekher, a former Intel and Qualcomm executive, and Cristiano Amon, Qualcomm’s current president—a person briefed on the chip giant’s search said.
Intel is still in the early stages of its hunt for a replacement for former CEO Brian Krzanich, who unexpectedly resigned from the company in June following the discovery of a past consensual relationship with a subordinate. Messrs. Amon and Chandrasekher, who haven’t before been identified publicly as possible replacements, join at least a half-dozen other candidates Intel is considering for the job, including two current Intel executives—data center head Navin Shenoy and chief engineering officer Venkata M. Renduchintala—the person briefed on the search said. External candidates in the mix for the job include former Intel executives Diane Bryant, Renee James, Stacy Smith and Pat Gelsinger, the person said.
Capital One Financial Corp. is in the process of moving more than 40,000 employees from Microsoft’s cloud email and productivity applications to Google’s competing products, according to two people with knowledge of the agreement. A Capital One spokeswoman confirmed the deal late Monday.
Capital One is the latest big-name customer to switch from Microsoft’s cloud productivity applications, called Office 365, to Google Cloud’s alternatives, known as G Suite, following similar deals in recent months with Airbus and Nielsen. Although Microsoft still dominates the huge market for productivity applications—bundles of email, word processing, spreadsheet and other tools—the deals are a way for Google Cloud CEO Diane Greene to show progress toward her stated goal of signing up Fortune 500 customers. Getting a foot inside the doors of large companies with productivity applications could also help Google expand those relationships to include a wider range of Google Cloud services. Microsoft has said customers that use Office 365 tend to use more cloud services from its Azure business, including storage and server offerings, than ones that don’t.