Category: Tech

• The new standard in wired charging

  

  It is widely rumoured that the upcoming iPhone 15 will replace its lightning charging port with a standard USB-C port. Maybe it doesn’t happen next month, but it will happen before December 28, 2024. Because this is the conformity deadline that the European Union has set for standardized wired charging.

  This said, I am already feeling like everything has switched over. All of the charging cables in my bag right now are USB-C. And I just realized that I’m going to need to buy some new travel adapters with USB-C ports, instead of USB-A (see above). This also means that hotels, airports, airplanes, and all other places around the world are going to need to start switching over to USB-C.

  I’m thinking about this right now because we are incorporating USB plugs next to work areas in some of our development projects. And there’s no point in going with USB-A any longer. That’s done. What would be even better, though, is if we could get rid of the 15 different plug types that are used around the world and switch everything over to one standard.

  Hopefully that’s next.

  2023.08.24

• Over 15% of retail sales in the US are now happening online

  

  Amazon was founded in 1994 and went public in 1997. By 1999, some 5 years after the company was started, only about 1% of total retail sales were being done online in the US. So you have to give it to Bezos, he saw what was coming and he got in early to help create it. This was not so obvious back in the mid 90s. The internet as a whole was still being viewed with skepticism, especially after the dot-com bubble.

  Today, online shopping represents over 15% of total retail sales. (See above chart from Charlie Bilello.) The pandemic pop is over, but it looks like we’ve returned to a pretty clear trendline — up and to the right. I guess the questions now are: When and where does this start to flatline? It doesn’t seem likely that this goes to 100% in the foreseeable future, especially if you include grocery. But it’s going to go a lot higher.

  For myself, if I were to exclude food/grocery, I would say that the vast majority (80-90%) of my retail purchases are done online. Even if I’m in a physical store, I’ll often pull out my phone to price compare. If it’s cheaper on Amazon, I’ll just order it there.

  Here’s another example.

  This past summer when I was in Park City, I discovered the brand Vuori. I had heard of them before, but I had never actually seen or touched their clothes. It’s great stuff. But instead of the store convincing me to buy something, it convinced me that I like the brand and that I should probably shop on their website at some point in the near future. And that’s exactly what I ended up doing. (Sorry Lululemon. You’re still my favorite.)

  All of this is perhaps obvious in a world where 15% of total retail sales are happening online. But I would imagine that the retail landscape and our cities will look very different when this number goes even higher. Our cities were different at 1% compared to today at 15%; so imagine what 50% or 80% might be like.

  2023.08.22

• You never really own it. You simply look after it for a few years.

  I have been wearing an Apple Watch for many years and I love it. I love tracking my workouts. I love seeing my altitude when I’m snowboarding. And I love using it to pay for almost everything. Today I also learned that when you dive into a body of water, it’ll tell you the temperature of said water and your depth. It’s all pretty incredible and, of course, it’s only going to get better.

  Like clockwork (bad pun), new features are continually being added and that means that the watch I have on my wrist right now will likely be obsolete in a matter of a few years. This is a good thing because it means the tech is continually getting better. But it’s also a bad thing because it means my current watch doesn’t have any real longevity.

  Legacy watch companies like Patek Philippe have sold us on the idea that a watch is something you keep for a lifetime and then pass down to the next generation. And there’s something wonderfully romantic about this idea, which is why people do/did it.

  But today, Apple Watches alone outsell the entire Swiss watch industry. Meaning, most people have moved on from this romantic idea of a watch. We want new diving features! And there’s part of me that feels sad about this. My parents got me my current watch and it would be nice if I could tell that to the next generation of our family.

  2023.08.20

• Lyft might sell its bikeshare business

  So apparently Lyft is the largest bikeshare operator in North America. They operate around 68,000 bikes and scooters, which equaled some 52 million rides last year. Ridership also continues to grow. Since 2020, ridership has grown in cities like New York (+56%), Chicago (+79%), Boston (82%), and Denver (+170%).

  However, this part of Lyft’s business was in the news this week because the company announced that they are entertaining proposals to sell it, as well as “strategic partnerships.” The company has said that it remains committed to offering bikes through the Lyft app, but clearly it is trying to shore up its balance sheet.

  This raises some interesting questions. Can bikeshare be a profitable and sustainable for-profit business? Or do we now need to be thinking of it as an important public service that is deserving of subsidies — similar to how public transit and cars/roads work in most cities? My own view is that these networks are here to stay regardless of how profitable or unprofitable they might be.

  For additional stats on Lyft’s bikeshare business, click here. One of the figures that I found interesting, but not surprising, was that 71% of riders use bikeshare for “fun.” This is by far the most popular use case. The next most popular use is “errands” at 39%.

  2023.07.25

• Can I take your order — from somewhere else?

  There is a Freshii at the bottom of our office building that is staffed by exactly one human. This human’s main job is to prepare food orders and then distribute those food orders to the humans waiting for lunch.

  If you’d like to place an order, well that is done through an iPad-like device on the counter and a video feed of someone that is seemingly located very far away from the bottom of our office building. You just tell the person on the screen what you’d like and they ring it through.

  And if you’d like to add a drink to your order, simply grab it yourself, hold it up to the iPad, and then boom. There’s very little room for chitchatting. This is an important lunch transaction.

  Virtual humans are not a new thing. Some, though not many, residential buildings use them in place of in-person concierges. I don’t know exactly how much money this saves, but I would imagine that it’s meaningful. You can now leverage one human across multiple buildings.

  So I think there’s no question that the world is heading in this direction. That is, less rather than more human interaction. But clearly this is all about utility. It’s about delivering you a healthy lunch bowl as quickly and efficiently as possible.

  If you’re instead looking to sit by yourself at a bar and learn something from the bartender, or you’re looking for a truly remarkable hospitality experience — well those are different things all together.

  2023.07.24

• Self-driving cars, plugs, and electrical grids

  This is going to be old news to many of you, but this past week I experienced Tesla’s self-driving capabilities for the first time. And I must say that I was very impressed. It did everything from navigate stop-and-go city traffic to navigate lane changes on the highway. Overall, it makes my five-year old car feel pretty quaint. The software is that much more sophisticated and one has to assume that all of this autonomy stuff will only get significantly better as LIDAR becomes common place in production vehicles.

  In other car news, North America appears to be narrowing in on an EV charging plug standard. It is Tesla’s plug, but it is now appropriately called the North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug. And last week, Electrify America — which is the largest non-Tesla, fast-charging network in the US — announced that it would be adding the plug to its network. The company also happens to be owned by Volkswagen. So big and important companies seem to be coalescing around this plug type.

  Lastly for today, here’s a post by Fred Wilson talking about (1) bi-directional EV charging, (2) the apartment buildings he and his wife are developing, and (3) our ongoing transformation away from a centralized electrical grid to a decentralized one. What he talks about in his post is something that we are actually piloting in a few of Slate’s office buildings right now. It’s still early days, but I think it’s really exciting. Tech seems to be enabling a broader shift toward decentralization. And in the case of our electrical grid, it’s going to lead to a more resilient one.

  2023.07.03

• Read, write, own

  

  I have been following Chris Dixon for many years and, yesterday, I learned that he has written a new book called, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet. It is a book about web3 (crypto things) and the title is based on thinking about the evolution of the internet in terms of these three phases:

  The first act, called the “read era”, circa 1990-2005, democratized information. Anyone could type a few words into a browser and read about almost any topic through websites.

  The second act, the “read-write era”, roughly 2006-2020, democratized publishing. Anyone could write and publish to mass audiences on social networks and other services through posts.

  The third act, the “read-write-own era”, 2020-present, is democratizing ownership. Anyone can become a stakeholder in a digital service or network, gaining power, governance rights, and economic upside previously reserved for only a small number of corporate affiliates, like stockholders and employees.

  The book won’t be out until March 2024, but if you’re interested, maybe you want to pre-order it or at least get it on your radar. I immediately put this in my queue and I’m looking forward to welcoming it to the pile of books next to my bed.

  Full disclosure: I don’t get anything if you pre-order this book. I’m only putting this out there because I have a high degree of conviction about this coming shift and because, in the future, I want to be able to look back at posts like this one here. I think they’ll age well.

  2023.06.23

• Decentralization and public infrastructure

  

  Decentralization, in the crypto/blockchain/web3 sense of the word, is a crucial thing. Here is an excellent article talking about why it is the key innovation of blockchain technology and why it is a central feature in this new emerging web3 world.

  But of course, it can all get very complicated. So I thought this — and in particular the sentence in bold below — was a good way of describing the benefits:

  “…decentralization enables web3 systems to be credibly neutral (they cannot discriminate against any individual stakeholder or any group of stakeholders, which is critical to incentivize developers to build within ecosystems) and composable (to mix and match software components like Lego bricks). As a result, web3 systems function more like public infrastructure than proprietary technology platforms. In contrast to the gated software of Web2, web3 protocols provide decentralized internet infrastructure on which anybody can build and create an internet business. Crucially, in web3, this can be done without the permission of the original deployer of the protocol or the need to use a centrally controlled interface.“

  This resonated with me because think about how important public infrastructure is to our cities. Most of us take it for granted that, when we need it, we can just plug in and access electricity, water, sewer, and other public infrastructure.

  But throughout history, these services have been fundamental to the growth of our cities. They empowered scale and better health outcomes, among other things. So it’s exciting to think that we are now living through the creation of something kind of similar in tech.

  Image: a16z

  2023.06.12

• Waymo and Uber announce autonomous vehicle partnership, starting in Phoenix

  Last month, Waymo (Alphabet) and Uber announced a new multi-year partnership that will bring Waymo’s autonomous vehicles to Uber in the Phoenix area later this year. Already, Waymo operates across 180 square miles of the city, making it the largest fully autonomous service area in the world. But now, or I guess later this year, people will be able to order a Waymo AV through the Uber app.

  Not a lot of people seem to care about autonomous vehicles anymore. For a while, every conference had people talking about how they were going to reshape our cities. But then the technology didn’t arrive quite as quickly as people were hoping, and so everyone lost interest and move on to other more exciting things. But clearly things are still happening. And this announcement strikes me as being an important one.

  2023.06.07

• Will Apple Vision make our cities more lonely?

  Okay, so I haven’t tried it yet. But Apple Vision looks pretty awesome and the people who have tried it seem to be very impressed by it. The best article that I have read, so far, is this one here by Ben Thompson (of Stratechery). He gets into some of the tech details and explains why Apple is probably the only company in the world that could have created a device like this.

  For those of you who are interested, Apple Vision is still technically a VR device, even though it is being marketed as an augmented reality (AR) device that allows you to stay engaged with the world around you. This last part is true, but it is all done digitally through 12 cameras that capture the world around you and then display it back to you.

  So experientially, yes, it is an AR device; however, the tech behind it is actually just exceptional VR.

  But this is not the point of today’s post. The point I would like to make is one that Ben raises at the end of his article. After praising Apple Vision’s achievements, he goes on to argue that the arc of technology is one that is leading toward “ever more personal experiences.” In other words, it is increasingly about individual, rather than group, use cases.

  And this is one of the first things that I thought of when I watched the Vision Pro keynote. “Wow, this looks like a really cool way to watch and experience a movie. But how do I do that with my partner? I guess we both now need Vision Pros. And what about families with a bunch of kids? That is a lot of Vision Pros.”

  But maybe this doesn’t matter. Ben’s point is that it’s probably not an accident that this technology arc is happening at the same time as a larger societal shift away from family formation and toward more feelings of loneliness. Indeed, the number of single-person households has been steadily increasing in the US since the 1960s. The current figure sits at more than 1 in 4 households.

  So there is an obviously dystopian narrative that we could all tell ourselves here. It is one where everyone works from home, plugs into virtual workplaces, and then flips over to other, more exciting, virtual worlds when it’s time to unwind from the stresses of the former. And if you think about it, this isn’t that much of a stretch compared to what many of us do today.

  Whatever the case, in my mind, none of this is any reason to become bearish on cities. Humans will still be humans. And none of this tech is going to replace the feeling of enjoying a perfect pesto gnocchi in an impossibly narrow laneway in Milan, or drinking a caipirinha on the beaches of Rio de Janeiro while being surrounded by shockingly beautiful people.

  Or at least let’s hope so.

  2023.06.06