Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “LinkedIn wants a piece of Wordle’s success | Equity Podcast”.
This episode is presented by invest Puerto Rico, if you believe your business can go anywhere. Puerto Rico is the place hello and welcome back to equity, The Tech runch podcast about the business of startups, where we unpack the numbers and the Nuance behind the headlines. This is Alex good morning morning. Today is March 18th 2024 and I got to say guys: I’m loving this early spring, I hate winter, with a FY passion and I’m waiting for summer. So anytime, I see flowers coming out of the ground, my soul is alive, and that means I am hyped for today’s show because it is packed. We have a quick markets, update with a special note on crypto, then the latest Apple and Google AI news.
This is the talk of tech today, so let’s talk about it, then grock’s open source debut and what it means for startups: reddits, IPO progress, gum, roads, NSFW Retreat and then to close us out why gaming is coming to LinkedIn. Let’S do it. Let’S start with a look at the world of money so spin that globe and let’s talk about stocks Shares are higher in Asia today and sharply higher over in Japan. Chinese Shares are staging a bit of a rebound lately, but I’d say too soon to call it a comeback. Then, over in in Europe, stocks are modestly higher, just as they are set to rise here in the US when things open and we’re seeing the best gains over on the tech.
Heavy NASDAQ 100 thanks to alphabet we’ll get to the Y there in just a second. Now, on the earnings front, we are nearly done woo, and that means just a couple of names for you this morning, on Monday, we’ll hear from Joy, that’s Joy with two wise, then Tuesday is 10 cent. Music, xang and ha. Then Wednesday will bring us numbers from PDD which owns both Peno and teu. Then Micron Technology, chewy and King soft Cloud, Thursday is Accenture, Friday, SK Telecom, and then we start all over again on April 1st, but the real action has been in crypto lately.
However, after a couple of weeks of great news, this week is a little bit softer now for two major tokens. There have been small negative price movements in the last week. Bitcoin is off about 5 % in the last 7 days to 68,000, while ethereum is off about 11 % in the last 7 days to about 3.6k, not that bad they’ve gained a lot lately. But Solana is the real recent mover Rising nearly 40 % in the last week to $ 27, and that rise has helped Drive spot trading volumes to their second highest level. Ever that’s good news for both exchanges and overall crypto sentiment. So why is salon token soaring? Well, I did a little bit of research and it turns out that Meme coins are blowing up on its blockchain, which means that this Crypt boom is very much like the one before it and that we’re not seeing tons of new consumer apps per se.
But instead a lot of fun if familiar speculation, all right, big news that matters and the biggest news that matters the most this morning is that Apple May team, up with Google to Leverage The Gemini AI model for iPhone. This was originally reported by Bloomberg, and it’s just so tasty. Now this potential tieup would be great for Google, which already has a deal with Apple as its preferred search engine provider on iPhone in Safari.
I’M sure everyone already knows that, but still two is better than one now. People familiar with the matter have said that apple is looking to license Google’s AI Tech so that it can introduce AI powered features into iOS later this year. So the timeline here is pretty quick and, according to Bloomberg, the company also held chats with open AI to potentially use GPT models, there’s so much to unpack here. First of all, it’s really interesting.
That apple is looking to partner instead of just build. That’S fascinating! Two that apple is looking to Google’s Gemini instead of a different model from a different company, especially given that Gemini’s reputation has in fact seen better days. But you know no matter which way it goes if Apple chooses to work with Google or open AI, which of course is a Microsoft, vassel company, it’s going to hand a win to one of its competitors, and I think that this deal setup also just underscores how Much room the biggest tech companies have already consumed in the world of modern AI. You know sure, there’s anthropic and mistol, and a couple of others, but Apple, it seems, is talking with two peer companies, or you know at least one Pier company and one Microsoft investment.
The good news for iPhone users is that apple is willing to partner the bad news potentially for Apple investors is that it thinks that that might be the best approach. Something else to consider. Google’S Gemini and open AI models are not open source. However, guess what is now yep? It’S grock over the weekend, xai Elon musk’s, AI company open- sourced grock, or at least mostly there are a few things missing, but reception does seem to be pretty damn positive over on Twitter. One thing: that’s good: they included weights data, fantastic bad news. Training data does seem to be lacking, but what I think is most important in this grock AI open- Source Saga – is that some startup Founders are pretty excited by the news that grock is now open for their consumption.
So I picked a couple of examples. First up Veron ma says that hyperspace AI will quote Network grock into its service. Bendu ready of Abacus AI says that her company will fine tune gr and then arvan shavas of perplexity. Ai says that his company will quote fine tune it for conversational, search and optimize. The inference and offer it to its own users, good, especially in light of the possible Google Apple tie-up. It is so nice and welcome to see startups, get a boost versus the already massive momentum from the trillion dooll Giants.
What’S next in Tech, that’s not the right question! It’S where Puerto Rico! More than just a Tropical Paradise, it’s an Innovations, Paradise where startups and Global players coexist in a vast and vibrant ecosystem, where Talent runs deep, highly skilled and bilingual plus the island offers the most competitive tax incentives in the US. If you believe your business can go anywhere, Puerto Rico is the place find out more at invest, pr.org Tech crunch. Now it wouldn’t be Equity Monday. If I didn’t have something to say about reddit’s IPO, so hear me out everybody, I’ve got good news.
Reddit’S IPO is oversubscribed at its current price range, making it more likely that the social Forum company can secure a valuation of 6 to 6 and A5 billion in its upcoming IPO the question before us, and it is whether or not Reddit can get a higher price. Now we are waiting for updated information from the company, but as of the time, I wrote my notes for this show this morning there was no sign of a new violing, still Reuters reports that the company’s IPO is – and I quote currently between four and five times Over subscribed now that sounds like a lot. Is it a lot? No, we have seen way higher numbers than that for IPO shared demand, and this early signal doesn’t always correlate to post IPO performance. As the Wall Street Journal wrote back in 2012 – and I quote here – this is a great headline: over subscribed is a weak IPO signal.
True, but I will say at the same time, it is still a signal and that’s good. It does make me slightly more confident that Reddit will be able to get out sooner rather than later. Currently, Reddit is expected to price on Wednesday and trade on Thursday, but that could change so stick with Equity. We will bring you all the news as it happens, and then next up we have news from startup.
Land gumroad is pulling back on NSFW content. Now gumroad, of course, is an e-commerce company for creators. We’Ve talked about it on the show a number of times and it has updated its rules to be more strictly limiting on NSFW content, and it’s doing that because of restrictions from payment processors like stripe and PayPal. Now for creators who sell adult art like explicit, comic books or lwd cosplay photos according to Tech runch, these really sudden policy changes can be detrimental and result in an unforeseen loss of income, but got to say it.
Adult creators are taught to anticipate this kind of deplatforming. It’S happened on patreon, which used to be much more LAX about adult content, and it actually almost happened on only fans. Now that doesn’t make the impact of these policy changes any less debilitating, because when creators have to Port over their followers to a new platform or direct fans to a different and new web shop to buy their products, the friction almost always results in a loss of Income now, why is gumro doing this? Well, the company says it has been quote, asked to be more rigorous in enforcing its to and must comply.
That’S according to its founder, seil, lenia and lenia went on to tell Tech runch. That quote, obviously it sucks to do this. We don’t take it lightly that many creators rely on gumroad for their livelihoods and have communicated that to our partners wherever and whenever we could also for gumroad this sucks, because adult stuff is popular and they get a 10 % cut of sales competitors are, of course, Pouncing on potentially booted Gum Road creators, although I’m going to be very curious to see how long they last at these new homes before they have to find a new new home, because that is the story of the internet and then to close us out.
I have some news that you did not see coming LinkedIn. Yes, the Microsoft own social platform that made a name for itself as a place to post your resume post, your professional accomplishments is getting into gaming. Yes, Tech runch has learned and confirmed that LinkedIn is working on new games experiences.
It’S going to do so by tapping into the same wave of puzzl mania that helps simple games like whle, find viral success and, in the end, millions of players. Three early efforts at LinkedIn are games, called Queens, inference and cross climb. I don’t know what they correspond to we’ll have to wait and see. But three titles is three titles. A spokesperson, fer lington, confirmed that they are working on gaming but said that there is no launch date and I have to read you this quote.
This is from the LinkedIn spokesperson quote: we are playing with adding puzzle-based games within the LinkedIn experience to unlock a bit of fun, deepen relationships and hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations. Oh Lord, is that a PR sentence uh, let’s see, unlock a bit of fun. Maybe that’s what games are for kind of goes without saying, deepen relationships, absolutely not and then hopefully spark the opportunity for conversations. No people are going to play them because LinkedIn looks like work at work and games are more fun than actually doing work.
What actually is going on here is that the New York Times bought Wordle and has built a very strong games business for itself that people really enjoy you may have played queen bee. You may have played connections. You may have played whle. These are fun games, they’re! A big part of my marriage actually but they’re cool, because they’re in a separate, app and they’re their own thing and we pay for them and we like them LinkedIn, is a place where you go to try to find a job. I don’t know why. I need to play games there to deepen my relationship.
I mean why not just buy Steam and just bake in all the games. Then LinkedIn. You have a billion users. Remember when every social media service wanted to have stories at the top of their.
You know navbar. I wonder if games are the next thing like that, like Netflix is doing gaming, Lake 10 is doing gaming. Maybe everyone else is just out of ideas, and this is the next thing everyone cies to try to get one more minute of your daily attention. That is our show for this lovely Monday morning.
Of course, if you need even more Equity between now and when we are back on Wednesday morning, we are Equity pod over on X and threads, and if you would like even more from me well, I am Alex over on X here at the Tech runch podcast Network we have two sister shows chain reaction on all things blockchain and found talking to Founders about how they built what they did. Well, talk talk to you soon we’re back. In 2 days, bye Equity is hosted by myself, Alex Wilhelm and Tech rench senior reporter Mary and aeto.
We are produced by Teresa loans, solo with editing by Kell Bryce. Durban is our illustrator and a big. Thank you to the audience development team and Henry pette who manages Tech, wrench audio products. Thank you so much for listening and we’ll talk to you next time. .