Dispatch 011
A few pieces I wrote over the weekend for you to read today below. Otherwise, I'm excited to catch up on Dune: Prophecy and may even do so with the Vision Pro. Hard to imagine how it could top Wolf Hall though. Back and so good.
I Think...
😎 Samsung XR Glasses Have Ray-Ban Meta Specs with More Features – Samsung teaming up with Google on Smart Glasses versus a new full-on AR (or VR) headset obviously makes sense in the short term. And it sounds like these would be very similar to the Ray-Bans only powered by Gemini instead of Meta AI. That's seemingly a strength but design will matter here too, of course. Are these really going to be sunglasses designed by Samsung, or will they work with a third-party? Also, if they're really not due until Q3 of next year, Ray-Ban Meta will likely have another turn of the product crank by then. Where is Apple at this point? [9to5Google]
🎬 ‘Star Wars’ Movies Race for Rey – A story by Borys Kit last week pointed out the obviously awkward situation within Disney/Lucasfilm where potentially conflicting Star Wars projects are racing for time and resources. Sure enough, a few days later came the news that the studio pulled their December 2026 franchise film – presumed to be the new Rey Skywalker movie – from the calendar (and replaced it with Ice Age 6). We're well beyond beating the dead horse, but the horse is also still dead and seemingly starting to decay: it sure feels like it's time for new leadership at Lucasfilm to get the house in order. This whole report details the stepping on toes, filmmakers tripping over one another, and just general chaos. Why has a major shake-up not happened yet? [THR]
🥊 Millions Watch Tyson/Paul Fight Buffer on Netflix – Thankfully, mine was not one of the 60M households that Netflix claimed tuned in to the boxing match – mainly because it was 4am here in London – as few things drive me more nuts than technical glitches by big, multi-billion dollar tech companies who tout their prowess at handling scale to no end. (Some may recall the YouTube TV fail during the World Cup several years back... One job, literally.) It seems that for as impressive as Netflix's technology is overall for streaming around the world, live is a different beast – as this is not the first time they've failed at this. Let's hope they get it ironed out before the NFL comes to town in a few weeks, or we're going to see some advertiser lawsuits as a result – a group they're clearly and specifically trying to impress right now. Also, the boxing match itself sounds like it landed with a thud. [BBC]
🏆 Conan O’Brien to Host 2025 Oscars Ceremony – I sort of thought Conan had already hosted an Oscars, but no, actually very few of the recent "late night" talk show hosts have outside of Jimmy Kimmel – undoubtedly for obvious network synergy reasons. And beyond Kimmel, a lot of recent picks have been odd, almost scattershot. While the ceremony has bigger structural issues – which is also why there have been so many "no host" years of late – I do think finding a steady-hand who signs up for a decade-plus of doing the ceremony could help make it a cultural appointment again (though having the right mix of films matters more). I'm still partial to the big-but-not-too-big comedic actors who actually work in the industry, but you get why they go with talk show (or former talk show) folks. Can podcasters be far behind? Actually, that's really what Conan primarily is now so... [Variety]
₿ MicroStrategy Taps Stock Market to Fund Record Bitcoin Buy – There's going all-in, and then there's what MicroStrategy has been doing with Bitcoin. After buying 51,780 more last week, the firm – which was, and is technically still publicly listed as an enterprise software company – now holds 331,200 Bitcoin, making it the largest institutional holder. Those coins are currently worth around $30B. The company has a market value of just over $75B. A year ago, it was around $10B. Two years ago, it was closer to $1B. The share price just past its previous record which was set on... March 10, 2000. That's not a typo. It's a 24 year high. It was a Dot Com Bubble™ stock. [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Link...
- Beyond the actual games they're streaming, Netflix may also have to worry about the Beyonce halftime show they just landed on Christmas Day for the Texans/Ravens game... [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Aside: I happened to be at the Super Bowl in 2013 where there was a technical failure with the power during... Beyonce's halftime show...
- ESPN is working on an AI-powered Stat Bot. They're also working on using AI to cut up highlights of games their human teams can't get to. [TheWrap]
- Sort of wild that Apple released the last major Final Cut Pro version eleven years ago. Now that version finally goes to 11 with, yes, AI. [MacStories]
- Unlike Xitter and Meta, Bluesky has no plans to use your content to train AI. They do use such tech for moderation, though. [Verge]
- Another obvious "Trump Bump" winner: TikTok parent ByteDance, which is doing a secondary sale near $300B – keeping it ahead of SpaceX, for now. [WSJ 🔒]
- Look, I'm of the belief that AI will figure out a way out of any current plateau, but tweeting out "there is no wall" feels a bit too insecure for my taste. You shut people up by shipping. [BI 🔒]
- A look into MGX, which aside from having a good name, sprung out of Mubadala Investment Co. and G42 with a $100B fund primed to pump capital into AI – including, most recently $500M into the OpenAI round. [Information 🔒]
- While there are questions as to how much power he'd actually have, Trump's pick of Brendan Carr to lead the FCC certainly doesn't seem ideal for social media and information companies – notably Meta and Google. [Politico]
- The time Elon Musk proposed buying Substack and merging it with Xitter, but was rebuffed... [NYT]
- tvOS 18 has a new "enhanced dialogue" setting, so we can finally all understand what is being said in Christopher Nolan movies. [9to5Mac]
- NVIDIA's chips are so hot right now – figuratively and problematically, literally, with their massive new custom server racks, the first that need to be water-cooled. [Information 🔒]
- Web search, canvas editing, image generation, and some lightweight agentic behavior all launched on Mistral alongside a new model, as the French AI startup plays catchup with their rivals. [TechCrunch]
- There's some concern that Samsung's massive stock buyback is related to a margin call facing the controlling family with the stock price so low. [FT 🔒]
I Quote...
"The state of most social platforms right now is that users are locked in and developers are locked out. We want to build something that makes sure users have the freedom to move and developers have the freedom to build. Fundamentally, we did this because we want to build an ecosystem that developers can put their trust in, and if anyone has an idea for improving the state of social media, they don’t have to lobby us to change things. They can just do it themselves."
-- Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, talking about the approach the social network has taken in building out not just the service, but their AT protocol (which is an open protocol, but not currently compatible with the "Fediverse" standard used by Mastodon, Flipboard, Meta, and others).
This all sounds refreshing, of course. And Bluesky right now is quite refreshing to use – certainly versus Xitter, but even versus Threads in many ways. It has a good combination of features and ideas that make it feel like Twitter, if Twitter were built in the 2020s, not twenty years ago. That said, I'm slightly wary of the VC funding and the incentives there. I'm currently of the mindset that we're in this weird in-between place with Bluesky where such services only work long-term if they're structured correctly from a financial perspective without any pressure to return money to anyone – but at the same time, there needs to be some strong centralized element that makes the service work as a product and as such, coalesces a user base needed for all this to actually work. It's a tricky balance, to put it mildly.
I Spy...
One of the most wild stock price charts you'll ever see. Per above, MicroStrategy's stock price peaked during the DotCom Bubble, nearly died in the collapse, pivoted to various things in enterprise software to stay alive, then went all-in on Bitcoin in 2020 to hedge against inflation. And they're still buying. 👀
