🤷♂️ No more genius single locations?
It's unlikely we will get a place like Silicon Valley in the future.
👋 Welcome to FWIW by David Tvrdon, your weekly tech, media & audio digest.
In this edition
The next tech hub
Apple products reviews are out
HBO Max Discovery+?
Looking for the next tech hub
A recent poll by Axios asked US college students where they want to live after graduation. Seattle has emerged as the no.1 destination for most.
It’s the home of Amazon and Microsoft, has a thriving tech and startup scene, but also green energy and a music and art scene.
Still, for the tech community, the Bay Area remains the top destination as it has the highest density of job opportunities.
According to Bloomberg data, San Francisco and San Jose also rake in the lion’s share of venture capital investment, capturing 36% of overall investment in the US last year.
Sure, tech workers are exiting California and looking for more affordable cities and the corporate rules are being relaxed so that they are able to work fully from home. However, this is not true for all Big Tech companies. Apple will still require employees to show up in the office some days, and so do other companies.
In 2016, The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley by author Eric Weiner came out. A great book, I recommend it if you haven’t read it yet (below is a good talk about it by the writer himself).
The book looks at six locations in our history that, for various reasons, accumulated a lot of talent that sparked innovation that pushed to whole world forward.
The last “genius location” is Silicon Valley.
Based on what has been happening with companies opting into being distributed and working more from home, looking for global talent, etc, my take is that such single location will be harder to create in the future.
A cynic would say there will be plenty space for them in metaverse but we talked about that in this newsletter and the 3D virtual world is still a couple of years, maybe decades, away.
For now, Silicon Valley remains the global tech hub but you can already see the next generation thinking they do not want to be pinned down to one place and certainly not the Bay Area.
TECH
👀 Apple reviews
Mac Studio seems to be an excellent pro computer for pros. Though it seems, in everyday use, there is little performance difference between the M1 Max and M1 Ultra (which is $2000 more expensive). [The Verge, Wired, CNET, Ars Technica]
Studio Display is a good 5K display with good mic and speakers but a very underwhelming webcam (Apple said there is a bug and they are going to fix it, but no timeline was given). [The Verge, WSJ]
iPhone SE 5G: Some compromises as you are buying a cheap iPhone, like an old design and not the biggest and longest lasting battery, but great camera and build, top performance. [NY Times, MKBHD]
iPad Air M1: Blurring the lines between iPads. Now it’s even harder to choose a top of the line iPad. I have recently bought the latest iPad 9th gen for family use. If I was now deciding to buy a higher performance iPad for work and travel, I would choose this new Air instead of the Pros. [MKBHD, The Verge, CNET, The Guardian]
🤣 The Apple Car project team has been dissolved for “some time,” and it needs to have a reorganization within the next three to six months to achieve the goal of mass production by 2025. [9to5Mac]
😯 Intel commits $36bn to making chips in Europe. This is a big deal. Looks like EU officials and Intel’s CEO Pat Gelsinger came to favorable terms and a new super-fab will be built in Magdeburg, Germany by 2027 creating 3.000 permanent jobs and more around Europe - Poland, France, Italy. [CNBC, FT, NYT]
🔋 Also Northvolt is going to build its third battery gigaplant in Germany. Northvolt is a Swedish battery developer and manufacturer, specializing in lithium-ion technology for electric vehicles. [Reuters]
🦾 A look at the “no-code” movement and some of the examples already in use. Proponents believe the “no-code” movement will change the world. Imagine anyone can build an app or an AI. [NYT]
😶 What are the results from the cyber war Anonymous is waging against Russia? Disabled prominent Russian government, news and corporate websites and leaked data from entities such as Roskomnadzor, the federal agency responsible for censoring Russian media. [CNBC]
🚗 This should be the perfect time for electric vehicles. Gas prices are up, commutes are back, and Russian oil is under sanction. Too bad the electric vehicle industry isn’t ready to seize the moment. I have read this same story for a few years now (yes, the circumstances are different now, the point is the same). [Wired]
👨💻 Interview with Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg. All kinds of topics in this podcast (or transcription, if you rather read it): the future of open-source WordPress, Tumblr moderation, Web3, Bitcoin, Ethereum. [The Verge]
MEDIA
🙋♂️ Job alert: Innovation Projects Manager at IPI. Anyone interested should apply immediately. [IPI]
📺 Amazon has closed its $8.5bn acquisition of MGM studio. Prime Video will get more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows. [Variety]
🤔 Journalists leave a bad impression with the public when they call themselves “storytellers,” a new study finds. It invoked a sense of the reporter’s bias in an experiment the researchers did. [NiemanLab]
🎥 This article claims video essays are booming. Hour-long YouTube videos are thriving in the TikTok era, their popularity reflects our desire for more nuanced content online. I have also come across more longform viral videos recently Though, we have no data, just a feeling. [Vox]
🕵️♂️ An analysis of Netflix’s most popular content reveals that TV is dominant, big hits disappear on average after two weeks, and international production will be more popular then English. After US, the biggest Netflix hits come from South Korea and Europe. [Bloomberg]
📬 6am City, a newsletter-first local media company in US reached 1 million subscribers. [6am City]
📺 HBO Max and Discovery+ are combining to form a Netflix killer. Please, please, don’t call it HBO Max Discovery+ (the new company’s name is Warner Bros. Discovery because…). Discovery has 22 million subscribers, HBO and HBO Max 74 million. [Protocol]
📲 Both The New York Times and The Washington Post launched Telegram channels. [NYT, WaPo]
👩💻 The founders of a Substack-funded local news publication talk candidly about how things are going. Another testimony of how hard you have to work when trying to build a news org from scratch. But, it’s good to be your own boss. [NiemanLab]
📝 The State of Journalism 2022. The average journalist covers 4 beats, Twitter is the most used social network (followed by FB, LinkedIn and Instagram) and most create content for online publications, only 1% primarily as a podcast and 1% as a newsletter. [Muck Rack]
👏 A very good profile of France’s Mediapart, an investigative news site with more than 200 thousand subscribers. [GIJN]
FROM THE FIX
1️⃣ How the war in Ukraine is changing European media and journalism
2️⃣ Russian forces target journalists, civilians
3️⃣ Fact-checking Russian propaganda during the war: An interview with Detector Media
4️⃣ Reasons for optimism: Podcasts and profit
5️⃣ Publishers’ business priorities and “readiness to meet the future”
6️⃣ Reasons for optimism: Local news startups
[ 📬 Get The Fix newsletter delivered to your inbox every week with the latest insights, news, and analysis about the European media market. Sign up here > ]
AUDIO
🗣 Why host-read ads will never go away. Programmatic is just low quality, research says host-read ads are more engaging. [Simon Owens]
📣 Twitter Spaces: Pros and cons of the community-building live audio platform. [Press Gazzette]
😵💫 Virtual podcast events are bringing in six-figure earnings. [The Verge]
😎 Research from The Guardian: podcast advertising commands the highest levels of attention across media formats. [Podnews]
⏩ Here’s a good tutorial on how to export your podcast from Apple Podcasts if you want to migrate to a different podcast player. [@NathanG]
❓ Poll: Which iPad would you buy now if you needed one, 9th gen., Air or Pro?
🙌 Thanks. I used HandyPolls to create this poll (instructions).
Last poll results: Do you think Apple should have a $199 phone? 30% think Apple will never do it. 26% says no. 20% think it’s a missed opportunity. 13% agree and 11% think a cheaper iPhone would diminish the brand.
🙏 And big thanks to Celine Bijleveld who helped me edit this newsletter. You can follow her on Substack here.