Image: Protocol
Facebook the robocaller?

Good morning! Hope you had a great weekend. This Monday, Amazon can't make games work, Facebook might be a robocaller, and Clubhouse has lots of questions for Clubhouse.
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You probably saw all the tweets about whether it's fair to compare the TikTok privacy threat to basically any other app. For my money, Vicky Xiuzhong Xu had the best take:
VC Brad Feld is trying a new calendar experiment this week, and it sounds … delightful:
Don't trust companies that make money from users' work but call themselves communities, researcher Britney Gil said:
Venture capital? Easy. At least compared to running a forum, Paul Graham said:
Remember Crucible? Of course you don't: Amazon's big-budget, Fortnite-competing, future-of-gaming game lasted barely a month on the games market, made roughly zero impact, and then disappeared back into closed beta. Which meant that instead of launching from the rocketship of a smash success, Amazon's next game — called New World — was tied to a falling anvil.
To give you a sense of how badly Crucible launched: A few days before the game went back into beta, there were roughly 150 people playing the game at any given time on Steam. (For context: PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, the most popular game on the platform, hovers around 250,000.) In closed beta, the player numbers have barely gone down.
Obviously, Amazon can afford a high-profile gaming flop or two. Or three: Amazon announced Crucible and New World in 2016, along with a third game, Breakaway, that was shelved back in 2018. And the company's famous for trying a million things, seeing what sticks, and happily moving on from what doesn't. (See: Fire Phone.)
The stakes are higher than a small handful of games for Amazon, though, because those titles seem to be part of a bigger strategy:
A successful Amazon game-streaming service would be a win for AWS, for Twitch, for Fire TV, even the shopping website itself. (I can already imagine the "buy this look" stickers on all the Fortnite skins.)
But the signs don't look good for that happening right now, and it's costing Amazon "hundreds of millions of dollars" to try, The New York Times reported back in April. To be fair, that's about what Jeff Bezos has in his couch cushions, but it's still a big swing at the gaming biz. And, so far, a huge miss.
It's been a big couple of weeks for robocalls, which are getting more time in front of America's highest court than you might expect. After telling government debt collectors that they can't robocall people anymore (a win for anti-robocallers, though a fairly narrow one), the Supreme Court said it will hear a robocall case involving … Facebook.
There are basically two questions here. First: Is the auto-dialer question really a free speech question? The Supreme Court neatly dodged this in its last ruling, and will do so again here. Instead it will consider the case's other question: What constitutes an auto-dialer? Does it have to methodically go through every number in existence, or can any automatic dialing mechanism qualify? In one extreme reading, the thing where you say "Call Anna" and Siri dials for you could be an auto-dialer, in violation of the statute.
One way or another, this ruling will modernize the rules. In 1991, for instance, people argued for the TCPA because "the machines invade privacy, tie up phone lines, cause havoc with corporate switchboards and have even paralyzed electronic paging services." Most of those problems are no longer problems, but robocalls are a scourge nonetheless.
Personally, I got three texts from Facebook this weekend about people and posts I don't care about. I'm rooting for Duguid.
In the face of COVID-19, many healthcare providers turned to remote patient monitoring and virtual visits to continue caring for vulnerable patients while minimizing risk of virus transmissions and reducing the strain on scarece hospital resources. At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decade innovating - and we believe our homes are destined to play a central role in the healthcare system of the future.
For an app that technically hasn't launched yet, Clubhouse has already raised way more than its share of both money and controversy. And, ironically, the app that lets anyone say anything to anyone — though "anyone" right now is pretty much just VCs and Kevin Hart that one time he was there — hasn't had much to say publicly.
But on Friday, co-founders Paul Davison and Rohan Seth published a post that attempts to address some of the questions about Clubhouse. The whole thing's worth a read, but here are a few salient bits:
It's a lot of questions, without many answers. But it's a good set of questions, and includes many things that every company should be thinking about. "Opening up to everyone" isn't just about scaling up servers and customer-support teams: It's about making sure your product can be productive, useful and successful for everyone who uses it. Not just the people who think like you and your beta testers.
Protocol's Health Care Summit is tomorrow! Mike Murphy and a rockstar group of panelists will talk about the post-pandemic future of wearables, data, surgery, regulation, telehealth, and why my knee hurts. (Probably not that last one.) There's still time to RSVP, too.
Earnings season is BACK. Netflix and TSMC both report this week, as does Domino's, everybody's favorite pizza-tech company. This is the first time we'll get a real sense of what COVID-19 did to the tech world.
VentureBeat's VB Transform conference runs tomorrow through Friday.
Paul Graham may not like running Hacker News, but I love reading it. And this weekend's best thread there started with a simple question: "What's the worst piece of software you use everyday?" Over 1,400 comments later, the answers are in. Lots of votes for Jira, AWS, Git, more Jira, Jira again, some more AWS, every other cloud platform, Microsoft Teams, Outlook (tough thread for Microsoft and Atlassian, this one), the whole idea of CAPTCHA, Dropbox, Google Chrome, WhatsApp, and so many more. The thread's also full of tips for improving all these apps, but the takeaway is simple: If you make a product, someone will hate it with a fiery passion. And if you make an edtech product? According to this thread, everyone will hate it with a fiery passion.
In the face of COVID-19, many healthcare providers turned to remote patient monitoring and virtual visits to continue caring for vulnerable patients while minimizing risk of virus transmissions and reducing the strain on scarece hospital resources. At Philips, we're pioneering stronger care networks with technologies we've spent decade innovating - and we believe our homes are destined to play a central role in the healthcare system of the future.
Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce, with help from Shakeel Hashim. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.
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