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Silicon Valley Frenemies Edition
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What matters in tech, in your inbox every morning.
August 8, 2021
Your five-minute guide to the best of Protocol (and the internet) from the week that was, from the chilly partnerships that govern Silicon Valley to the next privacy battle at Apple.
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The best of Protocol
Partners, frenemies and 'co-opetition': Inside the new enterprise cold war, by Joe Williams
- Tech's biggest companies are all constantly encroaching on each other's territory. And trying to be friends! While trying to crush each other. In a world of interoperability, APIs and best-of-breed options, tech is having to learn new ways to play together. And it's getting weird.
NYU researchers speak out after Facebook disables their accounts, by Issie Lapowsky
- What seems like a simple issue — researchers want to scrape publicly available data from Facebook — has become a flashpoint for much bigger questions about how information works on the internet. In this case, it was enough to get the FTC involved, and to reignite arguments all over again.
Silicon Valley has a new recruitment strategy: The four-day workweek, by Sarah Roach
- The 9-5 is dying. What will take its place? The four-day workweek looks increasingly like one answer. Companies are testing lots of different ways to get more done in less time, and finding it works better than you might think. But don't get too excited: If you thought remote work was a big shift, this one'll blow people's minds.
The game industry comes back down to Earth after its pandemic boom, by Nick Statt
- Tech continues to boom, but the game industry seems to be slowly coming down after a massive pandemic run of success. Now, as Nick has also written about, the industry turns to a new question: What's next? Mobile? Subscriptions? Streaming? Handhelds? All of the above?
Ripple's CEO is being sued by the SEC. He talked to us anyway, by Ben Pimentel
- Brad Garlinghouse has been pro-crypto way before it became cool to be pro-crypto. And even as his company is under scrutiny from the SEC, he thinks regulation's still the way forward. Just … maybe not the way the U.S. is doing it.
The pay gap persists for Black women. Coaches offer advice on how to push for change, by Amber Burton
- For every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, Black women are paid just 63 cents. And for all the talk and attention paid over the last year, that number isn't changing fast enough. But if your company wants to truly bring equity into the workplace, there are changes you can make.
A MESSAGE FROM SINGAPORE EDB
Expanding to Asia can be difficult, but Singapore is here to help. The Singapore Economic Development Board's guide to setting up in Singapore has all the information you need to find the right partners, talent, and connections to succeed in Asia.
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Join Protocol's Biz Carson for a conversation with Atomic's Swathy Prithivi, Accel's Rich Wong and Asana's Oliver Jay during our upcoming event: Going Global: How Tech Companies Expand Internationally August 10 at 9 a.m. PT / 12 p.m. ET Learn More
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The best of everything else
Apple Walks a Privacy Tightrope to Spot Child Abuse in iCloud — Wired
- This is going to be a complicated one. Apple built new tools to search for child sexual abuse materials stored on users' iCloud accounts. That's a good and useful thing! But the way Apple's doing it, including on devices themselves, looks to some people like the top of a slippery slope that ends in the total erosion of digital privacy.
The rebranding of Amazon's HQ2 neighborhood: Alpacas, mocktails and flower crowns for dogs — The Washington Post
- You'll notice we've developed a bit of an obsession with how companies change the towns they decide to land in. This is yet another example, in a neighborhood that's changing almost in anticipation of what Amazon's about to bring. Is it happening in the "right" way, though? And is there even such a thing?
The lost history of the electric car — and what it tells us about the future of transport — The Guardian
- Remember when we all first started talking about electric cars? Just kidding, of course you don't. That was like 125 years ago. And that's the point: We've spent more than a century trying to fix different problems in largely the same way, and this story makes the case that what we really need to reckon with is the reasons we didn't fix the future of transportation a long time ago.
Why one of Ethereum's cofounders is walking away from crypto — Fast Company
- Ethereum is on a roll, and yet one of its creators wants out. But what's most interesting about this interview with Anthony Di Iorio is his perspective on what blockchain tech is actually for. It's not just about "digital gold," at least as he sees it. It's about changing the business model of the world. It's about capitalism.
- Friday was the 30th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee putting the first website up on the internet. (Excuse me, the World Wide Web.) You can still browse the site as it was back in 1992, because apparently it took a year for anyone to realize that screenshots were a thing and "preserving the first-ever webpage" mattered. Either way, it's a fun trip down memory lane.
A MESSAGE FROM SINGAPORE EDB
Expanding to Asia can be difficult, but Singapore is here to help. The Singapore Economic Development Board's guide to setting up in Singapore has all the information you need to find the right partners, talent, and connections to succeed in Asia.
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Today's Source Code was written by David Pierce. Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to david@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you tomorrow.