Spotify and Roku have a lot more in common than meets the eye (and ear). Both companies are fascinated with advertising-driven business models in which listener and viewer time and engagement is monetized via delivering ads. Roku is much further along in its advertising pursuit. Nearly 90% of Roku’s revenue is generated by ads while just 10% of Spotify revenue is from ads. However, both companies have signaled that advertising is where…

The new year started out with a bang in the digital media space. Last week, the New York Times announced that it was buying The Athletic, widely considered to be the most intriguing sports media start-up, for $550 million in cash.

The deal does not look to come at a time of strength for The Athletic. Rumors from just a few months ago pegged The Athletic as seeking $750 million in a…

Whenever a new calendar year begins, there is an urge to press reset on the news cycle and existing strategies and plans. This doesn’t make much sense considering how, excluding new laws and taxes that may go into effect on January 1, the new year doesn’t usher in changes in marketplace conditions. Nevertheless, there is a psychological benefit found with using the new year to remove oneself from all of the noise…

It is too easy to get caught in the weeds of a topic and in the process lose sight of the big picture. That scenario is occurring with both NFTs and crypto.

At a very simple level, the promise found with NFTs and crypto is said to be about empowering people. Instead of figuring out if NFTs and crypto meet that promise, there is more value found in understanding why such a…

The more I think about smart homes, the more I’m convinced many of the concepts and ideas that have come to describe the phrase don’t make sense. Examining the smart home’s most publicized “chapters,” one is likely left more confused than anything else.

The late 2010s saw the smart speaker mirage play itself out in the home. Breathless press coverage for a new paradigm shift ushered in by voice computing in the…

YouTube’s history can be broken into eras symbolized by certain creators. Around 2010, creators like the Shaytards pushed the idea of vlogging. A few videos resembling something of a video diary were uploaded each week for the world to watch. The concept was an evolutionary offshoot of reality TV kicked off years earlier by shows like Survivor.

In 2015, Casey Neistat took the vlogging concept in a new direction by uploading a…

One of the main drivers behind starting Inside Orchard was analyzing how the lines that have traditionally defined technology are being erased. The “tech industry” is a term with a finite lifespan. We are heading to a point where tech will be so diffused in industry that it will be indistinguishable from society as a whole.

A question that has been raised is how to measure such diffusion. The answer can serve…

One topic that has fascinated me for the past 18 months has been societal changes arising from the pandemic. Most of the so called movements or shifts are showing signs of petering out. The Peloton movement, which pushed an anti-gym ideology, does not appear to be gaining much momentum. Meanwhile, the Work From Home movement, which took over tech-oriented blogs and news sites for the better part of the past year, is…

The economy is in a strange place right now. One can confidently and accurately point to data suggesting the economy is in a good position in terms of customer demand, unemployment, wage gains, and household saving rates. At the same time, however, problems such as unfilled jobs and inflation suggest a perilous state.

When it comes to the good news, people have disposable income and are willing to spend it on goods…

Facebook is no more, at least as it pertains to the $900 billon market cap company. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is now called Meta. Reactions to the rebranding have not been positive with most convinced the name change is a not-so-clever way to distract from ongoing fallout from the Facebook whistleblower. Others think Zuckerberg is trying to distance both himself and his other brands (Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus being the big three) from…

Last week, a number of publications reported that PayPal was in “late-stage talks” to acquire Pinterest for $39 billion. Such action would mean the digital payments company had finally acted on its long-held interest to get back in the e-commerce game. (PayPal was spun out of eBay in 2015.)

Pinterest is an intriguing company playing at the outskirts of the Amazon / Facebook / Google kingdoms. The company doesn’t view itself as…

The Facebook Files saga took an unexpected turn last week as Frances Haugen, the former Facebook product manager responsible for providing the WSJ a treasure trove of leaked internal documents, made her public unveiling as the Facebook whistleblower.

In what is still difficult to wrap my mind around, in the span of just two days, Haugen went from having her first public interview on 60 Minutes to sitting down for a three-hour…

Ozy Media had seemingly everything going for itself. The digital media company had raised $83 million from investors including Ron Conway, Axel Springer, and Laurene Powell Jobs. It’s charismatic co-founder and CEO was able to score big name after big name for his namesake video interview show. The company claimed to have big audiences in all of the digital content buzz words - video, newsletters, podcasts. It even had real-world festivals to…

In the mid-2010s, the tech industry thought it was onto something. The maturing supply chain from the smartphone revolution had made it easier (and cheaper) than ever to produce small, stand-alone speakers that could be placed in the home. Instead of playing music or talk radio, these speakers would be transformational due to their delivery of digital voice assistants that was made possible by years of cloud and machine learning investments.

The…

Over the past week, the Wall Street Journal has published a series of articles that reveal Facebook is aware that “its platforms are riddled with flaws that cause harm, often in ways only the company fully understands.” The articles rely on a trove of internal Facebook documents, correspondence, and presentations. While the WSJ is right to position these articles as a big deal, unfortunately the revelations are not going to lead to…

Last week, Microsoft changed its return to the office timeline to officially put off employees coming into the office indefinitely. COVID, and in the particular the Delta variant, was the stated reason for the change. I don’t think Microsoft, or any other company delaying return to the office indefinitely, is being entirely up front about all of the forces driving such announcements.

The work from home movement, which feels like the right…

The warning flags have begun to wave for Peloton. As one of the most high-profile beneficiaries from the pandemic, it should probably come as no surprise that the reopening of gyms has resulted in concerning business trends for the company. The average number of monthly workouts per user fell by nearly 25% last quarter. Google Trends data for Peloton is equally concerning with a steady decline in search interest for Peloton since…

The shift from brick and mortar to e-commerce has been one of the more pronounced tech developments to impact society. After years of on-again and off-again rumors, it increasingly looks like Amazon will expand its move into brick and mortar in a big way. It’s a move that traditional retailers need to monitor closely.

Amazon’s strategy for retail dominance hasn’t exactly been a secret. By not having a chain of physical stores…

One of the defining ideas behind starting Inside Orchard was chronicling how the technology industry would become hard to delineate as its influence on society expands nearly unchecked. Ten years ago, tech was a defined sector. Ten years from now, most of society including industry, education, and healthcare will fall under the “tech” umbrella.

In his essay, It’s Time To Build, published in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, VC…

We were supposed to be in the electric car era right about now. Actually, we were supposed to be in the self-driving electric car era. Instead, we find ourselves in the era of car companies announcing electric car aspirations for the upcoming decade.

While there are pockets of electric car success and adoption, lofty adoption predictions circulating for years have failed to materialize. Tesla is the best example of consumers actively seeking…