Down Round

The number one social media app in the Apple App Store is currently Xiaohongshu , AKA The Little Red Book, the Chinese social shopping app reminiscent of TikTok but with more shopping.  We take a squiz at that, before assessing the latest announcements from Nvidia and what it all means.  Strap in, the boys are back for 2025. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Over the last couple of weeks, Mark Zuckerberg and Meta have signalled a shift in the way the company is run — eliminating factcheckers, rolling back internal DEI policies and bringing politics content back to company platforms. On the one hand, you can read it as an obvious sop to the incoming Trump administration. But there's definitely a cultural change in the air when it comes to online...

On Down Round, we make many predictions. Almost all of them are correct. For this episode, we have used the power of AI to forensically audit a representative sample of episodes over the last year, with the goal of answering the question: just how right were we? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Just like we did last year, we're continuing the silly season with another entry of DOWN ROUND SHARK TANK. On social media and in our Discord, you submitted your startup pitches, and now we're going to decide if we will invest. Joining us on the panel are friends of the pod Becky Lucas and Joyride, who will assist us in the mammoth task of evaluating your very serious startup ideas. This is the fi...

This is part two of our annual Xmas spectacular, and we continue to answer your questions. To hear the rest, sign up to premium: downround.net See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is part one of our annual Xmas spectacular, and we are answering your burning questions. Is AI a bust? Why is a company called AppLovin worth more than 100 billion dollars? Has Raph watched any movies in 2024? An insane prank. Subscribe for part 2, which is out now: downround.net See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Apple has been hyping up its late-ish foray into the world of LLMs and artificial intelligence since June. But now a decent range of Apple Intelligence features are available — as long as you have the right device —like writing tools, image generation, notification summaries and so on. In this ep we talk about it, Apple's strategy, and why it all feels a bit weak. See omnystudio.com/li...

Australia passed legislation banning social media for kids under 16, as we've discussed in previous eps. But in today's episode, we're getting into the nitty gritty. We're joined by Crikey reporter Cam Wilson to tease out some of the specifics of the legislation and how it might be enforced. We also force him to debate the greatest question of our time: should we save Australian children from the...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . Crypto is back. The industry is excited by the forthcoming Trump presidency and what it means for their little online coins. Bitcoin just hit $100,000. But the mood is a little different this time. There's less pontification on the future of money and finance, less attempts at making art and...

Kickstarter. A gadget head's paradise... and hell. The boys revisit the glory days of crowdfunding, what was the vibe that made it prolific, and the pitfalls that befell it. And, most importantly: what does it tell us about love? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The US Department of Justice wants to force Google to sell Chrome, its browser, for antitrust reasons. It raises the question: who would buy it? Could it live as a standalone company? That opens a whole can of worms for your favourite tech podcast, as we talk about browsers and why they're such a strange business. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The the wake of the US election and the increasingly weird vibe on X, there has been yet another exodus of users to the promised land of "any text-based timeline but Twitter". That means people are talking about Bluesky again. In this episode, we revisit the erstwhile decentralised social media platform and check in on its progress, asking the question on everyone's lips: does it have the juice? A...

It's the first week after the US election, and Down Round is officially making the leap into being an American politics podcast. OK, not really. But there's actually plenty of Down Round relevant themes here. In this ep, we talk briefly about the new state of tech politics now that the conservative side of the industry is on the march. Then, we go into three big tech narratives that got the most a...

We are joined once again, for our sins, by the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window columnist Mark Di Stefano. A freewheeling episode on everything from smartphones to AI girlfriends, where we all perform some ruthless self-critique and ultimately come out happier, more self assured and about 10 IQ points dumber. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . We're putting on our hazmat suits and going back into the world of crypto. Or, at least, one promising part of it. Stripe recently bought Bridge , a startup which built a stablecoin issuance and settlements API. That sounds boring, and perhaps it is. But one day, it could play a serious role...

It's Halloween this week, and we've got an appropriately spooky episode for you. We're looking back at a random selection of some of our favourite dead and/or zombified companies, platforms and products of the past couple of decades. From instant delivery and Google Reader to Adobe Flash and the Microsoft Zune, prepare to be utterly terrified by these terrifying spirits from tech's past. See omnys...

Today's ep is the first and last edition of the Down Round Book club. We're talking about Play Nice: The Rise, Fall, and Future Of Blizzard Entertainment , by Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier. It documents the story of Blizzard Entertainment, the developer behind WarCraft, Diablo and StarCraft which is as of last year a subsidiary of Microsoft. James read it last week and felt it hit on some inte...

We're lauching a bonus episode this week to officially welcome in the silly season (commences mid October). We're joined by James Chin Moody, CEO of Sendle, a virtual courier service who is quite likely responsible for some proportion of the treats you receive via mail. We discuss the Australia Post monopoly, the funding environment and the future of ecommerce. See omnystudio.com/listener for priv...

It's another Tesla event, folks. At the tail end of last week, Elon Musk got up on stage and showed off the CyberCab, the company's attempt at a robotaxi. He also gave us some updates on Tesla's humanoid robot, Optimus, and even had some of these evil computer men walking around the event and serving beers. But there was some digital trickery afoot, and not everything was as it seemed. In this epi...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . Fun times create happy people, happy people create lovely times, lovely times create fun people. It's another loose, shot from the hip premium ep, folks. ChatGPT’s voice mode is finally here, while OpenAI itself s going through more weird palace intrigue for us to pick through.  A digression...

In last week's premium episode, we sounded off about the state of VR and smart glasses. In true Down Round fashion, Meta had already announced its concept product, a pair of AR-enabled smart glasses named Orion, by the time the ep aired. We will never admit we were wrong. Instead, we press forward. In this ep, we talk about Orion, Meta's plans, and why it seems like everyone is now locked in on th...

Intel may have more or less invented modern digital computing, but it hasn't been going so crash hot lately. Following decades of strategic missteps and blunders, it's now experiencing weakening earnings and stock price declines as it attempts to engage in the mother of all turnaround jobs with a little help from the US government. Now, the sharks are circling, with Qualcomm popping up as a potent...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . After 2 months of cringe-posting references to strawberries, OpenAI have released their latest model : o1. And AI heads are losing their minds. Ostensibly, it's intended for the kind of thorny math and reasoning problems that LLMs tend to struggle with. The guts aren't public, but it seems t...

We didn't cover the Apple iPhone keynote last week because it wasn't particularly exciting and there were virtually no surprises. But, having been given a week to ruminate on it, we have thoughts. In this ep, we talk about why analysts have been obsessed with an AI-driven iPhone supercycle, why Apple has backed itself into a corner by overcharging for RAM, and the slow death of the smartphone. See...

This is a free preview of a premium episode. To subscribe to Down Round Premium and get access, head here . Social media. Is it too dank for the malleable and developing mind? The Australian government seems to think so. Labor has joined the ranks of a number parties and bodies in various jurisdictions in attempting to set a lower age limit for social media .  We consider the following questions:...