A Letter from Om. Issue #09/2023

Hi! In case you are new around here, I’m Om. In this letter, I share my latest thoughts, articles worth reading from around the web, my recommendations & occasionally, my photography.

In this issue, I address the following:

Real Tech Takes Real Time

A dozen years ago, like many of my fellow networking nerds (and I mean real networking and not the LinkedIn kind), I heard about a TED Talk where Harald Haas, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, made a case for using light to shunt data between devices wirelessly. s someone who had watched the evolution of optical networks using fiber cables, Haas’ proposal was such a heady idea. “This is data through illumination,” Haas said.

More than a decade later, LiFi — light fidelity — is one step closer to becoming a reality. The networking standards body IEEE recently released the 802.11bb standard that makes LiFi a reality. The journey of LiFi so far illustrates one ground truth about modern technologies — despite all the hype and hoopla, it takes a long time for whizbang ideas to become real and widespread.

We live in a networked present where the media cycle is driven by attention, and nothing begets more attention than hype and fear. Over the last year or so, “artificial intelligence” has been presented in the media as a digital voodoo man: to be feared. AI taking over the world, taking jobs, and destroying our future makes for great headlines — there is a good chance that the reality might turn out to be mundane. Sure, things can go wrong — as they do in science fiction books — but we also have no idea what benefits we might reap from the shift to this new approach to software, aka artificial intelligence.

Another example of the media cycle whiplash is the rise and fall of Instagram’s Twitter competition Threads. It converted over 100 million Instagrammers to the new social platform in less than a week. It made great headlines, but things have slowed down since then. The engagement is down, and so is the daily usage. And that makes for saucy headlines too. The reality is that now the real struggle has begun, and it will be at least six months before we can decide if Meta has a winner or a loser on its hands.

About a decade ago, the Silicon Valley hype machine was working overtime to promote the idea of driverless cars. Hundreds of millions of dollars later, glimpses of that future become a reality. Alphabet’s Waymo and Cruise are offering “driverless taxi rides.” Chinese are being more aggressive in the march towards a driverless future. And despite the progress, we are still several years away from fully autonomous vehicles becoming a day-to-day reality.

In the past, technology might have meant creating software for your desktop computer or a mobile game, but these days technology is a much more complex idea as it intersects with humans and society at multiple levels. I bring this up because Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted, “We wanted flying cars, instead, we got 7 Twitter clones.” While many flying car startups might have failed, AirCar, made by Klein Vision of Slovakia, has produced a working model. You can see it fly on the latest episode of Grand Tour on Amazon Prime.

Flying Cars were supposed to be the enablers of future AirTaxi services. Jack’s tweet reminded me of Uber’s 2019 claim of launching air taxi services in 2023. It surely got a lot of headlines and helped distract from Uber’s woes at the time.

Uber, of course, hasn’t done anything of the sort. It sold its “air taxi” business to Marina, CA-based Joby Aviation and has focused on more mundane stuff — car sharing and food delivery. And even that hasn’t been going all that great. Joby, too, has faced some turbulence of its own. After going public via SPAC and opening around $10.62-a-share, Joby hit a high of $12.48 a share before sinking to $3.50/share. Since then, it has climbed back to almost $10-a-share. Why? Because it just got clearance for its first air taxi production — an eVTOL aircraft that looks like a cross between a quadcopter and a plane.

Joby’s vehicle is fully electric, takes off and lands vertically, has six propellers, and can fit five — a pilot and four passengers. It is quiet, registers at 45 decibels, and can fly 200 miles per hour. In the future, you might be able to request a trip via an app, go to a Joby port, and get taken to the destination. Uber folks had the right idea. But Joby’s first customer might be an old-fashioned airline. It might not quite be “flying cars,” but it seems Dorsey will get to ride in an “air taxi,” if not in 2023, then in 2025.

My recent articles

Five Good Reads

In The Media

Dom Cooke and Matt Reustle recently invited me to talk about my conversation with Brunello Cucinelli on their podcast. My chat with Brunello is the most popular interview I have ever published on my blog. You can listen to the entire podcast here.

Photos Etc.

Lasers light up San Francisco’s Sutro Tower—some photos of a laser light show by Ben Davis and his arts non-profit, Illuminate. The installation is called “loveAbove,” and was created to celebrate the 50th birthday of Sutro Tower.

July 16, 2023. San Francisco

A Letter From Om
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Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More