Danny Crichton

Another week, another mixed bag of news. Trump continues his tariffs spree, but also some continued news from Silicon Valley. Some weeks are just like all other weeks.

In Bad Blood, a pedestrian tale of heuristics and lies

A book review of one of the most widely-discussed books published on Silicon Valley in some time. The story of Theranos is now widely known due to the work of John Carreyrou at the Wall Street Journal, and this is the complete story with a bunch of details filled in. For such an important book on business ethics though, I found the book to be a bit pedestrian — for all of the fraud (and there are heaps of it), it’s hard to really feel that anyone

This week was busy with the Apple event as always, but also Mobile World Congress Americas, where it is clear that 5G is starting to become a mainstay concern for telcos across the world.

Apple’s 5G iPhone conundrum

Bay Area city blocks 5G deployments over cancer concerns

Two pieces on the challenges of 5G. The first is an analysis around Apple’s use of 5G in its popular line of iPhones. The company made no announcements this week, and that’s the challenge for Apple given the timing of its product launches, particularly around China. China will have commercial 5G service late this year to early next year or so, but the next edition of the iPhone likely won’t come out until September.

Summer is finally over, and I’ve had lots of travel the past few weeks to Seoul, Tokyo, and SF. TechCrunch just hosted the largest Disrupt ever, with thousands of attendees streaming across Moscone last week. I got to interview some amazing people, and the videos will hopefully come in the next edition of this review.

With work on internal projects and travel, writing slowed down to a crawl in August, which is why this review hasn’t been posted in some time. That said, some great news stories from August, plus some analyses as I walked and talked around San Francisco.

Benchmark and Tiger double down on going public

Benchmark is one of the most storied firms in Silicon Valley, and certainly the news

Another week, another set of important stories about startups, technology, and policy between the U.S. and Asia. Plus, one product launch.

India may become next restricted market for U.S. cloud providers

Data sovereignty is one of those slow-boiling issues that are easy to miss, but incredibly important to stay on top of. I have been focusing a lot on China’s data sovereignty policies, including its relatively new cloud computing law, but this week I shine the light on India. The country is promulgating a revamped data localization law that would require Indian data to be stored in local data centers. It’s a laudable goal for locals, but extraordinarily complicated for cloud providers who have to handle the data governance rules.

Washington

Another week of heavy non-writing work, but two good essays and one news announcement isn’t a bad haul.

The death and life of the tech press

This was a response to a recent Columbia Journalism Review essay about the need to completely rebuild the tech press from scratch. I feel as though this vastly overstates the problem, which is essentially that tech has grown to affect every facet of human existence, and it is really the non-tech press who need to raise their standards. In addition, I argued for the importance of dynamic range in the coverage of tech. A small startup is worthy of more praise than a massive behemoth tech company, and the level of criticism should expand as companies grow.

Alphabet