The future of “Silicon Beach” now that Snapchat has left Venice

Snapchat and the end of Silicon Beach? The New York Times covers how Venice, California, is readjusting after Snapchat, the biggest IPO in Los Angeles history, left the community for nearby Santa Monica. From 2012 to 2017, Snap dominated Venice’s commercial real estate market, prompting an anti-Snap resistance movement to get the company out. Now that it’s leaving, locals say the changes it brought to Venice are there to stay, and they’re not all happy about it.

• What happens now? Since Snapchat has left, “the local commercial real estate market is holding its breath” waiting to see which other tech companies might fill the commercial space it left empty.
  [Daniel Hernandez / New York Times]

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Trump “ordered” US companies out of China. But he can’t do that. President Donald Trump tweeted last week and then defended an “order” for US companies to leave China and to manufacture their products in the US instead. Trump argued that the International Emergency Economic Powers Act legally justifies such an order, but the act only allows a president to regulate commerce during a national emergency. It does not allow a president to order companies to close their factories in foreign countries. Trump’s original “order” came shortly after China announced it planned to react to US tariffs on Chinese goods by imposing new tariffs of 5 percent to 10 percent on $75 billion worth of US goods. China’s new action and Trump’s “order” triggered a strong reaction in the stock market: The Dow dropped more than 600 points on Friday before Trump’s announcement of his latest tariffs.

• Who this could hurt: After Trump’s tweets, the stock of Apple, which is deeply invested in China, went down by more than 4 percent. CEO Tim Cook reportedly told Trump last week that “tariffs would hurt Apple’s ability to compete with Samsung.” The planned tariffs could impact desktop Macs, AirPods, Apple Watch, and more on September 1.
  [Anya van Wagtendonk / Vox]

Book publishers filed a lawsuit against Amazon-owned Audible over a new speech-to-text feature. The Verge reports that the publishing industry claims Amazon’s new “Captions” feature, which uses machine learning to transcribe spoken words into written ones, is a violation of copyright law. The problem? Audiobook recordings have separate licenses from physical books and e-books, and Audible has not secured the licenses needed to reproduce the written versions of the works the feature will offer. Audible defended Captions in a statement to The Verge, saying it is “an educational feature designed to help young kids and improve literacy, and that “it is not and was never intended to be a book.”

• The big deal: This case will “be a determination on the transformative nature of an AI-created audio transcription,” writes The Verge. A copyright attorney told The Verge that “this is one of many lawsuits that will help define the future of intellectual property rights in the digital age.”
  [Nick Statt / The Verge]

Misinformation is raging along with the fires in the Amazon. The photos being shared far and wide on social media of the burning Amazon rainforest are intermixed with images of different places and even years. The Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo shared a photo that seemed to show the current fires in the Amazon, but it was in fact taken in 2013. Other photos have surfaced that were taken anywhere from a few years ago to a few decades ago, like this one that musician Jaden Smith and Madonna both shared, which was one of the most-shared photos on social media last week. Leonardo DiCaprio, Ricky Martin, and French President Emmanuel Macron have all also shared misleading photos of the burning rainforest.
[Niraj Chokshi / New York Times]

Coming in September ...

Join Recode’s Jason Del Rey and Kara Swisher at Code Commerce in New York on September 9 and 10. They’ll sit down for in-depth conversations with top commerce and tech executives about how innovation is transforming the way today’s consumers choose to spend their money. They’ll dig into emerging trends and what those trends mean for your business, including automation, the reinvention of malls, how direct-to-consumer brands use tech, automated grocery checkouts, and the future of payments. You can get your Code Commerce ticket here.

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