Bluesky Thinking

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 pl…

The Podcasting President

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 conservativ…

Is Technology Good? (ft. Mark Di Stefano)

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…

Coins, But On The Computer

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…

The Halloween Spooktacular

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 M…

The StarCraft Losers Club

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 whic…

BONUS: Arming The Rebels (feat. James Chin Moody)

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 P…

Unpacking Tesla's Robotaxi Fantasy

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 servi…

Talking About The Computer While Talking About The Computer (PREVIEW)

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…

The Society of the Spectacles

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…