Yo dawg, I heard you like basketball, so we built an AR basketball game you can play while you’re at a basketball game.

Ok fine, this isn’t how the Cleveland Cavaliers announced their new Augmented Reality game. But they should have.

Launching today, Deep in the Q (named after Cleveland’s Quicken Loans arena) is an AR basketball game launching just in time for playoffs. 

It’s pretty simple – the app opens to your camera, and once it recognizes a special trigger graphic it overlays an augmented reality basketball net.

A ball then appears which you can flick into the net. The AR tech is pretty good, letting you move your phone around and see the net (and shoot baskets) from all angles.

The game itself is really fun – the AR element makes it much more addicting than a 2D basketball game like the one Facebook recently snuck into messenger.

The Cavaliers plan to incorporate the app into their home playoff games by putting the graphic up on the main scoreboard during the game and letting fans shoot hoops from their seats. They’ll even give a prize to anyone who can make 10 shots in a row, which is definitely doable.

If you’re not at the stadium you can use their trigger graphic (shown below) to play at home. The game also recognizes the Bud Light logo as a trigger, so you can also play by just pointing your phone at a can or case of the beer. Since Bud Light is sponsoring the app you need to be 21 to play, and have to enter your birthday each time you restart the app, which a bit of a hassle.

The app was developed by YinzCam, a Pittsburgh-based app developer for sports teams. They’ve built apps for most of the teams in the NBA and NFL, as well as for events like the Super Bowl and NBA All Star Games.

You can download the app from the iOS App Store here, and use the trigger graphic below to play yourself right in this post.

80% of Instagram’s users 600 million users are outside the US, so it needed a way to provide a better experience for users with limited network connectivity or no data plan.

Today at F8, Instagram announced it’s built support for using most of its features without Internet access. Much of this functionality is now available on Android, which is the preferred device type in the developing world. More will come in the following months, and Instagram tells me its exploring an iOS version.

Instagram engineer Hendri says offline users will be able to see content previously loaded in Instagram’s feed. People can leave comments, Like things, save media, or unfollow people — all of which will go through when they reconnect. Profiles they’ve visited before will be visible, as will old versions of the Explore tab or their own profile.

The engineering gymnastics required to do this could help Instagram grow in developing nations where data is either too expensive for everyone to afford, or there aren’t omnipresent or stable data connections. Facebook’s developing world app Facebook Lite shot to 200 million users in just a year, proving the big opportunity Instagram could seize by allowing users to enjoys the app even in isolation. While Snapchat seems to have forgotten about the developing world, Instagram knows everyone everywhere wants visual communication.

Facebook Spaces aka Facebook In VR

Google hasn’t had a terrific record with building social networks, but its Timeline feature for Google Maps is actually surprisingly similar to a primary facet of most social products, and it’s a very interesting addition to an app that has largely been focused solely on getting you from point A to B. Now, iOS users can find out what their Android counterparts have been enjoying with Timeline in Maps since 2015.

What is Timeline? It’s basically a browser history but for IRL navigation. Google frames it as a great way to look back and find that restaurant you thought was terrific during your most recent vacation, or to find out what day you actually dropped off your dry cleaning (vs. when you’re pretty sure you did). Timeline has been live for Android users, and on the desktop, for a little while now, but iOS users get the chance to join in today, and Google’s iterating on the feature a bit to welcome the iPhone faithful.

New additions include the ability to easily control what shows up in your Timeline and what doesn’t, and edit specific items to tweak the accuracy of the information if the auto-tagged locations and activities weren’t quite right. You can also get to Your Timeline more quickly, from the place cards that pop up when you tap a location you’ve actually been to in the past. It’ll show you (and only you, when you’re actually logged in while using maps) when you last visited, potentially triggering an immersive experiential memory moment like in Assassin’s Creed (but probably not).

There’s also now a feature that will send you monthly emails giving you a monthly summary of your travel history during the past 30 day period, giving you a look at everything you did (or making you feel lazy – or content, no judgement – for not having done much).

Of course, it’s easy to see how some users will be unnerved rather than delighted to see jut how much of their movement is logged in Maps. But you can always opt out of storing your location history with Google, if it makes you that uncomfortable. The eternal dance of exchanging privacy for features and services continues, as it has since the dawn of the digital age.

It’s no secret that celebrities and athletes use social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to interact with their fans. But with all the noise on these platforms, it’s not always the easiest to engage on a deeper level. At least that’s what MLB players think.

So the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), the group that represents all players in the league, is launching an app called Infield Chatter.

The app is essentially a custom social network just for players and their fans.

Just like other social networks each person has their own profile and can post pictures, videos, etc. You can follow your favorite players (who are verified) and comment on their posts, and they can reply back.

There are also some more unique features – like Q&A sessions and contests to win player memorabilia and unique experiences with players. It’s also very much baseball themed – instead of “likes” you can give a “fist bump” to each post.

The best part? Over 1,000 MLB players are already onboard as registered users. This means there’s already tons of content for fans to start engaging with from day one.

Typically when apps like this are created they suffer from a major chicken and egg problem – fans won’t join until there are a bunch of players to engage with, and no player wants to take the time to signup for an unheard of app that may never takeoff. That’s why it’s such a big deal that this was created by the players themselves. Since the app is being deployed by the MLBPA, literally every player in the league has an interest (both professionally, and potentially financially) in seeing that this takes off.

The MLBPA says that the app was built at the request of the players themselves, who wanted a more personal way to interact with fans, and presumably develop their personal brand in the process. While platforms like Twitter and Instagram certainly have a wide reach, most of us follow so many people it’s easy to miss the content we actually want to see.

So while a player may have a million followers, it’s likely that those fans also follow hundreds of other celebrity accounts in industries like news, entertainment – or just athletes playing other sports like football and basketball. With Infield Chatter fans get their own space just to focus on baseball.

“Other social media serve their purpose, and that’s fine. But there is a lot of crazy activity on some of those sites, and they’re not always the safest places to post personal stuff.  There hasn’t been a good spot for baseball fans to gather, until now.  I think this is one of the best programs that the players have agreed to work on together.” – Rajai Davis, Outfielder, Oakland A’s

So far, it seems like other players agree  – most of the content posted by players so far is much more informal than something they’d put on other platforms. For example, you may scroll through your feed and see a blurry behind the scenes locker room shot from your favorite player. In my opinion, this is much cooler than any professional photo a player would post on their Facebook. Players have also been commenting and replying to fans, which is definitely a neat thing that doesn’t happen as much on other platforms.

The app was built in tandem with a startup called Honeycommb, which helps build social communities for groups of fans. They most recently build a custom app for Lady Gaga to interact with her fans on a more personal level than that allowed by other social networks like Twitter.

As of now there’s no plan to generate revenue, but the association won’t totally rule it out. Advertisers would likely find a platform with such dedicated fans pretty enticing, meaning if enough fans join there could be some serious advertising opportunities for the MLBPA.

The app is live now and you can download it on the iOS App Store or Google Play.

Featured Image: Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

One of the biggest tech concepts we take for granted today was essentially unheard of before Facebook launched its Platform ten years ago. While there were “social networks”, the rest of the web didn’t care much about who you were or who you were friends with.

This is before we “logged in with Facebook” not just on it. Before sites were peppered with sharing buttons. Before every app wanted you to invite your contacts.

“The core thesis in 2007 was that if you looked at pre-2007 social networks, there were ‘social networks’ that were social, and basically everything else was not social” Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg tells me. “The theory was almost everything should have social components. I think that’s been born-out over the last decade.”

Yet opening its audience to outside developers came with a steep learning curve. Social apps must be accompanied by social norms about respecting people’s time and attention. Facebook is still getting the hang of that.

On its 10th anniversary, a series of interviews with Mark Zuckerberg and other team members reveal how the Facebook Platform shook out and shook everything up.

Social By Design

In 2007, Facebook was experiencing unprecedented viral growth thanks in part to its freshly-launched News Feed. Given the right skeleton, it discovered people would flesh out a social network with not only their content, but their identities. The blue beast was alive. The scrappy young company could hardly keep up.

Yet the team had a hazy, crazy idea that belayed its humble dorm room beginnings. Facebook didn’t know what people wanted it to build, so what if it let anyone build apps on top?

A year later with the launch of the Facebook Connect part of the platform, it posed another peculiar question: If we let people log in elsewhere with their Facebook account and bring along their interests and social graphs, could any website become “social”?

The answers would surprise Facebook’s executives, spawn a legion of new businesses, entrechng the company while changing the Internet from a solo experience to a group one. Those same answers would also force Facebook to adapt to unforeseen trends, retreat from unsustainably spammy features, and crater some of the new business built on the fledgling Platform. ‘

Word of mouth is a top driver of popularity for any product. Facebook’s “social by design” philosophy sought to give each app its own voice users could speak through to rally their friends to enhance their collective experience.

Suddenly, Facebook’s exclusive relationship with its users became a tumultuous, bizarre love triangle between itself, the public, and its developers. One where the users were put first, even if it meant sacrificing immediate monetization of its site and the existence of some app makers.

“Crazy Time”

“There was no playbook for what we were doing. No one had built this sort of platform before.” says Ami Vora, a Facebook Product Director who was part of the initial team of five core engineers working on the launch for the first F8 conference. “We didn’t exactly know what would happen next to the developer community. We were really just trying to learn what we were doing as we were doing it.”

Vora had been working at Microsoft, a more conservative tech titan. What we think of as the “closed private beta” stage of modern platforms before they launch and open up was how many platforms ran permanently. Current Platform team member and Facebook VP of partnerships Ime Archibong tells me he came from IBM, which was “known for building proprietary stacks up and down themselves.”

The promise of pioneering a new way to work with developers lured fresh talent to Facebook. And the geyser of user growth it had tapped into attracted developers thirsty for attention.

Mark Zuckerberg on stage at the first F8 in 2007

Vora describes the “sleepless excitement” of this hockey stick-growth moment at Facebook. “One of our catch phrases was “‘crazy time?’” Employees felt the immense gravity of this phase of Facebook’s ascent. “You’d just nod to the person you were passing [in the office] and say ‘crazy time?’”

In fact, employees spent the days running up to F8 frantically updating Facebook’s marketing materials. Everything said 19 million users, but Facebook hit 20 million in the days before the event. The company scheduled a “20 million users party” for a few weeks later, “but by then we had 25 million users” Vora laughs.

After running the conference all day where Facebook announced the Platform, the core team retreated to a nearby hotel’s conference room it had established as its “war room”. There, on a spotty Wifi connection and patchwork of mobile hotspots, Facebook’s Platform launched.

With V1, Facebook lets developers create “canvas applications” within its desktop site. These experiences could be personalized with a user’s identity, and connect people to friends who were also using the app. Developers could build games and social utilities, or offer a “Profile Box” app that let you spruce up your personal presence on Facebook.

Facebook had dismantled two of the biggest barriers to people trying new web services. Users didn’t have to set up a separate username and password for each service, and they didn’t have to build a unique social graph there. Meanwhile, the lucrative viral channels helped developers rapidly build their audience as people invited their friends.

Within a few months, 7,000 apps had been built on the Facebook Platform. That number would grow to 33,000 in a year. In five years there were over 9 million apps and sites integrated with Facebook. And now after a decade Facebook has paid out almost $10 billion to its app developers.

“I remember talking to entrepreneurs in the weeks after F8 who were spending half of their day every day driving around trying to get whatever servers they could because they were experiencing so much growth” Vora says. Stanford University even created a Computer Science class where students had to build Facebook applications.

In 2008, Facebook opened the second wing of its Platform, “Facebook Connect”, which let third-party website from news publishers to utilities offer Facebook login, personalization, and instant sharing to the News Feed. Facebook effectively colonized the web, giving its citizens easy access abroad while funneling content back to the motherland. The Like button soon became Facebook’s calling card.

But while developers on Facebook’s platform would blossom into giant businesses like Zynga, others would end up as collateral damage as Facebook wrestled to control what it created.

Open To Surprises

The overarching strategy for Facebook’s Platform was that “it should be open. Anyone should be able to build on the platform” says Archibong. “Given that we aren’t going to be able to prioritize all this stuff, we don’t have enough engineers to build all the stuff we want to build, and arguably, we won’t know what the world and what people ultimately want, if we extend our Platform to developers, they’ll be able to build for these communities.”

That openness also forced Facebook to go where the platform pulled it. Sometimes that meant scrambling to support and survive unexpected success, as with gaming.

Facebook didn’t quite predict how well its desktop canvas Platform would work for spreading simple social games. Eager for distraction and with dense social graphs on the network, the college-centered Facebook demographic frittered away immense amounts of time and money on games like Zynga Poker and FarmVille. Facebook would have to build an entire international payments infrastructure around the burgeoning games industry.

Facebook VP of Partnerhips Ime Archibong

But games also threatened to kill Facebook. What some considered playful socializing others found deeply annoying. Developers seized on the viral invite and request channels Facebook offered, designing their games to heavily reward users who sucked in their frends. You either spent hours and hours watering your make-believe FarmVille crops, paid real money to keep them alive, or begged your friends to sign up and help you.

“I thought it was really fun” Vora says wistfully, showing the strength of Facebook’s cult Kool-Aid. “Remember with ‘SuperPoke’ we all just threw sheep at each other!?! Who knew that would bring so much joy. [It was] an interesting way to express your friendship with someone and bring just a little touch of lightness to your day.” 60 million people ended up hooked on FarmVille, deriving some kind of value from the game.

Developing Whiplash

Others did not think it was really fun. I did not think it was really fun. Facebook had been a way to connect online about your real life, not play pretend in a frivolous virtual universe. Sure, some might find companionship in cooperating around games. But the News Feed of updates about friends’ vacations and new jobs was overrun with viral game spam.

Zuckerberg eventually admitted half of Facebook might not want to see this content, severely curtailed its prominence in the feed, and thereby dashed the growth dreams of some developers. Meanwhile Facebook removed the entire Profile Box part of the Platform after profile customization ran amok and put the site in danger of becoming another slow-loading, buggy mess like Myspace.

Facebook game spam

Had these parts of the platform remained unchecked, they might have poisoned the populace before other developers could try their hand with chatbots and camera effects a decade later. Still, some devs felt like Facebook had pulled the rug out from under them. Startups had raised money and hired employees, betting on Facebook’s Platform to distribute their products. It was the developers who got the short end as Facebook tried to balance their needs with its own and those of the users.

This is a theme that’s played out over and over in the 10 years since.

The struggle to find this balance might stem from Facebook’s seemingly naive perspective that its partners prioritize the long-term satisfaction of the social network’s users, and Facebook by proxy, as Facebook does itself.

“Everyone knew we were building an ecosystem, and no one would be successful unless we were doing the right thing for people” Vora insists. “Even the hard conversations were grounded in this knowledge.”

“The ability to take such a long-term view on things I think allows you to have open, candid conversations about what the future looks like with partners” says Archibong. “That may mean . . . things that were arguably not as good anymore for the partner or the developer but that we collectively knew were good for people over the long-run.”

But this framework falsely delineates between the needs of users and Facebook. If developer spam drowned out the social content people came to Facebook for, the users would have a bad experience…but that would quickly lead to them leaving the social network, depriving it of fulfilling its mission and filling its bank accounts.

This prioritization has kept users happy, Facebook earnings billions of dollars in profit per quarter, and its Platform open to new waves of developers. But it’s also left a trail of dead apps and battered businesses.

Zynga struggled as a public company after Facebook deleted viral channels that helped it get huge in the early days of the Platform. BandPage, makers of  landing tab app for musicians’ Facebook Pages, was once the second-most popular developer behind Zynga and had just raised a $16 million Series B. But when Facebook decided these landing tabs made the user experience ‘inconsistent’ and suddenly shut them down, BandPage lost 90% of its traffic. It dropped from 35 million active users to 3 million in a few months, and after several failed pivots was sold to YouTube in a firesale for a fraction of the cash it had raised.

BandPage lost 90% of its users after Facebook suddenly killed off the Page landing tab part of its Platform

Yet Vora and Archibong repeatedly defended the limitations and changes to Facebook’s Platform as consensual. “I think most of those folks also understood, and were excited about the power they had gotten from the Facebook Platform. iLike woke up the next morning with 50k users, which was something they never expected” Vora recalls. She doesn’t mention that iLike withered after the Profile Box was shut down.

Archibong defends the tumultous point of Facebook’s history, saying “You actually find that conversations that from the outside looking in may look really difficult and probably seem really tough because they have both business impact for Facebook or the developer are actually okay because it’s not a transactional relationship.”

Maybe not for Facebook. With enough traction and network effect, it could outlive its Platform pivots. Still, for some developers, diverting their roadmap in search of Facebook-fueled growth was a transaction where the Platform’s exchange rate suddenly spiked.

Facebook would spend the next few years trumpeting its “Operation Developer Love”, where it tried to give app makers more warning about big changes on the roadmap and work with them more closely to ensure they were earning enough to validate the engineering time they poured into the Platform.

Balancing The Bizarre Love Triangle

The cycle of “too much virality -> too much spam -> dial back virality -> pivot the platform” has played out nearly a half dozen times since.

In 2011 Facebook launched the Open Graph platform to let apps like Spotify or Wall Street Journal’s Facebook News Reader automatically publish users’ listening or reading activity to the News Feed.

Facebook ended up reducing the number of music stories in the main News Feed and removing the side “Ticker” that embarassed people by sharing their guilt pleasure rock-outs with everyone they know. When Facebook decided stories about users opening click bait articles in Open Graph News Readers weren’t valuable enough, it downranked the apps, traffic dried up, and publishers abandoned that part of the platform.

Mark Zuckerberg discusses Facebook’s Platform partnerships with news outlets at F8 2010

On the other side of the spectrum, that same year Facebook tried to launch its own HTML5 mobile web app platform. It had been shut out of charging the same 30% tax on game payments it did on desktop computers when users shifted iOS and Android devices. But this time Facebook gave developers too few growth option, and weary from its past waffling, they never adopted Facebook’s “Project Spartan” and that Platform dried up.

Most recently, Facebook’s Instant Articles promised a publishing platform that would drive more traffic for news outlets that host their content inside Facebook’s app so it loads faster. But Facebook’s iron grip on how publishers could show ads, email newsletter widgets, subscription sign-ups, and their own design identity made the format a bad deal.

Instant Articles essentially turned publishers into ghost writers, creating dumb content for Facebook’s smart pipes rather than deepening their relationships with readers directly. Facebook tried to loosen up, but now major oulets like The New York Times, Vice News, and the Los Angeles Times have abandoned Instant Articles.

Playing The Long-Game

Clearly Facebook is still grappling with how to give developers enough support that they join its Platforms but not so much that they disrupt the network’s equilibrium. Where it’s succeeded is internalizing one thing it got wrong 10 years ago: as long as you don’t drive the users away, you always get another chance.

News articles were kept from overshadowing personal updates, and now publishers still see a massive chunk of referral traffic from the News Feed. Facebook dumped HTML5, but now is spinning up new games Platforms within Messenger and a new Steam-like desktop app. Open Graph auto-sharing fizzled, but Facebook’s Account Kit has flourished by allowing any app to use phone numbers and SMS for sign-up.

Whether Facebook is getting better at managing developer expectations or it just holds enough power to offset some missteps, it’s managed to keep its Platform well-populated. And now Facebook is expanding the definition of “developer” to include brands, small businesses, and more.

Zuckerberg tells me a high percentage of top-grossing mobile apps offer Facebook login or other Platform features. “I think that’s pretty widespread, but then even the ones who aren’t using our tools I think have generally adopted this apporach of every app, whether it’s an enterprise app or whatever it is, I think should have some kind of social sharing. I think that that idea, that’s been pretty cool to see.”

Mark Zuckerberg at F8 2016

Now Facebook is prepping a “Camera Effects Platform” to let developers help you augment your photos and videos. Snapchat also wants to give you a breadth of creative tools to enhance your social media sharing, but has never cultivated a developer ecosystem before.

With so many mistakes to make and fragile balances to maintain, a decade of wisdom could give Facebook a leg up over younger competitors. Though it doesn’t have a perfect track record as a Platform, at least Facebook does have a track record. Being older than some of its own users might not be cool, but it has its advantages.

Netflix whiffed today in its first-quarter earnings when it came to subscriber growth, missing the expectations it set at the beginning of the year for the first quarter.

Still, Netflix said it is expecting to add 600,000 domestic subscribers and 2.6 million international subscribers in the second quarter. That would bring it over the hump to get it past that 100 million mark that — again — may be some kind of signal of faith for the company as it looks to continue growing internationally amid heavy spend on content. The subscriber numbers are more or less the key part of Netflix’s business because it’ll determine whether or not it can level off the spend on content to grow and keep users around against the revenue it generates from those subscribers.

In the end, shares of Netflix fell around 3% following the report, but it could have been quite a bit worse. Netflix can be prone to major swings in its stock price based on the subscriber numbers it delivers every quarter. The last one looked good, so they saw a pretty hefty stock jump. Netflix earnings of 40 cents per share on revenue of $2.64 billion. Analysts were also expecting earnings of 37 cents per share on revenue of $2.64 billion. Near-term, things might not have looked that great, but the better-than-expected guidance seems enough to buoy enough major suspicions about its future potential.

The company added 1.42 million domestic subscribers and 3.53 million international subscribers. Netflix itself projected that it would add 5.2 million subscribers in the first quarter — 1.5 million in the U.S. and 3.7 million internationally. That estimate would have brought Netflix to 99 million subscribers, tantalizingly close to a nice round number that may or may not impress investors going forward.

In January, Netflix reported domestic subscriber growth that was much stronger than what Wall Street was expecting, which ended up sending the stock price soaring. It was a pleasant surprise — and maybe a relief — given that a lot of the focus and attention was given to its international expansion after it decided to open up to a wide array of new countries. International growth, too, beat expectations, with the company adding 5 million new subscribers.

Getting that growth up is going to be even more important given the amount of money Netflix has to invest to get those subscribers to stick around and gather new ones. In addition to the costs of producing original content, Netflix also said it would spend $1 billion in marketing this year.

“As part of this, we are investing more in programmatic advertising with the aim of improving our ability to do individualized marketing at scale and to deliver the right ad to the right person at the right time,” the company said in the earnings release.

In the past year, Netflix has seen a steady climb up as it looks like its expansion plans aren’t running into its major issues, though it has a lot of big markets that it has to get into. It also has to invest heavily in original content for those new markets, given that it can’t just rely fully on its existing library and the content that does well in its domestic markets. Last quarter, Hastings pointed to a new show called The 3% that was launched in Brazil and was highly successful.

Netflix’s report today kicks off the first quarter of the tech earnings season. Following a string of successful IPOs through the first quarter, we’ll see how industry observers will be reacting to what the rest of the tech world is delivering.

Featured Image: AP Photo/Paul Sakuma

Here at TechCrunch, we tend to pay close attention to the earnings reports of the big companies. And for good reason! It gives us some insight into major technology trends and some signals that can help us not only predict what products are going to be around in a few years (not mentioning any names), but also directionally what kinds of startups might be successful.

But!

Sometimes these reports can be dull. And sometimes these reports can be quite boring and fall directly in-line with what Wall Street and everyone else expects. We have a couple new entries this quarter like Snap, but since we’re here, we might as well have a little bit of fun. So we’re going to set out some of the odds of some of the fun, stupid and interesting things that might happen this earnings season.

NOTE: WE ARE NOT GOING TO PAY OUT THESE BETS. WE DON’T HAVE THE MONEY OR RESOURCES. OUR PARENT COMPANY JUST BOUGHT YAHOO FOR SOME REASON.

Twitter

Anything bad happens because it’s 4 A.M.: 3/2

Jack Dorsey says he’s still running both companies: 3/1

Twitter’s ad business shrinks: 2/1

Twitter talks about its great new executive team: 5/1

More Twitter layoffs: 50/1

Jack Dorsey accidentally calls Twitter “Square” and has to apologize: 25/1

Square shares go up after Twitter falls for some reason: 3/2

Apple

Apple grows revenue and/or iPhone sales: 5/1

Over/under on “Customer Sat” mentions on the earnings call: 3

Apple breaks out Apple Watch numbers: 100/1

Apple services revenue breaks $9 billion: 10/1

Self-driving car mention: 15/1

Tim Cook says services revenue will be “size of a fortune 100 company” in 2016: 3/1

Someone mentions augmented reality: 15/1

Apple stock rises more than 3%: 7/1

Over/under on number of Qualcomm lawsuit mentions (analyst or otherwise): 3

An Apple executive actually names Qualcomm on the call: 7/1

Greater China revenue shrinks: 4/1

Someone says something about the Apple car: 15/1

Apple TV is called a “hobby”: 25/1

Alphabet

Line on Other Bets loss: $900M

Larry Page shows up to earnings call: 40/1

The Waymo lawsuit is mentioned in some fashion: 20/1

Someone actually mentions Uber by name: 50/1

Alphabet breaks out cloud revenue: 25/1

Alphabet cost-per-click grows: 50/1

Alphabet declares a regular dividend: 3/2

Alphabet shares go up more than 3%: 6/1

Someone mentions currency fluctuations: 7/1

Yahoo

Yahoo discloses another hack: 25/1

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg says something about his USA tour: 3/2

Instagram is fully broken out: 100/1

Analysts ask about fake news: 5/1

User growth stalls completely: 50/1

A Facebook executive actually addresses fake news: 15/1

The number of stories posted to Instagram is mentioned: 3/2

Someone says anything about GIFs: 10/1

Facebook stock goes up by 3%: 8/1

Snap

Snap somehow discloses some number that’s beating Instagram: 50/1

A Snap executive actually mentions Instagram by name: 75/1

A Snap executive actually answers the inevitable question regarding Instagram Stories DAUs with some clarity: 45/1

Snap actually beats expectations enough to warrant its current revenue multiple: 25/1

Snap announces some new corporate governance method to share control with public investors: haha yeah right

Snap stock goes up by 3%: 4/1

Snap breaks out Spectacles revenue: 10/1

Microsoft

Microsoft discloses last quarter’s Windows Phone sales: 100/1

Microsoft breaks out Surface Studio sales numbers: 75/1

Microsoft breaks out Azure-specific run rate: 25/1

Google Cloud or AWS is actually mentioned: 30/1

Satya Nadella quotes some poetry: 35/1

Microsoft shares go up 3% or more: 9/1

IBM

Some ominous mention or signal of additional future layoffs: 5/1

Amazon

Amazon actually breaks out Kindle sales numbers in absolute terms: 15/1

Amazon makes money by some accident: 5/1

AWS hits a $12B annual run rate: 8/1

Amazon shares go up at least 3%: 3/1

Media is mentioned for some reason: 4/1

An Amazon executive mentions the number of Alexa skills: 3/2

Over/under on number of Alexa skills if mentioned: 7,000

Box

Box returns to negative free cash flow: 5/1

Over/under on mentions of “cohort analysis” during earnings call: 2

Box stock goes up 3% or more: 6/1

Verizon

Verizon apologizes for calling it “Oath”: 100/1

TechCrunch shoutout: 200/1 (come on Tim!)

Netflix

Netflix somehow beats expectations for domestic subscriber growth: 7/1

Netflix original series The 3% is mentioned: 8/1 (great show by the way)

Over/under on 2017’s content spend if mentioned: $6.5 billion

Iron Fist is mentioned by an executive or analyst: 5/1

Paypal

PayPal’s stock goes up 3% or more for some reason: 4/1

PayPal actually has some breakout of Venmo: 5/1 (💪💪💪)

Qualcomm

Apple is actually mentioned by name with regards to the pending lawsuit: 15/1

Over/under on number of mentions or questions regarding the Apple lawsuit: 5

Fitbit

Fitbit’s market cap falls below GoPro after its report: 3/2

Over/under on gratuitous vanity metrics mentioned: 7

Tesla

Tesla is GAAP profitable: 7/1

Tesla actually beats expectations for car shipments: 5/1

Tesla says it will raise more money with a stock sale: 25/1

Discussion concerning the raising of new external capital: 5/1

Over/under for the number of analyst questions regarding SolarCity: 4

Pandora

Someone says Pandora is “exploring strategic options”: 5/1

Cisco

Something interesting enough that’s worth mentioning happens: 50/1

GoPro

GoPro’s stock hits another all-time low: 7/1

Something dumb happens: 3/1

Square

Another minor beat: 3/1

Be sure to check out TechCrunch in the coming weeks for its coverage of earnings for major tech companies.

Alex Wilhelm, editor-in-chief of Crunchbase News, contributed to this post.

Featured Image: Drew Angerer/Getty Images