Push Pop Press (Facebook Instant Articles) with Todd Bishop

Episode 13 of Acquired, "the show where we talk about technology acquisitions that actually went well," opens with hosts Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal welcoming their guest Todd Bishop, visiting from the Seattle technology news site GeekWire. The framing is deliberate: the episode covers Facebook's acquisition of Push Pop Press, and the hosts wanted someone "experiencing the results of the acquisition firsthand" — a publisher living with Instant Articles — rather than analyzing the media business from the outside. The pre-show banter about whether an anti-Trump gag is safe to keep sets an informal tone that carries through the whole recording.

After the usual housekeeping — a request for iTunes ratings and reviews, promotion of the show's new Slack community, which listeners join through a widget on the Acquired website — the hosts announce the subject: Facebook's acquisition of Push Pop Press, a company name David immediately challenges Ben to "say that five times fast."

Push Pop Press, as David recounts in the history-and-facts segment, was founded in February 2010 by Mike Matas and Kimon Tsinteris, both Apple alumni — one a designer, one an engineer, each with roughly four or five years at the company, working on the iPhone in the years before its launch. Ben, self-described as "a total Apple nerd," calls the pair "legendary" and starts listing their credits from memory before David cuts him off with his prepared notes.

The notes are worth the interruption: between the two of them they designed the first versions of the Camera, Photos, Maps and Settings apps, the battery display, the Photos app for iPad, and Time Machine and Photo Booth for the Mac. The pedigree extends beyond Apple — Mike was one of the first people working on Nest at a time when nobody knew what Nest was, and as a native Seattleite he had earlier worked on the pixel-perfect Mac software Delicious Library at Delicious Monster with Wil Shipley, a startup Todd nominates for "one of the greatest startup names ever."

What they built at Push Pop Press was unveiled at the TED conference in spring 2011: an attempt to reimagine what a book looks like on a mobile computer, both tablets and smartphones. The first title was Al Gore's environmental book Our Choice — Gore being, notably, an Apple board member still affiliated with Kleiner Perkins, the venture firm that invested in Nest. Released as an iOS-only app in Apple's App Store, it used Push Pop Press's technology for highly immersive interactions, with interactive content, audio and video seamlessly integrated. Ben stresses how hard this was: imagining an application with a "perfect animation curve" is hard on its own, the engineering on early iOS devices was particularly difficult, and "these were kind of the two guys in the world" who could envision and build that experience.

The timeframe is early iPads and the iPhone 4/4s generation. The most provocative claim of the segment comes with an explicit caveat: the hosts say they "can't verify this, confirm or deny," but it was reported in the press that Steve Jobs noticed when the two left and what they were working on, and believed much of the technology used to build Push Pop Press was "alarmingly similar" to patented technology they had developed at Apple while working on iBooks — and that he supposedly got upset about it. David is careful to distinguish this from a non-compete dispute after Todd jokes, "Good thing there's no non-compete provisions in California, right?" — "this was actually an IP issue... a patent issue supposedly."