Welcome to Storyflo Daily Tech. I'm Mike, here's what mattered today.
The story I'd lead with is the surveillance one. Ars Technica reports the FBI has posted a procurement notice seeking nationwide access to license-plate-reader networks, with the contracts explicitly asking vendors to provide data "in near real time." This is a federal agency formalizing what local police departments have built piecemeal — a continuous, warrantless feed of vehicle movement across every camera-equipped intersection in the country. The procurement language matters: "near real time" turns the LPR network from a forensic tool into a live tracking grid. If you've followed the ALPR debate, this is the moment the federal layer locks in.
The week's product story is Plex. Per The Verge, Plex is tripling the lifetime-pass price to $749.99 on July 1st. That's after already more than doubling it last March, from $119.99 to $249.99. The Verge does the math: at the new price, you'd need to subscribe for roughly 11 years for the lifetime to pay off versus a monthly plan. Two price hikes in eighteen months on what used to be a darling indie product is the clearest signal yet that Plex is monetizing the lock-in. If you've been on the fence, the next six weeks is the window.
On the wearable front, The Verge also covered Google's Wear OS 7 announcement from I/O, which adds iPhone-style Live Updates for things like deliveries and live sports scores, plus the ability to monitor AI agent tasks from your wrist. The deliveries angle is the first time Wear has had a use case that isn't just fitness or notifications. Small step, but the direction is right.
Two builder-side pieces are arguing the same thing from different angles. Metatrends, in "Anyone Can Build. The Question is What?", argues the cost of shipping software has dropped 10x in 24 months and the bottleneck has shifted from engineering capacity to problem selection. Emerging AI's tutorial on agentic workflows walks the same conclusion from the practitioner side — the toolchain is mature, the missing piece is judgment about which workflows are actually worth automating. Topline's Tim Rutten extends the argument to go-to-market, claiming AI-native sales motions can't be retrofitted onto legacy funnels. The through-line across all three: builders now compete on taste, not throughput.
That's your Storyflo Daily Tech. Source links in the show notes. Mike out.
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