 Coming up on DTNS, Google redesigns Google pay to be much, much more. Apple knocks its rev share on apps down to 15 percent for everyone, but the big players and robot wolves defend a Japanese town against bears. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, November 18th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chains joining us today. We're very happy to have founder of five by five, Dan Benjamin on the show. Welcome. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having me back on. Oh, it's good to have you back, man. It's been way too long. We were just having a good time talking to Dan about VCRs and Tiktok. That's right. I show up on the show and we talk about 40 year old technology. It's lovely. It was a good time. You can get that expanded conversation on our expanded show. Good day, Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The U.S. FCC has voted to open additional spectrum for Wi-Fi use. This is an addition to the 1200 megahertz of spectrum in the six gigahertz band, which opened in April. The additional 45 megahertz of spectrum just voted on is around the 5.9 gigahertz band and was set aside 20 years ago for vehicle to vehicle and vehicle to infrastructure transmission, but hasn't been used much. When devices are updated to support the additional bands, it will help increase speed and reliability. Firefox 83 is out with an HTTPS only mode built right in. You don't have to use an extension anymore. When turned on, the browser will automatically try to connect you to websites securely, even if the link you typed or clicked is not HTTPS. If a secure version is not available, Firefox will warn you and ask permission to continue. Users can turn that feature on in Firefox's privacy and security preferences. Firefox 83 also added pinch to zoom for Windows touchscreen devices. Chrome 87 will prioritize active tabs to reduce CPU usage by five times. If you're a Chrome user, you might be cheering about that. Google also promises that Chrome will now use less power and memory. Chrome is also getting tab search starting on Chromebooks. The president of the United States terminated the position of Christopher Krebs, who headed the Department of Homeland Security's Cyber Security and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CESA. Last Friday, CESA issued a report finding, quote, no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. SoundCloud announced it will add blue checkmarks next to artists that it has verified. The company says it's adding the checkmarks to help well-known artists stand out and maintain their authenticity and to help listeners identify those artists more easily. Any artist can request verification from their settings. And it's so authentic, I can hear the blue check mark in this guy. All right, let's talk a little more about a new social media app to keep your eye on. If you've been wondering what's next after TikTok, maybe it's ad-free French social media app, Ubo. They've gone from 25 million users in December last year to 40 million, according to details released along with the latest round of funding. Ubo does not let you follow people or like contact, a content, but you can't add friends. So there's a little bit of following, but it's not like on Twitter or even on TikTok. Instead, you join rooms based on a topic like a games or politics. And then you live stream from your phone into that room and just chat with other users about things you have common interests in. Users can pay extra for features like boosting your profile or boosting your stream. Ubo is working on partnerships with YouTube to integrate video contents. You could just watch YouTube videos along with other people and Snap to use Snap's camera kit for lenses within Ubo as well. Why Ubo? Dan, what do you think the chances are this is the next big thing? I don't know, Tom, it sits weird with me. The whole fact that you can't follow people because I guess what their focus is on interest. So you said this is a thing I'm interested in and I want to join this room and I want to hang out with the people that are in the room. But you're all chatting and it's video chat, but you're chatting with strangers. Maybe they're your friend. I don't know. This doesn't appeal that much to me. But I mean, who knows? It's when I remember when Instagram first came out with stories, I was like, well, it's not really my thing. And now I love stories. I use them all the time. So who knows? It kind of reminds me of the video version of Clubhouse. If you're not familiar with Clubhouse and Twitter is apparently working on a Clubhouse feature of its own. It is the idea that you get into a room with a bunch of people who are talking. There's sort of a moderator. So somebody who's able to say, OK, Sarah wants to talk, you know, she's raised her hand, you know, you press a button in the app. OK, now, you know, you get to be part of the conversation and some people kind of sit back and just chill. But that's not video. That's audio only. I'm not a huge fan of Clubhouse because it's just it feels like it needs more moderation than it has. But the idea of saying, hmm, I'm in the mood to talk about horses today. Let's see if you Bose got a, you know, some sort of horse chat going on. And I don't maybe a friend of mine is in that video chat. Maybe not. But people who care about the stuff that I care about are in that video chat. To me, Dan, I'm with you. I'm like, oh, God, video chatting. I mean, that's asking a lot of me. But I think more and more people are getting used to that, especially if you look at the fact that Yubo has grown so much since December, just goes to show you that people are home wanting to connect with other people and see them. Yeah, maybe three people who even prior to 2020 just stayed in their in their studios going out of the wrong wrong target for Yubo. But I get what they're going for. And there does seem to be a trend, like you say, with Clubhouse. There was even a language app that I was seeing the other day that was about getting into rooms with strangers and conversing in the language you're trying to to learn. There's this backlash against speaking to a mass amount of people at once and more of like, hey, why don't you find people who you just want to talk to directly when you're talking to people directly? You're less likely to be hostile. You're you're less likely to troll and people will less likely to troll you. They have a lot of things in Yubo to kind of, you know, handle moderation and complaints and all of that. But it does seem like this is the next trend. Whether Yubo is the one to catch it or not, it does seem like the trend is smaller groups talking about shared interests rather than the sort of like post your thing to the world situation. Well, here's a familiar name that we haven't talked about on this show in a while. Former Yahoo CEO, Marissa Meyer, also former Google executive, along with her longtime colleague, Enrique Munoz Torres, have launched a company called Sunshine. First product is Sunshine Contacts. This is an iOS app for managing contacts. It's available by Invite in Beta, at least for now, Android version still in development. The company previously operated under the name Lumi Labs, which we have talked about on the show before, Sunshine plans to develop and release other products involving group communication, event planning, family sharing, and scheduling. Yeah, I think this is getting a lot of attention because it's got Marissa Meyer and it's being billed as her comeback as Fast Company says. But that said, the idea of creating sort of a suite of organizational apps for personal use, not for enterprise use, not for business use is an interesting take. Is there anything to this besides, hey, this is Marissa Meyer's thing, Dan, do you think? You know, Tom, you're right. I mean, Marissa Meyer is super smart. She knows what she's doing. She's had such a great track record. And you have to think that if this is her comeback, this is the thing that she's focusing on, then there has to be more to it than what the article talks about. Because for me, like, like, I don't know about you guys, but like the buzz on the streets always about like contact management. Like that's the big thing of like one of the organizational things, but at the same time, like, it's contacts. Is this really a thing? Like they're really, we need a new app for that. So it makes me think that there's a lot more behind the scenes that she's thinking about. And this is just a tiny little tip of the iceberg of what they have got to be working on. So, but it'll be really interesting to see. And I like the name Sunshine. She's always been good at that. So. Yeah, I, I, I struggled to, you know, this is an iOS app for now, right? And, you know, it's, it's in beta. So there's obviously work to be done. But I think, okay, what's wrong with if I'm looking up Dan Benjamin in my contacts on iOS, like what's wrong with the information that I have for him? Well, nothing, but it's also, you know, it's a little long on the tooth. As far as you got a name, you might be able to update a profile photo, you know, iOS will ask me to do that periodically. You might merge a couple phone numbers, you know, into a contact, but it's been doing the same thing for quite some time. So it, it, it may be one of those categories that we all go, I mean, okay, how are you going to make it better? And they have some great ideas. Yeah. I mean, it's something that's definitely we have so many organizational apps. We have so many to do apps. We have so many calendar apps. And when it comes to contacts, you know, maybe they're building a contact centric world or something like that, that could be kind of interesting. It kind of goes with the, you know, the personal media empire and the, and not to use this awful term of personal brand, but like it, maybe it's building off of that kind of a concept. And, you know, maybe connecting in a weird way to you Bo in the sense of like, you're forming new groups and this leads you to find new people. I don't know. There's got to be something. Yeah. I mean, maybe it's that context feels like an easy thing that everybody understands. And if you make it look nicer, it might turn some heads, whereas the real value would be the organizational apps out there like Slack and Microsoft Office are meant for the office. And if they make something that is for you to use on your own when you're not using it for work, I could see some advantages. They're like, yeah, you don't need all that stuff. You don't need that metaphor. We've got the meta. If they have the metaphor, then that could be compelling me. Yeah, especially because I think some of the solutions that it's sort of seems like Sunshine is dancing around is event based. If there are 10 people that I know I'm going to see for my birthday in a week, then maybe we're all going to be on a group text or something. If there if there is a contact layer that can that can sort of be built into my life to somehow make it easier and not necessarily be calendar oriented, because again, that still sort of tends to skew work. It'll be interesting. Google launched a redesigned version of Google pay for Android and iOS in the U.S. It has a lot of new stuff in it. It is not just paying by tap on Android or peer-to-peer on both iOS and Android. Although it still has that there are three new tabs pay is the one that has the tap to pay and the peer-to-peer pay. And then there's two other tabs explore and insights. Now the pay has those expected features, but also adds in functions like transaction history that looks kind of like a chat metaphor. Explore is a tab that will contain deals and discounts. If you opt into it, it will customize those based on your transaction history. If it knows you're buying certain kinds of things, it'll offer you discounts for those. If you don't opt into that, it'll just give you generic discounts that Google offers to everybody. The other tab is insights. That one lets you connect your bank account to get a searchable overview of your finances. So kind of like mint or something like that. You can also approve pay to look through Gmail and Google photos. You have to opt in to all this stuff, but if you do, it can look through Gmail and photos for receipts and then just automatically bring those into your insights tab. That's not all. Coming in 2021, Google will partner with banks to offer checking and saving accounts inside Google pay. Apparently they've got about 11 banks on board. They hope to have more by next year. Google has decided it was a good idea to call this new banking service Plex, which is also another product. But I guess they're not the same product. So by trademark law, they could do that. Google says it will not share transaction history with any other part of Google, whether you approve it or not. They're not even going to ask. They'll say we're not going to target ads with this stuff. Access to your data for searching and analysis requires you to opt in and it will use strong encryption when it does send that to the server for analysis. You can also opt into a three month trial of transaction analysis that will end unless you respond yes to a prompt. That way you don't have to remember to turn it off. You can say let me try it for three months. And if I like it, I'll keep doing the analysis. So Google really trying to say like, yes, we know you're freaked out by privacy, but this Google product is going to work really hard to keep your data private. But we do need a little bit of access to do the kinds of analysis that a mint or another service would do. I'd love to know how many iOS users use Google Pay. I don't because, well, if I'm in a store and Google Pay is limited on iOS, right? It's online transactions only or peer to peer. You know, if I don't know, I forget my wallet or for whatever reason I want to use my phone to tap, I'm going to use Apple Pay because I've got an iPhone. But I, and then if I need to send Tom, you know, 15 bucks for drinks that last Friday night, I might use Venmo or maybe PayPal or maybe Cash App. I mean, there are a lot of options. I know Android users are extremely familiar with Google Pay, formerly Android Pay, but I wonder how many iOS users are using it and how often because it is still limited. Sarah, I totally agree with you and that was exactly what I was thinking. Anytime that I have to pay for a service, especially since, like you were saying, the whole concept of contactless now, it, you know, people are wanting to pay with these apps everywhere I go all the time. You know what they're asking for? Venmo all the time. And I had to get a Venmo account. The personal trainer, the haircut, the, you know, everybody's using Venmo. So they're not just competing with Apple Pay, like you said. They're competing with all of these different apps and it really does seem like people in the services group are hardcore on Venmo for whatever reason. So this, they have a lot of competition in this space. Well, I think that's why it's smart to kind of move towards becoming a super app, to say like, well, you might not want to use Google Pay because you use Venmo, but you can manage your finances in here and you can get deals and you can do shopping someday in here. And I could see this thing, if it does catch on this part of it, growing and growing and growing to be more like a WeChat is or an Alipay is in the future. And I think that's maybe why they're doing that is like, we can't compete with Venmo on a one-to-one basis. So we have to offer more and they're Google. They can do that. I think that's, you know, the part of people saying Google's opening a bank now. I mean, it's really just a layer on top of a bank that you might already use that ends up being a partner with Google Pay and it will probably get more banks down the road. It's something where it's like, okay, if I have this particular participating bank and I'm in Google Pay anyway, now I can kind of deal with my bank account rather than dipping out and going to that bank's own standalone app. The bank gets your service either way. So it's advantageous to the bank and it's advantageous to Google because then, yeah, again, I might be like, well, sometimes I get like cool discounts if I hang out in Google Pay a little bit more and I can do all this other stuff. Well, and the bank might not have its own app anymore. This may become its app, which means they drive more. Right, yeah, and they save a little development money as well. Hey, folks, if you've got thoughts on this or any of the stories we talk about, we've got a bunch of other listeners who are thinking like you or maybe not thinking exactly like you, but they want to talk about this stuff. Join conversation in our Discord by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. Oh, a tiny little story you may have not heard of today. Apple announced that the App Store Small Business Program starting January 1st, 2021, will let developers who earn less than $1 million in annual sales over a year apply for reduced commission rate where Apple will only take 15% instead of the 30% of sales that it has up until now. Once you reach $1 million per year, your rate goes up to 30% from then onwards. Even if you don't make a lot of money the next year, you're still paying 30 at that point. Sensor Tower estimates that 98% of developers will qualify for the reduced rate. Those developers, though, make up 5% of total Apple Store revenue. More details about applications and processes will be released in December. Yeah, so Epic and Spotify, as you might have guessed, have already protested against this because they won't benefit from it. They think it's Apple trying to divide developers against their cause by giving the developers that make less money a better rate. And it is odd. Usually what happens is when your bigger customers get big, you give them a discount because they can handle more stuff. The benefit of paying for the App Store is less because they can do more on their own. Apple's turning that on its head possibly because they don't let you do your own stuff. They don't let you run your own payments to say, like, we'll make it easier to get in the door. And then when you start making more, then we'll take a bigger cut. Most people seem to be positive about this, though. Yeah, Tom, I mean, I think you're exactly right. Overall, for the smaller developer, they've got to feel good about this. They are getting a discounted rate and they're thinking, wouldn't making over a million dollars in revenue in the App Store be a great problem to have? Like, I want that problem. And at that point, let me be disgruntled about having to pay twice as much in commission to Apple. But at the same time, you know, and Sensor Tower, as you guys read, says 98% of developers are going to qualify for this. I think it might even be 99.9%. I mean, how many apps are there that are making over a million dollars? None of the app developers that I know make anywhere near that. They're usually, the app developers are thrilled if they can do that app full-time. Like, that's how big of a gap there is between the average iOS developer who's saying, I hope I can pay my rent this month working just on my app compared to companies that are like, well, we'll pay 30%, I guess. We're 1.5 million now, no big. Like, there's a huge, huge gap in between those. And this is just, it's fascinating to me because just like you said, Tom, you know, I'm very familiar in the work that I do. Often we're dealing with bandwidth costs, right? And generally speaking, the more bandwidth you use, the better your rate. So this is flipped exactly the way that you said, but it's just like you said, helping the small, I guess that ostensibly Apple is trying to help small businesses attain that higher level. So that remains to be seen if this will work that way, but good for the indie developer, I think. It's also Apple saying, listen, a vast majority of our developers will benefit from this, but we don't really lose out on much because you're not making us any money anyway, you know? It's just those 5% of the big guys, we're not gonna change your rules. But if anybody's looking into, you know, Apple in some sort of unfair competition way as far as the app store goes, the company can now say, I mean, look at, you know, how much we've reduced rates for the huge majority of people who are in our ecosystem. We've just helped 98% of all of our developers. Yeah, I think they really should have trolled Epic because what Epic does with its Unreal Engine and they do this because they want to encourage adoption. Apple doesn't really have an adoption problem, but with Unreal Engine, they say, look, everybody can use it for free until you make a million dollars and then we start taking a percentage because you're making enough money off of it. Apple's just like, forget the 15%, just been like, it's now nothing. It's nothing until you make a million dollars. They would have lost 5% of their revenue and they would have gained lots of argument points against Epic. And a lot of people who want to make $900,000 a year. Yeah, and just keep it right there. It's only 5% of the app store revenue, not of Apple's revenue. Well, that's a great point, yeah. And the app store is not the big part of Apple's revenue either. I mean, it makes them some money, but so it's like it's 5% of a percent, you know? So I don't know offhand, I should know this about what the total percent of app store revenue is, but for Apple, this is a drop in the bucket. Yeah, absolutely. All right, Twitter product lead Kvan Bakepour has been answering people who are saying, why are you giving us fleets when you should be giving us an edit button or better ways to stop misinformation? And one person among the things they were asking asked for a dislike button to the platform and Bakepour responded, among other things that he said, the company is exploring adding a dislike button to its platform. He says the priority now is minimizing the spread of inauthentic behavior, better harassment reporting tools and cracking down on misinformation. But yeah, he did say we're exploring that. Twitter previously let users report tweets that they didn't like, but other users didn't see a tally of that number. It wasn't like you had a thumbs down with a number by it. Yeah, the only real comparison I can make is YouTube videos, you know? There'll be a video that's, you know, 3,000 thumbs up and like a, you know, 1,000 thumbs down. It's usually many more likes than down, depending on the video. But this is something that I know Facebook went explored at some point years ago and kind of went like too negative, right? For a social network, we're just gonna be encouraging people to be angry, you know, when they should be, you know, leaving hearts on people's messages. But I do like the idea of a dislike button somehow factoring into Twitter, trying to go after the much bigger problem of harassment and misinformation and bots and all of that. If they can figure out how to sort of crowd source some of these answers, along with the algorithms, of course, that might not be a bad thing. I totally agree. And, you know, I'm gonna give Twitter this idea. They can have this. They can run with it. But in the past, when you could report tweets that you didn't like, there wouldn't, you know, the idea of showing like you had mentioned on YouTube how you can see likes and dislikes, you see a number. If there was a way to obscure the number and almost show like a mood emoji of like, people seem to like this, people seem to not like this, that's almost better because, and maybe even if it was, if they're show, again, Twitter can have this, that I'm not gonna charge them for it. But they could compare how many people are liking something versus how many people are disliking it to kind of show the overall quality of the tweet. That's a very compelling to me because if there's a tweet that has, that is harassing or has disinformation and a lot of more people dislike it than like it, then the tweet's kind of like a eh, you know, but if everyone's generally liking it, you know, it helps put that into perspective. Something like that really does make sense and it's so hard because there is a lot of negativity out there and it's very easy for people to be negative. This might give some kind of, you know, I guess incentive to be nicer. Yeah, yeah, I love that. Take away the like number too. Just give me the mood. Give me the mood. Yeah, 12 moods. They can have that. Twitter is a mood. It's a whole mood. It is a mood. Speaking of moods, I don't know if it's a good one or a bad one, but the Japanese town Takikawa, if you're not familiar, it's on the northern island of Hokkaido, has deployed two robots, two robots for now, that look like wolves and they're designed to scare away bears and they appear to be working. Now you might say bears, what? Yeah, after bears were found roaming neighborhoods back in September and in fact, there were some attacks on people. City officials decided to try out the monster wolf. It's a robot that has four legs, a shaggy body, a blonde mane, red glowing eyes. Really reminds me of the nothing from the never ending story. If you're as old as I am to know what I'm talking about. Yes. When it detects motion, moves its head, flashes lights, emits sounds ranging from wolfish howling and machinery noises, things bears don't like apparently. Otaseki, which makes the robots, has sold about 70 units since 2018. The real Japanese wolf, which was real but was haunted to extinction more than a century ago, is not around anymore but maybe the bears didn't get that memo. Or maybe they did and when they go into Hokkaido and they see these robots, they're like, oh my gosh, they're back. Right, it's like an instinctual genetic memory of the wolves and did you guys look at the picture of this robot wolf? Oh, it's terrifying. I mean, it's it's horrifying. It looks like a like a really high quality like Halloween automaton decoration type thing. And I mean, like you would think this is exactly what a bear would not want to see when it came into town. So I think this is great. Like, what do you tell the kids? You know, they're like, that's so scary, mom. It's just to keep the bears from eating you. Don't worry. I imagined it more of like a free roaming. It looks like it's a mounted on something. But I imagined it was like running around on its own. You know, that would have been even better. Yeah. And it doesn't really even have pause. It has like metal poles coming out. Right. Because it's kind of up elevated and it's just kind of, I think it's meant to move around from a distance. It does appear to be solar powered though. I mean, do you think that the bears will become desensitized to this over time, the way that like pigeons do at the like Tom at a Rudy's where they're, you know, they have like the fake owl. And after a while, they're like, let's roost on the owl. That's fine. A scarecrow covered in birds. I took a picture of a pigeon sitting on the little spikes that they put on top of stuff. Like it had just accommodated like, it's not that uncomfortable. It's like acupuncture. So yeah, I do wonder if that's where we end up, if they get used to it. And if so, is there a way to change it up? So because they are robotic, because they're, I don't know if there's so much robotic as animatronic from the looks out of it, but you could change their behavior a little bit. All right, folks, let's check out the mail bag. What do we got in there, Sarah? We got something from Pat who wrote in about our Amazon pharmacy story from yesterday. Pat says, if you're interested in more background in the future of pharmacy and the changes in the profession, I recommend grassrootsrph.com. Just filling prescriptions, no longer the main focus. I don't really see a tech angle to this, but I thought I would pass it along. The young man running that site is the Pharmacy Advancement Fellow at the Ohio State University, and he's my son. That's cool. Yeah, I haven't had a chance to look around at the site yet, but I liked that a member of our audience is like, oh, by the way, more information, and it's my boy. So that's cool. Thank you, Pat, for sending that along. Thanks, Pat, and thanks to everybody who sends us questions, comments, cool stories like Pat's. If you have one of your own, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Want to shout out patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Steve, Aya Darula, Chris Allen, and Mike Aikens. Also, big, big thanks to Dan Benjamin for being with us today. Dan, we know you're a very busy person, so where can people keep up with all your work? Oh, thanks. And by the way, thanks for having me. I love being here. Anytime you need me. You know, I'm at Dan Benjamin on Twitter. 5by5.tv is where all my podcasts live. And fireside.fm, if you want to host your own podcast, that's a big part of what I do these days. So thanks, guys. That's really cool that you're like creating a platform. I love that. Fireside.fm, people go check that out. Thank you. And folks, if you would like a DTNS hat, hoodie, mask, or mouse pad, we have them. They are just sitting at, well, they're not sitting at my house. They're sitting at our distributor's place. Ready to go to your house. You can find all that and more at our DTNS store, dailytechnewshow.com, slash store. 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