 Coming up on DTNS, NVIDIA wants to use their AI talents to make video conferencing better, why you should never, ever save a file as .xls, especially if you're the UK's health care provider, and Mark Johnson tells us how technology makes it possible for musicians all over the globe to collaborate on the same performance. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, October 5th, 2020, in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. Joining us is Mark Johnson, Grammy Award-winning music producer and engineer and co-founder of Playing for Change. Mark, thank you for joining us, our first guest on Creator's Week. Wow, it's an honor to be here, guys. Thanks for having me. We've been having so much fun talking to Mark about his travels and the different musical instruments he collects and just the sort of the meaning of music in the modern world. You can get more of that conversation on a good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Venmo began offering its Venmo credit card to select customers. The Visa card breaks out spending into eight categories, grocery, bills and utilities, health and beauty, gas, entertainment, dining and nightlife, transportation and travel. Users can see spending broken out in the Venmo app and receive 3% cashback on their top spend category, 2% on their second and 1% on their third. The card includes RFID for tap to pay and includes the user's Venmo QR code on the front. Instagram rolled out in-app shopping tools to its IGTV feature. This lets users tag specific products in their videos, which you can then click on and purchase from within the app. Instagram also plans to test out in-app shopping in its Reels feature later this year. The China Africa project reports the United States Development Finance Corporation has invested $25 million into a company to help develop a Brazilian nickel and cobalt mine used in battery materials as well as military and aerospace uses. BNEF notes that China has more cobalt refining capacity than the rest of the world, combined at 118,000 tons. Finland is a distant second with 15,000. Transport for London opted not to renew the ride-hailing license for the Indian ride-hailing company OLA, citing a failure to meet public safety requirements specifically around licensing for drivers and vehicles. TFL reportedly found failures in OLA's system that allowed for the use of unlicensed drivers and vehicles in more than 1,000 passenger trips. OLA said it will appeal the decision, just like Uber did, and can continue operating in the city until that appeal is heard. Microsoft rebranded its Bing search engine to Microsoft Bing. The rebrand updates the Bing logo to be more in line with the company's other cloud services. A new global survey looking at shifts in spending habits as a result of COVID-19 from Standard Chartered found that more than 64 percent of respondents were more positive about online payments compared to the prior to the pandemic. Overall, Kenya saw the biggest shift in shopping preferences with a 30-point swing, now showing 51 percent of respondents preferring online payments in Kenya. Overall, 60 percent of Kenyans predict that the country will go cashless at some point with an average projected year of 2033. Sources speaking to Politico say that Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Google's Sundar Prachai, and Twitter's Jack Dorsey have agreed to remotely testify before the Senate Commerce Committee on October 28th regarding Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Last week, the Senate Committee unanimously voted to send subpoenas to all three CEOs, but those have not been formally issued. The luggage maker, Samsonite, announced the Connect Eye Backpack, a backpack that includes Google's Jacquard touch-sensitive fabric. That's the one where you can swipe on your fabric and have actions happen on a device. Like other Jacquard products, this includes a small tag that includes a small LED light and vibration motors for notifications. The touch surface is included on the left strap of the pack and supports brush up, brush down, and double tap gestures, which can be tied to media controls, activating a voice assistant, and triggering directions in your nav app. Backpack comes in slim and standard sizes for $200 and $220, respectively. In August, app researcher Jane Manchin-Wong found evidence that Twitter was building tools to let moderators flag tweets for misinformation. Late last week, social media consultant Matt Navara noticed a new feature called Birdwatch on iOS, which allowed users to add tweets to a list of flag tweets, add either public or private information on why they flag them, and use a Twitter community form to advise if a tweet is true or not. Twitter product lead Kavon Bikpur confirmed the feature, saying that the company will share more about its plans with Birdwatch soon. All right, let's talk a little more about four big announcements from an NVIDIA event that are getting attention today. NVIDIA announced two new Ampere cards, the RTX A6000 and A40, and you may have noticed they're not called Quadro. They're dropping the Quadro name. The A6000 will ship in mid-December with the A40 coming early next year. NVIDIA also announced it's building the UK's fastest supercomputer for AI research and healthcare uses. The Cambridge One, as it will be called, will deliver 400 petaflops, putting it in the top 30 supercomputers worldwide. It will also be among the three most energy-efficient supercomputers. Cambridge One will come online by the end of the year for use by researchers at GSK, AstraZeneca, guys in St. Thomas NHS Foundation Trust, Kings College London, and Oxford Nanopore Technologies. It's the first part of NVIDIA's AI Center for Excellence that NVIDIA wants to create in Cambridge alongside ARM. On the more affordable side of things, NVIDIA announced the Jetson Nano 2GB single board computer for makers available for $59. It's essentially the same as the Jetson Nano, but with two gigs of RAM instead of four, allowing for the cheaper price of $59 instead of $99. So if you're into a single board computer to mess around with and make stuff with, here you go. It does have a few reports, so you want to check that before you pick it for your project. And NVIDIA announced Maxine, a suite of software tools for video for video call app developers. Maxine can upscale resolution, remove background noise, center you in the frame, reorient your face so it looks like you're looking at someone else in a call, and even simulate eye contact. So you're looking down at the person you're looking at, but they think you're looking at them. It could also do things like replace your face with an avatar if you want, add virtual backgrounds, that sort of thing. Maxine can do real-time captioning, can do note taking for you, and even some translation. Those three features come through the Jarvis SDK. Bandwidth compression can reduce video size by 90% by analyzing the facial points of each person on a call, then algorithmically reanimating the face in video on the other side. So it's able to basically compress you down to a few facial points and then reconstruct you on the other end to save a lot of bandwidth, which in low bandwidth situations is pretty important. Maxine runs in the cloud and developers and service providers can apply for early access to Maxine starting next week. Of all these announcements, I mean, the Maxine one really struck me. NVIDIA has a, you know, sort of explain us where a video that shows you, okay, here's what we're doing, and here's how great it looks, and here's how much bandwidth is saved. It is impressive. I mean, it is like, wow, you know, at first I was like, what? They're gonna make me, when I'm looking to the left or looking to the right, seem like I'm looking at you. That's important, I guess. And I've seen a lot of people online, you know, while it was on Twitter, but, you know, kind of going like, ah, this is, here we go. You know, now, now you never know what's real on video conferences. And that's the only way that we all, you know, are having conferences these days. And it's going to make in-person stuff weirder than ever because we're all going to get used to these kind of Instagram filtering versions of life. None of this stuff scares me. It sounds like it's saving bandwidth, especially, yeah, when you're like, you know, Mark, if you're in a part of the world where you're like, I mean, I'll try to get on video right now, but you know, I will see. This is, this is like greatly improving the situation for a lot of folks. Yeah, you said you do some of your stuff over Zoom. Do you hear any of these features we were naming out and think that that's a feature I wish I had right now in a video conference? Well, I think just bringing accessibility to everybody so that people can have more of an opportunity all over the world to use Zoom and have a good connection. You know, that to me is the most important thing, just trying to get it everywhere. Yeah, I think a lot of the fears here come with what it could do, not what it does. So it comes down to whether you trust Nvidia to create an algorithm that is just going to reposition, it's going to change eye contact, it's going to make stuff easier to use in that respect and also when it compresses down to save bandwidth and then reanimates on the other end that it's fairly faithful to what's really going on. If that's the case, I don't have any problem with this. I think people jump to the conclusion that it's either not going to work well or it's going to be manipulated and that's unfortunate that that's where we're at. Yeah, it does seem, from what we've seen anyway, it's a pretty cool way to replicate what would have been a nice clear video in the first place and for whatever reason might just not be able to be delivered that way. And yeah, the whole thing about like, oh, if I'm actually talking to you looking this way, I guess it's slightly awkward for eye contact because we're humans and for it to be able to reanimate me just slightly so everybody feels a little bit better. That's again, like it doesn't seem scary to me. I wonder what the scare is. It reminds me of an Alistair Reynolds sci-fi book where he had this technology where they could do somewhat faster than light by predicting what you were going to say based on what you were saying. It's one step away from that kind of thing. Well, moving on, Google announced it will delay enforcement of requiring apps in the Google Play Store to use Play Billing in India until April of 2022. Last week, Google announced that all apps would have until September 30th, 2021 to use Play Billing for an app transactions rather, which gives Google a 30% cut. 30%, that's what we're all doing. This comes after the economic times of India reported that over 50 Indian technology entrepreneurs petition the government to create an Indian digital app ecosystem. Google says the delay is not a change in its long-term business model rather designed so that businesses are not unduly stressed by its new policy. Yeah, my interpretation of this is Google has enough fights right now with antitrust in various parts of the world. It doesn't need another one in India, which is a very important market for it. It's a market with a lot of potential for growth. A lot of very up and coming and important startups are happening there and they want to keep them happy. They want to keep them on the Android platform. I also, part of me wondered if maybe Google, which remember they've said recently, they want to make it easier for third-party app stores to be created on Android if they are wanting to have this extra time to talk to those entrepreneurs and say, what if we helped you make that Indian app store within our framework so that you can have it, it's independent, it's yours, but it works within this new framework that we want to make for independent app stores. If they did that it makes India happy, it makes the entrepreneurs happy and it certainly doesn't hurt their antitrust case, right? Yeah, that's a really good point and maybe that is what's going on because at first I was like, well, they had 11 months. Google was like, you have to fix all your apps by Christmas, that sort of thing. You've got some time. There's an additional seven months that have been tacked on. If Google does want to reach out to developers, make sure that developers are happy, get a little bit more sense of what restrictions they might feel and make sure that they don't leave the platform, which is, there's not a huge cause for concerns because it's Android, but still in that market alone, it does make sense that it's not just like Google saying, all right, fine, you get a little bit more time. There's probably more going on. Yeah, yeah. Over the weekend, PHE Public Health England advised that it under-reported COVID-19 infections by 15,841 cases between September 25th and October 2nd. Normally, that wouldn't be a DTMS story, except for the reason why. The BBC reports that Public Health England used an automated process to combine logs from multiple commercial providers of swab test analysis. So far, so good. You've got a lot of different people doing tests. They're all sending their logs into PHE and PHE needs an automated process to take all those reports and combine them. That's not controversial. The process took the data submitted as CSVs, comma-separated spreadsheets, and combined it into an Excel spreadsheet. So far, that's also not controversial. Like, yes, you might take it, put it in a table, you have an Excel macro to look at it. Maybe you might want something a little more enterprising than Excel, but it should work until they decided to export the combined merged file as an XLS. Get to that in a second why that's important. It was automatically then uploaded to a central system where it could be accessed by NHS Test and Trace and other computer dashboards to report on aggregate test statistics. The problem was XLS is an outdated Excel format. It can only handle 65,000 rows of data, which in practice ended up limiting these files to about 1400 cases because each case had multiple rows. If the Excel file had been saved as XLSX, which is the new file format that was introduced 13 years ago in 2007, this would not have been a problem. Or I don't know, they could have saved it as a more standard compliant cross-platform file format instead of an Excel format. PHE says test subjects receive their results normally, so it didn't stop anyone from knowing whether they were positive or negative. However, the cutoff data, the 1400 case maximum in the XLS file meant that contact tracers were not able to view all the positive results and alert other people to get tested. Again, this only happened over the course of the week before they caught it and fixed it. They're able to go back and recover the data, but not good, right? Yeah, I mean this would, if this was not about COVID-19, I would chuckle out the stride and be like, oh, XLS, get you again. But this is really significant. The amount of cases, especially when you're trying to figure out, are you in danger? Have you been near anybody? 15,000 plus cases, those matter. And for them to have been kind of just lost in translation is unfortunate. I get why it happened, but yeah, bad news. Mark, I don't know if you've had frustrating spreadsheet experiences in the past or not. I think we all have, so I could sort of empathize. I just wish it didn't happen in this context. Yeah, I know I'm with you guys. It's just a serious subject matter, so we want to get it right. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, please subscribe to DailyTechHeadlines.com. All right, let's talk about playing for change. Mark, first of all, just tell us what it is. Playing for change. Playing for change is a movement of people all over the world who use the power of music to bring us together. The idea of the project is that the things in life that divide us disappears when the music plays. And so we travel around the world with a mobile recording studio and cameras, recording film musicians all live outside in their own native environments. We then add musicians to the same song. I think it started with Stand By Me. So we have a guitar player here in Los Angeles plays the song Stand By Me on the Third Street Promenade. I then take the recording equipment and cameras. We go to a Zulu choir in a township in South Africa, put headphones on them. They all sing on the song. Then we go to Nepal to a sitar master, put headphones on him and he plays along all of the musicians playing on the same song around the world. Throughout this process, we also created the Playing for Change Foundation, which is a separate 501C3 building and supporting music and art schools around the world. All the schools are free and run by their communities. And then we created the Playing for Change band, which is a group of 10 musicians from 10 countries who tour the world. And they go to homeless shelters and children's hospitals and remind people music is much more than entertainment. But also the project is about showing people that all the things that we think of as making us different in music as in life, they make us stronger. And this is a chance for everybody to see the world through that lens, through joy, through connection, as opposed to all the negativity and the division we see on the media. So when you and your team decided, all right, let's do this. Did people look at you like, this is crazy? How did you get the ball rolling and get the whole thing started? Yeah, as a matter of fact, the first musician said those exact words to me. It was Roger Ridley. He was a street musician singing here on the third street promenade in Los Angeles. And I remember walking by him. I was a recording engineer at the time for Jackson Brown. And I was going to work in the studio. And I heard this guy on the street and I ran to watch him. And I remember saying to him, man, you sound like Otis Redding. What are you doing sitting singing on the street? And he said, man, I'm in the joy business. I come out to bring joy to the people. And I remember asking him, well, hey, would you consider playing stand by me and I'll take it around the world, put headphones, add people. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And he said, man, you're crazy. But if you come back here and record me, I'll play it. And that's where it all started with an amazing musician, an incredible song, and sort of a crazy idea of, listen, I'm tired of seeing everybody get divided. When I go to work and I record musicians, no matter who they are, it's their favorite moment in life. And I can see the joy in everybody. So if they can see what I can see, it would be a lot easier for people to get along. That's sort of where this whole thing came from. I know a lot of folks in our audience are really interested already. They're like, okay, I want to capture the joy. But how do you do it? What equipment do you use? What do you use to record, to mix, to make sure that that you've got a really high quality capturing of all of this? Yeah. And actually the original thing that sparked the project was I was a recording engineer in New York City. And I was on my way to work one day. There were these two monks painted in white with robes on. One was playing a guitar. The other one was singing. I don't know the language. And nobody gets on the train. Everybody is watching this performance. And I look around and I see an elderly woman and a little girl and a homeless man and a businessman and everybody watching so connected. And it occurred to me, man, the best music I heard in my life is on the way to the studio, not in the studio. So there, I realized that great music and art, they're everywhere. So I want to bring the studio to those people to get those moments. So I built a mobile recording studio with the exact same equipment I would use with Paul Simon in the studio, but powered it originally with golf cart batteries and had a really cool mobile recording studio, then golf cart batteries and then eventually little battery packs, lithium ion packs and take it all over the world. So yeah, so it's a mobile recording studio. And then the cameras have evolved over time. Now we shoot with black magic pocket pro cameras. But it used to be the big cameras and everything was on tape. And thank God for technology. So how many folks when playing for change is like, all right, we're going on the road. We're going to get some performances. How many of there are you? Generally, it's about four or five people that travel, you know, because we produce the music, record the music, direct the video, shoot the video. And then, you know, the whole concept is based on a good friend of mine named Kepp Moe, a great blues musician. He once said to me, you know, sound is a feeling first. So if it feels good, it'll always sound good. So it's so important to make people feel good. We don't just show up with strangers and be like, play on my song. First, it's about understanding who they are, what's their identity, what role does music play in their life, and then finding a way to work together, making each other feel good. Then they perform really well, and it sounds really good. And you really capture magic that way. So it's a small crew. When you when you get to a location with this crew, even if everybody knows where you're going and what you're doing and why you're there, what are what are some of the things you run into because you're you're not in a studio? Like, how do you figure out like, what's the best place to set up? What's the best situation for all of this? Right? I mean, there's all the normal obstacles, like wind and rain, parking police and honking cars, airplanes going over all that. But you know, I use the same microphones for the last 20 years. They're called Shep's microphones. And they just really don't pick up anything else. I can record in a windstorm. And when I get home, there's no wind. So it's really amazing. You know, and we usually find a, you know, go scout for locations and just try to find something that the musician is comfortable with and would give the viewer kind of a window into life in that place. So the musicians, I assume they they know why you're coming. You've talked, you've gotten a sense of who they are. They know the song that they're going to play. They've got some time to practice. But how does it actually work once you're there? What are they listening to? So everybody's, you know, the cadence is right and everything is smooth. Everybody's listening to what whoever had played before them. So if I'm making a song and I'm halfway through, you've heard everybody who's played up until that point, and I'm bringing pro tools and a laptop so I can make a mix for each musician. And you know, and I wish that everybody knew in advance what we were doing and all of those things, but the truth is a lot of times we just show up and we find a local musician or we go to a local music club and find musicians that way, hire one to be a guide for us, introduce us to their friends. And it's really organic that way. You know, one person tells another person and it just spreads. Do you ever wish you had changed the order at some point where you're like, Oh, I wish the person who recorded earlier was able to hear this part. Do you ever go back and redo it? Anything like that? No, I mean, you know, each a lot of times it's to a click and pro tool so I can have somebody maybe start the song and they end up finishing the song instead later. So I mean, I definitely move things around. But for the most part, I try to start each track with the heartbeat of the song and then build from that heartbeat. So, you know, it could just be various things for various songs. But for standby me, it was just a man and his guitar with that incredible voice. And then I was able to take his guitar, you know, his voice out in other sections and bring in different singers. His guitar became the through line. Everybody played to him and his guitar. And then we would build it and add drums and add strings and horns and all kinds of stuff. With some of the situations with travel being so limited, because we're in a global pandemic right now, how has that changed how the team was forward? You know, maybe you can't be there all the time, but there are a lot of things you can do remotely. Right. I mean, it changed literally everything because I would have been in 10 countries by now, at least if this had been a normal year, but instead we've been able to activate local crews, recording production crews, filmmakers, recording engineers, music producers and musicians, and bring them all in and finding these incredible cameras and incredible talent all over the world that we're getting to tap into. So right now we have over 40 productions happening in over 15 countries around the world, creating content for playing for change. And, you know, it's amazing if different languages, different styles of capturing and creating art, all merging together digitally with Zooms and Dropbox and Pro Tools and Premiere and people really, you know, finding the tools. That's what's so amazing. You know, this had happened a while back. We wouldn't have had this opportunity to stay so connected, but we're as connected now as I've ever been, and I haven't even left my house. You mentioned Shep's. Is that spelled S-C-H-O-P-E-S? That's the mic? I think it's O-E-P-P or something like that. O-E-P-P. Okay. I just wanted to, because I know there's somebody out there writing that down. I wanted to. Yeah, the Shep's CMC-5 is the greatest mic ever for recording outside. Yeah. But no, it's been amazing. And I've had to go through all the growing pains of figuring out what works and what doesn't. But now we've got it down, and it's really just about, you know, tapping into the style of music in each place and giving it the best chance to succeed based on the songs you're choosing. I would highly recommend people go check this out. I was telling Mark earlier that I was watching the Love Train video they did in partnership a few years ago, and it just brought tears of joy to my eyes, seeing all those people playing together. I would like to play a little bit of on the show, but I'm always worried about bots coming in and doing takedowns on videos and muting things. How do you deal with that? When you're doing well-known songs like Love Train, like Listen to the Music, how do you handle the licensing aspect of that? Yeah. I mean, so much of that is about relationships. You know, so when we finished Stand By Me, we met Lieber and Stolar and Benny King, and they wrote the song. And then we did One Love by Bob Marley, and we met the Marley family and built a relationship with people. We had done Give Me Shelter by the Rolling Stones. And then we met Keith Richards, and he said, man, pick any song of mine. I want to play with these people. So those relationships have helped us a lot. And then the platform of YouTube has been incredible. Our YouTube channel last month went past 1 billion views. And about 10 years ago, I think it was my mom and my dad and my brother and I had seen it. So that's the power of technology. It's like almost 200 countries, 1 billion views of content of people coming together around the world. So I think that's an amazing thing. It's not just like they got to see some funny video. They got to see something important that could inspire them and give them hope. And when we're all here in our own homes, we need that, especially now to realize that we're all connected and we're all better together. You know, and that's what I think playing for change and music, you know, are able to do. I mean, you think about someone like Keith Richards being like, I'd like to be a part of this. I'd like to meet some of these cool folks that you know. It just goes to show you that you can be one of the best musicians in the entire world and still want to connect with people and need a little help doing so. Right. And the fun thing about what we do is it's different. So we record Keith Richards on an island. Then we go to Aztec Indians, put headphones on them, and they play the drums. Then we go, you know, so it's all of these different combinations that never get put together. So suddenly, you know, Keith is just blending in with the world. It's not about him. It's about how he made it better. And I think that's what's cool too. It's kind of music without an ego. I think that was one of the most impressive things watching these videos is how even the musicianship is when you're going from somebody like Kevmo or a Keith Richards that I recognize to some kids somewhere in Kenya who are just killer, like they're so good. Yeah. And that's one of my favorite things. It can reinvent what we consider great. It can reinvent what we consider success, you know? I mean, if you're a great musician and you inspire somebody, now you have an opportunity with technology to reach a wider audience. It's not about how famous you are. You know, it's about how much you can connect your life experience with another person and lift them up. And we're lucky we have a world full of talented people. Before we wrap up here, I want you to tell folks about the UN event that you've got coming up in November. Yes. Playing for Change has partnered with the United Nations for their 75th anniversary. Late November, early December, we're going to be having an online global music event to stand up for social justice and human rights. It involves some of the greatest musicians all over the world that you have heard of and have not heard of, as we've been talking about today. So if you just visit playingforchange.com, we'll be putting up more and more information as we get closer and doing more announcements. Excellent stuff, Mark. Well, if you're interested in playing for Change or anything else we talked about on the show today, you can join the conversation in our Discord and join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com.dts. Before we all get out of here, let's check out the mail bag. Oh, let's do it. Carol wrote in about our conversation last week on the EU banning pre-installed apps on devices. Carol says, my thoughts kept going to my mom, who doesn't really know English. She's not tech savvy. When she needs a new phone, she always goes for the best devices from Apple or Samsung for the prestige, but she doesn't even really understand the concept of an app store, let alone how to install a new app by herself. No matter how many times I've tried to teach her, it might be the language barrier. She'll always use the pre-installed apps for her messaging and other basic needs and have someone else like a family member install things like Facebook. If phones were to contain no pre-installed apps at all, I would pity anybody who had to help her set up a new phone. A way to batch install some chosen apps during setup would be absolutely necessary. Carol says, I would personally love not having to bother removing or disabling pre-installed apps on my phone, but I understand that this ban would be more of a disadvantage to people like my mom. I hope this gives a slightly different perspective on everything. It really does. Thank you, Carol. And hopefully when they implement this, if they do implement this, they come up with an easy way for people to say, just give me the defaults if that's what they want, if they don't want to go through and choose stuff. But yeah, you've got to have a phone app on a phone to be able to use it. Good stuff. Team Carol's mom. Also, shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels, including Andrew Bradley, Dustin Campbell, and Brad with 2Ds. Also, very, very special thanks to Mark Johnson for being with us today. Mark, your story is inspiring. Such a cool message. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything playing for change is doing. Right now. Well, thank you again. You guys are amazing and thanks for having me. And anyone who wants to check out more can visit playingforchange.com. Folks, don't forget, we are providing you with some free posters and stickers and stuff. If you support us on Patreon for just a couple months, three months in a row at the same level, get your stuff. We've got a couple posters and a couple stickers going out this month. So sign on up, patreon.com, slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com, and we love your feedback, so you keep it coming. We're also live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live Creator week rolls on with Shana Moon talking about narrative game design. Patrick Bejo will be here too. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Climbing Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.