 Do you want a holiday card from DTNS? Become a patron and give us your address by November 15th. We'll send you a special DTNS holiday card and if you're a patron already just check to make sure we have your address if you want to get the card at patreon.com slash pledges again if you want holiday card become a patron now daily tech news show dot com slash patreon by November 15th. Coming up on DTNS Tim Stevens helps us understand what effect the supply chain will have on your ability to get an EV plus a retail mega company creates its own crypto coin and Meta's hot open source touch for tech by robots. This is Daily Tech News for Monday November 1st 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt in lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Trafalino. I'm the show's producer Roger Chang and joining us editor-in-chief of Rhodes show Tim Stevens. Welcome back Tim. Hey thanks for having me Tom. It's great to be here. Thanks. It's good to have you here. We are definitely coming off of a longer show Good Day Internet. If you want that longer show where we talk about the effect of the supply chain on the increasing value of my used car you got to subscribe patreon.com slash DTNS. Yeah we want to thank our top patrons like Dan Boyle's Logan Larson and Turning Bones. You can join them. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Pinterest will launch a shoppable live series called Pinterest TV on November 8th. Each episode will feature a high profile creator from the platform and air Monday through Friday at 6 p.m. Eastern time on iOS and Android. Live episodes will feature an interactive chat and Friday shows will offer a shopping experience for exclusive products from different brands. Fortnite will end game service in China on November 15th that the same day we need your address to send you a holiday card. Players will no longer be able to make new accounts. The game launched in April 2018 during season five in China. They did not give a specific reason for the shutdown. A lot of people assume it has to do with China restricting the amount of hours children can play games in that country. Dell Technologies completed its spin off of its 81 percent stake in VMware into an independent company. Dell originally announced plans for the spin off back in April. The spin off will help Dell pay down debt it took on to acquire EMC in 2016 and then go public again in 2018. A pilot program in the Netherlands will see Tesla open up its supercharger network to non-tesla vehicles for the first time. The pilot operates at 10 supercharger stations and users need to download the Tesla app and create an account there. EVs must use a CCS standard connection and will incur additional fees including those associated with charging a large number of different cars and made to make the location suitable for cars from other brands. And Apple announced the Beats Fit Pro wireless earbuds with an IPX4 rating and adding a fitwing for better stability in your ear. Inside is Apple's H1 chip with hands-free Siri access, find my network support, adaptive EQ, spatial audio with head tracking and active noise cancelling. Battery life is rated at 6 hours with ANC on plus 21 hours from the charging case. Pre-order is open now for $200 shipping November 5th. All right let's a little talk a little more about super apps. The Verges Alex Heath has a column up called Rise of the Super App. You may have heard us talk about super apps before on DTNS. They're essentially apps that let you do a lot of things like way well beyond messaging from one app. Very common outside the US and Europe. The biggest example is WeChat in China. WeChat is a messaging service but it also has about 3 million. I'm not making this up. About 3 million mini apps that let you do things like banking, shopping, buying tickets, pretty much everything. You can pay with your WeChat app. Basically if you have WeChat you can do almost everything in China. WeChat reported $240 billion in commerce done through its mini apps last year. That's double the year before so it's only getting stronger. And Heath predicts that Facebook, Snap, and TikTok are hoping to become that super app for other parts of the world. Facebook has been adding more shopping features. A key to diversifying revenue from being entirely based on ads. Back in June Instagram head Adam Osseri said their app would focus on creators, video, shopping and messaging. They didn't mention photo sharing. WhatsApp has a directory in South America to find local businesses and is testing banking products like loans in India. And TikTok has added in-app shopping and a platform for developers to build app experiences in the main video feed. But Heath notes that Snapchat is the farthest along of this group. It's had mini apps for years that let people play games by movie tickets and more. He notes or he quotes Nicole Quinn, an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners, that app makers are focused not just on downloads but becoming a home screen app. You don't just want people to use your app, you want people to put it on the home screen and use it a lot. Part of that's driven by the increasing difficulty in tracking people. If you can't gather information from people as they move around the internet, then companies are motivated to keep you in their app on their platform where they can first party track you without having to share that info with third parties. Apple is also being pressured to loosen up its app store rules, which have prohibited letting apps have their own app stores. And of course, they take a 30% cut of any digital purchase. WeChat works on iOS, but the way it does it is it has users search for mini apps or scan QR codes in real life to add those apps, but it cannot have its own mini app store on iOS, even though it would absolutely love to. Tim, I'm curious if you've had any experience with these kind of mini apps or these super apps or anything like that. Yeah, you can definitely see Facebook trying to kind of evolve in that direction. I've definitely been curiously following this as we've seen it develop on WeChat, as you mentioned, and elsewhere. It's a pretty logical thing for an app to want to do. If you have a massive user base and you're trying to monetize them in every way possible, then it makes sense to kind of throw everything at them that you can. And as you mentioned, the ability to track users within your app is a hop from one thing to the next and one retail experience to any other kind of commerce related experience. That is incredibly valuable. The more information that you can give to an advertiser to show what someone is looking at, even if it's showing a directional from they were looking at smart locks, and then they were also looking at front smart door mats or something like that. Being able to show that direction is something that advertisers will kill for. So not literally, but definitely that's the kind of thing that they want to be able to show. And as you mentioned, again, with that getting harder and harder to do as you have more restrictions on iOS in particular and in browsers when it comes to tracking cookies and that kind of thing, beyond the first party is incredibly valuable. So that's really what it comes down to. I don't think it really matters the experiences that they're developing, but just their ability to track you as you move from one to the next. I'm sorry, Rich, real quick. Keep in mind that WeChat really isn't interested in advertising. They make their money just off of the stuff that the many apps are doing. Go ahead, Rich. Well, and going back to Facebook, the idea that we've seen from a lot of the Facebook files that have been coming out is the company is prioritizing engagement even over direct ads and stuff like that. So that would kind of fit in when you're trying to just keep people in your ecosystem. Now, that's obviously been so secret that that's Facebook strategy, I guess, for a while, but specifically prioritizing engagement, even when it doesn't necessarily lead to more ads being seen because that's more valued by the company long term, it definitely kind of goes along with that. It also does remind me though that when Facebook was more desktop focused, I'm thinking like mid to late 2000s, we almost saw it trying to do this with at least a lot of games experiences integrated into their extremely popular with a lot of different integrations. And that was kind of stripped away obviously when they went a mobile first, kind of in the 2010s or early 2010s somewhere around there. So almost kind of a return to form. The other big thing to keep in mind though is that as popular as WeChat is in China, big tech crackdown in China is not, we're not breaking any news there. They're taking key steps to not necessarily break up these, but definitely tear down a lot of the walls that keep people in these walls, but requiring cross compatibility with different links for different services among the big tech platforms there. So with that kind of as the backdrop, obviously China is doing that for their own reasons that might not necessarily apply to other markets. But maybe if we're seeing the rise of these in the US, we do in the near term might see the decrease in importance of those where they've previously been kind of king. It would almost be a situation where you would see companies getting to the super app too late where the conditions on the ground where they yeah, you can get confused by the fact that Rich is talking about China, but forget that it's China. Every company is trying to break down the walls and the silos of big tech companies. And the super app sort of requires you to have a silo for to really work at scale the way the way WeChat does. All right, our next story here. Central Retail Corporation is Thailand's biggest shopping center developer. It owns Danish retailer Ilum, the Vietnamese hypermarket chain Big C and department store La Rincente in Italy. Tech in Asia reports it's testing a digital currency called C coin for use in its shopping centers. The test is starting with Central Retail's 80,000 owned employees around the world. C coin being used to pay in restaurants by products from partners, those kind of things. The company will test its performance among employees before making it available to the public. This kind of struck me as a little weird. Now, these coins will be on top of regular compensation. They're not replacing your payment and requiring you to use C coin, but to me it almost feels like a factory town in an old mining town where you got the factory dollars to go spend at the store. I'm curious about the utility of a cryptocurrency if it isn't available widely, just kind of this. I realize they're saying they're just doing this for testing. If I was an employee, I don't know, Tim, what's kind of your take on this? Yeah, I'm curious to see where this goes to. I don't think we quite have enough information to know what the intent is for this. Yeah, like you said, it seems to be a pretty limited application thing, almost like loading up your your pass at Disneyland with some kind of playing money and then only being able to spend that within Disney World less than like an Ethereum competitor or something like that. I don't really see this as kind of a boomer-bust cryptocurrency that people are going to be trading and making memes about on Twitter. I think this will be something that'll be more utility focused, at least that's what it sounds like to me, but I think it's a little too early to tell right now. I think it's definitely a good solution for companies like this that want to kind of keep things in the loop and maybe they can reduce their processing, the card processing fees and things like that too. There's probably really the intent here, but yeah, I do worry about the rise of kind of this new era of factory towns and keeping everything in the loop and trying to keep your employees as well as your customers all spending their money in one place. That's a little bit disconcerting to me. I mean, the good news is this is a bonus for the employees. They're not getting paid in script. This is on top of their regular pay. They are using the employees as the test bed, so I don't think it's as bad as a company store. It certainly has huge benefits for retail, like you said, Tim, to reduce transaction fees. If you're a shopping center owner to offer to your tenants the ability to reduce transaction fees and point of sales fees could be huge, whether C-coin is the thing that catches on or not, that's a huge question. Everybody wants to be the cryptocurrency that catches on. This almost kind of is analogous to Visa opening up cryptocurrency to be used by banks for kind of like you could use your travel rewards or redeem them in crypto and stuff like that. That almost seems like this could be that way as like, oh, instead of getting you a $20 gift card to Chili's for a monthly little employee bonus kind of thing, we're going to give you a thousand C-coin and you can go to the food court and go to town. I could see it kind of along those same kind of veins. Meta's Facebook AI research or FAIR announced an open sourced suite of tactile technologies to help researchers give robots a sense of touch. You always hear people talking about giving robots a sense of vision, but touch is less well developed. This includes Digit, which was announced back in 2020. Digit is a low-cost vision-based tactile sensor, uses RGB LEDs placed around a camera and it can interpret shadows and changes in color and then turn those into touch, kind of like having eyes in your fingers. It costs about $15 and is on sale from Gelsight if you don't want to build it your own, but again, these are all open source, so you can build them yourself. A newer tool called Tacto, T-A-C-T-O is a virtual environment to train machine learning algorithms without having to collect the amount of real world data you would have to do for training, which could take a long time. Tacto can generate hundreds of frames of realistic high resolution touch readings per second. Another tool called PyTouch, not PyTorch, PyTouch is a set of pre-trained touch sensing models to make building robot applications easier. This is similar to PyTorch, which is a library for vision-based functions. And finally, Reskin was developed in partnership with Carnegie Mellon. It's a low-cost, durable, touch-sensitive skin for robots. It uses micro-magnetic particles and a grid of magnetometers to detect changes in magnetic flux and interpret those as touch. It's very thin, just a couple of millimeters. When it wears out, you can just pull it off and paste on some new skin. 100 units cost about six bucks to make, and they last for up to 50,000 touches, so you shouldn't have to be de-skinning your reskinned robot very often. All of this is useful in making robots that can handle sensitive tasks, things like picking up cotton balls, maybe, or anything that requires greater dexterity. A sense of touch in the robot is a limiting factor in what it could do. Yeah, and it's pretty exciting to see this kind of coming together. I've been kind of a fan of virtual reality for, I don't know, since the early 90s anyway. And this is all stuff that was talked about back then, but then it just sort of kind of felt a radar for most companies. So as much as I'm not in love with Facebook's meta move, honestly, this stuff I think is pretty cool to see, getting some investment, especially with them talking upfront about how this is basically low-cost applications. One of the biggest restrictions in getting you in VR in the first place is how expensive it can be. The idea of trying to make this stuff not only work and be widely available, but also be relatively cheap or extremely cheap in this case, that to me is encouraging and also makes me feel a little bit better about the whole meta thing in general. And as cool as the hardware is, I mean, using basically light to give you better touch, that's super awesome. The software stuff is really what actually excites me because I feel like that's what's going to allow companies to really rapidly deploy this kind of stuff. We've seen Waymo having a lot of success with training machine learning or having that virtual environment to train machine learning and not needing that huge test bed. And then having those pre-trained modules plug and play so that you can have a bunch of these on GitHub or wherever, and you can just have these already preset usage models just already out there, you can hit the road running. Yeah, I mean, believe me, magnetic touch skin sounds awesome, but weird, boring software is what gets it into the world too. That to me is like, I'm on board. Hey, folks, if you got thoughts about what a robot should be using its touch sensitivities for, send them to us. We've got an email address, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We'd love to hear from you. All right, folks, EV growth is set to boom. Governments are pledging to be carbon neutral. Automakers planning on shifting to all electric models, all on various schedules. But we all know there's supply chain issues out there at the very basic level. Display controllers are keeping cars from being made. And there's all other manner of logistical processes that are that are causing problems for EVs as well as everything else. What does it mean if you're in the market for an EV? If you're like, yeah, I want to help. I also want to save on gas. Tim, what are the biggest issues in the supply chain for EV right now? Yeah, it's not really just one issue. It's a series of issues. And ultimately, there are just kind of major supply chain issues across the board. And most manufacturers rely on dozens or hundreds of individual suppliers to put different components in the car. And so we're seeing, as you mentioned, Ford F-150s that are 99% ready to go, but they have one chip missing. And so therefore, they're piling up in the parking lots outside of Ford factories, because they can't be shipped without those components. We're also seeing other things like the Toyota Sienna, for example, was supposed to have an integrated refrigerator. This year, Toyota said, well, we can't get the components for that. So we're simply not going to ship the refrigerator in that car, making it, unfortunately, a less competitive vehicle than it would be otherwise. It all kind of traces back to what's called just-in-time manufacturing, which is something that major manufacturers like Toyota and Ford have worked for decades to get perfect to the point where shipments of components will come off the truck and hit the assembly line and go right in a car, often within an hour. And that's been home to a state of perfection. But as soon as you throw in any kind of kink into that process, suddenly the whole thing falls apart. And we're at a point right now where it's going to take years before we're able to really improve that. So if you're looking for an EV right now, your best bet is definitely to get to the dealership to put down a pre-order. And you're probably going to be waiting at least six months, if not more, before you're going to be able to get your car. The only thing you can do right now is try to find a dealer that won't charge you some outrageous upcharge just for the right to pre-order something. I think particularly batteries are something that people wonder, is that a special problem with the materials that go into batteries, the lithium-cobalt, lithium phosphate, whatever, all the different ways of making batteries? Is that something that impacts EVs more? Or are they just as delayed as anything else? As of now, actually, that hasn't been a real strong sticking point versus everything else. Right now, semiconductors are definitely the biggest issue. EVs definitely have more semiconductors because these aren't just a big lump of lithium-ion sitting in the bottom of the car. There are multiple cells. Each cells have controllers. And so all those need to be constructed as well. And if any components are missing for there, then that does give you orders of magnitude more things to worry about. But EVs actually are simpler in a lot of ways than a traditional internal combustion engine. They have fewer parts and fewer moving parts. So you're actually simplifying things in some way by going into EVs. So it doesn't really seem to be an EV-specific thing, but definitely down the road, the production resources for things like lithium are pretty limited. And so if EVs take off in a big, big way, the hope is that technology will keep ahead of that so we can move away from lithium-based battery packs to salt-based battery packs and other things are a little bit more easy to acquire and also, frankly, more environmental friendly. And Tim, real quick, I know you said that in some ways EVs are simpler to make. Is there any reason why a plug-in hybrid or anything like that would face at least different supply chain issues that if you were in the market for an EV, you might consider a plug-in which, depending on your nomenclature, isn't traditional if it can run full-time or something like that. I've just noticed that there is a big push for that. I was wondering, is that a response to a limited supply chain on the EV side? No, I think it's more to do with that being a really good transitional technology for a lot of people. If anything, plug-in hybrids are probably the most complicated thing because not only do you have the full internal combustion side, you also have a full EV side, and then you have the very complicated differential that ties it all together. PHEVs are potentially the worst case from a complexity and from a supplier standpoint, but certainly from someone who's wanting to ease into an EV technology sort of world, but they're not really to jump in full-time or they only have one car and they need to be able to go longer ranges. PHEVs make a lot of sense. Honestly, it's kind of a car by car and manufactured by manufactured basis right now. Some cars are more available than others and it really just comes down to the suppliers that are involved, which we honestly have very little insight into. Do you have any tips particularly for somebody looking for an EV? Is there a way to navigate all this a little better than you would otherwise? We're definitely covering it as closely as we can on roadshow and I know a lot of other manufacturers as well are, but manufacturers are kind of keeping their cars pretty close to their chest. We're not really getting strong regular updates on what models are available and what ones are not. When a manufacturer drops a new car, they're usually being pretty transparent about when those cars will be available, but it's really the ongoing supply and that's the bigger question. It's a good idea to get a relationship with your dealer if there's a car that you're looking at. See if you can go get a test drive, have a good rapport with the salesperson hopefully, and see if you can get kind of in the loop too. Also, check out online forums for that manufacturer in general, you know, a Ford group or a Hyundai group or something like that because usually customers will be pretty in the loop in terms of what they're seeing on their orders. You can probably get a pretty good idea of somebody ordering something in March. Their estimate is in July, then maybe you can expect if you order something in April, then it will come in September or something like that. It's probably your best bet at this point, but honestly, if you know what you want to get, get your money down and go to the dealership, that's your best bet right now. So use your skills you developed in order to get a PlayStation to get a car. Not too far off of that, sadly. You might have to wait a little bit longer even, and it's certainly going to be paying a lot more. All right. Thanks, Tim. All right. Well, in some automotive safety news, documents seen by the Wall Street Journal say Apple began testing a crash detection feature for iPhones and Apple watches over the past year using the accelerometer to measure a sudden spike in G-forces. Apple products have detected more than 10 million suspected crashes with the accelerometer with more than 50,000, including a call to 911. And then Apple is using that call data and that correlation between those suspected crashes to improve the accuracy of its crash detection algorithms. If the feature rolls out, users could set a call to emergency services automatically if a crash is detected, kind of a little bit similar to their fall detection feature on the Apple Watch. Google's Pixel phones introduced a similar feature in 2019. So Apple is not even first to the rumor mill on this one. And the OG, of course, is the automatic crash response in GM's on-star subsidiary, offering the feature since 1996. So not necessarily a new idea here for Apple, but Tim, I mean, I guess in the Apple hype cycle, Apple Watch has a huge install base, potential integration with the watch, some health features, seems like maybe could be an interesting feature. Yeah, I think it could be a great thing, especially having it integrated with the watch. If you are in an accident and your phone is sitting in the center console, there's a pretty good chance your phone is going to be stuck in a receipt or gone out the window or who knows where it's going to be. So if it does trigger something automatically, you might have a hard time cancelling it, which is also what you might want to do in this kind of situation. But with the Apple Watch, if you see a notification on there, hey, were you in an accident? Would you like to call 911? To be able to cancel that pretty directly, I think would be an important part of the equation, which would be missing if it were just baked into the phone. So yeah, having that as part of the Apple Watch, I think makes a lot of sense. It's just another step of their focus on health, which I think is a great thing. And as you mentioned, GM has been doing it for a really long time now, but they have the luxury of looking into the car sensors to know if an airbag deployed, if a collision sensor went off, that kind of thing. To do it just by accelerometer data is pretty impressive stuff. Yeah. It's impressive. Is it necessary, though, or would it be better to have it built into the car? I know it's flexible. If it's on my watch, it's in whatever car I'm in. But if all cars had this like airbags, I feel like maybe that's a better system. I don't know. What do you think? Yeah, it would definitely be better if it were in the car. But certainly, as we were talking about before the show, a lot of people were hanging out in the cars for longer than there were before. And certainly, every GM has this built into it. And a lot of other manufacturers do as well have similar systems that will automatically call in case of an emergency. But a lot of cars don't. And so having that baked in would be great. And also, if you are the passenger in the car, or you can even see this extending to bicycle crashes or motorcycle crashes as well, which I think would be really valuable. As someone who's had a serious bicycle crash, I think it would be really good to have that baked in for that as well. I will say that 10 million suspected crashes to 50,000 calls. I mean, hopefully that's a good dataset they can use to really fine tune this so that you're not making those kind of false positive calls to our services. I think we've all had a kid grab our phone and all of a sudden, we're dialing 911 or something like that. So obviously, you don't want that situation to happen. But I imagined the G-Force, it's not going to be like you're on a roller coaster and like the stop of that is going to activate this. I imagine that has to be a pretty dramatic event for it to even think to warrant that. So probably it would be deactivating in the case of a fender bender or something like that. Maybe, I would hope. But yeah, really fine tune and accuracy to me as a consumer is what I'd be most worried about. I don't want those false positives. All right, let's check out the mailbag, Rich. What's in there? Yeah, we got Vince writing in and he says the CBC was running a pilot on Facebook for the last few months where they wouldn't allow comments on most of its stories and has decided the trial was successful and has made no comments the default. I think there are a large enough news organization that others might follow their lead, Vince. I can't say that you're wrong. In fact, I was reminded that we've seen a number of websites kind of go through similar kind of cycles where they decide the comments aren't worth, that they turn them off, then they come back in some form and stuff like that. So obviously being on Facebook, a little bit of a different situation, but I think you got a really good point. It's like a never-ending topic, the idea of turning off your comments. Almost every news outlet has gone through this at one point or another. Even back when I was at ZDTV, there was an argument at Ziff Davis about whether to turn off talk back on stories and when to turn it on and whether it should be moderated and all of that. I think what's interesting here is we're seeing a lot of people turn off their Facebook comments in Australia because of a court decision in Canada. This is just because they were tired of the cesspool that their comments had turned into. Yeah, we used to have a big deal had in gadget when we turned them off. We would run a post saying, hey, you guys have been idiots in the comments section. So we're going to shut down comments for a week. And then if you're good, okay, we'll turn it back on again. But now that's kind of evolved into a scene that we have comments talk about default now going forward. And to see that extending into social media, honestly, it makes a lot of sense. It makes even more sense there. What I remember from my time at CNET is when you had proper moderation, which we sometimes had, you had good conversations. And when you didn't, you didn't want those comments anymore. It's even harder to have moderation on another platform. That's the big thing. Exactly. Hey, real quickly, I want to thank our brand new bosses over the weekend. We got a few people, a few folks jumping in, including Keith Fry and Han Lee, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thanks to Keith and Han and everybody else who's a new patron who joins in. We really, really appreciate you. And welcome you into the fold. If you want to join them, please jump on in Patreon.com slash DTNS. And of course, we want to thank Tim Stevens for dropping the EV knowledge and all sorts of other wonderful bits of tech wisdom. Tim, where can people find more of your great stuff if they're so inclined? Yeah, head over to the roadshow.com. We have a ton of EV coverage there. One of my drivers, Emmy Hall, she just did a rally in the Rivian R1T electric truck, which is a really great article. And Antoine on my team just got some extended impressions of the Lucid Air EV, which is a 500 mile range EV coming to market right now, actually. So check those out. All right. We are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 PM Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Nate Langson. See you then. Nate Langson will be explaining the metaverse to us. Finally, somebody will. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.