 Coming up on DTNAS, the time for a multitude of smartphone form factors is upon us and LG has the latest. Why Nvidia buying ARM is all about AI and how TikTok avoided a shutdown in a very Chinese manner. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, September 14th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. I was just talking about my weekend with the Microsoft Duo. Roger was talking about his weekend at Target. Rich Strothalino had a birthday to talk about. You can get that wider conversation by becoming a member of Get In Good Day Internet at patreon.com. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Sony announced that it will hold a PlayStation 5 event Wednesday, September 16th at 4pm Eastern Time. Sony says it will be, quote, one more look at some of the great games coming to PS5 at launch. It's possible that Sony may announce a price and release date for the console as well, given that the Xbox Series pre-order start September 22nd. But the invites don't stop there. Google sent one out for a September 30th event. The invite mentions a new Chromecast, a smart speaker, and new Pixel devices will be shown at the event. Google already confirmed that a Nest smart speaker was coming after a leak image surfaced in July and said the Pixel 4a, 5G, and Pixel 5 would launch later in 2020. So those are good bets to be there as well. The events do not stop there. Samsung announced it will hold the Galaxy unpacked for every fan virtual event on September 23rd at 10am Eastern Time. Samsung will broadcast the event on its website. I'm not to mention Apple tomorrow, Oculus later this week. The European Commission announced that it began testing servers to provide interoperability between the COVID-19 contact tracing apps being used in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Latvia. The system was developed by SAP and Deutsche Telekom and would log encounters by people traveling abroad and then send push notifications when an infection is reported. Protocol reports on a Facebook patent that shows a method of adding URLs to Instagram captions. As outlined in the patent, the system would display a pop-up window when entering a URL into an Instagram post caption offering to activate the URL as a clickable link for a $2 fee. The patent was originally filed in January of 2016 and issued September 8th, 2020. Verizon announced it agreed to acquire the prepaid MVNO TrackPhone in a deal worth $7 billion. TrackPhone has 21 million prepaid subscribers across its own brand as well as Straight Talk Wireless and Net10. Roughly 13 million TrackPhone subscribers already use Verizon's network for service. They rent it out from Verizon. As of the end of June, Verizon had 4 million prepaid subscribers of its own, so this will significantly boost it. If the deal is approved by regulators, it would make Verizon the largest prepaid provider in the world as a matter of fact. Facebook began rolling out a Watch Together feature in Messenger, allowing up to 8 users on mobile or up to 50 users in a Messenger room to watch video content together. Watch Together draws in content from Facebook Watch and all participants on the call can control playback. Watch Together rolls out first on mobile with web support coming in a few weeks. Amazon changed the name of Amazon Freetime to Amazon Kids and Amazon Freetime Unlimited now becomes Amazon Kids Plus. A parental control service will also get a redesigned home screen, echo integrations and more music and video content. Very excited about this next story. A pair of leaked videos for Oculus Quest 2 VR headsets revealed specifications for the as-yet unannounced device. The Quest 2, reportedly, if you're watching the videos and they look pretty real, will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon XR2 platform, offer displays with more than 50% more pixels than the original Quest, with a claimed nearly 2K per eye resolution. The Quest 2 also features 6GB of RAM, 256GB of storage, that's twice what it was before, with support for 3D positional audio and controller-free hand tracking. No pricing or release date was included in the videos. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about LG, like Red Bull, gives you wing. Yeah, or one. LG announced the first device in its Explorer project line of experimental designs. A new dual-screen phone called the LG Wing, which stacks two OLED displays on top of one another, swiveling open into a T-shape. A 6.8-inch bezel-less main display swivels 90 degrees to reveal a 3.9-inch screen underneath. The second display is meant for a dedicated keyboard, camera controls, media playback controls, etc., but it also supports running separate apps. You can also turn off the second display and use it as a handle, if you so desire. In fact, a second dedicated ultra-wide camera on the back can capture footage while the main display is in its swiveled landscape mode. A gimbal mode puts joystick controls on the second screen, and it can record from the front and rear cameras at the same time. There's also a pop-up 32-megapixel front-facing camera for selfies. The phone comes to Verizon first, then AT&T and T-Mobile afterwards, and price and release date not yet announced. Wonder what they'll be. At the end of the announcement, LG showed a 13-second video of a phone, a pull-out chin that extended the display. Yeah, so LG, I think we're experiencing a Permian explosion, if you like, of form factors. We're talking about the Surface Duo. LG is avowedly in this Explorer project. It's going to put out stuff. I'm like, I don't know, what do you think of this? What if you had a swivel, like an old sidekick, but you could use it as a handle? We put a second camera with the right orientation, so when it's open, you can do that. We're going to show off a phone that you can just pull out and make longer. Do you like that? I don't know. You tell us. We've got to the point where the specs themselves are not as much of a differentiation, so we're starting to see them just try out different form factors to see what sticks. When I first looked at this, I was like, I hate it. This one did not stick for you. There's too many angles. There's too many bezel. It's too much. The form factor between the main screen and the secondary screen doesn't make a lot of sense to me because there's no symmetry really going on. I would love to know if someone out there is like, no, actually, this is the absolute best, and here's why, because I don't see it. It's starting to feel like we're getting silly with form factors, and I might be wrong. I might be wrong here. I think we are getting silly with form factors, and I think that's a good thing where I sit. It's like, yeah, try some stuff. Not all of it's going to work. Some of it you're going to hate. That's fine. But that's how we get the new ideas that are different and hit upon something where we're like, oh, that's one that is really cool, is to try these out. And I think that's why LG is doing the Explorer project. YouTube launched a beta of its TikTok competitor, YouTube Shorts in India. Remember, TikTok currently blocked in India. Users of YouTube Shorts can create a 15 second video clip set to music. Shorts will appear as a dedicated row on the YouTube homepage, and the Android app has been updated to feature a prominent create button with plans to bring it to iOS soon. Clips creation supports a multi-segment camera to string clips together, playback controls and hands-free recording. In the blog post announcing Shorts, YouTube said it has 2 billion monthly viewers on the platform right now. Well, I don't know. I mean, sure. We're just going to get a lot of TikTok competitors at this point. It makes perfect sense that YouTube would do this, particularly in the Indian market, but in general, because it is, you know, this is the hot noise right now. Yeah. And especially in India where there isn't a TikTok, everyone's kind of scrambling to be the one to replace it, so I'm not surprised they tried it there first. Yeah. No, me either. And I know we're going to talk a little bit more about TikTok later in the show, but man, there are days that I go like, who's got the time? And then I go on to TikTok and I'm like, five hours later, I'm like, I have so many new creators that I love and have followed. They're onto something here. Yeah. I'll just say, I doubt YouTube doesn't seem to be very good at making these new attempts stick. People like YouTube, for what YouTube does, maybe this will be the time I'm wrong. I don't know. Yeah, perhaps. Moving on, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection issued a press release and tweeted out that it seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple Airpods from Hong Kong. There was one problem, though. The pictures of the seized products were in the tweets, which was tweeted, were actually one plus buds, not Airpods at all. The buds were seized at JFK Airport in New York City and originally shipped to Nevada. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection spokesperson told the Verge, quote, the subject earbuds appear to violate Apple's configuration trademark. Apple has configuration trademarks on their brand of earbuds and has recorded those trademarks with CPB. CPB says that the importer of the goods will have an opportunity to provide evidence that they are not violating Apple's trademark at all. Yeah, so this happens. We just generally don't see it happen because it's happened into, I don't know, handbags or something we don't care about, right? Where Customs and Border Patrol, as part of its enforcement, randomly select shipments to inspect and occasionally says, nah, we've got a list of trade design here or in this case a configuration trademark. Configuration trademark is what the product looks like and you appear to be violating it. We're going to hold this up until you can provide evidence that you don't violate their trademark. So this at first was considered a joke because of the way the tweet was written. The tweet was written as CBP officers at JFK Airport recently seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple Airpods, valued at $399,000 had they been genuine, which they weren't counterfeit Apple Airpods. They were OnePlus Buds that violate Apple's configuration trademark. So this goes from being a ha ha, you guys, that's not a counterfeit to like, oh crap, OnePlus is going to have some explaining to do. I mean, that's where we are, right? It's going to have to justify to the CBP that those Buds are not close enough to Apple's Airpods to violate the trademark. And then I assume if CBP doesn't agree with them, then it can be appealed to a court. But it's going to take a while for this to get through. I mean, having finished the weekend going through my second viewing of the wire, you know, all the stuff, I'm like, yeah, I know what you're doing. I get it now. Air Buds on the table. That's right. Ah, yes. Well, let's talk about one of the bigger stories that happened over the weekend. NVIDIA announced Sunday it reached a deal to acquire ARM from SoftBank for $40 billion. SoftBank had wanted to use ARM to cash in on Internet of Things, but Internet of Things just didn't have the cash everyone thought it would. So it's getting out of the business. NVIDIA says it wants to make ARM a division of NVIDIA. It will be headquartered in Cambridge, UK. They're not going to, you know, eat it up. They're going to leave it as ARM operating in the UK. NVIDIA says it will quote, continue to operate its open licensing model while maintaining its global customer neutrality. So they're saying all the right things. You may not believe them, but they're saying the right things. In fact, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wong said, we intend to expand ARM's licensing portfolio with access to NVIDIA's technology. So that sweetens the deal. They're like, what if you could actually license NVIDIA stuff just like you license ARM? Wong told Forbes that quote, data centers and clouds are clamoring for the ARM microprocessor, the ARM CPU. So I think they see this as a valid business that they want to continue to supercharge. Wong also said quote, in time there will be trillions of these small autonomous computers powered by AI connected to massively powerful cloud data centers in every corner of the world. Pay attention to that statement. That's what they're saying they want to do. Small autonomous computers powered by ARM, massively powerful cloud data centers powered by NVIDIA. In other words, NVIDIA makes the data center piece of AI with its GPUs and AI chips. ARM is where AI is headed as it becomes less cloud dependent and can work on devices at the edge of the network. And NVIDIA, if it gets this acquisition, would own both where AI is headed as well as where it's coming from. That's super smart. NVIDIA can use some of ARM's tech to make its GPUs more power efficient in the data center as well. And ARM can use NVIDIA's substantial AI research and development to make the ARM edge design smarter. NVIDIA says in fact that it's going to build a new AI research center in Cambridge where ARM is headquartered. Now this is not going to be easy though. It's not a done deal. It will face regulatory scrutiny. It will bring ARM under a U.S. company which would expose it to more of the U.S. China trade war fallout and it won't be popular with some of ARM's clients, Samsung, Qualcomm, C and NVIDIA as a competitor in chip making. So ARM would go from being the neutral site to having a company that has to reassure people that they're still neutral even though they're owned by us. Also it's not popular with one of ARM's co-founders, Herman Hauser, who wrote an open letter to the U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson opposing the deal. Hauser also created savers.co.uk to get people to sign a petition to save ARM. I'm sorry, savearm.co.uk. Hauser wants a guarantee of U.K. jobs, enforcement so NVIDIA doesn't get preferential treatment for ARM licenses to itself and exemption from the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment Regulation which would relate to its sale of ARM technology to China. Right now ARM can sell to Huawei because ARM is a U.K. company owned by a Japanese company. So it doesn't fall under those U.S. trade restrictions. Yeah, that seems like the biggest potential issue here. When you look at NVIDIA and ARM together and what the companies seem to want to do makes perfect sense. But if there is any way that ARM gets into hot water because there is some U.S. issue with trade restrictions that obviously we'll talk about that more in a few minutes. But that seems to be the only place where this deal would be bad. Otherwise it seems like a win-win. Yeah, if NVIDIA does everything they say, a lot of people are like, NVIDIA is lying. Anything they don't put in a contract you can't trust. In fact, Hauser said those exact words. So if you don't believe NVIDIA, you may say, but they're still going to ruin it. It doesn't make sense to me that they would ruin it though. Yeah. Well, Walmart announced a partnership with Zipline for on-demand one-hour deliveries of health and wellness products within a 50-mile radius. Trials of the service will begin in Bentonville, Arkansas early next year. Zipline has been doing drone deliveries of medical supplies for some time, launching deliveries of blood to patients in Rwanda back in 2016 and most recently medical supplies in PPE in North Carolina. Walmart also recently announced a partnership with the Israeli Drone Startup Fly Tracks to pilot drone deliveries of household items in North Carolina as well. And Amazon received approval to operate its drones for the first time in August, but has not yet launched a service. Yes, thank you for mentioning that last because everyone thinks Amazon has a service and I've already heard stories today comparing this to the Amazon version of the service. Walmart wants to get into competition with Amazon. No, it's the opposite. Amazon doesn't have a service. Amazon is talking about having a service. Sure. But yeah, there are plenty of other companies who are already doing it. And I've been fighting to get Zipline credit for being one of the first, if not the first, to provide actual commercial service of drone delivery in Rwanda and other places in Central Africa over the years. They have now expanded to other parts of the world, including the United States, North Carolina, first in flight makes perfect sense for both Fly Tracks and Zipline to be doing partnerships there. And this is smart. This is smart on Walmart's part because they are trying to go toe-to-toe with Amazon on shipping. And if they can use Zipline's experience to get ahead of the game with these 30-minute low-weight deliveries, I think that you could soon have a system where you still order from Amazon for some things, but for a while maybe you're ordering your lightweight impulse items or maybe your lunch from Walmart. Yeah, I continue to... Well, I'm excited about this. Just personally, I'm like, this is just really cool. I'd love to order my first drone delivery of something that I get often. But I've already started thinking about, okay, well, what could that be? And what's too heavy? And all my dog food's too heavy and the cat litter's too heavy. But some of the garbage bags maybe would work. It'll be interesting to see how we all start ordering things because once we get into this and lots of companies start offering a service like this, how do we compartmentalize? Oh, what goes in the air and what goes on the ground? Yeah, because right now it doesn't make sense for a $5 foot-long sandwich to be put in a car and driven to your house by someone spending gas and paying a driver. But it might make sense to throw on a drone and 30 minutes later, boom, you got it. Well, and what if it's hot? Then it's hot when you get it. Yeah, keeps it. Meatball sub, right? Exactly. It'll be, perhaps the companies will, let's say you're like, okay, well, I'm in my cart. I want to check out, I'm done with all the stuff. Maybe it says, oh, based on the weight of this item or this item, you're going to get this via drone and then the other stuff is going to be delivered to you by car or truck. Ian, on a text message this weekend was saying we should just all repurpose our chimneys to be drone delivery chutes so they could just drop them right down. They do like Santa Claus every time. So exciting. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day, be sure to subscribe for five minutes a day to DailyTechHeadlines.com. So, Oracle's getting TikTok, Sarah. Yeah, I heard about this over the weekend and, boy, did the story change from Friday afternoon when we were talking about it to right now. A lot of twists and turns and even a lot of technology folks who follow the story, I was kind of hearing people scratching their heads like, what is going on? What are they even buying? Yeah, what is Oracle buying? Yeah, why is Oracle doing it and what are they dying? Well, let's try to break it down. We have an accord. The concerns that this was trying to address are mainly these three. A fear that US user data could be accessed by the Chinese government. Even though TikTok said everything was in the US and backed up in Singapore, still under the control of a Chinese company, so who knows. A fear that TikTok might promote or censor content on its platform with a political agenda and a fear that TikTok might sneak malware into its app. We definitely have addressed the first of those three. I'm not sure about the last two. Here are the solutions that were rejected, Microsoft. Microsoft wanted to acquire the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand operations of TikTok wholesale and run it. That's not happening. Walmart wanted to be in on a deal at first with Microsoft. At first they wanted it on their own, but then Microsoft, they want ad sales. In fact, they may not be totally out of this while Street Journal reports that they are part of the oracle offer. That is unconfirmed though. But here's what Microsoft said Sunday when they officially said we're not getting TikTok. Quote, We would have made significant changes to ensure the service met the highest standards of security, privacy, online safety and combating disinformation. We made these principles clear in our August statement. We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas. Microsoft throwing a little press release shade on the idea that you don't seem to have solved all your problems with this deal, but let's see how it works out. Here is the, in fact, the solution. Oracle will serve as a trusted tech partner. So they're not buying TikTok the way Microsoft would have bought parts of TikTok. US Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told CNBC that this deal will establish TikTok as a global company headquartered in the United States. There have been a lot of talk about the possibility that ByteDance would move the TikTok headquarters into Santa Monica or possibly London. Sounds like it's going to be Santa Monica. And Mnuchin said that would mean 20,000 new jobs. I saw 25,000 too, but it's going to mean a lot of new jobs. Also, Sequoia Capital in general, Atlantic will get to keep their stakes in TikTok and will have stakes in this new venture as part of the deal. So it sounds like they may be setting up a joint company to administrate this that's run by Oracle. Who knows? We don't have all those details. However, we do know according to Secretary Mnuchin that the US Committee on Foreign Investment will review the proposal this week to decide if it addresses their concerns because remember they had said we're rolling back the musically acquisition that turned into TikTok unless you meet our concerns. Once CIFAS has looked at that, the committee will make a recommendation to the president. And then if the president agrees this will go through. If the president looks at this and says, yeah, I still don't like it, then this isn't going to happen. So we'll find that out later this week. Also, China's state-controlled news outlet CGTN appeared to confirm something today reporting that bike dance will not sell TikTok's US operations. So if you were thinking like, well, maybe this is Oracle TikTok, no. They're moving a headquarters. They're partnering with Oracle, but they are not managing the operations. So what does this all mean? It's hard to say. It seems that Oracle will serve as the host of the TikTok service in the United States keeping US data in the US. TikTok will make it Santa Monica headquarters, the main headquarters for TikTok worldwide. So it would be under US jurisdiction. And this might be some kind of joint venture, as I mentioned. Sources we're telling the Wall Street Journal is a partnership. They're like, this isn't an acquisition. It's a partnership. But what we don't know is, will bike dance employees still do the coding? Will Oracle get the code? China's saying no, they won't. Will they hold the recommendation algorithms? China very seriously saying like that is an import restriction and no, the algorithm remains with bike dance. And who handles moderation for TikTok under this new arrangement? Now, Rich Truffilino, one of our producers pointed out this sounds very similar to what US companies do in China. Amazon did not sell its AWS business in China back in November 2017, but to comply with Chinese law it sold certain infrastructure from AWS to its partner, who was the seller of the service in the country and Amazon continued to own the intellectual property. In China itself, we have several examples of a blueprint for this, right? AWS with its partner, Sinet. There's also Microsoft, which actually doesn't run Azure in China or Office 365. That's run by 21 Vianet. But Microsoft still holds the intellectual property and works with 21 Vianet on this. So it feels like we're taking Chinese template for how business has to be done in China. China says if it's going to be a cloud service, Chinese company has to handle the data so that we can get access to it. And they're doing that in the United States. They're saying, sure, TikTok can operate, but Oracle has to handle the data. I mean, on the surface, and I know that, again, fast-moving story 24 hours ago was that TikTok is it won't sell to any company in the U.S. Right. And then it was Microsoft's out. Oracle's in. What is Oracle getting? Oracle's getting Oracle will serve as the host of TikTok in the U.S. And there are a lot of U.S. users. I mean, it's a lot of data. Keeping U.S. data in the U.S. Okay. I mean, it's a partnership. I'm not totally I'm still not totally sure what Oracle gets out of this. Oracle gets a guaranteed client for their cloud service and a lot of money. Yeah, I guess so. That's pretty much what Oracle gets. Oracle gets a favor from the president. Larry Ellison, no secret, is a supporter of the president. So, you know, if the president approves of this then that would be considered valid to be done to a supporter. Right, right. I mean, that Oracle gets a lot. Oracle gets a lot of money and a permanent client and a little bit of investment. Sequoia and Atlantic get to keep their investment. They don't lose out. Bite Dance doesn't have to shut down TikTok. China gets to hold on to the algorithm and doesn't have to give that over to a U.S. company which might be considered a competitive disadvantage. I mean, I didn't quite know what they do in China. It's just not a thing we do in the U.S. where we require a company, the government usually doesn't tell a company you have to partner with a U.S. company if you want to operate. But that's what they're doing. Well, I'd love to say, all right, well, we're at the end of this story but it's changed so much. Check back later this week to find out for sure. On the show tomorrow, maybe we'll have more news about this. You know, okay. All right, Oracle, we see you, I suppose. Join in the conversation at our Discord if you have ideas about what's going on with this or any of the other stories that we talk about on DTNS and you can join by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. James from Columbus, Ohio wrote in and said, over the past week there's been a lot of discussion about the 512 gigabyte limitation of the Xbox hard drive. Although I agree it would be nice to have a larger drive, I don't think it's that big of a deal. I've already transitioned to an altered perspective on storage with the current Xbox. I don't have anywhere near enough storage to store all the digital games that I own currently. I only download the games that I'm currently playing or might be interested in playing soon and that I uninstall games once I've finished. The Xbox keeps track of the fact that I still own the game. I can always re-download later if I want. I've usually backed up to Xbox cloud as well so the only issue is possibly the delay involved downloading and installing the game. With past systems I couldn't load all my game or game discs or cartridges all at once either. I stored all my physical media in a cabinet on a shelf and I popped games in and out of the system as I wanted to play them. Now I think of the cloud as my new game cabinet where I grab the game I want to play off the digital shelf when I want to play it. I uninstall it when I'm done, I turn it to my digital shelf where I retain access to all my games whether they're installed in my hard drive or not and with this mindset and strategy I don't see too much of an issue with a smaller hard drive and I probably wouldn't bother expanding my storage even if they allow off the shelf hard drives to be paired with the new system. James well well said I know some people are like no that doesn't work for me but this this is a very reasonable explanation of why you know 512 is fine I just got to manage it a little totally it's not a new thing to have to manage your games right? You know I've gone through this with the Oculus Quest which has well well again later this week check back we'll talk about the new one but where there's only so much on board storage and games or apps you know whatever you want to call them you know they're pretty hefty you can only have so many at one time right and as I've talked about this in a previous Live With It segment when I kind of went through the Oculus it's like yeah I mean you can bump them off and then bring them back because you already bought them and the App Store recognizes that but it is cumbersome so you can do that and if you're fine with that great but I think a lot of people are like well it would just be better if I had a lot more storage. Yeah if I didn't have to think about it at all your mileage may vary. Shout out to patrons that are master and master levels including Tim Ashman Johnny Hernandez and Hi-Tech Oki. 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