 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Andrew Bradley, Dale Mulcahy, and Matt Zaglin. Coming up on DTNS and FTs for Restaurant Reservations, Equilibrium, or Elitist, plus Japan's War on Floppy Discs, and Will Harris gives us a peek at the future of publishing. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 31st, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And on the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us, CEO of Unbound, Will Harris is here. Welcome, Will. It is lovely to be back with you guys. It's been a while, so I'm so happy to talk all things tech. Indeed. We've got some good stuff to talk to Will about, including a little bit about the future of publishing. But let's start with a few tech things you should know. Snap CEO, Evan Spiegel, announced restructuring at the company, including laying off about 20% of its over 6,400 employees who will also cancel original shows and in-app games, and wind down its Friend Discovery app, Zenly, and its music app, Voicy. As Beagle said, this restructuring will allow Snap to focus on three strategic priorities, community growth, revenue growth, and augmented reality. Snap also confirmed its chief business officer and top ad exec, Jeremy Gorman, and VP of Ad Sales for the Americas, Peter Naylor, have both left the company and gone to Netflix. But how will I find friends without Zenly? Ticketmaster now allows event organizers to issue NFTs tied to tickets issued on the Flow blockchain, operated by Dapper Labs. These can be made available before, after, or during an event. They can serve simply as memorabilia, you know, a record that you would get if you had a paper ticket. They, you know, win the world of e-tickets you don't get otherwise. They can also enable other rewards that go along with attending the event. Ticketmaster already used Flow to issue digital collectibles with Super Bowl tickets in the past, and will expand its NFL partnership to issue NFTs to attendees of at least three home games for all 32 NFL teams this season. LG announced its first bendable OLED TV, the LG OLED Flax. Model number is LX3. The 42 inch set can automatically bend into a curved configuration for more immersive content, able to be set up with up to 20 different levels of curvature. So you've got some options there, depending on what your situation is in the living room. It also supports Dolby Vision Gaming at 4K 120 Hertz and includes HDMI 2.1 ports. However, no word on pricing or when it will be available. If you're wondering where Scott Johnson is today, because it's Wednesday, he's actually on a cruise, which he went on too early because Royal Caribbean cruises just announced it will begin offering internet through SpaceX's Starlink network. The cruise line will begin installing terminals immediately, scheduled to be completed by early next year on all its ships. Having been on cruises in the past with very bad internet, I welcome this. Microsoft's 365 Defender Research team announced on Wednesday it had discovered a one-click exploit in TikTok for Android. Microsoft found a way to bypass protections in deep linking that let you use a link to open another app, but not access other functions. When bypassed, an attacker could create a link that when tapped, accesses JavaScript bridges from WebView and then gives the attacker access to the primary functions of a TikTok account, including posting and messaging other users. Kind of big things on TikTok. Microsoft notified TikTok of the issue in February and it has since been patched. TikTok and Android users should always make sure that they have updated to the latest version to avoid things like this. And as always, avoid clicking on links that you're not 100% sure are legitimate. Alright, let's talk about something that we've all been dying for. Everyone's been talking about it for decades. The end of floppy disks. Japan's digital minister Kono Taro has vowed to dismiss current laws that prevent online submissions and therefore leave people no option but to submit data on physical media including floppy disks and CD-ROMs. Kono says the digital agency will change regulations to move these online. A tweet on his English language account said, Digital minister declares a war on floppy disks. There are about 1,900 government procedures that require the business community to use disks, i.e. floppy disks, CD mini-disk, etc., to submit applications in other forms. Digital agency is to change those regulations so you can use online. He also announced the same thing during a press conference in case you were worried that a staffer went rogue on his Twitter or something. It's for real. I mean, the idea that mini-disks are still something that are being used is kind of cool to me. So you might say, alright, well, if Kono doesn't like the way it's going, what are we going to do? The country is writing a national ID smart card program called My Number that citizens can use to sign online for things like tax submissions, applying for other government services, online banking logins, signing transactions instead of physical alternatives. So the country has already been going in this direction. Kono says this will help municipalities that have had difficulties distributing things like emergency benefits, you know? COVID-related, but emergency benefits in general. He also said recently at a press conference that he wants to get rid of fax machine use. And boy, am I on board with this. Japan isn't the only one that kept the floppy faith, though. If you're saying, what is going on in Japan? The U.S. Air Force just replaced floppy disks for managing its nuclear program with solid state drives. That was back in 2019, but still fairly recently. Not that long ago, yeah. And I think, you know, I think, Sarah, you said, you know, mini disks are still in use. I don't even remember where mini disks were started being used for data. Well, I've got a mini disk player behind me somewhere. The only time that I can ever remember seeing a mini disk used for data was Neo in the Matrix. Definitely had some programs like delivered to his door, right, that were on mini disk. But I don't think I ever actually saw it in the wild. I think they were more popular or maybe only popular ever in Japan because Sony made them. I had a mini disk player, okay. Yeah, and with Sarah. But I'm also sort of a Sony faithful, or at least I was for, you know, for quite a few years. I mean, I still have my disk man, or my disk man, my cassette sports. Walkman. Yeah, Walkman, you know, that I keep kind of close just to make me feel good about myself. But I love the cheekiness, you know, Kono saying, well, here's what we have to do. But he's having some fun with it online. Yeah. And, you know, letting people know this is just silly. Floppy disks, CD-ROMs, we can do better. He's worth a follow on Twitter, I'll be honest. I made sure that his English language Twitter was legit and it is linked from his Japanese language account, from his actual official website. So I think it is. He tweeted a picture of an empty plate with the word lunch, for example. So he's got a sense of humor. And all of you that have gone through digital transformation at a company, I think can identify with someone coming in and saying, No, really, we have to move this stuff online. We have to make it available in an easier way for people in the modern century to be able to deal with. He was, the vaccines are in Japan and was complaining that he couldn't use email to administer the vaccines in Japan. They were still using the old, you know, seals, the stamps. I mean, generally, Tom, you can't, you can't administer vaccines over email anyway, just to be clear. That's a different type of virus that you get. That's a good point. That's a good point. But you know, the paperwork that you do. The paperwork. Yeah. Yeah. In the press conference, Kono said, where does one even buy a floppy disk these days? So I looked verbatim floppy disks are still available. You could still buy a two sided, you know, and it's taken me until age 39 to realize that verbatim is when you have an exact copy of something. Right. Which is what you want. Which is why they were called, which is why I always used to call it verbatim. I never really understood what verbatim was. And it's not just clicked. Well, finally, we have accomplished something on this show. Congratulations, everybody. All right. Moving on to private clubs. Shall we? Something called show club is building itself a San Francisco's first NFT based restaurant. It will serve California style Asian food like sushi and a Rory cuisine, which is described as Japanese farmhouse food on a charcoal grill. Sounds like a private club. There will also be a retail market on the ground floor for takeaway food. So there's more to it. Anybody can try to get a reservation, but if you're a member, you're going to get priority, which is why members would pay for this sort of thing. Show club offers three tiers of membership. Tom, tell us about the tears. Yes. How much is it going to cost for you to make sure you can eat peasant inspired food that's very expensive? Well, 2,678 earth tier members will pay $7,500 each to get priority reservations, a members only menu, a members only lounge, and access to special member events once a quarter. If you want to go more than once a quarter, you pay $15,000. $377 water tier memberships will be offered, though 50 of those will be reserved for folks inside the company. Water memberships will add on to the earth membership, complimentary valet parking or car service access to all the events, not just one a quarter. An exclusive event for just the top two tiers in case your exclusivity needs more exclusivity and a special monthly omakaze dinner reservation. You'd get the reservation. You still have to pay for the food. Finally, there are 20 fire memberships. Fire memberships cost $300,000 each along with everything in the first two tiers. These members get a monthly omakaze experience at their home. You still pay for the food. A share of the restaurant's revenue, a seat on the fire board, which is not the actual board of directors, I assume, and a curated trip to Japan. So you get taken to Japan to see how the charcoal grills that inspired the one in the show club work. How is this whole thing going to work, Sarah? Well, so far it sounds exactly like a normal members club, and I don't see where the NFT comes into it at all. Yes, Sarah, tell us where the NFT comes in. Will, will, listen to this. All the perks are for the lifetime of this NFT that you have now purchased. No matter who holds it, except for the trip to Japan, that one can only be taken once. So I couldn't say, like, yeah, Tom, I'm not going to Japan, you go instead. The restaurant won't issue any new memberships, but you can sell your NFT to somebody else on OpenSea using Ethereum. Show Group gets 10% of the price of that sale of any of its membership NFTs. So you can transfer, but Show doesn't lose out on you doing that. There's your answer, Will. Future revenue for the company. The group is also looking at opening additional locations in Las Vegas, Miami, Tokyo, you know, NFT places. Presumably new NFTs would be minted for those locations, but existing San Francisco members would also get some benefits at those locations. You know, if you paid in, you get some perks. The San Francisco club is being built at Salesforce Park, shocker, and broke ground August 19th. They hope to open in autumn of 2023. So we've got some time yet. They have a 25-year lease, so if all goes well, they'll be around. There'll be 300 seats in the restaurant with some reserve for non-members, but they didn't say how many non-members will be included. Memberships will be sold privately first with sales to the public expected to open in September. And Show Club isn't the only restaurant playing around with NFTs. There's a seafood restaurant called Dame in Greenwich Village, New York, partnering with a restaurant-oriented crypto company called Front of House. They're offering $1,000 NFTs that give you not only a picture of fish and chips, but also preferential booking when done at least 24 hours in advance. They call that the Affable Hospitality Club. Front of House also working with other restaurants on NFTs. And Gary Vaynerchuk is opening a members-only dining club using NFTs called Flyfish Club that's coming in 2023. Will Harris, have you now or will you ever buy an NFT to get a reservation at a restaurant? So I mean, the thing that I find interesting about this is as far as I can tell, the only value of the NFT, you're not getting anything. There are no sort of collectibles or any other associated art. There's no board-ape thing going on here. So with a profile picture, it is just a sort of digital token that you own this membership. And I just don't know if that really requires NFTs to do it. I suppose the smart contract that allows the show group to take 10% of all future membership sales is helpful. But my question would be, what happens if the value of those memberships is not perceived to be the original price? So if I buy, let's say I'm going to buy a fire membership to this thing for $300,000, could I resell it for $100,000? Would that be allowed? Because in that case, isn't the company getting way less than they anticipated? And likewise, could I sell it for half a million and keep the profit? So it depends on how they structure the NFT. We know that they've structured to take 10%. So if you sell it for $500,000, they're going to keep $50,000 of that and you get the rest for selling it. Is there something else in the contract on the Ethereum chain that says your minimum price has to be $250,000? Yeah, we just don't know that. They could do that, but we don't know whether they're doing it or not. I like this idea of NFTs maybe making restaurant reservations a little more accessible. The way that StubHub and such have made tickets more accessible, where you could possibly get a reservation at a restaurant that you would not be able to get otherwise and not have to pay $1,000 for it. Somebody could rent out their NFT. I don't know if that's going to be allowed with Show Club, but I can see that being something you could do with some of these restaurant NFTs is, well, I own a seat at Dame and there's a service created that lets me rent out my NFT for a day for somebody. I make a little money, the restaurant makes a little money and people get access to restaurants that they couldn't get otherwise. That's not what's happening out of these, but that's the best I could come up with. It's a good idea, or it's just not the thing that's happening. Yeah, yeah, at least not yet. Well, folks, if you've got good ideas that aren't happening yet, tell us about them in our Discord, which you can join by linking to a Patreon account at Patreon.com slash DTNS. The internet has certainly affected publishing, going from making self-publishing something you can do easily through sites like BookBaby and Lulu and, of course, Amazon. There have been innovative business models like InkShares, which crowdfund book selection and then took a more traditional publishers route. Will Harris is the CEO now of Unbound at Unbound.com, which is crowdfunding ideas for books. Will, where does Unbound fit into this lineage? Yeah, so I mean, Unbound has been on a journey of its own. It was actually started knocking on 10 years ago now by a chap called John Mitchinson who you might know as the co-creator of QI, the wonderful TV series and series of books. And it's an interesting lineage. You know, 10 years in, traditional publishers still haven't really changed an awful lot. When you think of how the internet has affected the wider media world, when you think about the absolute sort of carnage and remaking that it's sort of reeked on newspapers. And then when you think about the huge amounts of change going on at magazines and certainly in television with all the streamers, book publishing still pretty much looks like it did 20 years ago. There's not a huge amount of difference. There's some consolidation, if I could say it, of some of the major publishing houses. But I think there is still lots of opportunity for disruption. When you think about digital disruption in publishing, you know, you can argue that actually the biggest digital disruptor of publishing in the last 20 years has been audible, right? With this kind of credit and subscription system for purely digital books. E-books haven't been quite as successful as people perhaps thought they would be. E-magazines certainly haven't been. So I think we're still looking to explore what the potential is for digital disruption in the future. And, you know, the crowdfunding element of our business is just one way that we're looking at doing that. So what kind of authors is Unbound for? If I'm a writer, which I actually am. Hypothetically, if you were a writer. Why would I want to be interested in Unbound? So I think the way that we run the crowdfunding. So we try and reach out to authors and work out, OK, what do we think we can get to fund? And that enables you to talk to a much more diverse set of authors. Because if you think of the traditional publishing industry, it's generally pretty risk averse. Because the model is you want to fund, you know, you as the publishing house are funding the book upfront. If it doesn't sell, you know, you're not going to recoup your costs on the printing. So because of the crowdfunding model that we adopt, we actually have much more ability to work with a wider array of authors. So, for example, we work with a lot of first time authors. We have a fantastic woman called Ariel Anderson at the moment who is writing a memoir on her journey from being a Jehovah's Witness to a BDSM video model. That's a change. She has a journey. But because, you know, she's got a fan base, obviously, for what she does, we can work out how to how to make that happen. We have got, you know, an incredibly diverse range of books and authors from from Ariel as a first time author through to we just funded a book by a fantastic woman called Sanjana Moda, which is all about what's it's a cookbook of vegan Indian food, but it's very cool Gen Z Indian food. And, you know, publishing books for Gen Z in general is pretty difficult because they don't buy a lot of books on the whole. But the phenomenon of the book movement on tick tock book tock has made that possible for us to look at all the way through to I'm sure you guys will know Douglas Adams, the the sadly late author of the hitchhike is going to the galaxy. When when Douglas died, he left his his soul sort of office and a state and all the little post it notes and the scrap books and the notebooks and the six by fours for wedding speeches. And we worked with with his with his college to digitize all of that and create a compendium called 42 of all those of all those sort of musings. It's the last sort of unpublished works of Douglas. So I would say from from it's kind of if you've got a good idea for a book and you think it can fund we would love to talk to you. So it's it's not as wide opening as a self publishing we're right where I just go in and upload my book and start publishing it. But it also but it does have that crowdfunding aspect of bringing an audience in to help, you know, get it launched and getting them invested at the beginning. Yeah, exactly. So that's, you know, the sort of main difference from self publishing is that on the whole we are publishing it. So we will, you know, we have a team of editors in Harris that will do copy edits, development edits, structure edits. And if you're booked a bit controversial, we've got people that can do a legal read. We will print it. We will ship it. We will do all of those kind of things. So it is in that sense quite different from the from the self publishing. And as a reader, which I also am. I obviously could go to unbound.com and order them. Can I find them elsewhere? Yeah, so we we have everything that we that we publish is available on unbound.com. But one of the interesting things is when you think about funding a book, you obviously got that crowdfunding element. But then you can think, OK, so what actually could go and be successful in Amazon? What could go and be successful in Barnes and Noble? And sometimes you get books that will have, you know, a fantastically huge crowdfunding and sort of direct audience for something particularly niche. But nobody, you know, nobody's ever going to look for it on Amazon. It's never going to hit those Amazon lists. Sometimes you'll have something we have a book at the moment called Cain's Jawbone, which had almost no crowdfunding element to it. Very low cost, originally written in 1934 as a crime thriller. But you don't ever find out the sort of who done it unless you can solve the actual the clues are hidden throughout the book. So while we had almost no crowdfunding for that, it is selling tens of thousands of copies every week in about 10 different languages that we've translated it into. As people do that sort of the meme of Charlie from It's Always Sunny of ripping out all the pages and putting the red on the walls and trying to work it out. It's got absolutely nuts on TikTok. So that's one of those things where actually we weren't expecting that to be huge, but suddenly it takes off and then the trade sales into Amazon and those places have a completely different life of their own. Well, you were nice enough to send me some examples of stuff at Unbound. So on the extended show, if you're a patron folks, we'll be talking a little bit about things I learned from Mario's butt as well as several of the other books from Unbound. Thank you, Will. Well, it's an absolute pleasure. And I will just add that anybody listening on DTNS, we put together a little special for you. If you want to use DTNS 15 at checkout, you can get a nice little discount off anything on the site. That's lovely. DTNS 15. Good to know. Well, you might want that discount when you hear about this next product. Peng and Olafson introduced something called the Bayo Sound Theater Dolby Atmos Sound Bar at EFA 2022, which is going on right now. This is an all-in-one speaker and also a motorized TV stand that has a lot of bells and whistles. There are 12 speaker drivers, including 6.5-inch woofers, two of them. The theater can also power a Dolby Atmos 7.1.4 surround system with seven built-in outputs and support for up to 16 external loud speakers if you want to go nuts. The clincher is that the interface bracket is motorized, so that makes it easy to rotate the TV to find the best viewing angle. Maybe you're in different areas of the room, that type of thing. The cover version will set you back $6,890. If you want the wooden cover because some people prefer wood over fabric, right? Well, that goes for $7,990. They're both available October 1st. This is pricey stuff, but B&O says the design is inspired by sailboats. And it kind of does look sailboaty, really, when you see it. With either an option for the stand to sit on the floor or for the unit to be wall-mounted. Now, I have to say, not having seen this in person, I've only seen images online. I don't like it. Also, just to be clear, it's a TV stand for $7,000, but doesn't include the TV. Right. It doesn't include the speaker, but not the TV. No, the TV, you're on your own for that. But it can be swapped out. Once you mount the TV, B&O has said, you know, it's going to be, you know, just get a new TV and everything else is going to work as planned. I just think it's the whole thing is kind of ugly. I mean, it's the price of a show club, Earth Tier, remember? What do you want to do? Want to go to New York's hottest club? Or do you want to get this motorized TV stand? Yeah. What you need is to get both so you can have the Omikaze sushi in front of you if you need sand. See, that's what I always want. I'm like, screw the club. And then the motorized thing can move with the chef as they serve you. So at first I was like, motorized? Okay, like how is this good for me? Now, granted, everything in my house is, you know, I tell everything audio-wise, you know, what to do. So I'm into the future of things like this. I have a TV stand on my wall. It's, you know, it's mounted on the wall. And, you know, I can move it in various directions, which proves very helpful just because of the way that my apartment is set up. The motorized thing is silly to me because I'm never really far away from my television. But if I had it, maybe I'd like it. Yeah, you wouldn't have to get up to change the angle. I would get up like... Actually, I think I prefer the LG one that automatically curves or not, based on what you want to do. Yeah, no-ish. All right, let's check out the mailbag. What do we got there? John wrote in and said, this is in response to recent discussions we've had about aerial photography. In fact, yesterday on GDI you might have heard our conversation about France cracking down on people who have swimming pools and have not properly declared them to the tax authority. John says, I work for a civil engineering firm and we use a service called Nearmap to get updated aerial photography. Google Earth and Big Maps are usually a few years old in our area. Nearmap updates a couple times a year. When first looking into the service, it appeared to be marketed towards insurance companies, with AI being touted to find swimming pools and trampolines on properties, things like that. Additional information being determined by AI include surface permeability, ground debris, roof conditions for our use. It allows us to get a better idea of how the proposed design can take advantage of the existing site conditions. Interesting. When I had solar installed on the house, they used aerial photography of the house to kind of say, oh, well, this is how we'd lay out the panels and all of that. So it's a similar idea. Cool, I had no idea about Nearmap. Thank you for sending that in, John. That's great. Indeed. Folks, if you're free on Thursday, September 8th, so just a little bit more than a week from now at 3 p.m. Eastern time, I'll be on a free and publicly available panel with actual scientists to talk about how memory makes it harder to fight COVID-19, particularly about how it affected contact tracing, even when we had apps and other tech. The panel is part of the Association for Psychological Sciences Global Collaboration on COVID-19. So get the link. We have it in our show notes or you can just head over to PsychologicalScience.org for more. Will Harris, so nice to have you on the show today. I don't know how long it's been, but it's been a while. Let folks know, besides Unbound, where they can keep up with your work. It's been a minute and it's been absolutely fantastic to be back. So you can follow Unbound on Twitter at, at Unbounders. And you can always follow me on Twitter at Will Harris. That's with 1L and 2Rs. Excellent. We also want to extend a special thank you to Michael Engel. Michael's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. And we'd like to shout y'all out. So thank you for all the years of support, Michael. You're the best, Michael. You sure are. By the way, if you have thoughts on anything that we talk about on any show, please do send it our way. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Patrons, stick around for the extended show. A good day. Internet, we roll right into it after DTNS is done. But just a reminder, you can catch this show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern. That's 2,100 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewShow.com. We are back doing it all again tomorrow with Justin and Robert Young joining us. Talk to you then. Thank you.