 Coming up on DTNS actual evidence of a radicalizing effect from YouTube, Facebook is about to hit the skids and you are the star of a new Snapchat show coming this Saturday. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, January 30th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Baytree, I'm Sarah Lane. And from somewhere in Southern California on the show is producer Roger Chang. On Good Day Internet, we were just talking about the tree that came down on Sarah's property was a bay tree. It's affecting pole attachments in the region, electricity, telcos, cable internet, all of that. If you're interested and you know about that, please become a subscriber and get Good Day Internet at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple's redesigned Maps app has rolled out to all users in the US with better views of roads, buildings and parks, among others. Apple announced the redesign back in June of 2018, so it's finally happening. The company also says that the new Maps will arrive for users across Europe in the coming months. A jury in the US District Court for the Central District of California has ruled that Apple and Broadcom both infringed on Wi-Fi patents from the California Institute of Technology and ordered a total of $1.1 billion in damages be paid out to the CIT. The suit was filed in 2016 with Caltech naming iPhones, iPads, iPods, Apple Watches and Mac computers all as devices that included the infringing components from Broadcom. The damages break down to $837.8 million from Apple, $270.2 million from Broadcom. Avast announced that its subsidiary Jump Shot will no longer have access to user information from Avast security products. The company will wind down all Jump Shot operations. Avast CEO Andrek Visek apologized and explained that Jump Shot acted independently with its own management and board of directors. And Samsung Q4 operating profit fell 34% year over year due to low chip prices, big inventories, and the US-China trade dispute. Mobile profit rose two thirds, but that wasn't quite enough to buoy everything back up. Samsung's total operating profit for the year was its lowest since 2015, but Samsung expects things to bounce back later this year. Data center needs are rising, the chip inventory is going down, 5G rollouts are increasing chip demand. Samsung did not comment on the impact of the coronavirus other than to confirm it has extended holiday closures for some of its Chinese factories in line with Chinese government guidance. Let's talk a little bit about that smartphone industry. The 2019 smartphone infirmars are in from a bunch of analysts. Canalus shows that Samsung increased its worldwide market share. That would go along with that Samsung number we just heard about their sales. Samsung market share is now 21.8% up from 21.1% in 2018. Huawei moved into the number two slot worldwide growing from 14.8% to 17.6% despite US trade restrictions. They've sold enough inside China to keep their numbers up. A lot of people are saying if there wasn't trade restrictions, Huawei might have dominated and passed Samsung. But as it was, they came into number two. Counterpoint estimates 60% of its shipments were inside China. Apple's worldwide market share fell from 15.3% to 14.5%. Xiaomi and Oppo both increased their market share but stayed at numbers four and five. Now, Apple having decreased market share worldwide on the year is not great news, but Apple had some good news about Q4, kind of similar to their earnings report from Q4. Counterpoint, Canalus and Strategy Analytics all estimate Apple took over number one worldwide Q4 just barely outselling Samsung. They were both really close to 70 million. IHS market estimated Samsung still at number one, but Apple was really close on the other end, so it's a virtual tie. All three of the analyst companies, Counterpoint, Canalus and Strategy Analytics estimated that fewer smartphones in general were sold in 2019 than 2018. So Q4 for Apple and the whole year for Samsung, Huawei, Oppo and Xiaomi bucking the trend. But yet overall smartphone sales being down, which is something that we've heard about as of late. I wonder what, because China's going through a little situation right now and Samsung had a good year. Apple had a great quarter and it does appear that there are some movers and shakers in those middle categories, but the fact that smartphone numbers being down overall makes me wonder, what are we going to be talking about a year from now? I have a feeling we've reached cruising altitude with smartphones. I don't think they're going to start declining precipitously. We're talking about one or two percent decline, which to me is flat. So I think it's all jockeying for position now. We've probably got some room to grow in Africa, still some more in India and a few other parts of the world, but we're generally reaching saturation in the large markets like China, Europe and the United States. So now it's about who can maintain that cruising altitude and avoid the fate of Nokia and Blackberry. Well, and Huawei moving into the number two slots. Despite U.S. trade restrictions, does that hold? Yeah, can they fight those? Can they fight those currents? Can they stay aloft if they're still fighting these trade restrictions? I mean, it was a good was a good first act for that fight, right? Yeah, absolutely. Speaking of Huawei, Huawei's Austrian country manager Fred Wangfei told Austrian newspaper their standard. Sorry about my German accent that it doesn't attend to return to Google Play services, even after restrictions are lifted. He said that Huawei wants to develop its own ecosystem on Android, something that it already has to do domestically since Google Play services aren't offered in China. Huawei says it replicates 24 of the 60 Google Play APIs through its Huawei mobile services and is also considering starting a European proxy company to let U.S. companies like Facebook submit apps to the Huawei app gallery. However, and this is kind of breaking news here, responding to the verge of Huawei spokesperson wrote, our first choice is the open Android ecosystem. Including GMS, that's Google mobile services. The spokesperson added, I believe both Google and Huawei hope a license will be granted, but you would need to confirm that with Google. As a reason of the entity listening, we're now developing HMS, that's Huawei mobile services, inviting app developers to come on board, etc. This offer has received a lot of positive interest in Europe. So now question is, did that newspaper get it wrong? Editor at their standard, Andreas Pochofsky, wrote on Twitter, there was no wiggle room in what Huawei told me. I asked them several times as I was rather surprised myself and they insisted on not going back to Google, even if the US ban fails. So how initially my thoughts on this were, is this some bluster? Is this kind of, you know, a little bit of a bluff and maybe stoking some patriotism at home for the Huawei brand, showing the strength of Huawei. Now that Huawei has come back out and said very carefully, our first choice is the open Android ecosystem. I definitely think it was bluster on the part of Austrian manager Fred Wangfei. I think I don't know if it's coordinated, it doesn't even have to be. But it's definitely Huawei employees trying to get the message out of, we don't have to have you back, US. If you don't want to make this happen, you've taught us how to stand on our own. And maybe we will. So maybe it's in your best interest to play nicer with us. And this also ties into the wider fight against Huawei networking equipment where the US is trying to convince countries not to use it at all, etc. So I feel like this is a little bit more of a war of words than an actual policy where Huawei is saying, no, no, we feel comfortable with our Huawei mobile services. And that's what we're going to do from here on out. I think this is this is more bluster than it is policy. Yeah. Yeah, interesting. It's if the newspaper has to now submit some sort of retraction, saying sorry, we just got that wrong, that that's sort of embarrassing. But it is it would be important to know what. No, no, no, no. This is a very important point. They will not issue a retraction based on what Prostrovsky said. He said, we asked them several times, are you sure this is what you mean to say? And they said, yes. So there will not be a retraction at best. There will be a contradicting statement. Well, Huawei is now saying this, even though this Huawei person said that. But I liked that the editor from Dirstandard came out and is like, no, no, we did our job. We didn't just get the quote wrong. Like we we even double checked, which is good journalism. Yeah. Well, and just goes to show you that when you are a company as large as Huawei, you need to make sure that your managers are on the same page. For sure. We talked about the Microsoft earnings yesterday. There wasn't a whole lot more to go in. If you if you missed that show, basically, Azure is kicking all of the cloud services, if can, around the sky. And Xbox Digital was was down a little bit on the year, but Microsoft didn't seem too concerned with that. They're like, yeah, we don't have new products out. We had a big title a year ago that that made the numbers higher than usual. So all in all, it was it was a decent earnings report for Microsoft. However, they also announced that they plan to spend 40 million dollars, not that much for Microsoft, on a program called AI for Health. Over five years, Microsoft plans to spend money giving partners access to Microsoft data scientists, AI and cloud tools and some actual cash grants. Partners in the program will include nonprofits, researchers, industry professionals and government programs. Among its projects will be things like trying to understand sudden infant death syndrome or maternal mortality, fighting leprosy and tuberculosis, improving tools to prevent blindness and expanding access to cancer information, particularly with child cancer. Microsoft says only 3% of AI professionals work in health organizations and the program hopes to allow doctors to treat more patients and improve the quality of care. This this is important because we know that one of the things that AI is actually good at if you separate the hype from the reality is a diagnostic aid. It's good at finding patterns. It's good at pointing out things that a doctor can then use to make a final diagnosis. It can help inform decisions and speed up some of the work. So it would be important to get this into the hands of more doctors in a useful way. Absolutely. I mean, if you're if you're a researcher trying to figure out how tuberculosis gets eradicated, eventually, then anything like this that give you new tools that maybe won't help, but might help and might save a lot of lives. And at some of the other medical conditions that you mentioned, Tom, that's really great. My first thought because I'm pessimistic is Microsoft 40 million. That almost sounds low. But I think that it would, you know, I that's it would sort of be ridiculous for me to to say that when the number could also be zero. Sure. Yeah. So, you know, so this is this is a step on the right direction. I'm really interested to see what comes out of it and how certain nonprofits might say, thanks, Microsoft, because of you, we were able to achieve these things that we weren't able to achieve before. Yeah, certainly any partner that gets a cash grant or gets some assistance that they wouldn't have had otherwise is going to be appreciative. But the criticism you're absolutely right is is this just a PR stunt? I mean, it's definitely a play for PR companies don't do that. We're not we're not innocent. We're not naive here. We know companies don't do this purely out of the goodness of their hearts. But is this also useful? That's what's always important. Is it not just good PR, but also going to make a difference? And I don't know if there's somebody out there who works in this industry and has a good perspective, please email us feedback at daily technewshow.com because I'd like to know if 40 million sounds like the amount that could make a difference or not. It could go either way. Absolutely. You know, who else has 40 million dollars to burn? And Mark Zuckerberg Facebook. Yeah, Facebook reported 25 percent revenue growth for its latest quarter, but also a rise in quarterly expenses of 34 percent related to privacy protections and content moderation. Both of those numbers were bigger than expected. So more revenue, but also more expenses. Future guidance from Facebook does warn that growth will slow as the business matures. Facebook's CFO, David Winner, said that the majority of the impact from privacy regulations and ad targeting concerns lie in front of us. So they're they're laying the foundation that there might be some down quarters ahead. He specifically noted changes in the way that Google and Apple's browsers handle cookies. Amongst all of this monthly active users across all products, all Facebook products rose 8 percent to 2.89 billion worldwide. Facebook monthly active users rose 2 percent to 2.5 billion. And CEO Mark Zuckerberg said, quote, my goal for this next decade isn't to be liked, but to be understood because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for. OK, I want to get to the the rising expenses, which were rising much faster than analysts expected. I want to get to the the Facebook cautionary tales where David Winner saying, hey, folks, we haven't even started to feel the headwinds yet. Like our growth is going to slow. And the fact that with all of Facebook's troubles, they're still able to raise their monthly active users 2 percent and across Instagram and WhatsApp, 8 percent. But my goal for this next decade isn't to be liked. Well, OK, that's probably, you know, that's something you need to accept. Don't worry about that, but to be understood because in order to be trusted, people need to know what you stand for. I think it's easy to take potshots at this statement. But I think he's actually saying something. I don't think this is just falter all. And that's because we know that Facebook has a trust problem. Facebook knows that it has a trust problem. And he is saying we've been trying to make people happy and that hasn't make them trust us. So now what we need to do is explain our principles to them, help them understand why we do things the way we do. And and if I can dig into this a little more, I think it's because Zuckerberg assumes, and I think probably rightly, this is this is just a guess that people don't trust them because they think they're just in it for the money. So he wants to help convince them that they're not just in it for the money that they are a company that, of course, needs to make money, but they have principles beyond that that they're trying to achieve. I think that's a hard sell. Yeah, I mean. Back back in the early days of Facebook, when it was just a college network, I might say, yeah, it's kind of, you know, this is a revolution of sorts of social networking. I do believe that Facebook's in it for the money. I understand that they have trust issues that is largely Facebook's fault. Some of it was probably unanticipated, but it is it just as a reality. The the interesting thing about Facebook's own monthly active users rising two percent, two point five billion. OK. Well, again, I feel like I've been saying this for the last five years, but it's like eventually we're going to we're going to get global here. Everybody's going to be on Facebook. And those monthly active users can't continue to rise. But it's interesting that the company and maybe this is a little bit of a I am just looking into my crystal ball at this point. I wonder at what point, if ever, Facebook wants to bundle in monthly active users across all of its products across the boards. Now, we know that some people want to break up Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and any of Facebook's other subsidiaries. But I think that that would be the key at some point in the not too distant future, what Facebook has to do that so that their monthly active users don't fall. Yeah. And we see an indication that they're they're headed that way with a sort of an arcane number that they they announced in the earnings called family average revenue per person. So average revenue per person is here's how much we make on average off each person who uses our service. Right. Family, Facebook's family, not our family. Family average revenue per person is here's how much we make off each person across the family of our brands. So that's combining Instagram, WhatsApp, Facebook, Messenger, all together. And that that's a step towards what you're talking about, where they they're kind of I think starting to come to terms with the fact that Facebook itself may be merely a driver. It may be a lost leader because it's so huge. It's too big to get rid of, but it's also becoming so costly to operate that they need to just use it to push people into the other brands that make money. And that's, of course, why they want to unify the messaging across that and all of that. But family average revenue per person, which, by the way, Josh Constain at TechCrunch said, sadly, Facebook is not calling the metric FARP. It's ARP. They left the F out of the acronym. But that's a move towards that. I'm very interested in the FARP next time they do their earnings. Scientists at Switzerland's Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil presented a paper at the ACM FAT 2020 conference in Barcelona that found YouTube users who engaged in some moderately or mildly extreme content. So you're like, wait, is it mild or extreme? Well, there's a spectrum. There's like really extreme and not as extreme. Mildly extreme is, you know, at the close end. If people engaged in some of that content, they tended to drift towards the more radically extreme content over time. You may say, well, that's what I would have expected, but you didn't know until you tested it. It could have been that people go into mildly extreme content, start to experience more radical content and get turned off. Like, oh, that's too extreme and go back. But that's not what they found. They did find that people just kept getting more and more extreme if they went in there. What they also found was that this is people who start there. People don't generally jump from mainstream content into even the mildly extreme content. The team analyzed 330,925 videos posted on 349 channels encompassing 72 million comments. They classified videos into four types from mainstream to that far right extreme. The researchers did not claim YouTube was responsible for the radicalization. They allowed that the radicalization could be coming from outside the platform. They may be engaging in this content because they're being radicalized outside. And this is just one element of that radicalization. But in our constant, at least my constant attempt to find evidence of what's going on so that we can better combat it rather than just guessing what's going on and trying things that may or may not work. I like this because it says, OK, we know if you go in here, you're likely to end up over here. That's something useful that YouTube can use to create policies around. What I find really interesting, too, is that the researchers were careful to say it's not just because you watched one. I don't know, this is a somewhat radical video. And then the platform suggested something way deeper. That's not what's going on. It's more of human behavior because we analyzed so many videos and how people were interacting with them from 350 different channels. Doesn't mean that the platform isn't to blame for some of this stuff, certainly, but that's not the what sort of the takeaway is like, well, YouTube just sucks and they're radicalizing people, even if it's all algorithmic. That's not really it. It's more based on if you get used to a certain type of content, then you tend to sort of maybe you get a little desensitized to something that could have been, again, offputting to you before or too or too intense or whatever it is. And and and that's something that we all have to think about. Yeah, and this this is important because I think a lot of times people like fix the algorithm, right? But what does that mean? How do you fix the algorithm? What what part of the algorithm? And this would be something that you could take action on to say, ah, OK, so we want to really make sure that we're not pushing people from the mainstream stuff into the slightly more radical stuff. And we want to put extra roadblocks in between going from the mild stuff to the extreme stuff. Because those are the two points where it's like they don't generally move here. So we want to keep that happening. And we know that it's really easy for them to move over there. So let's let's spend our let's prioritize figuring out that side of it. I know that you're like, well, the easy answer is just not let any of that radical stuff up there. But that's a whole lot easier said than done, too. So you kind of need to approach this on all the fronts that you can fight it on, right? Yeah, absolutely. Well, here's a little bit of a head scratcher, at least for me. Snapchat will premiere Bitmoji TV on Saturday, which inserts you and your friends Bitmoji avatars, if you've made them, into PG 13 animated adventures. So basically full motion Bitmoji stories. Bitmoji TV will have its own Snapchat show page where you can subscribe, get notifications, see new episodes on the Discover page as well. Your Bitmoji stars along the Bitmoji of the last person that you interacted with. So Tom and I have been interacting. Then, you know, we're kind of the stars of the show together, which is probably supposed to, you know, just kind of keep it relevant. Also, occasional guest Bitmojis from celebrities such as Randy Jackson, Andy Richter and John Lovitz, because nothing says millennial like those three. The first two episodes are about America's best Bitmoji game show and a mime cops hostage negotiation with occasional flips to short single gag clips that put your avatar into sitcoms and soap operas and infomercials and more. The first season will have 10 episodes and no ads. So there's really no reason you shouldn't try this out if you're at all interested. I don't want to say anything ill about something that I have not seen work yet. It it it makes very little sense to me. But it maybe it's just a novelty. It's like, oh, look, it's me kind of thing. And maybe some people are very tied to their Bitmoji. I have one. I think it kind of looks like me. I mean, in the limitations that Bitmoji provides. But I don't know how much I would get out of this, but maybe I just got to see it in motion. Yeah, I'm going based on the TechCrunch reporting, Josh Constine again, doing the Lord's work over there at TechCrunch, saying Randy Jackson, Andy Richter and John Lovitz. I looked to see if I could find other listings from Snapchat about this and I failed. Maybe they're out there, but I didn't find them. But it did strike me as an odd collection of people that are not top of mind for the young Gen Z millennial crossover that makes up the Snapchat audience. I mean, John Lovitz was recently on Saturday Night Live. Don't get me wrong, like he's out there working. Andy Richter's on TV almost every night. I'm sure Randy Jackson's still doing something out there. He's not on American Idol anymore, though. So he's not as high profile as he used to be. And that's my point, like these seem interesting choices. But that aside, because I don't know, maybe there's other great choices in here and maybe these make perfect sense and they're super fun. I mean, I thought it was odd that the magicians featured a bunch of 1980s songs and it's fourth season, but that seemed to be super popular. So there you go. What do I know? I'm 50 years old. I'm an old man. You're not exactly 50 yet. Well, I'm pretty much. Take note. Take note, audience. Don't fact check my age, thoroughly. What I'm trying to get at is. I think I'm like you, I need to see this first. But it sounds like it could be fun content. It sounds like they did the right thing where they didn't make lame content that the whole feature is you're in it. They tried to make really funny, like Saturday Night Live, Rick and Morty level funny stuff and then use the technology to put you in it as an added novelty, which is where I slightly differ from you. I think this might continue to be worth watching for people, but they'll forget that they're in it. It won't. They won't be watching it because their bitmojis in it. They'll just watch it because it's funny stuff. Yeah, that's possible. I try to think of. I have to assume that Snapchat says, here's where we start with this. And eventually we get to the point where Sarah with her, you know, a cat filter or whatever, then we get into more almost live action type stuff. That's where I would be like, if it if they could pull it off, I'd be really impressed. The bitmoji stuff, I'm like, and, you know, it's like a sort of South Park Woken character. But but but again, I will reserve judgment until I've seen it. I actually think this is the kind of thing I'll be very curious that I will hear a lot of people talking about this weekend. We'll be having people talking about like, oh, my gosh, my bitmoji thing was so funny because I was in it with this person that I didn't know exactly the last person I talked to. Yeah. And is that is? Yeah. Is that a thing you do once? Where is that a thing you go? Oh, now this is, you know, this is part of my weekly routine. It's so funny. I don't know. We will find out. I will be certain to tune into my Bitmoji TV. That's the other thing is that yours is never the same as the other person's, even though the script is, the effect will be different because of who's in it, I think. Right, right. If you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, there's an easy way to do it, folks. Keep up on the tech news. Even when you don't have a full 30 for DTNS, become a subscriber of Daily Tech Headlines at DailyTechHeadlines.com. You know what I want to do? I want to thank everybody who participates in our subreddit. Be all the best. 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