 Oops. This is The Daily Tech News Show for Wednesday, December 26, 2018 from DTNS Headquarters in Los Angeles. I'm John Merritt. And from Studio Feline, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Welcome to our listener co-host show. This is the annual episode where we invite some of our supporters, some of our members, some of the DTNS audience folks that we do the show for to come on here and talk to us about what they do and why they like technology and why they listen joining us this time. We're very happy to have pianist and composer Justin Coughlin. Justin, thanks for joining us. Hey. Glad to be here. Been a big fan since Buzz Out Loud and i5 for the iPhone. So this is very exciting for me. All right. Good. Yeah. Go way back. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for being willing to do this. So Michael Parker, who's a purchasing manager at ACD Distribution, thank you, Michael, for joining us. Hello. And we'll be talking to everybody about what they do, including our other guest, Liam Hughes, senior software developer at Focus Software. Liam, thanks so much. Glad to be here. Ah, you're in Australia, are you? I am. So it's December. Let's give it a wait. For you. Yes. I'm in the future. Yeah. We're all kind of in the future. In a way. But you're even more in the future. Yes. Well, thank you guys so much. I know there are so many people who respond every year who want to be on this show. And we really appreciate all that response. And I always wish we could just have everybody. But for reasons of listenability and production resources and whatever, we have to limit it to three. And I think we picked three folks who can represent some interesting viewpoints. And if you didn't get picked to be on the show this year, keep asking. Keep trying. We'll start by talking to Justin. So you're not just a pianist and composer. You're also a touring musician and educator. And you also can't see. Yeah. You're blind, right? That is right. Totally blind. And that's pretty much my story. I told it all for you. I'm so sorry. Oh, no worries. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess just a little bit of background of where I'm coming from is, yeah, I play jazz piano. Don't hold that against me. I love jazz. That's all right. Like, you know, all kinds of music. But as a jazz pianist, I think for a long time, my aspirations were pretty low. But a crazy thing happened about almost 10 years ago. A buddy of mine decided he wanted to make a film about one of our teachers. A guy named Clark Terry. And he wanted to film, he filmed for about four years and threw me in the mix as one of Clark's students. And after the four years, they actually made this movie. Crazy thing happened is that through the filming of the movie, we met Clark's first student who was Quincy Jones from the 50s. Wow. Wow. So the movie gets made and it gets out there. And ever since meeting Quincy, I've been working with him. And that's kind of because, you know, as a jazz pianist, my goal was to be a good musician back in Virginia. But now I'm living out in the LA area. And when I'm home, I'm here with my guide dog, Candy. And when I'm on the road, accessible tech is extremely helpful. Yeah. So tell us a little bit about the tech you use to get by in your day, both at home and on the road. So, I mean, I probably would start to say that just technology in general. For me, in my experience of it, it's split into two parts before the iPhone 3GS and after. The 3GS is when Apple introduced VoiceOver, the screen reader for the iPhone. And that was groundbreaking because first of all, I didn't think I would ever use a touch screen, but they created an interface where basically I dragged my finger across the screen. It tells me what's there. And not only do I know what's there, but I know where it is, which is a new thing for a blind user. The other thing was that I could actually have something that was cool. Like an iPhone. Before then, you know, blind tech was always quite old, very expensive, and, you know, definitely not cool. So, the iPhone is this Swiss ironing knife of very useful tools. So, when I'm on the road, you know, hotels are always different. So, FaceTime for me is a godsend because I call somebody back at home who I trust and we walk through the room and they tell me where the thermostat is. I said the thermostat. We go into the bathroom and I find out which one of the four identically shaped bottles is the shampoo and the conditioner. Because I don't want to wash my body with conditioner. So, that was big, being able to use that to get sighted assistants remotely. And then PayPal and Venmo, of course, everybody uses them. But for me as a band leader, this eliminates the stress that I used to have. Like, do I have to write checks for my band members? And I don't really want somebody else writing the checks for me. You know, I don't want them giving themselves more money than I want them to. So, PayPal just simplifies everything and I'm, you know, I'm using the same tech and the same apps as everybody else. But it's been... In a different way. Yeah, it's been extremely... Justin, here's a question I have for you. Because we try to cover assistive technology as much as possible on the show because it's important. You know, most recently we covered the idea of Instagram photos having, you know, read out loud descriptions, either by AI or if a user submitted it. How much are some of these technologies really lacking for somebody who's actually living and breathing this? I'm glad to see any developments. I'll say when Facebook rolled out their AI described pictures, it wasn't too exciting. So, when AI does it, I'll see that somebody posted a picture and it'll say so-and-so is in the picture. And I'm like, well, that's cool, but also not terribly helpful or descriptive. Right, the context is lacking. If a user is able to go in and actually enter in text to really paint a picture for the blind user, that is cool. And of course, if AI gets better, then we might have more substantial things coming from that. But it's all baby steps. I'm just happy to see any progress. That's always exciting and to have it covered in any news platform is just always good to see. I like seeing the Microsoft story that you guys reported on about the closed captioning in real time. Because all this stuff helps. And Microsoft actually has been doing a great job. They've rolled out Soundscape, which is a GPS app. It's free. I've downloaded it on the iPhone. And they've also rolled out another app called Seeing AI that reads currency. So, I actually know what dollar bills I have. So, it's just good to see things being rolled out by the major companies. Not by a specialized blindness tech company, which is good too. But it's even better when it's mainstream. Because then I feel included. Now, I know that Roger said that you had a question you wanted to ask us about. Yeah. I've just been curious. I've been watching these or listening to these podcasts for a long time. I'm curious if somebody is watching the video, what do they see? Is it like Brady Bunch? Is it that kind of thing? Is it Hollywood Squares? Well, it's not unlike that, I suppose. I mean, if you're talking about the Google Hangouts experience, I mean, as far as Tom and Roger and I go, and all of our regular contributors, we all kind of have our little backgrounds. Certainly at my house, you'll see a dog and two cats walking around behind me very regularly. You know, at Roger's house, his daughter maybe makes an appearance every so often. Tom's pretty good about all his free friends away. But yeah, that's an interesting question. Because of course, we know a lot of people listen to our audio show, but don't watch it. But if you could never watch it, what does it look like? Because I go back to, you know, I listen to Buzz out loud and I just imagined a round table and I don't even know if that's correct. But you know, because you hear things and you just paint a picture automatically in your mind. But yeah, it was just something that I had wondered about. Video automatically switches. It's full screen for each one of us. So it's not like Brady Bunch in that way. Each one of us is on screen as we're talking. Hangouts will automatically switch to the person that's talking. And then down in the bottom, we have little chicklets that sort of see the other person's camera. Everyone hanging. So like right now it's like one, two, three, four, five, seven of us. Yeah, because there's two of them down there. Yeah. Got it. So it's mostly full screen though. Okay. Very cool. Yeah. Well, let's talk to Michael a little bit. Michael's a purchasing manager for a distributor of hobby toys and games. Michael, what kind of content? What is it? Is it tabletop, RPG, all of that kind of stuff? So we focus on analog hobby games and toys. So we service a lot of independent retailers. So, you know, in the LA area, there's, you know, like Gamescape or up in the San Francisco Bay area, there's a number and game out in Oakland, as well as Gamescape in San Francisco and San Rafael. So these independent retailers are getting product, Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, other role-playing games, other board games, miniatures games, hobby supplies, all of these things and the majority of them are purchasing from distributors or directly from the manufacturer, depending on their relationship or how big they are. Like a lot of these small independent specialty stores don't necessarily want to have a relationship with, you know, 50 to 60 different manufacturers that might be their top sellers. So they'll work with distributors who aggregate that content down and, you know, combine shipments to make shipping more reasonable and justifiable and things like that. And that's a lot of what... So I am on the not sales end. I'm on the purchasing end. So I work with the manufacturers to bring in inventory to our warehouses and then our sales team takes that inventory and resells it back to those retailers. So the hobby shop buys from the distributor because that makes it a little cheaper to get a lot of things at once. And you're the guy that makes sure the things are on the shelves when they order them. Correct. Okay. Let's make sure I got that right. Yep. So what kind of technology do you use? I'm sure you use a lot. I mean, we talk about logistics quite a bit on the show. So the interesting thing that I thought that I could kind of share was just kind of... Particularly when you talk about, like, Amazon or some of these really big players kind of in the supply management space. Amazon obviously operates a number of warehouses that are both direct to consumer as well as they operate their services platform. A lot of the technology that they're starting to develop is probably years to a decade down the line for what we could start using. So a lot of what we're using is a little more designed specifically for kind of the cottage industry that I kind of operate in. So from a purely technological perspective, a lot of... Like we are using modern warehousing techniques and things like that, but a lot of what we do kind of from a supply chain management is we're really excited about some of these developments that we're going to start seeing down the line, particularly when you're talking about being able to verify shipments through blockchain or getting better analytics as far as kind of how our delivery schedule works. Because a lot of that is stuff that we're still needing to do manually and when you're talking about games and toys and books and things like that, a lot of those industries are stretched back into a lot of the pre-internet days. So we're working with... And particularly us as a distributor who works with a large volume of manufacturers, we're dealing with wide variances of technological level infrastructure within those manufacturers. And then we need to kind of translate that into how that's coming across in our system and ultimately to be able to give the retailers and the retailers, the end consumers the information about, well, I want X product, I want X game, or I want X book, or I want these toys. When are we going to get that? Managing that information flow. You sound like the kind of person that people would assume would be worried about automation eliminating your job. Do you feel like machine learning and AI is just going to make your job better or are you worried about eventually some day, uh oh, they won't need me? I'm not as worried about that specifically with automation. I mean, I'm looking forward to automation coming in and taking pieces of my job away that I have to do manually. I long for the day that I can make certain elements of my workflow easier. But there are definitely things I think in the supply chain that are going to be automated out of the human intervention. And I'm not necessarily worried about those and specifically in my industry a lot of it is user tastes. I mean, similar things you would see in kind of like book publishing or fashion or things where the end consumer preferences are very high, influence the market quite a bit. You're still going to have kind of taste makers or gatekeepers that try and distill information from kind of early in the supply chain process to anticipate what is going to be popular within consumers down the line. Yeah, I feel like that sounds like the kind of thing that AI is good for in medicine, right? In medicine, you don't get rid of the doctor. The AI helps the doctor diagnose by suggesting things. I feel like AI could help suggest things to look at to capture those early taste maker situations. But you still need the human touch in there. Absolutely. So one of the tools that we've used is we've used inventory analytics software that kind of helps grade products along with varying criteria and then throws up basically infographics or metrics to say here are the number of products that you have in these categories and these are the ones that have this level of high velocity versus these are low velocity and you can start using that information intelligently to say, well, I now have these that are an accelerated curve for what I need to purchase. Maybe I need to go look at ordering more or these have slowed down. Maybe I need to start divesting myself of inventory or not worrying about restocking that particular line. So we've used a lot of that particularly in the toy market which is somewhat new for my company. We've grown into that space in the last year and we've been working with those toy stores which is all new for us. So we're taking a lot of that type of metrics information a lot more seriously as we need to react quicker because we don't necessarily have the in-house expertise to have a baseline of the product as much as we have with the things we've carried for decades like board games and card games and things like that. You know, Michael, you mentioned Amazon a few minutes ago that has gone above and beyond trying to figure out how to best sell to your audience but let's say you were a little bit newer to the market. How much does that sort of big conglomerate perhaps help a smaller seller that might not have the exposure and the reach otherwise versus heard it? So from one of the things that we've seen trending wise just over the last several years the Amazon Marketplace and Kickstarter have really opened up the potential for a lot of independent creators in the same way that it's done for a lot of industries where getting directly to the end consumer has never been easier so we see that there's a lot of product getting out into the market that maybe it doesn't actually need a lifespan and distribution but this person who's creating a handful of games on Kickstarter can fulfill those directly to his audience and maybe he sells the remainder on the Amazon Marketplace Justin talks all the time about how his games can be found on Amazon and for him and his audience that's a perfectly reasonable and logical place for him to sell his products there's such a wide option for products particularly for retailers online as well as brick and mortar stores that not everything needs to necessarily be in a brick and mortar store and what we see is that there's a small divide between these publishers that are able to focus on their niche within the market as well as people who are still operating off of the traditional publishing model where a bigger publisher takes it does a large print run brings inventory and then sells their direct accounts, big box stores as well as into distribution or directly to those smaller independent stores So you're kind of in between there's the direct through Amazon approach and there's the direct from the manufacturer approach do you see that there's a good future for that middle approach that sort of helps connect the dots Yeah I mean and I think overall as kind of the market itself kind of grows just with these other avenues and technology kind of helping these other avenues basically support themselves maintain themselves The other thing that we're seeing is that communities for and consumers are growing every year there's more and more like local conventions for hobby games and just nerd culture in general that games are a part of that culture for a large number of those communities and the technology that kind of helps support those communities and those networks mean that there's still opportunities for people who are either at conventions or supporting them or supporting local communities through their local shops before working distribution I managed a retail store in the San Francisco Bay Area for a number of years and one of the models that we focused on was focused on Starbucks third space model where you have work, you have home and then you have a place where that's your community center and for a lot of people who are enthusiasts for hobby products that game store is that third space where in addition to obviously offering the retail component of it there's the community that's managed whether they're playing in store or they're just using the store as a spring board to play elsewhere or form local home groups out of that type of situation and developments in social media and being able to kind of manage communities has only enhanced that ability for a retailer to be able to kind of curate their communities and engage with them better in the same way that a content creator would. Well let's get to Liam who has been patiently waiting always patiently waiting for the rest of the world to be in the same day and also waiting for things like the U.S. to get tapped to pay but Liam Hughes senior software developer at Focus Software tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into app development So from the earliest time I can remember I've wanted to be a computer programmer my dad introduced us to computers very early and basically when it came time for me to go to university I went and did computer science I had a bit of a diversion for a little bit including doing some consulting with IBM but I've been here at Focus now for about 6 years doing web based application development And did you use any particular technology to help find work to help get your job? Pretty standard really JobBlood went on a job site my contract with IBM was coming to a close so I just went online and found this application development job in country New South Wales which is rare but I was very excited at the opportunity Okay so Liam my question to you is how many folks do you do you deal with work with on an everyday basis that you don't see You're not in the same hemisphere with Yeah so I mean for our company we have sales and customer support in the UK, the US and Australia but all the software development is done here in orange so my team of about 12 we have some contact with our customer service staff for sure but a lot of that is obviously asynchronous with time zones so we use email in JIRA but yeah the core team is here in orange How long have you been doing app development for again? Yeah so I guess about 7 years all up I had a crack at iPhone development but the sales didn't take off it was a greater learning experience though and I did a bit of contract work but full time for about 6 years It feels like your part area of software development has been fairly stable from the outside whereas like you say iPhone app development has its rises and falls it's getting more stable now too does it feel that way from the inside or would you dispute that notion? Yeah I mean I guess for us we as a company we've had the subscription model for a very long time before I think it was popular so we've kind of had we haven't always had to worry about big splashy releases as long as we're consistently providing value to our customers then they stick around and we are able to keep working away at our applications Is there a dream application that you would like to work on one day? I used to have lots of lots of after your IBM experience I mean family life takes up a lot of my time so I don't have a lot of time for side jobs at the moment I've got a notebook filling my Evernote with different ideas but nothing that stands out Well and Roger said that you had a question for us Yeah I guess a few years ago I got back into reading partially because I wanted to do the whole no-screen time before sleep thing I know Tom reads a book or two I was just wondering if each of you if there was one book that would be your absolute favorite or perhaps one book that you have learnt the most from Ooh Well if we're talking about fiction and this one's a little obvious but Fear and Lothian in Las Vegas is my absolute favorite book I've read it like a hundred times it's just the funniest thing I've ever read in my life movie not so funny didn't work it just didn't translate in my opinion but that would be my favorite book that I still have it's like a very weathered paperback that's under my TV right now but otherwise well I don't know I mean Tom and Roger please weigh in I I'll confess to rereading Dune because that was one of the first things I got unfortunately I had a lot of typos because I think they just did an OCR of the actual book but it was one of the first books that I read not as a kid but like a teenager where you know the whole allegory of the book and this stuff was such an important corner stone of the entire what would be the series although I've only read the first book but I've always enjoyed it because it both as literature but also because one of the biggest fattest books I've ever willingly sat through and read and not like kind of just like I don't ever want to do this again it's one of those things unfortunately the past two years ever since actually I moved down to LA I actually haven't had that much time I have kids that cry for my attention constantly and it's not conducive at all to reading the printed page well I've mentioned this a million times but for those who haven't heard The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick is kind of my favorite book of all time just because I'm a big fan of alternate history and what could be and differences and and it's set in the 60s so it's got that retro to it as far as the book that I've learned the most from would be hard for me to pin down I was very influenced by the clue train manifesto seven habits of highly effective people for all things getting things done those of all kind of contributed to the way I put things together but I don't know if there's one book that I've learned the most from I feel like it's just kind of get pieces like that out there and everything just adds a little something as you go along it's a hard one for me to answer in that way I might be the minority but I don't read a lot of nonfiction and it's not because I don't enjoy it it's because I feel like I kind of live that so when I kind of sit down and want to escape maybe into another world so all of the books that I love the most and are dearest to my heart are fiction and that's my own sort of escapism thing going on but I'm sure a lot of people share that sentiment with me I'm actually curious if Justin or Michael have an answer to this question as far as a favorite book man I think it's whatever currently reading I guess you only read a book that's better than the last one I probably revisit Terry Pratchett's books pretty frequently as a I've read them all so going to bed that's a fun one that's a lot of them too you've got a whole number to choose from there there's what 30 some and I assume those are the audiobooks and the the audio reader for the Terry Pratchett books is fantastic I could not read those in print because I didn't understand the joke until it was read to me with a British accent Michael do you have an answer to your favorite book? if we're talking about the most influential book it's probably Roger Zalazny's Chronicles of Amber series I reread that series once a year-ish as far as one that I've actually learned the most from I read a book in college by Simon Sinek called Start with Why and it was an interesting book about it's kind of about the process of why we engage with brands as kind of a meta term it talks about Walmart and Apple and things of that nature but it talks about what speaks to us about brand loyalty to a certain degree why someone is always going to use an Apple product because not just because of the aesthetic or the functionality but what that brand might mean to them on a personal level and it was very interesting just to kind of think about how that affects our culture from a mind-share perspective Liam I want to turn your question around back to you I'm curious what your answer would be to your own question I realised about two minutes ago that you might ask that so I guess for fiction definitely into the science fiction when I yeah like I said having not read for many years when I got back into it I started with I think it was Ender's Game which I managed to avoid the spoiler to so that was definitely gripped to me and I stay up too late reading that a lot I actually as a Christian I read the Bible a lot and then for non-fiction predictably irrational has changed the way I think about how we think and that we're not always aware of why we do what we do that's great I'm curious before we wrap up here if you guys have any questions for each other now that you've sort of gotten to hear each other's stories I know that's sort of an awkward thing to throw out there sometimes so you may not but don't be afraid to throw out a question if you've got one right now this is that part at the end of a conference we're trying not to put you on the spot but you sort of do let me ask justin this okay because you work with Quincy Jones sure you have some idea of him as a person are there any memorable moments that you could share that wouldn't get anyone in trouble I'm just curious one thing that's worth mentioning and I had mentioned it to you earlier Roger but when the articles came out I'm not one that likes to I don't interact a whole lot with whatever but when you guys actually covered it when these articles came out and Quincy people I think the internet was like is he crazy or whatever and when I read it I loved it because it really did capture what it's like to sit down and have a relaxed conversation with him but when it was written in print all of the things that contextualized what he was saying made it seem so much kind of more sensational nonsensical between email and talking to someone I mean how many times do we run in every day where we say something in email or we say something in Slack even and people react in a way that you're like oh no I didn't mean that because it's written the written word always plays different I mean Tom and Roger and I talk all day every day and we do that constantly where I'm like alright and Tom's like no I didn't mean it there is something lost when you're not you know face to face he is an incredible human being and one memory the thing that pops into my mind the first thing was one of the first times I was at his house it was we were hanging in his living room and it's him Candy's with me and his daughters Rashida and Kidada and Candy so she's a black lab so she's a real lover and we're all pretty much on the floor just hanging and they're petting Candy and Candy was just like sprawled out one paw was on Rashida's leg the other one is on Kidada and Quincy was just like oh my gosh oh my goodness he was just so taken aback by how comfortable Candy was and pretty much ever since then I think my name has become Candy Man and that can be very embarrassing in like in public because I'll be doing a performance and he makes it appearance and he shows up and it goes from the audience Candy Man stop saying that he's the best though we love him it's one of those things where nobody else understands why he's saying that unless they've now heard you tell the story yeah well any other questions at all even questions for us that you guys have got to say I love I love what you guys do I love the format that you guys created and as somebody I think you know as somebody who's a part of the Patreon group it's you do a fantastic job of creating I think what is the ideal situation with the Patreon format which is where it's an engaged audience and I'm also very glad to see how you guys are constantly thinking of new ideas it makes it very interesting to be involved in the Patreon thing so definitely kudos on that that's so nice to hear yeah we try to keep coming up with new things so we don't fall in a rut keep it spicy my other question is about an old thing is pick of the day I used to love pick of the day you're the one am I the only one no it's not quite that bad but pick of the day was definitely a thing that a few people really liked and the rest of the audience it's not that they didn't like it it was just when we kind of stopped doing it nobody really complained so and it was one of those things it took more work than it was getting back so we sort of pick of the day still exists just through email if you have a pick or a cool thing you can send it to email and Sarah will read it in the mail bag and so that way we don't have to force it to happen because it's a segment every day I did enjoy that just kind of reiterating that just because it pointed me to a lot of things that I would not thought that I would have needed to go explore where it brought something to top of mind that I was like oh that sounds interesting and even if I just looked at it and I was like oh that doesn't quite do what I was thinking it was doing based on the one line description it was kind of a neat feature just as food for thought maybe what we could do it's because I don't want to have to force it every day because then it starts to get get watered down but maybe when someone sends us a pick we could call it out more as like ooh it's a patron pick you know and that might encourage more people to send them and you still get that benefit of being introduced to some things that you wouldn't otherwise know about and encourage people to sign up for the Patreon yeah yeah all at the same time well thanks you guys all for joining us let's go around the horn and tell folks what you want them to know about you if it's where they can follow you on Twitter or a website or anything we'll start with you Justin where can folks find out more about you on our website it's just www.JustinCofflin.com and my Twitter is pretty sad I try to keep it updated or be engaged but it's not my favorite platform things that are going on I have two CDs that came out in the last year one is called Coming Home it's produced by Quincy and it's a bunch of originals and some covers I did a Sufjan Stevens cover called John My Beloved and then we covered Strawberry Fields and then for the holidays I also made a CD called Silent Night which is a solo piano and it's more it's quite Catholic I would say in that it's kind of sad but I like to say it's contemplative so I explore some older hymns and it's definitely more of a quiet it's not a Michael Buble Christmas so those are there and then the film Keep On Keeping On is the one that featured myself and I do make a cameo in Quincy's so you can see me there it's JustinCofflin.com K-A-U-F-L-I-N if anyone's trying to remember it at JustinCofflin.com Michael what about you where can people find more of what you could do? Well similarly to Justin my Twitter is mostly a place where I lurk but if someone wanted to follow me on my very occasional post or wanted to reach out and chat games with me or what not it's mparker546 is my Twitter and I post there mostly when I'm at game conventions and see cool things. Cool excellent check it out mparker546 and of course Liam tell us not only what's going on a focus software but anything else about yourself that you want folks to know Yeah for sure I should put a plug in for focus and Michael was talking about his analytics of inventory and velocity of sales and all that sort of thing that's what my company software does for inventory retail manufacturing or sales all that stuff so definitely check that out if you're involved in any of those sort of things you can check out my website it's pretty bear but lianfuse.com it includes a link to the focus website and my Twitter where I don't post anything but you can send me a message if you want to know anything else Well thanks to these folks and everybody who supports us on patreon patreon.com allowing us to continue to do the show of course our goal every month this month is no exception is to have one more patron than last month so if you're not already supporting us you're not already a member there's lots of cool perks in there get in at patreon.com we'll be back sort of in a way tomorrow with the predictions results show talk to you then thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you