 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Larry Bailey, Michelle Serju, and Miss Music Teacher. Coming up on DTNS, IKEA forges ahead with augmented reality, Shopify has a good use for NFTs, and the brave search engine gives you back control. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, June 22, 2022. So many twos, deuces wild in Los Angeles. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Now, I don't know about y'all, but I would like to start with a few tech things you should know. Good idea, Tom. Amazon announced its first fully autonomous mobile robot called Proteus, designed to move large carts in warehouses. Proteus bots are equipped with advanced safety, perception, and navigation technology, so says the company, to avoid human warehouse workers. Amazon also showed off a robot arm system called Cardinal that can select and lift individual packages up to 50 pounds expected to deploy in warehouses next year. Amazon told Forbes, replacing people with machines is just a fallacy and that it expects the robots will improve safety as well. I feel like now I don't believe them. I would have been fine until they said it was a fallacy. Doth protests too much. Fitbit launched a new sleep profile if you're one of the people who pays $10 a month for premium. It'll examine 10 metrics like time before sound sleep, disrupted sleep, bedtime consistency. The feature will offer you monthly reports comparing those metrics with averages for your age and gender. Sleep profiles will be available to premium users on the Fitbit since the Versa 3, the Versa 2, the Charge 5, Lux, and Inspire 2 wearables. First report is expected as soon as July 4th. Microsoft will soon add keyboard and mouse support to Xbox Cloud Gaming. The company says developers who don't already support keyboards and mice can add it now, so titles will be ready when the feature launches. That's good for PC gamers. Back in 2019, Google released Android Auto for phone screens, but then discontinued the feature last year, 2021, if you were running Android 12 or higher. However, those Android 11 and earlier folks, now you're on the chopping block. Google has ended support for Android Auto for phone screens on all versions of Android. If you try to launch it, it'll say Android Auto is now only available for car screens. However, if your car doesn't have a screen, you can use Google Assistant driving mode instead. Google with your naming. You just never fail to impress. Nothing, the company, nothing confirmed to PC Mag. It will not launch its phone in North America instead focusing on the UK and parts of Europe where the company has strong partnerships with carriers. Meanwhile, if you get a nothing phone and you try to use it on a US carrier, you'll get an unpredictable coverage on T-Mobile. You won't have any voice over 4G on AT&T and you won't have service at all on Verizon. The company says it does have plans to launch a smartphone in the US in the future. So North America gets nothing. Wait, no. North America doesn't get nothing. I don't know why that took me off guard. I should have known. I should have known you had a joke like that coming and it caught me off guard. North America is not for nothing. Anyway, let's talk about IKEA. IKEA launched a feature called creative. And of course, because it's IKEA, it's spelled with a K and a V at the end. It's available for the IKEA website and iPhones and lets you design your living area with digital furniture. And in fact, iPhones with LiDAR sensors will be able to include even more spatial detail. Okay, so for anybody who's like, well, hold on a second, IKEA already does this, right? Isn't it called IKEA Place? That's an app that lets you put a digital version of IKEA furniture for sale in your room. How is this different? Yeah. So place isn't going away. You'll still be able to use place, but everybody does that now. Amazon Wayfair, they all do that. Creative does a 3D scan of your room and then uses computer vision and machine learning from geological labs to let you remove some or all of your furniture. That's the twist. You don't have to put it in the room with the furniture in it. You can get rid of your furniture and then add IKEA items to see how they look. You can also use the app for more than 50 pre-made showrooms if you don't want to use your own space. TechCrunch is Lauren Forrest. I'll test it on an iPhone with LiDAR. You stand and point the camera at five target spots in the room that Apple direct you where. You have to do it just right. It's like learning the golf. You got to keep your elbows in. You pivot with the wrists. And then once you've done that, you wave the phone in a figure eight motion to help the algorithm stitch together those five images that you took. Then you'll have to step to the left or right and repeat the whole thing a second time. The scan takes about two minutes and it's another five minutes to upload it and make it available to use. That's if you're using a LiDAR iPhone. If you're using the website or a phone without LiDAR, you'll need to take five photos. They'll direct you on that and then upload those and they get stitched together. But like you would expect, it doesn't have as much detail. Either way, once you're done, you can then place items that will be accurate by size. You can put things like lights up on the wall and you can save your items to your account or put them right in a shopping cart. Of course, you can also share your finished design with other people, including an IKEA interior designer if you want. So for anybody who's like, all right, this sounds pretty good. IKEA has had this in the works for a while. Creative has been in testing since April of last year. So just over a year and hopes to eventually add options to change things like wall colorings and other features. Just kind of make it your own. Creative will launch on the web and iOS in the US coming later this summer to Android and other markets in September. So I am in the mood for this. Are you? Yeah, we're looking at our basement and we're trying to make some decisions about what we want to do. And it's really hard to visualize. I really struggle with that. And people say, Scott, you draw and paint. You can't visualize. I really can't. When it comes to 3D spaces, actual living spaces, I can't picture it any other way than it is currently in. So these tools are really helpful for people like me who want to maybe make a change down there. And this sounds like maybe the most comprehensive I'd heard of. But what's funny is this made me start asking questions that made me have a little naivete or as I would say, Ikea. That's terrible. Forget it. Scratch from the right. Naivete. No, you said that. Naivakia. There you go. That's even better. But it's spelled with an oomla somewhere. I never know what Ikea is up to. I don't know if it's because I don't go into the store very often. I do have Ikea furniture. We pick up stuff here and there. I didn't know they were in the home like Internet of Things market. I didn't know they had products as back as far back as 2014 in that regard. I didn't know they had the first smart bulb. Like a lot of these things, I don't think they're good at telling us about. So I'm glad we're hearing about this one. And this is seems like maybe the most mainstream push they've done in terms of different outlets picking it up. The show is one of them. But I feel like Ikea is bad at telling me they have cool tech to work with on home stuff. You got to go to a Kia store more often. That's all there is, I guess. Or Ikea.com or whatever. What this reminded me of is more and more just for fun, even though I'm not necessarily moving apartments anytime soon. Hopefully never again. But when I do look at apartments, you see that you can tell that it's slightly fake staging. But it gives you a sense of like, oh, that's what a couch and a TV and a couple chairs and a coffee table would look like in that space. I feel like this is just like one step closer to that virtual staging thing that Ikea can help with. If you're a landlord and you've got some tenants in there and you take a bunch of pictures of the house, but you're like, yeah, well, but that's not going to make the next person want to live here so much because they want their own thing. So if you have this much control over how you can present it and how you can stage it, I think that's probably what Ikea is going for here. Yeah, I feel like you're right, Scott, that people don't realize how maybe not ahead of the game, but on the edge of the game Ikea is. Like you said, they had their first hub for a smart home back in 2014. Just yesterday we mentioned that they are part of the standards organization for the metaverse. And then we get this AR announcement today so it makes sense like, oh, that's what they're doing. They want to be able to let you go into a metaverse and design your home and maybe buy virtual Ikea items in a metaverse someday or something like that. But I think they are well placed for all of those things in a way that a lot of other retailers are. And I don't think it's paid off quite yet because the smart home hasn't quite permeated everywhere, but matter is about to make it do that, I think, and augmented reality as we heard is kind of wonky. Like it's just as easy to assemble Ikea furniture as it is to remember all the steps of like, okay, keep your arms in and then pivot this way. And like eventually though, this same technology will be available in some kind of AR headset from somebody and will do real time scanning. So all you'll have to do is look around the room and you want to follow these crazy steps. But Ikea is getting in and getting this tested ahead of time. Yeah, and they're in a good position to have the vested interests that make sense. Like, you know, Amazon has products like this for me, but I don't know. I think of Amazon is somebody's going to help me figure my house out. Not really. Well, there's more like places anyway, where it's like, oh, you want to see this piece of furniture over there? Great. Put it over there. But I've tried that and been like, yeah, but without moving my furniture around doesn't really help. This lets me virtually move my furniture around to Sarah's point, do virtual staging and stuff. Yeah, and especially in the case of me, if I do anything in the studio and change anything down here, it will probably be with Ikea furniture. Like I was going to go there anyway. I like the pricing. I like the simplicity, you know, quality is an arguable thing. But being able to have more tools to do that, it really is in their interest to give us these tools. I just think they should be a little bit better about communicating it. And maybe they are now and maybe they just kind of been doing just fine. I don't go to Ikea enough. Clearly the meatballs don't pull me in like they used to. I love how Scott, you're like, I love all of this, but I just wish Ikea was more relentless about telling me. Just tell me about it, I guess. I don't know. Like I guess everybody's vying for my eyeballs these days and Ikea is just not. Yeah, I was going to say that. I don't think of them that way. I think Ikea's premise is you'll come to them for home stuff and then they'll show you what they have. Yeah, probably. You'll think, well, I should go to Ikea for their smart home stuff, right? It'll be more of like you're going to go there anyway, maybe just to get meatballs. And then you'll find out that they have all this stuff. I do like going for meatballs. And I also wish they would, you know, those fake flat TVs they have in their little fake living rooms. I want them to sell me a fake flat TV. It can't be that much money. I feel like you could just like take one. You think I should just steal one? I'm not condoning, you know, theft, but I'm like, I don't think anyone's going to be like, oh, fake TV. I bet you'd get a fake TV on Amazon right now or Alibaba even probably. I don't know why I'm fascinated by those things, but I love them. So, so, you know, not to, not to take us too far from the topic. Make those available for purchase. That's all. To bring us back to my own topic. Well, I say Ikea just wants you to come into the store and then expose you to stuff. Very obviously creative is not that creative is we want you to see how the furniture will look so that you'll then order it. Yeah. So it's trying to hit you at home, trying to hit you where you live, literally. It literally hit me where I live. Well, maybe Shopify will hit you where you live when they do stuff with Twitter. Shopify announced around 100 new features this week as part of its semi-annual Shopify edition showcase. One of the main announcements was that Twitter partnered with Shopify to launch a sales channel app for all U.S. merchants, letting merchants onboard to Twitter's shopping manager dashboard. This provides product catalog tools and lets merchants add other shopping features to profiles and so forth. Twitter also recently launched the new shopping related feature. This includes includes a new product drops feature. Twitter previously launched mobile storefronts and live stream shopping. Shopify says orders placed through the partner integrations with Twitter and others quadrupled in the first quarter of 2022. So they're pushing that direction. TechCrunch sources say Twitter began testing a notes feature with selected users, letting users create articles with rich formatting and uploaded media. Twitter will hold a CHERP developer conference on November 16th in San Francisco. It's only held one other CHERP conference, by the way, and that was back in 2010. Dang. I barely remember that. Yeah. I completely forgot about it till we talked about it today. Which is fine. You know, a company the size of Twitter, not that you have to have events every year, but the fact that, you know, CHERP was back in 2010 and I don't know, people have been working on products rather than talking about products at events since then is quite some time. Yeah. I like this whole Shopify thing. When I think about certain brands that I follow on Twitter and there aren't that many, but some of them, you know, like Nike, for example, like I follow Nike on Twitter, so that's a very obvious example. It's like, okay, well, Nike's got their own thing, but usually if there's some new cool sneaker or the company is pushing, you know, a collab with an artist or whatever, then you get that and you might get an image and then you get a link and then it bumps you out to wherever that you, you know, end up finishing the transaction. That's the eventual goal for the company. Sure. I think it's like this to be something that's a little bit more integrated in Twitter and I've talked at Nauseum about the fact that I use a third party Twitter app. So a lot of this stuff probably wouldn't even show up for me unless I was using web Twitter or, you know, an official Twitter app. But I think that this is, this is potentially a pretty untapped market for Twitter just because so many folks and brands are on Twitter. But the idea is that you're just kind of letting people know where to go elsewhere to do the thing that you want to do. And make you do the thing that you want to do. Because you can already link out to your Shopify account on Twitter, right? So this has to be more compelling than that. It has to make it easy for the shopper to be like, oh, I'm not really leaving Twitter and I'm able to buy this stuff. But the key is that you are still checking out on the Shopify website. So even though you never feel like you're leaving Twitter, Shopify is handling the whole customer relationship, which means the merchant is handling the whole customer relationship, which is super smart for Twitter because they're stealing a page out of Instagram's book where they're like, hey folks, sell stuff on our platform. We've got a captive audience. They love being here. Sell them some stuff. But unlike Facebook, Meta, Instagram, they're not taking a cut because they know they'll make their money off of merchants wanting to promote a tweet to make more sales. They don't need to take a cut of that. And maybe they will. Maybe they won't. But to get it started, it's going to be much more compelling to be like, yeah, just integrate your Shopify store with us. You don't have to pay anything extra and you get more sales. You want to promote a tweet? Great, we'll talk. Otherwise, have at it. I've had the experience on Instagram before. I thought I'd never be the person to do this because I just thought, I don't know. I thought I was too high and mighty for this. But using Instagram, you get an advertisement for something that may interest you and you click on it. It's literally a buy as a click away. It's not hard. It's just boom. Get it. And that's what made the decision for me to say, I will spend $10 right now on these replacement nibs for the, for my stylist pen. Yeah. From this company who obviously, you know, through data collection knows who I am and what I need. And so I did that and it was so easy and so fast, almost a little too easy and too fast. It kind of was like, who did I actually buy this through? What was the deal here? Like there's a little bit of that feeling if you're not used to it. But I think Twitter would benefit by having something like that. What the third parties will do with their apps, like Tweetbot and Twitterrific and all these. I don't know. Maybe they'll integrate too, but you know, if you're using the official app and you're looking for quick ways to grab stuff without having to do too many clicks, too much jumping around. This seems like a cool idea. Shopify also announced something called token gated commerce that will let customers link crypto wallets to a Shopify store for the purposes of using NFTs. Shopify already has let merchants sell NFTs if they want, but token gating lets a merchant use an NFT like a loyalty card. So you can reward fans and VIPs with exclusive access to products, perks, or even experiences. They did a test run at South by Southwest with a company where if you had the NFT from that company, you could show up and get access to exclusive products and an exclusive experience in real life. So this includes in-person shopping, not just online. Pretty cool. Yeah. Well, no, I was just going to say, I think that's this is a more compelling use of NFT technology that doesn't care if NFTs are tanking or if cryptocurrency is tanking. It's like, no, we're just using the technology to help you have a better relationship with your customer. Yeah, it's there. Whether your things are up or things are down, I do like that about it. I mean, the loyalty card thing is, I mean, we've been doing this for some time. It's sort of the modern version of that. It makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And he's like, oh, just what we wanted, more NFTs. You're talking, I think, about the NFTs that can be fraudulent or you don't understand why they cost so much. That's not what this is. This is just using the technology of the NFT to be able to prove who you are easily in a better way than we have with current loyalty cards. Yeah. And like you pointed out in the beginning and I totally agree with the building the technology or the conduits for the stuff to be manageable regardless of where the market is or where everyone thinks it is or where we're speculating at any time is not a bad thing at all because some form of the technology and the tech, whether it's NFTs or not, are going to be here. And the more pipeline we have to handle this stuff, the more, I don't know, structured and grounded it'll be. I think this is always good when this happens. Yeah. But if you have a thought about it, we'd love to hear it. Email us feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. The Brave browser folks launched a search engine back in October of last year. One piece of news is that Brave Search is out of beta. Another piece of news is that Brave Search is launching a new feature that is in beta called Goggles. Not like Google Goggles. This is different. Brave's Goggles let you modify the criteria for your search ranking. So you can adjust things like whether a query should rely more on blogs or maybe more on mainstream news sites. Brave isn't opening up its search algorithms. So it's not totally open, but it does give users more control than a lot of other search engines do. To try the feature, you search for something, then you choose the Goggles button, and then Brave will supply Goggles from developers that you can choose to follow or not. But, Tom, I know you've kind of looked into this. This is a little bit more than switching a few settings, right? Yes and no. It's both easier and harder than you think, depending on what you want to do with it. The Goggles themselves are just unencrypted text files with instructions for re-ranking. And if you want to create your own, you can, but you need to learn the syntax and host them on GitHub or GitLab. So there's a little bit of a learning curve. Most people will likely just be using filters made by others. For example, AllSides, which ranks political leanings in news publications, has made two filters, one for left sources, one for right sources. Other pre-made filters that are there right now at launch include one that attempts to remove copycats, one that removes the top thousand most viewed websites, so you can see lesser seen sources, one that narrows results to a list of tech blogs, if you want to get just tech stuff, and one that removes any result from Pinterest. The other two are even more specific. One removes the top thousand most viewed websites, but then prioritizes the most popular domains on Hacker News, and then another one boosts content related to the Rust programming language. You can turn Goggles on and off if you want to compare your tweaked results to what the search engine normally returns, and Brave is fine if other search engines wanted to use this, right, Sarah? Yeah, apparently when Brave published a paper about the idea for Goggles back in October of last year, Brave had to share the tech with other search engines. Other privacy focused search engines that could benefit include Duck.Go, which uses Bing results, StartPage, which uses Google results, and Mojeek. However, no company has taken Brave up on their offer as of yet. Yeah, and I don't know why that is, except that maybe they're, you know, it's more of an offer in spirit than an offer. It feels a little bit, I don't know, if I were over at Duck.Go, I might be like, let's just see how the development community takes to this, if they do. There's a difference between go ahead and use it and let me help you implement it, right? Those are two entirely different things. Yeah, that's a whole different bag of cheese. Look, these two of the companies mentioned here, Brave in particular and Duck.Go are kind of my go-tos these days, one for browser, one, like the Duck.Go browser, I hope it comes out of beta soon, but I use their search engine. And what's interesting here to me is it reminds me of a whole different kind of filtering, and I think that's why I'm drawn to this. This is going to sound a little bit weird, but the comparison I would use is a video game I play or have played before called Grim Dawn. It's an action RPG, think Diablo 3, but you know, sort of a different take on it. And in that game, it has loot filtering. You're sick of just dealing with all the common and the somewhat rare items that drop that you don't need anymore because you're all maxed out. You just want to see legendaries and important drops. It just won't show you the common stuff. You can filter it out. So they literally don't clutter up your screen and drop on the ground for you to pick up. They virtually don't exist to you. And that's really compelling. But then you start talking about information and who gets what and how they get it. And then also that information is monetized. I get why people might be a little squeamish on this. I like that this is developer oriented versus having to go in and set filters because nobody would use it. You need to make it easy to use for most people. So providing a bunch of filters that are easy to understand. Oh, this is going to remove the top 1000 websites. Great. Oh, this is just going to give me tech blogs. Awesome. I also like that it is developer friendly, which is like, hey, if you want to do the learning curve, you can do this yourself because I think enough people will be willing to try this to do it. And that way I could take a stab at saying, you know what? I just need to get rid of the day's news sometimes because I'm researching a story about the day's news like happened with Apple Passkey. And I need to find out what Apple did before Passkey. And I can't because Google is just showing me the news. Right. And so it'd be nice to have a filter that easily does that. I know there's other ways to do that in Google, but they're cumbersome. It'd be nice to just click on one button and Brave Search and be, yeah, filter that. So I think this is great. The problem is are enough people using Brave Search to create a community around this stuff, which is what you need for this to thrive. Well, and what you had described earlier, Tom, is like, okay, there's some somewhat specific filters from obviously companies being like, let's see what kind of results we get from this if somebody were to use it. And that's great. That makes a lot of sense. I think there are a lot of branding opportunities here. But, but yeah, how, how much does, you know, as a, as somebody who devours a lot of news, you know, every morning I'm like, this makes perfect sense to me. I could maybe use Brave to search for a DTNS rather than just kind of search for what I'm doing. If I'm just casually surfing the net type of thing, kind of two different situations. But how many, how many people are out there that want that? Maybe a lot, maybe more than I think. Maybe, but maybe less. I mean, the part of the problem is I think that the, we all say we want as many options as possible. We all want choice. We want to be able to flick things on and off and use things the way we want to use them. But I feel like that's a little bit at odds with the free internet, finding ways to make money on the periphery. And I just don't know. I also don't think people want as much choice as they think they want. I think they'd like to feel like they do, but at the end of the day, some of them just want to hit the search and get the result they want and move on. And if they have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get specific results or only categorized results or whatever. That is why I like their implementation. It's a lot of hoops to create a filter. But if there's a filter you like that's been created, it's really easy. You just click it and it'll, and then you unclick it. If you're like, oh, I want to see the other results. It's just a matter of like, are the filters you want going to be created by someone? Or are you going to be willing to put in the time to create your own? And I don't know. Brave girls. Are you ready? Let's do this. Yeah. Yeah. I love this idea. I'm more skeptical whether it's actually going to catch on, but we'll see. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mail bag. We got a good one from Thor. Thor says, hello from sunny and delightful Oslo, Norway. Hello, Thor. Thor had a couple of quick thoughts on our 6G chat that we had with Shannon Morse yesterday. He says, you mentioned that the lower power draw makes it seem more environmentally friendly. Just wanted to add that it does depend on how many transceivers are needed for a given area. Since the frequency is even higher, the range would probably be even lower due to higher attenuation. The total power per area would be a function of power draw per unit and the area that it serves. Also the impact of the production of the transceiver units, although that's a one time cost for the lifetime of the unit. It does also add to the environmental impact per area served. Yeah. So there's some math to do to see if this will really be a power save in the implementation or not. It's a good point, Thor. Yeah. Thanks for very kindly making this point. We appreciate it. Has he even allowed to send emails on a day that isn't Thursday though? It seems like he's Thor. He can send it wherever he wants. Yeah. Oh gosh, you guys. Thor has emailed us in the past and Thor, please keep doing so. We appreciate your feedback and we appreciate all of your feedback, by the way. 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