 Coming up on DTNs, prop tech does not involve propellers or fake swords, but it might make it a lot easier to buy and sell your house. Plus, is everyone ditching Spotify for Amazon? And Dan Campos tells us why privacy issues led to a record-setting Twitter Spaces event. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, February 14th. Happy Valentine's Day 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt from Lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Rich Schiropolino and I'm the show's producer. There is a longer, oh, sorry, Roger, there is a longer version of the show called Good Day Internet, available at Patreon.com slash DTNs, where we were just talking over that Coinbase ad from yesterday. And we want to give a big thanks to our top patrons, including Dr. X17, Dustin Campbell and Tim Deputy. Thank you. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Last week, reports surfaced that Nike and Amazon discussed internally about acquiring Peloton. The news came as the company laid off 2800 employees and appointed a new CEO. Now, in an interview with the Financial Times, incoming CEO Barry McCarthy dismissed the company being acquired for the foreseeable future. Further stating, there are lots of other things I could be doing with my time that are quite lucrative, then hanging out with the business that's about to be sold, emphasis my own. He emphasized the company had room to grow, saying it was a connected fitness company, not a bike company. Snap announced it will introduce mid-roll ads during Snapchat stories for creators in its Snap Stars program. Creators will earn a share of this ad revenue. The company already began a beta of the feature with a small set of creators in the United States, but plans to roll it out more over the next few months. Apple registered three new Macs with the Eurasian Economic Commission, including one laptop. Apple devices generally appear in the database about one to three months prior to release, although a few registered products have lagged for up to a year. The EEC requires registration for any device that relies on encryption technologies. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously reported Apple will hold its first event of the year on March 8th. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against Metta over its use of facial recognition on Facebook. Metta announced in November that it was shutting down Facebook's facial recognition system, no longer identifying opted in users and deleting more than a billion facial recognition templates. However, despite being shut down, Texas alleges that the program violated the state's privacy laws while it was in operation. Samsung announced the Galaxy Tab S8 series of premium Android tablets last week. After opening pre-orders on February 9th, the company has now paused pre-orders on the Tab S8 and S8 Ultra, citing overwhelming demand in the first 48 hours, listing them as sold out. The middle child Tab S8 Plus remains available for pre-order. All right, let's talk a little more about what's going on with Spotify and Amazon and all that stuff. Yeah, you I don't Tom, I don't know if you've noticed this, but over the past, I'd say about two weeks or so, there's been seemingly like a lot of interest in or at least expressing the desire to maybe move off of Spotify to another streaming audio service. I don't know, maybe this has something to do with content deals with prominent podcasters. Maybe there's just a lot of Joni Mitchell fans out there. Maybe they just don't like the color green. It's it's a mystery to me, but the conversation is out there, certainly. And, you know, I thought it was interesting to kind of look at the overall kind of streaming audio landscape and, you know, just see how like what are the options out there, I guess, and what how do you get out of these walled gardens kind of once you're in there? Because I feel like that is a lot of the staying power of like, I got my playlist set up, you know, even if I'm mad at Spotify this week or, you know, I want to support maybe there's another streaming service that, hey, I like how they're treating artists and stuff like that. You know, there seemingly is kind of a wall on there. And, you know, Spotify is kind of the 800 pound gorilla here, 31 percent market share globally out of, I think, in Q2 2021. There was like 325 million or 523 million total streaming subscribers out there. So Amazon leading the pack. But, you know, outside of Apple, I think there was an interesting piece in protocol that Amazon makes kind of a compelling case for, you know, picking up maybe some of the Spotify slack if people are trying to move off of there. Yeah, I don't use Spotify myself. I use Apple music. I used to use Google Play music until it went away and became YouTube music. I used to use Artio or Radio back in the day. So I have not been involved in this in any way. I don't use Spotify, so I didn't have to make a decision. But I do have Amazon music. I thought about this when I read David Pierce's article here, because I've got Amazon Prime. Now, I have the base thing. It's only, you know, 10,000 or so songs or whatever. So it's it's not everything, but I do have it. And the fact that I have it means that Amazon has a leg up where if I were to get upset at Apple music for some reason, I'd kind of already have Amazon music and I could just add a couple of dollars and boom, I've got Amazon music. I think a lot of people still think of Amazon music as limited because when it launched, it was very limited, but it's full-throated now. We do have lots of other choice. YouTube music, obviously, title, etc. I set up a title account this weekend for the first time. And I really liked the setup. I really liked the way it draws you in. I think it's just a matter of marketing. And I really like David Pierce's point that Apple and Amazon have the advantage because they don't have to market as hard. Music for them is a feature, not not the service itself. It's not the business. Yeah, and honestly, that like those integrations, I was kind of in the same boat as you where I was on Amazon music. I was using that a lot for the kids, right? They have like a ton of like free kids' music on that Amazon Prime tier and stuff like that. And it came down and I was a Google Play Music subscriber and it came down to, all right, do we use the Amazon ecosystem more or the Google one more? We ended up going with YouTube music for now, but it really was like that convenience feature. And I was thinking about this with, specifically with title, where over the past like three, four months, they've made some changes to their tiers. They've introduced a free tier and they've also added a lot more visibility, I guess, into how your funds are going into supporting artists. They kind of they definitely have a reputation. They're partially artists. They started as an artist-owned company. They're still partially artist-owned now for being artist-friendly in terms of payouts and that kind of stuff. And you can do things there with like direct artist funding. You're most listened to artists. You can give a like a portion of your subscription goes directly to them. There's a tier at which your payments are artist-direct, like 10 percent or so. Yeah, I think it's your most listened artist. Yeah. So like that really interests me. But then I was kind of questioning, well, why people like supporting artists or at least saying they support artists? Like why? Why isn't that a greater draw? And I was I was kind of looking into it. And the reason is it like title doesn't integrate. We I listen to with my kids. That's like the primary use case. A ton of my listening is through our Google Hub, where we, you know, put on kids music. There's no direct title app on there. I can do it through cast. I can do it through Bluetooth and stuff like that. But I like I can't do the direct voice interaction, which is the chief. Like my kids are, you know, like three and four, they're calling out the songs that they want to hear on the Google. And I like I as someone who likes a home where things go smoothly, I'm not going to change that behavior anytime soon. But there are some interesting ways. Wired had a really great piece kind of putting together some of the ways to get around this walled garden aspect, if if you're not locked in with your kids to a Google Hub of apps that let you transfer playlists, like songs and stuff like that. But these are all third party solutions for the most part. You know, there's a there's an iOS app called Song Shift that will let you transfer playlists and libraries. There's even one that will work on Linux, which I was I was super psyched on. Free your music cross platform, even to Linux, Tom. So don't fear, you can get it off Linux. Oh, good. Yeah. No, I I've actually used that one. I've used for your music when I moved off of YouTube music to get my playlist on Apple Music. It's pretty good. I did pay for it in order to make that happen. I have never enjoyed moving services. It is it is a chore. It is something you have to get a how to article for most people to figure out most people don't have the steps memorized. What's the name of the program again? Because they're not doing it every day, which is one of the reasons I think, again, David Pierce's point about these are features, not businesses, is good, is that once you get them in, you've you've kept them. And Amazon can just say, well, we already have you because we've got you as an Amazon Prime subscriber. Apple can say we've got you. You're an Apple One subscriber. I really think that is kind of the future of music services. And Spotify had an early mover advantage that it may lose. It may become the Yahoo and MySpace of music. Well, and what's interesting about Amazon is their strategy, at least when it comes to like overall audio, does mirror Spotify in a lot of ways, kind of goes under the radar, but they've acquired podcasting studios. They have exclusive deals with several popular podcasts to get like weak early access, not exclusive to their platform overall. But they do get some of that access. They have hosting and you know, podcast hosting and ad tech acquisitions they made over the past year. So in a lot of ways, you know, mirroring that Spotify approach to stuff so that when they can, you know, if people are, you know, there's a little attrition off of Spotify, then they can, you know, hop on that and provide a similar experience, admittedly not one to one with podcasts and stuff like that. All right. Opera is enabling emoji based URLs in its browser. They're not domain names, they're URLs, but all you have to do is type in a few emojis because they've done it in partnership with a company called YAT, Y-A-T. YAT sells emoji URLs as a one time purchase and it calls them YATs. You have a YAT when you have like Skull Cowboy Hat shrug as your URL. Pricing is based on character length. The fewer characters, the more expensive. At the time we wrote this three character YAT cost several hundred dollars. Four characters is about 50 bucks. Five characters was just a few bucks because it's easier to remember fewer characters. You can customize a YAT page that they give you or you can have it redirect to your own website if you want. The company also lets you create an NFT on the Ethereum network for your YAT and plans to connect YATs to electronic payments at some point so people can pay you by your emoji string. Other browsers can get these URLs, but they have to precede them with Y-A-T because again, these are not domain names. These are just Y-A-T slash emoji, emoji, emoji. So it's no different than any other, you know, it's subbrilliant.com slash ace detect or something like that. The opera browser, however, is supporting just using the emojis and just assuming if you just type in some emojis, you must mean Y-A-T slash emojis. They also will take emojis embedded on web pages and automatically turn them into a corresponding YAT address. But the URLs do still live at Y-A-T. TechCrunch's Aisha Malik points out that you can already use emojis in a domain name. The domain name system supports that. So you can buy a domain name that supports emojis and set up something similar on your own. But that does require knowing something called puny code, which converts emojis to ASCII. And not all registrars deal with that well. Some do, some don't, it kind of depends. So it might limit your options. Certainly YAT is trying to make this easy, Rich, and say, like, hey, you want an emoji name, we'll make it easy. Even if behind the scenes, it's really just a URL, a subdomain for us. So I understand the appeal of, hey, you can have a very specific URL that can redirect wherever you want it to go. And you have, you know, people remember, like emojis have currency, right? They have they have meaning that the the Verge piece highlights like a bunch of, you know, there's been some categories. She's got one, she's like a poster person for this. That have been integrated. I've been trying this out, I'm sure. And so I can see the aspect of that. But like from Opera's perspective, I guess, like, what is is Opera's focus here just to kind of trying to win whatever the whatever the race for Web 3 ends up being? Are they just trying to win that at this point? Like they've integrated a lot of cryptocurrency features as of late, you know, and obviously this is unrelated, but it feels like, hey, we want to be on whatever the next hip thing is. Opera, that's our I just remember when they just had a fish tank widget you could install. That's my main opera. Well, I do think that Opera and Brave have been trying to differentiate themselves with privacy and now Web 3. Both both of them have tried to do things to protect your privacy built in VPNs and things like that. Both of them now trying to incorporate crypto in various ways. Brave's been doing it for a while, honestly. So Opera's maybe even a little later to the game. But I think what they're looking at is we're behind Chrome. Everyone is behind Chrome. We don't have the advantage of a Microsoft or an Apple where we could just use our heft to try to get people to adopt our browser. So we need to do something else to catch people's attention and Web 3 gets attention. You use Web 3 these days. You're going to get a lot of people looking at you. You could you can judge out there in the audience, whether you think that's right or wrong, but it is true at the moment. And so coming up with, you know, we're going to support emojis, we're going to we're going to support crypto wallets and all of that are all attempts to try to capture an audience that's being underserved elsewhere. I will I will get that. Can we know that's that's something different? Well, we'll move on. Yeah, it's Queen. Thank you for making that so I didn't have to. All right. Moving on. You know, we discuss a lot of stories dealing with data privacy on the show. You know, it's often focused recently, at least on the US, Europe, GDPR, the ever evolving transatlantic data transfer laws seem to, you know, every every couple of quarters seem to get a couple of new ones. But Dan Campos is here to tell us about personal data privacy in Mexico and some of the social media reaction to it. Take it away, Dan. Hi, there, the DNS crew. This is a special report from NTX. In Mexico, the longest and most least in the Twitter space in Spanish took place on Friday 11, according to a Twitter spokesperson. The forum, entitled Todos Somos Loret, reached a maximum attendance of 64,000 listeners. It began around 5 p.m. on a Friday and ended on Saturday, February 12th at 3 a.m. with 27,000 people still listening with more than a million plays registered by that night. This space was a protest forum against the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, after he published the late income and personal data of journalist Carlos Loret de Mola by letting Article 16 of the Constitution that refers to personal data privacy back to you, amigos. So I will say, researching this, I was trying to look for what was the second most Twitter space. This is like amazing to use this, like these tools that we've kind of all taken for granted for this. The second most one I could find was about 45,000 BTS fans getting together on the spaces 2001. Bigger than BTS. I mean, what else? What else can we say? Hold on, hold on. Not bigger than BTS, just bigger than the single BTS space. I full respect for BTS. I love BTS. Yeah, that's a huge, that's a huge, huge number of folks getting together. And one would assume that it would have to be either BTS or privacy issues to get people to that level, right? Exactly. Exactly. Well, Dan, thank you so much for that. And remember, you can catch Dan on NTX every weekday. Hey, we love to hear from you, the folks supporting us. So if you have some time, it only takes a couple of minutes. We have a survey out. We're asking a few questions about things. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you and what is it? Just visit dailytechnewshow.com slash survey. Protocol has several stories out Monday on something called prop tech, which sadly is not making props for cosplay, but property tech, things that make buying and selling property easy. Protocol focuses particularly on something called iBuyers, i, the letter i, B-U-Y-E-R-S. We're learning so many new buzzwords today. This stands for instant buyers, not interactive buyers, although it probably is meant to kind of signal both. Their companies, iBuyers, are that use algorithms to decide whether a home is worth buying and then make all cash offers with quick closing. So if you've ever sold a home, this is going to sound like a dream to you. No staging, no buyer requested repairs, no contingencies. They resell the home for more money than you paid for it, but you get to cash out fast and without the hassle of showings and giving you more control on when you move. They'll set the closing date when you want it, within reason, obviously. If you're thinking, didn't Zillow do this and totally fail? Yes, there's a lot of good coverage on why Zillow had to stop being an iBuyer while Offerpad and Redfin and OpenDoor have all thrived and basically it comes down to better algorithms. Zillow paid too much in the spring and summer of 2020 for its houses and bought too many homes in a race to try to catch up with OpenDoor. Now, OpenDoor has kind of become the de facto leader in this space. It says it trains and tests its models several times a day. So it's keeping its algorithm sharp. It says it thrived in the pandemic because it had better data. It has its own proprietary data that it doesn't talk about, but it also uses seller data and home inspection data. And OpenDoor also uses humans in the process to step in where the data is uncertain. OpenDoor is also trying to move into the rest of the process. They bought RedDoor so they can offer you a mortgage. You can use another mortgage if you want. But if you want to buy something through them, you can get a mortgage through them too. They also have Pro.com and Skylight. They've shut down both those services and now we're using them to offer home renovation through OpenDoor. OpenDoor already offers a service to sell and buy a house simultaneously. So you don't have to move into a rental or handle two mortgages while you move. They if you're buying and selling through OpenDoor, you can you can time the closing so that you go right from one house to the other. Offer Pad lets you stay in your home up to six to nine months after you sell it to them. That's Offer Pad, not OpenDoor. So Offer Pad is just like, yeah, don't even worry about the closing date. We'll just make it really far down the road. But I know a lot of folks don't own a home at all. Some companies are trying to make it easier to get into a home as well. Protocol also talks about divvy homes and zero down offering alternatives to traditional mortgages. In those cases, you buy a home that they own. They basically buy it for you and then rent it to you with a portion of your rent going into a savings plan for a down payment with some guarantees that you'll be able to buy the home from them once you've got the down payment saved. It's a spin on rent to own. Or if you change your mind, you can walk away and keep the cash from the savings yourself. So there's some innovative things happening with finance here, but the algorithmic buying of houses really does promise to help simplify the selling and the closing and all of that. Roger, I know you've been messing around with one of these as well. I've been messing around with Sunday, which is the only reason I know about it is because they sent a little flyer to my to the house I live in your LA asking if I want to sell there. So my house, because they'll take care of it. One of the more interesting facets of what they offer is they will give you if you go through the deal, they'll give you $10,000 immediately so you can do things like move ideally out of the house or you need it to do something. It has the same thing. Don't have to don't have to worry about showings. Don't have to worry about repairs. Don't have to worry about, you know, cleaning. And I think that's really, really amazing for people like myself, because I have a property that is some distance away, 300 miles away from me, that I'm looking to sell. And having something like that where I don't physically have to, like, drive up there and manage all that stuff. Sure, I'll have to go up there and talk to the tenants, but it's one of those things that people have been waiting on forever because of all the simplifications in life that need simplifying, outside of taxes buying a home is like right up there. It's dealing with the, it's dealing with the realtors, dealing with escrow, dealing with, you know, getting the mortgage, all of that. And a lot of these services really kind of hit that on the spot. How much of a value they are remains to be seen because these are relatively nascent, but I am definitely very excited about it because it could take care of a lot of things quickly. The thing that sticks out to me though is like the outside of the oftentimes intensely personal process of buying a home where it's like you're meeting with agents and brokers. There's like reams of paper you need to, like it does feel very old school. It's been a couple of years since I made my father home, but the one thing that this doesn't feel like it takes away is a lot of times when in the process of buying a home, you feel like you are the least informed person about this process where someone's telling you you have to get this inspection done. Someone's telling you you have to, all of these people, this is the course of their everyday day. And for you, this is something you'll do, I don't know, maybe five times for most people that's like the most homes they would ever buy or something like that. So you feel intimidated at best and oftentimes kind of drowning in either information or process or that kind of stuff. I don't necessarily think this takes away, certainly believe me, the convenience of not having to have people awkwardly walk through your home while you have to stage this completely neutral decor that you have to live in for a year while you try to sell your home. I fully welcome that for whenever we sell our house because that does not seem like any fun at all. But that's like one of my stresses as a homeowner outside of kind of the anti-diluvian process of signing mortgage documents and that kind of stuff. But the intimidation factor, I don't know if that solves that and I don't know if that's the intent is to solve that, certainly it streamlines a lot of the issues. I think really what they're trying to solve is the timeline, right? So if you've ever been and unfortunately, fortunately, I've been through four or four or five mortgage applications in the whole process. It takes a very long time for when you see the house, even a quick house selling can take, I mean, the shortest I've ever seen is a couple of weeks because there's a lot of paperwork that gets shuffled around and you're dealing with multiple people, right? Because the mortgage people aren't the same people as your title company. Your title company is the same thing as your realtor. And of course you have two realtors. You have the selling and the buying and they each get the 3%. So closing costs on a typical home, say like if you sell like for $450,000 house, you look at $96,000 rough estimate of what your closing costs are. If they could whittle that down because they do everything internally, I can, and they sell your house for maybe a 10% premium over what you sold it to them for. I could totally see this being a viable business for those companies. Yeah, that's the argument, is that companies like OpenDoor are taking less of a percentage than the agents would take in a typical transaction. They're reducing closing costs. Yes, you could possibly sell for more if you did it yourself, but their argument is, hopefully they are going to reduce the cost that it won't be so much more that the convenience of just being able to go to them and get an immediate price and they give you cash, doesn't outweigh the amount of time, the amount of effort you'd have to put in to get that extra money out of it. The other thing is, will this lower or raise the prices that people have to pay for homes? And there's some arguments in the protocol articles about this that it could lower the price of homes by adding some fluidity to the markets. Again, there's a lot of questions of whether these algorithms can really stay accurate or whether OpenDoor was just lucky. But if they can, it would mean easier buying and selling, which means more people would be willing to buy or sell and move because you've taken out one impediment, one downside to it. And in which case, they're also partnering up with new home construction to try it like they're literally partnering with the companies that build new homes to say, let's get people on OpenDoor who's selling their house into a new home construction. That encourages new home construction. It could, I'm not saying it will, it's conceivable that it could lower the price. But we're so far early in PropTech that it's hard to tell how it's actually gonna shake out because we haven't had it around long enough to have good data about what works and what doesn't. We just have anecdotes. The other thing that we have is a wonderful voicemail from Nick in Australia. And he's talking about feeling the support from Samsung. Hey, DTNS crew, this is Nick from Australia. After Samsung's aggressive marketing campaign in Australia for the Fold 3 last year, that included over $1,000 worth of bonuses for purchases, I decided to buy one. With yesterday's big Samsung announcement, I was very happy to hear they will be providing software updates for four years to my Fold 3. This thing was very expensive. So anything that helps extend the life of it beyond the one to two years Android phones used to get updates for is something my wallet is very grateful for. Thanks and keep up the great work, guys. Thank you, Nick. Yeah, no, it has multiple benefits. Longer support means better benefits. So good on Samsung for doing that. Also, thanks to our brand new bosses, Diogenes, Mike and Damon, who all just started supporting us over the weekend on Patreon. We got three brand new bosses. So thanks to all of you, Diogenes, Mike and Damon. And thank you, Rich Shruffin. It's good to have you today. It was a pleasure truly from the bottom of my heart, as always. Remember, we are live Monday through Friday at 4.30 p.m. Eastern 2130 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow to talk about what's up with game DIY announcements with Tricia Hirschberger. See you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.