 Coming up on DTNS, Amazon is back in the hot seat. Earbuds get closer to becoming health devices. And do you want a laptop that lets you see objects in 3D? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, October 13th, 2021. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino. From Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty ser... We were just talking about the many ways that people can have different personalities. Up to and including Psychopaths. If you want to get that wider conversation or expanded show, Good Day Internet, do so. By becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. That's where you can join our top patrons like Justin Zellers, Eric Holm, and Carmine Bailey. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Instagram today announced that IG Live creators can now schedule videos up to 90 days in advance. The company is also rolling out a new feature called Practice Mode, which allows creators to join guests they might be bringing into the conversation ahead of that scheduled event to test connections, lighting, and other things. Samsung announced it will hold a Galaxy Unpacked Part 2 event on October 20th live streamed on YouTube at 10am Eastern Time. A teaser for the event shows icons for Samsung's apps being put into little boxes, so make of that what you will. Bloomberg's Debbie Woo sources say Apple will likely slash its iPhone 13 production targets by as many as 10 million units this year. Component shortages from Broadcom and Texas Instruments are reportedly behind the production cut. Apple originally expected to produce 90 million new iPhones in Q4 of 2021, reportedly. Riot Games announced that it will shut down the slash all chat in League of Legends, disabling chat between opposing teams. According to a post by Game Director Andre Van Roon, quote, right now negative interactions outweigh the positives and quote, that's referring to the chat and the company will later survey users whether or not they want to keep that change. And Nikkei Asia sources say TSMC and Sony are in talks to build a joint semiconductor fab in Japan. If the project goes through, this would be TSMC's first fab in Japan. This will reportedly be built on Sony land adjacent to its image sensor factory. The Japanese government would likely subsidize half of the cost of the construction if TSMC commits to prioritizing chips from the plant for the Japanese market. All right, let's talk a little bit more about Amazon being Amazon. Scott, we alluded to this at the top of the show. Tell us what's up. All right. Well, Reuters reports that has examined thousands of documents, not hundreds, thousands that include emails, strategy papers and business plans that describe a systematic campaign by Amazon's private brands team in India to create copies of popular products. Then manipulate search results to favor those products on Amazon.in, which is what you would go to if you were in India. As an example, Reuters points to a 2016 internal report laying out Amazon strategy for Salimo, a brand originally created for Indian markets and now tops many search results on Amazon.com even in the US. The 2016 document called India Private Brands Program states the following quote, it is difficult to develop the this expertise across products and hence to ensure that we are able to fully match quality with our reference product. We decided to only partner with the manufacturers of our reference product. That's the full quote. The practice was called tribal knowledge. Amazon said in response quote, we are unable to confirm the veracity or otherwise of the information and claims as stated, we believe these claims are factually incorrect and unsubstantiated unquote. This is really interesting because, again, this is Reuters saying, hey, we've seen thousands of these documents. These are emails. These are, you know, messages back and forth between folks. It's a big treasure trove of information. Amazon saying, well, you haven't shared these documents with us, so we can't even tell you if this is true or not. However, and we've talked about this on the show many times in the past. Amazon is consistently accused of doing exactly what Reuters is saying Amazon was doing, at least with its Indian team for the Indian market at one point going back to 2016 and perhaps earlier. I don't work at Amazon. I can't say for sure that that that all of this stuff isn't just a big old miss calm, but I really do believe in my heart of hearts that there is just no way that Amazon wouldn't try to do this. Maybe not worldwide, but in certain markets where it makes the most sense just to see what it could get away with. And the Salimo is a great example of a brand. I don't know if I run an Airbnb. So there are lots of things like paper towels, toilet paper, hand soap, you know, dishwashing liquids, etc. that Salimo is always at the top of the results for. Now, sometimes it's the cheapest and I've bought quite a few of the products and I don't have an issue with them. So that's not the problem. The problem is, huh, did this somehow push down something that would have been at a, you know, competitive price point that I now don't see when I'm the sort of person who's buying this sort of thing and that is exactly what Amazon, as far as Reuters is concerned, is doing. Yeah, to me, it screams anti competitive behavior. And maybe they can explain their way and saying, Well, we're not doing in this. We're not doing this in a market that is as scrutinized as say the UK or the EU or here. I don't know what their excuses will be, but it feels anti competitive rich. You've got to have a. The thing that I think that is, you know, some of the examples are pointing out in the Reuters piece like they were saying like a shirt popular shirt that they had that they had used the exact dimensions. Now they could have bought that shirt, you know, they could buy any of these products and like, OK, this USB charger is very popular so we can measure it and find out the components and stuff like that. Problematics still to be using that information, but like that's not impossible to obtain otherwise. The other like the search result, you know, if that that they outlined where, you know, Amazon's product was coming up there, their private label stuff was coming up two or three. They were saying in most of these searches again, this goes back to a 2016 document. That's a little bit of time ago. So we don't know if that's currently the practice. But that to me is really where it becomes, I think problematic. And then the other thing is how does this fall into the overall, you know, kind of within India's overall tech policy, right? We've seen a big crackdown on anti competitive behavior in China. India seems obviously is much more focused on encouraging like local local production, local competition, that kind of stuff. Everyone has to have local offices and a certain percentage of your goods have to be made in India. So I wonder if Amazon pushing out possibly other Indian brands, even if they're making that in China, I don't think that's going to play well also with their regulators as well. So I'd be interested to see what their response is. Again, and also to point out, India is coming up with or Amazon is coming out pretty much. It's not a flat denial saying this is not true. You know, they did hedge it. We can't confirm the veracity. But that is that that feels more definitive than, you know, no comment, essentially, which we might have heard otherwise. So I am curious to see if more comes of this, if this was, you know, if they're going to throw someone under the bus and say this was a rogue division, or what the outcome will be from that. Yeah, I mean, I you're right, rich. I mean, Amazon has more or less said this is not company policy. If this was happening, I mean, that's that's somebody was going rogue, right. Reuters is saying there's enough information here and then enough, you know, people at a not just middle management, but high management level involved that this doesn't seem very rogue. And it'll be interesting, you know, what Amazon has to say about this, either this is wrong. And here's why this was totally our bad. And here's why we are, you know, weren't paying attention to that, you know, that this particular division in this particular company and or region. And I don't even know what the third option is. I mean, Amazon saying, sorry, we did all of this and we rely on the whole time. That's not going to happen. All right, we'll move on to Reddit. This is actually some kind of fun news. If you hang out a lot of subreddits Reddit launched a new feature called predictions. This is a spin off of something you might have already seen that got pretty popular on subreddits called reddit polls. Predictions tournaments are set up by a moderator within a subreddit and let users guess the answers to questions, questions that are timely, such as will the giants beat the Dodgers tomorrow might be a question I would be asking or interested in in Wayne and or something like will Bitcoin be up or down on Monday with participants receiving 1000 tokens after joining this particular tournament, and they can place bets on their predictions of 10 to 100 tokens. Now, if you lose your tokens, you're done. The tokens aren't convertible to tender in any sense. This is just sort of a fun thing that you're doing within the game. There's no way to get more of them, though the tokens are free and don't convert to money outside the tournaments themselves. Very important distinction here. So this is fun. It's a participatory thing. It's not a way to make money. Reddit says the predictions will increase engagement by those who may not want to start or join a conversation but may respond to a prediction. Reddit says during testing ahead of today's official launch, it saw more than 1 million participants join prediction tournaments, such as the Oscar prediction tournament on our slash movies and the 2020 Eurocup prediction tournament on our slash soccer. You know, what's interesting is it just hit me. We didn't even talk about this pre show, but so many subreddits, especially the really successful ones are all about speculation and whatever their subject is. So as an example, a subreddit dedicated to a television show, they're always doing this saying, well, in episode 10, I think this is going to happen or I think this character is headed toward this and or whatever it may be. And just watching just just reading a subreddit rabbit hole the other day that was all about that Ted lasso episode that was all about coach beard. I won't say much more else in case anyone hasn't seen it, but it's a really strange episode and asked a bunch of questions and this thread was like all about that. If you could give them tools to better have, I don't know, both fun and usability of their sort of speculation aspect that's already part of their discussion. This seems like a really great ad. I like it. I think it's a really interesting combination of a couple of different things. In some ways it reminds me of like online betting markets that I know like 538 likes to reference those in terms of like political races to see, you know, how people are willing to kind of put their money on the line for for things like where the confidence is for betters and that kind of stuff. Obviously, like, like Sarah said in the read, there's no monetary value to this. But it still feels like it has that component. But the other thing is that this kind of puts a limit and kind of atomizes the strength of an up or a down vote in a weird way where, you know, you know, you'll always see someone complaining on a subreddit like, oh, why, you know, people that just come in here and just downvote everything. It's like, oh, you know, you're not great. Like, please leave us alone. But like this allows you to within these interactions. Obviously, these are very specific tournaments. You know, it kind of lets you weigh how much you want to like upvote something by betting on the success of something in a weird way. And I could totally see that that gamification element really, you know, engaging YouTube. I mean, obviously Reddit is doing this to get further engagement to get people checking back on subreddits for these types of tournaments and that kind of stuff to make them more of an attraction for live content or more timely content stuff like that. You know, in a weird way, it gives it kind of a almost like a Twitter feel of like, oh, man, I got to check to see, you know, what's what's going on with my wager here and I get my fake tokens. So that mean nothing, but I like them. They've made karma that for forever. So I could totally see these taking off with that kind of Reddit mindset and very much in that kind of upvote downvote way. Yeah, I'm such a Reddit lurker. I mean, rarely post anything on Reddit. I can't even tell you the last time I did or at least started a conversation. Maybe I've, you know, responded to a few things. And at first this seems like, I don't know. I mean, how many times am I going to be like, here's my prediction for this thing that's going to happen. But yes, as you mentioned, Scott, for something like, you know, a popular television episode or whatever, it doesn't really matter because you're not really going to lose money if you get it wrong. It's just like a fun thing to participate in, especially if you hang out in certain subreddits and there's a pretty thriving community and you know that your voice is going to be heard on some level. I think it's smart of Reddit to say, okay, not everybody is going to be these prolific original poster type folks, but it gives, you know, the lurkers a reason to like very easily say, I contributed. Yeah. And you're much more likely to get roped in to be less than the lurker later on. So or more than what I should say. Well, the weather is getting a little nippy around these parts, maybe in your parts as well. And you might want a hoodie. And did you know that you can get a DTNS hoodie? You can. You can get a DTNS hoodie, a hat, a mask, mouse pad. We have all that and more at the DTNS store. If you haven't checked it out lately, do check it out. You know, holidays are coming up. Could be a fun gift for your loved one. DailyTechNewsShow.com slash store. All right. Well, the Wall Street Journal sources, they're always saying stuff. And now they're saying that Apple is looking at using AirPods as a health device. Possible applications include use as a hearing aid, monitoring posture with motion sensors, and checking temperature, although the sensor tech on that seems like it's still in development. Obviously, the success of health sensors on the Apple Watch means that Apple is no stranger to this growing market. It's obviously very key to their growth strategy. However, they won't be the first hearable device from a tech company. Bose actually introduced its FDA cleared sound control hearing aids earlier this year. We definitely covered that on DailyTech headlines. The journal sources also say that any health uses for AirPods wouldn't be ready until after 2022. So this is a little bit ways off. And there's no guarantee Apple will go forward with these plans. This may hinge on new rules from the FDA that are expected sometime in 2022, which may permit the sale of a new class of cheaper hearing aids direct to consumers to treat mild to moderate hearing loss. In related news, that shows just how long this regulatory approval process can take. The US FDA approved the withing scan watch to take ectocardiograms and oxygen saturation readings in health and medical settings. The watch actually launched in Europe last year and will now start sales in the US in November starting at $279.99. So, you know, Apple definitely seeing, you know, these these health wearables. I think that was the, you know, the kind of the Trojan horse to get a lot of people to buy an Apple watch initially, especially a lot of their ads around like heart monitoring and that kind of stuff. You know, you can do spot temperature checks. I'm just saying in a global pandemic that sounds like a good feature right now. I always wonder about these things though when I hear about health products and they're trying to get, for example, the watch to be, you know, to be a further device in terms of health detection and problem detection and maybe even get to a point where we can do a one C tests and all sorts of stuff on your watch. I have, I guess I have no problem with any of these initiatives. I just feel like the more you pile these on, the more likely it is that someone's going to have some weird problem and then blame it on the device because it didn't tell them in time or it didn't give them advanced warning or or whatever. So I just think it's risky for them to get as involved in that stuff as as they do, but they're clearly interested in it. And maybe that'll just keep getting better and more reliable and it's okay. But, you know, we are getting to a point where we're kind of told to believe that our watch will be our watch, our earbuds or whatever's going to be our health checking device is going to be a reliable doctor in a weird way. I think people have to be a little careful not to be that guy. And the companies, you know, you aren't alone, Scott, the companies always say, listen, you know, this is only meant to be, you know, some sort of barometer that then you can take to your medical professional and say, Hey, let's take a look at this thing that, you know, I may have gotten a reading on that I'm a little bit concerned about. I also, I'm with you on the, you know, the entry into Hey, this device is like fun and cool and and provides a lot of entertainment, but can also be a health device for you. It's great. And the more we get into the health stuff, the more I, you know, I don't dislike that the more the better. But the more I'm like, How does the marketing change at, you know, a lot of these companies where it's like, and also you can play podcasts, but also you can save your own life. And I just don't, you know, it's like, we're, we're getting to the point where they're getting it's so robust. And I know we're, as far as the AirPods discussion, we're, we're just talking, you know, somewhat hypothetically, because this isn't happening this year, it's probably not happening by the end of next year either. But it, it turns into something where it's, it's like an essential device rather than something where if you want to pay for it, it's nice to have. The hearing aid use case, I think one interesting, obviously they have to do something about the battery life. This meant to be like an all day thing right now, because even, you know, all these wireless earbuds have relatively good batteries, but not if you have to have them in your ear all day to hear. But the thing that I think gives them an interesting advantage right now, Bose, with their sound control hearing aids, they'll do a virtual try on that you can, you know, when you kind of buy it, you can sign up and kind of get all set up, make sure it's fitting in your ear right, make sure all your settings in your, you know, on your device and stuff like that are all set up. But Apple has that retail footprint, so that if they have people trained, and again, that's a big expansion of what their workforce looks like. But if they have people trained that you can physically go in and have that experience, and have it help them set it up on your phone and make it all very seamless and very nice. I think that's something very unique from a technology company getting into a medical setting, where people are very comfortable or feel more comfortable having a place to go for medical issues as opposed to, you know, remote help. I think that's a big advantage. And I think Sarah actually said it best. They're trying to make devices that you think you need now more than ever because they're actually also saving your life as well as letting you play a podcast. I think there's something to that, like that feeling of being that devoted to your device who wouldn't want that out of their customer base. Right? Speaking of something, speaking of something that you might want, depending on what you do for a living, Acer announced the Concept D7 Spatial Labs Edition laptop, which uses Acer's Spatial Labs system of stereo cameras, also an optical lens on the display to let you see 3D on the 15.6 inch display without needing to wear an extra set of glasses. So you're looking at it and you're seeing 3D. This is meant to be a workstation for 3D CAD animation, 3D printing work. So it can be equipped with up to an Intel Core i7-11800H processor and NVIDIA RTX 3080 GPU. Acer will also release the Spatial Labs model viewer with the laptop, letting you import files from popular 3D workflow applications. It'll launch in December, but that's only in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Obviously, big part of the world, but that's where it is. Starting at 3,600 euros. So not cheap, but it might be something that somebody would like to splurge on based on what they do and available in North America sometime in 2022. Scott, I particularly wanted to ask you about this because I don't know how much 3D printing you're doing, but I can imagine that working in the artistic world, this would be pretty great. It would. And I do a little bit of 3D work here and there for different clients and stuff who may have a specific need. And the idea, I've been thinking more about it the more I read this article and more about use case and I can definitely see a use case. If you're trying to design a replacement part for some companies, you know, they got a whole bunch of stuff installed base and you're like, well, we got to change this one part. We'd really like to get a better view of that part and not just rotate it around with a mouse, but actually kind of get some depth on it just to kind of get a better feel for the entire piece. I think that that is really useful. It strikes me. This is just as much as I've read about it. It seems like it's basically an expansion on what the Nintendo 3DS basically did, funny enough. It's got its technology rooted in that. That was another device where it could achieve the look or the illusion of three dimensions without glasses, but it had a very specific viewing angle. I have to think they've got a lot better at that nowadays so that it'll be a little less dependent on you being in the exact right spot. But anything that gives us more tangibility to the stuff we're working on, whether it's 2D, 3D or otherwise, always a huge boost for artists and creators. The thing for me with this is and I think what it's doing is it's doing face tracking with the cameras so it's kind of and then repositioning that optical lens so that you're always getting the 3D effect. Unlike the 3DS, which famously you kind of had to hold in one position. This is meant to be a workstation if they can demonstrate that you're not going to get a blinding headache after 10 minutes of using this or something like that. Some other 3D systems have kind of been known for. That's great, but there's something about this being locked into Acer that, yeah, a shop may buy 10 of these machines to work on and stuff like that. But I imagine any kind of repairability with that system, who knows what that's going to look like, which might be a concern if you're in a shop where you need these for production kind of work. And then also, is this in any way standardized? And is there any motivation outside of Acer to kind of write software that's and is there going to be any kind of performance penalty for this kind of 3D effect? Those are like my concerns. Still amazingly cool tech and considering, you know, 10 years ago, we were all thinking we're going to be putting on our 3D glasses to watch all of our 3D screens. You know, amazing to see this come to market even at that price. Yeah, it took long enough, but we're getting there. And you're right about standard standardization. Like if it's just an Acer thing, good for Acer, but I don't know if it's good for all of us. In an interview with Automotive News, Ford's general manager of EVs, Darren Palmer said that by the end of 2021, the company will deploy employees and specifically equipped electric Ford Mach Ease to test charging stations. Ford doesn't directly operate its own charging network, rather it's Ford past charging network is operated by third parties like Electrify America and ChargePoint. So this is Ford's way of quality testing the network to fix widely reported variability and quality in the charging stations themselves. This doesn't make this doesn't surprise me. I mean, I would want more control over that side of this. And if you don't have your own dedicated network of charging stations, why wouldn't you want to have a better handle on quality control that you may not have, you know, you may not have otherwise. So they're not Tesla, but they're they got, you know, they got their own little thing going. I kind of, you know, I've thought about this as charging stations have become, well, depends on where you live, of course, there's lots of places where people are like, we don't have any. But as it's become more of like a ubiquitous way to, OK, there's a charging station here there, you know, there are more EVs on the road all the time. This has to be a network that is constantly growing. It's kind of like, you know, when you drive up to the gas station, it's like, oh, man, they're like refilling the gas, you know, and, you know, everything's roped off. They're like, I'll come back later type thing. How yeah, how does how does it more efficiently turn into something where a variety of companies are taking care of the stations that those companies directly benefit from even if those companies are also sharing that energy with other companies like a gas station. Well, the interesting thing to me about this is that they're going to be using like information from cars that say, oh, hey, you can like report, I guess that or it seems like you'd be able to report that charging station isn't working on your vehicle, but also in response to social media complaints, which just like, which makes me think this is just a much because a lot of this is anecdotal that there is, you know, widely reported variability. That's anecdotal I haven't seen any industry reports on that. However, EVs still the rollout is very early. And I think Ford is definitely trying to get out there being like, hey, I don't want someone on their on Twitter blowing us up because, you know, they're their favorite charger that's convenient for their car to pull up is broken. So we'll send someone out in the Maki in the in the local office to to take a look for sure as well. But I mean, with an nascent industry like EVs, optics are just as important to. All right, well, our final story of the day allow us allow me and us to introduce you to Leonardo. It's short for legs on board drone spelling by the acronym. Yeah, it's it's acronym ish. But it's a bipedal robot with propeller arms developed by Caltex Aerospace Robotics and Control Lab. Leonardo has been around since 2019, but its design and capabilities have been rebuilt from scratch with lighter legs, double the number of propellers and a new integrated design that places the battery and electronics on board. Leo can both fly and walk and could potentially move through environments like other that other robots struggle with such as in high altitude environments like for inspecting high voltage lines or tall bridges. Leo is still a research project with battery like limitations still yet to be solved before commercial use. This thing is straight up man. I think it's like it looks like the drone that found out where the rebels were on Hoth. You know what I mean? I don't know. Like I so Scott's like too smart and I'm like just smart enough, you know, like you can walk and you can fly. This is the bet. Like you're like a superhero robot. Leo, I love you already. I know this is still a research project, but the idea of, you know, besides the kind of like cool factor, I was like, but okay, like give me an example. And as soon as something like, you know, high voltage line, it was like, ah, okay, that totally makes sense. I mean, the humans that have to do that now, it is extremely high risk work. So it would totally make sense. And then you don't have to have, well, you potentially wouldn't have to have an additional, you know, piece of machinery to get the robot up there because it could just fly. The rebels are on Hoth. That's what we know. Yeah, that's the one. Oh, Leonardo. I don't know. I thought you guys would be more excited about Leonardo, but okay, that's fine. If you have any thoughts about robots that walk and also fly or anything that we talk about on the show, anything we might talk about on a future show. Questions, comments, send it all to us at feedback at daily technewshow.com. We'd also like to extend a special thanks to Scott Hepburn, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Thank you for all the years of support, Scott. And, you know, speaking of cool Scots, thanks to Scott Johnson for being with us today. Scott, you're the best. Let folks know where they can keep up with your work. Of all the Johnsons, truly the Scott Johnson is the best. Lots of stuff going on and busy as ever. If you want to find out what that means in terms of actual output and here's some of the content I create and see some of the stuff I make. You can find it all as usual at frogpants.com. And I also post that stuff up on social media primarily on Twitter. So you can find me at Scott Johnson. And you'll find Scott Johnson on the show next week. But until then, just a reminder, we're live Monday through Friday. Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern, 20, 30 UTC. And you can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com. And we'll be back doing it all tomorrow with our guest Charlotte Henry. So excited to have her back on the show. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.