 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you including Irwinster, Ken Hayes, Philip Shane, and our lifetime supporter, Monty Marvian. On this episode of DTNS, meta numbers showing some signs of reality. Proprietary software isn't always good for hardware, and BodeGram is with us making sense of the evolving changing options for EVs. Are we nearing an industry standard? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, July 14th, 2023 from Studio Secret Bunker. I'm Sarah Lane. From the land of the 216, I'm Richard Raffaleno. I'm the show's producer, Roger Cheng. And joining us is host of the Kilowatt podcast, BodeGram. Hey, Bode. Hello. How is everybody today? Well, we're doing well. Better now that you're here, we're going to be talking to Bode a little bit later in the show about the whole idea of charging EVs and where that's going depending on what market you're in. But for now, just real quick before we get to the quick hits, wanted to let you know that Microsoft has named a new default typeface for its productivity apps, Aptos. Calibri has been Microsoft's default font since 2007, so this is kind of a big deal if you follow things like fonts. And now on to the quick hits. Meta confirmed it applied further measures to prevent users in the European Union from signing up and using threads. Many EU users report the service is no longer accessible in Europe using a VPN. That's, of course, relevant because earlier this month, the Guardian reported Meta didn't launch threads in the EU over legal uncertainty around the block's upcoming Digital Markets Act. Meta also announced a new text to image model called Chameleon, C-M-3-L-E-O-N, but pronounced Chameleon, capable of producing image captions as well. This is a transformer model, so it's different than using diffusion like Dolly to another image models. Meta also claims it requires a five times less compute and a smaller training data set than other transformer based approaches. The model can also understand instructions to edit an output as well as answer questions about a generated image. No word though on plans to release Chameleon to the public. Oh, the world of foldables keeps getting more interesting. We have on or launching their magic V2 foldable. This is in China for now. We don't know if it's coming to other markets, but its standout feature is it's 9.9 millimeters thick when folded and compared to the what is considered very thin pixel fold, it's 18% thinner than that device. It offers an external 6.43 inch screen and it unfolds into a 7.92 inch screen, both of which are 120 hertz. It offers 2023 Android flagship specs, pretty typical there with a 5,000 milliamp hour battery. It ships July 27th starting at $8,999 yuan. I'll save you the conversion. That's about $1,250 US dollars. According to documents seen by and sources speaking to Reuters, India's information and broadcasting ministry held a meeting with several streaming service providers, including Netflix and Disney proposing that content should be independently reviewed for obscenity and war violence prior to release. The streaming companies rejected the proposal. All theatrical films are reviewed and certified by a government board in India currently, but this doesn't apply to streaming content as of yet. The UK's Competition and Markets Authority, my personal favorite CMA, extended its deadline for a final decision on the Microsoft Activision Blizzard acquisition until August 29th. Additionally, Bloomberg sources say Microsoft and Activision Blizzard are considering selling off rights for cloud-based games in the UK as a possible concession to appease regulators in the country. Rich, let's talk about social networks. Where are we? The battle of the social networks rages on like we haven't seen in quite a few years here. We mentioned in GDI yesterday that Twitter has begun compensating some of its popular creators with a share of ad revenue for ads served in tweet replies. To be eligible, you need to be a Twitter blue subscriber with over 5 million tweet impressions a month for at least three months. Now, some creators have publicly touted their earnings, but it's not clear whether they had to do that in order to get their payouts. It's like a lot of people sharing the exact same screenshot, it seems like. It's also a little unclear why some prominent Twitter creators with large followings either didn't get payouts or just didn't say anything. Bodie, I'm curious, creators are used to being rewarded on a variety of networks when they get traction. There's a lot of different mechanisms for this. I'm curious, what do you think about Twitter's play here? Well, okay, so I spoke to my oldest daughter who's in the social media business and she was actually very surprised that Twitter could afford to pay anyone. There's several lawsuits with Twitter and unpaid severance packages and stuff like that. So she's a little concerned about that. Most people aren't going to be able to take advantage of this, especially me. So I really don't have too much to say on the matter. I do find it interesting that not in the article that you guys provided, but in the Twitter space, I've seen a lot of people talking about followers and it's really important that all of this is measured off of impressions, not followers. Yeah. And the other thing that stands out to me is that this is based on replies to tweet and a lot of other where you're talking about like TikTok snap or something like that, those are all based just on views, right? Like consuming content, not generating responses to your own content. Sarah, do you think that like changes up kind of the motivations and kind of like the thought process behind creating content on Twitter? Definitely. I think we've all gotten familiar, all of us who have been on social media for some time with the whole sort of like, Hey, look at this funny picture. Would you do this with your dog? That kind of thing because you're trying to get response. You know, you're trying to get engagement. You're trying to get a conversation going. Sometimes that's totally organic. Sometimes, you know, it's more of a click-mating thing. We've been doing this online for the dawn of the internet. Some of the Twitter folks who were like, wow, didn't even know I was about to get five grand. Thanks, Twitter. Thanks, Elon. That kind of stuff. You see a few of those posts and then you see 10 to 12 to 15 of those posts and you go, what's going on here? You know, and why do other content creators who say, well, I'm a subscriber, meaning I pay for Twitter blue, which you have to do. I Sarah Lane do not. So, you know, I wouldn't have expected Twitter to ever give me any money. But if you do that and you have enough engagement, meaning that you have a lot of impressions, a lot of impressions, let's be honest. You might get, you know, a little bit of a kickback. Everyone, the tone of all of this, you know, it all sounds like, wow, I just won the lottery. And it just strikes me as very odd. And perhaps because Twitter, you know, has fewer employees that might be in a marketing messaging PR department than before, that might be part of it. But yeah, it all seemed a little strange. I also do wonder considering that, you know, we've talked about this a couple of times now that Twitter is resource constrained, right? Whether it's they have reduced ad revenue been reported, they've made massive cuts to staff and stuff like that. I do wonder if potentially this could be seen by Twitter as a way to almost self moderate replies, right? Like if you're based, if your revenue is based directly on ads run in your replies, at a certain point one, I don't know, one would think on most other platforms that would give you an incentive to make your replies more ad friendly. I know Twitter has, you know, had cuts to content moderation teams and stuff like that. So maybe that has seen that. I don't want to say that's intentional. That may just be a side effect that I'm seeing and I'm putting those pieces together out of turn, but that also that thought also did strike me as well. Well, we would be remiss if we didn't talk about the challenger in the room seems like just less than a week ago, because it was meta is Twitter competitor threads reported a record 100 million signups in just five days. People went, whoa, the company itself said, wow, we did not, you know, think that so many people would, would care about it. So of course, you get a lot of people talking about, oh, it's because, you know, it, you know, all the Twitter haters needed another place to go. Sometimes it's just a shiny new thing now new data from 10 sensor tower rather shows that threads daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday and the time spent for users was down 50% from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Data from similar web shows the same trend. Now, I think in general, especially when you've got a company like meta, you know, putting anything out there, this is to be expected. If the trend continues downward, I think, you know, it would be an issue. But, but yeah, for your a lot of folks who said, Justin Marbury young, a frequent contributor to the show among them saying, this isn't a really novel thing. This isn't that great. This isn't going to, you know, the be and all be all of, of, of social networking. Perhaps Rich, we're seeing some signs of that. Yeah, that or it could be that it's, it is an extraordinarily bare bones app at launch. I think also there's just less things to do in it than even, you know, than most other apps. So I also think that's a factor to it as well. All right. Well, in the growing market for e-bikes, the Dutch company van move has made a name for itself by taking a very designed forward. Some might even say Apple like approach companies bikes offer a minimalist look with no visible batteries or screens is pretty unique in the e-bike world. That doesn't mean though that they aren't tech forward, the bikes feature things like Apple find my integration remote unlocking and stolen bike recovery services on top of a fairly novel front spoke drivetrain. Van move bikes also a shoe industry standard third party parts with Van move handling its own supply chain. You just can't go buy your Shimano shifter and throw that on there. Oh no. All of the company's technology runs through its phone app. The problem though is that after pausing new orders, the company has now received a postponement of debt payments by Dutch courts and it's temporarily closed stores while attempts to restructure is basically the step you take before you file a more traditional bankruptcy. So Bode obviously a big problem for van move owners, but do you see, I guess, device app dependence as a bigger problem? I do. This was a huge van oof. Van move. Sorry. They were thinking outside the box with these rolling keys and then they got overly cute with features and ultimately that feature that was used to sell bikes is now a cautionary tale because a lot of people may receive brick bikes in a couple of weeks. Yeah. I've got a couple of friends who live in Amsterdam, which is in the Netherlands, Dutch company. And I said, did you ever heard of van move? Because I'm not familiar and they go, oh yeah, they're everywhere, everywhere. So this is not a few people who are going to be affected. This is a large swath of people who are going to be affected one way or another. Does the bike get bricked at this point? That would be a pretty big issue, but does it just not receive updates anymore? Also a big issue. If you're paying a premium for something like that. And to be clear, potentially affected because if they file something, like if they're filing a chapter seven, that's one thing. If they're filing a chapter 11, which is a business restructuring thing, usually the point of those kinds of filings is you're trying to keep the business running. And so they would keep their existential services running. Now, they've gone to the point where they've basically shut down every single way they can possibly make revenue, which is not a great sign, admittedly. The other interesting thing though is we're seeing their competitors trying to maybe make some inroads with their customers. The Belgian e-bike maker Cowboy released an iOS beta app called Bikie that will download and store the current unlock key from your VanMoof app in case the servers go offline. That'll only work for existing bikes, but not like if you bought one after theoretically the company went out of business, you would still be out of luck. And that wouldn't offer any of their dashboard functionality as well. But again, Sarah, to your point with having a huge market share, obviously there's an incentive there to make use of that. But with that market share, Bode, I'm wondering, do you see like in the event that they file this chapter, whatever bankruptcy they may end up filing, there's always the private equity swoops in and turns everything into a subscription? Yeah, honestly, I'm surprised that VanMoof didn't have something in place just in case this did happen. And especially when they are rolling closer towards chapter 11 or bankruptcy. I would hope that somebody swoops in and picks up this technology. I also hope that it doesn't just turn into a money grab that will eventually turn people off on these electric bikes. Yeah, I mean, they do have a big market share. And so I do think there is an incentive, even if someone comes in and say, hey, we're going to run the leg, we'll buy their legacy infrastructure from them. And if you still want to use all these features, it's X amount of dollars per month. That stinks. If you were counting on that as a free thing and you bought this because it was integrated into that. But there is like, there's enough business sense in that I can see that people won't be totally out of luck. But we've seen it happen across technology, just not with necessarily vehicles like this before. Well, you might say I've got thoughts on what VanMoof should have done differently or anything that we talk about on the show. And if you do have feedback, well, we'd like to hear about it. You can get in touch with us. The DTNS audience has lots of social network options because you might be in a lot of different places. DTNS show on Twitter and Mastodon at mastodon.social, Daily Tech News show on TikTok, DTNS pics, BIX on Instagram. And also we are now on threads. Well, late Friday, Mercedes-Benz announced it would be integrating Tesla's North American charging standard or NACS into its electric vehicle lineup. And starting next year, Mercedes-Benz EV drivers can take advantage of Tesla's supercharger network. The company will also build out its own charging network accessible to a wide range of EV owners. The company plans to have over 2,000 charging hubs in North America, Europe, and China by the end of the decade. Yeah. So this comes on the heels of similar announcements made by Ford and GM last month, seeming everybody's getting on board with that whole Tesla supercharger. Now, Bodie, as a person who follows EV trends in the marketplace, let's talk about what's going on here. Why is everybody suddenly working out deals to use Tesla's charging network? Were they always going to? Were they working on their own? What does this mean for the Tesla supercharger becoming an industry standard? That is a very, very good question. And a lot of people in the EV space are asking that same question. And I don't know that we'll actually have an answer until we start hearing from the automakers Q2 2023 earnings calls, because they've been pretty tight lipped about it. I wouldn't imagine that Ford and GM and Mercedes and these companies would get in bed with a competitor. And just to have that capricious CEO of the competitor make changes that will affect your business. I'm sure that there are ironclad contracts in place, but I honestly don't have any additional information on why they would do that. They haven't really said anything. I do have some thoughts, though. Certainly, it could become an industry standard right now. The Society of Automotive Engineers is looking at making it a standard. And that might take some of the power away from Tesla, which is a good thing. Right now, in the United States, we have a whole grab bag of charging standards. We have J1772, CCS, Chattano, the Tesla standard. We just have a lot. We do need to, for lack of a better word, we need to cut off some of those standards and make one quality standard. Now, you mentioned an industry standard perhaps taking some power away from Tesla. Why would that be the case if Tesla is the one that's providing all of the charging stations? Well, Tesla will certainly get their money because they'll license out this technology. If the Society of Automotive Engineers ends up making this a standard, then it goes to a consortium and EV players in that market, whether they make charging equipment or they're charge point operators or automakers, they all get to have a say in how that is developed. In some ways, I think it's similar to what we've seen just kind of across tech. Standards by their nature need to move slowly so they don't break everything when you add a new feature for Tesla or something like that. Bode, I guess for EV owners on their perspective, the benefit would just be a wider charging network not to worry about carrying adapters or does my vehicle work on this? Is there any other benefit than just a wider charging base? Hopefully, right now in the US, I won't speak about anywhere else because I don't, I'm not as familiar with, but right now in the United States, there is a whole list of problems with our charging networks. So I'll leave that, I think maybe we can talk about that later. The benefits, I'll just stick with the benefits, be positive. With Tesla, you can have plug and plug and charge capabilities. I would imagine that third party EVs equipped with the NACS standard will also have this ability where you can go up to a Tesla supercharger, plug your car in, watch a movie, unplug your car, leave and the payment details are saved in the app or in the car or however they decide to implement that. One of the other good things about the NACS adapter is there's bi-directional charging, which is vehicle to grid, vehicle to home and vehicle to load, like if you needed to charge your refrigerator and an outage, you could do that. Current Tesla cars don't do this, but it is in the NACS standard that Tesla put out. You might say, okay, well obviously they're, depending on what market you're in like the US, there's some government hurdles to jump through for any company who wants to be part of this, but probably a lot of hardware hurdles as well, especially things that are needed across the world to make this hardware. Do you think, Bodie, that part of this may be that Tesla just got a jump on being able to put together these stations that other companies say, well, there isn't really any more cobalt, for example, to do the same? Well, I don't know. Ultimately, this is just a connector. So right now, EV or EVGo or Electrify America, if they wanted to, now that they have permission to use the NACS standard or agreements in place, they could just plug the, they could just install an NACS connector onto their existing charger. So it's not magic. It just provides electricity from one place and puts it into your battery. The thing with the NACS adapters, it does level one, level two, and level three charging, whereas the CCS-1 and Chatham adapter only do DC fast charging. And then the J1772 does level one and level two charging for those vehicles that use CCS-1 and Chatham. Bodie, do you see, is there any company you foresee being the big holdout? I remember, this is a much lesser example, I remember when CarPlay and Android Auto were rolling out, Toyota very resistant to doing that. They wanted to control that whole stack for a really long time. Do you feel like there's any automaker out there that's going to be extremely resistant to this, or is it just too much up in the air? I think there are several Nissan motor group, which includes forgetting what Nissan's luxury brand is, but Honda, Mazda, Sony and Honda developed a car together. There's a good chance that they won't adopt it, Toyota for sure. I mean, at some point in time, they might adopt it. I think they're not going to just easily come out and say, well, we're going to go ahead and do this now. And also, it's worth noting that those companies don't really have a big hold in the EV market, Nissan, more than the other two that I mentioned. All right. Well, Sarah, it looks like later in the news today, we also saw some interesting stuff with some emojis. Can you share some light on that? Rich, glad you asked. Thinking about charging your EV along the road might come along with sending people emojis, depending on how you feel about it. So new potential emoji time, contenders in 2024 could include head shaking vertically, like a nod, head shaking horizontally, like a lime, a phoenix rising from the ashes, actually just a phoenix, but a broken chain, a brown mushroom, which confused Roger a lot, and new family silhouettes. The Unicode Consortium will be approving its emoji 15.1 specification in September, after which point Apple and Google and other device managers can all adopt them using their own software updates, but that often takes time. So if you're like really looking forward to that brown mushroom, probably not coming to iMessage until 2024 earliest, you never know. The latest emoji edition came in iOS 16.4, which was released in February of 2023. You know, I like the lime one. It's, you know, some refreshing citrus, some refreshing citrus in your messages. There's been times when I needed to- What do I have to say to you for you to give me a lime back as a response? What do you want to drink, Rich? What do you want thinking? I'll send you back that. And then you would say something lime-related. Yeah. Well, I would signal a gimlet specifically, but, you know, the fact that I can do that with emoji will make me feel hip and cool, like the kids. Hip and cool. Yeah, you know, we are arguably sort of hip, sort of cool. We're certainly not kids. Bodhi, back in the day, some of these, you know, usually the yearly drop of like new emoji, I used to be like, who cares? And now I care quite a bit. Where do you fall on the spectrum? I use emoji all the time. I love emoji. It's usually to try and insult my friends over text. I don't use it to like verify contracts or anything like that, but it's usually as a way to just to make people laugh. I'm most looking forward to this because my father-in-law is like an emoji hunter. There's no contextual use. It's just very clearly he's going through every single one to find something very specific. I've gotten the mini DV cam one. I've never had anyone else send me the little camcorder looking emoji before. I've seen that and I've never used it either. Yeah, but I don't know where that chat was going. I love the idea that my father-in-law will find these new emoji. He'll find a phoenix or something like that. Maybe the broken chain and hopefully not the brown one. That was one of my favorites. So I was like, I like it, but I don't know when I would ever send that to someone. It's for when your friends blog has a broken link, has a broken link and you can just send it to them. It'd be like, hey, that link, broken chain emoji. I see what you're saying. It wasn't that somebody said something weird. It's that they sent you a link where you're like, oh. Well, that's the exciting thing to me is we don't, these are like things that are going to be put up the culture and I'll get to see how our wonderful human society will interpret these in ways that will confound me in my unhipped and non-young status. So it's very exciting. Oh, well, Rich, you're a hip and young as far as I'm concerned. Also, you are also somebody who could read an email from an illustrious viewer. It is. It is both a skill I have and a pleasure. For example, Kenneth Waden on the Washington Post reporting that members from similar way mitigate traffic to chat GPT fell 9.7% in June month over month. It's not just threads, chat GPT, seeing a decrease in traffic. What Kenneth said, it'll be interesting to see if that number month over month increases in September to October. If so, that is the percentage of chat GPT traffic that could be attributable to students using it for school work. Just a thought could be of less interest, summer break slump for students. So Kenneth, I love this. This is a brilliant insight. I hadn't thought of this till I saw your email. But yes, of course, what happens in June? Kids aren't in school using the chat GPT to write their papers. 100%. I think, I mean, this probably doesn't make up all of the numbers. Maybe some people, like myself, were sort of like, ah, cool, chat GPT, cool. These tools are cool. Let me figure out how to make them useful and my everyday life doesn't necessarily need them. Bodie, you've got kids. Are they using chat GPT to write book reports? No, no, not even a little bit. They're 10, though. They're not really writing, like, in-depth book reports at this point in time. My oldest, she uses it for her work all the time, though, all the time. There you go. There you go. Okay. So maybe, yeah, that summer slump could be summer vacation, but also, you know, we know this in the tech world as well. Sometimes the summer kind of turns into a little bit of a, you know, a... A little bit of a vacay season. Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Where tech news dribbles out, but it's not necessarily as as exciting as some of the other months of the season. But Bodie, back to you. We want to thank you so much for being on the show with us today, bringing the knowledge. Let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work. Well, I happen to host what might be the worst podcast on the internet. It's called Kilowatt, so I would highly suggest that you don't go search it out and look for it and listen to it, because you'd just be disappointed. I like what you're doing. Yep. Yep. Don't go to Kilowatt. Do not check out that podcast. He will only be disappointed and sad. I'm also telling the truth. Well, in non-reverse psychology, patrons stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet, where we are going to test everyone's knowledge of sports, tech history. I'm terrified and intrigued, and I can't wait. Oh my gosh. I'm going to bomb this so badly. What I do know, though, is our live show times. I've been doing this for a minute, y'all. You can watch the show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. You don't have to watch. You can just listen, but we are live every weekday. You can find out more at Daily Tech News Show dot com slash live. We hope y'all have a wonderful weekend. We'll be back on Monday with Megan Maroney joining us. Talk to you then. This week's episodes of Daily Tech News Show were created by the following people, host producer and writer Tom Merritt, host producer and writer Sarah Lane, executive producer and booker Roger Chang, producer, writer and host Rich Stravolino, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coons, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zooey Deterney, our mods, Beatmaster, WSF1, BioCal, Keptkipper, Steve Guadirama, Paul Reese, Matthew J. Stevens, a.k.a. Gadget Virtuoso and J.D. Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A, A-Cast and Len Peralta. A-Cast's ads poured from Tatiana Matias. Contributors for this week's shows include Justin Robert Young, Scott Johnson and Tim Stevens. Get us on this week's show included Will Smith and Bode Grimm. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com.