 This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, September 3rd, 2015. I'm Tom Merritt. It's headlines only today because I'm traveling to DragonCon. That means we're going to have a special DragonCon show tomorrow. So you'll get an extra-long episode. You'll get at least an hour-long episode tomorrow. And then Monday's the Labor Day holiday in the United States, and we'll be traveling back from DragonCon. So it's headlines only again on Monday. Thank you for your patience. We still will endeavor to continue to bring you our perspective on Daily Tech News on your side as always. But it's just going to be me and it's just going to be the headlines today. So settle in. Ninja Steve was among the folks submitting Samsung's second-generation SmartThings Home Automation Hub and Sensors. In fact, Samsung had a ton of announcements at EFA in Berlin. The announcement includes a new services model and plans to open up to developers more so than they already have. Among the new features are the ability to control the home when the net is out and the power is out. It's got a 10-hour battery in there. And it can now communicate with sensors and other connected devices even without an internet connection. It also can now connect to cameras for the first time, which allows you to view things remotely. And there's also a cloud storage and monitoring product, which you can get for free to the end of the year. And then after that, it's going to be $4.99 a month. SmartThings is still an open platform, and they're working with more people all the time, trying to make it easier and now works with more than 200 devices. The hub will sell for $99 in the U.S. online, starting Thursday and in stores in October. And then it's coming to the U.K. later this month, and it should get more countries after that. Samsung didn't stop there either. The Samsung SleepSense is a disk you slip under your mattress, which Samsung claims will track from under your mattress. They claim it'll track your heart rate, your breathing, and your movement with 97% accuracy. It's like a princess in the P thing. And it can work with the SmartThings hub that I just mentioned to automatically do things like turn off your lights or the television or adjust the thermostat if it detects that you've fallen asleep. No price for this one, but it's set to launch in South Korea later this year. Not done with Samsung yet. Samsung Gear S2 Watch getting all the positive reviews must come out at NDA today. The watch runs ties in, if you remember, but it does work with Android phones. And Samsung today released an SDK to encourage apps to be developed for it. They're hoping to get 1,000 apps at launch. Wi-Fi version of the Gear S2 comes to the U.S. in October with an LTE version arriving soon after that. We still don't know a price, though. And one last Samsung announcement. The first Ultra HD Blu-ray player was announced, compatible with 4K streaming services, supporting HDR video. It can also connect to the SmartThings hub. I assume the Samsung Gear S2 should, too. What the Blu-ray player doesn't have is a price or release date. Samsung did announce it's partnering with several content makers like Amazon, Netflix, BT, and Canal Plus to deliver more ultra high-def content. So there you go. Samsung took the stage at IFA. They dominated the news cycle today. But the thing I'm most excited about is SmartThings. I was a fan of SmartThings before Samsung bought them because they're open. They can work with other ZigBee Alliance products. They can work with the Nest. They can't work with Apple, but Apple doesn't ever work with anybody. So it's interesting to see them trying to tweak things to make them work better. And having that camera interaction, I think, is very interesting. Obviously, the tech press is in love with the Samsung Gear S2. They think it's the best thing since sliced bread. And a lot of you want a watch that doesn't have to be connected to a phone, so that's promising that. And if you care about 4K on disk, that first Ultra HD Blu-ray player has got to have you excited as well. Alright, here's a piece of news that doesn't involve Samsung. Skype has updated iOS and Android apps. These are all interface tweaks. There's not a whole lot of new functionality here. For instance, the iOS app is promising simpler navigation, more effective search. The iPad version will add in some things like location sharing. It's kind of cool. And large animated emoticons. Because we love emoticons. Android app now fits into the material design aesthetic, adds a floating action button, and Android will also get enhanced search. So, trying to make it easier to use Skype because they're in the big messaging fight with everybody else, from Snapchat to Line to whatever messaging app you like to use. Instagram's adding messaging. Messaging is the new hotness. Elon Musk likes to make his Tesla announcements on Twitter and he did so yesterday. The first Model X cars will, according to him, be handed over at the Fremont factory on September 29th, beating a self-imposed deadline by one day. By the end of the quarter, in the quarter end of September 30th. Fast Company reports that IBM and ARM announced they will cooperate on Internet of Things Ventures. It's another hot area, Internet of Things. ARM-based chips will be able to collect data from Internet of Things devices and send it securely to IBM cloud servers. Now, why do you care about that? Well, everybody's trying to marry big data to sensors for personal reasons to do, you know, give mind data for you and tell you things you didn't know about yourself or help automate things in your life. Recreational, they're using them on boats for things like safety. Lots of industrial sectors are using them. It's a popular area of development for companies like IBM and GE and of course collecting lots of chip license royalties is something that is very popular with ARM so they want to get into the Internet of Things sensor device chip making, not just smartphones. They don't want to have what happened to them, what happened to Intel, when Intel did get into smartphones fast enough. So that's why ARM's in it. IBM is trying to pitch it as the security aspect. They are very good at securing cloud services, they say, and that's their big advantage here if you would want to use their service. The next web reports, RICO announced a new spherical camera. This is a, they've had one before. This is the new one. It's called the RICO Theta S. Two, one and 2.3 inch 12 megapixel sensors deliver 14 megapixel images of, or, or 1920 by 1080 HD video at 30 frames per second. You can use the app to let you configure settings and view the images. The Theta S will sell for $349.95 in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific beginning in late October. I feel like this is akin to the flip cams when people started to video blog and you had these specialty devices, eventually I think we're going to see a lot of cameras capable of doing 360, but it is a little bit of a different form factor that you have to do here. So RICO is on the ball here. Let's see if they can maintain their first mover advantage. The Corley noted on our subreddit, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, that ours Technica has a report that Salisbury, North Carolina announced it's making 10 gigabit per second service available throughout the city for businesses and residents. You heard me right, 10 gigabit per second. A city-run company called Fibrant was created five years ago when private ISPs declined to upgrade their infrastructure. The city was trying to work with them, they declined. The service is targeted at businesses, so it varies by who you set it up with, but they do offer residential service. It's really expensive right now. 10 gigabit service is going to cost you $400 a month. You can get 50 megabit per second service for $45 a month there. So their normal service is on par, maybe a little bit at the upper range. This new 10 gigabit service, real expensive. Vermont Telephone began offering 10 gigabit service back in June, but that's about it for the United States. Fibrant, the North Carolina company, began its deployment one year before North Carolina passed a law limiting the ability of municipalities to offer broadband service. Now the justification for that law has been that a municipality getting into business is unfair to the incumbent ISPs, but none of the incumbent ISPs have run out of business. They have a cable company, they have a telephone company providing service just as they did before Fibrant came along, and those ISPs didn't want to offer infrastructure, so what happened in Salisbury, North Carolina, because they got in under the wire before the law, is they are able to provide 10 gigabit per second infrastructure, and Salisbury, North Carolina is not some unicorn of a place where everybody uses high bandwidth. They're saying they want to encourage businesses to move there. Vermont isn't the hot bed of people who are going to use a lot of bandwidth either. These are just municipalities that felt it was in their interest, either for their residents or for their businesses to provide that service because they weren't going to get it another way. So you can debate amongst yourselves whether you think municipalities should be allowed to do that, but here's a case study for you to use in whatever argument you want to make. In California, you can make an argument that you have the right to pursue a job anywhere you want at any time, because you do, according to the law, several tech companies are paying for trying to limit that, right? They found guilty of collusion. I believe it was collusion. I shouldn't say that because I didn't see if it was actually collusion that they were found guilty of, but they were found guilty of violating the law when they had a no poaching clause among them. U.S. District Court Judge Lucy Coe approved a settlement where Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe will pay $415 million for creating those no poach lists that limited the employee's ability to change jobs. It's class action suit. Approximately 5,860 workers affected by the poaching scheme will collect about $5,770 each on average. And this is a fight that's not over. I know under NDA, many people who have been told you have a non-compete, you can't go work for someone else, you have a non-poaching clause with us, you can't hire people from us now that you've left us, and those things are generally considered illegal in California, but companies really try to clamp down on people. And of course, because Google's in this story, I will disclose that my wife works for YouTube, which is owned by Google. Ironhide83 wanted us to mention the Verge article about ASUS's new router, the RT-AC5300. It looks like a spider. It has eight legs. It's a top eight legs, which also serve as dual-band antennas, and they are removable. You don't have to have all eight of them on there. It can handle 1 gigabit per second over 2.4 gigahertz wireless and 2.167 gigabits per second on 2.5 gigahertz bands, which is not, I mean if that sounds crazy to you, that's actually fairly common in newer routers. It's just the form factor that's crazy. Probably not good enough for Salisbury North Carolina, but fine for most places. Unlike the On Hub from Google, the RT-AC5300 has Ethernet ports too, four of them in addition to the inputs. You get five ports there. No price yet, and it is expected to creep up on your shoulder and scare you later this year. And that's a look at the headlines. Alright, our pick of the day, and one correction is all we have left in this headlines-only edition, but I hope you enjoyed it. Website, camelcamelcamel.com collects price histories from Amazon and then they offer alerts, either by email or Twitter, based on a threshold price. Do you paste any Amazon URL into the search bar, where the graph is provided for price history, sales rank, product details. Good smart shopping. There's a lot of services like this, and Nick in Louisiana likes camelcamelcamels. You might want to check them out, camelcamelcamel.com. He pointed out when he sent this email that the Watchmen Blu-ray had just dropped below $35 at that time. So thank you, Nick, for your pick. You can send your picks to us as well, folks. Do it. Feedback at dailytechnewshut.com. We love your picks, and you can find my picks at dailytechnewshut.com. Fresh picks? Pick picks picks? Finally, several of you, some gentler than others, pointed out that the emailer mentioning using the Google trigger phrase yesterday and said how he had to say it three times. He only had to say it three times in training. I think we sort of just had a brain glitch and both of Scott and I were thinking he had to say it three times every time. You only say it three times in training so it can recognize your voice, thanks to the body who clarified that for us. It's maybe not as bad as it sounded. Actually, not nearly as bad as it sounded. And that is it for the show. Once again, don't forget if you're in Atlanta and you can make it to Dragon Con, especially if you're already going to Dragon Con, we are going to be doing the show in the Crystal Ballroom. I'm going to double check that to make sure I'm saying that right, but we are definitely going to be doing the show in the Crystal Ballroom in the Hilton at local time of 4 o'clock. So 4 o'clock Eastern, 1 o'clock Pacific, just a half hour before the normal time. It will be streamed live on AlphaGeekMedia.com. So both the audio on AlphaGeek Radio, the video on AlphaGeek Media, as are all the podcast panels here at Dragon Con this year. Big thanks to Todd Whitehead for all of that. So if you can watch, watch, if you can come out and join us, come to the Crystal Ballroom and hang out and say hello. We're going to have Veronica Belmont, we're going to have Jonathan Strickland, we're going to have Justin Robert Young, and as always happens when we're in Dragon Con, somebody else, maybe a few other people show up. And of course, Lemp Rolta will be here in person illustrating the episode, so you might walk away with some art if you show up as well. Big thanks to all the patrons who make it possible for us to try different things who are patient with us when we do the headline news and who make the show possible. It is a minority of you that support the show, but there is enough of you who are generous enough who make it so that we can do the show. So thank you, thank you, thank you so, so much. If you would like to become one of those people and you're not already, go to DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can support by Patreon, you can support by PayPal, you can support by buying something in a store, or you can just tell a friend. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. You can give us a call at 51259Daily, that's 5125932459. Listen to the show live usually Mondays through Fridays at 430 Eastern, like I said 4 o'clock tomorrow at alphageekradio.com and visit our website DailyTechNewsShow.com I'll talk to you live from Dragon Con tomorrow. Goodbye! This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at FrogPants.com