 Daily Tech News show is made possible by you, the listener. Thanks to all of you, including Johnny Hernandez, High Tech Oki, Jim Hart and Nick Giuliani. On this episode of DTNS, Gemini shows the way to Google survival, a lightweight pair of AR glasses you can afford, and Disney sets the future of cord cutting for sports fans and more. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, February 8th, 2024 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Animal House. I'm Sarah Lane from Deep in the heart of Texas. I'm Justin Robert Young and I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Oh, my friends, get ready for most of America to call in sick on Monday. It's Super Bowl weekend coming up. And right before the show, Justin made us make our best bets for usher's first song in the halftime show. I went with OMG. Justin, you went with what? DJ got us falling in love. And Sarah was still on the fence. I'm not wagering anything. All right. You all bet amongst yourselves. I'm just going to enjoy it like an American. Fair. Roger, do you even care? How many usher songs? I don't know any usher songs. That's fair. Just let it burn. OMG. All right. Let's start. Those were his confessions. Sorry. Go ahead. Apple has removed the preview tag from Windows versions of Apple TV, Apple Music and Apple Devices apps. The change comes along with a major update to the iCloud for Windows app that leaves Windows users still relying on iTunes for podcasts and audio books. But you know, they're making a change. The new Apple apps are for x86 versions of Windows 10 and 11 only. So you still need iTunes for Windows. Denmark's data protection authority issued an injunction that will require schools that use Chromebooks actually municipalities, but mostly this is targeted towards educational uses to prevent student data from being sent to Google. The data authority determined that the method of transferring data to Google does not have a legal basis for all of its disclosed purposes. So it's not that they have to stop using the Chromebooks. Schools may continue to use educational services offered by Google workspace. They just have to lock these things down so that data is not transferred for other purposes, like helping Google improve Chrome OS, for example. The municipalities in charge of the programs have until March 1st to create a plan and then until August implement it. The US Federal Trade Commission filed a complaint and Federal Appeals Court Wednesday arguing that Microsoft's reduction of 1,900 employees in its gaming division contradicts what it previously told the court, which is that there would be no redundancies between Activision Blizzard and the rest of Microsoft's gaming division because it was a vertical acquisition. Not all 2,000 layoffs affected Activision Blizzard directly, but Microsoft did say the layoffs produced areas of overlap. The company responded with its own court filing to say that Activision Blizzard had planned layoffs on its own before the acquisition. Microsoft was like, wasn't it? The FTC, which continues to object in court to the acquisition, asked the court to pause Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard. Boy, the story just won't end. The FTC is like, we're not letting this go. You need to stop the thing that is already done. Mozilla's Mitchell Baker is stepping down as CEO, but will remain as Executive Chairwoman. Board Member Laura Chambers will take over as interim CEO. Chambers will focus on product strategy and pipeline. Chambers previously worked at Airbnb, PayPal, and eBay. However, the Mozilla board is going to conduct a search for a permanent CEO. To fund implementation of the Digital Services Act, the EU charges tech companies, who are affected by the act, supervisory fee. Those fees are determined based on user numbers with a maximum fee of 0.05% of yearly profit. So if your company doesn't make any money or even loses money, maybe your ex, maybe your wiki media, that cat means you pay nothing. But if you're huge and profitable, think Metta, think TikTok, then you're going to pay a lot. Metta and TikTok don't think this is fair, and that each filed lawsuits against the European Union over these fees. Well, while they do that, Google does what it does best, right, Sarah? Yeah, it changes names of products. Google is the best at this. Hands down. All right. Google, you got it on lock. Google's back at it. So it confirmed Thursday what developer Dylan Russell noted Monday in Google's changelog, the AI-powered chatbot formerly known as Bard, plus its sister model Duet, which handles Google Doc stuff, will both be called Gemini in a combined effort going forward. The company also released Gemini as a dedicated app on Android, which users can use to set Gemini as their default assistant, meaning that you can use the wake word or long press the home button to launch Gemini. Gemini Pro is the standard version. A lot of people will use that at least at first, or if you want to go up for $20 a month, you can use Gemini Ultra 1.0, which is the most powerful version of the model, which also is bundled in as part of the Google One AI premium plan. If you're already on that plan and you're paying $10 a month, then you're only paying another 10. For newer users, it would be 20. Yeah. So I think you made that more clear than it needs to be, Sarah, because as you correctly pointed out, if you're on the Snappily named Google One AI premium plan, you get Gemini Ultra 1.0. But I'd like to point out that Google doesn't call it Gemini Ultra 1.0. They call it Gemini Advanced, but only when it's in Google One AI premium plan. Gemini Advanced, of course, is powered by Gemini Ultra 1.0. So I just thought I'd add that piece of lack of clarity, just in case somebody looks at this and is like, wait, what's Gemini Advanced? Also, just so you know, there's Gemini Nano too. Gemini Nano is the version that is on device that is used on the Pixel 8 for things that can be used by developers. So you've got Gemini Nano, Gemini Pro, and Gemini Ultra are the models. And then you've got Gemini, which is- You have other nomenclatures based on whatever else you're doing with Google, yeah. And then there's, yeah, anyway. Let's let them off the hook and be okay with them just calling their AI Gemini in all its various flavors. Justin, what do you think of Google's attempt to play catch up with open AI? Don't hold your breath on how long Gemini is going to be the name would be my first piece of advice to DTNS listeners. I've been consistently baffled with Google's foray into AI. They're very obviously playing catch up. I was very, very critical of their launch of Gemini, which I thought was anywhere between too slick to outright shameful in terms of how they demonstrated their technology. There's no reason why they should not have a best in class product here. Let me say that I am not here to say that they will never get there. They have to get there. They will change their entire leadership before they fail at AI. It is that big of a issue for them. It is an existential threat. That being said, boy, it is just this reek of Google's biggest problem of the last 10 to 15 years, which is middle managers run wild. And that's how you get 50 different names for one product in a sphere that is still experimental as much as we might know it as the future for technology or at least one of the possible futures for our world of technology. And I'm as bullish as anybody on generative AI. It still is a learning curve for a lot of people and giving it 50 names doesn't make it more inviting. It's just one name, Gemini. What a Gemini one plus ultra advanced nano, RIMO, whatever. Wow. Now we're writing novels. What I did think was interesting about this rollout is you can clearly see that Google wants to go all in on Gemini. And to your point, Justin, it's a little clunky. This is what Google does best. Not the rollout itself, but just naming things and trying to make sure that all the users understand what's going on. You just have a lot of people being like, okay, four or five different options. Fine. I just want Gemini to do something cool. Well, if you are one of those people, I think it's interesting that there's a new toggle at the top of the app if you're in a mobile experience on Google, switching from search to Gemini. Now, obviously Google search is bread and butter for the company, always has been. We'll probably continue to be for some time. But Google wants you to try out Gemini and learn to love it so much that it's willing to say like, all right, let's hide search and just use Gemini. Yeah. And furthermore, gosh, you know, you're using Gemini Pro, which is great. But if you want the better version, just an extra $10 a month on your Google One plan or $20 a month if you don't have a Google One plan, that's cost effective because a chat GPT's paid plan is $20 a month flat. So if you are already paying Google One, it's only an extra $10 and that looks cheap by comparison. And by all accounts, Gemini is better than GPT for it, some things and not as good at other things, but is roughly equivalent to, so you're not trading down to do that. I think this shows that Google, as we mentioned with YouTube previously on the show, is valuing subscriptions as it's hedge against moribund advertising dollars. So them saying, Hey, in your search app, you can use search, which we fund with advertising, or you can use Gemini, which we fund with subscriptions. Either way, I think that points the future of Google strategy here. Well, it is necessary for them. They need it. Right now, they've got a path in front of them. The question is whether or not they can walk it. And so far from the stuff that I've seen Gemini is it tested well, but in a test that they administered themselves, but it is not equivalent to GPT for and all the stuff that I've read so far. I've read some independent tests that have said, yeah, it's not equivalent in some things, but it's actually a little ahead in other things. It's too early to tell, to be honest. And there's no real objective thing. What I haven't read is someone trashing it and saying they're behind. And so I think, you know, depending on the use case, it's, it's Coke and Pepsi, not Coke and RC. Well, I mean, they are behind. They're behind by the way, by the way of saying that they are launching something that is GPT for equivalent when we could see GPT five from open AI at any time now. Don't count your GPT fives before they hatch. I'm, I'm still waiting on that. I'll bet you. All right. All right. Let's, let's, let's bet a steak on GPT five coming out by June. That's crazy. All right. Singapore based brilliant labs announced a pair of lightweight augmented reality glasses called frame with a multimodal virtual assistant named Noah on board. That's not the Noah that had the arc. It's NOA and the frames kind of look like something John Lennon or Steve Jobs might wear. They're the round frames or Gandhi as the company pointed out. Yeah. Sure. Because Gandhi would have bought some frames from Singapore based brilliant labs, as we all know frame. However, can display images and video at 640 by 400 not not super high resolution, but not bad, especially for something that actually just looks like glasses and isn't a big bulky goggles headset. NOA, the AR, the assistant can respond to voice commands with text that displays in that field of vision, but it can also recognize images, generate images and translate speech. Interestingly, NOA doesn't run just one model. It uses perplexity AI for conversational search. It uses stable diffusion for text to image generation. It uses whisper for speech recognition, and it uses GPT for for text generation. So it selected a model that thought it was best at each of these things and went with that particular model. You do have to connect this thing over Bluetooth to do things like search and to power the models. But that's another thing that's keeping the frames lightweight. One example, one use case they gave was you're out shopping, right? And you look at a shirt and you're like, I wonder if I could find a cheaper online. You can just ask the glasses. Hey, I'm looking at the shirt. Find it online. Tell me what the prices are. Frame is available to order right now for $349 and it'll ship in April. Justin, would you pop these on your face? You know, at sub 400, we're at least in the realm of screw it for S's and G's. Let's see what this kind of technology can feel like at this stage. I do think that the biggest issue or the biggest sign of this, because the product to me feels like a lot of spaghetti being thrown at the wall. We'll see what sticks. Not to say that it's going to be good or bad, but because AI is something that you can build on available APIs for fairly cheaply, it allows for a product that is promising a lot of punch for something that is that cheap because the hardware components have been there for a while. So I think that this is fascinating that these kinds of products are coming out for as cheap as they are. I mean, my first reaction was, are the glasses really my style? But you say that about any AR glasses experience. And obviously, Real Hate Labs is not the first to try this, but we're now in an era where people go instead of VR glasses, who even wants to do that? So dumb to like, hmm, okay, how do I do this out in the real world? Well, I'm not going to wear the Vision Pro on the subway, even though some people are doing that. But something like this could be something that I would use. I think the style, the lightweight function of it, and the fact that it has to pair to a phone, which I always have with me anyway, you know, as much as I would like to say like, oh yeah, I just wear my Apple Watch out and about by itself now. I need the phone to do all the good stuff. This feels like a pretty decent price point for what you're getting. Yeah, I think this is a different product category than either the Quest or the Apple Vision Pro. It's a category that CES was littered with people trying different aspects of this. I saw translation glasses. I saw the N Real, which is very similar as far as like showing you real time information while you're walking around. So this is, you know, these folks have a lot of cred in the community because they made the monocle. I don't know if you ran into that, but if you're familiar, that was a big hit with the open source crowd. And these, the frame are also open source. So, you know, they've got a posse there with the open source crowd. These are going to be a little more easy for people to understand the monocle, which was in fact a single lens as cool as that was, probably not a mainstream adoption take. And so having something that's more traditional glasses. And like you say, you know, stylish in a way that may or may not be your style, but certainly catches your eye and doesn't look like you're wearing a big thing. Well, because you're not. You're not. You're wearing basically prescription glasses, which they do offer. It's designed to be like, put them on in the morning, wear them all day. And by the way, I just went through their, their checkout process for prescription, a prescription version of it, you're still getting out for under $500, which was, I think is, is that's good. That's around the price that if you want to spend a lot of money, if you are somebody who spends a lot of money on glasses or likes to buy consumer tech, 500 is around. You know, that's not a crazy number. It's not that much more than some of the higher end, you know, prescription glasses that you'd get at your eye doctor. Yeah. Or even a, or even a pair of Chanel glasses. I mean, let's be honest, you can see me wear Chanel, but yeah. Well, but, but my point is, is like, you can buy expensive anything. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. And they don't do anything, but correct your vision. Sub 500 is good for a product like this. If it can deliver on the promise that the tech says it can, then I think these are a good buy for under 500. Lamar Wilson has been trying out the new version of the Wayfarers. I had the old, the first version of the Wayfarers and we were both talking about how the assistant stuff is kind of the stuff you love, right? It's, it's cool to be able to take pictures and shoot video from your perspective in certain cases, but really being able to just ask it things and have it tell you things and look at things and have it recognize things that feels like the situation you would use it more often. And so what frame's doing here or what brilliant labs is doing with frame here is, is more to my mind, what is likely to get people to want to pick these up. And you mentioned that this is not in the class of Apple vision pro. And I would totally agree. In fact, I think even going forward, this, the Apple vision pro to me is not something that is designed to be worn on the streets. It is designed more like a MacBook where you are at a location and you are, and you are working on stuff. These are the kinds of things that you want to wear at all times. And I do think it's more like the difference between an iPhone and a MacBook with, with the Apple vision pro being the MacBook and products like these as they continue to develop being smartphones. Yeah. And especially because most of the processing is done with your phone. These are just Bluetooth. You get hours and hours of battery life out of these things. So, you know, it's not something you have to continually plug in like you do with an Apple vision pro or recharge like you do with a quest. Well, folks, if you are into the Android scene, if you're sitting here every time we say Apple and you're like, ah, man, why aren't they talking about Android? Well, we've got a whole show for you. Android faithful every week. Android aficionados, Ron Richards, when's way down, Michelle, Ramon and Jason Howell bring you the latest Android news and information for an hour or more. You can watch it live on Tuesdays. They just did a show a couple of days ago, 8pm Eastern, 5pm Pacific, youtube.com slash daily tech news show or subscribe and enjoy it at your leisure at Android faithful.com Disney made a lot of interesting announcements on its earnings call Wednesday following the news earlier in the day that it would team up with Warner Brothers Discovery and Fox on a sports streaming service this autumn. One of the biggest takeaways is that Disney says it will take a small equity stake in Epic Games. Yes, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite and also the legal nemesis of Apple. Disney says it will partner with Epic on an all new games and entertainment universe that will further expand the reach of beloved Disney stories and experiences. A teaser video promises it will be a place to play, watch, create and shop while discovering a place where magic is epic. You get it, Disney magic. Disney also said a new universe will interoperate with Fortnite. Yeah, it's not an epic stake. Ten cents still owns half of Epic, but you know, it's something. Disney CEO Bob Iger also announced that a standalone ESPN streaming service will arrive in autumn 2025. So a year after this combined service with Warner and Fox, that one will have all ESPN network games, shows, content of any kind, as well as some of the website features like fantasy sports embedding. You'll be able to bundle it with Disney Plus and Hulu. And they didn't announce a price, but CEO Bob Iger said it would be more attractive than a cable bundle. One would hope that a service that is just ESPN would be more attractive than a cable bundle. Justin, let's start by focusing on that combo service coming this fall. We mentioned it quickly yesterday on the show. We don't know how much that one will be either, but we do know when it combines games from Fox Sports, TNT, ESPN and more, that it will have about 55% of US sports. Is this what court killing sports fans have been waiting for? I think that it is less what everybody has been waiting for and more an answer to a problem that they are going to really feel acutely over the next 10 years, which is the continued splintering and exclusivity of live sports rights. We already saw the first big shot of this war being fired during the playoffs this year for the NFL, where you had a Chiefs versus Dolphins playoff game, exclusively on Peacock, which is not in the top three streaming services. I've never had so many people ask me how to set up Peacock. Yeah. There's going to need to be consolidation. And from the sports perspective on this, you have probably the most valuable intellectual property in terms of game coverage that will be combining between ESPN, which has rights to things like Monday Night Football and beloved weekly broadcast from Turner Sports with the NBA, as well as a lot of other stuff. I think that there are some very interesting implications if you trace this out further. But for the rumored $30 or so per month that people are saying, if you can knock out the vast majority of all your sports watching and not try to app hop between a bunch of different stuff, I think that this is a pretty, pretty good idea. And it was one that not a lot of people were talking about before the announcement happened. How are you getting your sports these days, Sarah? On YouTube TV. So it's through the cable-like service. You just, you're like, I've got everything there. Yeah. That is, and still not everything, but most things. YouTube TV has come up in price quite a bit since I first got on board. What are we at now? 73 bucks a month? I think it's 72.99. You know, it was like 50 back in the day. But no, this works out best for me with a combination of over-the-air antenna for network stuff that I can get. Can't get any of the good stuff doing it that way, unless it's like the Super Bowl. So yeah, YouTube TV is what I use. I don't really have any qualms with it, but it's also just kind of my least expensive option. If I had a sports-only less expensive option, I would find that very attractive. Because again, with the OTA antenna, I can get like, you know, the Grammys and the Oscars and local news and just stuff that like I need every once in a while. And the rest of it I'm using third-party apps for anyway. Yeah, this doesn't solve the problem of fragmentation of sports for folks. And I think for someone like Sarah, YouTube TV is still going to be a better deal, because it has more things in it that you need. However, I do like the idea of this because it reminds me of Hulu. If you remember, Hulu in the earlier days was stopped, was started in order to combat YouTube, which seems odd, because YouTube is nothing like Hulu now. Everyone thought it was the thing that was ripping off all the TV shows. So major networks ABC and Fox got together to start Hulu, and they got NBC to come on board. They never got CBS to come fully on board, but they did get Warner and they got Paramount before Paramount and CBS were together as one company. I wonder, Justin, if they do that with this, right? They've got these three, so that's 55% of sports. What if they can get NBC and Paramount Plus to join in? Do you get the Peacock and Paramount Plus sports to be a part of this as well? And then you're pushing close to 90% of the sports, because there's other little things here and there, and obviously things on Amazon and Apple, and I wouldn't expect them to join it. Well, here's the other big thing, and I'm going to make a sports point that'll then dovetail out to a wider world. We're at a tipping point when it comes to sports rights. As we speak right now, people are exchanging paper and various different offers for what the NBA rights are going to be going forward. And Apple's involved, Amazon's involved, as well as some of the players here, ESPN and Turner specifically, which are splitting the package. Now, who knows how long those companies are going to be able to bid for that package on their own, unless they create a product that creates a lot of revenue, and they can continue to offer these leagues the kind of percentage upwards that they want. Because otherwise, you're going to be outside of the realm of bidding when Apple and Amazon come to call. And the larger point I want to make is, why would this only be true about sports? Why would this not be true going forward? And while we look at this grand game of musical chairs that is being played throughout all of these streaming services and the companies that may or may not want to be in them, one of the thoughts that people have had is that at a certain point, all of the dinosaurs, relatively speaking, are going to join together because they know that together is the only way that they can stand up to the apples and Amazons of the world. Yeah, I think there's more to this, like you say, that they're pointing towards. And it could be used in other ways. I also think it's an experiment. And I also think my last thing I think is price is everything. How they price this is going to make a big difference. My gut says $55 a month. I don't know why. Whatever it's going to be, we will see. Yeah, something around the $50 range would be... Or $49.95 maybe to start just to... Something like that. So just enough to say, I mean, aren't you just watching Sports Center all day anyway? Yeah. Come on over. ESPN and... And I would be like, yes, it's me. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes in from Brian who said, regarding your discussion on GDI yesterday about podcasts being open across platforms and wishing other social networks and web tools worked the same way, I feel like a key point is that podcasts are inherently unidirectional. That isn't the case with most social networks, where the goal is to get a bidirectional experience, right? Oh, that is a good point. That is a difference when we talk about podcasts are open and they've stayed open. Wouldn't it be great if social networks were that way too? Anil Dash, if you didn't hear our conversation on GDI yesterday, pointed out that you can say, find us wherever you get your podcasts. And that is truly a unique thing about podcasting. You can't say, follow me wherever you follow people. You have to say, follow me with this username on Twitter and this username on Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. And Brian's pointing out, it is easier to do unidirectional broadcasting like RSS than it is to handle follows, which Mastodon and Blue Sky are dealing with that complexity right now. So it's a good, it's a fair point. Yeah. Thank you, Brian. And thank you everybody who writes in with feedback, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Keep sending them. Always makes our show better. Justin Robert Young, you also make our show better every time you're on the show because you're a shining star. What else are you up to? Oh, thank you so much. Well, of course it is the political season with a presidential race ongoing. Your old boy was out in Vegas last weekend, wherein I covered the non-existent Nevada primary and caucus. The caucus is happening right now. But the primary, I told you on the show that Nikki Haley was going to lose to none of these candidates. If you want that kind of insight, you gotta listen to the show. Politics, politics, politics. Wait for it wherever you find your podcast. So you're saying nobody can beat Nikki Haley. My favorite petty comment was, I think, from one of the other campaigns that said the donors to Nikki Haley would have been better off giving their money to none of these candidates. Well, patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. Gotham Heights asked us what our guilty pleasures are. So we're going to tell them and you. Just a reminder, though, we do the show live and you can catch it live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 2100 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back tomorrow discussing social media platforms from a small business owner's perspective with Aunt Prueh joining us. Back to you then.