 This 10th year of Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Carmine Bailey, Vince Power, Rodrigo Smith Zapata, and our new patron, Eric! On this episode of DTNAS, Lenovo announces the Legion Go handheld, plus quite a few other things, autonomous drones, surprise and delight, and our tech IPOs finally making a comeback? This is the Daily Tech News for Friday, September 1st, 2023. From Studio Underscore, I'm Sarah Lane. From Columbus, Ohio, I'm Rob Dundlewood. Drawing the top tech stories from Cleveland, I'm Len Perlton. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Rob Dimello, Chief Technology Officer at Skidmore Owens and Merrill. So good to have you on the show. You're so good at this, you were just going to introduce yourself. I'm so sorry. Don't be sorry. No, it's, it's, you know what you're doing. And that's why you're on the show. And we're going to talk with Rob about all of the things. And those things are going to start with the quick heads. Magic Leap announced its one AR headsets will cease to function after December 31st, 2024. So you have some time. You can't buy a Magic Leap one anymore, but the company says it will be supported through the cutoff date. Support includes outages that impact core functionality, although Magic Leap says we will be at the discretion of what that means. Troubleshooting with customer care, cloud services, valid warranties, all supported through the end of next year. Magic Leap one launched back in 2018, mid-year, powered by a tethered, waist-mounted compute pack and included a single-tracked controller with hand tracking support that came later. So pour out a little liquor. Paris has banned e-scooters following a referendum back in April, where 90% of residents are at least the ones who voted favorite getting rid of them. Tiered, Dot and Lime all previously operated in the city with a combined 15,000 e-scooters. E-bike services in the city aren't affected and privately owned scooters are still allowed. Dot says it will re-home its 5,000 scooters to other markets with high demand such as Belgium and Tel Aviv. Tier says the majority of its scooters will go back to Germany or Warsaw, Poland and Lime will ship their scooters to Lily, London, Copenhagen and cities in Germany. Hmm, yeah, scooters. Out of Paris into other markets. Meta is doing whatever it can to bump up the engagement of its new social network threads, saw a lot of signups and then a lot of drop in engagement. And, as noted by many users across the world, is using Instagram, the company is anyway, to show a 4U on threads carousel with a button to open threads directly from your phone. A company spokesperson from Meta said, we have added a number of new features to the app since launch and are now making it easier for people to see their latest content from threads directly on Instagram. Starfield is already in the hands of some folks with early access and if you are limiting the exclusion of support for NVIDIA's deep learning super sampling or DLSS, don't worry, modder's got you. IG notes that at least three Nexus mods have created a mod that adds not only support for DLSS, but also Intel's XC Super Sampling or XCSS. Mods also added a field of view slider not currently available in the game's own PC version. Starfield's official launch date is September 6th. Sony announced the PlayStation Portal will launch on November 15th. The portal will be available to stream PlayStation 5 games over Wi-Fi. It also costs $200. Pre-orders now open in the US, UK, France, and Belgium from Sony's official PlayStation direct storefront. Sony wrote on its blog for PlayStation that other retailers will offer pre-orders starting September 29th. That's when other markets will be open and support will be open as well for regions like Canada and Japan. And those are the quick hits. Okay, let's talk about Lenovo's big ol' Friday dump. Don't know why you did it Lenovo, but we're gonna talk about it because everybody else is. Lenovo announced the Legion Go, its first Windows-powered gaming handheld that set for an October release for $700. Specs include an 8.8 inch QHD plus screen, an AMD Ryzen at Z1 Extreme processor, a 49.2 watt-hours battery, and controllers that can pop out from the chassis. The Verge notes that it's less of a valve steamed at competitor and more of a cross between the Nintendo Switch and Asus's ROG Ally. The screen is 2560 by 1600 with a 14, I'm sorry, 144 hertz refresh rate. 1440 would be great, but no, that's not what we have here. The guts also include 16 gigs of LPDDR5X RAM and up to one terabytes of internal storage. There's also a 3.5 millimeter audio combo jack, some people will be excited about that, two USB-C's, one on the front and one on the back, and a micro SD reader. Lenovo also announced a new Legion 9i, also slated for an October release for a very specific $4,399. For that price, you get a 16-inch gaming laptop with a self-contained liquid cooling system that differs from traditional air cooling and is designed to handle much more thermal mass. But Rob, Lenovo did not stop there. No, no, we've got one other announcement. The company's new Legion glasses function as an external monitor for devices that support screen pass through for AR glasses. Now, you might say, oh, so it's for the Legion Go, and what Rob just explained is the Legion 9i. Yeah, those are the obvious companions, but you do have other device options when compatible. The Legion glasses mimic a 27-inch monitor and can display at 60 hertz and 1080p per eye. The display also uses a micro LSD panel, plugs into a USB port, and features built-in speakers, sound and brightness controls. You might say, I like it. What does it cost? $329. So if you add all these up. All right, Rob DeMillo, let's talk about these. What are you buying, if anything? All right, so I'm going to roll back also to the Sony conversation because I think it all kind of ties in. I'm confused. Reddit is making fun of the Sony product. If you go to the Sony subreddit, it's brutal. And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that there's already the Sony Play app that runs on Sony phones and all that stuff, which I use, and it works really well. So I have no interest in getting the Sony, what do they call it, the portal. In the case of Lenovo, it's an interesting little product. I'm always confused by companies that cap out its 16 gigs of memory on these things because you're going to notice that. It's great that it has all these other features and I'm one of the people that's jazzed about the audio combo jack. That kind of stuff, I dig all of that. But this thing is going to make or break itself on how fast it runs because it's a gaming rig. And so having 16 gigs, I do not understand. So there's that. Yeah, I kind of agree with Rob because here's the thing. When these are PCs, this is a computer for a lack of a better word. You expect it to run like your computer, but they're cramming all these parts in. They don't give it an abundance of RAM. So when you compare it to running on a computer, you're going to think it's a little bit sluggish or you're going to think it's a little bit slow because they can't put all of the hardware in there because it would be just immensely expensive. So I think that companies are ultimately, they're chasing Steam. And I don't know that anyone has quite figured it out yet. What Steam has is kind of awesome. I think everybody is trying to capture that lightning in a bottle again. Yeah, I agree. And the 16 gig thing, it's like I keep harping on it, but it's like a dime. I don't understand. Just put another 16 gig in there. Who cares? What difference does that even make to you as an OEM? So that's a little odd. And Rob, you're right about catching up to Steam, right? Everyone wants to do it. So let's move on. Let's talk about, for the first time ever, a neural network powered autonomous drone has been able to beat human pilots in high-speed FPV drone racing. A team of researchers from the University of Zurich and Intel have developed a system called Swift in which they came up with an autonomous breakthrough based largely on machine vision, putting the AI system on a more even footing with human pilots. Yeah. So before Swift came about, researchers had to rely on a special motion capture system, capture system, rather to win against humans. Their new solution uses real-time data collected by an onboard camera, similar to those used by human racers. It also incorporates an integrated inertial measurement unit that measures the drone's acceleration and speed. Kind of knows what's going on in real time. That data is set to a neural network for processing, which allows the fully autonomous drone to win against multiple human FPV champions. Now, my first thought here was like, oh, it's like chess, where the machine is finally better than the human, but for drone racing. I think chess is actually more interesting. Like chess is more of an interesting problem. This is a very robotic task. For AI to jump into this, I think this is the first time that a AI has powered a physical device in a contest kind of situation. I could be wrong about that, but that's what I remember seeing earlier. Of course it does better than people. It's like I don't understand why this is even a thing, like why this is a news article. I mean, maybe one of you guys can explain it better than I am. Okay, so compared to the ongoing conversation, ad nauseum really, about autonomous vehicles on roads, and whether or not they take out a lot of human error, but at the same time, they're not humans. So we're still doing some sort of a hybrid form of both. I feel like this is a little bit more of a, it's that conversation, but hey, look what the machine can do. Yeah, but it's kind of like a autonomous vehicle. That's a much harder problem. This is a confined course with a very strict set of rules. Nothing's going to get in your way except the other contestants. So it just feels like it's like, okay, sure. I think what's cool about this is that when you think about these, these drones are relatively small. So for them to be able to get enough stuff on the drone for it to be able to still fly at these speeds, I mean, these things are going really, really fast. And it can self-contain. I mean, it is fully autonomous. That is kind of the thing here, because before they had to actually rely on these high-end imaging systems that you couldn't put on to the device. They had to be tethered, even if wirelessly, to something else to do that processing. And that's now happening on the actual drone. The other thing is when you start looking at where this technology can go, like search and rescue was something that was mentioned, you can send these drones out and they can fly very fast while they have their charge and actually survey large areas relatively quickly. There are other things that they could do such as force monitoring or space exploration or just things where you need devices that they don't know exactly their environment. So they need to be able to make the decisions on their own. This is the precursor to that. So I think eventually this could really be some cool technology as we build Skynet. Oh, God, oh, God, we're all going to die. Yeah. I mean, the Maui fires come to mind for something like this. You've got a bunch of humans who are working as hard as they can to make sure that everybody who needs to be safe can be. This is great technology for something like that where it's not even hours or minutes but seconds that matter. And I can see those situations being really great examples of why Rob DeMillo, where you were like, is this cool? It's like, well, it can be. It can be cool. It's going to get cooler too because one of the things the story notes is that as soon as parameters changed, the drones became significantly less efficient. So basically they were trained on a very specific course of very specific lighting with gates and specific locations. And as soon as that changed, they, you know, I don't want to say they fell out of the bottom, but they don't do as well when they're not trained specifically on the environment that they're in. So there's still some work to be done here. But the fact that they could actually in a, you know, control situation beat human champions. I mean, these gentlemen are, you know, people are really good at flying these drones. The fact that they could actually get that done to me is pretty impressive. Yeah. But that's kind of my point, right? I mean, if you take one of these things, you put them out in the field, you know, to Sarah's point about looking for folks in the Maui fires, it's a different environment. Like it's a, it's a lot, there's a lot more activity going on around the drone. They bring the drone down also. Variables different. Yeah, 100%. Right. And so it's a different problem set. Also, I would look towards the military, right? We've had drones for a long time in the military. I mean, there's tech in there. I wouldn't even call it AI. It's just, it's just very good at dealing with environmental situations and, and, and what have you. But it, you know, it should be beating on their door for rescue drones and that sort of thing. I just, I just don't see how this made the news. That's my only comment about it. It seems very sort of computer science 101 or something. Yeah. I know I'm being kind of a kind of a biffle about this, but you're just too smart. That's fine. You're like, this is CS101. Yeah, I get where you're coming from. I just, I think we're early and at some point, they have to try it in order for it to be what it's going to be at some, it's some day. So this isn't, you know, I said, this is not the Terminator T1000 yet. This is like the, the T6. You're just, you're trying to get to that point. And I think that eventually the use cases will absolutely make themselves, you know, available to us. Excellent. Well, Tom Merritt is, he's hopefully having the best time in Seoul, Korea right now, but his how to make a great podcast class was a big hit. Many of you said, we weren't able to make that class. Where can we, you know, find it somewhere else? Good news. You can still get the online course at our DTNS Patreon store. Tom explains the fundamentals of producing a really good podcast and you know, who else better to do it than Tom Merritt? He is good at this. You can download the class or stream it over at Patreon.com slash DTNS slash shop. All right. We hear terms like IPO, initial public offering, company going public, NASDAQ. These are all terms we talk about on DTNS. If you're listening, you know what those terms are, but tech IPOs have had a hard time of it for the better part of two years, maybe a little bit more depending on where you are on the spectrum, but things seem to be blooming again this week. Grocery delivery startup Instacard and data and marketing automation company Clavio both filed IPOs. Obviously, we talked about this last week. SoftBank owned chip designer arm, which has an arm, I guess, which is SoftBank announced plans to join the NASDAQ seven years after being taken private in a $32 billion acquisition. So we've got some movement, right Rob? Absolutely. So for anyone who isn't following financial markets so closely, a lot of this is locked into timing. For example, Instacard's valuation was shaved ahead of its IPO, which made it more attractive to investors. Meanwhile, DoorDash, let's call it Instacard's closest public market comparison, trades at 3.8 times Instacard's revenue. The way SEC rules work, management teams and bankers have to wait at least 15 days after the IPO filing before they can start their roadshow with an offering taking place two weeks later. So Rob, I know you've got some expertise in this area. Can you explain to us what a roadshow is and does the timing of the roadshow significantly impact it in any meaningful ways? Well, the IPO timings are important, right? So there's been less IPOs, obviously, over the last several years because of everything that's been going on in the economy. And then the IPOs themselves, within a given year, they've got seasons, I guess that's the best way to think about it. You want to avoid the holiday season, you want to avoid summer because nobody is paying attention. So if you target the spring and the fall, which is usually when these things happen, not a rule, but it's usually when they happen, they'll go on these things called roadshows. And you can think of a roadshow as like an album release party. You're getting on the tour bus, hitting the road, getting people pumped. Yeah, 100%. There's usually involved in the an IPO is usually something that includes the board, the executive team at the small company, and they often hire an underwriter, which is an organization, either a person or a bank or a financial institution that will put themselves financially at risk in order to in order to help increase the PR for the IPO. And so some combination of those folks will put together slide presentations, maybe a demo, and they'll hit key market cities, Boston, San Francisco, New York, in Canada to be like Vancouver and Toronto. And they'll go on these roadshows. And it's literally what you're thinking of. It'll be a big stage presence drones, like lights and cameras. Yeah, and all that stuff. And they'll try and they'll try and drum up support. And more times than not, it does exactly what it's supposed to do. Back in 2020, I think it was when Alibaba hit the markets, a lot of their success was based off of some of these roadshows. So it can go several different ways. It can either be a flop of a roadshow, or it can be a roadshow that actually generates a lot of interest and excitement and activity around the company that's trying to pop onto the market. Now, okay, so Rob, you mentioned summer and holiday season being sort of like dead times. Yeah, the summer I get. We're in our summer slump now, although there's plenty of news to talk about, thankfully for us. But holiday season, I don't really understand because isn't a holiday quarter supposed to be especially for, I don't know, if you're selling hardware, a place where you're going to make a lot of your money? For a consumer, yeah. But if you're on a roadshow, you're not interested in the consumer at this point. If you've got a company that you're trying to bring on market and you go on one of these roadshows, your target is going to be the investors, financial institutions, individual investors that want to get in on the ground floor. So it's not about what you're selling, it's about who's buying into the eventual sale. And let's face it, like in the holiday season, all the venture capitalists and financial institutions are all like skiing in stow and things. They're not paying any attention at all. Right. So long, long, long, long time ago, I actually got to attend a roadshow. I was kind of working, I was supporting the people who were doing the presentations and making sure that they were technically correcting the things they were saying. But Rob, as you said, it's kind of like, it's a giant party of people and institutions with lots of money and you're trying to get them to get in on that IPO. So Sarah, to your point, it's doing it right before Thanksgiving. That is not the time to have it done because the people you want there are in Davos or something like that. They're not there. Yeah, they don't care. They have no interest in what's going on in the market at that point. So Rob D'Amillo, what are you thinking about? We've got obviously our big one and that was being teased for a year plus and we're finally there. You've got a couple of other tech IPOs that have sparked people to say, okay, we're back. What do you think? What do I think about IPOs being back? They've never gone away, really, but it's definitely, I'm hearing more and more and more about it. So it's gone through this kind of cyclic adventure over the last couple of decades where there were a ton of IPOs. A lot of them just fizzled on hitting the ground and that soured a lot of folks getting involved in IPOs. So the IPO market dropped and then it's been too long. So this little ebb and flow to the way all this stuff works, the global pandemic did not help in this last couple of years. But as we're starting to come out of the cloud, no pun intended, as we're starting to come out of the pandemic cloud, people are starting to get interested again and people want to turn these engines back on. And it's not just in the tech industry. It's a lot of industries you're seeing IPOs starting to show up again, but it's a lot more discriminatory. So back in the heyday, anybody with a website and a plastic trinket to sell could do an IPO. And now it's not quite sure bets, but companies are a little bit more backed and have a little bit more traction in the market and a lot more people using their services or buying their product or whatever the heck it is. And those are the ones that are generating all of the interest right now. And I think eventually we're going to wind up going back to, you know, I've done this thing in the basement and I think it's really good and I need some money. So I'm going to try an IPO myself. But right now, it is the Instacarts and the arms and the companies that have been around for a little bit. Well, I'm not sure when you Rob or Rob last bought a Hallmark card to give to a loved one, you know, maybe it was an anniversary or a birthday or, you know, dads and grads type thing. Hallmark, the card company is partnering with Venmo to let people send money along with physical greeting cards. Okay, let me explain. Hallmark plus Venmo cards will let anybody who wants to send money choose a card for a specific, specific occasion, then scan a QR code and then set an amount that they want to give that is associated with that card. So all I have to do is give you a card and say, you know, congratulations. Also scan my QR code and get that $40 that I'm also giving you. So if it's my birthday, I get my physical card, I scan the code, I get my money in my Venmo account. If I have a Venmo account, which many people do Venmo says that 78% of its users are already sending money as gifts. So this is something that Venmo is obviously banking on, you know, people wanting to do more of the new option will cost you it's $5. It's available online in physical Hallmark stores and other select retailers. So you are paying for the option to be on the pulse of tech, I suppose. My question on this is, are you paying $5 for the card? Are you paying $5 for the option to send someone money to give people money? So you're paying $4.95 for the card for you to do. It's a $5 fee to participate in this fun experiment. That's what's going on here. Let's say my Aunt Bertha lives, I don't know, in Belgium, right? We were talking about Belgium earlier, so it's on my mind. And she can't be near me. There's no, you know, I don't, I don't know. I don't know if this is like the worst idea or the best idea. It would be a really good idea if there was no surcharge. Like I didn't realize there was a $5 surcharge for doing this. Or even if it was like $0.59 or something, but the fact that you have to spend money to send money, when you could send it for free without actually doing this, is kind of confusing. I mean, I have to assume that these companies are used to people, myself included, who sometimes go like, oh, you know, let's say I'm, I don't know, putting PayPal money into my bank account. Like, do I want it to be immediate? That's a little bit of a charge. Or do I want to wait three days, which would be free. Most of the time, it's three days. But sometimes I'm like, yeah, immediate, I got to pay upfront. So I think that this is a little bit more of that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Although, you know, there's something thrilling, like I remember being a teen and opening up the car and the $20 bill fell out. That's pretty cool. There's a QR code and it's like, why is my aunt Matilda trying to sell me golf clubs or whatever it is. Well, it's been a long time since we were children. I was telling the guys just the other day, but you know, every Christmas, my uncle Rich wrote me a check for $40. It was in the card, you know, where I was like $40. Oh my gosh, you know, at the time, you could buy anything with $40. All right, well, you know, if you, if you like Hallmark cards and you use Venmo, that is an option for you potentially going forward. But we've been talking ad nauseam about all this stuff today. So Len Peralta, let's check in with you and figure out what you've been drawing. Oh, you know, I know that Rob DeMilla was not excited about the drones too much. So but, but maybe this my art today will help that, you know, so I don't know if this is a thing around the country, but here in Cleveland, we have an air show. And I've been thinking a lot about the air show. And so this is a little bit of an homage to that. It's AI beating the drone, which is which is run by Dumball human Dumball human, if you get that. And, you know, it's that's the name of this piece. It's called Dumball human. And you can get it at my online store, LenPeraltaStore.com or at my Patreon, Patreon.com forward slash Len, where you back me at the Len lover level and you get this image. And I know it's not exactly the way that drones work. I don't talk to me about that, but it's more of kind of an interpretation. I'm more excited about your drawing. That's what I thought. I thought you might like that, Rob. Thank you. So Rob D'Amilo, can you just give, you know, thank you so much for being on the show with us this, you know, this Friday afternoon. So could you tell everybody how they can contact you? You know, we, you know, tell us what you got going on with what you're doing. You all know this already, but I'm the technology officer over at Skidmore Owings and Merrill architecture firm worldwide architecture firm. You can find out all about me and all the places that I am by going to about.me slash Rob D'Amilo. And you can connect with me there. I'm always around and available. Excellent. Well, we're so happy to have you on the show with us as always. Absolutely. And Patron stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. It's our second round of GDI debates. You take on great questions of the day. Come debate with us. Oh, the last time we did this, Rob and I were doing questionnaires and it was, he won. I don't want to talk about it. You guys did not know that I was a space nerd. I think that's what it was. Yeah. I think, I think we were talking about space or something like that. So yeah. Well, just a reminder that our show, Daily Tech News show is live Monday through Friday. We're always on demand, of course, but if you can catch us live, we'd love to have you. 4pm Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. Just a reminder, we are off Monday for the US Labor Day holiday. But we're back on Tuesday with Patrick Norton joining us. Talk to you then. Have a great weekend, everyone. 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 co-host Rob Dunwood, video producer and Twitch producer Joe Coates, technical producer Anthony Lemos, Spanish language host, writer and producer Dan Campos, science correspondent Dr. Nikki Ackermans, social media producer and moderator Zoe Deterding, our mods Beatmaster, W. Scottus One, BioCow, Kept Kipper, Steve Guadirama, Paul Rees, Matthew J. Steedon's a.k.a. Bet, Gadget, Pertruoso and JD Galloway, mod and video hosting by Dan Christensen, music and art provided by Martin Bell, Dan Looters, Mustafa A. A. Cast and Len Peralta, live art performed by Len Peralta, A. Cast ad support from Tatiana Matias, Patreon support from Tom McNeil, contributors to this week's show include Nicole Lee, Scott Johnson, plus guests on this week's show included Teja Custody and Rob DeMillo. And thanks to all our patrons who make the show possible.