 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Pele Glendale, Dr. X17, and entropy UK. Coming up on DTNS, well, we have an Elon Musk Twitter deal, plus Amazon's trying social sales again, and what does the wearable market look like it's going? This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, April 25th, 2022. From Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And lovely Cleveland, Ohio, I'm Richard Raffalino. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. As we mentioned, just about an hour ago, it became official that Elon Musk is going to take over Twitter, and we're still trying to make some sense of that, but we have a lot of other news to talk about today. So let's start with a few tech things you should know. The analysts at NPD Group found that the Xbox Series X and S was the best-selling hardware platform in March 2022, and in Q1 overall, and that's in terms of overall dollars spent, not unit sales. The unit sales title went to the Nintendo Switch, and it led for both of those time periods. The last time the Xbox led a month in total dollars spent was in March 2014. Overall Q1 video game hardware dollar sales did decrease 15% of the year to a mere $1.2 billion. Meta will open its first Meta Store in Burlingame, California, that's just south of San Francisco on May 9th in the same building that houses the Reality Lab's hardware division. The store will demonstrate and sell portal smart displays, Quest VR headsets, and its Ray-Ban smart glasses. The company says it doesn't have plans for future stores, at least at this point. Several iOS developers report receiving an email from Apple with an app improvement notice. Warning that apps that haven't been updated in a significant amount of time will be removed if not updated within 30 days. This doesn't appear to be a new policy from Apple, rather an enforcement change. Apple did change its policy back in 2016 to say it would start removing abandoned apps. After removal, any already downloaded app will remain on user devices and developers will still be able to monetize as well. SpaceX reached its first deal to offer in-flight internet service with its satellite network, signing a deal with Hawaiian Airlines. The airline plans to offer it to passengers for free, and the service will be its first in-flight Wi-Fi offering. That will make some folks happy. Installation of Starlink terminals is expected to begin next year, although the airline has yet to test and certify the technology for flights. The autonomous driving startup Pony AI received a taxi license to operate 100 self-driving cars as traditional taxis in the Nansha district of Guangzhou. While Pony AI received approval to charge fees to operate robotaxis in Beijing last year, this is the first taxi license granted in China for autonomous vehicles. So operating robotaxis does not mean you necessarily have a taxi license. The company said it plans to launch service in two other large Chinese cities next year. All right, Rich. Let's talk a little bit more about how platforms are going to have to behave in the EU going forward. Yeah, lots of interesting legislation coming out of there. Of course, we've talked about earlier about the Digital Markets Act. That's a proposal in the EU, or DMA as sometimes known as. That's the one that among other things would require some interoperability between messaging platforms. That's like the top line kind of item that that would regulate a companion measure called the Digital Services Act or DSA has now been unveiled. And just like with the DMA, the DSA has no final tax and will have to make its way through the European Commission, European Parliament and individual countries before becoming law. So you may say seems a little early. Why are we talking about it now? Well, yes, some parts may change. But these proposals do their best to get kind of all the member states or at least representatives from them on board before the release. So this gives a pretty clear indication of where the legislation is going. So here's what it sounds like will be in the DSA as it applies to large platforms defined as at least over 45 million users in the EU. So there will be the DSA will prevent any targeting of users based on religion, gender or sexual preference. It'll also include rules against dark patterns, the way content is either colored, capitalized or otherwise designed to encourage a particular response. There's other measures like terms and conditions must be understandable to minors and no targeting of advertising to specifically minors as well. The way algorithms work must also be made transparent to users and users must be offered a feed, not based on profiling. So something like a chronological feed would be a requirement under the DSA. There's other measures like hosting services and online platforms will have to explain why they removed illegal content and give users the ability to appeal such takedown. So have a clear mechanism mechanism for content removal appeals in place. And illegal content will be defined by each country. So this won't, you know, there'll be some individual sovereignty on that front. Basic information must be kept about traders to help combat sales of illegal goods and services. So kind of tamping down on counterfeit stuff. Measures to force a disclosure of steps taken to combat misinformation and propaganda must be present for all platforms. And this will apply to search engines as well as regular social platforms as well. So that that one was one that really stood out to me to power all of this compliance, because this is quite a bit of of compliance on this end, fees of around 20 to 30 million euros will be collected from large tech companies with at least 45 million users in the I mean, collective is very generous term for a tax and finds up to six percent of global turnover in the event of non-compliance. And you may say, is this coming tomorrow or when's that when's this coming now? Well, like I said, there's still a big pipeline to pass all of this. But companies have 15 months after the act is voted into law or January 1st, 2024, whichever is later to be in compliance. So Sarah, a lot in there, a lot on pack. What stood out to you of any any top line ones that stood out to you? Well, you know, and as you said, these are, you know, this is still proposals. This is not law yet, and it's going to be some time even if it passes all the things that it needs to pass. Most of this feels pretty standard, right? Like, let's not target advertising to minors. Let's make sure that if if, you know, an algorithm works a certain way that users understand how the algorithm is working, what did strike me as a little unclear is the whole dark pattern thing. Now, when, you know, I understand that if if if the dark pattern is defined as something being colored a certain way or looking a certain way, maybe a word is capitalized in a way that's supposed to invoke a certain response. And that might be something that doesn't seem very fair on a platform. Is that something that I as a user would would would would that that would be something that I would not be able to do? Or is that just the platform itself? Let's say let's say we're talking about Facebook. Let's say I'm looking at my newsfeed and somebody shares something and it's some sort of an image that is invoking a response in me. That's not what we're talking about, right? That that would just be Facebook shouldn't be pushing me one way or another. I believe so. But again, there where you get into the language of design, like things are designed to have an impact on you one way or the other. And so again, we have the broad strokes. We don't know the exact language that this will take. So my like my question is how they will enforce this. Like if Amazon rolls out a change in one of their shopping page UIs, will that need to get approval beforehand? Well, they have to show a slide to say here was the design process of the intent behind this. This is why we rounded this corner. This is why we're highlighting this button right here that it's not, you know, so yeah, like I don't yet. So to your question, will individual user be able to complain? Most of the ways that we know about these dark patterns is through leaks. You know, design guides or something like that. A lot of the times, you know, like they don't call them dark patterns because companies are like super thrilled about talking about them. Yeah. So that. Well, I mean, the idea of advertising is like, I mean, advertising is all dark patterns. That's I mean, whether you like it or not. I mean, it's a series of dark patterns. We want you to buy this thing. So we're going to make you feel guilty or excited or, you know, all of the, you know, there are all these tactics that that that also that lives online alive and well and certainly on platforms. But yeah, it's it's maybe needs to be a little bit more defined. Yeah. And and and again, this does apply to large platforms. So it does limit the scope of this. And for reference, I looked up what the Max find for GDPR, which is one of the, you know, kind of signature tech regulations that we've seen, or at least privacy regulations that we've seen in past years from the EU. That's four percent of annual turnover. That was a huge deal when that first came out several years ago now. So six percent of annual turnover is there are some financial teeth to this regulation for sure. Well, moving on at the Economic Times of India's sources say that Amazon India acquired the women focused social commerce startup called Glow Road in an attempt to further expand into the rapidly growing social commerce space. Now, Amazon has tried on its own to get into the social commerce market. You might recall way back in 2017, Amazon launched Amazon Spark. That was an app that let prime members post pictures of products with users shown feeds of products that they were interested in, you know, to get to get excitement up to get people buying stuff. But Amazon shut down Spark in 2019. It did integrate some of the idea into its interesting finds section. But as a standalone product, didn't really work. Glow Road has a different approach. It pitches itself as an earn from home business that uses other popular platforms such as WhatsApp to promote products from resellers. Glow Road's website claims a reseller selling, let's say 100 products a month can earn around 20,000 rupees. It's about 260 US dollars. Again, within a month, I mean, it's not a ton of money, but depending on who you are might make a big difference. Maybe many e-commerce players in India are trying to expand outside of the country's top 10 to 12 cities as well. So Glow Road currently claims to have over 6 million resellers across 2000 different cities. Yeah. And usually when we're talking about social social commerce, these kind of sites, at least in the US. And this is why I found this story so interesting is because it kind of gives you an international perspective. I'm thinking of things like Depop or Poshmark, where they're borrowing the language of social media and present and using that to craft a marketplace. So you have a lot of the same mechanisms of I can like this. I can comment on it. Oh, and I can also buy this shirt or pair of pants or what have you. Yeah. What's what's interesting about this is it's kind of almost the opposite of a of social commerce, what we understand, or at least usually what I assume to be social commerce, is piggybacking off of other services like, hey, WhatsApp groups are super popular. Boom. You know, you can get on here. We'll give you some some promo codes or what have you and you can kind of get link backs kind of almost like super localized affiliate link or influencer operations, whatever, you know, what have you. I think it's a really fascinating way, you know, Sarah, does any of this though sound a little multi-level marketing to you, though? That's like the first thing that kind of popped up in my head. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I would say that, but I would say of what I understand of Glowrode's business bottle, a few people are going to be really successful at this, just like, you know, you can get certain people are just great sales people and that, you know, it's might, you know, give you some money in your pocket, might have some fun doing it, might get to know some products that you wouldn't have known otherwise, you know, and and be able to sort of spread the word. Most people are not going to be good at this. That's just the way that just the way that life works. So in that sense, sure, I think that this is this is a interesting opportunity and is going to help some people out. I think I, you know, if I have to guess, I would say that the scale is going to be a big issue here because they're they're just only going to be certain people that anyone listens to and buys products based on their their recommendations. Yeah. And on the multi-level marketing front, from what I understand, Glowrode does not require you to like hold inventory or anything like that for these things that you're selling. So it's you're not taking on a liability and and kind of forcing it to pass on. It's just like when you get that like, hey, sell so much and you get this reward sometime with your group of friends, it can sometimes feel that way. But I could definitely see this, I think of like parent groups and stuff like that where you have like a big group chat with a whole bunch of other people. And it's like, you know, you got, oh, those diapers you bought, those are really cool. Like you got, oh, you got a deal on those. Hey, I could see like that kind of like influencer based, like super micro influencer based, I could see being really popular. Well, like you mentioned, you know, with affiliate links, it's as long as that is something I'm aware of done by me at all. I don't really know if it bothers me that I realized there's an affiliate link that wasn't super disclosed to me just because I understand the practice. But, but yeah, we were talking about drobos before the show started. It's like if I was trying to sell some drobos, well, I don't have to like clear my closet out to have a bunch of them in my house. You know, that would that would be a very different thing. You know, it would be there would be a lot more pressure on me to like get rid of this merch and, you know, save myself some space and make some money. So so yeah, I think this is I think this is interesting. And if anybody out there is like, I know something like Glow Road, or I've even I've even used this in the past, do do let us know. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Just don't sneeze on those drobos. All right. Well, the big news of the day, Twitter's board accepted an offer to buy the company by Elon Musk in a deal worth forty four billion dollars toward stockholders. We received fifty four dollars, twenty cents per share, the exact same as the initial offer from Musk. And once the deal closes, Twitter will be a private company. Musk said he wants to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating spam bots and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential. I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it. Twitter's next earnings call is on April 28th, although it will not hold an earnings call. It's already said just based on the acquisition. The company's annual shareholder meeting is set for May 25th, so we'll make it some comments there as well. And the deal is expected to close overall some time this year, pending regulatory approvals and that and shareholder approvals as well. So, you know, Sarah, where we are in an Elon Musk, you know, it seems like every time we're on the show together, Elon has to break new news. I appreciate that he likes giving us the attention. It's nice that he pays so much attention to you and me that he does want to, you know, give us a lot of news content. I appreciate that, Mr. Musk. Otherwise, yeah, so this this has been a, I think I called it a roller coaster a couple of weeks ago. It really has been a roller coaster I haven't been able to get off of. And yeah, so today we got a deal. The company will will go private. I think that that is probably, you know, right now I know, particularly on Twitter, because that's where I am every morning looking for news and everybody was losing their minds about this. This is extremely new news. We will discuss this more tomorrow because there's going to be more information and more hot takes that we can kind of parse. But for now, I think what is most interesting to me, and I've said this before, is I don't feel personally like my Twitter experience is about to go into the toilet in any way based on this. But if I were running a an account that maybe represented a marginalized group and I was worried about, OK, well, how will free speech be defined in the future? And I'm not saying it will be defined any differently than how Twitter has been defining it thus far for the last 14 years. But but, you know, if that was something for 15 years, if that was something that was concerning to me and already was, yeah, I might be I might be a little bit worried, especially again, because the company is private. There are certain things that they don't necessarily need to listen to people about the way that you do when you are a public company. So, yeah, I mean, a knee jerk reaction is let's not lose our heads here. Twitter didn't go away. In fact, I just paid for my annual subscription to Tweetbot. So I'm still here. But yeah, there are a lot of questions yet to be answered. Yeah, a lot of reactions out there if you love Elon Musk, if you don't like him. But like at this point, what we do know is that he plans on making the algorithms open source to increase trust. He wants to target defeating spam bots, and he's looking forward to authenticating all humans. And it seems like he's not going to be taking any measures to decrease what he sees as free speech on the platform. Any of you look square? Like that's what we know. He's been very vocal about that. I for all that you could say about Elon Musk. Usually, he's extremely vocal about what his plans are. And then you have a reaction to them and then he does them. And then we have a reaction about when he does them. So at this point, that's what we know. He's been very vocal about it. And we'll be continuing to cover any changes to Twitter that certainly have a lot more ability to experiment with new features, not having to worry about reporting growth numbers every three quarters or three months, excuse me. So it's an interesting one. Indeed, you probably have thoughts on this. You have thoughts about anything that we talk about on the show. And you say, you know, I'd like the team to know how I feel. Please do send us an email. We love your emails. Feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send them. Thank you in advance. So we've heard leaks for some time now that Google has begun working on a first party smartwatch, but the company hasn't announced anything officially and sourcing on rumors can be kind of sketchy. Not the kind of things that we cover on DTNS unless we feel it's really warranted and has some weight. But Google evidently has a name that it wants to protect for a device of this kind, as it filed a trademark on the phrase Pixel Watch with the United States Patent and Trademark Office, which specifically lists it covering smartwatches and accessories. So probably signs point to they're doing this. This also comes as Android Central sources sent them pictures of a supposed Pixel Watch prototype that was left at a restaurant. How convenient and showed up on Android Central. Interesting how there's things work showing a circular face, a rotating crown and two buttons. Now, we don't know the source, so it could be legitimate. It could be final hardware. It could be neither. But Google has been trying to crack the wearable OS market with some success here and there for some time that we do know. So, Rich, do you think a new hardware play as wearable makes sense for the Pixel line? I look at what Google hardware has generally been and usually it's a showcase for a platform in a in a market that Google is usually already doing pretty well in. So like Pixel phones like Android has a huge market share, right? It's it's number one globally, right? So you can you can have a Google showcase and it's and it's going to show off. Hey, this is what plain vanilla Android looks like. And we have a cool, clean design or what have you. And it's not going to traditionally, those have not significantly sold in huge numbers. I know Google has been ramping that up and trying to refine those efforts over time. But that's just the history of those. Same thing with Chromebooks, a lot of Google Chromebook devices. Again, Chromebooks are a huge market, you know, that we've seen kind of grow up over the course of the pandemic. And yes, Google makes well regarded Chromebooks, not necessarily the top sellers, usually fairly premium. The where this gets weird with wearables is that Google does not dominate this market in any kind of way, right? The most popular smartwatch category when you're looking at the statistics from where is it here? When you're looking at analyst numbers that from counterpoint research that the top OS usually is other. It's like 42 percent other, which is like proprietary or real time OS or stuff like that, where you're really not installing apps. Apple is number two at 30 percent, at least at the end of 2021. And Android is at 10 percent. You may say, OK, you know, second or third compared to the depending if you include the other category, that's pretty good. Except most of that came from Samsung devices after the unified play where they integrated ties into wear OS. So I mean, what I will say is it seems like there's this is still obviously still a growing market, still it's not like a completely commodified market, right? But at the same time is a Google watch. What is that going to offer? It's going to run the same unified platform. It's not going to have Samsung's one UI integration on top of that. It's not going to integrate as well with Samsung devices. And one would presume it would interoperate pretty well with pixel devices. But that's an extremely small set of numbers versus Samsung devices, which, you know, is the number one Android OEM by a mile. So I don't know what the goal is for this. If it's to be a showpiece and say, here's the cool things we can do with wear OS, no one else is doing this right. It's great. If not, it could actually edge out smaller wear OS players like fossil, for example, you know, has been making, has been plugging along on that wear OS train for years now. Despite it seemingly being abandoned at times or not getting updates maybe as quickly as they would like. But all of a sudden you have Google and yeah, fossil has more of a traditional watch kind of background to it. But I wouldn't be thrilled if I was fossil. Let me put it that way. I was and this is probably just because until very recently when I started wearing an Apple watch, which I'm reviewing for my next Live With It segment with Jen Cutter, I was a Fitbit user. And I actually I'm still using Fitbit data for my Apple watch. It's a very long story for another time. But I was surprised that the Fitbit OS was only 4% of the market. I would have thought it was a lot higher. And that's probably just because I used it so much that I just was like, oh, it's great. You know, it's this is great. The Pixel watch competing with Google's Fitbit line is strange to me. And maybe I'm just maybe it's because some people go, I don't really want a fitness tracker. I don't want to wear that. But I would like to wear, you know, a high end watch. And the Pixel line is high end by all accounts. So this would be the same. So maybe maybe it does make sense for Google to have that kind of distinction. At the same time, I'm like, this is what Google does. There's too much. You have all these products that are like kind of similar, but not exactly the same. And they've got different names and they have different product roadmaps. And it confuses all of us and we talk about it all the time. So yeah, I'm I don't I don't know what's going on here. But let's just say that prototype was real. I would I would think that Google would want to integrate everything that they have in a smart watch slash wearable slash fitness tracker category and make it this watch. Yeah. And they have, I mean, Google has all sorts of IP. We don't know the specs for this have really haven't been leaked a ton. I'm assuming it's going to run some kind of Qualcomm chips at, you know, stuff like that. But the the the issue is it's like if you buy an Apple watch and you use an iPhone and you buy a new Apple watch and you put it on if especially for a watch, it feels probably the same. It's going to sync all your settings. Everything's going to look exactly the same. And it's go, oh, I just runs faster, gets longer battery life, whatever. If you're using the other category, right? One of these proprietary, you know, smartwatch and stuff like that, you're buying it probably because it's fairly affordable, right? So that's that's your your top thing. And oh, yeah, it tracks my steps and I can get notifications from my phone. That's really awesome. Where Google is going to have this problem and where OS has had this problem also is like everyone wants to create their own experience. And that works great if you're like whole hog. I'm imagining it's going to work fairly well if you're whole hog into a pixel ecosystem and I got the pixel phone, I got my pixel watch, I got my pixel book, I'm good to go. I'm all Google all the time. But if you're coming from a Samsung smartwatch and you port everything over, you're going to be missing that Android or that Samsung One UI secret sauce that they put on there. You're going to be missing all the Samsung apps, even though it's running the same OS, you know, kind of in the background. And to me for like to me a watch, I this is tough not to crack, but I don't think people want like radically changing experiences. Like they want the watch, they look at it, they know what to expect and they can put it down and get on with their day. It's a little it's a different interaction than a phone, I think. Very much so, especially because, you know, it's a small screen. So you have to get creative about what kind of data you're you're you're checking on the device. It's also a watch. The way that the way that a phone is a phone, but it's also so many other things. But but yeah, there's there's only so much you can veer into like our uncharted waters before people go. This is weird. I just going to go with what I had before. Well, a couple of years ago, it was my birthday and a friend of mine had a person on a reality show send me a video message telling me happy birthday. I'm not going to tell you the reality show because it's just too embarrassing. But that that service that my friend used to get the celebrity to send me a birthday message was called cameo. Might have heard about it where celebrities, you know, often reality TV, but it could be, you know, sports figure or whatever, send you video messages. Well, move over cameo because a startup called Imagine A.R. has launched something called Fame Days. It's both a website and a mobile app. So fans can enjoy life size hologram video images from athletes and also celebrities. Now, the roster, you know, it's limited for now. Current A.R. celeb greetings include boxer Tyson Fury, baseball athlete Pete Alonzo, football player Vaughn Miller, wrestler Rick Ric Flair, rather reality television star Blake Hortsman and others. So again, it's not that many folks, but this is new stuff. Imagine A.R. launched back in 2018 and now delivers an A.R. self publishing CMS. That's content management system, if you're not familiar with the term in the cloud that lets businesses create an A.R. experiences for customers in 60 seconds or less with built in chroma key capability, meaning that the company uses a visual effects and post production technique in tandem, layering two video streams together based on color hues to make that A.R. effect. So imagine A.R. includes things like A.R. scavenger hunts, holograms, as I mentioned, and some other unique ways of using this technology. So my interesting idea, if they can get that chroma key stuff to work that, I mean, that obviously is the whole kitten caboodle. But you can Snapchat filters have convinced me to the point they could probably do that fairly well. I think though this misunderstands the appeal of like a cameo thing that what's cool about that is it feels like a celebrity is face like giving you a FaceTime call and you're like, oh, oh, yes. Of course, you know, Mick Foley, I'd love to take your call and talk with you about my birthday. That seems absolutely wonderful. Now, would I love an A.R. message from the Nature Boy? Of course, that would delight my heart. I would say woo, he would say woo. It would be a really fun time. But I don't I like I this to me is it should be like a Snapchat or like an A.R. filter, like Snapchat filter. I don't need it to be personalized. I just need to be like, oh, there's, you know, there's Von Miller and his pat me on the back and he's saying happy birthday and he puts his arm around me and I can share that. That's that's the experience I want. It lacks the I guess the personality because like cameo also offers like chat things where you can like chat with a celebrity for like five minutes or something like that, too, because like you wanted to feel personal, not necessarily like you're trying to fool people into thinking they're there or like they're you're interacting with them in real space. No, it's weird. Yeah, I this some. It's I not that I'm saying like, please get this for me for my birthday to anybody, but I'm like, I don't want to poo poo it because I'm like, it actually could be really cool. And the novelty aspect of, you know, somebody that you, you know, you look up to, you admire where you think it's funny or, you know, whatever that celebrity or athlete or combination of the two means to you. This this actually could be really cool. But I'm sort of with you, Rich, where I'm like, yeah, I mean, is the video is the video window not enough? But maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough. Maybe it's just not the right reality show star listed on there for you to was it love is blind? You don't have to say yes. It wasn't love is blind. You know, it's like two years to confirm or deny. You don't have to confirm or deny. It was fine. I'm not sure. OK, OK. It was for sure. Now, let's just move on and I'll look my wounds in peace. Well, we do we do have a lifetime supporter for DTNS. We'd like to thank Alex Erickson for being that top lifetime supporter. We have quite a few of you and we'd like to shout one of you out when we can. Thank you. Thank you so much for all the years of support, Alex. And of course, you can get a longer version of this show called Good Day Internet, available at patreon.com slash DTNS. It gets started in earnest right after the show. Indeed, it does reminder for folks that like to join us live or can in the future. We are live Monday through Friday at four PM Eastern, twenty hundred UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live. We're back tomorrow with this big and science host, Dr. Kiki Sanford. Talk to them. This show is part of the broadband network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.