 Coming up on DTNS big tech comes for small businesses snap is big in India and Huawei. They're still trying This is the Daily Tech news for Thursday, October 22nd 2020 in lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Strafilino Oakland, California. I'm Justin Robert. Yeah The show's producer Roger Chang Remember you can always get the wider conversation on our expanded show Good Day Internet by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS we were having scintillating conversations about when to buy a new microwave check that out and join us each end every week Day, but let's get started with a few tech things you should know Google added a new price insights tool to Google shopping letting users see the average and range of prices for a searched product across the web It also lets users track prices for specific products and receive price change notifications The central bank of the Bahamas launched the first central bank digital currency The sand dollar the currency is backed at one-to-one to the Bahamian dollar which itself is pegged to the US dollar This will roll out in phases across the country Focusing first on making sure banks and credit unions can meet compliance checks for the new currency to use in digital wallets These wallets will require Authentication and be mobile based the central bank hopes the sand dollar will reduce financial service delivery costs and boost transactional efficiency for underserved communities in the country IBM and Pfizer have designed a new AI model to predict the onset of Alzheimer's instead of testing patients already exhibiting signs of the disease Researchers tracked healthy patients who had a genetic history of Alzheimer's or were in a high-risk category for developing the disease Researchers use sample data from clinical verbal tests provided by the Framingham heart study a long-term heart study tracking over 5,000 people and their families since 1948 The AI was able to correctly predict Alzheimer's close to 71% of the time seven years before a patient was clinically diagnosed with the disease With the launch of the ps5 the consoles media center will automatically include major streaming apps such as Netflix Disney Plus and Apple TV as well as Spotify Twitch and YouTube an Apple TV app is also coming to the ps4 and Apple retail chief chief Deidre O'Brien said the company is expanding its Express store formats with plans to expand from 20 to 50 across the US and Europe The format was designed to allow for social distancing and puts a wall in front of the main store Adds plexiglass protections for the sales counter and limits accessory shelving All right, we got some more stuff to talk about so Justin. What's going on with Huawei? Would they announce? Oh, I'd love to tell you Rich Huawei announced the Mate 40 Pro the first phone powered by it's a five nanometer Kirin 9,000 chipset with an integrated 5g modem and a 24 core GPU Huawei claims 10% better CPU performance and 52% better graphics than the Qualcomm snapdragon 865 plus the phone offers the same 50 megapixel main camera as the wall way p40 pro but adds an ultra-wide and 5x periscope zoom sensor as well as an improved xd fusion engine for real-time HDR video processing the 40 pro also support 66 watt fast charging and runs Android 10 based em ui 11 the chips in Europe on November 13th for 1199 euros Huawei also announced the mate 40 pro plus with 12 gigs of RAM and a longer zoom range on the rear camera and the Standard mate 40 with a smaller screen than the pro a less powerful Kirin 9,000 e chipset and a smaller battery with 40 watt charging No shipment dates on those two, but the mate 40 will set you back 899 euros So it's it's interesting usually the narrative around you know when Huawei puts out a new phone is oh They're they're you know, they're leading in or they're making really interesting design choices. They're using their own chipset Well, you know, we'll probably never see it in the US Maybe an interesting play in Europe or something like that obviously the conversation given the ongoing trade war the the You know the lack of available chips and technology from a lot of American companies has kind of shifted that To where you know looking at the the surface of this announcement Justin I mean we're talking, you know find five nanometer chip. That's a that's an advance on their process You know, we can argue whether nanometers, you know, are you know, they're not really universal between comparing chips But it's still in advancement in their chip processing They have integrated 5g in their highest end phone not something that Qualcomm currently offers right now They're claiming better performance You know, I think the conversation would be a lot different if for The small fact that we don't know what their chip supply situation is kind of long even even in the medium term I would say and obviously it now lacks the Google Play Store Support kind of having to roll their own at this point Yeah, you know the Future of Huawei was interesting before Considering we don't know exactly what their access are going to be to European markets based on everything that's happened over the last year It will make it even more interesting I don't know if there's a lot of clues that we can read into with this device though However, because the decisions made on this particular hardware were made I mean maybe with the idea of the trade war in mind But hopefully looking for sunnier days ahead with that and certainly not necessarily with the Pandemic factored in at all. Yeah, what I'll be looking for is what their supply is like maybe after launch because again You know, you can you can wait on the launch on this, right? Huawei is is effectively playing in a much more limited market so they can wait on the release of this for a little bit till they have some stock up But a month two months down the line after maybe there's initial rush domestically or in Europe if they're able to keep units in stock keep making chips, you know We've heard Huawei executive say we don't know how we're going to You know continue at volume producing, you know, a lot of our chips. So we will we will see how that goes Next up here. So we had Justin I believe a couple weeks ago We talked about that the Facebook oversight board was kind of going to be getting started maybe in early November late October Something like that that was kind of up in the air, but that it was it was coming, right? Yeah Now we have the word though that the Facebook oversight board will start reviewing content moderation decisions starting today So let's set the table. I thought it was important to kind of understand what this means what this Organization is this body is all about and and the kind of what their role will be going forward with when it comes to content decisions This independent body will provide rulings on specific content take down decisions with Facebook committing to follow the board's recommendations for Specific instances so for one piece of content the board says something Facebook says If it was taken down, they will put it back up if that's what the board recommends The board can also recommend platform policy changes based on those individual decisions with Facebook saying it will review that Guidance to determine if policy changes are needed effectively not committing necessarily to following those Just based on the board's recommendation while initially users will be able to submit an appeal for content taken down by Facebook The board will also review content left up when Facebook directly refers those decisions to them right now though ordinary users cannot Kind of appeal leave up or leave up decisions at this moment Facebook does say that they're aiming to bring all content under the board's scope as quickly as possible They're saying it's it's a technical limitation at this point So with all that being said with that with that being their mission How does this appeal to the oversight board actually work first? A user has to go through a standard internal Facebook content appeals process This is the kind of through their internal tooling once that is exhausted users will get a special idea that they can take to The oversight board's website to further submit a case Cases are taken up to be heard by the board's 20 members that include former journalist US appeals court judges Digital rights activists and ex-prime minister of Denmark and one member of the Cato Institute So kind of trying to cover their bases there when it comes to perspective seemingly four members of that Four members of that of those 20 members were also added to Facebook's board So, you know Justin based on now we know okay They're starting today a little maybe a little earlier than some earlier, you know the initial predictions or initial announcements What impact do you see this having in terms of? Facebook as a platform and the perhaps more importantly to Facebook their perception of content decisions on their platform. I Would like to congratulate the Facebook oversight board on today the greatest day of their live because as Outcast told us once from this point on it only gets rougher that there is Absolutely, no way that this in any way shields Facebook from the problems that they've had before the fact that they are now Putting this out to another board that now is going to Seemingly with at least publicly facing less ties to the the organization itself It's still the Facebook policy board like I get there oversight board This is still an organization for which they're trying to farm out some of their bad reputation when it comes to not doing what their audience Likes the simple fact is they're never going to stop having these problems Moderating speech is literally their job as any of the admins and mods that are listening to my voice right now Can attest this is a thankless job people are always going to be upset I don't think that this necessarily does them any favors going forward I mean Is does this board at the end of the day like maybe not initially like you said the best day of their lives? Congratulations at some point though. I mean is the hope of Facebook that they make they make the call Transparency is the best thing that can come out of this is that okay? At least you see the volume and at least you see that there are decisions on having these people be articulated Beyond that I don't really see a ton of work The other question I have is in terms of volume, you know Facebook has what almost over two billion users or somewhere somewhere close to there I'm assuming there are a lot of content decisions that are made and even if only a very small fraction of those ends up getting appealed There I also think the problem just could be one of scale now I know that they said technically they were you know They were working out technical issues probably to address some of that scale But I also imagine the amount of cases that they're going to be able to take just in terms of like being humans That are looking at things. There's only so much time in the day I do wonder if that will become an issue down the road for them as well Moving on snap saw its strongest growth in its Q3 earnings report with revenue up 52% on the year to 679 million dollars well ahead of analyst predictions of 127 million holy moly big big stacks for for snap That's a big quarter-on-quarter daily active user growth was almost flat in the US in Europe Snaps saw them grow 13% quarter-on-quarter and 43% on the year elsewhere around the world Well snap doesn't break out numbers by country in its earnings It did say India was a huge growth market with almost a hundred and fifty percent year-on-year daily active user growth in Q3 2020 part of this was driven by efforts to localize snapchat in the country with the app available in nine Indian languages and signing original content deals Of course, this is also the first quarter reporting where tick tock has been banned in the country as well Yeah, I looked it up and tick tock was banned Toward the end of June which both seems like three years ago and yesterday weirdly enough in 2020 So this is like a clean quarter of a of a no tick tock India where they have been operating here still it's it's it's kind of feeding into this this larger discussion that India's kind of I Don't think it's becoming I think it certainly is and a lot and clearly we're seeing tech companies acting as if this is their next big Obviously growth market. I mean they have a billion people like I'm not I'm not saying anything that no one knows But we're seeing you know significant investments when it comes to telecoms from Facebook. We're now seeing snapchat You know certainly taking advantage of a little bit of a vacuum in that market to drive their growth But also making significant efforts On which I'm assuming are not cheap, you know the a lot of the articles from the economic times of India had a really great Breakdown of some of the content deals that were signing, you know, they're working with independent studios They're redesigning the discover page specifically or the discover tab specifically for that market And obviously seeing some success, you know, I think a lot of the the talk with snapchat recently is oh, you know They can't compete with the numbers that you know Instagram stories are seeing what we see with every single Facebook report Well, they're their users in or outside the US in Europe are about to exceed they've already exceeded Europe They're about to exceed the you know in the US if they can keep that trajectory going 150% obviously is not sustainable every quarter but You know if they can get that growth now whether the the revenue from the users in those areas It's gonna take some time for that to build up But that's kind of another the other the other question when it comes to this Oh, it's a massive question because India has a very saturated market for smartphones They have a tremendous demand for free content online And so a snapchat came in here and signed local content deals and people then people are going to want to be on the platform to do it The question is where do you go from there? And and that's where you've seen a lot of growth in India have a hard time turning into profits because This isn't the same kind of country in terms of the money like the United States or many of the Western European countries Yeah, and when we're talking about our poo It should be noted that while their growth was flat their earnings per average revenue per user, right? Was up like 20% I don't want to say it was double digit though growth when it came to the US Europe is actually down on the year when it came to the rest of the world and it was up like five or six percent On the quarter so, you know, yeah the revenue question That's a big one still not a bad thing for one for a firm a snap perspective to kill it on the the revenue And then also to put up some some nice User numbers something they haven't been able to say every quarter for sure. All right and remember Thank you to all those who participate in our subreddit Remember you could submit stories and vote on them at Daily Tech news show dot reddit dot com All right, so for you know, Justin I want to talk to you about this because you know, you're a you're a man of many ventures Many activities and I thought you know We've seen a couple of pieces that will Tech pieces that are designed to kind of speak to small business and want to get your take on them First up here. What's that for business kind of has become Increasingly important part for a lot of small businesses when it comes to messaging integrating that into their platforms and stuff like that So they are rolling out Facebook announced that they're rolling out in chat shopping for the first time letting merchants link to products and services With the option to buy without leaving the interface. This is for Facebook specific catalogs, but also for third-party stuff as well I'm sure there will be a preference there. I'm sure Merchants will also be able to add a buy button to other online locations Which will then take WhatsApp open users into a WhatsApp chat to complete the purchase the company also announced plans to launch Facebook Hosting services aimed at small and medium businesses using WhatsApp business API that will let them use Facebook's own secure hosting Infrastructure for free don't have a lot of details on it But Facebook has promised more as it gets closer to launch which right now is unknown So a lot of questions there anytime you have free and and small businesses kind of an interesting proposal Especially when you have kind of I don't know a viral hit when it comes to WhatsApp for business, you know Justin in terms of this kind of business messaging we've seen Facebook kind of Realizing hey, we can monetize messaging in a whole lot of ways. They're integrating Instagram and Facebook messaging They're adding all sorts of features for businesses on there. They've opened up that API. We just covered. I believe this week You know WhatsApp for business is in chat shopping the new hotness coming up Well, it's not new. Well, yeah, this is certainly not new internationally It has not taken off in America, but it's also kind of an interesting place where in chat shopping would be because a lot of the Concept of chatting as we had previously understood its success is On some level dependent on or at least the examples that we used were on physical Meeting where are we gonna meet up? Oh, we should all buy movie theater tickets together Or let's order a Uber or Lyft via your your your your chat interface So I don't know whether or not in a world where you are at home a lot more in a pandemic world You know with more tools at your fingertips if this is necessarily going to be Something that will explode that being said Facebook having more of a hosting infrastructure that makes a whole lot of sense because as we're gonna see with this next story as well Everybody has to understand that digital is the future any any moment because digital is the present right now now that now that Everybody understands that you have to have a better website. You have to have an online engagement then maybe for those that are focused on on some of the Chat side stuff. They'll want an easier off the rack tool and Facebook will be there to offer it to them And then I'm sure Jack the price later Well, that's the other thing is that Facebook essentially signaled they said they're exploring ways to further monetize WhatsApp for business basically saying at some point you're gonna have to start paying for some of these services that we've been offering for free Interesting also, you know, I feel like WhatsApp is at least in the US is a little bit of the the forgotten platform What if any of Facebook's platforms can be forgotten it tells billions of users tons of people use it But in terms of like being able to monetize that it's it's really interesting if adding adding the the services aspect to it Adding maybe some sort of tiered pricing and stuff like that The impact that that could have especially if they can offer then value, you know, if they're charging money I'm assuming they would have to add some sort of additional value Take some kind of it pressure off places that should not be doing it anyway I you know mom-and-pop businesses, you know, it could be could be a totally new direction for WhatsApp Another totally new direction though They want to talk to you about Justin is CNBC reports that JP Morgan Chase Big ol stodgy bank plans to roll out quick accept a new fintech service for merchant payments Payments are made either in an app or through a contactless reader that you can buy and there's no additional fee to receive funds that Same day something that can't be said for all aspects of things like square or PayPal services necessarily All transaction fees though would apply so you're still kind of dealing with that JP Morgan plans to migrate a large portion of its three million small business customers to a new chase business complete banking offering That includes quick accept and they waive the fees if you meet some nominal Balance or you know transaction volume the company piloted quick accept in Utah early this year Clearly they like what they saw and they're planning a wider rollout So, you know, I saw CNBC reporting that you know square shares were reacting to this news I guess Is this a chase is coming for square or is this chase realizing? Hey We need to you know, we need we we need to compete in this Kind of this new not even this new landscape the current existing landscape for a lot of these small businesses I think it's very smart. It's JP Morgan Chase is a brand that a lot of people that don't know what square is Recognize that that they recognize this is the line of credit that I run my business on this is how I normally move my money. This is these are the banks that I am normally dealing with They may or may not, you know Everybody's listening to this is probably aware of square from the from the the dongle phase now our contactless present, but This just goes back to every single one of these stories If you were to look at it at the beginning of the year before COVID you'd say Oh, look makes sense that JP Morgan Chase is doing it at this point When we have seen a quantum leap forward in terms of user acceptance on a lot of different Technological fronts the the back end side of this is just a no-brainer It is it is something that especially as I mean if let's say American culture tends to go in the same way that Many Asian cultures have who are very focused on virus stuff in a way that Americans have not up till this point and Contactless becomes a bigger and bigger way that people pay for things. Then you're just gonna need it Like this is just gonna be something that you're going to want more Access to so absolutely. I do think that this is not only Well timed but it's it's necessary for JP Morgan Chase Yeah, and I think the thing that JP Morgan Chase maybe likes the best I'm this is my opinion 95% of the people in that Utah trial were new to the bank and Two-thirds of them were from businesses that hadn't been less than a year old So, you know kind of courting a totally new Kind of bank, you know finance market for them. I'm sure has a not insignificant appeal All right, and finally here the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to authorize subpoenas requiring Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to testify regarding the platform's recent policy enforcement decisions regarding a New York post story About Hunter Biden. You may have heard of it. The motion to issue subpoenas did not list a date for testimony So Justin the You know, I guess what can we expect from these? Proceed like what I guess what can these platforms say Twitter's already changed its hacked materials policy like literally the day after They enforce it, you know now going to only enforcing it if the the actual attackers are leaking that material You know, are we gonna hear about lessons learned? Are we going to is this just the first step in a much bigger proceeding? Oh This is a tempest in a teapot This won't be the first time that Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey get subpoenaed by Congress will find out exactly if and when this will even happen because it's likely not going to happen within the 12 days before the election and then at that point this will probably get lumped into some other thing that Congress is very mad at Facebook and Twitter about but it is I don't know this would not happen if the election weren't here and everybody was all ratcheted up the issues Underlining this are very real and will likely wind up becoming there there will be another news peg to have this conversation with these particular with these CEOs, but I I don't think that this particular issue would rise to the level of congressional subpoena if we were not 12 days away from the election It is interesting. We've kind of seen this move of We're going to issue this motion for the subpoenas aka give ourselves some more time to negotiate about We've seen this a number of different aspects when it comes to kind of the big tech CEOs Before congress, so you're absolutely right, especially given the proximity of the election where we will see this I do wonder though if this is where maybe not in this particular instance But in a in a similar situation if this is something where a facebook oversight committee You know might provide some cover if they if they said we made this decision in consultation with this independent body of experts yada yada yada Does that's uh, I guess does that's does that see on Washington tank the reputation of the independent body If they don't make a decision that the people that are complaining the loudest Want them to make yes indeed it would immediately take their reputation As for the ins and outs here, uh, I mean These kinds of hearings are often more for the press than they are for any kind of edification That being said, uh the Wild bottle rocket without a stem Uh a decision-making process for twitter does beg for more Inquiry, I don't quite know if the senate judiciary committee is going to be the ones to give it to us Well, Justin, maybe we'll get some sort of edification from our mail bag. Uh, what have we gotten there today? Nick writes in regards to the discussion between tom and scott about the value of game pass I personally am a person that buys games because I want to own them Yet I'm still subscribed to game pass for me game pass is like a modern version of the old video shops when I was a kid I would almost always rent a game from the local shop before buying it with game pass I can download a game play it for as long as I like and decide if it is worth buying Sure, I could rely on steam refunds to do this But sometimes you need to play a game for more than two hours to figure out if you like it or not This way I can properly try a game before I buy Justin do you have sympathies for this position? I find I'm the same way with music. Uh, I subscribe to streaming services I can get any song that I want, but I will still go and buy You know if the Beth's come out with a new record, I'm going to buy that Uh, even though I can get I already have it on my phone. Yeah, I'm I'm I'm all in on the streaming model They they have they have given me the ability to listen to everything I want Unless it is somebody a band that I really want to support financially Uh, I I I won't do that with music I I will jump in and say I am totally with Nick I am the kind of person that used to rent games and see if I liked it And then I would actually go and buy it Because it was a very inexpensive way because I had a discount at my local video store for video games Um to to test it because you get a lot of reviews get online reviews But oftentimes what they like may not be the same thing that you like and you really have to test out Especially since the number of demos that the that they get released for games has dropped Compared to like even 15 years ago. So Oh man, the demo CD it was the best If you have thoughts about buying streaming renting faxing updated send it to us at feedback at dailytechnewshow.com Of course, we need to give a shout out to our patrons at our master and grandmaster levels Including read fishler mark gibson and chris smith. Thank you so much. And of course Thank you to justin robert young Justin where can people find more of your great stuff if they are so inclined? uh the finale of my uh political history podcast raise the dead is out right now the final episode the man Who got everything you wanted chronicles linden baines johnson ascending to the role of president after The murder of john f kennedy and it does something that we have never had in the history of raise the dead and that is Our subjects are our subject in his own voice Fun history fact that you might not know Those tape machines that got nixon in so much trouble during watergate were not installed By dick. No, they were put in by lbj. He recorded all of his phone conversations And we use them Tremendously in this last episode if you don't like it, then you're not going to like anything that we do It's been called one of the or the the one episode that if you've never listened to raise the dead You should try out this one by my friend brian broshwood. I'm very proud of it. Go ahead and check it out right now raise the dead podcast dot com And I will safely say the best tension hook Sound effects in the business on raise the dead. So uh highly recommended. Thank you justin for that amazing podcast If you want, of course, if you want to get some d tns as a video podcast And why wouldn't you you get to see me and justin smiling faces get the video rss feed at daily tech news show dot com Slash subscribe and you can always support the show at any level daily tech news show dot com slash patreon Patreon I don't know why I said that word. You know what it is All right, we'll be live monday through friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 u dc This show is part of the frog pants network frog pants network get more shows like this At frog pants dot com diamond club. Hope you have enjoyed this bro