 Hi, we're doing, well, we're doing video. Digit, don't you know? Don't sing anything popular, we'll have to pay a license fee. I'm kidding. What's an unpopular song? See, that's the thing no one knows in the unpopular song. You still have to pay the license fees if they're unpopular, isn't that, you know? Doesn't really matter. That's a good point. I am excited, Scott Johnson, to see you in person this weekend. Yeah. When's Patrick getting there? Patrick is flying in to Los Angeles tomorrow afternoon, and then he will do the show Thursday and then we're driving down to Anaheim. When do you get in to Anaheim? We get in late Wednesday night, so I'll be there. All right. Lots of time Thursday. When do you get in late Wednesday night? Yeah, we're going in a little early. That's why I can't be in LA late Wednesday night. Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry. We leave late Sunday. We get in Wednesday, or no, we leave at 11 a.m. our time here. We get in there at whatever an hour and a half is, I guess. So you get in Wednesday? I get in Wednesday. So you'll be doing... Which is why we flip shows today. Yeah, well, and also we do that ritual. We're doing that ritual misery recording on Wednesday. Oh, wait. Oh, we are? Who is? You are. Oh, I am? You even responded saying, yep. Oh, shit. Wait a minute. Which you can do. It sounds like you'll be, you won't be in the air or anything. No, I might be there and able. He's just doing audio, isn't he? Yeah, I think so. All right, that might work. Shit, totally forgot about that. All right, I didn't mean to out you on that. No, no, no, this is good. Someone needs to be my personal assistant in inadvertent ways. Anyway, so you'll be out and around on Thursday. I will be there a lot Thursday. I think we're going to take the kids of the beach for a while, but then we're going to be around the con most of the afternoon. I mean, we're doing the bowling alley thing again. When's that? Nine o'clock Thursday night. Okay, we'll see you there then for sure. Yeah, for sure. Probably see you before that. I don't know who knows. I'm sure we're running into each other. I'll keep everybody. We should start some kind of, I don't know, group something, something. Yeah, some kind. Well, we can use the frog pants. It's lack actually. Yeah, we could. I think everybody's in there that we would need to communicate with. That's a good idea. I'm gonna hide. All right, yes, we should do this show. Oh, yeah, time is it. We'll stop planning our weekend and do this show. You ready? Yes. Here we go. Daily Tech News Show is powered by its audience, not outside organizations. To find out more, head to DailyTechNewsShow.com slash support. This is the Daily Tech News for All Saints Day, November 1st, 2016. I'm Tom Merritt, joining me. Scott Johnson, usually on Thursdays today, on a Tuesday, because we're shifting things around. We're keeping, we're moving things around, shaking it up, Scott. Well, technically Wednesday is usually. So this is how confusing it is. It made you- Oh, wait, did I say Thursday? Yeah, no, I'm all shook up. Yeah, it's usually you on Wednesday. It's a really weird week. We gotta go to BlizzCon. I gotta try to shuffle things around. I gotta somehow use six second videos on apps that aren't buying because they're closing that down. Why didn't they just sell it? So that's my little tech intro for you. Uh-huh, oh, I like that. Yeah, I like what you did there. We're gonna talk about Twitter and all of that in a little bit. A few other things going on. Google announces the Daydream VR ship date, November 10th, officially arrives. Microsoft on today, which is Tuesday, November 1st, launched Minecraft Education Edition. You may say, well, wait a minute, they launched that already. They put it into beta in June. It's now officially out of beta. And Pinterest is making Instapaper's premium service free for everyone, including the ad free website, text to speech playlists, unlimited notes. All of the premium services are now available for free. So if you were worried about Pinterest buying Instapaper and shutting it down, they've done the opposite. Yeah, I feel like I should thank my wife with a gift, she uses Pinterest every day and one of those, so. Thank you, Mrs. Johnson. Now some more top stories. Instagram launched shoppable tags. Speaking of Pinterest, shoppable tags will go into photos on its iOS app starting in the US on Tuesday. Retailers like Kate Spade and Jack Threads can tag products and photos. So what'll happen is you'll see an image in Instagram. There'll be a little thing they're saying, tap on the image to see products, to highlight products. I can't remember the exact wording. But you tap on the image and these little highlights with tags show up on any product that you can buy. Then you can tap on that product itself. So let's say there's a shirt. Maybe there's a shirt, a belt and some pants in a picture and all three get highlighted. You can tap on the shirt. You'll see without leaving the app, details, price, description, and a shop now button. So basically instead of sending you to the website, Instagram is loading the shopping page in the app which is faster. Although you do need to leave the app to finish the purchase and they don't have plans to change that. And Instagram's not taking a cut of the sales either. Yeah, that's the really interesting part to me. Instagram is suddenly becoming quite the destination. I mean, with Vine leaving, a lot of people are migrating there. A lot of big numbers getters have already moved over there and it already started building their communities there and now they're sort of there to stay. I feel like I've seen a big influx of new people, additional people in my life that are using it. And this seems like a great idea. I actually really like this idea. If I see an image and see something in it, I would like to know more about, this is a great way to get me to it. It reminds me of how they do app advertisements in there now. If there's a game they're trying to advertise to me which I get a lot in my feed. I can just tap that thing and it opens in the app store and I get to download the thing. And I've actually done it quite a few times. So I think Instagram of all the services, all these social networks that have tried to figure out the advertising role, weirdly they seem to have done it the least offensively, sometimes with the most ease of use for the end user. Like I feel like it's smart stuff. We'll see with this. I mean, it's, we don't know yet, but I like the sound of it. Yeah. And W. Scott has one in the chat room is like, why not just have the entire purchase go to the browser? Why have part of it load here if you have to go to the browser to purchase anyway? And the answer is speed. If you have to go to the browser the first time you tap, you might bail. Whereas if you get people to like look at the product, mark some details, maybe save it to look at later. And it's all happened super fast in the app. You have better retention. And what Instagram wants to do is sell these pictures. So if I don't follow almost a Jack Reacher, Jack Threads, although maybe movies should start doing this too. If I don't follow Jack Threads, Jack Threads can buy an appearance like you were talking about with the game apps that'll show up in my feed and then I can do the shopping there. So that's how Instagram is going to make the money. And especially if I'm not following something, but I'm like, okay, well maybe I'll click on this shirt. You wanna make that experience as fast as possible all the way through. The reason they don't bring the purchase in is that they don't wanna build out that whole system of having purchases within Instagram, at least not yet. Yeah, and you know what people are using Instagram with their thumbs and they're clicking on stuff and they're constantly moving. Now you can pinch and zoom on photos in there and video for that matter. Why not give that muscle memory another short, quick thing to do that may or may not retain you, but I'm guessing it may more than it would have otherwise. It seems really smart. So we'll have to see after implementation, but I feel like they're kind of firing on all cylinders right now. And maybe that's the Facebook influence, maybe it isn't, but Instagram seems to be killing it. Google launched its augmented reality system Tango for smartphones on Tuesday, that's today, with the arrival of the Lenovo Fab 2 Pro for $499. We knew this was coming in the US in fact. So get out there and get it, I suppose. Tango uses depth sensing cameras and inside out position tracking. 35 apps are available at launch from games to staging furniture in your home, that kind of stuff. It's exciting to see something out there competing with gear VR. Yeah, and with Daydream VR launching, I wouldn't expect that this won't play a part that there'll be a dual push for this, but Tango is so funny. Like remember when, a couple of years ago when they announced it, it was so futuristic, like really they're gonna be able to do depth sensing and on the fly AR, that's crazy. Now it almost feels, I wouldn't say it feels behind the times, but it feels like, oh well yeah, well Microsoft just announced a lot of six axis tracking is coming next year as well. And they're gonna give more details about that at WinHack in December. And you've got Oculus talking about an independent headset that won't need to be wired. So Google's like on its game at this point. And it's a project we've been watching for a couple of years now. Yeah, what makes it more interesting is that market is dubious in terms of its overall adoption so far. They're trying to build early adoption in consumers. They don't really know what the numbers are because a lot of these companies aren't releasing what those numbers are for the big PC headsets and so on. Sony has yet to tell us how many they sold. And so it's so new, but everything's moving so quickly that what you announced a year ago is gonna sound like magic. And by the time you release it, we're onto the next thing. And that's kind of unusual for a technology that is this young in the marketplace. Tango's coming to more phones than just the Fab2 Pro as well. So it'll be interesting to see how quickly those roll out. Monday, Google's threat analysis group disclosed a critical Windows vulnerability on their security blog only 10 days after it was disclosed to Microsoft. But the vulnerability was being actively exploited in the wild. It exploits a flaw in the Win32K system in conjunction with another Flash exploit to escape secure sandboxes. Google patched Chrome against the vulnerability but Microsoft has not yet patched Windows and they're very upset with Google for publicly announcing this vulnerability. Google generally gives companies at least 60 days to patch vulnerabilities unless they're being actively exploited. If someone is out there actively exploiting one, they'll give you a shorter period of time to at least come up with mitigation. But then within seven days or more, in this case 10, they want to let the public know because the argument goes, hey, we wanna give you a chance to fix it but we don't wanna keep the public in the dark when we know this is an exploit that people are using. The public has a right to know so that they can either not use the product or do some own mitigation or research their own mitigation factors here as well. And Microsoft's saying you should have given us more time. Yeah, I understand that. I mean also, I can't imagine that top engineers and those running the Windows project over at Microsoft like it when one of their chief rivals in the marketplace tells them that something's wrong with their product. I think there's a lot to do with them being upset. However, part of me is also really glad that Google is sort of quote unquote, independently finding vulnerabilities, patching in their own products and warning others about them. I mean, if they're in the business of finding those vulnerabilities, why not share it with the market at large? So I don't know. I'm having a hard time seeing this from Microsoft's position to be honest. Yeah, there's a valid debate about how long to go with an exploit that is not being actively exploited as far as you know. And the argument there goes, well, just because we don't know it's being exploited doesn't mean that someone hasn't independently found it. But yes, we can give you more time because there is no clear and present danger. I don't think this is just PR to see if you know there's an active exploit out there. And if Google were BSing about that, they will be called on it very quickly and I have not seen them called on it. So I think it is fair, I think it's fair for them to say, look, people are using this vulnerability so we need to let folks know about it. Also seems like it might make Microsoft find their own vulnerabilities once in a while. Hey, good news Kickstarter fans, Kickstarter is launching Kickstarter Live. This is a feature that lets crowdfunding projects live stream to their product pages. So imagine scheduling something for the HoloVect and you would get in there and answer questions for people. This is created by Vancouver Video Startup Huzzah, or Huzzah, I believe is how you say it. Ah, I don't know. Huzzah, there you go, there's no H, so it threw me off. Viewers can ask questions and back projects while they watch. You can find live streams at the live.kickstarter.com site where there's a schedule of upcoming streams and replay older streams that are no longer there. So some VODs are there as well. This is a great addition. I think this is a great idea. There's a real connectivity when you can bring your potential community slash consumer in for a project and answer real questions from live flesh and blood people and really put a face to these projects. I think it builds trust. I think it makes you more confident in the system in general. I think this is a great move by Kickstarter. Yeah, it's interesting though and T2T2 nailed my thought about this too. He wrote in the chat room because YouTube Live doesn't already exist. It's like, or Periscope? Or like, there's Facebook Live. There's so many things you could do. I guess not all of them are embeddable but YouTube Live certainly is. So why Kickstarter needed to work with Huzzah to make their own is curious to me. Now, some of the answers could be the ability to pick rewards and back a project from within the video stream. That's something you couldn't do in a YouTube video very easily, if at all. At least not without being real clunky and having links that are good taking you outside the experience or whatever. So I haven't seen just how elegantly they've implemented this, but that's an interesting part. I feel like Kickstarter also just wants this to be something that feels all of a piece that they control and can control how it's presented and where it's presented, which again, you're limited when you're talking to embeds. But I don't know. I mean, I haven't done a Kickstarter in a long time myself. Scott, is this something you could see yourself taking advantage of? Well, a lot of people, look, I totally get the idea that these other services exist, so why can't you just use those? Periscope, your thing or whatever. And a lot of those things are embeddable. I totally get that. However, and we're not, some of our main topic today is not gonna be too off the path from what I'm about to say, but there is some value in Kickstarter establishing a all-in-one solution. Yeah, because it keeps people there. It also is a lot easier for somebody who's doing, say, a craft project and doesn't wanna be an internet whiz and go out and get all the embeds and figure it out. They just wanna hit a button and have a video go from the webcam built into their computer they bought. So I think that that's part of this. They want to appeal to that part of this, a vast part of Kickstarter that aren't tech heads like us. So to me, not saying it's good or wrong or that they couldn't go the other way, I just seems like that makes sense for them, for the kind of thing that they are. And I get that. That's actually something I hadn't really thought through enough. If you are someone who doesn't make websites, you don't do any WordPress stuff. You just wanna start a Kickstarter. And it says, on the one hand, it says, here, you can do a live video, go to YouTube, sign up, forget this embed. You're like, forget it, that sounds complicated. If Kickstarter can say, press this button and it's all tied into your Kickstarter account already and all you need is a camera, go live, then more people are gonna take advantage of it. Absolutely. Sony reported a drop of 86% in profit year over year in Q2, due to, among other things, a strong yen at the impact of the Kumamoto earthquake, some company restructuring costs that they incurred. The downsized Sony mobile division is starting to turn around, posted profit of $37 million, up from a $172 million loss a year ago, even though sales aren't that great. Sony's PlayStation business was its top performer, though sales fell 11%. Now, part of the reason the sales amount, not units, but amount fell was because of exchange rates, home entertainment profit rose 11%. The earthquake impacted Sony, semiconductor division saw revenue drop 5%, which could have been worse. And in the media space, Sony pictures profit rose 5% and Sony music profit rose 15%. So a very mixed picture here and a lot of overall down profit year over year, but a lot of it is situation that you would not expect to be replicated a year from now. Yeah, and when you're in a position like Sony where you're doing a lot of rebuilding in certain markets that you've always had a hand in, whether that's television and coming off the sort of failed 3D revolution but working toward 4K and other divisions, working on phone and other products, they kind of need a couple of years of small losses, slight gains to kind of get back on their feet in those areas. And it's good that they've got these other places performing well, but to be affected so much by exchange rates and other uncontrollable factors must be really frustrating for them. Yeah. Cause some of those, I mean, especially at a time they're trying to turn things around. They're trying to tighten up. Yeah, it's tricky. Anyway, we hope for the best because I would like to keep playing a PlayStation. Justin TV and Twitch founder, Justin Kan announced a launch of a one-on-one, it's a very different model, one-on-one video Q&A app called Wale, W-H-A-L-E. Got originally developed the app to provide a repository for frequently asked questions. Helps to use the platform for creators to monetize their content. Users buy whale coins, which can be used to buy answers on the app. The app is available on iOS right now, perhaps more later. I don't quite want to think about this, except it's interesting. We haven't heard a lot from Justin since the sale of Twitch and him sort of receding in the background in terms of what his involvement was. It's interesting, a one-on-one app. He must have some good ideas here. This is one guy I would always pay attention to, no matter what he had to launch. I feel like he's done some really interesting thinking in the past, a great success. Despite what you may think of Justin TV's origins, Twitch is a bona fide, perfect storm kind of success. And I would very much like to see what this is. So we'll give it a shot, see how it goes. Yeah, so it's really interesting. Minimum price per question is a dollar. So if you want to ask me a question on whale, you pay a dollar. It's the lowest amount I can ask for without making it free. You can make the question actually free as well. I have mine at a dollar because I'm curious to see how it works. Once I actually, if I decided to treat whale seriously, I might do it for zero. But here's the trick. If you are the first person to ask a question, you pay to get it asked, but then you split the profits, you split the earnings afterwards. So when you unlock an answer with coins, the answerer and asker split the earnings. Interesting. Yeah, so if you're the first person to get someone to ask a question, maybe it costs you a dollar to ask it, but you might make 50 bucks off it if it's a really super popular answer or something. How do you feel about it being whale coins and not just straight up currency? Well, yeah, I mean, it's cost, and it's a minimum of $5 to get 150 whale coins and yeah. It's actually just like, I mean, Twitch just implemented their BITS system, where, well, not just implemented, it's been a couple of months now, but you can go in and pre-purchase a bunch of these BITS and you use them to throw at the creators or the streamers that you like and be able to use certain emotes. And you basically, it's basically microtransaction interaction via Twitch stream. That revenue split's still a little weird for a lot of people, but I wonder if this wasn't somewhat inspired by that. Maybe that's going really well over there, don't know. Yeah, it's weird. So I can unlock a question with eight whale coins. How many whale coins do I even have? I don't know. It's a little confusing for people, I think, and I think a lot of people will have the reaction that W. Scott has won, has in our chat room. You have to pay for this? No thanks. Yeah, I mean, that's, okay, I'm trying to think of a scenario. Tom has a, all right, here's your scenario. Tom becomes a mega million-selling book author because his books just take off. All right, this is something I actually hope for you. So that happens and a bunch of us fledgling authors, we think, man, it'd be great to have some of that knowledge. I just want to know how he came up with these ideas or what his process is or whatever. Oh, he's got a whale account? Sweet, I'll just ask this question for a dollar and it's this burning one I've had forever. And I can kind of see that working in numbers like it's a scale thing, but sure. I don't know, I mean, here's the thing. I don't think you as Tom Merritt would do it. I think what Tom Merritt would do is fire up a live stream. Yeah, yeah. Q&A for an hour for free for fun because you love your readers. But I get what Justin was doing before the monetization, which was he was getting people asking him the same questions all the time when he would do live streams or Twitter Q&As and ask me any things. And so he decided to create a tool that would collect all those to say, hey, if you have the same question, you can, I can record an answer and everybody could watch it. And then he's like, what if we monetize it? So I'll charge whale coins to unlock answers that you can listen to. It's the monetization that's a little confusing and a barrier to entry, but yeah, maybe if you just really want to know. I mean, he's targeting this at creators and influencers, right? So if Tim Cook were using it, I think people would pay a dollar or maybe five or $10 to get him to answer a question. It all depends on who the person is and how in demand of their knowledge is. Yeah, if it's Kim Kardashian, she's gonna get a lot of money from this because again, it's a scale and a percentage thing. But if it's me and you or if it's, you know, I don't know, maybe it's just relative and we'd get a little because it would be a little bit of interest or something. Maybe we're just pitching it wrong. Like, no, the people in our chat room, the people in our Slack, the people on Patreon, obviously they're not gonna use this. We need to be going and pitching it at social media conferences where we bill ourselves as analysts, social media consultants. And then we can charge like 10, 20 bucks per answer. Yeah, I could do, listen, I'm happy to be a fake guy at a conference. It's fine. I'm John Scottson. I have all the answers. That's the other thing is to get on the service you have to be approved. Now, I was approved instantly. So I don't know if they just look and see, oh, he's Twitter verified, that's fine. I don't know how that works, but not everybody can be a question answerer. Everybody can be a questioner. That's right. Thanks to all those who participate in our subreddit and can submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com, get in there and vote. It's important to vote in our subreddit. And in the French primaries also. Sure, there's no other elections going on. I don't, it seems like we're forgetting one. It's a real quiet, it's just been so quiet. There hasn't been any of them in there. Let's talk about Twitter launching new features for companies doing customer service. Direct message windows can now start with a welcome message. So to do this, to turn this on, you have to go to your customer settings in Twitter. You have to be a business and when I have customer settings turned on. And then you can create a custom welcome message. So even if I don't follow Frogpants Industries, when I open the Frogpants Industries Twitter DM, I get a welcome message that says, hey, ask us anything about our shipping and current big boxes or whatever, right? You can just put that in there. Then there's something called quick replies, which prompt the user with specific replies. So in the video that they put out demonstrating this, the examples were what's the status of my order or talk to an agent. And these are just basically pre-populated responses that you can use to speed up the conversation. So you kind of know what to ask. Evernote, Pizza Hut, Airbnb and Spotify are all using the platform. It's not exactly a bot. Now, when we talk about this in the DTNS Bosses Slack with all the analysts earlier today, they were saying, I don't want to not talk to a person. I wanna talk to a person. That's why I go to Twitter, because I feel I could get faster service because I'm talking to a real person. I didn't get the impression that this is supposed to replace a real person. It's just supposed to speed you into getting that real person the information. But you can use the API any way you want if you're approved to use it. The developer API that powers the feature is in private beta. But if you're a developer and interested in building solutions in direct message, you can sign up and apply for access. So Scott, my original reaction to this was, I don't think this is as compelling as Facebook Messenger's platform because it isn't a bot platform, but maybe I was wrong. Well, I mean, again, flesh and blood people sometimes has a big advantage, the ability to know. And I think it's important that this lets people know because it isn't a bot system that live people are gonna be on this thing. I don't know why, that seems like a benefit for customers to feel that or at least they think it is. This says here, they're starting companies or ever know Pizza Hut Airbnb and Spotify. I just wanted to make at least a comment that that is one of the most diverse starting lineups I've ever seen in my life. That's not all of them, that's just four of them. Right, that's a great list. Those are all things I could do in a day, find a beat. You're just describing Scott's normal Tuesday. Yeah, this is just me in California when I visit. But anyway, I love this idea. Honestly, I don't know which I prefer. There's part of me that goes, oh man, I wanna talk to a robot and have that robot be smart and give me everything I need and know when I put that order number in, what order number it was. And I want that to work. I don't think we're there yet. It's still kind of goofy, just like voice assist stuff. It's just not quite there. And this other part of me, this down to earth, let's go plant our own vegetables kind of guy, wants to talk to a real person about the thing I bought and find out what's going on. So what I've come to with this is if I look at it as a consumer directly at Twitter, here's where my head is. I already go there and say, Comcast, what gives with my connection? It would be nice if I could go there and go, oh, well, there's actually a forum for this in here. It's not just, I hope my at reply doesn't get lost in the stream. They, assuming that they're participating in this in a partner way, they're going to be paying attention to these. They have people and customer service that are watching this. So I think I lean, I'm leaning currently more toward this Twitter way because I feel like I can reason with people more than I can reason with machines if it's something important. Am I ever gonna use this? I mean, you and I talked earlier offline about once again, we're in that conversation of why does any of this need to be walled in? Why can't it be, oh, here's, like it is now, here's Comcast, Twitter profile, I hit the website, I go there and get customer service because the web already has all the things we need in all the places it needs to be, but yet we wanna kinda just wedge it into this place we're at. And again, I think the answer, like you said with Instagram is time. It's just quick, it's convenient. And if this goes well, like a lot of at reply support now does, you'll get results. So if you take a step back from this, we mentioned Facebook Messenger bot platform where the idea is you create bots that will help answer your question. And some of those bots will deliver you to live people if they need to. You've got Twitter's new support system, which seems to be a little bit of giving you pre-populated, automated responses on your end, but getting you to an actual agent or helpful person as soon as possible, then you have, say, Google and Amazon with their 24 seven buttons. You hit that Mayday button on Amazon's Fire TV. You're talking to a person. It's all person right from the beginning. And you've got, what else you've got there? You've got Twilio. Twilio is a service that's saying, hey, we will provide SMS and phone experience, more of that open platform that Scott's talking about where any company can say, we'll provide the ability to text or talk to a representative immediately and get their help. Given all of those options out there, and I'm gonna say, well, let's not restrict ourselves to just those options that are available, knowing what is possible. What's your ideal customer support situation as a customer? Yeah, I mean, that's how you have to ask it, right? I think the ideal, like right now, is it ideal for me to call Apple support and go through a five minute maze of a computer asking me to say things back to it. In some ways, yeah, like it depends on what I'm calling for, I suppose. But if I could just kind of love a place that I can call, a phone picks up, my name's Bill, what can I do for you? And then you tell them what you need and you do the thing you need to do. Now I know that is the purview of the small company. At some point, it's just not feasible. I totally get all the reasons why automation gets us into a better place. But if you're asking me what I as a consumer want, I want somebody who cares about the money I spent for the thing they're providing me be it a service or product. And for whatever reason, on the surface of it, this Twitter initiative feels more like that to me. Only because I know that there's gonna be flesh and blood people. Now some may say, well, that's your lazy of Twitter. All they're doing is just facilitating direct messages. And it's just a couple extra clicks. That's hardly any development. All right, I'm fine with that, I think. But yeah, as a consumer, I just wanna get helped. And if the help comes quicker, that side wins, usually. Yeah, I would like, I like the idea of pre-populated responses that give me an idea of like, okay, this is the kind of thing they need to know. I would really like the idea of if it asked me for my account number, that I don't have to give it again, which always happens on telephone. I would like the idea that if I start talking to someone on Twitter through DM, that I keep talking to them, I won't out the company, but I at-replied someone on Twitter last April and they said, hey, send us your account number in DM and we'll take care of it. So I sent the account number at 9.13 PM. The next morning I hadn't heard anything. So I wrote in the same thread, any help, and got, hey, how can I assist you? Please let me know. And I wrote someone at this account asked me to send my account number last night to investigate the problem. And they said, we understand your frustration. Have you contacted our support team at this phone number? I'm like, and I wrote, thanks, yes, I know the support number. I only responded here because you asked. I'll keep that in mind. Yeah. Yeah, see, okay, so all right, new question. And that was not a bot, those were real people. Yeah, if that was real people, then maybe the problem doesn't really solve by what I think real people do for a problem. It's all about having good real people, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. And the right blend, right? Giving the account number can be handled by a bot. Saying, what is the nature of your problem can be handled by a bot? Giving me a status update if I'm like, hey, my power's out. And it can say, yes, we know you're in the area. The techs responded 30 minutes ago, they're working on it. That's great, that keeps me up to date. I like that. But then once I need more help, I wanna be able to very easily get to a real person. I know that real person to know what they're doing. Yeah, one of the things I like about Uber, if you think that I don't, but one of the things I really like about Uber or Lyft is, especially Lyft is the one I saw most recently, is they track the car and you see where it is. I assume Uber does this now, but following that little car on my phone is like having a personal update manager just telling me what's going on. I don't have to wonder, I don't have to wonder where the heck he is. I can see what intersection he's stuck at because of traffic, or I can see that he's nearly here, he or she. So that kind of stuff is really valuable. I'd be okay with rudimentary service with more tools at my disposal. And even if that takes me out of Twitter to get them, I'm cool with that. But I also think the places this is gonna be, this is gonna be the most important is smaller-ish companies. I would, I mean, it's hard to say Spotify is a small company, but these niche providers of very specific kinds of content and products, not Amazon, not Apple, not Google necessarily, they're kind of too big. Even though, speaking of Google, they have 24 seven support, they actually seem to value that. But I like the idea of much smaller businesses being able to connect in a way that Twitter could facilitate or other services could facilitate that the big companies don't have to worry about, like Sony's not gonna do this. They're just too big, but everybody else, especially in this sort of- I don't know why Sony wouldn't do it, to be honest. Well, maybe they would, and maybe they'd come around to it, but the sharing economy, quote unquote, which I hate that term, but that thing that spawns all these things like delivery or door and Uber and Lyft and all that sort of thing, they'll benefit from this in a big way, I think, because they're already sort of customer facing and they know their customers are using things like this, so they don't lose if they- Yeah, I mean, one of the brilliant things that Uber did in the early days was make it so that you can call your driver without giving away your phone number so that you don't see their phone number, they don't see yours, but you can still talk to them and you have that building on that relationship you have as someone who asked for a ride. It was something that just seems obvious in retrospect, but I remember being surprised that that was a feature and that it was a feature that actually worked and still does. So yeah, I wonder if maybe what Twitter's doing, what Facebook's doing, what all these companies are doing is a way that will save companies enough money combined with the pressure on customer service that companies are starting to feel like you probably shouldn't cheap out on your customer service because you're gonna get out competed if you do, then maybe they can hire good customer service agents. Yeah. And do you think, not to take this too far down the road, they haven't even really implemented these features, but do you think there could come a day where the text back and forth in DM is just not cutting it and I need to get on the phone with this person because he understands what's going on so there's an agreement with some sort of VoIP provider. Yeah, well, you could just have Twilio. And there's no reason you can't in your direct message say, here's a link to our VoIP service, which is really just powered by Twilio in the back. I like that a lot actually, because you're gonna need that aspect to it or else you're back to the old, well, call our number and then what was the point? And to those of you out there who work in the customer service industry, which I also used to, when I say, pay you enough to do a good job, I don't mean you don't do a good job. A lot of you really are trying to do the best job. You don't always get the tools, they don't always pay people well enough to stick around long enough to get good at it or to feel rewarded at it. And so I would like the good customer service agents that are out there and they are out there to be supported and get the compensation they deserve. I agree. All right, let's get to our pick of the day. This is in response to your headset pick from a couple of weeks back, Michael wrote in and said, I was listening to Scott's headset pick and like to add another brand, which is relatively unknown to most consumers. It's headphones from Bayer Dynamics, B-E-Y-E-R Dynamics, spelled like dynamics, who are producing professional audio equipment but also consumer level stuff. Their sound quality is on par with Sennheiser, which you might know, but Bayer Dynamics is as widely known, so their products are much cheaper. He says I'm currently using an MMX2 and I'm very happy with the sound and microphone quality. He has a link to an Amazon page that is in German. So I'm gonna guess Michael is in Germany? I'll leave that link in the show notes, but we'll also have a link to the American store with an English language version of it as well. Oh, weird. It sent me to the US one. It must have, it must have- That's the link. You clicked on the English link and then in his email in the show notes is the actual link to the German version. The only thing I'd like to hear back from him on and maybe he can do a follow-up, I'm very curious about the comfort level. One of the real selling points of that other one for me was that it feels like I have air on my head. It's like nothing. Yeah. And that's super key for a lot of these things. So you've piqued my interest and I've had a lot of people. I'm surprised how many people were so curious about this headset thing. This is great to have another recommendation that isn't gonna break your bank. Thank you, Michael. Send your picks to us, folks. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. You can find more picks at dailytechnewshow.com slash picks. Hey, real quickly, Scott, I wanna remind people that we're gonna do a best of show this year. And the best of show that Roger wants to put together is the five best segments of the year. So if you remember a segment, anytime from January one on, that you're like, that's a really good segment, go to bit.ly slash best of DTNS and let us know. There's a little form you fill out there. If you've got time codes from the actual episode, that's great. Episode number's probably good enough as long as you give a good description. More detail, the easier you're making Roger's life. And Roger is in the middle of a very stressful move right now. So try to make his life as easy as possible, please. Go there and help us figure out what the best segments are for the best of DTNS show. Nice. And Mr. Scott Johnson, what are you up to these days? Oh, I don't know. The BlizzCon thing is kind of blocking out all the light. So I don't mean that a negative way. I'm very excited about going, but it kind of makes it hard for me to see what's on the other side of it. But there's always a lot going on. Follow me this week specifically at Scott Johnson if you wanna know when I'll be moderating panels there and doing other stuff. I'm not sure how much of this stuff is gonna be on the Direct TV feed, but I am supposed to show up on Direct TV at some point. I don't know when, but if you follow me at Scott Johnson on Twitter and keep track of probably my Instagram, which is currently changed and I forgot what I called it, it's now called, you know, you love it when you do this. Okay, here we go. While you look for that, I will remind people that you don't even have to have Direct TV. You can go to the BlizzCon website and you can buy the Direct Streaming and that gets the same feed. Good point. I actually should have mentioned that a lot of people are cord cutters, I'll listen to this. So it's actual Scott Johnson on Instagram. I plan on filling that thing up with- You don't like Battlestar Galactica? This is Scott Johnson actual? Like when you're not having Nick or Carter answer the phone for you? Right, I like that a lot. And the phone needs to be, it's like old, cruddy thing in space. I'm a big fan, but yeah, I'm really looking forward to that. So if you guys are interested in that again on Twitter, we're gonna find all this stuff at Scott Johnson. And if you're there, come up and say hi, that's why I go. Excellent. Once again, huge thanks. It's Patreon day, November 1st. This is the day when everybody's pledges start being made good. So we're extra, extra, extra thankful for each and every patron out there. Big welcome to brand new patrons, Zolnix and Eric Vogslid. I asked him how to pronounce his name. I probably got it wrong, but at least I tried Eric. Huge thanks to Sorob, Michael Kennedy and Ryan Officer who all raised their pledges. Bunch of new people showed up in our DTNS Analyst's Slack and we're having a great time in there. So you guys, you guys make this world go round and it's only getting better the more of you there are. If you have at all considered supporting us, why don't you head on over to patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email address is feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. We're live Monday through Friday, 4 30 p.m. Eastern. AlphaGeekRadio.com, DiamondClub.tv and our website is dailytechnewshow.com. Back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young, even though it's a Wednesday. Talk to you then. Show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. DiamondClub hopes you have enjoyed this program. And I hope you've enjoyed DiamondClub. Oh, of course. DiamondClub. Can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you now. All right, titles, titles. Kickstarter won't get in bed. Get it in bed with YouTube. Oh, because it's a pun. Oh, wow, wow. Really likes it too. Yeah, fail whale, moving streams. Oh, man, I already calling it a fail. Have a question, May as whale. May as whale. Are you making fun of my accent? May as whale, a whale ask it. That's a tongue twister for me, because it just doesn't. Have a question, May as whale ask it. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, what are you doing, small fry? He's talking to Scott. Oh, sorry. I know, I'm talking to my kid. She's touching the keyboard. I just think it'd be really funny if you called me small fry. That's my first name for Scott. Yes, small fry. Like tall fry. Tall fry. All right, here's the remote. Justin Jive and then you whale. Oh, that one I like. Get it, Justin Jive and then you whale. That's not bad. So where'd she go? We didn't talk about whale that much, but I guess everybody really likes it. There's just so much to work with, I guess. Oh, don't cry. We'll pick it. We'll pick it. Fine, it's fine. What do you need? I like the customers always write that they are R-I-T-E. You are, you are great. The most demanding patron. You're the moment host. All right, no problem. Hey. Look, it's two guys with glasses. Hi, Ellie. Two guys with glasses, all right. How many glasses are there? Oh, and now you're going to pretend to be shy. This is when they learn. Yep. No way around it. Nope. Google Vance is the first tape. Justin Jive and then you whale. It's pretty musical though. Justin has a whale of an idea. Everyone is pretty with the whale. The best one about the Twitter topic is the customer's always right. Yeah. Although in Japan, it used to be the customer's God. You do what they want. Customer's God. Or, or if you're a priest, the customer's. Yeah, that's true. Well, wait, I'm just signing up new people for the. If you're a priest, the boss is God. I guess the boss. No, you're right. It's not the customer. Customers are the other four guys. The flock. The rest of your raid team. Yes. Do you ever call your raid team a flock? No, but I smell a new phrase coming. Yeah, whoever's whoever's leading the raid. Yeah, it's my flock. Because it's kind of a feel flock in a raid. Lock together. Speaking of which, raids and dungeons have been so fun. This expansion. So I am. I am so remiss. I know, I know. You don't even know how cool your your your mages right now. My mages. I'll get in there. I'm playing finally playing Civ six. No, six is great. It's complex. Yeah, it's a beast. They added all that religion stuff and wow, I love it all. I love it all, but it's not. I thought, oh, I'll sit down. I know how to play Civ. I'll start playing the new Civ. And I'm like, whoa, I have to relearn a bunch of things. Not everything, but that's a thing with civilization, though. They keep increasing the complexity with each revision. Yeah, like civilization three is kind of the last one I could play. Like, like everything like four and up is more of a exercise and learning. Like, well, you got to take it slow. It's not like like I get you get with Civ one and Civ two. Once you went through the game once, you knew how to play and you just played, right? You just power through that thing. Now it's like you're you're doing an exercise. I love it. I was great. I mean, it's it's I also just like how a lot of stuff is refined. Like in some ways it's more complex. But in other ways, they've really tightened up some of the tech trees. No, you're absolutely right. It's complex in the right way. Yeah, and it feels very much like what Blizzard kept trying to do with talent trees where it's like, let's make this fun so that you're actually getting a result from choosing, but not feeling like there's only really one right choice. Yeah, it's then that's hard to do, especially if one is complex as the trees that are in that game. Yeah, some have done it and they also they do a good job of onboarding you into into stuff, even stuff you already know, if you're a new player, I guess I went and did the tutorial just because yeah, do what to do and everything that would happen. I'm like, oh, yeah, I know what this is, but it was great. It was like, I don't know. It was like it introduced me to the newer ideas, like the the important people concept, which I didn't understand that at all. But this idea of important people like Aristotle or, you know, whatever you get them in your town and then they can go to one of your districts and they end up giving a permanent bonus to it. It's almost like a, almost like a consumable. Well, I remember that district thing is something I wanted like back in Civ 2 era. Yeah, yeah. All right, customers always right is winning now. So we're going with that. Customers always right. Because the customer is always right. That art style is amazing in it. I just love the map, the way it leaves kind of like parchment map everywhere. Oh, yeah. And you don't, you actually don't get to keep the map until you learn how. Yeah. And so instead of just a bunch of clouds that are just there for no reason, the fog of war is handled in this much more elegant way. I really like it. I also like that they, and this was true in five too, but I still like that it's not just my warrior attacks your scout and that's it. Goodbye. We're done. It's all over one by one. One of them won. Shooter, did you say bye? Bye, bye. Show wave. She's like, why aren't you going? You said goodbye. I also think Twitter does kind of wrong. I know they've sort of made inroads here, but I use DMs as one of my main messaging apps, like straight up. Oh, yeah. You know, I always use that with people when I'm, when we're not from the same country. And it's like, I don't know if text messaging is going to incur fines or if it's going to work or maybe I'm a different phone number, but it seems like DMs always work. Yeah. Or you got to get them on WhatsApp or Allo or something like, come on, let's just do the thing where all you- Actually, Charlie Oliver that we had on the show yesterday, the whole thing started when she tweeted something to me and then I DMed her. I was like, hey, you know, I see that you work with machine intelligence stuff. You want to be on the show and talk about it? And we had all of, we did all of our setup in Twitter DM. All right. Yeah. See, I like that. I don't know. I just like that it's all there and it's happening. And I don't know. I use it in anything. All my Blizzard contacts I talk to through Twitter these days. Oh, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Slack and Twitter are probably my two main communication things though. Weird. Yeah. I mean, it's still an email every day, but less and less important. Yeah. I just use WhatsApp to talk to Eileen now. We don't speak in person. Hey, honey. In WhatsApp, please. Only by GIF, please. We do that. I mean, I'm joking obviously about that, but we do sometimes talk to each other through text message or WhatsApp, even though we could go into the other room. I always knew Eileen. I do this with him all the time, so that's not too crazy. And my kids, I talk to him by text all the time. Yeah. Jen and I really communicate through Google chat. Yeah. Same sort of thing. What do you want for dinner? Here's a list. I'm trying to think. I'm, you know, it's funny. My family too has all moved. We used to be, I'd call my mom. I'd call my sister out in Illinois, or my brother up in Wisconsin. Now it's almost exclusively text. It's like a special occasion when we like, oh, I have time to talk on the phone. Oh, I send a text every Monday to my mom just asking her how she's doing. I saw her the other night. So I see her here in there. But it's great. Do you make her send you pictures to prove it? Yeah. How you doing, mom? I need a picture. It didn't happen. Picture? We didn't do it. Excuse me. I have to clear your schedule. Are you going to talk to someone? Yeah. Well, it's become a kind of a de facto etiquette that you text someone before calling them, right? You say, hey, do you have time to talk? And then you call them. Whereas calling someone without texting first is almost almost now seen as rude. It's like showing up at someone's house unannounced. It's a little pushy. Yeah. I might do that to you, Tom, once I moved out. Oh, yeah. No, you're welcome to. I remember Patrick Norton showing up at my house unannounced and being really excited. He's like, hey, I just realized I'm back in a situation where I could just show up at people's houses because we know each other and live in the same neighborhood. It's a special, it's a special bond. I would show up at Scott's house unannounced if I lived in the same neighborhood. You could knock and come in, right? You could walk in. Are you kidding? I just, you just find me eating burgers in your kitchen. Yeah. Just walk in, eat. I'd walk in and find you. Oh, hey. I'd have made you a salad. Yeah. I used to do that all the time in college to show up at people's places. Oh, yeah, totally. Me too. Very collegiate. Not even just in, not even dorms, but like, I mean, again, before we had mobile phones, you didn't really, like, always call someone. You might be out and about. Like, oh, I was in the neighborhood. Yeah. Kids ask your parents what I was just in the neighborhood means. I'm very different now. Well, because we have so many options for communication and it changes the dynamic. You could have called because you did have a phone on you. Got that Instapaper announcement from Instapaper. Oh, you did? We're thrilled to announce that as of today, we're opening up Instapaper premium for all our users, free of charge. Now, the ad free part of that is interesting because I'm like, what does that mean? Does that mean that the site is just not going to have ads anymore? Or is it possible for you to opt for the ad version for no reason? Or a good question. Yeah, I don't know. I think you just want to support the, support Instapapers. So I've decided to opt for ads. I guess you could. Some people would if they love it that much. I guess. The premium of yours. Yeah, I guess I would in certain circumstances. I don't use Instapaper that often. You know, Instapaper is where things go to die for me. Like, it's my way of saving. Hold on there, Ellie. I'm trying to talk. It's a way of saving my conscience when I don't have time to read something that I really want to read. I put it in Instapaper. I just like to use the word sav. Because I don't hear that enough in my life. Word sav. Where'd Ellie go? I think that was slave misspelled. Slave? Kid. What's funny is one of your emails today. I thought it said, where was it? Or maybe it wasn't an email. Or a Slack thing. I don't remember. Oh, I know what it was. In your, your top of the show stuff, we were just to have a few notes about Google Microsoft and Pinterest. He said, Microsoft launched Minecraft Education Edition in my head. And this probably speaks to the current state of things. I swore that said launched Minecraft Election Edition. Oh, yeah. And I thought, are you kidding me? Your brain just sees things. I was like, Bill, I've done Jill Stein. Oh, I would have been so irritated if that was true. Yeah. Oh, did you get my email on Scott? Oh, maybe. Let me check. A little behind on emails. He's sending emails about scheduling for recording these special holiday episodes. Oh, oh, oh, right. I did get that. Let me just pull it up. Did I not reply? I must not reply. There it is. Oh, okay. I need to know. Are there any weird scheduling conflicts outside of holidays that will conflict with DTNS? No. After BlizzCon, I am good. Okay. Are there any new or any Tuesday, Wednesday, to Thursday afternoons, you have a bill to record a show, meaning for the holiday one, right? Yep. I will adhere to whatever the body says. I will fill, as they say, in Heroes of the Storm. All right. I think I know what that means. Let's just say, sorry, conflict. And I doubt it could ever be. So whatever it is, I'll do it. I mean, the only, well, I guess I should say this. Tuesday nights, I record core. So I guess that night's out. But the Wednesdays and Thursday nights are totally fine. Okay. That's good. I'm going to cancel more in favor of this. So it's not like it's, I don't have any wiggle room, but yeah. It's cold finally leaving her and flew right over the hill. Oh yeah. Your voice sounds much better now. Yeah. I was bad last week. The instance, I sounded like a lawnmower. It was bad. I thought that was just a lawnmower that was following me when I was running. Yeah. I was not so good, but it's definitely gotten better. Terpster's fighting the same thing. Hopefully he's okay by the time he gets here Thursday. Eileen had it too. It's real bad this time. Like 15 days or something. Whoa. That's too long. It's too long. It's not right. It's not funny anymore. No. At that point. He's just to be funny at that point. All right. I think I have successfully posted this show. The customers always write. The customer. Custard. I want some custard. The custard. I used to love custard. Makes me all throaty now. Oh, man. So good. Too much dairy. Yeah, I think so. I dairy you. When I was young. I could eat anything. I could eat a whole cow of dairy. I could. And I did. All right. Thanks everybody for sitting through our dairy talk. See you later. Bye. Bye, Ellie.