 Coming up on DTNs, Google wants to show you just how many meetings you have. South Korea freeze in app payments and why Apple might put satellite connectivity into an iPhone. DTNs starts now. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, August 31st, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Los Angeles. I'm Lamar Wilson and I'm Roger Chang. The show is pretty soon. We were just talking about family and friends and we didn't bring up fast and furious once. If you want to hear that conversation, go get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNs. That is where you can join top patrons like Degrassia A. Daniels Erwinster and Ken Hayes. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. The Central Bank of Nigeria will work with Barbados based block chain and payment startup Bit Inc. to launch the nation's E narrow C B D C or Central Bank digital currency. Later this year, the government of the Central Bank, Goodwin F MFL said that the digital currency should increase cross border trade, also speed up remittances and improve payment systems, efficiency and tax recollection. Bose announced the quiet comfort 45 over the year headphones with improved noise cancellation and acclaimed 24 hours on a charge. Noise canceling headphones available for pre-order now for $330 ship in September 23. Meanwhile, Jabra updated its elite line of earbuds and the elite seven pro promises nine hours of battery life with active noise cancellation on just in tiny little earbuds and 35 hours with the charging case. Those are 199 bucks. There's also the elite seven active with shake grip that supposedly keeps them in your ears while you're working out. That's $179 and the budget elite three with no noise cancellation, but only 79 bucks. The elite three goes on sale September 1st. The elite seven pro and seven active will be available to buy on October 1st. My job is to not fall out of my ears while I'm working out, but probably a nice feature for some couple pieces of news in music technology. Apple acquired the Dutch classical music streaming service Prime Phonic. The existing Prime Phonic service will shut down on September 7th and relaunch with a new app in 2022. Current subscribers can get a six month free trial of Apple music and report over their existing playlists. Meanwhile, Axios sources say that Amazon music is developing a live audio feature that it would pay musicians and celebrities to use for live shows and events. Bloomberg reports that public interest company, the Nippon Foundation and Japan's largest shipping company, Nippon, you send plan to have a container ship pilot itself. No crew on a 380 kilometer voyage from Tokyo Bay to the coastal city of Se in February. It would be the first test of an autonomous ship in a heavy traffic marine area. Autonomous ships are considered necessary in Japan as 40% of Japan's crew are 55 years or older and the workforce is shrinking. Plus 70% of shipping accidents are caused by human error. China's S volt showed off a cobalt free 82.5 kilowatt hour capacity battery at the Chengdu Motor Show. S volt claims that the battery can deliver a range of 373 miles and do zero to 60 miles per hour in five seconds. Cobalt is in short supply. Sometimes it's mined with child labor and environmentally destructive to extract cobalt is problematic. So if S volt can reach its promise capacity, it would join others in making cobalt free batteries, including contemporary amperex technology, which makes lithium ion phosphate batteries for test the model threes that are sold in China. All right, let's talk a little more about the big news from Microsoft. Let's do it. Microsoft announced the free upgrade to Windows 11, which will begin rolling out on October 5th. Put it on your calendar, starting with new devices, then coming to other devices in phases with all eligible devices, getting the upgrade by mid 2022. Windows update will alert Windows 10 users when they're ready for the upgrade, but you can also check yourself if you're so inclined in either Windows update or the PC health check app. However, even if you get Windows 11 on October 5th, you won't be getting the promised support for Android apps just not quite yet. The partnership with Amazon and Intel to bring Android apps to Windows will come to Windows insiders in the coming months, but there's no word exactly on when it will roll out to all Windows 11 users. Windows 11 will feature Microsoft Teams integration, also a new design and an updated start menu and an improved Microsoft Store, among other features. I mean, I'm looking forward to getting Windows 11. I've got a couple of years old machine. It's an alien where it's got like a 700 series and video card. If that tells you how old it is. So I doubt I'll be getting it right in October 5th. There's usually a way to force that update if you want. So I'll probably do that. I'm looking forward to Android apps on Windows 11. I have them on Chrome OS, which obviously, you know, that's all in the family with Google. But it's really useful to be able to just download some Android apps. They're not always perfectly suited for Chrome OS, but I've got a touchscreen on my Chrome OS, so that kind of gets around some of the issues you have when you take something from mobile to a desktop. So I'm looking forward to being able to take advantage of that on Windows as well. Yeah, I don't have a Windows machine. It's sitting in my closet. So, you know, but I'm actually made dust off and download this. One of the things I've always said about Windows that I'm glad Windows 11 is addressing and maybe even more so with the Android apps is that the this is I don't know if this is a word, the synchronicity or that that Apple has the synchronicity that that the Apple has with this stuff. You know, just from even from, you know, like airdrop or things like that, you know, they can kind of start narrowing the gap on how to get things easier from your phone to, you know, to your to your computer. And in a in a, you know, in a much free flowing way, I'm all for it. I because I just never understood how Windows, which is largest they are, does not have a seamless feature like that. I know they don't have phones anymore, but, you know, I'm glad to see. There are some stuff they've they've made progress since you last put your Windows machine in the closet. There's a lot more secret stuff out there. Yeah. OK. Sure. Yeah, I'm with you, Lamar. I have a Windows machine. I don't use it regularly. But I when when iOS apps and Mac OS iPad OS apps rather came to Mac OS, I had some pretty mixed results with some of the apps where I was like, this would actually be really great on the desktop, you know, because it's something that I'm, you know, I don't need to reach for my phone all the time. If I'm kind of doing desktop stuff, you know, at least a little bit to be desired, but I can see where the Android apps on Windows 11 would be super helpful for some folks. And it when I when I read some of the stories about this this morning, it made it seem like, oh, no, look at Microsoft. They're not ready for Android apps. That's what they promised us. But it doesn't sound like it's no anyone's life just yet. Yeah, I don't feel like it's a must have. It's a nice to have. So, yeah, I mean, I can get the Windows Insider preview if I'm really hot to try it. It's not like I can't do that. Yep. So Google is adding a panel called Time Insights to its calendar app. It will show several graphs charting how much time you spend in meetings. Now, a pie chart called Time Breakdown divides your working hours between one-on-one meetings and group meetings. A graph called Time In Meetings breaks down each day by how much time you spend in meetings and reports an overall average time per day spending meetings. Now, Google says that this information will only be visible to users, not managers. Users can minimize the section, but not turn it off, though workspace admins can disable the feature. Now, Time Insights is rolling out gradually over the next few months on Google Workspace Business Standard, Business Plus, Enterprise Standard, Enterprise Plus, Education Plus, and Non-Profit Description tiers. I did not know they had that many tiers. Yeah, yeah, there's so many tiers on Google. OK, for data nerds who just want to have personal data and be like, oh, what's my meeting breakdown? This is wonderful. For if you're trying to if you're trying to win an argument with somebody about too many meetings, maybe this is useful. But I'm not. I don't really believe this is going to change meeting culture to have this there. Maybe I'm just not, you know, believing enough that that the data can prevail. But I imagine everybody will say, yeah, it's sure we sure do have a lot of meetings, but I'm not canceling the one I call because mine's important. Yeah, the whole information being visible to the Google Calendar user, but not a manager in some sort of workplace environment is also sort of like, OK, well, if if Tom's my manager and I say, Tom, we're having too many meetings, I've got all this data, then it's sort of like, well, why didn't Tom also just get the data if we work together for privacy, right? As soon as Google says managers can see this, everybody is up in arms and like, oh, so you're a manager, you might have put some on your calendar and taken my personal data. It's like you can't even though like the member meetings you have in work is probably well known to your boss. Like everybody's so sensitive about personal data and spying even at work. That's why they did. That's why they made a point of saying and your manager can't see this. You know, this is just you. So it can't be used against you. I like Sarah's point, though, because like I don't use workspace or anything like that. But just thinking back when I was in kind of a corporate setting, you know, you do have separate calendars on Google. Do you not? You have your personal calendar? You have your work calendar. So like, I don't see if the manager is the person making the meetings or at least managing them. Yeah, if you've got nothing to hide, why not let them know? It's just the world we live in, I think is that that people are very especially when Google's involved and when your workplace wants to know the data about you, people get worded out. It's the slippery slope argument. Like, oh, they'll if they start to see my calendar, my meeting percentage time, maybe they'll think I'm slacking off because my meeting percentage isn't as much as others worry about stuff like that. Oh, boy, this is a little I love data. I yeah, this would be something that I would be curious to check out. I only use Google Calendar, you know, for certain things. But but in general, I like the sort of thing. But I liken it a little bit to when my iPhone tells me once a week what my screen time was over the last week. And it's like, I look at it and I'm like, yeah, well, that's what it was. What do you want me to do about it? I feel like I'm on my phone a lot last week. Well, because because screen time works because screen time is something you theoretically have control over. If you're like, oh, my screen time was way up. OK, I'm going to cut down. You can do that. Meetings are not something you are the only one who has control over. Right. They often. Yeah, I involve other people and you might be roped into something and mandatory and all that. It's a great way to complain to your boss. Too many meetings. Yeah, let me show you the screenshot. Protocols. Amber Burton has an article called there aren't enough data scientists how the future of reskilling in tech is changing. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, job openings reached a high of 10.1 million in June 2021. And many of those are high skilled tech jobs. Companies can't afford to wait around for students to finish up master's and PhD programs before they fill these jobs. There's just not enough coming out and graduating. So they're turning to cross training and upskilling where you train somebody already in a job to do a new job. Corporations are increasingly paying for employees to do this. In fact, paying for employees to do things they've been paying for themselves in the past like taking courses on Udacity. Udacity offers so-called nano degrees, very short courses in things like data science and cloud computing. Udacity is entirely online, but there are others that do hybrid. Fuse machines offers classes that are partially online and partially in person. And they focus primarily on AI and work directly with corporations on this. Their business is focused on helping corporations reskill or upskill their existing employees. These companies say they don't see themselves as competitors to traditional colleges, but the colleges seem to. Colleges are exploring offering upskilling and non-resident training. Carnegie Mellon, for instance, Carnegie Mellon's Dean of Computer Science, Marshall Herbert, told Protocol, he's working with colleagues on a way to reformat the master's program for professionals who don't live near Carnegie Mellon and don't wanna go for a full master's program. Herbert said, quote, the old model for educating employees is no longer realistic for rapidly changing fields. I love this. And I love the story in the sense of, especially because we talk here on DTNS and elsewhere all the time about, okay, AI taking people's jobs, what are they gonna do next? You have to go get your real estate license, like, are you gonna be out of a job? If you work for a trucking company and all of a sudden the truck can drive itself, there are all sorts of ways that companies are trying to get creative about, no, we wanna keep this employee and this employee is highly skilled, but maybe can be of better use to everybody in this other area that they need a little bit of training in. They don't need to quit their job and go to get a master's degree that is not only not feasible for a lot of people, geographically, certainly financially. And so for colleges to kind of be waking up and saying, okay, these are also things that we can offer because we wanna be in the game as well, I think that's great. Yeah, and these companies, as I mentioned here, when you read in time, they don't have the time, they don't have 46 years to wait for you to get your degree, they need people, and so if you have people already in the seats, why not enhance the training? If you don't have the skills to do it as a manager or as the owner of the company yourself, then you have these companies like Udacity, which I had not heard of, but I love this term, nano degrees. Just like, hey, something very specific, you need to be trained in, and will they undercut universities? Sure, I kind of hope so. The whole university thing, I don't wanna say it needs to collapse, but sometimes it takes too long to get certain things, you can get right in the door and get working. That's why I love trade schools as I was coming up and you see those dying off, which is a shame. Coming back in this capacity. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it. This is kind of the modern day trade school, right? Where unlike traditional trades, it's teaching modern digital era trades, I suppose. You can look at it that way. Yeah, I think this is really fascinating because Udacity has made its money off of employees who wanted to gain a new skill, but the company wouldn't pay for it, so they get the new skill and they go find another job that paid them more. Companies have caught on to that and be like, well, we can't fill the positions we have, maybe we just try to keep the people who are already familiar with what we do and train them because you can take AI and automate more tedious knowledge worker jobs and then take those people, upskill them to be an actual data scientist and keep them in the family. I think that's a fascinating trend to keep an eye on for sure. Absolutely. Hey, folks, if you need just the headlines some days, you're like, man, I love the 30 minutes, but sometimes I'm in a crush because I'm taking that Udacity course. I don't have time. Daily Tech Headlines is right there. Check out our related show, All the Essential Tech News in just about five minutes. Go find it at DailyTechHeadlines.com. South Korea's National Assembly passed an amendment to South Korea's Telecommunications Business Act on Tuesday. This is big. It prohibits large app store operators, basically Google and Apple, from requiring the use of their in-app purchasing systems. The Korean Communication Commission may find a company up to 3% of their South Korean revenue is found in violation. Now, legislation was created last year after Google began to enforce its rule that all developers had to use Google's in-app payment system. Previously, they only had to enforce the rule for game developers. The law was nicknamed the Google Power Abuse Prevention Law. Yeah, I think in the US, we get in the habit of thinking about app store in-app payment battle as being between Apple and either the government or Epic. Whereas in South Korea, it was all about Google. It still applies to Apple there. And while South Korea is a small percentage of the worldwide market for both these companies, this is a template now. This is an important market that will now serve as a template. And I am, both Apple, I don't know that Apple even responded to this yet. Last time I looked at Google had said like, we will look and see how we can preserve a good experience, blah, blah, blah, blah. I wonder what these companies are going to do in reaction. And the past Google has just said, we'll pull out of a market if it's something like this. I doubt they do that when they've got a very lucrative partnership with Samsung. And this is Samsung's home market. Yeah, it looks like Apple did say something, like it said after the committee decision, it was concerned that users who purchase digital goods through the payment systems will be at greater risk of fraud and privacy. It's kind of like the, oh, for the children. That's the old privacy and security thing. Yeah, yeah, so, I like this idea. Sarah, you wanna say something? Sorry. No, no, I just. I thought I heard you, sorry. No, no, I pretty much agree with both of you on this. I think that this is, sure, it's perhaps not either company's largest market, but if the companies comply and say, sure, okay, fine. We'll give you 3% of the revenue that happens in South Korea. Do other countries follow suit and does it get messy? And this reminds me of just, especially the recent conversation that we were having in various markets about paying publishers. It's kind of, you know, it's like the company is, they can afford it for now. They can totally afford it. But if they roll over too much, then does their structure break down too much for it to be comfortable for them? Yeah. I'm sorry. It's an interesting thought of like, would it be worthwhile for them to just pay the 3% like a tax and just get fined every year and be like, well, that's the cost of doing business in South Korea? I think they calculated this to make it, not make sense for them to do that, but I wouldn't put it past one of them to try it. Yeah. Yeah, 3% of their total revenue of everything they make in South Korea, right? In South Korea, yeah, yeah, yeah. So that, yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, I was thinking about it in a pre-show, what they just like find, we'll deal with that find every month or day. I don't know who knows how that's allocated, but yeah, we'll see. Yeah, and you know, the United States and Europe are gonna be looking at this to see what Apple and Google do in reaction because there are similar rules in China as well, being considered there. Anthony Calangelo from Main Engine Cutoff Podcast has some additional info on what we were talking about yesterday where Ming-Chi Kuo was saying that Apple is probably going to put a Qualcomm modem in a future iPhones that would allow for satellite connectivity. Anthony Calangelo here from Main Engine Cutoff. I wanted to provide some context for the iPhone 13 satellite connectivity story from yesterday. And unfortunately, this one does not look like a satellite connectivity story, although there is something in this regard to track in the future. The confusion here comes from the fact that the Qualcomm chip we were talking about yesterday operates with Spectrum that is currently owned by GlobalStar who does in fact operate 24 low-earth orbit satellites for satellite phone connectivity. In this case though, the Spectrum we're talking about is actually for use back down here on Earth for private wireless networks. They're operating something like this right now at the port of Seattle to test out a wider area of private wireless network in partnership with Nokia. So it looks like the iPhone is going to be expanding its 5G coverage, not necessarily offering cell phone to satellite connection just yet. However, there's a company called Link, that's Link with a Y, who is operating satellites in low-earth orbit right now. They have five plans to launch more this December and then more in the spring and summer leading to commercial service in 2022. And what they offer is satellite connection to unmodified cell phones. That means no new hardware to connect to their satellites and they're able to send text messages via these satellites. In fact, in February 2020, they did send a text message to an Android phone located in the Falcon Islands when their test payload passed overhead on top of a Cygnus cargo vehicle. So all is well there so far with their testing. They're heading to commercial service next year and we could see this starting to be offered by way of mobile network operators sometime in 2022, probably 2023 because all space things are always late. And if you wanna stay up with those space things that are always late, head over to www.managingcutoff.com where I'm talking about this kind of stuff every single week. Now that's interesting because today, Mark German of Bloomberg has sources saying the satellite capability that Ming-Chi Kuo was referring to and is in that Qualcomm modem will be used for a feature called emergency message via satellite, codenamed inside Apple as Project Stewie. The messages will have a length limit so you can't send a lot. They'll use a gray bubble instead of the traditional blue or green. And if you're contacting your emergency contacts it'll break through the do not disturb setting. So if they have you set to do not disturb they have their phone set to do not disturb but you're an emergency contact they'll still see your message. Another feature would let you report the kind of emergency you're having to emergency services. Say like you're in a car accident or experiencing a fire. It would also allow you to send location and medical ID to emergency services. Also, even if the next iPhone is capable of all of this the features don't appear to be ready to roll out at launch likely coming sometime next year. Now I'm a little mixed up on this because Anthony is pointing out like the spectrum in that Qualcomm modem is used for this 5G related thing but there's a service that doesn't require that modem I can do all the stuff that Gurman's sources are telling him Apple wants to do. So I'm curious if there's a combination of this and the fact that it's not gonna launch for another couple of years makes me think maybe it is tied into that link company that Anthony was talking about but it does bring it a little more into focus as to what they're up to, I think. Yeah, in general, I don't know much about this. I'm still learning this kind of dynamically but I really do like the idea of just you're out in the middle of nowhere. You need to get an emergency out I think, Sarah, you mentioned a bad cell service area. Oh, I live in one. Okay. I mean, we'll call it the middle of nowhere. I mean, it's not really the middle of nowhere but yeah, I live in an area where there's extremely bad cell service. Wi-Fi is fine but if the power goes out I gotta drive 30 minutes to get my phone working again if I really needed to get a hold of somebody. Yeah, and when you're in California and fire season and all that stuff this has happened to me more than a few times now and to have any sort of emergency service on any of the level that we're hearing about now would be really advantageous, truly. Yeah. Do you have to get like a backup satellite plan or something for emergencies or? Well, we have a generator here so when the power goes out the Wi-Fi stays on. Oh, okay. But the generator was broken for some time so it's not a perfect system. This is why in a true emergency these sorts of things do save people's lives. Not even kidding. Definitely. You know what else saves people's lives? What's that? Yeah, it really does. Man, it does. I'm gonna have to work something. A group of astronauts at the International Space Station speaking of pizza, released footage of a pizza party they were having. They were having a pizza party. Now pizza brings people together. People have pizza parties all the time but usually the pizza is not floating in zero Gs. Franchi astronaut Thomas Pesquet posted a clip earlier this week to Instagram of their group, all in the ISS, making the pizzas and then they float cause you know, gravity in space. It's a really great video if you haven't seen it yet. Kind of heartwarming. Now Instagram user, Possumness brought up a good point in the comments. Possumness said, now why the pizza floats but the toppings stay on top of the pizza is mysterious. I was looking at that myself and it looks to me like they use the pizza sauce cause it comes out of a ketchup bottle looking thing. They use the pizza sauce as glue. So cause he put a little few dollops of pizza sauce then he put the pepperoni on. So I think that the pizza sauce must be extra sticky or something. It's holding it together. It's gluey sauce. The taste good pizza sauce. So pizza hut. I'm sorry, you'll never get a pizza sponsorship now. I used to work for a pizza hut. I feel like I don't know. I I I I know there are always so many jokes about what astronauts have to eat and just the pizza party video is made me happy. Turns out they can make fresh pizzas. So yeah, today's space and they're floating around and you know, look at look at my personal pizza. Hamburgers and like they're not even that that dried out 60s astronaut food anymore. It's different. Yeah, it is not a tang life anymore. All right, let's check out that mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Russell. Russell says, I know Tom's mentioned his novel Project Vera on the show, but I wanted to let you know that I downloaded it on Audible and I listened to it over the weekend and I thought the story was really fun, well crafted and the audiobook performance was great and really enhanced the story. So definitely recommend it. I think it's my favorite of Tom's books so far. Thanks, Russell. Yeah, that's really nice. Russell also said I got got another pick that might interest the DTNS audience. This one comes from Andrew Main. I know he's been on the show from time to time. He has a new book coming out on September 7th called Mastermind and the fun thing about this is it combines the main characters from two of a series, Jessica Blackwood and Theo Gray. Both are interesting in their own right and I think pairing them up is a really fun idea. This is sort of hinted at at the last naturalist book. So it's great to see it happen. Russell also says I really enjoyed Experiment Week. That was our week last week where DTNS in its regular form was off but we tried a bunch of new stuff and we had a bunch of new shows as a result. Russell says I thought the diversity of topics was really interesting and especially helpful was the photography episode with Ant Pruitt. As I'm thinking of getting my first DSLR and the insight was great. Well, thank you, Russell and thanks to everybody who's been sending us their thoughts on what they liked and didn't like on Experiment Week. It's definitely helping us figure out what we're gonna do with all those ideas. So keep that feedback coming. Indeed and feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send your emails, questions, comments. All the feedback goes there. Thank you in advance. We love to hear from you. We also love our patrons and we'd like to thank our brand new boss, Tim Barber who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Tim. Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim. You like Tim? You like Tim? You need more new patrons. Today's the last day before the new month. So we need like 16 patrons to keep us level for the month. Come on in. Come on in. The water's fine. Get over here. Also thanks to Lamar Wilson, one of my favorite swimmers. Lamar, where can people keep up with your work? You come visit me at lamar.tv. That's Lamar with two R's because I make just fun short unboxing videos on every platform now. So it's the same thing everywhere. So you don't like Twitter? It's okay. Come on Instagram. Just come on over. It'll be fun. Well, we always love having you on the show Lamar. Thank you. Come back early and often. We're also live on this show Monday through Friday for 30 PM Eastern, 2030 UTC. You can find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we'll be back doing it all again tomorrow with Patrick Norton. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Broad Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.