 Coming up on D T N S solar charged headphones could mean endless battery life. The numbers show that tick tock is the Facebook threat you've been waiting for and VR gets productive and good for your health. Sarah Lane's fitness VR regimen is indicated. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, April 14th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane from Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Jane. We were just talking about baseball stadiums, among other things. Get that wider conversation. You never know what we're going to talk about on good day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung announced its next Galaxy unpacked event for April 28th at 10 a.m. Eastern time. The event announcement promises the most powerful galaxy is coming. So conventional wisdom is that it's not a phone announcement and the image looks slightly like a laptop. New Galaxy books, perhaps. Maybe. Back in March, we talked about Microsoft releasing patches for four newly discovered Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities that were being actively exploited by an advanced persistent threat group believed to be hafnium. The attackers were exploiting the vulnerabilities to install web shells. Web shells give them access to targeted networks. The patches closed the vulnerability but of course wouldn't remove the web shell once it was installed. So Tuesday, the US Department of Justice announced it received approval from a court in Houston to copy and remove web shells from hundreds of Microsoft Exchange email servers. Now they didn't get all of them out there, but they got a bunch of them. The FBI conducted the removal by accessing the web shell and issuing a command to the servers to remove it. The method only removed web shells that did not remove any other malware that might have been installed through the use of the shell, but it's something. Amazon announced second generation Echo Buds, which are 20% smaller than the originals. IPX4 rated and offer twice as much noise cancellation as the originals, although they no longer use Bose's active noise cancelling technology. The new wireless headset ships May 13 for $119.99 with a USB-C charging case or $139.99 with a wireless charging case. TCL announced the 6.67 inch 20 Pro 5G Android phone, which features its in-display fingerprint reader, is coming to Italy, Portugal and the UK for 549 euros and eventually to the United States, though they didn't give pricing and a date for that yet. Budget versions, the 20L and 20L Plus also coming to those countries without 5G or wireless charging. That's why they're budget. And TCL announced its combined foldable and rollable phone tablet concept that CNET talked about back in March is called the Fold and Roll. Like with a little N with an apostrophe mark. The Fold and Roll. Still no plans for a release on that yet. Just concept. You may have heard Coinbase issued a direct listing on the NASDAQ Wednesday with a reference price of $250. Instead, it opened at $381, instantly up 52%. The cryptocurrency exchange's stock continued to rise through the day, making it one of the most successful recent tech IPOs, partly because it was already profitable. It closed its first day at $328, so it settled down a bit, but still a pretty good showing for the first day. Coinbase's future rests on the future of cryptocurrency in general. Alright, let's talk about the next big threat to Facebook. What is it, Scott Johnson? It's the thing I look at when I'm in the tub. Alright, as part of a leaked pitch deck to advertisers, TikTok claims to have more than 100 million with an M US monthly active users. That's just in the US with 732 million on a global scale with 59% of users under the age of 24 and 17% ages 13 to 17. So the Youngers. The company claims 47% of users have bought items seen in TikTok. I'm one of them. I did it once. With its US ad business growing over 500% in the last year by comparison in quarter four of 2020, former king of young people, apps with Snapchat, you may remember them. They had an estimated and now sounding paltry 46 million monthly active users in the United States according to market data from Statista. That's less than half of TikTok's numbers if you do the math. If the TikTok pitches numbers are accurate in an online survey, Statista performed last fall. 34% of US teenagers said Snapchat was their most important social network with TikTok in second place with 29%. Yeah, so this really struck me. I mean, the article on Business Insider talking about this leaked pitch deck was mostly about plans for e-commerce. And that's all very important because e-commerce is definitely how ByteDance is making money off Duyen in China and will probably be able to make a lot of money off TikTok with as well. But these numbers, these numbers are, these are Facebook in its younger days numbers. These are when Facebook was for young people, you know, for college age people back in the day numbers. I mean, you've passed Twitter. You're well ahead of Snapchat. You're on the way to being a billion user worldwide phenomenon. And that's launching you into Facebook territory. As we've talked about before on the show, Facebook kind of for the olds, you know, the young people show on Facebook to talk to their parents and their grandparents. Yeah. I mean, it wasn't that long ago that Snapchat burst on the scene and, you know, all the headlines were like, Snapchat is for 16. Oh my gosh, the youth. You know, this is, this is scary, scary app. And it's all secrets and ephemeral, right? And, and then I kind of was like, Snapchat is pretty fun. And then I sort of fell off and because I didn't have enough friends on Snapchat, but I realized a long time ago, Snapchat is not for me. But young people, you look at the numbers, it's still very, very popular. However, when you compare 46 million monthly active users in the US, that's Snapchat's numbers, to more than double that for TikTok. Again, I mean, this is a leaked tech. So just assuming that the leaked tech numbers are accurate. I mean, TikTok is blowing Snapchat away. And the fact that more US teenagers who were polled, and it was under 10,000 teenagers, it was an online poll. So I mean, it's a small subset of what would be, you know, the entire US teenage population. But for more teenagers to say that Snapchat was their most important social network, that was last fall. I wonder if the poll was done today, how much things have changed in half a year. Yeah, I would think so too. But I would also argue, I mean, again, this date is really hard to gather and get. But I know so many people who are not in that age demographic who love TikTok. I know a guy who's 56 years old and his favorite thing to do right now at the end of the day is sit on the couch with his wife and compare their public feeds. There's something about that algorithm that hits everybody if they give it a chance. And I'm not, you know, this isn't me saying, yay, rah, rah, TikTok. I just think they found this magic sauce in the algorithm in how it works and a, you know, critical mass of people. They've built something that's very quickly becoming more important than some of these other services and doing it in record time. And that's just crazy to think about those numbers. Yeah, I mean, obviously there's, there's, you know, it's a huge swath of TikTok numbers is people younger than us. However, I was at a barbecue over the weekend and, you know, we're all talking about TikTok and, oh, you know, we're sharing animal videos. And there was someone who's just like, I just haven't gotten on there yet. And we all kind of looked at her like, you're really missing out. It's really fun. And I'm not always the story, right? I can remember that conversation about Twitter, about Facebook, about Snapchat. Now it's about TikTok. But TikTok seems like it's got the momentum. It has gone from me thinking like, oh, musically, that's the thing for kids to lip-sake. Oh, TikTok, a little uncomfortable for me to watch because it's mostly young people dancing to be like, oh, no, I think I could learn Korean by, you know, watching a certain section of TikTok. Yeah, exactly. This is a cool one. Urbanista, if you haven't heard of the company or Urbanista announced something very cool. It's latest wireless noise canceling headphones. The Urbanista Los Angeles, the name of the headphones, it doesn't really have to do with geographically Los Angeles. They can charge the battery inside with any kind of light, promising, in the company's words, virtually infinite playtime. The headphones have power foil solar cells, which promise to add three hours of listening time, one in bright sunlight for just an hour, two hours of listening time on a cloudy day, and the headphones will also charge from ambient light indoors, but charge fastest in sunlight. So you might want to leave them near a window if you're trying to charge them up without being outside. They can also charge over USB-C, so it's solar, but also power, if you got to go that route. And Gadget points out that JBL tried to crowdfund power foil solar headphones back in 2019, but had to cancel the project partly due to COVID-related travel restrictions, just bad timing all around. Power foil was developed by Swedish company Exager. It's screen printed on flexible plastic and uses principles similar to photosynthesis to generate electricity from any source of light. Partly, this is because there are no conductive layers blocking photons. Urbanista Los Angeles headphones can be used in other cities besides Los Angeles on Windows, Android, and iOS, and work with Siri and Google Assistant. Like most wireless headphones these days, they pause playback when you remove them from your head and they look pretty nice over the ear headphones. You can get them for 169 British pounds when pre-orders begin. Yeah, so this is a big advance and power foil is really interesting to watch because if this takes off with Urbanista, it might prove the technology for other platforms to pick up. And the big advantage of power foil is that it can work in situations that other solar panels don't. It can work at angles better than other solar panels. It's a single cell, so you don't have a lot of the seams and stuff. And that's what makes it work in a headphone situation where you can just flexibly put it over the top and get enough charge out of ambient light to make it worth implementing, but charge really well. I mean, three hours in one hour in bright light outdoors, even two hours with the cloud cover, like you were saying, that's impressive. And we've talked a lot about the idea of wireless power. This could be a type of wireless power if the only time it doesn't charge is when the lights are off. Yeah, these are massively cool. Also, 200 bucks if you translate the dollar to dollars. It's not bad. Like you're going to pay that for competing products anyway. Yeah, or more price for those. And if they sound great, that's a big kicker. Obviously, we got to see how they sound. I just want to mention one other thing. I think I noticed a new naming trend on the internet. You guys, we just talked about Statista. Now we're talking about Urbanista. What's with the East? Statista's been around for a while, though. I don't know how long Urbanista has been around, but you may be on to something. Oh, it's a new flicker. They're putting they are at the end. Everyone's going to put Easter on everything. I'm excited. I want to address JSC 315 says you really shouldn't be moving solar panels. So I don't know if it's something that will last more than a few years. These solar panels, because of the way they're constructed, handle moving very well to the point that the solar panels generally outlast the device they are on. Parts of the actual headphone wear out before the solar panels. Again, that's one of the advantages of Powerfoil is very durable. All right. Facebook announced several updates coming to the Oculus Quest in version 28, V28 of the headsets OS, wireless connections to PCs, and 120 Hertz come into the Oculus Quest 2. The 120 Hertz refresh rate will only work on supported games and will not be brought to the home screen. So it looks like it's there mostly for streaming VR from the PC, which you can do with Oculus Link. But you can also now do it from your PC wirelessly over your local Wi-Fi network. A wireless version of Oculus Link called Air Link will be built into V28 of the OS, requiring V28 of the PC software to work as well. But once you've got both those going, you can use it. Air Link is in the experimental stage. So for it to work, you'll need an Oculus Quest 2, a secure and un-congested local 5 GHz AC or AX non-mesh Wi-Fi network. So it's not going to work for me. And ideally, you need to be within 20 feet of your Wi-Fi router when you're using it. So it's very early days for this, but it does work. Facebook also recommends connecting your PC by Ethernet to the router so that your PC isn't using up Wi-Fi, that less congestion. There's also a list of hardware recommendations. Facebook also announced an update to Infinite Office. That's its collection of productivity features coming to VR. This update lets you connect compatible Bluetooth keyboards starting with the Logitech K830 to the headset. And then a 3D model of the keyboard can show up in the virtual world you're in and you'll be able to see your hands typing on the virtual keyboard but actually be typing on the real keyboard. The idea for now is to put a virtual desk on your real desk and then let you interact with all of the Oculus Quest productivity apps like the browser, I guess, but more to come, I'm sure. This new feature will work on the original Oculus Quest as well as the Oculus Quest 2. And all of this, of course, requires you to turn on beta features and get V28 of the OS, which is on the way soon. I'm genuinely excited about this. Sarah and I are both Quest users. I've got a one, you've got a two. No, I have a one. Oh, that's right. We both have one. Tom has the two, although he never talks about using it. Do you feel, Sarah, you tempted it all to go, oh, well, now that we're at 120 hertz and all this extra stuff and virtual keyboard, is it time? Very much so. And we'll continue to talk about it on the show. 72 hertz is as good as my original Oculus is getting. And I still think it looks like magic. So the better it gets, the better it is. And the Oculus 2 is just sort of smaller and has a couple more bells and whistles. I don't play PC games. So the idea of being untethered to free myself to be fully wireless is a little bit lost on me personally, but I understand how important it is to a lot of folks. The Oculus link has been something that people were like, this is awesome. In fact, you, Scott, were telling me how by using that I could get like more beat saber songs back in the day. When I was first getting used to this, but you were like, it's a little bit complicated, need a PC. And I was like, ask her. I don't even want to do that. So this is just one step closer to what people are going for and be able to play the sort of stuff that they've been playing on a PC. Infinite Office, I've played around with a little bit. I look forward to this. I'm not totally sure how much this would be of productive use to me day to day. But again, I also didn't think I would like VR. So there you go. Yeah. It's a really interesting thing in the concept of you being able to say access the PC version of that game with 120 Hertz support, which it has on PC or at least it does on some headsets. I think the vibe and maybe the, I forgot the one that valve makes anyway. Those that experience in theory could be yours and wirelessly or at the very least through that link cable again, which will probably ensure that you get the 120 Hertz refresh rate. So it's a little weird though, right? It's kluji. It's like, well, on the one that I have this game, I own it. I bought it and I've bought it twice. And I'm kind of playing it over here because the refresh rate is better and have more access to songs. But I kind of want to go on the road with it. And I need to take that version of the game with me. And I mean, that starts to get weird, just a little bit weird. But I really like that they're branching this out and making more stuff possible. I'm all. Yeah. It's all stepping stones, right? Eventually you want everything to be on the device. But until then being able to get some from your PC, you know, expands the capability. Eventually you want to use your VR headset as a monitor. But until then, you know, being able to use the browser with the Logitech keyboard, that's kind of cool. Eventually I just want my Oculus headset to be solar powered like that. Like those headphones. So I never have to charge it. But, you know, we're not there yet. We'll just all be walking around in the sun. Yeah. More battery, more battery. Folks, we got some more VR news to come. But first, we love to hear from our supporters. It really helps us improve the show. The show is as good as it is now because you keep telling us what you want. So if you have some time, please fill out our latest survey. Let us know what about DTNS is working for you and what is not. Just visit dailytechnewshow.com. Well, I'm always talking about how I love VR because it's the best way to work out. Not everybody exercises and uses VR exercising apps. But for those of us who do, it's very fun. And today I feel vindicated. Yesterday, the Verge's Nilai Patel interviewed the co-founder and CEO of Within, which is the company that makes the VR fitness app Supernatural. Supernatural is far and away my favorite app. I love it so much. I'm going to play it off to the show today. Chris Milk on the Decoder podcast last week talked to Nilai about how Supernatural came to be. And it's kind of an interesting path because Milk made a name for himself directing music videos. He was working with Kanye West and all sorts of really, really big names in that entertainment industry. He was also creating digital experiences and museums and was kind of interested in immersive entertainment. And that's exactly what he and his co-founder Aaron Coblin, who was formerly of Google's Creative Lab, started doing when they founded Within back in 2014. They wanted to kind of figure out how does entertainment like music or film turn into something that is a VR experience? They said, Milk says that they pivoted to exercise as entertainment back in 2018 from what they were kind of doing the first time because they both hated working out and they wanted a solution. And they were like, wait a second, why don't we just make that the company? So there's that. What's interesting about Supernatural specifically, and I've always wondered, so that's why this interview was very interesting to me is music licensing because the music is, it's very good. It's very top 40 to the point that it blows other apps away completely. I mean, unless you're talking about Spotify or Apple Music, you just don't get this kind of library in other apps, even something like Beat Saber, which Supernatural is very often compared to because it's kind of a rhythm game. In February, Supernatural signed a deal with Universal Music after signing deals with Sony, ATV, Warner Chappelle, Cobalt, and BMG as well as label deals with UMG and Warner. Milk wouldn't really go into specifics in the interview of how that all happened, but he said it was incredibly and continues to be incredibly complex and that he definitely used his contacts back in the entertainment industry to broker some deals. My first reaction to that last bit is this is the problem with trying to protect old business models. Is it makes you inflexible in adapting to new ones? Think how much money these companies could be making if it was easier for all of these VR exercise apps to license their music. And music companies are doing better now because Spotify finally was allowed to lead the charge and now you've got Tidal and Apple Music and all the others bringing in streaming music. This is the next wave and instead of keeping copyright licensing so complex that it's hard to make a deal and that Supernatural is the exception, not the rule, they could be raking in money. But I digress. I love this idea that VR, you know, another use for VR beyond gaming is fitness, is exercise. I think it absolutely is. It absolutely is. If you don't want to wear a headset, you know, on your face while you're exercising, okay, that, you know, maybe it's not for you, but I cannot tell you how much and I know I'm not alone because I like I'm part of their Facebook group and stuff now. I mean, I play Supernatural. When I say play, it's, I don't really have a better word for it. I use the app at least five times a week. I would not go to the gym five times a week. And listen, this is not a full gym. It's mostly cardio. And Scott, you got me hooked on Beat Saber back in the early days when I first got the quest, which was not even a year ago. And I was like, this is pretty fun. Yeah, rhythm game. I like it. But then when Supernatural came along, I was like, oh, this is like an actual workout. You're not lifting weights. I mean, I suppose you could like weight down your arms or, you know, put weights around your, your waist or something to make it a lot harder. So, you know, it's, it's not going to bulk you up necessarily, but it is quite the workout and it's focused on exercise. You know, you got a fitness trainer in front of you, virtual, of course, and this whole thing. And there are lots of other exercise apps. I haven't tried all of them, but that is, I think, I mean, it's, it's the killer app for VR. It really is. And I think anyone listening to this being like, what are you even talking about? That's how I felt until I tried it for the first time. And I was like, oh, this actually makes me like want to exercise rather than have to exercise. Well, plus those things. You need to be wireless for that to happen. Right. And the music. And the music is inexorably connected to fitness. That's just, that's the way it is. We work out to music and, you know, if you go to a spin class, music is blaring for the whole class to hear as they're ripping through that thing. And even if they bring their own sounds, they've got their own music. So you can't take music out of the equation. Not only that, headsets are only going to get smaller, smaller, more compact, more light, more conducive to them being workout ready and not big and bulky. So they got to get on board now. Or they, like Tom said, are going to miss the boat because they keep fighting it. Well, you may have heard there was a record broken recently and the record was broken by the Twitch streamer Ludwig Argen, Argen rather, who ended his nonstop stream after 31 consecutive days breaking the record for most pain subscribers with over 282,000. Ludwig started the stream planning to add 10 seconds to the live stream for every new subscriber and he said he would donate $5 for every new subscriber added on the last day to charity. We don't exactly know what the final tally was, but, you know, it was, it was an interesting 31 days indeed. After wrapping up his record, Argen tweeted, since I started streaming, Prince Philip died. The Suez Canal got blocked and unblocked. David Dobrick made two apology videos and Jesus of Nazareth died and then rose from the dead. Easter happened, right? Wow. That's really impressive. The Suez Canal one is the one that turned my head the most. That felt like that lasted forever and that all happened during the time of 31 consecutive days of streaming. So yeah, sure. At first I was like, what, I mean, was he like insane at the end of it? I mean, he was sleeping and then he kind of had like a small team of folks. Hold on, hold on. Sleeping in a race car bed. In a race car bed. A red one in the shot. Yeah. I mean, he was, you know, sometimes you gotta, you know, go to the potty or something. So there were things that they were doing to allow him to be a human, but the stream went on 31 days. Yeah. That's impressive. I've heard of these sorts of things before and they don't work so well. Some people have crazy exhaustion problems and, you know, it kind of messes with their head. I think he had a good plan and he pulled it off. I say, I say, well done to this guy. Do we know what charity he was donating the proceeds to? Um, let's see. Twitch addiction anonymous. Just kidding. That's not true. I don't know. Actually, it doesn't say. It is not yet known how much he raised and the BBC article doesn't say which charity. So though I'm always, you know, I'm not, I'm not accusing Ludwig of anything, but I'm always more supportive when we know exactly where the money is going, where the money is going and all of that. By the way, if you're wondering who held the previous record, it was Tyler Blevins, otherwise known as Ninja, who had 269,154 subscribers, still a lot. But, uh, but we have, we knew we have a new champ everyone. So which nascent Microsoft streaming service will Ludwig Ogren be? And then come back after a while. I don't know. All right, let's check out the mailbag. This one comes from Matthew, who says good morning. I mean, good morning, Matthew, to you, most wonderful people and happy spring greetings from the UK. Good to hear that, Matthew. Matthew says, just got a quick question. Tom mentioned in the Monday conversation that he has a Harmony Hub, but he hasn't touched the remote for a long while. Matthew says, my question is, how does he start, stop and skip and fast forward and all that stuff? Yeah. So I wrote directly to Matthew and long time listeners of this show know that I suffer from a malady known as liking the Apple TV remote. There is no cure. I just like the remote. And so for stopping and starting and actually for stopping and starting, I can use voice and I do sometimes. But mostly I use the Apple TV remote or the Roku remote. The Roku remote sitting out there as well. We do tend to use the Apple TV a little more than the Roku and certainly for fast forwarding and stuff. So, yeah, I do use fewer devices, right? Because I don't need to use the remote for the TV. I tell the Echo to turn it on and off. Or with the Apple TV and the Roku both now, they use Keck, so I can just press a button and they will turn the TV on to the right input. The speakers automatically pick up where the input is coming. Occasionally those JBL speakers don't catch up and I may have to pull out the JBL remote. So I know you're mentioning a lot of remotes and it may sound like, why aren't you just using your universal remote? And the fact is I use them so infrequently that keeping the remote settings up to date with the latest devices became more trouble than just having that remote sitting out. Yeah, that makes sense. Whenever I use that remote and I love that you back that remote so much because I don't think anyone else will. So you're fighting a good fight and it's important. Oh yeah. No, I'm wrong. I just want to say before you email me, I am absolutely wrong to like that remote. But I do. I love the Apple TV as an overall device and the experience. But that remote, I feel like I'm disarming a bomb every time I pick it up and use it. And then I'm very careful putting it down very gingerly on the table. Nobody bump it or else we're changing channels and you don't want that and kind of annoys me. But every time you back its cause, I don't know, I feel like an angel gets its wings. I am physically incapable of picking it up right side up, physically incapable. It's almost like the universe has it out for me. I mean, I'm not going to talk about it slipping between my couch cushions because that's a whole another ball game. But there's something it's as if it's secretly weighted in a way where I always pick it up upside down. Yeah. Just maddening. I don't know. It's just one of those things. Yeah. It needs to be like triangular shaped or something like that. I don't think you're going to get a new Apple TV remote this year. That's that's all signs point to that. I'm not the only one who complains about it. So let's here's hoping. Yeah. I'd be shocked if they didn't do that this year. It'll be a big deal. Well, they've shocked us before. That's true. True. Thank you for the email Matthew. And if you have any feedback of anything we've talked about on a past show question about a future show or anything in between feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com is where to send your correspondence. Shout out to patrons at the Grand Master Levels including Carol, Dustin Campbell and Andrew Bradley. By the way, very special thanks to Andrew Bradley, who is in the top lifetime supporter list for DTNS. Thank you, Andrew, for all the years of support. We love you. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson, who we also love. Scott, what's been going on since we saw you last Oh, well, thank you for saying so. We're a second week into this Kickstarter for my card game. If you want to see progress on that, I just put up a video today or it will be going up today where I go through a couple of cards and how they work and now it affects the card game. So lots of good new information happening as we get ready for our next set of stretch goals. It's going great. So go check it out. It's over at frogpants.com slash rock runners. So you can just search rock runners on Kickstarter and for everything else you can find me on Twitter at Scott Johnson. Excellent folks. We are live money through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow doing it all again with Justin Robert Young. Talk to you then.