 Coming up on D T N S C E S twenty twenty two rolls on with a Sony car announcement that's big, but maybe not for the reason you think plus Amazon's free I O T connectivity platform, Sidewalk tries to take a big leap and a smart home hub that tries to get you convenience and privacy. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, January 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City. I'm Scott Johnson and I'm Roger Chang. You put the wrong year, twenty twenty two in the in the rundown. But I just read what you write, Roger. I am I am Ron Burgundy. Welcome to twenty twenty two folks and joining us from CES because CES is now everywhere. The real CES is inside of all of us. Nate Langston, tech editor from Bloomberg. Welcome. The ICS. What you did very good. I like that. We were just having a good conversation about processors, Intel, M1, all that good stuff. You want that longer version of the show. Get good day internet available at patreon.com slash D T N S. Speaking of patrons, big thanks to our top patrons, including Justin Zellers, Pepper Geesey and Eric Holm. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Amazon will bring its fire TV platform to more set tops this year. Stellantis has offered it in its Wagon ears and will also offer it in its Jeep. Grand Jan Caracay and Grand Cherokee and Chrysler Pacifica. I haven't shopped for cars in a while, obviously. Fire TV will also come built in on the Ford Explorer and Lincoln Navigator. Fire TV for auto responds to voice commands and also supports downloads for offline viewing. The system is also getting an update to support personal profiles and also recommendations, as well as picking up where you last left last left off on another device outside of the car. Hey, when we talk about foldable screens, it's usually in relation to phones, but they are useful in laptops as well. Lenovo did one with the ThinkPad X1 Fold and Asus is using one in the ZenBook 17 fold OLED. You can use it like a 17.4 inch tablet, either flat or kind of propped up with a kickstand, or you can fold it at a 90 degree angle and use it like a laptop. You can even get an external keyboard for it if you want. Has a beefy 75 watt hour battery, ZenBook 17 fold coming in Q2, but they haven't given us price yet. Dell announced the concept Polaris. That's a concept, which is the new take on a EGPU, which can hold a full size graphics card, uses liquid cooling, comes with RGB lighting and improved cable management and can be mounted vertically or horizontally. It connects over Thunderbolt 4 and Dell wants customer feedback on the concept to inform a potential new and real EGPU product. Outside of CES, Instagram head Adam Moseri tweeted Wednesday that there will be three new options for home feeds rolling out. Home is what the current algorithmic feed will be called in this test. Favorites uses a curated list of friends, family and creators. And following is good old fashioned chronological order. Testing of the new system is happening now and they hope to roll it out to everybody soon. Well, VR Giveth, but VR also take it away. The information sources say that Meta has halted development on a new OS for its VR and AR headsets after several years of development. Meta reportedly told staff it will keep using a modified version of Android for Oculus headsets, but HTC revealed a risk tracker for its Focus 3 VR headset, which is 85% smaller and 59% lighter than the Vive Focus 3 controller. That's coming out in early 2022 for $129. And Ring announced a glass break sensor that works with the Ring Alarm and Ring Alarm Pro. 3.7 inch puck sits near your windows and will monitor for sounds of breaking glass and send you a notification in the Ring app if it detects them. You can also set it to automatically trigger a siren instead or alert a professional monitoring service available for preorder at $40 ship in February 16. Alright, let's talk about Sony's big announcements yesterday. We'll get to the car. But first of all, announce the PlayStation VR 2, a successor to the half decade old PSVR. PSVR 2 will work with the PlayStation 5. So you'll need to go through the hoops of getting one of those first. Field of view is 110 degrees uses HDR rated OLED panels for 120 Hertz for fresh rate 2000 by 2040 or per eye resolution. It's about 15.7% more than the Quest 2 not a lot adds haptic feedback, though, and internal eye tracking, though you still have to wire it to the PS. Sorry. The eye tracking can be used to respond to a user's gaze in game, but also for foveated rendering. If you haven't heard us talk about that, that's what when you render just the area of the screen you're looking at better than what's in your peripheral vision, which means you can do a faster frame rate overall. Sony also confirmed last year's announcement of the PSVR 2 sense controllers, those the ones that include haptic rumble among other things. Sony did not announce a release date or price yet. So there's so much to say about this. The main thing I wanted to say was everything about the specs wise is cool. Their commitment to VR moving forward is cool. It is probably the most accessible VR got in the last five years in terms of sort of pre quest days. You know, what can we get and how do we get it? Here's the only problem. And Sarah's groan agrees with my groan. A tethered experience is a bummer, given that we are absolutely moving in a direction where untethering everything is the way to go. The problem is this device isn't going to do everything within the device is going to use the PlayStation as its as its computer basically. So it's the old fashioned way of getting VR hooked up. You're basically plugging in into a computer and the computer does most of the work. If this was a separate wireless thing, that would kind of be its own ecosystem. It would be its own, not its own store, but it would be a different experience than the games that you're pumping out of your console and therefore maybe less of a graphical experience or whatever. So I understand why they're doing it. You are still in the living room where the PlayStation is and maybe that's all fine. But if you ask me, it's like one step forward and maybe 1.5 steps back, given that this is a tethered solution. I have to say I'm moderately in favor of keeping the wire. I know that's counter-intuitive by everything that you've said, which all makes sense. But there's something that makes me very angry when I pick up a controller for the Xbox or the PlayStation and the battery's dead or there's some kind of interference. And I think, well, when you multiply that by wireless demands and battery power of a VR headset and what be required, that's just going to get really, really tedious really, really quickly and maybe sticking with the cable for another generation alleviates some of those issues. On the other hand, you'll get tangled up, which is a pain. And it depends on what you're playing, right? It depends on what you're doing. There are VR games that I have that I play with my Quest. It's like if there was a wire, I mean, I'd trip and fall and hurt myself immediately. Can't be done. But there are a lot of things where it doesn't really matter if you're wired and if the game is more seamless, smoother quality and pulling from hardware that you already have also makes sense. It just really depends on what you want to play. Yeah. All right, let's talk about that car. You're not going to go buy a Sony car this year or even next year. If you don't recall, this isn't even new two years ago, when we were actually at CES in person, Sony introduced the Vision S concept at the time. We didn't know if this would be a way of selling in car tech, like image sensors, you know, Sony makes a lot of image sensors. Or if Sony wanted to get into the business of making cars itself, we said, well, wait and see. Well, Tuesday at CES, Sony responded to a lot of those questions, but not all of them. A new division, a new company under Sony is being created called Sony Mobility. That will manage the concept SUV, which is now called the Vision S02. They have a new version of it. It's got the same shape as the first version, roughly the size of a Tesla Model Y has two electric motors, each produced 200 kilowatt hours. That's about equivalent to 268 horsepower each. The whole thing weighs 5,467 pounds, riding on 20 inch wheels can be configured to seat four or seven people and still has the three screens in a single housing across the dashboard for car controls, along with 40 sensors, including CMOS and LiDAR sensors for driver assistance, a time of flight sensor inside that does driver authentication and gesture control. And of course because it's Sony, it's going to have a top tier three dimensional sound system and its own Bravia core for Vision S streaming service. Sony's testing this in Europe for level two plus automation. That's about where Tesla is. And they say they aim to eventually offer level four, which is autonomous driving in almost all but not all situations. Sony's also still working with Austria's Magna Stere to make the sedan. So maybe Sony's not going to make this thing, but will it start selling cars? Well, creating a division around it is a step closer to an answer. Sony says it's exploring the idea, but otherwise it isn't committing. Nate, or what do you think? Sony going to make a car? I don't know. As you said, we've first heard about this a couple of years ago. There are companies that would surprise me less for getting into cars, but I still believe that Sony, and I believe the same about Apple, that the goal is not to be building the car, but to build all the stuff that powers the car. And that's a Sony powered car with a Sony badge on it. Totally, totally see. But I don't necessarily see him taking on Ford or GM or whoever. Magna Stere could make it. And they just branded it Sony. But then who do you sell it through? Right? Do they have to create dealerships and all that becomes the next problem? Yeah, I mean, I love the idea of not everybody was on board with this idea of big electronics manufacturers getting into car markets. But personally, I was like, well, that's just a cool way to disrupt things because they've got new ideas or ideas that they've learned from a very different business. And now this stuff's converging and everything's electronic anyway now. And so let's go. Let's get these EVs out the door. Hearing that Sony has not only a working prototype at the show, but, you know, plans in this direction, whatever they may manifest themselves as is pretty exciting. I don't know. I like the options. I like choices and I like, I like they did that they're coming to the table with a different, you know, a perspective than Ford or GM might. So I'm all about this. So it's not tethered. Yeah, I have to plug it in. And it's untethered. You have to plug it in and drive it around while you're driving. So you have to plug it in. I had a friend who knows that I'm following CES news really closely. And last night I got a text of like, Sony car question mark, question mark, question mark exclamation point where I was like, I mean, listen, I want it as much as you do. But yes, this is something where Sony, I feel like Sony is kind of going like, look, you can do it. Anybody want us to do it? Because we can. Yeah. And we're creating a company. So we're obviously serious about it. Who's on board? Yeah. All right, let's talk about Amazon. Let's do it. Let's start with Amazon sidewalk, which we've talked about on the show in the past. Amazon sidewalk is a network for Internet of Things created by Amazon devices that you already have. The idea is to take a walled off portion of, say an Amazon Echo or Ring doorbell and use them to connect to other sidewalk-enabled devices within a mesh network. The use case usually is given for finding lost things like tile uses it for instance. It's free to use for other app developers. It also uses Bluetooth low energy for short distance communication and 900 megahertz long. Laura. Yeah, it's low, low raw. Low raw for lower longer distance. Yeah. For longer distance transmissions, you use Laura. Laura isn't short for longer distance. Got it. Also has three layers of encryption. So this isn't going to use up your home bandwidth. And that is something that certain people have been a little curious about, like, what is this going to do to my bandwidth? It's likely not a security risk either, although continue auditing by security pros is obviously warranted because this is a new protocol after all. But to be useful, it also needs good coverage, which is possible in high density areas with apartment complexes, not as much in rural areas or industrial parks where a lot of people might actually have a lot of these devices. So Amazon announced the sidewalk bridge pro by ring. It's designed to be mounted on rooftops or cell towers has a range of five miles. Arizona State University is testing it with environmental sensors on campus currently. Amazon also says the price will be decided by contract since this is meant for companies or governments to deploy. It's possible that Amazon might subsidize or even pay for the hardware outright in order to increase sidewalks reach hard to say at this point. But Amazon gets the benefit of a more robust network for tracking things like their delivery vehicles and packages and things that Amazon cares about as well. Selling more sidewalk enabled devices on Amazon and selling AWS to sidewalk enabled device developers to I mean, I guess bring it on. They don't bother. It doesn't bother me. This stuff they do with these connected devices, the whole ring thing, and even them sharing some of that data with local police departments and all the controversy around that. None of that bothered me. I don't know if it's because I just don't really worry that much about what Amazon is going to do with any particular piece of data, but all the data they would ever get from me via this is data that I already sort of let everyone have anyway. Like it's not kind of feel the same way. I'm I'm you know, the whole sidewalk idea. I know this particular initiative is a little bit more, you know, less on, you know, consumer households and more on, you know, business stuff. But I feel like if I can help connectivity with my neighbors, I feel like it's a decent trade off because I've already trusted Amazon with a lot of my information. That's already something that I use on a day to day basis. You might not feel the same way. And that's fine. But that's sort of what sidewalk is banking on is people saying, yeah, we all have the devices. Let's help each other out. And to be clear, Amazon doesn't use get sidewalk data. It's triple encrypted. It's a mesh network that is walled off. This is not being stored on Amazon servers unless the developer of the device uses AWS to store it or something. You'd have to think about the developer using sidewalk is getting your data, not Amazon. Amazon is just creating this thing that is kind of a dumb mesh network. Do you think Amazon will at some point create a essentially a mobile phone network and use that as a way of basically building out a system like this countrywide? I don't think so because a mobile phone network needs to do so much more. This is so much easier. It's low energy. Lora, which by the way stands for long range. I finally put that together. This is all like low bandwidth, like easy, like we just we just need to know where a thing is. We need to be able to track it. We don't need to handle voice. We don't need to handle video. And it's so much more complex to do something like 5G. So I doubt it. I doubt it. Well, we've got some more in Rhodes on matter coming from Amazon matter, of course, is the interoperable smart home from smart home platform that's supported by pretty much all of the smart home companies at this point, set to officially launch this summer. Amazon announced that its frustration free setup feature that's already found on Echoes and Fire TVs has published documentation needed to be implemented by matter compatible devices. Significantly, those that are not made by Amazon Sengold, TP-Link, LIFX, among those already working to implement it on their matter compatible devices. The documentation is out for Wi-Fi and documentation for devices that use thread is coming out soon. Amazon also announced a commissionable endpoint, Alexa, which basically lets you set up the voice assistant as a matter administrator. This is actually really exciting. So even if you already have already set up a matter compatible device on Google or maybe Apple, something off of Amazon, you can add Amazon as a control system if you so desire. Maybe you're doing a lot of other stuff through Amazon could be helpful to you. It can also be set up to use your local network instead of the cloud if you prefer. And if you're hoping for matter to fulfill its expectations of making the smart home easy to use and install, these are the kinds of announcements you want to see more of. And Amazon had a lot to say this week. Yeah, they had a big press announcement like everybody did. Yeah. Yeah. I really like the commissionable endpoint A word. I'm not going to say it out loud because mine is very sensitive sitting next to me. Sorry. Sorry if I turned around earlier. No, no, no, you're all good. But I like that idea that it can be set up that way. I don't know. The more I said this earlier somewhere, I like that this CES in particular has just said, hey, you kind of thought that the big thing of the last couple of years was like all the home devices and how they're connected and Internet of Things and all this stuff we've been talking about for half a decade or more. This year feels more than ever. And Sarah pointed out at the top of the show, I think that the show or that the that makes sense. We're at home more than ever, be it the pandemic or otherwise. We're just a lot more remote than we used to be. So what better time to talk about this and Web three and metaverse and all this other stuff while we're all stuck here trying to figure out, you know, how communicable we're going to be. So just as overall kind of a camera or a bird's eye view of this, but I I like that this is the direction this year from most of what we've heard. I've really invested a lot of time and money in smart home stuff this year, and I never thought I would do that. I actually always kind of liked the simplicity of having a button that says on and the opposite was off and now we've got bulbs and scenes and colors and moods and all this sort of stuff. But honestly, we went with HomeKit, Apple stuff, because I just don't trust Amazon and the A word and any of that. So but sticking with HomeKit for everything is really difficult. Like it's good when it works and it works most of the time, but getting products, particularly light bulbs with the correct fitting. There are there are brands that sell in all but one fitting or they sell the other fitting, but they don't support HomeKit. It's maddening. It's frustrating, but I feel we're getting there if this is the kind of system that would, you know, push me over the edge. Maybe it is. But yeah, it's it's it's a challenge. Well, rounding out our Amazon news, which is car related. Stellantis will make an all electric car of its Ram Pro Master commercial van in twenty twenty three. And Amazon says it will be the first customer buying thousands. Stellantis formed the merger of Fiat Chrysler and French PSA Group last year. The company will also bring Amazon into development of in car software for Stellantis's line of vehicles starting in twenty twenty four. It'll offer voice control, navigation, vehicle maintenance, e-commerce marketplaces, payment services, all the things that you expect in your car these days. Stellantis is already working with Foxconn on some of those applications and with BMW on autonomous features. Amazon will add personalization features and AWS service, among other things to come. Folks, if you want to talk about any of this stuff, jump in our Discord. You can join up by linking your Patreon account at patreon.com slash DTMS. All right, we're going to do a lightning round here. We're going to Sarah and I are going to go back and forth, reading stories. Nate and Scott, just jump in if you have something to say afterwards and we'll keep moving because there's so much good CES stuff to talk about. Qualcomm announced it's working with Microsoft to develop a customized Snapdragon chip to power augmented reality glasses. The chip will support both Microsoft's Mesh Mixed Reality platform and Qualcomm's Snapdragon Spaces XR development platform. Microsoft has used Qualcomm chips before in the HoloLens and the two partnered on custom chips for the Surface Pro X, so just a continuation of the partnership. As part of its 2022 TV lineup, Hisense announced two TV series with mini LED backlighting. The U9H flagship series will offer a $3,199 or 17 inch set with up to 2,000 nets of peak brightness, Quantum.HDR and support for variable fresh rate. Refresh rate, the U8H series starts at $1,099 with 55, 65 and 75 inch models offering 1500 nets of peak brightness. Samsung showed the Home Hub at CES. It's for standalone smart things, smart home controller. It's basically just a big vertical tablet with a similar interface to what you find in Samsung refrigerators, except without having to buy a whole new refrigerator. You can pin your favorites. It has a home screen. And if you live in South Korea, you can get it in the first half of 2022. No plans for release outside of that. So if you really like this, who's ready to move to South Korea? I'm ready. Seoul's awesome. Let's go. It is awesome. But so is so is an iPad mini or something else that you can use as a home as a hub for stuff like this. But it doesn't come with a stand. And it's not limited to just being. We're getting there, guys. We're getting there. You know, somebody in South Korea, please let us know. How does it work? We always we always kind of expect new form factors at CES. Laptop form factors are always a big one. Lenovo has one that might pique your interest, though, this year. Seventeen point three inch thinkbook plus gen three puts an eight inch color pen enabled touchscreen to the right of the keyboard. So it can be used to view tools or quickly draw sketches or view images, that sort of stuff. You can even continue using or displaying a document from the main screen onto the smaller screen to reduce scrolling. So you kind of got a second screen situation going on. Lenovo also said it can work with Microsoft's your phone to literally mirror your phone. The Lenovo think plus plus gen three will be available in May, starting at one thousand three hundred ninety nine U.S. dollars. If that thing lets me draw on the main screen as well as that little touchscreen to the side, it's actually really cool because you could use it as like a secondary reference image. Like I got to have a picture of, I don't know, Abraham Lincoln for this main portrait I'm doing over here. That's a thing missing in a lot of form factors when it comes to how it feels very it feels very yeah, like art specific. Yeah, but I'm sure there are other use cases that that for me, it would be take it would be taking notes. I routinely use my Apple Pencil on an iPad laying flat. If I'm interviewing somebody's for a story, I take, you know, my shorthand with the Apple Pencil on an iPad. So for me, having this built into something like this would be would be great. I could totally see it. It looks really useful. All right, who wants to buy an autonomous car for yourself? Right now, GM CEO, Mary Barra wants to sell you one. Barry Barra promised that GM will sell fully autonomous vehicles to the general public. Quote, as soon as the middle of the decade could mean 2025, you could push that to like 2028, still be roughly the middle of the decade. However, Barra did not provide details on the kind of vehicle, the cost, which markets or how it would handle things like liability and licensing and said as soon as so it gave some wiggle room. GM previously set a deadline to launch Robo Taxi Service in San Francisco in 2019 to miss that deadline, though it now says it's going to launch that service this year. GM is planning to start production on cruise origin this year, which is an autonomous shuttle that doesn't have a steering wheel or pedals. So ambitious. Who believes her? I don't believe her on the rough timeline, but I believe her on the ultimate goal. I think that's where everyone will be. And they probably have to start promising that stuff now. I don't know, man. I mean, I remember I I think it was on DTNS back in when I first joined the show was there were there were a lot of autonomous car stories. What was this like late 2017? We all kind of went, OK, well, let's see how 2020 looks. Well, OK, we're you know, it's it's it is not the future that I had expected three years before 2020. But we're we're getting close. We are we are we we have companies that are at least testing fully autonomous, you know, vehicle not just for delivery, but just driving in general. Yeah, there's still, you know, a human component, but we're a lot closer than we were back in that day. And I think 2025 maybe is doable. Google made several Android auto announcements. If you have an older hardwired Android auto system that doesn't offer wireless functionality, that'd be a pretty old one. You can add it. There's an MA1 adapter that uses the USB port to add wireless control so it can connect to your phone. Also, Android auto is adding Lyft and Kakao mobility this summer and partnering to bring Mochi Mochi and Fulio to the platform. And an update coming this spring will add voice command for activating things like lane assistance and asking when the next services do, as well as adding SIGIC and Flitsmissier nav charge point and plug share charging apps and spot hero and park with parking apps to the dashboard. Later this year, YouTube is coming to Android auto, but you can only use it while you're parked. More integrations with car makers are going to allow you to ask Google Assistant to do more things like warm up the car. You can tell your phone or your Google home device when you're inside to start up the car, lock or unlock the doors, get battery status. Volvo is going to be the first to get those features. Weird, because Volvo already does this in its own app. I know because now you'll be able to do it with the Google app. That's the big app. Yeah, which is, you know, it's it's like saying like, but don't you love Volvo's in, you know, built in navigation? Not really Google. Google maps some car plays better. Found out the other day. This is a bit of a side note, but excuse me, Colorado has some law that makes it so you cannot pre-start your car remotely and let it warm up or something, according to Brian Ibbid, who lives there. I just thought that sounded crazy because there's a lot of cars sold with these fobs that like start from out, you know, inside the house and you're like, all right, I'm starting the car to do it. And of course this will do that. I wonder how much I mean environmental laws will mess with it. The rule, at least with mine is that you can't do that unless the car is locked, right? Because it's trying to, you know, cut down on somebody stealing away with your car, you know, you know, having having access. But yeah, interesting to to not be able to have remote start or remote heat options depending on where you live. Yeah, it was all it was. Yeah, go ahead. Nate, if I recall correctly, you don't drive, right? I do not drive. Well, I'm one of the guys come for the gear stick. Yeah, no, I'm all for an autonomous bicycle. You know, I have an electric bike that I bought about almost two years ago now that I absolutely adore and it replaced my e-scooter and it really replaced my desire to drive. I didn't replace my need to drive and I am learning. But the the automated bicycle is probably not going to happen. But I still love my bicycle. Yeah, I would like one as well. Well, let's talk about liking things razor razor might make. Maybe we don't know yet. If you like the way razor light sinks stuff on your keyboards and your mice and your video games, you're probably familiar with that brand. If you are, well, they think you might like sinking all the lights in your home. So to announce the razor smart home app to do just that, brands like Nano Leaf, Life X, Yi Light, Monster and Twinkly are already on board to support the app with more to come. Razer also announced a new smart mask. This is effort pro, which adds voice amplification up to 60 decibels for one hundred and fifty bucks. Pan tension streamers that might be for you. But that's an update to a previously crazy razor announcement. This year's crazy CES razor prototype is Project Sofia. It is a modular gaming desk with room for 13 modules. The modules could be hot key panels, external capture cards, the audio mixers that you're used to using are seeing, among others, a PC to control everything sits in a case that attaches magnetically underneath the surface of this thing. It's pretty crazy prototype has a 65 inch OLED display. Razer says it could do one that 77 77 inches as well. It's a concept, though. So who knows if any of this or a version of this ever comes to market. But hey, they did eventually sell the Zephyr mask. So maybe, you know, they have ideas, they got ideas. So go for it. I think this is always taken in by the razor prototypes. And they, like you said, sometimes become products. I definitely think I want this. But then when I think about it harder, it's like they made the one thing non modular that I would want to be modular, which is the screen, right? I need to move that screen around and they built it attached to the back of the desk. And why do you have to move the screen around? Because I like to to to have my camera over my screen. And so I need adaptability to be able to like put lights and cameras and stuff. It's most people don't have that issue, though. I got you. I got you. It's cool. It's cool. It it it feels like it's it's it's those folks where, like, I got a couple hours. I'm going in, you know, and it's like, let's make this the best it can be. Let's make this fun. That's what this feels like to me. I still just like the idea that some of that fun stuff and colorful light, you know, uses for movie and home theater setups and all that. Those are all very popular and are gaining in popularity. This is just them jumping in on that at least that part of this announcement to say, look, what if the rest of your house was all twinkly and cool? And then also, by the way, what if you had a cool control station for everything you're doing? Like streamers would love this setup that we're talking about here. Like they're not afraid to say, hey, niche market, look at us. We're razor and we have you in mind. Yeah. And I think I admire that about razor. Twinkly and cool or yeelitey or life XE or a monster. Oh, there you go. I don't want to leave these other weird brand names out. You're a good point. All right. Finally, from me, BMW showed off a car with ink technology called I X flow. It's the I X concept car and the technology is called flow because it can flow from one color to another without repainting it. As long as the color you want is either white, black or gray. The car is not painted but coated with microcapsules with white and black pigments that can flip at the touch of a button, just like an ink screen. Grayscale ink screens work exactly the same way. It's advanced research and design project for now. Not something they're shipping on cars. BMW also showed off a 31 inch rear seat entertainment display and something called digital art mode that customizes the background art on the dashboard along with steering and power trim settings, cabin lighting and sound. BMW, though, did not seem to ever use the word NFT in relation to that. Just wanted to make that clear. When I want to go ahead, Tom. No, no, I was just going to say I like the ink stuff. That's kind of cool. Well, I like that too. That's what I was going to say. I'm like, that is amazing. Right now I have a black vehicle. It's winter and muddy here all the time. So it's just like the worst color ever. It would be kind of fun to change it to gray. I don't know, white or I don't know. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless you were like evading the authorities. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. That's thinking the exact thing like a cop on the radio going, we're in pursuit of a blue. I'm sorry, a rip. I'm sorry. I guess it's not her. No, she was in a white car. This is not a white car. If it's really hot outside and you have a black car, you could change it to a white car. And now it's a much cooler car when you get into it. Well, I mean, and I love I love this. Don't get me wrong. I just I always go to like the like, how can this, you know, help me solve a crime? One of the chameleon. I will. I will say this would be huge for companies that just want to do if you if you could get it where you could put signage on the side of your car. This is like Ron's bombing or something, right? It would be huge because you don't need to get like the little little bubble thing wrapped and it'd be so easy to adjust. Oh, I got to change the signage or logo of my company. Yeah, I don't have to, you know, you don't have to be stealing the magnet that had your company sign off the side of the car. I mean, I mean, think about it. You don't need custom plates because you can put whatever message on the back, you know, of your car. They'll still make you do plates. Yeah, you know, if you're actually a criminal, that's how they get you. You know what, this would also really help with a problem I have, which is it drives me nuts when I see someone with their branding on the side of a vehicle, a van usually, where they've got a grammatical error. Like they've missed out the apostrophe or something. And it's like, how did that get past you? How did you print that on the side of your vehicle? Your brand without the apostrophe. With this, yeah, you can just add that in. You don't need me sneaking around at midnight anymore with a marker pen. You could also prank your friends with the car at the concert when they go in, you can change the color of their car. So they have a harder time finding it when they come out sneaky, sneaky. A lot of ways to be sneaky. Well, listen, we talked about the idea of smart homes already on the show. Security and privacy, obviously a big concern for a lot of folks, not necessarily properly nailed down just yet, especially because people have distrust of smart home providers. Amazon, Google, Apple come to name. Homie has developed a smart home hub to handle your home devices securely, while also trying to make it easy to manage and use the products from those big tech manufacturers. Homie has operated in Europe since 2014. So some of you may be very familiar. Announced at CES that it's expanding into the US. So this may be a household name to you. It might be a new name to you. Homie says it doesn't monitor or sell any customer data. It doesn't create customer profiles. Doesn't use targeted advertisements as well. The Homie Pro smart hub sits smart home hub, sits in between your devices and the internet to shield as much information as it can from anybody who might be, you know, prying or sniffing. It's also useful because Homie's app can create what it calls flows. Those are automated routines like turn on the porch light when somebody rings the doorbell, for example, flows can be started on a schedule by an interaction like unlocking the door or by voice command with Google, Amazon or Apple devices. Homie can also analyze energy use and offer energy saving recommendations as well. It has iOS, Android and web apps that can all be used for free to control up to five devices. Or if you have a lot of devices, you can have a limited number for $2.99 per month. And if you want the Homie Bridge, that's $69 and includes compatibility with Zigbee, Z-Wave Plus, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 433 megahertz radios. All useful if you want one bridge to control all the things. And for full capability, there's the Homie Pro for $399, which includes a speaker and add support for 866 megahertz and infrared control, too. I want one. Can somebody just give me one? That'd be cool. I'd like the bridge. I mean, I'm kind of, I'm kind of, you know, when Nate was saying, I'm not I'm not into the the A. I and and you had Amazon one. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And you were with with HomeKit. I mean, I I kind of went the other way where I was like, I'll just do everything through Amazon. It's not perfect. It works pretty well. And what Homie is is is promising is something where I'm like, I kind of do have all that functionality right now. I feel like with the devices that I'm using that are all going through Amazon system, but to have a company that is going, you know, getting out front right away, saying, hey, we're not going to do the kind of shady stuff that you're used to all these other companies doing, which is why you don't trust these other companies. That is a nice alternative. Yeah, to their credit, too. Five devices for free is actually pretty generous, considering some of these things. Yeah, you just try it out, right, Scott? And then you don't have to have somebody buy it for you. Try it out for five devices. See if you like it. I have questions, though. Like I don't like the idea of putting something else in the chain because the more things are in the chain, the more chance something goes wrong. But I'm willing to do it if I'm getting a clear benefit. And the benefit they're saying is we don't sell any of your data. OK, that's nice. Are you also preventing attacks like security attacks? Are you also helping me monitor firmware upgrades of my devices and alerting me if if one of them is out of date? Are you able to allow voice control with Amazon without Amazon getting any data? Is that an actual thing? Or because you're aren't they still getting some data? And what is that data? I just I have a lot of questions. I like the idea of it, though. I just I haven't seen all the details that I would like to see here. You know, one thing that's really interested me about CES in particular over the last, you know, two or three years pandemic, notwithstanding is to think back to the first CES I went to, which was in 15, 15 years ago. And you could point out the car bit and you could point out the place where all the refrigerators were. And you could say, great, don't need to bother with those holes. Now it's the exact opposite, almost, isn't it? But you yeah, all everything we've been talking about, really, it's it's home, it's cars, pretty much. It's such an enormous shift. And it's interesting. It's not just the people are doing a lot of the stuff. It's cool stuff. I find that amazing. You'll shipping stuff. Yeah, it's not like someday we'll be able. I mean, some of it is someday. Obviously, the car that changes colors is a someday. But there's there's lots of practical stuff in there. Well, listen, some of you have dishwashers. I'm a person who doesn't have one. And I'm very jealous of dishwasher people. However, dishwasher tech getting better all the time. TechCrunch wrote up Don Tech's countertop dishwasher, whose name is Bob. That's the name of the dishwasher. It has integrated one gallon water tank. And Don claims it uses one one-fifth of the water of hand washing. So quite a bit less water. Also features a watercress cleaning cycle that uses UVC rays to disinfect things. So it could be used for phones or keys or your wallet, for example, anything besides dishes and cups. This is also the second version of Bob. It's it's dubbed Bob Global and will be available to most countries this year with a price of two hundred ninety nine dollars and delivery by late summer. Bob Global, Microsoft's, you need to sue. It's it's actually a terrible name. Bob's global. I kind of love it, though. Like, I know it's not good, but maybe it's so bad it's good again. Goes all the way around. I don't know. I'm torn. I like it, though. I think none of us have it. Well, maybe, Sarah, would you have a small enough place where you'd be like, yeah, no, this will take up just enough room that's worth it. I'll I'll drop three hundred dollars to speed up my dish washing. I mean, I I've thought about installing a dishwasher in my little apartment, which sort of is my landlord's decision and not mine. But but, you know, this has been going on for a while, and I kind of just got used to it. But I realize that I'm wasting water. And that's actually what I think is most important here is, sure, you you're going to it's going to you're going to have to figure out how this works. And it may not be a great method of cleaning up after dinner at first. But to use that much less water, I just don't know how you could go wrong. If you're in a position where you can't have a dishwasher. If you wash dishes or you're named Bob or both, please send us an email feedback at DailyTechNewShow.com. Please do. Also, we we like to thank patrons that have stuck with us for a really long time today. That person is Mike Cortez. Mike Cortez has been one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS for some time. Thank you for all the years of support, Mike. We love you. Yeah, Mike. Hey, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike. Also, thanks to Scott Johnson and Nate Langson, both for being with us today. Scott, let's start with you. Where can people keep up with everything else that you do? Well, even though it's CES week and that means lots of new things, I'm suddenly focused on a lot of old things with a brand new show we launched at the first of this month, and it's called Play Retro at frogpants.com slash play retro focuses on the world of retro games. Think arcades and ES Super NES Genesis stuff that's older than your like 3D era consoles, and we really get down and dirty into what made a game happen. Why was it an influential game? How to play it today and even how to play some of those games of VR, which is kind of a weird twist. Anyway, we started with joust and we have plenty more to come. I think people really, really like it. Go check out the feed and you can get it anywhere. You get your podcasts available now frogpants.com slash play retro. Nate Langston, thanks also for being with us. I know CES week is always kind of a frenzy. So thanks for being with us today. Let folks know where they can keep up with everything else that you do. Well, my podcast text message comes back properly this coming weekend. That's at UK techshow.com. I would love people to go and give that a follow, subscribe and keep track of what we're up to this year or eighth year. I can't believe it, although you're in your ninth year. So a little bit older than never catch us, Langston. No, I know. Not alive. Well, thank you, Nate. Always good to have two foot two guest day is always fun. So Scott and Nate, thank you to you both. We're going to do it again tomorrow because we're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 21 30 UTC. We'll be back tomorrow with Justin Robert Young and Shannon Morse. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Well, I hope you have enjoyed this program.