 Coming up on DTNS, working from home may not make you more productive. Google renames hangouts to chat, but promises something interesting this summer. And Jen Cutter is here to help us wrap our head around Microsoft and Amazon's gaming news. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, June 14th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Canada, I'm Jen Cutter. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Sheik. We were just talking about E3 game announcements in Good Day Internet, as well as the Westminster Dog Show, something for everyone. If you want that wider show, go check it out. Patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Thailand Securities and Exchange Commission ordered cryptocurrency exchanges to delist meme coins like Dogecoin, as well as NFTs, utility tokens and social tokens that have what it calls no clear objective or substance within 30 days. The agency also banned exchange coins, which are proprietary coins issued by crypto exchanges that can be traded and also pay fees. Irish Justice Minister Heather Humphries published a bill which would give Irish police the power to compel people to provide passwords when executing a search warrant with fines of up to 30,000 euros and up to five years in jail for non-compliance. The bill would also require police to make a written record when doing a stop and search, which would include location, age, gender and ethnicity information to better document trends of who the procedure was being used on. Beats announced the wireless Beats Studio Buds for $150, offering active noise cancellation, IPX4 water and sweat resistance and five hours of battery life. The earbuds will integrate with Control Center and so offer hands-free Siri support on iOS, but also support FastPair and Google's Find My Device features on Android. Pre-orders are open now, shipping June 24th. They look really nice, too. Bitcoin miners approved the taproot upgrade to the cryptocurrency set to roll out in November. This is the first upgrade in four years, which is meant to improve efficiency, improve privacy, make multi-signature transactions infectively unreadable and support smart contracts on the Lightning Network payments platform. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman and Debbie Woo's sources say that Apple will release an updated Apple Watch this year, 2021 with a thinner display bezel, an ultra-wide band radio and a faster processor. Apple will reportedly update both the standard and SE model Apple Watches in 2022, as well as introduce a model for extreme sports athletes, including adding a body temperature sensor to some models. All right, those are the quick hits. Let's talk a little more about Gmail and workspaces. Your Gmail account may soon get a different look. Google announced its workspace productivity suite is available to all Google accounts. Now, you don't get everything yet. It starts by making Google Chat available in Gmail in the place of Hangouts Chat, which it is interoperable with, but has a few different features. It's mostly a renaming. So if you go into settings right now and say, I switch me from Hangouts to Google Chat, you get a different look and you get a few more, well, maybe a bell and a whistle. These group chats are not the same. However, as rooms, you may find that some of your older chats were set up as rooms and Hangouts and rooms will reappear if you switch to this showing up separately. But don't get too used to that because rooms will soon be called spaces with a number of new features like better message threading, emoji reactions, user roles, moderation tools, and basically things that make it more like Slack than like texting. So that'll be the difference between chat, which is more a messaging interface, even though you can do groups and spaces, which is right now called still called rooms, which will be more of a Slack like space. With Workspaces Smart Canvas UI, you'll be able to move from an email to a real time Google Chat space within the same window. That's why it's all integrated together. It's where you'll be able to do things like collaborate on a Google Sheet or Doc while chatting about it all in one tab. That's all coming with the launch of spaces expected sometime this summer. This is all very Google. If you're having a hard time following it, but basically right now you can change your settings. You'll get email chats and rooms and eventually rooms will become spaces and eventually spaces will become something that is actually sort of interesting. Other news involving this includes a Google Workspace individual plan for $9.99 a month. That gives you access to advanced Workspace services without having to set up a dedicated domain. So if you want some of the advanced features that you get as a business, but you don't want to go through all the things to be a business, you'll have that option eventually and the launch of a progressive web app for Workspaces coming in September, as well as client-side encryption for enterprise customers. So a lot of a lot of announcements here, but I don't know about y'all, Jen, Sarah. But for me, it's the idea of Workspaces being like, oh, turning Gmail into a more collaborative space, bringing docs in, bringing chat in, and making it useful. That sounds on paper anyway, like something I'd be interested in. Yeah, a lot of the Google naming convention stuff I roll my eyes at just because Google does this all the time, although I feel like hangouts is like too casual, right? You know, this is a suite of productivity tools for work. So it seems like they're going in the right direction, yes, making something like a room called a space, but essentially acting the same minimal, but sure, moving in the right direction. To be able to have a better kind of cross Google product interoperability, for example, if we get a mailbag and I want to ask Jen and Tom and Roger about it real quickly. And I know that they're hanging out in a spreadsheet that is connected to the show. Anything that makes all that a little bit easier and keeps me within the Google world makes sense to me and is obviously what they're going for. Tom, I have an embarrassing confession to make until your explanation right there. I could not keep straight all of the different Google like works based off and hangouts and chat. I don't think I don't know. There have been so many different versions of that. I don't think you're alone in that. No, it was like a really nice fast know a little more. Now I feel so much more ready for it. But yeah, this is definitely for people who do this for a living. Like unless we're all switching to workspace, I can't see myself switching just yet. I'm going to let other people work out the bugs on this. Yeah. And this I don't know what the mobile aspect of this is. If there is anything right now, you can do meet an email on the mobile app. I assume that it would be chat coming over there yet, but I didn't see anything about that. I only saw the desktop. But yeah, I like this idea of having useful tools. It seems like maybe we are finally seeing the huge battleship that is Google's productivity tool shifting. It's it's been better on the enterprise for a while, but but the consumer facing version finally turning into something that is a little more streamlined and a little more usable. We can we can laugh and make fun. And I think rightly so at like, well, Hangouts has now been renamed chat, you know, and it used to be G talk. And, you know, before that it was something else. I think they finally decided like we're getting rid of Hangouts. I'm not going to call it anymore. It's chat, email and meet. And who knows? Maybe this time they'll actually stick with that instead of introducing something else. You never know. All right. And ByteDance launched an enterprise product called Volcano Engine last Thursday. Volcano Engine will let companies use the same recommendation algorithm TikTok uses, offering data analysis and other services. The algorithm also powers TikTok's Chinese version Jo Yen, as well as news aggregator Toa Chao, Chinese companies JD.com, Vivo, China Construction Bank and Geely have all been trialing Volcano Engine over the past year. Yeah, this kind of got lost in the wash last year, but it resurfaced in a couple of places today. And I think it's worth talking about the day after the US rescinded the executive order against TikTok, which one of the reactions to that might have been them licensing out their engine to Oracle to operate. They they come up with this plan. So Rich Strafilino put together a lineup today and produced produced things for us. Suggested that this this may have been an idea that ByteDance got while going through that process of like, well, if we don't have to if we're not forced to license it out, maybe there's an Amazon Web Services equivalent for us here. Maybe maybe we could take this algorithm and instead of having to hand over the source code, we could license out its operation as a web service to people. And I think that's really smart, really smart, especially since, you know, TikTok, you know, it's the hot new thing in many ways for a social network. But those like me who hang out on TikTok enough to be like, God, it's why does it know me? Why is my for you page the way that it is yet mostly accurate knows that like, yeah, there is that kind of special sauce going on with the algorithm. When I first, you know, was thinking about the story, I was like, I wonder if TikTok thinks the special sauce days of the algorithm are numbered. And so the company ByteDance might as well make a little bit of money, you know, licensing the special sauce out to other companies because it'll get replicated eventually anyway. But but yeah, I mean, I think it's I think it's inevitable that there are going to be companies that want to pay for this and it's good revenue stream. And there yeah, there's probably some political element to it, too, that the company had been batting something like this around and was kind of ready to go. I see this as a huge thing for TikTok, not just for, yeah, here's another revenue source, but they're going to know what everyone else is doing with the algorithm and how is that going to feed back in TikTok or any future offerings they have. That's a very good point. This this could improve the algorithm. And to that point, avoid, Sarah, what may be motivating it of like, oh, our algorithm, you know, people are catching up, let's license it out, and then that will improve it. So we actually stay ahead. That could all work in tandem. Well, one of the hottest topics over this last pandemic era we've been in has been the benefits and drawbacks of remote work and how hybrid work may be the best of the two, at least for some workers and some bosses with anecdotal evidence of bounding. We're only starting to see more rigorous studies being published about the impacts of our collective change in working habits. Michael Gibbs, Frederick Mangel and Christoph Seemroth at the University of Chicago released a working paper describing their study of remote work of 10,000 employees of an Asian IT services company between April 2019, so it's pre pandemic, and August 2020 few months into the pandemic. Now working papers haven't been peered reviewed. They haven't been published in a journal. They're working papers. So take that how you will this. But the scientists use the company's sapience analytic software, which is installed on employee computers to monitor app and mouse and keyboard usage to determine how the employees were spending their time working every day and the percentage of completed tasks relative to assigned tasks. So what did you get assigned? What did you complete the data covered April 2019 through August 2020? Like I said, overall employees work 30 percent more hours compared to pre pandemic times, including 18 percent more work outside of normal working hours. So they were working longer, roughly 1.9 hours more per day with employees with children working even longer on average. This saw the employees maintain roughly the same overall productivity output, but productivity per hour dropped 20 percent. And you might say, well, why what, you know, what's going on there? Too many medians. The researchers broke down employee time by collaboration hours, a.k.a. meetings and focus hours, finding that work from home created substantial and ongoing coordination costs. Group meetings generally increase while one on one time decreased. These collaboration hours also increased as work from home continued with the number of Microsoft teams calls per week, averaging 15 in the fourth week of the work from home study up to over 30 by week 24. So people as time went on kept saying, well, we need another meeting, you know, we gotta we gotta check in with each other a little bit more often. We're all remote. The researchers also noted the findings are significant given this type of organization often predicted. This is the type of organization often predicted to be successful when you shift to a work from home kind of situation. All right, so the caveats here before before we start parsing our reactions is this, as you mentioned, Sarah, is a working paper, right? So there's not peer review on this, but let's say these are these are reputable researchers. They've done other work before, let's say it makes it through peer review and gets published. This is also one study of one organization. These are valuable data points, but you have to be careful not to conclude like and therefore now we know work from home is not productive. There's a lot of questions raised by this, which is how science works. So what I'm looking at this and seeing is there are interesting questions to address, which is what if you don't count meetings as work, right? The reason they had mouse and movements was to note when you were engaged with an app versus when you're just sitting back and reading, right? It helped to identify when work was actually being done. And I found it interesting that more work was actually being done in the same amount of hours than you would when you were at work, because the theory was, oh, you're going to goof off more if nobody can see you. It turns out no. And the reason for that might have been meetings. Well, what if we don't count meetings as work? Or what if we separately count them? Then what kind of productivity stat do we see? Because my guess is, the meetings did suck up more time because you didn't have that personal connection. And so you needed or at least some people felt like we need more meetings because I'm not seeing you in the office anymore, which meant that you actually probably got more productive or you might have. That's the question to study. You might have gotten more productive in the hours you weren't in a meeting because productivity stayed the same, even though you had all these extra meetings and extra time worked. Like they mentioned, what was that last line there in the fourth week of the work study? The average sorry, from the week 24 in the study, the average calls for 30. That's the average. That's a scary, scary number of meetings where you are sitting there listening to everybody else. And you might feel like you're being babysat at that point, which I think would definitely affect my productivity, especially knowing that everything I do in my computer is being monitored. Whereas in the office, I feel like a little bit more free from having that kind of constant surveillance, even though you're around everybody watching, it feels more invasive when it's in your own home. And that would definitely affect me mentally. Yeah, I'm sure. Right. So so yeah, I just wanted to say this is one company. So their corporate culture involved this, what it might be different in a different company. Yeah, I mean, depending on definitely who you know, I'm imagining a manager, not even necessarily wanting to micromanage everybody and know where everybody is at all times, but that being like, well, you know, we've got different schedules now and you're not commuting. So you know, we maybe just just checking is better for everybody. And you know, the workers don't even necessarily disagree. But hey, you know, if you're in a meeting, you kind of stop what you're doing, do the meeting, catch everybody else up on what you have been doing before you continue what you're doing. You know, it's a it's a you start and stop enough times. Yeah, your productivity is going to go down or your your my multitasking. And then people say you're not paying enough attention during the meeting. I don't know. I always get because we could see you your cameras on. You're looking down. Yeah, I there. I don't want to throw this report under the bus. I think this is valuable research and they're putting it out there as a working paper to get these kinds of feedback from other people in their own scientific community so they can refine it for publishing. But I do think that this is the kind of study that will raise more questions than it answers, which is where when you're at the beginning of studying something new like this, you know, we haven't had this many people working from home at this scale before. That's what you're going to get. You want this study that will cause someone else to do like, oh, let me do another study to compliment that. So keep an eye out for that. Well, Jen, you very kindly referred to know a little more earlier. That is a separate show that patrons get, or you can get separately for free in your podcasting app to go deep into tech topics like Wi-Fi 6 or 5G or the most recent one was about NFTs. Check out our related show, Know a Little More, and you can know a little more about all that and more at knowalittlemore.com. At a T3 2021 event, Microsoft announced that Flight Simulator will come to the Xbox Series X on July 27th. Microsoft promises it's going to offer, quote, the same level of depth and complexity as the PC version. The game is also getting a one of a kind expansion tied to the release of Top Gun Maverick, the movie. More details on that to be released in November, nearer to the release of the movie. The game will be available as a purchase or through Xbox Game Pass on release date. So if you have Xbox Game Pass, you'll get access to it. The addition of titles to Xbox Game Pass was a major theme for Microsoft at E3. The company announced 32 other titles like Bethesda Starfield, Halo Infinite, Psychonauts 2, Forza Horizon 5, Dungeons and Dragons Dark Alliance, Age of Empires 4, all coming to the service on their release dates. Last week during its E3 business briefing, and we mentioned this on the show, Microsoft announced that browser-based streaming will come out of beta for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers in the coming weeks, with a quality upgrade to Xbox Series X hardware coming as well. The company has already said it's working on dedicated game streaming hardware. That's interesting. Also, because it beats Skittles in a Twitter poll, Microsoft announced it will release an Xbox Mini Fridge shaped like an Xbox Series X console. That's coming in Q4 2021. No price on that announced. Jed, what do you make of Microsoft's E3 announcements? Well, first, I should do a small disclaimer. Sony is not at E3, which is why you're hearing a lot of Microsoft news. And Nintendo's Treehouse is tomorrow, so that is also why we're not talking about them. So just to save me some ads later, that's why this is all Microsoft. I'll start with the meme fridge first. The fridge has a trailer. The fridge trailer is really funny because it starts acting like this big grand thing. And then it's a fridge that opens. I mean, and so fridge should. It should open. They did a full size version of this, right? And this is the promised mini fridge that everybody can buy. Yeah, the big one was like a one off and a contest thing. And this one is like, oh, we can we can make money. Let's let's put a skin on a fridge. And it is getting some of the most attention out of this. What does that say about the rest of these announcements? It says that a lot of trailers are very vague and doesn't really matter for you. Yeah, I'm very curious. And I know we talked about it on the show last Thursday, but I'm very curious about this idea of being able to stream everywhere. And I think that was expanded on with the addition of these titles as day and day releases of, you know, day it comes out as a title to buy. It comes to Xbox Game Pass. There's some impressive stuff here, which is the beginning of the trend of Microsoft trying to say, yeah, the Xbox is the premium way to game for us. But you can game with us in any way, even on your TV. Yeah, if you were playing drinking games while watching the conferences, if you had a drink every time you said they said optimized for Xbox, you would not be here right now. It was a lot. Yeah, they have made it very clear that Game Pass is the way to go. It's like 1499 a month US. It includes all of the games for PC and console. And you get day one access to all of their first party new stuff, which is a lot because they were hyping up everything that's coming over the next year. You read the list of titles already. It is hard to say, like, yeah, like, no, no, no, you just buy games individually so that you have them forever when you are getting such a ridiculous deal and may end up playing more games that you could still like buy a physical copy of later if you really wanted to. But like, man, the other huge, huge part is this is the best way to get into gaming right now because it's all cloud and because you can't really buy your mileage may vary depending on region, but because you can't really buy the newer consoles because there's such a shortage and buying a new video card is like new car money. 1499 a month for a game that just works on things you already own is a pretty easy sell. Yeah, especially when that comes to my smart TV, which I think it's going to come to fewer smart TVs than maybe some people would like. But, you know, when it does, you can suddenly just get a controller, right? And and suddenly you're playing Xbox games. And those those TVs are going to have to be new to not have the lag. But for a lot of people that that's going to be a plenty good experience. Yeah, they keep hyping like that's not Microsoft specific, but everyone who's making a cloud gaming offering keeps saying like, oh, yeah, you can like play on 5G. And I'm thinking like, where am I in the world that I need to play, you know, like Witcher 3 or something on the subway on the subway? OK, at the beach would kind of be fun. Yeah, maybe. Well, Amazon is opening up access to its Luna game streaming service as well. All prime subscribers in the US will start to get access June 21st and 22nd. Luna was previously limited to invite only and signups from supported fire TV devices. So if you had wanted to try Luna, if you're in that that very thin Venn diagram of wanting to try Luna, but not wanting to sign up for an invite. Well, June 21st, that's your day. Users will be able to start a seven day trial and play Amazon's library of games on PC, Mac and fire TV devices as well as browser based versions, progressive web app style on iOS, iPad, OS and select Android phones. This is not changing anything with the way Luna works, Jen, but it is opening it up to say, OK, anybody who's a prime subscriber, jump on in and there's a lot of prime subscribers out there. Yeah, Amazon is pulling the good old option select if everybody stampedes it and it breaks like, oh, you guys are so amazing. You look at how much you want this stuff. And then, of course, if it works, they get to be where the first gaming service in history that didn't crash on like our huge first day. And we've talked about it before, but but Luna gives you you have to pay for it, right? Even if you are a prime subscriber, just get you access, you still have to pay for it. And then you also can pay for other things. I think Ubisoft is the only one now. But the idea is that you'll be able to pay for more games from developers. Yes, they are launching with an extra 15 bucks a month for the Ubi Channel that will have all of their games. And then they're launching with, I think, almost a hundred of the others because this is beta. So that's why I'm saying launching. My only like caveat with all of these streaming services is like, it's the future, clearly. That's the way it's going. The future is not here for everyone. Again, I can speak from the Canadian perspective, whereas where I used to live, I was capped on DSL. I could only get 300 gig a month plan and that was still over a hundred dollars. And 1080p streaming for about an hour is like 10 to 12 gigs. Like it's already hard enough to patch your PS4 games, depending on where you live in Canada. So as much as like I think this tech is really awesome and really cool and makes gaming more accessible to more people because all you need is a controller. It's not here for everyone. And I'm kind of worried that a lot of people are going to be left behind because building networks takes a long time. Yeah, it's it's the Netflix issue. I remember when Netflix first offered streaming back in the mid late 2000s, everyone was saying the same thing, which is how am I going to do this on my small data cap? How am I going to do this with my DSL connection? They eventually figured it out. So that indicates some optimism that the same thing would happen for video game streaming because these companies have an interest in and getting the ISPs to accommodate it. But that's not a guarantee that my guess is they will. But yeah, it'll be bumpy and some people will be left out along the way. Well, if you want to save money and who doesn't and you're taking a trip sometime soon and you identify as perhaps older than Gen Z, your age might actually work in your favor. And to tell us more is the amateur traveler himself. This is Chris Christensen from the amateur traveler with another tech in travel minute. If you're looking to travel this year, and I know some of you are not yet ready and you want to save some money. If you're over 40 or over 50, there's two different options that you can use to save some money on lodging by joining a hospitality exchange club. If you're over 40, you can join the affordable travel club. That's affordable travel club dot net. And if you're over 50, you can join the Evergreen Club at evergreenclub.com. And with both of those clubs, you can stay in another club members be and be basically or in their home and you're guaranteed a room and some sort of breakfast for about $20 per person per night. And so that can save you quite a lot. Again, you have to be old enough to qualify and you have to be interested in joining the club. But you do not have to reciprocate with stays in your own home. Check them out. I'm Chris Christensen from Amateur Traveler. Intriguing. Is this because people like myself who are older than 50 don't have the energy to wreck your place so you just charge them less? All he wants is a little breakfast. He's just going to sleep and eat his breakfast. Yeah. What appeals to me is being like, oh, I'd love to take advantage of this. You know, I like the traditional be and be situation. I just don't want to run one so that not having to reciprocate I'm like, oh, yeah, sounds good. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Oh, let's do it. So I mentioned this is in a post show on GDI last week that my remarkable to E Inc. tablet had come in and Jeremy heard me talk about it and this is going to be my my newest live with it device. So in three months, I'm going to tell you all how I feel about the remarkable to Jeremy says good luck. One thing, a lot of E Inc. people don't realize I think he means people who are new to ink E Inc. Don't realize is the touch sensitivity is not nearly as good as most tablets. He also says the extension for browsers does also work in the edge chromium browser because I was complaining that it looked like it was Chrome extension only and I use primarily Firefox. Jeremy says it's actually the main thing I use my remarkable to four. So that's a good tip, Jeremy and I agree with you on the ink stuff. I've I've definitely because the remarkable to has this really neat pen and you can change the the sensation. It's very ASMR, the sensation of, you know, do you want something that feels more like you're holding a calligraphy pen or a pencil or a ballpoint or something else. There are several choices. There's a there's a real satisfaction in the writing sense, but the tapping on things is a different experience than a tablet for sure. If you have feedback on E Inc. or anything that we talk about in any of our shows, please do send us your thoughts, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Also shout out to patrons that are master and grandmaster levels, including John Atwood, Pat Sheeran and Degracia A. Daniels. Also a very special thanks to Alan Char, who's one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS. Alan, you've been with us a long time. Thank you for all the years of support. Yeah, and good conversations might I add to Alan always has interesting thoughts. Yeah, keep it up. Love to have you. Also thanks to Jen Cutter for being with us today. Jen, where can people keep up with you? Oh, the best place to keep up with me is on Twitter at Jen Cutter, and that's Jen with two ends. Very cool. We are live on this show Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30. UTC. Join us live if you can and find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We'll be back tomorrow with Christian Cantrell for Tackling in the Future of NFTs. What does the future hold? Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at Frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.