 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you including Justin Zellers, Pepper Geesey and Eric Holm coming up on DTNS. Google makes a room-sized machine that can do 3D avatars. Well Mark Zuckerberg's definition of open may be a little different than yours and Microsoft's getting rid of the name office. And we think it's a mistake. At least I do. This is the Daily Tech News show for Thursday October 13th 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. In lovely Cleveland, Ohio. I'm Richard Raffalino. Also in Los Angeles. I'm Lamar Wilson. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. No, you're not making a mistake. You're not wrong. Sarah Lane was supposed to be back today, but she had a thing come up at the last minute. She'll be here tomorrow. But we are here and we are ready to go with a few tech things you should know. The quick hits. Netflix announced it's basic with ads tier that launch in Canada and Mexico on November 1st. It comes to the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Australia, Japan, Korea and Brazil on November 3rd. And not to be left out, Spain gets it on November 10th. It costs $6.99 a month in the US and includes 720p HD, meaning the $9.99 a month basic plan that does not have ads will also upgrade to standard from standard f to 720 HD. This comes a month ahead and a dollar cheaper than Disney Plus's ad supported tier set to launch December 8th. Pricing on Netflix's ad free plans will remain the same. The company will partner with Nielsen on audience measurements. So, now we know why Netflix joined the UK's Barb ratings organization. Oh, that may all make sense now. They need the ratings because they're selling the ads. Sony and Honda announced plans to accept pre-orders for their first joint venture electric vehicle in the first half of 2025. So you're not going to get it for a while. The joint venture is named Sony Honda Mobility. That's, you know, it is what it says. Sounds great. They hope to start deliveries in the US by the spring of 2026 and in Japan in the second half of 2026. Currently no solid plans for a European launch, but hang in there. They might come together. There has yet to be a look at the planned vehicle with no mention of pricing, battery tech or range, but they have plans to take your preorder. Just please trust them. The Wall Street Journal sources say China's state-owned memory chip maker Yang Zi Memory Technologies, or YMTC, experienced a freeze in support from key suppliers in light of new technology export restrictions imposed by the US Commerce Department. Both KLA Corp and LAM Research paused support on installed equipment, pulled out staff and halted new tool installations at YMTC as a result. Sources say these sanctions could cut memory chip firms like YMTC off from upgrades, maintenance expertise and future technology they need to develop chips. Now you may remember that SK Hynex already confirmed it received a one-year exemption on these new roles and it's expected that other US and allied firms will or already have received exemptions. We just don't have confirmation on those. In some matter-related news, Samsung announced that if you own a Galaxy device, you'll be able to onboard matter-compatible devices to both its own smart things and Google Home ecosystems. This comes on top of Matter's multi-admin feature, which lets a device in one ecosystem be controlled by another. The partnership will show any devices already set up with Google Home in the Smart Things app rather than requiring each device to be set up individually. Samsung says this will simplify device sharing across apps and ecosystems on Android. Of course, that's what Matter's supposed to do. So here it is, starting to do it. Apple announced it will launch a savings account for Apple Card credit card holders in the coming months in partnership with Goldman Sachs, their longtime banking partner. This account will be used to save daily cash cashback rewards from the Apple Card. So instead of going into your Apple wallet, those would go into the savings account and users will be able to transfer funds into the accounts as well. Apple says this will be a high-yield account, but no word on what that interest rate will be. Yeah, so basically taking daily cash and putting an interest rate on it and letting you move money into it. Kind of cool. Alright, let's talk a little bit about avatars, not the James Cameron or the Netflix animated series. Explain, Rich. Yeah, so I mean, we've been talking a lot about this weekend in weeks past about virtual avatars hinting at, you know, making them more responsive to real-life facial expressions, having more photorealistic features or heck, just, you know, adding some legs to them seems to be a very popular feature ad, it turns out. But we're not only seeing the, we're not only familiar with the limits of 2D video calls, but we're kind of tired of them. So 3D chat has some appeal, even the great cynics among us, kind of sick of looking at just standard zoom calls. There has to be a better way, right? Still, do we want to throw what is essentially a helmet to get that 3D experience? Google to the rescue, perhaps. Perhaps. Last year at its IO conference, Google showed off Project Starline. It provides a holographic video chat to make it feel like a person is sitting right across from you as opposed to looking at a virtual avatar and you don't need to wear anything. You just sit inside a very large and mobile booth to get the experience. Now, the Verges J. Peters got to try it out. He said the Starline machine took up most of a small conference room, so it's not small. It was tracking him with more than a dozen cameras and sensors. He described the effect as doing a terrific job making a 3D representation of the person you're talking to. So he and the TechCrunch folks who talked about this seem pretty impressed by it. Project Starline uses a lenticular array of lenses, which is basically the same tech that the Nintendo 3DS used, except a lot more advanced, a lot more going into it. In fact, they can control the lenses and change how the lens is positioned, which the 3DS certainly couldn't do, so that it can change the display based on where you're looking. It does some eye tracking to optimize the image based on where your gaze is directed. Yeah, and like we said, Project Starline isn't new in and of itself, but it's been really limited to just booths on Google's campus for employees to use for one-on-one meetings and that kind of stuff. And it was also shown to more than 100 enterprise partners in beta testing, but at Google's campus, so they had to go there to check it out. Now Google has taken that feedback and is ready to offer Starline in an early access program, letting those partners set up their own calling booths in their offices to get a sense of more real-world challenges with the technology. Presumably, do you have an extra conference room? Salesforce, WeWork, T-Mobile, and Hackensaw Meridian Health will be among those trying Starline out. Oh, look at WeWork. Still kicking. Yeah, rumors of their death. I was saying that. Exaggerated. Still a lot of questions about Starline. How do you commercialize this? How do you monetize it? Is it just going to be for big companies? Can it handle more than just one-on-one? Right now they're just showing one-on-one. Can you get a whole group in there? Do organizations need better than good enough video calls to the point that they would want to do this? I'll start. This reminds me of Cisco in 2007, so about 15 years ago, bringing me into a specially created demo room in downtown San Francisco and showing me video calling. And it was impressive. It was a big conference room-sized thing, had lots of cameras and lighting. It really looked good. I was talking to somebody in New York from Cisco and it felt like I was talking to them. Of course, now we have that on our phones. It's called video calling on WhatsApp or FaceTime or something like that. So I'm curious if this is just something that leads the way to this technology being miniaturized as well. One element I see that could be the problem here is that lenticular display, right? Because all the sensor aspects of this, we've seen this with something, this got me thinking of the Microsoft Connect, where we went from seeing this in like Dave and Buster size like event kind of tech demos to being something that sits on top of your TV to that same tech being used to power Face ID in an iPhone where it's a 1% the size or whatever of the TV top version. So like we've seen that kind of miniaturization and, you know, and again, maybe miniaturizing the display form factor or something like that solves a lot of those problems. But yeah, that lenticular screen, I feel like that and like that real-time tracking, I don't know that's something you can miniaturize in a display, but based on the demo seeing it, that to me feels like a really interesting way to interact with someone as opposed to it's less digitally native, but more immediately familiar, right? Like the whole avatar system makes sense if you're living in this, you know, if you're living in a virtual world or you're operating in that mode all of the time. But for something like, hey, mom, sit on this bench and it looks like we're talking to each other right now. That to me feels like there's, I guess, like less learning, less translation into as opposed to like have 50 cameras scan your face. So, you know, when my eyebrow moves that ultimately you're kind of getting to that same point either way, right? This kind of more realistic interaction. This is super interesting. It seems like it's way farther off though than, you know, what we've seen from other companies right now. Yeah. As someone who's owned both the 360 and Xbox One version, I love that you mentioned likeness to connect in a way because I think if you're going to make this portable or something like everyone can use, like it's really about a device that size or that accessible to the average person because when I saw the video, two things about the video, it appeared like you were visiting someone in prison. That's the first one. And secondly, I don't know, I know they have to go through the layers of when you try things like this out, you got to go to business, let them figure it out, get it miniaturized and it goes to the consumer. But I feel like this is something the consumer like when you watch that video, we get to see grandma gets to see the baby kids and and and that kind of I feel like families will benefit from this far more. And that's why I wish Xbox, you know, or Microsoft in general really didn't give up on the connect for consumers part because I think they're they may not be getting there but that idea of being able to kind of model yourself and send that data off. It's actually quite fascinating and and I'm like, yeah, we have them. We have the form factor. We just need to we need to figure out how to make that accessible for everybody. The particular lenses go into headsets already. That's a thing that's a thing that virtual reality headsets use. So there's a path to this not going into your phone, but going into a headset should a headset become comfortable to wear and become popular. In which case, yeah, you won't need. I mean, yes, your family can still visit you in prison through one of these things at the record house. Actually, I could see that. But but it could get miniaturized into a headset and be able to do that 3D sense and be able to handle more than one person and still do all the eye tracking all that can go to a headset. It's what meta was shown off. Yeah, yeah, I agree. All right, the Verges 80 Robertson has an article up called What Does Mark Zuckerberg Think Open Means? That's what she's talking about it. This year's Meta Connect event CEO Mark Zuckerberg reiterated his vision for an open metaverse. It's not a new stance for Zuck or the company, but this is the quote on it. In each generation of computing that I've seen so far, PCs mobile, there's basically an open ecosystem and there's a closed ecosystem. I strongly believe that an open interoperable metaverse built by many different developers and companies is going to be better for everyone. Who could disagree? Robertson notes that in a conversation with the Verges Alex Heath, Zuckerberg uses Microsoft as the example of what open is as opposed to Apple. Okay, Zuckerberg used Apple as an example of a closed ecosystem, which he called very tightly integrated, relatively insular, a lot of value basically just flows toward the closed ecosystem over time. He compared this to what he considered an open ecosystem. This is a quote. In PCs, I think you'd say that Windows during the 90s and 2000s especially was really the primary ecosystem in computing. The open ecosystem was winning. Remember that open ecosystem in the 90s and 2000s from Microsoft? I'm just going to pause here for a moment, maybe wait for some longtime Linux users to stop laughing or throwing things, getting physically ill. I don't know, but Tom, take it away. Everybody, everybody settled down? You're back on your Arch Linux. Yes, Microsoft in the 2000s was so open that federal regulators almost broke up the company for practices like dominating browsers to the point that we still can't get rid of IE6. Microsoft even has a website pleading with people to stop using IE6. But to Meta's credit, the Quest is more open than iOS. You can side load on the Quest because it's based on Android and the company helped found the Metaverse standards form. So it is participating in an interoperable platform, but it doesn't support you accessing Horizon Worlds on Steam VR and most of its tools involve getting data into its system. It doesn't let you take your avatar and your friends to another VR chat platform. Lamar, how'd this sit with you? Yeah, so I used to build computers in the 90s and worked at Best Buy and Office Depot. And I was like, oh yeah, it was so open. Like Microsoft was so open and accessible, there was nothing called Red Hat Linux that was available that I totally put on my computer and was actually open to do whatever. No, that didn't exist. None of the sort. But yeah, Microsoft being open was funny. After I read for this, I'm like, was Apple more closed? Yes. Apple in the 90s was known as, oh, that's for schools. Oh, that's that one. I get the feeling that Zuckerberg is confusing not abusing your market position with openness. I don't think he understands what abuse is. I don't think he knows that word. Well, one, I think this also speaks to the power of Microsoft's recent marketing efforts of, we're this cloud-friendly, friendly grandpa of tech now that everybody can like. I do think that's part of it. But also, to his point, in the 90s and 2000s, you could drag any EXE file, a lot of malware certainly, and run it on your Windows machine. That wasn't locked down. You could throw a new graphics card. Oh, sure. Microsoft Windows was more open than Mac OS or OS 8 as a, you know, if we're going to. So it's detriment, though. That's when you start getting into the tribal like, you know, you know, I like the openness. I like the security. It's security through obscurity, like, but neither of them are open. Like if we're talking about an open metaverse, we're talking about I can take my avatar and I can be on Steam. Or I can be on HTC or I can be on Samsung, whoever. PlayStation. And I can just wander out into the world and not worried about walled gardens. And Quest is right now a walled garden, by all I can tell. Yeah, I mean, it really seems like he is very clear. I mean, he wants to say open because that sounds better than we're locking this stuff down. And guess what? We're going to own the whole stack. But like, I think he's just very clearly spelling out like, here's the model that we're going to go after. Yeah, maybe we don't have the market share to get into regulatory trouble. We will see. But the idea of, hey, we're going to let any big partner that wants to pay us some money to develop. We'll provide you all the tools that you want to get all your services. Hey, Microsoft, you want to bring, you know, all of your productivity stuff. Hey, Adobe, you want to do all this stuff. We have no problem with that. You look at that metaverse standards for them. There's a ton of huge names on there that I'm sure they would love to have all the software on there for them. They're not going to say no, but, you know, the, the, the Quest marketplace is ahead of iOS. When you look at in terms of transaction, you know, the amount that they're taking from developers for like things like in app transactions. So that to me is fundamentally not all that different. It's like, yes, you can use our platform and we can make some money from you using it and you can make money selling software services on top of that. I think the, you know, what the degree of openness is certainly a lot of window dressing. I also think Zuckerberg is being fairly honest. I believe he believes what he's saying. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah. Oh, go ahead. Sorry. No, no, no, you go ahead. Yeah, I listen, I, I ordered it. I ordered the pro because I'm, you know, just from a gamer point of view or tech point of view, I'm, you know, I'm, I'm curious about what is, what is going to do or what the benefit is. But let's, you know, let's be real here. Metavert meta is death. Like they were desperate here. They need people to look at them as the gatekeepers of the metaverse. And I think there's, there's super worried that anyone can come in like an apple or someone and and completely take that that type of a conversation away from from them. They're trying to, they're trying to be the first ones out there. And so yeah, the appearing open is, is for that reason. But, but, but Meta Facebook, how far you want to go back has never had a, a, a, a, it's never really been known for just being completely open. They have always had their wall wall garden. It just makes, it just makes sense to be like that. And I don't think this is going to be any different, but it has to appear like they have partners. That's why Microsoft was on stage, stage with them. But, but they have partners that you, you can be closed and have partners. You let people into your walled garden and then they're your partner. Pay a close attention. He's saying an open ecosystem. That's what Microsoft used. He's taking a playbook from Microsoft. Microsoft was in this battle when Mark Zuckerberg was coming up in high school and college. Microsoft is the open platform to a Max closed platform. He's using the open ecosystem architect argument. It is not the same as an open platform. Don't let him get away with that. If you're going to have this discussion with anyone, an open ecosystem is very different from an open platform. The internet, email, those are open platforms. iOS is an open ecosystem because they let other developers make apps in it. That is an open ecosystem. At least the app store part of it. Maybe not iOS, but you get what I'm saying. There's a very big difference between those. And I think that's the importance to understanding this. If you have a thought on that, send it over an open platform called Electronic Mail to us. Feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com Germany had unified. So had Yemen. Tim Berners-Lee was setting up a server at CERN to share some documents easily across networks. Mariah Carey's Love Takes Time was topping the charts. Home Alone, the very first one was dominating the box office and the search engine Archie was only a couple months old. It was November 1990. I was a program director at WPGU and something else momentous was about to happen. My birth. And then after that, Microsoft finally launched what he announced two years before at Comdex, Microsoft Office. Another birth. It brought together Word, Excel, PowerPoint into one offering. Supercharging Microsoft Works for the enterprise user. Oh, God, I haven't heard Microsoft Works in forever. Anyway, for more than 30 years, Microsoft Office has reigned as the dominant productivity suite and second only to Windows as the software of what you think of when you think of Microsoft. So why are we reminiscing, Tom? What's going on here? Office doesn't have much time left now, Lamar. No. Starting in November, Office.com will redirect to Microsoft365.com. And in January on doctor's orders, the Office app for Windows and mobile will become the Microsoft 365 app. Now, the office name is going to hang on by a thread, though. While Office 365 did get renamed to Microsoft 365 two years ago, existing Office 365 subscriptions won't be changed for the time being. And if you're real old school, you're not going to notice this at all because you just got the offline version you paid once for. The suite will still be available as Office 2021 or Office Long Term Service, Office LTSC. Microsoft has said it will update that version at least one more time, whether they call that next version Office or not, remains to be seen. But, but, but wait. You won't lose your old friends. Oh, no. Yes. Microsoft 365 will include Teams, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Loop, Clipchamp, Stream, and Microsoft's new designer app. See, they'll still be around. The Microsoft 365 app will have a feed of meetings and a listing of your files and documents. My God, this sounds boring. Why are we reading this like this? Because it was the only way to make it dramatic. No, I think I, I think this is a mistake for Microsoft to do. But before we get to that, any, any fond feelings for Office, you know? Yeah, I mean, I have, I have a fond feeling just I deployed it, you know, through, again, I had a computer business where I was built inside. I deployed Office through there to customers, but more fondly at a local school through the school district was having to push out, you know, Office to all the different workstations throughout my local school and then I actually helped out some other schools. I remember it finally actually been the licensing being what, 10 bucks? And getting to buy it for that because the retail version was $400. And I was able to get a license because I was in education. Oh, I missed those times. $10, the $10 Office. Yes. I mean, I remember it like in the late 90s, like just that being the standard, like using anything else, you had to measure like how short it came up. Like whether it was word perfect would just like format your stuff weird or you'd use something like open office, maybe a little later. And say, okay, what kind of compatibility issues are there? Like, okay, it gives you the basic functionality, but like Excel formulas get weird or something like that when you're trying to move between the two. So yeah, just kind of being that productivity standard bearer so that even if you weren't using it, you were kind of measuring against it in a lot of ways. Yeah. And yet I think it's a mistake to lose the name Office. I think you should have just put office as part of Microsoft 365. Office means something to people in a way granted word probably means something more than office more people know Microsoft Word and probably call other things that aren't Microsoft Word Word, because it's a word processor. You know, it's been genericized, but office, you immediately know like, Oh, that's the stuff I use for work. You know, it's the spreadsheet. It's the word processor. It's the PowerPoint. It's my email and calling it Microsoft. Microsoft 365 is not intuitive to the point that people are going to still look for office and obviously search engine optimization will keep them pointed at Microsoft 365. But I think Microsoft 365 should be the service and the office suite is one of the things you get in it. I wonder if they'll change their mind on this down the road because they because this this makes as much sense as changing the Xbox to be the Microsoft game thing. But here, here's why I don't think this is a mistake. This is Microsoft already recognizing that they're kind of creating the these it's almost like Adobe Creative Cloud. It's very similar. They're creating this this interwoven network of productivity soup that you can just kind of dip your hand. And it's like, I really know that Adobe changed the name of Photoshop to Creative Cloud thing. But it's but Photoshop is word Photoshop is word. Lightroom is Excel. You see what I'm saying? You're right. You're right. So but like this really struck me with the designer app where really that is I feel like that's not really meant to be a standalone thing. That's meant to spruce up your PowerPoints. That's meant to like to be used across all these other services. And just like when you're using, you know, you're using audition and ask you if you want to export this to premiere and it all just works very seamlessly. And you can kind of bounce between the two. Well, it's most of the time works very seamlessly. I feel like with with a lot of the stuff that that Microsoft is doing with kind of interactive elements that you can share amongst other people and they can live in multiple spaces. I don't think they really care about office about in that way. Also, there's a whole like remote work. I think kind of wording semantic game that they're playing, but really is about like we want this to be this productivity soup and the individual products themselves. I don't think mattered to them long term. Yeah, I'm just trying to stick Microsoft into the name. Go ahead. No, no, no, I was going to say something similar to that. And, you know, basically what is an office anymore? Maybe that's what, you know, they're they're thinking, but I was going to be against you, Tom. I actually I'm coming around to understanding yet. Yeah, when you think of these products, you're thinking of work. I don't think of pleasure when I think of Excel. Some people do. Some people think have extreme pleasure with Excel. I think you have a problem to judge. We're not here to judge. No, no, I just judge. I just judge. Except Lamar. I did judge. Yes. Get help. Okay. No, I could see a better argument for changing it to Microsoft work 365 or something. But even then you've got a valuable brand in office. When people think software in office, they think Microsoft like it just it seems like a mistake to lose that. I totally get the logic of what they're doing. I do, which is like, this is more than just office. This is what Microsoft provides to you 365 days a year and we'll read. We'll change the name and leap years. But, but yeah, I, I, I think office was is a very valuable name that they, they. I regret kicking to the curb, which might be why they're not totally kicking in it to the curb with the downloadable version. I'll see. They're holding on to it. They can keep that trademark. All right. Let's check out the mail bag. Yeah. We got this really great email from Brian. He says, Tom and Robert were talking about new TV tech during last Friday show and Robert talked about quantum dot tech and how it's used to make colors pop. Well, it turns out there's another use for quantum dot tech improving solar panel energy capture rates. Quantum dots are being investigated to see how much more energy a current solar panel can generate using this tech. Quantum dot tech can be added as another layer on solar panels and using this tech. Some of the blue light and ultraviolet light can then be down converted by the dots to a usable wavelength and then be used by the panel to generate more electricity. The side benefit is the panels won't get as hot due to the wasted energy of the higher energy wavelength not being used. So when it happens, there will be two benefits. I never even obviously I'm not a solar panel scientist, but that is super awesome. I love it. This makes perfect sense. We've got a know a little more that explains some of this quantum dot stuff. If you want to check that out. But Brian, thank you for this. I had no idea that it makes sense, but I had no idea that this was happening in the in the solar area. So I, I highly look forward to more good information on solar coming to Brian coming from Brian down the road. All right. That's going to do. Oh, sorry. Rich, did you have something else on that? I just said most definitely too late. Thank you. Lamar Wilson for being here today. We appreciate it. What you got going on to let folks know about. Yeah, I make short form vertical content across networks. If you go to Lamar Wilson dot com is Lamar with two hours. Pick the network of your choice and I'll have great unboxings and tech video games and this upcoming Microsoft box thing that has not been announced yet. That will replace the Xbox. Oops. Did I spill that? Wow. Really? Oh, no. You were a little too open. Much like Microsoft. Yes. Yeah. Exactly. Thanks. Well, and also thanks to our brand new boss, Russell, who just started backing us on Patreon. Thank you, Russell. Russell. Russell. Russell. Russell. Why can't you more of you be like Russell? I know a bunch of you are, but come join the fun patrons. Stick around. If you're a patron, patreon dot com slash dts, you get the extended show. Good day internet. We're all going to keep this conversation going. You can also catch us live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern, 200 UTC. Find out more daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Rob Dunwood, Sarah Lane, fingers crossed and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com.