 Coming up on DTNS, Apple launches Fragile Rock shot on iPhones from producers' homes, a robot that can increase COVID-19 testing capacity, and e-racing is the only racing right now, but the NASCAR drama has followed right along with it. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, April 21, 2020. In Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. From Toronto, I'm Jen Cutter. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking about that clever land shark, as well as grocery delivery, smizing, and so many more interesting topics at Good Day Internet. You've got to become a member. Get that show at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Microsoft launch its Microsoft 365 personal and family subscriptions on Tuesday. The new plans are essentially Office 365 with extra features like a family safety app and Microsoft Teams. Prices start at $6.99 per month for personal use and $9.99 for a family of up to six. Apple is expanding its App Store, iCloud, Apple Podcasts, and Apple Arcade into 20 new countries Tuesday and expanding Apple Music into 52 new countries. Expansion includes countries in Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Oceania, pretty much everywhere but Antarctica. Samsung's Health Monitor app that measures blood pressure on its smart watch has been approved for use by South Korea's Ministry of Food and Drug Safety. Samsung says it will be available on the Galaxy Watch Active 2 in the third quarter. Spotify announces rolling out three human curated weekly podcast playlists in the US, Germany, Sweden, the UK, Mexico, and Brazil. They're called Best Podcasts of the Week, Brain Snacks, and Crime Scene, each geolocalized and populated by curators that Spotify hired specifically in each location. Google is opening up its shopping results to include unpaid organic listings and announced it will consist primarily of free product listings starting next week and an attempt to compete against Amazon. Due to the global pandemic, e-commerce strategies have grown in importance and Google's president of commerce, Bill Reddy, said in a blog post it led to advancing their plans to make Google shopping free for merchants. Google product search, which used to be free and was called Frugal, do y'all remember that, shifted to a purely paid product in 2012. Streaming service HBO Max is set to launch on May 27th. It includes 10,000 hours of library programming from across Warner Media's catalog and new original series for $15 a month. Scripted comedy Love Life with Anna Kendrick, Sesame Workshop's late night entry, the not too late show with Elmo, and former TBS comedy Search Party will join all current and former HBO shows and current and classic WB movies on the service. The cascade of reduced demand from countries shutting down to slow the spread of the virus is hitting at Chinese manufacturers. Workers told the Financial Times that Foxconn has paused hiring edits planned in Zhengzhou, China, and has started to cut temporary workers hired back in February. The Financial Times also reports that Pegatron has let go of a thousand temp and third party workers at its factory in Shanghai. Aristectica reports that eyesight technologies is one of the first driver monitoring systems, or DMSs, to update its facial recognition to work if the driver is wearing a face mask, which a lot of times they might be doing because they're about to head into a workplace. Truck drivers are often required to use DMS as a safety measure. It looks to make sure they're paying attention, not falling asleep while they're driving down the road. France's digital minister, Cedric Oh, told Bloomberg it has asked Apple to lift an iOS restriction that stops Bluetooth from running in the background when data is going to be moved off the device. France's app would feed data to a central server run by health services. Apple and Google are working on a system that does not use a central server. In a related story, Aristectica points out that close to two billion phone users worldwide don't have the proper Bluetooth LE chip that makes these contract tracing systems possible. Oh, folks, after 18 months, Epic finally threw in the towel and put Fortnite back in the Google Play Store, blaming popups that warn users that apps from outside the Play Store may be malicious for the reason that they were forced to do this. Epic will now need to pay the Google 30% for any in-app purchases. Netflix added 15.77 million subscribers in Q1, well past estimates. Netflix reported a total of 182.9 million subscribers up 22.8% year over year. Tiger King was one of the most popular shows on Netflix with Nielsen estimating 34.3 million unique views in the first 10 days of its release. Yes, Tiger King has propelled Netflix to heights it had never reached before. We are happy to say. All right, let's talk a little bit more about what's going on with Sonos here, Sarah. Yeah, I'm not sure if I'm happy about this yet or not. Sonos Radio, a digital streaming service with a mix of existing radio stations from Tune In and I Heart Radio and then Sonos' own original programming. So there's sort of three offerings here. Sonos' sound system is its own ad-free single station, playing new and well-known music, some kind of popular stuff, snippets of stories from artists that are on that station, and then guest-hosted sessions similar to something like Beats 1 on Apple Music, for example. Artist stations also add free or curated playlist chosen by artists. For example, Tom York of Radiohead has a station called In the Absence Thereof. Don't know what that means, but it's Tom York, so whatever. Sonos stations is 30 dedicated genre stations, also free, but that one is ad supported. Sonos Radio's original products will be available in the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, and use Napster's streaming catalog, which is why their licensing areas are limited to those countries. Sonos Radio is also not compatible with either Amazon's or Google's Assistant, which really annoys people like me, and stream quality is 128 kilobytes per second, which is going to annoy a lot of audio files. Yeah, I'm looking at my Sonos app right now. I have a system update available, so maybe that'll add it here. I'm going to do that. But the tune in and I Heart Radio are already there for me, so I don't know if that's something that's now just going to show up for everybody, or what's actually different about that offering. These other offerings are interesting, I guess, kind of a nice little added value for your new Sonos user, but I'm not sure how often I'm going to bother to go to a Sonos station when I've got plenty of other options. Yeah, I'm a fan of Sonos hardware. I've got two Sonos ones. I have a couple old plays too, although they're pretty obsolete at this point. I have a Sonos Beam attached to my television, which I use for music as well. So between sort of, you know, spoken word and news and podcasts and music, I never open the Sonos app because everything is voice commanded. And I've gotten it to, you know, down to a bit of a science, depending on, you know, what I want to do. So the whole kind of like, well, it doesn't work with a voice assistant that you've set up for lots of other things. You'd have to go through the app already. I'm like, oh, I don't even launch the app ever. But okay. But then it does seem like, well, I already do pay for other music streaming services. This is not, you know, if something's free, I'm not going to complain about it. But I just don't know unless for some reason, I was to listen to one of these curated playlists and just go, wow, they really get me the way that no other service has gotten me before. I don't know how this is much more of than Sonos being like, well, we're doing it too. Yeah, introduce me to music, Sonos. Thanks. I had no idea. Yeah, I'm not sure that I was needing that. What's up with Nvidia, Jen? Nvidia announced Monday that its GeForce Now game streaming service will no longer offer titles from Microsoft's Xbox Game Studios, Warner Brothers Interactive Entertainment, Codemasters, and Clay Entertainment starting April 24th. So there's a little bit of notice there. GeForce Now lets you stream titles from your Steam library, but only if Nvidia has received express permission from the game publishers. Activision, Bethesda, and 2K games have also withdrawn permission. Nvidia says 30 of the top 40 games on Steam were still supported and announced the addition of the Complete Assassin's Creed and Far Cry series with more Ubisoft series to be added in the days to come. Yeah, I don't know how much this dampens the enthusiasm for GeForce Now, because in the beta days when it was free, everything was on there and there was a wonderland. People raved about it, right? How much does it dampen that when, you know, they still have 30 of the top 40 games on Steam, but a lot of big titles aren't there anymore. It's going to be interesting to see because, like, the free title tier is still there. It's limited to one hour play sessions, I believe. So, like, that is still an option, even though, you know, the title is all reduced. It feels like a solution in search of a problem because, like, Google Stadia had to throw money at a whole bunch of studios to get games on their service, which are still kind of limited. And now I think Nvidia is going to end up having to do the same. I kind of wonder if this new partnership with Ubisoft is financial or not, because those are a lot of games there. And then for the studios that withdrew or, like, people like EA, are they just going to build their own as well? Is there going to be, like, a billion services out there? Yeah, and I wonder, I mean, I don't blame the game companies for trying to get money if they can, and Nvidia is playing by the rules. They're not trying to get around the rules and getting forced into the table. They're trying to be good citizens. But if you were talking about virtualizing a PC in the cloud like Shadow does, you don't need permission. You just install Steam like you would on any machine. So I really wonder if these are all going to converge on some middle ground, where Stadia doesn't have a lot of titles because they have to get permission per title, whereas Nvidia didn't need permission when they weren't charging. They only had to start really enforcing permission once they started charging. And now they're seeing people leave. Will the GeForce titles reduce as the Stadia titles increase, and we meet in the middle somewhere? Yeah, like EA has the bank account to just go like, and here's our thing that works with Origin. And, you know, it's all free for all of our titles. Yeah, or they'll be like the Xbox Game Pass. Like, oh, well, for this one low price, you can have everything. It's like renting, but better. I mean, they're going to need something in-house to drag people over to their service in the same way that every video streaming service eventually just like, all right, we need to come up with something that no one else has as a way to seed people into the service. And then you can tack on the other stuff, but you need the core on Switch, which unfortunately I don't think Nvidia has at this time. Yeah, it's possible that we go from a world where we have games on multiple services to a world more like video streaming. That's a really good point, where things are exclusive to Netflix or HBO Max, et cetera. E-Bikes are interesting. They offer batteries, motors, and other electronics to make pedaling around town easier, very popular in places that have a lot of bicycle commuting going on. A lot of times they're rental versions of them, but some people like to buy them themselves. And the tech press is in love with the high-end VanMoof E-Bikes, mostly because they're really pretty. VanMoof is now taking pre-orders on its pedal-assisted S3 and X3 models. These are brand new with lower prices than their predecessors at $1,998. Two bikes are very similar. They're basically the same bike in different sizes. The X3 is more compact than the X3 is more compact than the S3. Among the improvements are four-speed electronic gear shifter, improved turbo boost, if you need a little help going up the hill or getting off of a start, nearly silent front hub motor, along with front and rear hydraulic disc brakes. So the shifting and the driving, people were raving about how silent these are, the battery can now go 37 miles at full power that's 60 kilometers or 93 miles in economy mode. Charging takes about four hours. And one of the big downsides is you can't remove the battery to charge it. You've got to put your bike near wherever you're gonna recharge that battery and plug it in. When I first read the story, I was like, it can go 35 miles per hour. It just seems extremely dangerous. But all kidding aside, I live around some pretty hilly areas. Great for hiking, not great for biking. I just don't have that kind of strength. This is perfect for stuff like this. So I'm like, okay, I wanna work out, but I'm gonna need some help to get to the top of certain hills and depending on where you live. I mean, you might want this for flat road too, just longer distances and a little help along the way. E-bikes are extremely cool. And I mean, the charging taking four hours means that I guess you have to think about it in advance that you would in an electric car really at this point, as long as it's... It's just good overnight. Yeah, it's part of your routine. You're in good shape. $1,998 if you don't realize is about a mid-range price. It's not cheap, but it's not the most expensive. A lot of these high-end e-bikes are around $5,000. So it's not a bad price for what you're getting. And it's just pretty, isn't it? It's so pretty. It's the first one to be like, I would totally like go downtown and sign up one of those bikes and drive it around. Yeah. All right, so Apple TV Plus is premiering mini-sodes of Fraggle Rock called Fraggle Rock Rock On each Tuesday. Apple says Fraggle Rock Rock On is all shot on iPhone 11s from the Homes of the Production team and individual artists from all over the U.S. And I am super excited about this. I mean, if you don't know, Fraggle Rock was a big show. It was one of the first original HBO shows, back in the late 80s, early 90s. And so it's that nostalgia play that Apple's doing, right? By bringing it back. But the extra impressive thing is that they're able to bring it back in the middle of everyone working from home because this production team must have some decent cameras and green screens and mics so they can record the voiceovers and shoot the puppets and do the puppetry. That's incredibly impressive. I've only seen the trailer, but the trailer looked just like Fraggle Rock to me. The trailer looked awesome. And Sesame Street is actually doing the same sort of thing right now. They sent out the Muppets on a special trip to certain puppeteers' homes. And they're all shooting from home. Like they've got the headbands, the rigs, everything. And if you've been watching their Instagram lately, they have a wonderful video from Elmo's dad telling all the parents are doing a great job. But you would not know that this wasn't shot in studio because everything looks and sounds exactly like you would expect it to. And they're doing a great job teaching kids about distancing and how to talk to their friends remotely because this is what you need Sesame Street for. And Fraggle Rock is just gonna be so much fun. Fraggle Rock we need just because it's Fraggle Rock. Just for the theme song alone. Yeah. Absolutely. Well, and depending on the age of the, well, depending on the kid really, but I would think kids would be more forgiving about things like this. Oh, they're home. They're shooting video on a smaller device. And stuff where people, adults who work in production might be like, wow, they've really taken a turn. They've had to make so many concessions and kids are like, I love the show. I have to say though, and I'm just going on the trailer again, but I would not have known. I would have looked at this, I would have not have known because the style of it, not just the fact that kids are watching it, although Fraggle Rock's more for grownups, but the style of it lends itself to being done from home easier. And the audio sounded great. It was not tinny or obviously recorded on a phone or anything, so they must be using professional mics. It's just the camera and the iPhone. And Apple wants to take this moment to play up like look how great our camera in the phone is. You can't even tell. Yeah, totally. CNET reports on a company called Bright Machines that's developing a robotic system to process COVID-19 test samples. The automated system could run without stopping, increasing the number of tests processed per day. Bright Machines usually makes product assembly and inspection at micro factories, but it's collaborating with Tel Aviv's Echeloff Hospital Laboratory, Impact Lab and iCobots on this system. Bright Machines provides the robotic cell, the dual conveyor, the robotic arm and the vision system. The robots can open test tubes, they can draw samples into a control tube and verify performance with computer vision. The first system is expected to be operational at Echeloff Hospital in just a few weeks. Yeah, this is great. I mean, granted, we still need to see it in action in the hospital, but other outlets, other organizations are already inquiring about using this and testing capacity is one of the biggest hurdles to being able to get back to work, to get to a new sort of normal. And there's lots of efforts for bringing up testing capacity, but using some robotics, I thought was worth paying attention to because it's a good use of technology to overcome one of those hurdles. I will take any and all good news about COVID-19 right now. Yeah, no kidding. Hey, folks, if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes, be sure to subscribe to dailytechheadlines.com. iRacing president and CFO, Anthony Gardner, says, active customers of the online sim racer have grown from 110,000 at the beginning of the year to 160,000. That's no surprise with people indoors. They're looking for things like this to do. But what maybe people wouldn't have expected that is happening is major car racing series, the Enaskar Coca-Cola iRacing series, the Porsche Mobile One Super Cup Virtual Edition are using the platform with actual professional racers. And Jen, that means you're getting some actual professional NASCAR drama along with it. Yeah, you're not seeing any fights in the pit lane, but you are hearing a lot of heated words and also a lot of really fun costumes. People are racing in giraffe outfits and a giraffe onesie. A driver in Australia was dressed up as Mario from Mario Kart, had the white gloves and a construction paper mustache. That really looks fantastic. But you are still getting people mad about getting hit and getting parked because racers are going to be racers no matter what platform they're racing on. So... Is it because they're, you know, I mean, obviously nobody wants to hit someone else on purpose in a race. If you hit someone else on purpose in an actual race, you risk killing themselves and yourself, right? So is it because, hey, this is virtual, no one's really gonna get hurt? Is that's why we're seeing more of that kind of behavior? I would argue that sometimes drivers do hit other drivers on purpose. You see that more in closed wheel as opposed to open wheel racing for the safety reasons. But yeah, racers are gonna race and tempers run hot, even though they're all separately in their homes and incredibly expensive rags that I am so, so jealous. These things cost more than my car. That's amazing. But yeah, so Bubba Wallace in NASCAR, he got dropped by one of his sponsors because of his actions in a race earlier this month. He and Clint Boyer, I believe, were kind of getting into it repeatedly through the race. And then when Boyer took revenge on Bubba by hitting him into the wall again, Bubba decided to park and exit the race on stream, which is really easy to do. He raged quit. And he was joking about it on Twitter because his mentions blew up with people being mad at him and he kept joking about it saying like, well, wow, I made you guys all upset just by quitting. And then his sponsor said he was fired on Twitter. I mean, what happens then? Like, this is just the sponsorship for the e-racing, right? It's not dropping him from his physical racing once we get back to that, is it? It was kind of a new sponsor. And yeah, that relationship is dead and buried. I mean, not that that's good, but it would be huge if you're like, oh no, you're off the team now because you raged quit on a stream because I think there is, I'm not trying to defend Bubba Wallace here, don't get me wrong, but there is sort of this like, but what are the consequences? Just like we were talking about with tapping somebody else, right? Like you're not actually gonna hurt their car, so it's a little more tempting. Rage quitting probably doesn't feel like as big of a deal if it's like, yeah, but this isn't the real race. Like that's gotta be in their minds. Yeah, some drivers are definitely not taking it seriously. And some drivers are also forgetting themselves in the fact that the world can hear them. So that happened to Kyle Larson, right? Yes, it did. So you wanna talk about consequences? He lost major sponsors like McDonald's. That is a huge loss. He was suspended without pay initially for his, the euphemism is a heated gamer moment. And now he's fired. And that, I mean, that is a real world consequence because it's one thing to rage quit and be like, well, that wasn't sporting, right? But no one really got hurt by the rage quitting, did they? That's just not very nice. Whereas what Kyle Larson did was he said stuff in front of the entire streaming audience and embarrassed himself and his sponsors. And that would happen if he said it in a post game or a post race interview, right? I mean, that's the real world sneaking in here. Yeah, you cannot get a more clear example of how seriously NASCAR and sponsors are taking this e-racing being the only form of motor sport going on right now than those two examples. Like I know that for the NASCAR Europe, they've decided that the races that they're going to do, the real world consequence is those points are gonna count for later whenever they get back to racing. So that will definitely make people not horse around so much. I still hope they dress funny at home, but I hope the racing is a little cleaner. Matt DiBenedetto did both. He got dropped for intentional ramming, which is one of the things we're talking about, but he did it while wearing a giraffe onesie that was not taken into account, I guess. No, and he posted a video afterwards explaining his action still in the giraffe onesie. So if you wanna go watch that video, it's pretty great. His biggest comment though was that the onesie was very hot. Yeah, they are. I can say that from experience. And then there was the thing that happened to Rick Kelly's car, which I don't even quite, but I watched that video multiple times now. I still don't understand how that happened in the game. Oh, I love weird wonky physics in racing games. Usually when I'm playing by myself, the wonky physics are, why does this car that weighs the same as mine act as a cement truck? And I'm only the one who goes flying off when I get hit. In this case, yeah, I love the digital crashes because it is a dumpster fire on wheels, literally. And nobody gets hurt. It's the best part. And I think the announcer did a fantastic job saying the car helicopter, which is exactly what it did. It's just vertical takeoff right off the track. And you can see all the drivers giggling. Jen's not kidding. Like, you know, there's a crash, the car skids off, but then starts twirling and rises up to the heavens out of the shots. It was kind of, it was funny. And like you said, everyone saw the humor in that. So there's some good times happening here as well. It's not just all drama, right? Right. So Robert Wickens, who was my favorite, still is my favorite IndyCar driver. He was paralyzed in a crash in 2018. But this year, because of e-racing, he made his return to IndyCar, because IndyCar is doing the same thing as NASCAR. And like to me, like this story got buried, obviously, because there's a lot of other news going on right now. But it's huge. He has a specialized reg at home so that he can race. And he said he felt like really great about it to be on the grid again, because as he says, he's a driver. This is what he lives for. And I would love to see more of this in the future. I really want to see like a kind of combination between the virtual and the real when we get back to actual motorsports. Oh, wow, yeah. That would be an interesting integration. Robert Wickens, this was part of his rehab. Like he was doing this kind of e-racing before the pandemic. And it just, the timing was such that he was like, I could actually compete now. If we're going to be doing e-racing, that's what I'm doing. Because he's starting to get functionality back from his paralyzed state. He's able to move better. He's still not able to move perfectly, of course. But this is helping him. That's what struck me about this, is he's not only getting to get back in the race with his fellow competitors, but it's part of his therapy. It's part of getting him back on his feet. Yeah, it's not the same as being in the paddock with everybody, of course. But as this is the closest thing for everybody to being in the paddock, you can't beat it. Yeah, I mean, I wish there was a chance that somehow this would lead to him getting so much functionality that he could get back into the paddock, right? That would be amazing. That would be incredible. I want to touch real quickly on that point about how we could keep some of the good that's going on with this. How do you combine that, do you think? I'm not sure yet. I know that for e-racing, they run series even separate from this. They run series kind of parallel to the actual series going on. So you can drive the exact same cars on the exact same tracks. They're all laser scanned, and you can run fixed setups to kind of match everything and test yourself against the pros. Can you do a whole race distance as well as they can? And I would love to see some sim racers graduate to real racing, which has happened a number of times. Gran Turismo Rang, Gran Turismo Academy, and Lucas Ordonas was one of the first winners. He has an actual racing career from that. It's been six or seven years since the first one and it proved that sim racers are real racers. Well, thanks, Jen, for bringing this inside. Appreciate it. Really interested in where this all ends up in the end. Can we come to watch? Oh, sorry. Thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. Racing stories end up there sometimes. In fact, if you have one, you can submit it. You can vote on stories that mean something to you. It's a good tech conversation happening at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's. This one comes in from Mink. Mink says, thought you might find this quote from Goldman Sachs on teleworking interesting as it very much mirrors what we've been hearing just from an unusual source. Then he quotes, if you had asked any of us, if you could have run the financial market system with less than or more than 95% of our people working from home, we probably all would have had a fair bit of skepticism about that. This quote goes on to say, while you may be unhappy with the values of assets in the market right now, the actual functioning of markets, it's functioning properly, where the technology is functioning quite effectively, which a number of us were quite concerned about when this began. That was Goldman Sachs president and COO John Waldron, which was a client market update call that Mink found available on their podcast feed. So say what you will about bankers. Sounds like a lot of them can work from home. Yeah, they didn't think they could. And I wonder what effect this will have on the already dwindling physical presence in markets. So much of it is electronic already. And they're showing that you can basically do it with no one around. Do we need to have people around for it? So a question that's being applied to so many other things as well. Absolutely. Something that we do need is patrons at our master and grandmaster levels so much, we're going to give them a shout out right now. Adam Carr, Martin James and Bjorn Andre. Also thanks to Jen Cutter for being with us today. Jen, you always bring so much wisdom. Where can people keep up with the rest of your work? I would always recommend following me at Twitter, which is at Jen Cutter, Jen with two N's. And then I have a new project going up on Mother's Day. So I will be announcing it on Twitter first and sending out the relevant links there. Jen Cutter.com, that's two N's and Jen. Don't forget also two T's in Cutter, Jen Cutter.com. Hey, I had the pleasure of being on Ken Ray's show in a few minutes. It's a wonderful show daily Monday through Friday. Each day is a snippet of a longer conversation with his guest for that week about Apple news, which is what Ken covers on Mac OS Ken. So it's another take on that, a very conversational take, really fun to be on. And he has great guests besides me. If you want to go check it out, subscribe by searching for In A Few Minutes in your podcast app. And thanks to everybody who's been sending along these kinds of suggestions to share the love with other creators and other places that deserve it. We've got a couple already, but we need more feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com and you can also support our show at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash Patreon. Our email address is feedback at DailyTechNewsShow.com. If you got feedback, we want it. We're also live Monday through Friday, 4.30 p.m. Eastern. That's 20 30 UTC. And you can find out more at DailyTechNewsShow.com slash live. 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