 Coming up on DTNs, Zoom wants to sell its video conferencing tech to others, HP's latest salvo in the battle for the creative computing class and Microsoft's data on the coming hybrid workplace. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, March 22nd, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Joining us once again, host of AVXL, Patrick Norton is back on the show. How's it going, Patrick? It's going extremely well. Metaphysical conversations and philosophy aside. Oh, indeed, we were just having those sorts of things about Jack Dorsey's 2.9 million sale of his first tweet. We were also talking about our favorite backup drives and tacos. Get that wider conversation on our expanded show, Good Day Internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNs. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. A fire at a factory owned by a subsidiary of auto chipmaker Rene says electronics looks to worsen the ongoing semiconductor shortage with the company predicting at least a month to resume operations. Two thirds of the chips made at the factory were automotive chips. U.S. Representative Dave Siciline told Axios that a house judiciary subcommittee on antitrust plans to create a series of smaller antitrust bills targeting major technology companies. Saying the number could be 10 or more. He said the approach would let more bipartisan support happen on targeted issues and would make it harder for large tech companies to coordinate on lobbying against one larger antitrust bill. Bydance's new first games unit acquired the Shanghai based gaming studio Monton, Muntan technology makers of the MOBA mobile legends and a deal that Reuters sources say is worth $4 billion. Bydance reportedly outbid 10 cents, which makes competing MOBAs honor of Kings and leagues of legends. Senior advisor to President Trump Jason Miller told Fox News that the former president will return to social media in quote about two or three months with quote his own platform. Miller predicted the platform will attract tens of millions of users but said President Trump is conducting meetings with several companies about the platform indicating it is still in the planning stages. The South Korean newspaper Dong-a Ilbo sources say that negotiations for LG to sell its phone business to a group including Volkswagen have failed to reach a deal. LG has reportedly shelved a planned first half rollout of new smartphones and may shutter the business entirely. Maybe they should just make their phone business an NFT. Yeah, you could get $2.9 million. All right, let's talk a little more about HomePods. Little news around HomePods. Bloomberg and iFixit confirmed that the HomePod mini includes an inactive temperature and humidity sensor buried in the bottom edge of the case. That's why iFixit missed it on the first round because it's in the case facing out near the power cable. Mark Gurman sources say Apple considered using the sensor to connect with smart thermostats as well as automatically triggering other actions. They could still do that with a firmware update. Gurman sources also say that Apple has been developing new speakers with screens and cameras but that no launch is imminent. Ooh, the Apple Echo show. Yes, the Apple HomePod show. Something like that, yeah. E-Show, iShow, the iShow. Listen, somebody please tell me why I should not be more enraged that there is a sensor buried in the HomePod mini that might... I've seen a lot of rage. Oh, I've seen a lot of rage. Yeah, from people saying this is exactly what they do. Here they go again. Yeah, they get some smart speaker in your house and then all of a sudden they're going to turn other things on and they're going to be monitoring stuff. It's like temperature and humidity. Okay. Well, sure. That is a privacy point, I guess. If you don't want to ever be able to share that with anybody or have it reported. I'm going to sell it to Big Weather. Exactly. It's just one of those things where it's like, I don't know. Is this the sort of thing that is so upsetting, especially because, listen, so Apple's just continuing the HomePod. HomePod mini has been selling pretty well. They're all in on that. The idea that it would be able to connect to a smart thermostat or, I don't know, some other way that, you know, might be able to measure the humidity in your house. That all makes sense to me. I just don't know why people are so up in arms about something where... I guess it's the hidden quality of it. Yeah, it's a thing they didn't tell us about in a smart speaker, which there's just kind of a general aura of those things. They're always spying on you. They're always spying on you. Here they go again. Smart speakers. I mean, the rage is thin. Given that you're not going to find out about it until there's... Maybe they're going to do an update. They're going to bring a feature. There's going to be 2,000 pages of lawyer-generated boilerplate that you're going to agree to. They're probably going to do anonymized... Can we anonymously browse your... People are looking for reasons to rage. And given, you know, most of the people buying this are so deep in the Apple ecosystem. Apple pretty much knows everywhere they go do think... Anonymized in the most part. You know, maybe less anonymized than others. But the idea of getting... I don't know. It seems real slim to get raged about. Yeah. Because the other alternatives... This is akin to Bluetooth... There being a Bluetooth radio in the iPod Touch before they had Bluetooth support for the iPod Touch. And then later, they did a firmware update. Suddenly the iPod Touch could support Bluetooth. I fully expect them at some point to push a firmware update to the HomePod Mini and be like, oh, HomeKit now supports, you know, different room temperatures with your thermostat thanks to this sensor. Your Ecobee can use your HomePod Mini as a remote sensor. Because I was literally thinking if they told people the sensors were there, there would be outrage that the sensors weren't doing anything useful from the moment they bought them. I know. Yeah. That's another way to look at this is, oh, cool. Will the HomePod Mini soon be able to work with my Ecobee? That would be great. I'm more enraged. On Snobo S-Cast this week, I thought Brother Tech had a great analysis of the fact that HomePod being phased out, granted it was a bit of a failure, might be an indication that Apple is ready to put out a new product. Because that's what happens with Macs when a Mac stops selling. It usually means, ah, they've got a new model in the works. So I was more outraged with German sources saying that no new launch of a new speaker is imminent. I'm like, oh, man, I would have thought that this would be the perfect time. We're expecting an April announcement now, since it doesn't look like there's going to be one in March. I don't know. The new HomePod Mini with a screen, that's actually more interesting to me than any of this stuff. The HomePod Hub or something like that. Something like that. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, it's perfect for Apple. Agreed. Well, Zoom will begin selling access to its API for companies to embed video calling into their own products. The service will use Zoom's technology, but not carry any Zoom branding. Companies pay .0035 cents per minute after the first 10,000 minutes of use per month. It's not that much, but would add up, obviously. This could lead a healthcare provider to add video calling to its app or a social media company to embed live streaming. Companies could integrate Zoom previously, but the Zoom brand remained in those integrations. So this will put Zoom in competition with similar offerings from Amazon and Twilio. This comes as a broader effort to unify the company's developer initiatives. There's now a central hub for developer resources at developer.zoom.us, and the company's also launching a new dashboard with more detail to analytics and usage statistics. So yeah, everybody's expecting video conferencing to decline a little bit as people start going back into the office. We're going to talk about that in a little bit. So Zoom trying to get ahead of that and say, okay, what other revenue streams can we have going in? And this is them doing what Amazon did with AWS. We had to build this provider for us to do Amazon.com. Let's try to make money off of it, and it worked great. I'm not saying it's going to work great for Zoom, but this is Zoom trying to do the same thing. We built a platform for video conferencing. So now let's take that platform that we've been using and license it out to others so that they can put it, you know, your bank can put it in an app so you could Zoom conference with tech support, stuff like that. You know, the Zoom thing is, it's funny because it is the Kleenex of... It has become that, yeah. It has become that, and it's not because it's the best product. It's certainly the best product for some people, and I got no problem with Zoom, but every time someone says, oh, let's get on a Zoom call, I'm like, well, for our purposes, is that the best? Here are some other options. Certain other platforms will allow me, as a podcast producer, to download a WAV file, for example, rather than the crappier MP3 file. There are lots of options, but Zoom has become the household name. That is what people equate what we have been doing, you know, whether it's kids at school or people who are unable to go to the office to be doing, and so it makes sense that the company is expanding on that success. I think something to think about here is, I mean, you want to talk about stepping in dog group and finding a bag of gold. So, you know, the quote on this is the founder and chief executive officer, Eric Juan. In fiscal year 2021, we significantly scaled our business to provide critical communications and collaborative services right in response to the pandemic. So just to put this into perspective, they made $623 million in 2019. They made $2.65 billion in 2020. Huge scale in business, which means a huge scale in infrastructure, which means the nightmare for this crew is assuming they didn't run everything on Amazon Web Services, you know what I mean, where they're doing it, where they're paying for it to use somebody else at services, assuming they invested a lot of this, they want to keep that hardware running. I would like if Zoom maybe did some things to improve the interface, the user experience, the audio quality and the ability to attach something other than a webcam to it, but I have my own particular access to grind with almost every video conferencing platform I've used, especially Skype, which we're on right now. But Spotify had a good year. Netflix had a great year, but probably the best year of all, it's like way over something nuts, like 370% revenue increase over the previous year in the fourth quarter. This is nuts. And so they probably have staggering amounts of money invested in all of this infrastructure, which they're a little worried about, given what's happening in our next story. Yeah, yeah. Before we get there though, I do want to point out that back in December, Zoom signed a multi-year contract with AWS. They basically run on AWS Oracle and some of their own stuff, so... Oh, that's funny. So it's, I think your point is still well-made, even if it's not their own hardware that they're running on, is they built a system. You know, they spent a lot of money creating a system that works at a high capacity. They want to keep that capacity up. You're absolutely right. But to your point, we are headed back into the office. Microsoft will start a limited reopening of its own headquarters in Redmond and Seattle on March 29th. This comes as stage four of Microsoft's six-stage reopening plan, the soft reopening. Though offices are reopening, Microsoft isn't ready to just get back to businesses usual, considering working from home part-time as standard. To that effect, company also released its work trend index report. This isn't just about Microsoft. This is about everybody. They studied 30,000 people across 31 countries, along with using data from Microsoft 365 and LinkedIn. The study found that 73% of respondents want to continue with flexible remote work. They want the option to work from home sometimes. Hybrid work seems to be the order of the day because 67% want more in-person time with work teams. Comparing February 2020 with February 2021, self-reported productivity remained the same. Didn't go down, didn't go up. But Microsoft found that the intensity of work increased significantly. Time in Microsoft teams increased two and a half times. Average meeting times increased 28%. If you thought that wasn't possible, well, it happened. That's exacerbated by the fact that 62% of meetings weren't planned. They were ad hoc. Hey, can you jump on teams for a second? We need to talk about this. 54% of employees feel overworked as a result of all of this. Generation Z was found to struggle the most with engaging in meetings and calls in the past year. However, the switch to remote work has opened up jobs to new applicants. An analysis of the LinkedIn economic graph shows that women, Gen Z, and those without a graduate degree are most likely to apply for remote jobs, and there were a lot more of those jobs for them to apply for. But there's also a worker disconnect. 46% say their employer does not help with remote work expenses. 37% say their company is asking too much of them right now, given the situation. And if you feel satisfied and thriving, you're probably a millennial or Gen X male. If you feel like you're just surviving or struggling, according to this survey anyway, Gen Z, a woman, or a frontline worker. So we are now headed into the second grade experiment. At this time last year, on this very show, we were talking about, oh my gosh, so many people are going to have to work from home. This is a big experiment. We're going to find out all these things about what works from work from home and what doesn't. And now we're about to begin another new experiment, which is, well, we figured out what works for work from home. So we're going to let people continue to do that some of the time. But we want to bring them back into the office some of the time. So the experiment for 2021 is hybrid. Nobody's ever done it at this scale. It's all the same things we said last year. Nobody's ever done hybrid at this scale. We'll find out, does it really work? Is it good to have people working in the office sometimes and working from home the rest of the time? What works about it? What does it work? The rules, et cetera. You know, some of the numbers that you mentioned, Tom, one that stuck out to me was meeting times increasing 20%. Wow. Like everyone's just having more meetings. No. Well, it's sort of like, remember when we were all in an office and Patrick might say to me, Sarah, do you have a second? And we, you know, do a little, you know, offline situation and we go about our day. Was that a meeting? No, not really. It was just sort of, that's what happens all the time when you're in an office with people that you are working with and collaborating with. Well, you can't do that when everybody's at home. So this whole hybrid thing to me is what I think is going to be the most interesting part about it is, and we've touched on this on the show before, is which people who are not there, you know, on any given day where there might be a few people, key members of your team that are in the office and you're not because you're on your own schedule that have, you know, a pow-wow of sorts, a meeting of sorts and you're not involved or it's too hard to get you involved and that affects your work going forward. So, I mean, it's interesting looking at this because I was reading an article last week like Target's given up 30% of its office space in, I want to say, downtown Minneapolis. I've had neighbors around here in St. Louis, where they were basically like, well, productivity's up and everybody's happy, but I think our manager misses being able to seize domain at their desks in front of him. So they're coming back into the office. I can't imagine. So Gen Z, that's like 96-ish. People are in there like just at home. 24 and younger usually around there. Yes. I can't imagine. As somebody who, you know, is a Gen X male and has dealt with a lot of office situations and is used to dealing with new situations, like I've been in some insane online meetings in the last year and I can't imagine what it would be like in your first job dealing with, you know, all of these people. Basically, in some cases, shouting each other on Zoom, you know, where you're sitting there with your eyes this big and, you know, can I join in? Do I say something? I mean, what a nightmare because all the things you learn in an office, you're not learning remotely. And it's, I will say, one of the big messes I worked with with one organization last year where some people emailed, some people used the chat in Google, some people used proprietary, like, you know, somebody used a secure chat line, some people occasionally phoned, and then there were two different video messaging systems being used. And it was a nightmare because person A would text you, but the other person, or not text, would text you in Gmail, then you would have to contact somebody else and, like, signal. And it's messy. I cannot, and this was maybe with a group of 10 people, and it was a nightmare. I cannot imagine what it's like for an organization the size of Microsoft. It's going to be really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Microsoft, in its article, talking a lot about the hardware you need, of course, you know, multiple screens to have the people who aren't in, be present in the same rooms as the people who are in. So if you want to get ahead of the game right now, start your medium think piece on the asymmetry of the hybrid workplace. That is one of the first ones I expect to see, is, you know, how people who are working from home in the hybrid workplace are left out of meetings because the people in the office can easier interact. It's definitely coming. We're going to get that kind of stuff. Hey, folks, join in the conversation in our Discord. We're all in the same level playing field there. You can join it by linking to a Patreon account at patreon.com slash dtns. HP refreshed the Envy X360 15 laptop. That's their 15-inch laptop. Now starts at $900 if you want an Intel 11th gen core processor or a little cheaper $750 if you want the AMD Ryzen 7 processors. Both 15-inch models weigh in at 1.8 kilograms. Come with a magnetic active pen. You want to do a little art. Offer optional 4K OLED displays. There's also a 17.3-inch HP Envy 17 with Intel 11th gen processors. That one has options for up to a terabyte drive and 32 gigabytes of RAM. That one also starts at $999. All three of these laptops include a 19% larger touchpad than the previous gen. Optional NVIDIA MX450 graphics available for pre-order now shipping in April. And HP pushing that creator line also announced the HP 930 Creator wireless mouse has created right in the name seven programmable buttons, 12-week battery life, pairs up to three devices. It's a nice mouse. $90, chip in later this spring. HP told Therat.com, quote, the HP Envy X360 15 and HP Envy 17 are designed for the way creators are working now, giving people the freedom to create and stay connected from anywhere. These are nice incremental upgrades of the HP Envy line for sure. I don't think there's any debating that. But we're really seeing, you know, the war for the mind of the creator. If you're the creator class, they want your money, whether they be Apple, HP, Intel, or somebody else, right, Patrick? Well, you know, I think they want the influencer class more than the actual creators, maybe. Wow, because one brings the other. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, okay, first up, Apple's really interesting because of their move to their own processors and the staggering performance bump that brings, like I'm actually thinking about going back to Apple, which is something I never thought I'd say. You know, these are nice expected incremental upgrades, being able to attach a mouse to three computers. You know, that's like one more than most of, I think, the mice I've seen out there. Multiple mouse attachments is not, you know, that unusual, like two computers. I want to see AMD produce more mobile parts and have them more available because of the really incredible performance on that. The other thing is, you know, we were talking earlier, Good Day Internet, is look, if you've got $500 to $700 for a laptop, it's kind of amazing how much, you know, if you shop carefully, it's kind of amazing how much performance you're getting at this point. You know, if you, for everybody who's not, say, editing massive video files or working with staggeringly large static files, almost any laptop at this point is going to give you an excellent experience for day-to-day work. You know, it's also kind of crazy looking at these, somebody actually really pushing a 17-inch laptop because that's something that people, everybody did because there was always a market for that, but it's kind of funny to have that being like, forget about your desktop, look at our great big screen on this laptop. And by the way, you're going to have to buy a new laptop bag for that because it's not going to fit in anything you own currently, which sounds silly until you're carrying a $3,000 laptop that actually literally won't fit in any bag you own and you're terrified to leave the house with it, which kind of defeats the purpose of having your fantastic mobile environment. They look nice though. Oh, I also have to, I should say that I have to disclose I was a host of an HP data-sized events in the recent past, so don't believe anything I say about HP because they paid me money from an entire laptop. Fair enough, fair enough. I mean, the 17-inch thing is, it's kind of funny that forum factor coming back around. I had a 17-inch MacBook Pro back in, I don't know, 2011? Yeah, something like that. And at the time, I was doing some video editing, so I was like, this is great. Like, this is my main computer. This is what I'm going to use. This is the best screen and power that I need. But Patrick, you're right. It was actually very specific about what I could put that in because it was huge. I actually still have it, it's around here somewhere. But yeah, to just sort of be like, yeah, 17 inches, most people don't have ways to be portable with something that's supposed to be portable, and that's the whole selling point about it is that it's portable. It's big. I'm giggling because I had an uncle who is six foot four and probably a little bit maybe even wider than I am in the shoulders. And I was like, you don't want that laptop. It's too big. And he got it. And like, three months later, it was like, I see what you mean about the big laptops. I'm now envisioning you with a backpack sticking out of either side of your shoulders because the laptop screen is so big. Yeah. I mean, I had to use it recently because my old MacBook Pro had died. And I was like, well, it still works. But oh my God, I can't believe this form factor was something that I was using all this time. Well, the preservation group Hidden Palace, have you heard of them, has obtained 752 PS2 games, prototypes and demos from not only collectors, but also shutter developers and defunct media outlets as part of a project deluge initiative. God of War two. Katamari, Demacy. Katamari, Domacy. Domacy. Okami and the Ratchet and Clank series all there along with E3 demos like Shadow of the Colossus and some rough alpha games for titles like Def Jam, Fight for New York and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3. Hidden Palace says it's checked for differences from retail versions and to make sure that the prototypes will run in emulators. Yeah, this is a history project. This is if you want to see, if you're like into the special features, if you want to see what it was like before it was released, what are some of the things they tried and didn't work or got rid of? This is a treasure trove of that kind of thing. Patrick, you had a really good comparison to music for this. Yeah, I was like, this is like when you buy that reissue of an album and they have the demos and the alternate takes. And if the artist really despises you a bunch of remixes of it. So I was laughing because, you know, as again, we're talking about good day internet. It's, you know, a lot of these are final, they're featuring complete. They probably won't run. There's already issues with the PS2 only emulator only being in about 90%. So it's really, it's like, oh, so that's what that sounded like before we went in the studio. Why? And for good day internet. For good day internet listeners. My drive just finished copying over in case you were wondering. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Javon in Jamaica who has more ideas about what we should do with our DTNS meets twist. That's the Speak in Science crossover show that's coming up in April. Javon says, how about the question of when we will be able to download edible fast food? Javon says, I want to download and eat a pizza. Can't be difficult if we perfect teleportation, right? Or should we be making more intelligent machine robots or should we be making ourselves more intelligent? For example, let's inject nanoparticles into our own bodies. Enhanced physical, mental, social, health abilities. Yeah, good stuff. Yeah. So don't forget we're doing a crossover with this week in Science, April 17th at 7 p.m. eastern time. More details to follow. But what do you want us to talk about with Dr. Kiki and Blair and Justin and me and Sarah and Roger? So keep those emails coming. Thank you, Javon. That's a good one. Indeed. And if you have any other questions, comments, ideas, thoughts about anything that we talk about in any of our shows, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also, I'd like to shout out patrons from all over the world. To them, they include DeGrascia A. Daniels, Dustin Campbell and Andrew Bradley. Also, thanks to our brand new boss, Joshua Tunt, who just started backing us on Patreon. So thank you, new boss. Also, thanks to Patrick Norton for being with us today. Patrick, what's been going on at AVXL? Oh, we're talking about subwifers and some of the craziness with home theater and audio and the nightmare of well, just a lot of active noise cancelling headphones are awful. And I got a favor to ask everybody out there. If you've got a tech question, not just a home theater question, do me a favor tweet at Patrick Norton, because I'm looking for some tech questions. All right, very exciting. Hey folks, if you speak Spanish or you know somebody who speaks Spanish and you would like some tech headlines in Spanish, we have a show for you. Dano 5 minutos y te daremos las noticias mas importantes en el mundo de la tecnología. O te devolvemos tu dinero. Escucha, noticias de tecnología express disponible en español. You can find it at dailytechnusho.com slash n-t-x. We're live Monday through Friday on this show at 4 30 p.m. Eastern. That's 2030 UTC and you can find out more at dailytechnusho.com slash live and guess what? We're going to do this all again tomorrow. I'll be back with Peter Wells. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program.