 Coming up on DTNS Outlook becomes a web app, good news and bad news for cryptocurrency and the first trickle of CES products announcements begin with Dell monitors. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, January 5th, 2021 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Columbus, Ohio. I'm Rob Dunwood. And I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. Yes. The part of Chris Ashley will be played by Rob Dunwood today if you're expecting Chris, he had an appointment ran long. So, Rob, thank you for stepping in for him. It was good. We were talking about junkyard workouts and arugula and all kinds of good stuff on good day internet. Get that extended show. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Qualcomm launched a budget chipset, also got a new CEO. The eight nanometer Snapdragon 485G has an integrated X51 modem for 5G. Qualcomm claims that 480 supports the Quick Charge 4 plus 120 frames per second on 1080p displays, supports cameras up to 64 megapixels and offers a triple ISP to let it capture images from three cameras at once. The first phones with a Snapdragon 485G are expected later in Q1 of this year. Qualcomm also announced that its CEO, Steve Malenkov, will step down in June. Qualcomm's president, Cristiano Amalan, will oversee its which oversaw its 5G strategy will take over in the CEO role. Singapore confirmed the law enforcement officers may access the data of the Trace Together contact tracing system. And if you haven't been keeping track, 78 percent of Singapore's residents, that's about 4.2 million people, have now adopted Trace Together. It records anonymized contact, does not use GPS location, but there's some data there that could be accessed. And authorized officers can access it under the Criminal Procedure Code for purposes of safety and security. OnePlus is bringing the Nord N10 5G and N100 phones to the U.S. on January 15th. The handsets will be available unlocked from OnePlus, also from T-Mobile and Metro. The N10 5G starts at $299 with a Snapdragon 690 chipset, sub six gigahertz 5G support, and a 90 hertz screen. The N100 starts at $179 with a Snapdragon 460 system on a chip, 5000 milliamp battery, and a 6.52 inch HD plus display. Those are some nice prices for sure. Amazon has leased its own cargo planes since 2016, but now it actually owns a few. Amazon bought 11 used Boeing 767 300 jets from Delta and WestJet. Prices for planes have fallen, of course, as demand for air travel fell throughout 2020, so Amazon's picking them up at a discount. It will continue to use third parties to operate the planes, as it does for its leased aircraft. A report by top10vpn.com estimates that India lost $4 billion in productivity due to internet shutdowns in 2020. India blacked out or curbed 8,927 hours of bandwidth usage in 2020, primarily in Kashmir. Belarus was second at $336.4 million lost, followed by Myanmar and Yemen. Countries without publicly available data, like China and North Korea, were not included in the study. All right, let's talk a little more about smart home stuff. Let's do it. Luxury smart home company Savant Systems bought GE lighting back in May of 2020 and has now relaunched the C by GE smart lighting brand under the name Sync. That's spelled with a C, C, Y, and C. A new app is coming in March that is promised to be more user friendly, also customizable. Sync is also launching an outdoor smart plug in March, an indoor security camera in May, and a smart switch for ceiling fans in June. Nice for the summer. The Sync indoor camera can record to the cloud or SD cards and is a built-in privacy shutter to cover the lens if you so desire. A thermostat is also coming sometime later this year. Yeah, I mean, on the business side, it's interesting to see what Savant is doing with GE lighting and it's expanding it, you know, giving it a arguably better brand name. Although Sync's spelled with a C, I think it's probably going to throw some people off here and there, but overall, it's another maker of good smart home stuff, which I don't know about you, Rob, but I welcome lots of choices anyway. I'm definitely all for choices just because every time I walk in the looser home depot, the prices seem to seem to be, you know, at least staying where they are. They aren't getting more expensive, which is generally the case. So I like the competition. I'm actually kind of surprised that GE got out of the business, that's probably not the best way to say they necessarily get out of the business, but they just got out of this particular line. But it seems like this would be something that would be right up GE's wheelhouse. So it's kind of interesting that they decided to shutter this part of their business. Yeah, I don't keep up with GE, so I can't say, you know, what their whole corporate strategy is these days, but it does seem like Internet of Things smart home is a growth industry. And so smart of Savant, if for whatever reason, it didn't make sense on GE's side to keep in this to snap it up. And it's a luxury smart home company. So I imagine these aren't going to be the cheaper items on the shelf when you walk in there. And it remains to be seen what about them is luxury. But you know, SD card, that's not a luxury item, but it's a nice option to have. Not all of these cameras come with that. The Nest cams haven't, you know, etc. Built-in privacy shutter, you know, that's again, that's a nice add-on. Again, I'm not sure I call that luxury, but maybe that's where they're going to go with, like, oh, we're going to be feature rich. We're going to have, you know, good stuff on our options. Yeah. I mean, to your point, Rob, I think that having more choice, especially when you're walking into some of the stores that have a lot of choices already, this luxury brand is, sure, maybe a few more bells and whistles, but it also helps keep the prices down for the category in general, because people do have lots of choices. If you're thinking of starting a smart home from scratch, you know, you get a couple light bulbs, maybe, you know, get some smart switches, you know, you add a security camera somewhere. You have a lot of different companies that want to help you do that. So this is yet another, and I don't think they can price anything too crazy above the rest where people won't get on board. Yeah, I agree. So like I said, I'm all for more competition here just because, you know, these type of devices, you know, they can become very expensive. So if you can get, you know, like a higher end, as you said, Sarah, that'll push it down. That's good for consumers. Yeah. Twitter has acquired the social broadcasting and podcast app Breaker. Breaker's team will work on Twitter's audio networking feature Twitter Spaces as well as, quote, improve the health of the public conversation. But this doesn't mean Twitter's getting into podcasting. In fact, it means Breaker's employees are getting out of podcasting. Breaker will shut down its apps and services on January 15th with users able to export their OPML files so they can transfer their subscriptions to another podcasting app. Any podcasters broadcasting through Breaker can do the same thing move their RSS feeds elsewhere. In terms of the deal, we're not disclosed. This does, however, follow Amazon's purchase of Wondery last week. A lot of people thought Apple might purchase Wondery, but it ended up being Amazon. Wondery was a long line of content acquisition. So Amazon has got Wondery's podcast and will add them to Amazon Music, possibly Audible, just like Sirius bought Stitcher, Spotify, bought everybody else, it seems like. So this is an interesting change in that story where Twitter is buying Breaker for its technology and specifically for its audio technology, not for its podcasting technology. Yeah, this was a little confusing to me at first because I wasn't a Breaker user. As I understand it, Breaker was trying to set itself apart among a sea of podcast apps by saying, well, this is more of a social app. Rob Dunwood loves an episode of such and such podcasts. We as friends in the Breaker app can have a little bit more back and forth about, oh, you should watch or listen to this, or here's something that happened, and there's a little bit more of that friend capability that most podcast apps don't really have. You can ask somebody, hey, what's a new podcast I should listen to? And then they tell you and you look it up yourself. So there was more of that built in. But yeah, this is not what Twitter is doing. The whole Twitter spaces thing is a clubhouse competitor, as I understand it. It's the idea of Twitter saying in certain situations, you kind of take it to the audio room, and then you have trusted sources helping you with conversations based on your friend list and all of that stuff. And so what Breaker has in its underlying technology seems like that's all Twitter really cares about is how do we make this as social as possible? So it's a better experience than what is already out there because people have a lot of problems with clubhouse. Yeah, if you guys remember, not a week ago, I was on a show and we you know, our prediction show. And this is one of the things that I thought you were going to see Twitter's, Facebook's, Instagram's of the world get into clubhouse is it's got a lot of issues with it. But it's a it's a it's a great idea. People love to be on there. So if you can get people talking to each other, you know, in these in these rooms that Twitter put now, I think they're going to look at, you know, you know, more acquisitions potentially to come, you know, and add to that technology just so that they can do it and not be last. I mean, clubhouse is kind of there. But there's opportunity for these big billion dollar companies to get into the space and not get edged out by a very, very small company at this point. And Tech Ridge mentioned in its article that in the Valley anyway, Silicon Valley these days, the joke is every podcast company sells for $300 million, which is not a lot when it comes to VCs and acquisitions and all that kind of the idea of being, well, podcast companies aren't really worth that much. You're not going to get a big exit out of them. We don't know how much Twitter paid for this. But to me, it's less about that and more about maybe what we're seeing is a change in that binge of like, we need to buy up content, we need to buy up content and more of a change to well, maybe it's less about podcasting and more about audio. And I think that's really smart. Yeah, I think this is an aqua hire as much as anything. You know, the folks at Breaker, they know what they're doing as far as making things sound good and compressing stuff and, you know, and still having decent quality, which is what, you know, a platform like a clubhouse or what Twitter's doing, you know, they're going to have to do something with that. So it makes sense that they would buy a company like this. Yeah, absolutely. Well, according to a leaked test build obtained by Windows Central, Microsoft is building a new Outlook app to replace the built-in mail and calendar apps on Windows 10, as well as the Mac OS client and Outlook web access versions, code named product Monarch, Project Monarch rather, and one Outlook. The app is designed for large screen experiences. So the aim is to offer the same UI and design on all platforms, though it's supposedly similar to the current Outlook web app. Windows Central claims that will be a universal web app with a smaller footprint and accessible to all Outlook users, whether or not they're free or business users, and it will integrate with the OS for notifications and also offline storage. The new version of Outlook might launch in preview by the end of this year and then release on Mac and Windows in 2022. So not right around the corner, but interesting nonetheless. Rob, what do you think? I am surprised that it took Microsoft this long. I'm surprised and I'm not surprised. Microsoft is a giant enterprise platform where they've got to keep stuff around forever. Therefore, they have kept, you know, their mail apps around forever. But Gmail has showed everyone the way. Put this stuff in a browser and just, it doesn't matter what you use it from. It looks the same wherever you log into it at. It doesn't matter if you're on a Mac or a PC or even on your phone. It all just kind of works and this makes perfect sense because I know that we're talking to a relatively tech-savvy group, but my gut tells me most people aren't using the native email client on their PC unless they're using Outlook or they're connecting it to some back office or something like that. So this kind of just makes sense to me. Yeah, I have a little of that feeling that the seniors have when the freshmen come in where I'm like, man, I had to use Entourage on the Mac back in the day. And we had Outlook was just this behemoth of a program on Windows. Now everybody's going to get this nice smooth streamlined thing. I'm a little jealous because I don't have to use Outlook anymore and I don't use it. But yeah, I think this is a super smart move for Microsoft. And a little note that we're seeing another example of a web app, not in this case for game streaming like we've seen recently, but for productivity software because it's easy to make it look and work the same way across platforms. I hope this is the earliest beginning of a trend there. Hey folks, what do you want to hear us talk about on the show? One way to let us know is our subreddit. You can submit stories and vote on them there, dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. We have three pieces of news in the cryptocurrency world to talk over for you. The U.S. Office of the Comptroller of Currency, or commonly called among people who know about it, the OCC published interpretive letter 1174. That letter says that banks can use stable coins. Stable coins are virtual currencies linked to fiat currencies that keeps their value from fluctuating. So the most common ones are like, this stable coin is linked to the dollar. So one stable coin is always a dollar. There are other examples, some that are linked to baskets of currencies. That's what Libra wanted to do back when it was still called Libra. A stablecoin blockchain works faster and more efficiently and it can handle transactions even when banks are closed, meaning your bank transfers don't have to start and end on business days or happen during business hours. Anybody who does transfers regularly knows that if you do it on Saturday, it's not even going to start till Monday and it usually takes till Wednesday or Thursday to actually finish. This would end that. Well, that's the good news. On the other end of the cryptocurrency news spectrum, the U.S. Financial Crimes Enforcement Network is proposing requiring financial institutions to collect personal information like name and address for anyone involved in large cryptocurrency transactions. Doesn't matter whether you're using your own private wallet or a service like Coinbase. Well, Square CEO Jack Dorsey, yes, he's also Twitter CEO, but in this case, he's speaking as the CEO of Square, said that would drive users outside of the United States because they wouldn't want to hand over that information and would actually have the effect of decreasing transparency rather than increasing it. Also, Singapore similarly is now requiring any entity dealing in cryptocurrencies to be licensed. So there's more restrictions going on there. All right, back to some more positive news. JPMorgan said Tuesday that if Bitcoin continues to be established as a safe haven asset similar to gold that they think it could rise as high as $146,000 per coin. Investors have been driving up the cost of Bitcoin as they see it as a hedge against inflation and an alternative to the sinking dollar. To sum up, investors are pushing Bitcoin higher. Regulators in the U.S. may drive crypto users outside the U.S., but also different regulators in the U.S. may make bank transfers faster. Oh wow, where do we start on this? I mean, if we start with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of Currency or OCC saying, okay, if you're a bank, you can use stablecoins. If you've got somebody who's banking with you and they're trying to make a transaction and I'm that person, I am very incentivized to be like, okay, let me get on the stablecoin train because I want the money that I'm sending to Rob Friday night to get there Friday night or Saturday morning. And you don't even have to know anything about the stablecoin to be clear. Like the bank uses the stablecoin between the banks. You just go transfer the money and it happens super fast. And that's what I love about that. I just can't imagine a bank would be like, eh, no, we'll just do it the old way. No, I think the banks would like to do this. And I think there was encouragement. And the OCC has been very forward looking. The OCC back in the day is the one that got internet banking off the ground when there was a lot of concern about the security of internet banking. And the reason you can actually go and check your balances and do all that stuff is the OCC issued early guidance on that stuff. Yeah, this is this is interesting on multiple fronts. It's, you know, the banks are wanting to do this. And the banks, I mean, they are heavily regulated by at least in the United States by you know, the FTC, you know, they, you know, they are very they're the government for all practical purposes. So you have the government is saying, yeah, we need to get into this, but it's still the government. So we're just going to do it in a way that is actually going to hurt us more than help by forcing people or giving people, you know, very good reason to bank outside of the United States by just, you know, the, you know, the regulations on how they're thinking they're going to make you register for this stuff. But to me, it is all, it is all interesting. You know, it's all, it's all long in a two for me. They should have been doing this a little while ago. I have been into cryptocurrency now for eight or nine years and it's just, you know, this, this wave is coming. So, you know, the, the regulators need to figure out how to get in front of this, you know, or the people developing the technology are going to help them figure it out for them. You're liking that $146,000 possibility. I have no complaints. I mean, we'll see. We'll see. There's, there's a lot of things and JP Morgan even says there's a lot of reasons why that might not happen. But we think it could. And going, going to our Twitch chat bio cow who works in the banking industry notes banks move slow. So this, this instant transfer thing is not going to be showing up next month. Maybe not even showing up this year because they all have to build the system and test it and be, you know, sure that it works securely and all that. But man, I mean, a little peek behind the curtain. I pay myself from some brilliant LLC by a bank transfer. And so while Sarah and Roger get paid on the payday, I always forget to set mine up earlier. And so I always get paid three days to five days later because I'm, I'm having to wait for the bank transfer to happen instead of the other way of doing it. So I would like this to happen soon. You know, on the, on the other side of this, Jack Dorsey and certainly others pushing against this financial crimes enforcement network proposal to require financial institutions to get personal information from people who are trading some crypto. And maybe those transactions are pretty big. I know a lot of people are going to say, well, this is probably for tax purposes, really more than anything, you know, so people can't get away with cashing out on a bunch of stuff that the US would like to keep more handle on. But, but Dorsey's saying, you know, there's privacy issues here. This is the sort of thing where if I request something from Tom and Tom has a square account and now Tom has to, you know, disclose some information that he wasn't supposed to before or didn't have to anyway, then that provides a little bit of a roadblock. And yeah, I can see why people would say, well, hold on a second, I don't have to do this with a US company at all. Yeah, let me let me just use a wallet organization that's outside the US. So I don't have to mess with it. Yeah. All right, we got some products. Let's talk about them. Let's do it with CES starting a week later than usual. Nobody is there really, but we're still following it. We've got more runway for early product announcements and Dell jumping in now. Dell announced three Microsoft certified monitors with a dedicated Microsoft team button to launch on to launch the app on PCs with a built in noise canceling microphone, five megapixel pop up infrared camera with Windows Hello support and dual five watt speakers. They come with a 24 inch model that goes for $519.99 and a 27 inch for $799.99 and a curved 34 inch variant for $1,149.99 all arriving on February 16th. Dell also announced the first 40 inch ultra wide curved monitor, the ultra sharp for curved W U H D it has a 51 20 by 21 60 resolution and letting you put full cave work full 4k video with controls along the side on the monitor also includes a 90 watt charging for your PC over Thunderbolt three 10 gigabit per second data transfer also internet and the four inch curved Dell monitor arrives January 28th for $2,100 40 inch not four inch Dell also announced the 55 and 65 inch 4k interactive touch monitors with 20 point touch capability so multiple users can write or draw it once nice for collaboration we don't have a price on that one yet but it is coming on March 30th and still introduced new laptops in the latitude line including the 94 20 and 95 20 with Intel 11th Gen V Pro chips and automated webcam shutter that blocks the camera will not in use but people really want that also a mute key for both the mic and the camera the 94 20 will start at $1,949 we don't have a price for the 95 20 but one would assume a little bit higher than that both launched this spring after the Intel V Pro chips launch in March monitors man people getting excited about these monitors I mean I kind of am right who would have thought I remember when I was working at CNET you know back last decade the monitor section was always the dead section because it's like and we got flat screen LCD monitors what else is there to say but here we are with 40 inch curved monitors of course we talked earlier this week about LG having that monitor that can go from flat to curved and back again um Rob do any of these monitors pique your interest they do so uh for the better part of last year I started doing a lot of video editing and I'm starting to get even into like 4k video editing and to have a monitor where I can actually see that and I don't have to keep you know downresing upresing you know to try to figure out what something looks like would be a plus so if you would ask me a year ago could I have seen spending that kind of money on a monitor there's no way now I can kind of say there's a way and it's like you know if you know it's it's all about productivity and allowing me to do the work that I'm doing more efficiently and if I can just have a couple of windows open in full resolution and actually see the thing that I'm working on without would having to switch or look onto my laptop monitor which is actually the highest resolution monitor that I have and I can see this in a nice big 40 inch display that that to me is just that's that's wonderful so these things are crispy and I'm very interested in them not getting one I want to read the specs and see the reviews of these yeah yeah yeah that 40 inch curved monitor I mean it that sounds ridiculous to me because my monitor is 28 inches right now and it seems so big and I really have no need for anything almost twice the size but I want it I went from a 27 inch to a 34 inch I actually have a 34 inch Dell right in front of me and it felt huge first few weeks and it's starting to feel normal so yeah it's it's funny how how fast 40 inches which it's like storage huge to me right now you find a way to put it yeah right it is good well as AI gets closer and closer to human like behavior whether you like it or not we would like to present something that you also might or not like but it is the Beatles AI jukebox uploaded on December 30th by a youtube user named broccolou and this is an album it's only 15 minutes in length but it's an album of like seven or eight songs and the songs are pretty Beatles-esque if you're familiar with the band you know little heard known band maybe you have or haven't heard some of their songs but they're not actually Beatles songs this is AI that has been trained on a variety of other songs and sounds cadences and voices to sound like the Beatles and of course I hit a hit a part of the track that's quiet now there we go I listened to this earlier today and I was like it's very Beatles-esque especially because this is just you know AI saying yeah I think I know what you like so now I think most I don't think that's language though is it no and it's funny if you if you actually we've got a link to the youtube video in our show notes and if you read the comments you know people are starting to pick apart their lyrics like what are they saying it doesn't even make sense the Beatles would never say that broccolou says of the project this is just a fun experiment listen to real Beatles songs on the streaming service of your choice buy one of their albums you want to listen to the real Beatles this was just something that broccolou did for fun and he he or she used open AI jukebox which is the neural net that generates music and has been trained on about 1.2 million songs at this point open AI hasn't publicly disclosed which songs are in the data set but it's a pretty good sample size and uh people have been having some fun with us do the AIs run into copyright issues for sounding like the Beatles or sounding like other no that's that's a really interesting question though like this is not copying so there's no copyright right there's it's not a performance of an actual composition but could they accidentally run into it like a plagiarism issue right where it gets too good and someone's like they were not so much that they sound alike I mean you could get into problems of somebody's likeness if you tried to like pass it off as the Beatles that that's where you could get into trouble but you could also accidentally like cover someone else's actual composition uh and then and then get into to trouble there but yeah I think I think they're mostly you know 98 percent free and clear they're like it's so it it's fair to sound like something and even though they're using copyrighted materials the source that's not what comes out at the other end so yeah I remember uh you know a few years ago I think it was uh um Robin Thicke and Pharrell ran into an issue to where one of their songs sounded way too much like a uh Marvin Gaye song from back in the you know early 70s yep and uh they you know they they they lost that case and had to pay millions and millions of dollars uh you know in restitution to the uh you know you know to to you know to his family I believe but uh I think that's why you get into yeah I think that's why broccoli was making a point of saying look I'm not trying to pretend I'm the Beatles go buy Beatles songs stream them do not you know go at me bro this is an experiment yeah that the open AI allows all of us to play around with yeah yeah all right let's check out the mail bag let's do it we had a conversation yesterday with Tim Stevens our car expert really and uh and the idea that you know is the public really ready for EVs because they tend to be a little bit pricier but you also get some rewards Howard said I have the Hyundai Kona EV I've had it for about 18 months Howard pointed out a couple key points about electric vehicles especially not uh not to forget that the savings on gas is pretty big Howard says if you drive a lot which he used to to go to the office or maybe still does says he notes he went from $225 a month spending on gas to $30 a month on electric power says you know when I pay the car off I still get that savings he also noted that NEMA for 14 to 50 outlets used for electric dryers like the dryer in an apartment building because I was making the point yesterday I was like as a renter I can't just like plug my car in wherever I mean they're just like isn't a plug said well sometimes a dryer might be located near a parking garage and can be used for level two chargers so you can use the one that you have or you could ask your landlord to install it ask nicely maybe you'll get what you want and then Howard says finally regarding longer day trips and the idea that you know you need to kind of find a place to charge your car you're not going to be able to get where you're going he says he needs to plan well one well time stop at an EV charger if he's you know driving for the day either at a rest stop maybe a shopping center with a charger and he says it's about five minutes of planning the day prior or you know or whenever before the trip but not a big deal so Howard's pretty happy with his Hyundai Kona EV yeah there's some good points here I mean you can you can actually charge off of a regular 110 it just takes a long time but there are adapters that let you do that and and so that's a good point to I still think they're too expensive even with the gas savings but that's somebody who doesn't drive $225 worth of gas a month so you know your mileage will literally vary on this so but it's a good point is you should calculate that in and see if like well me even if it's more expensive maybe it will save me some money Rob I know you're talking to Rod Simmons on on SMR about this all the time yes so for me I want to I want to want a EV I want to want one I don't quite want one yet but they're getting close and this one actually you know looked at it it's a nice looking car it's it is a bit pricey though so I'm wondering you know if you if you've got to pay that for this one you're just probably just going to get a Tesla so we'll see yeah well if you have thoughts on anything we talk about in the show anything that you want us to talk about in the show or anything in between feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send those emails thank you in advance to everybody who does on a daily basis you help make our show better than ever we also want to shout out patrons at our master and grand master levels today they include Carmine Bailey Eric Holm and oh who's this Linnell Lane I wonder if she's related to me I wonder if she's your mother I wonder also I should I don't know maybe I'll you know do some research and find out it's my mom everybody Linnell is now a master at our grand master level yay thank you patrons all the patrons also thanks to Rob Dunwood for being with us today Rob I know you're busy with SMR podcast it's a great podcast one of my favorites what else is going on in your world well I'm actually I'm not ready to announce the name of it yet but I do have a new show coming out sometime in Q1 this year so I'm going to be working on a brand new show and you can always get me over at SMR podcast as well excellent very excited hey folks would you like a DTNS hat a hoodie a mask a mouse pad we have all that and much more at the DTNS store go check it out dailytechnewshow.com slash store you can also get some special exclusive merch at certain of the higher levels of our Patreon dailytechnewshow.com slash patreon we are live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. eastern that's 21 30 utc find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live and we will be back tomorrow we're going to do it all again with Scott Johnson 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