 Coming up on DTNS, Niantic actually becomes a lot more like real augmented reality. HTC's former CEO makes a play for the killer VR app, and why the media stars of the future will be famous to fewer people. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, May 26th, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane. And from the ever lit forests of Finland. I'm Patrick Bishop. Lit, but not on fire. From some and I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. We were just talking about we were following up on the the raging controversy over Patrick's accent or lack of on good day Internet. You can hear that debate by becoming a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. Apple has fixed a bug that saw many users see massive numbers of their iOS apps update over the weekend. Sometimes 50 apps were even more. The apps were updating to the exact same build as was previously installed, which caused some heads to scratch. Nine to five Mac speculated that the updates appeared to be a workaround to family sharing glitches that were preventing some apps from launching with a message that it was no longer shared. Users could fix the glitch at least temporarily before it got fixed officially by deleting the app that wouldn't launch and then reinstalling it. And so it's now being fixed. Switzerland launched its Swiss COVID contact tracing app. The first to launch using Apple and Google's exposure notification API. Swiss COVID is being piloted among hospitals, key workers, civil servants and the army. Public availability is expected mid June. Mealwhile, India announced it is it will release the source code of its contact tracing app, which launched in early April. The Android app source code will be published on GitHub. A bug bounty program for the app will also was also announced. Chinese smartphone maker Realme announced the Realme X3 Super Zoom phone. And interestingly, it's going to launch in Spain and the UK first. Realme normally launches their phones in India. The X3 Super Zoom has a periscope telephoto lens for 5x zoom and 120 Hertz refresh rate on an HD LCD screen. Pre-orders start today at 499 euros coming June 4th. Realme also announced a smartwatch, a TV, wireless earbuds and a power bank. All of those coming to India in June. HP announced a new line of elite books running on Intel Core and AMD Ryzen Pro 4000 series processors. The 1030G7 and 1040G7 convertibles both have options for 5G data and the 1040G7 claims 29 hours of battery life. Google's support for rich communication service or RCS messaging on Android will now come to all T-Mobile US Android users. T-Mobile offered RCS to some users, but on different standard than Google. T-Mobile is now adapting the universal profile 1.0 interconnect used by Google, which can work across networks. T-Mobile is part of the CCMI initiative along with Verizon and AT&T, which announced plans for an RCS cross-carrier app last October. Facebook released a voice call app called Ketchup. It's an experimental thing for coordinating calls of update friends. Your contacts show a ready to talk icon when they're available, so you know it's time to start the call. And if you're late, showing of in-progress calls, we'll let you join. Spotify has lifted the 10,000 song limit on the number of songs that you can save to your library. While Spotify has 50 million songs up until now, you had a limit on how many you could save to your music. Spotify previously resisted raising the limit because it said fewer than 1% of its customers even got to that limit. Individual playlists and the number of songs that you can download for offline listening are still limited to 10,000. Facebook's Libra Wallet Calibra has been rebranded to Novi and has been redesigned as a standalone app with interoperability with Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. Novi didn't give details on what standard transaction fees might be if this ever gets off the ground and all Novi customers will need to be verified using a government-issued ID. Novi will now be operated by a new Facebook subsidiary called Novi Financial that will operate independently of the rest of Facebook. Alright, let's talk a little bit more about reality, Patrick. A form of reality that might be alternate. Niantic will add a new feature, it calls reality blending to Pokemon Go next month. The augmented reality feature known as occlusion will let creatures hide partially or entirely behind real-world objects like trees and furniture. Niantic first demonstrated its occlusion technology with a Pikachu video almost two years ago. Pokemon Go is also getting crowdsourced mapping functions similar to Ingress' portal scanning. Pokemon Pokestop scanning will let max level players record a stream of images at Pokestops and gyms to help improve 3D maps. Niantic says faces and license plates are blurred and it does not store any personal data in connection to contributions. Niantic says the feature will come first to Samsung Galaxy S9 and S10 devices as well as the Google Pixel 3 and Pixel 4. When Pokemon Go first launched, everybody called it augmented reality and people started to get upset that it's not really augmented reality. It just superimposes a creature in the world. It doesn't really know where the location is. Slowly Niantic has been improving that and adding more actual augmented reality functions. This would be the biggest step forward in that and would be really fun if your creatures are hiding behind a chair and you have to move around to find them. It makes the game more challenging. I have to admit I'm not a big Pokemon Go player but my impression was that augmented reality was kind of a novelty in the gameplay loop. And people who were serious about playing it didn't really use it all that much but maybe this will change that and maybe it won't. But it doesn't seem like it has a huge amount of gameplay value. I'm not a Pokemon Go player either at all. I was briefly when a lot of people picked it up for a few months and then put it back down. But it was cool and it was fun and the idea of this type of true augmented reality coming to apps that I would use. I'm not going to be rearranging my home every day but something where I might be able to mix and match. Something that's really in my living room with something that's virtually in my living room. And it would be a little bit more seamless than the kinds of tools I have for that now. I can see where gameplay is one aspect of this but just better AR apps in general are another. Yeah I thought it was interesting to see how different outlets chose to slant this different ways. Some focused on what we're focusing on here the gameplay and the augmented reality portion of it. And others focused solely on what you said about letting people stream images and capture and improve the maps and any privacy implications that that may or may not have. Sounds like Niantic addressed those privacy concerns in the announcement. So as long as they follow through on that I guess it'll be fine. Well future rather phones will get better battery life and more powerful CPUs and also GPUs. ARM which licenses its designs to Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung, Huawei, you know the big guys. Announced to the Cortex A78 CPU and the Mali G78 GPU. ARM says that the Cortex A78 CPU core design offers a 20 percent increase in sustained performance and stays within a one watt power budget. A new Cortex X custom program will let partners create their own specialized Cortex CPUs. The Mali G78 GPU supports up to 24 cores for a promised 25 percent increase in graphics performance. I mean it's ARM promising it but you know it's good. ARM also announced the ethos N78 neural processing unit with up to 25 percent improved performance efficiency over the ethos N77 its predecessor. Yeah we don't usually get as much attention on the ARM updates but as phones are becoming the predominant computing device that people use it's people are paying more and more attention to that and wanting to know like you know when these ARM designs show up in chips which will probably be later this year which means probably not till 2021 when you see a lot of phones with chips on this ARM design. Will I be getting better graphics? Will I be getting better CPU? Will I be getting better battery life? So a lot of good claims, a lot of good promises here from these ARM designs. It'll be a while before we get to live with them ourselves. But I mean 25 percent increase in graphics performance I'm guessing compared to the previous generation of GPUs. It is pretty massive and we're already getting some very impressive graphics on mobile platforms and ARM MPUs I guess or CPUs and GPUs. This is a lot and we're getting this year a bump in graphical fidelity with the release of the new generation of consoles which will allow PCs to then get a you know to get into the race again because the bar will have been raised for everyone so PCs will increase their efforts let's say. But it seems like even with the power constraints of mobile platforms ARM is following through on graphics performance on mobile platforms. It's very impressive. And there's aspects of this that will be interesting for those trying to use ARM designs and server chips as well with that kind of performance update. That's a really good point as well. All right. Pay attention to this one. Might end up not being anything but it has the feelings to me of something notable that will look back and go oh I remember when that was new. Former HTC CEO Peter Chow start up XR space has unveiled its 5G capable VR headset the XR space MOVA. Now the MOVA itself as a piece of hardware is interesting. It's powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chipset has a beefy six gigs of RAM which is a couple more than what you get in the Oculus. 4600 milliamp hour battery 2880 by 1440 display panel with a 90 Hertz refresh rate and 702 dpi pixel density nice display. That's in what the field of view is which makes me think it might not be that impressive. And it's meant to be controlled with hand tracking though it will ship with a single controller. They have cameras on the front of the headset to do that hand tracking and the hand tracking supposedly will enable things like shaking hands giving high fives. You know things you can't do in real life right now grabbing and throwing objects. It can track enough of your legs to with those front facing cameras to let you play a simple soccer game as well as make your avatar full body. Remember we talked about the avatars being cut off at the waist in previous software we've talked about not in the MOVA system. And here's MOVA's big differentiator. It's the social space Manova which hopefully they'll change that name. I think you can meet people in Manova in private areas. You can watch videos play minigames all that kind of stuff. You can also space scan with your with your camera your actual room and make that a virtual room in Manova. There's also public spaces so parks beaches nightclubs cinemas all those things that Neil Stevenson and other novels have promised. Other public spaces will come from furniture stores realtors. They have Vogue and GQ on board. They have a Taiwanese baseball team on board so you can go to a virtual baseball game for institutes in Taiwan or on board to use Manova for remote learning. It's listed at $599 so not cheap not ridiculous expensive but not cheap by any stretch. And we'll come to Taiwan with Chunghua telecom and Europe with Deutsche telecom. We don't know when the reason I think this is notable is that the hardware is nice. It's supposedly lighter than the HTC Vive but it's that focus on we want to get the social aspect of this right. And if they do that's the big if but if they do I think that could be the thing that makes VR take off. Like oh I'm an avatar that feels like me and I can virtually get together with people in a way that feels more reality. That's been the promise of VR and it's always kind of fallen short. Yeah I I'm totally with you on that with the Oculus Quest which I'm I'm currently still in my review period for my next liquid that segment. As much as I really like this and I know some other people who have Quest or who at least are into VR enough that they care what I have to say or you know want to hear my experiences it feels very solitary. It's like OK I'm going to go away from Earth for a little while and do my thing and then come back and talk to whoever will listen about it with me or maybe nobody. And the idea that I would be going to hang out with real people that I know the way that social networks work now in some sort of you know reality that that adds some more dimensions and some more games and makes I don't know the idea of a chat room different yet the same is really exciting. And I think that they're on to something with this and the idea that the headset itself is lighter and thinner and and has nice specs does not hurt either. This is a pipe dream and it will never work that way. I'm exaggerating a little bit but I think it's the kind of thing where with every new piece of technology we try to imagine a replication of what we already know. But the actual use cases for the this new technology are different from what we already know. And I don't think we'll find many examples of that we imagining actually working. I get mad second second life vibes from this which second life was super hyped got a lot of attention a lot of investment from brands and companies. But it was more hype than reality. People didn't use it in that way. And when the hype died it died with it. I'm also reminded of this is a little bit of a different topic. But when when we first started getting mechanical things at home people thought that we would have carrot graders at home to make grated carrots and we do. But more likely you will buy carrots already grated from the factory from the store. And this is when you think about to use for new technology you think of it as in terms of what you already know. I think this is what is happening there. And I don't know we'll see but it does I would put my money on it not working out. You're you're right that that's always the hurdle. What gets you over the hurdle is enough people being interested in that possibly incorrect use like Twitter. Twitter was meant to allow you to send short messages to each other over text message easier and share them with more people. That's not what we use it for. But enough people were interested and went through the gates that they started to figure out those other uses. And so that's what I'm curious if Manova can overcome is to say look all these other things second life Facebook social rooms. They're all weird. They all require a little too much imagination. Whereas if they can nail the appeal of this that will cause a lot more people to dive in and try it with in which case then they might find out the other uses. A lot of ifs trust me and you may be right a lot of too many too many ifs. But it does I don't know it does have the flavor of something that's worth paying attention to and might have a better chance of overcoming those ifs than a lot of other things we've seen. Because they're paying attention to some of those barriers like yeah but it's only half of me or the yeah but it doesn't feel like me. They're they're focusing on solving that problem. That's the right problem to try to solve whether they solve it or not. That's that's the question. I'll agree. I'll definitely agree that this is how you find the actual use of the technology is by getting enough people to give it a try and see what works and what doesn't. Google has launched a limited pilot to use Google Assistant's voice match to secure restaurant orders and purchases that are made through Google Play. Users in the limited rollout will see the option Google Assistant settings to confirm purchases with voice match. Google warns during setup that somebody with a similar voice or recording may be able to confirm purchases on the devices you're logged into. So it's well aware of the first thing that someone's going to say this is a bad idea. Google told Android Police that the feature has a limit on how much money can be spent as well. Yeah this is a convenience not security. This is like I'm so tired of having to say that pin every time or having to use something or having to go pick up my phone and and press the thumbprint. I don't mind giving up a little security because I don't have an evil twin and nobody's breaking into my house to play recordings of me. I'm not worried about that. I just wanted to use my voice to confirm that it's me not someone else in the household. So I mean I think that's what it's for. Is it is it secure. No it's not. But in some situations convenience can Trump's security rationally and I think that's what this is for. This reminds me of contactless payments with credit cards which security minded people were going crazy about because of the security flaws and I thought would be kind of a you know insignificant improvement. I can't live without it now. It is well maybe because of the pandemic literally contact less is better. Yeah right. But it's just so convenient. I don't mind the security issue and this sounds a little bit like that. As long as you're aware as long as you go in eyes wide open on this stuff I think it's fine. Hey folks if you want to get all the tech headlines each day in about five minutes be sure to subscribe to daily tech headlines dot com. The New York Times Ben Smith has an article called the new model media star is famous only to you. To which I add mom. No it's focusing on a service called cameo that lets you buy short custom videos from celebrities. So Smith himself used it to get retired New York Giants defensive lineman Leonard Marshall to convince his dad to stop taking the subway into Manhattan during the pandemic 75 bucks. Got an Olympic triathlete to give his daughter a pep talk 15 bucks message from a former Boston Red Sox manager for his boss cost 100 bucks. And he got Chuck Norris to make a joke that he put on Twitter for 230 bucks cameo is seeing a boom during the lockdown bookings have grown from 9000 in early January to 70000. And Ben Smith identifies this as part of a larger trend towards gig work for mid level celebrities. Legion a former partner at the venture capital firm and recent Horowitz calls it the passion economy. So examples are small merchants on Shopify making cool things that are really popular to a certain set of people but would never play in massive chains of retail stores instructors on you to me finding a group of people passionate about the thing that they know how to teach even if there's not a massive availability of it musicians on Patreon podcasters on Patreon writers with paid newsletters on sub stack. He cites Emily Aitken former New Republic reporter who's made one hundred seventy five thousand dollars this year with just two thousand five hundred subscribers. So Ben Smith goes through all of this. He talks about how these are people finding their niche. Maybe they were big celebrities that aren't as big anymore. Maybe they were never big celebrities but they are celebrities within their expertise. Smith asks is this good news. The rise of these new companies could further shake our faltering institutions splinter our fragmented media and cement celebrity culture or they could pay for a new wave of powerful independent voices and offer steady work for people doing valuable work. Now Patrick I know you brought this into the show today. Do you have a thought on how to answer Smith's question. Is this good news. I would say to his two proposed scenarios. Why not both. Obviously it seems like both are plausible and I don't think it will have to choose. I will say however that the first part of his proposition is addressing content and the way fragmented media. Helps maybe disinformation and things like that. This is already happening. What is not happening as much or has only just started happening is people being able to monetize a smaller audience. And of course I think we are the forefront of this with Patreon. But these are other ways and cameo is a really interesting one of making that happen. So I think overall I would say it is a good thing because it enables the good content to be monetized through another way than just advertisements which traditionally favors quantity I would say over quality. You know cameo I'm familiar with for a couple of years now because it happens to be something that somebody secrets secret santed to me a couple of years ago. There was a particular reality show doesn't matter which one. But there was a certain person on this reality show who sent me like a Merry Christmas note and my friend paid for it on cameo and I got it and I lost my mind. You know I was like how did you do the most amazing thing I've ever seen you know that was very haha novelty kind of thing. I know that the kind of some celebrity that Sarah might care about for whatever reason maybe it's silly maybe it means something to me but isn't necessarily a huge part of pop culture. This is perfect for that. There's also an element of so the celebrities just kind of sitting around like waiting to get little gigs kind of thing and I think like OK well if that were me do I have a problem with it maybe not. It depends on you know the kind of I don't know your portrayal of yourself in the first place. So this whole idea of maybe somebody who is semi retired or maybe in a sort of bridge area of their career where they're transitioning into other things but people still really like them. I think that's great. I think that part is great. I also know that there were a lot of Tiger King cameos that I saw recently and you know that was it was what it was. I think initially it might seem a little bit demeaning for someone who was a celebrity and maybe we're thinking of it as you know in terms of oh they were in a movie or they were on TV which was you know so cool. And so it's like how they have to sit around waiting for a cameo orders to be paid like and they make 50 bucks per message. Well first of all those messages take about two minutes to make 50 bucks for two minutes of your time isn't you know if you get a dozen a day or you know whatever it's a good rate. And second of all it is the article dives into that very well. It is about catering to smaller audiences and distributing the revenue to people who didn't get it before because those semi retired people they were just sitting in their home fading it to ignorance and at least now they have or maybe they would go to small conventions dedicated to what they were doing. Now they have another way of connecting with people another way which is not just Twitter where people yell at everyone but that gets monetized I think that's valuable. Yeah because it's not that they're sitting around and like cameo that's my new career I'm just going to sit here until I can get a request right this is a this is a part of what they do. I imagine Leonard Marshall defensive lineman doesn't get a lot of speaking engagements and maybe does but he's certainly not going to be in demand like a quarterback would have been so this is nice supplemental income for him and puts him in touch with people who are like yeah I was a fan of that thing that not that many other people are a fan of but me and my friend or me and my family are. You know and I can think of smaller TV shows where you know secondary characters they have to work hard they don't they don't get to coast through like like you know like a Brad Pitt they have to keep finding work and so a little bit of supplemental income like this works but also it's not just TV and movie celebrities it's also you know Ben Thompson Stratechery like being able to say like look I have a number of people who really like what I have to say and are willing to pay me for it and and I'm going to keep doing that really well and and like this woman Emily Aiken making $175,000 a year from 2500 subscribers now you have to be talented and you have to cultivate that audience. But but you don't have to be a hit TV show star to make that happen I think that's really interesting. Don't forget also that we we offer voicemail recordings of from Sarah Roger and I on our Patreon. I was okay so I was like I and that was the first thing that I thought of is would I ever have an issue getting you know some residual income residual income from something like this. Like if enough people were like we really like your voicemails not that you guys wouldn't want it but you know again Tom and Roger and I do do this on occasion. I mean what if lots of people wanted it and you're like okay this is a thing people want this is something that I can give you if you feel good about it great. I actually just just to finish up I actually use bonjour which is an app that let you send very short exactly similar but for free. I was sending messages to every new patron I would get on the tech I did it for a couple of months it was really fun. I ended up being overwhelmed with the pandemic when it started so so I stopped but it's so easy to do with the app as well done. And it's actually pretty fun and that is another way of connecting with your audiences which is valuable. Stealth Dave in our Twitch chat has the question that we will finish on can anyone get a cameo by cameo. The musical artist word up but it costs infinite dollars. So that loop is let us know if you get one I pretty sure someone's already tried. Yes but but please let us know that would be great and my mind would be blown again. Hey thanks everybody who participates in our subreddit. It's also a great place for people to connect with each other. Doesn't matter if you're a celebrity or not you can submit stories and vote on them at daily tech news show dot reddit dot com. Let's check out the mailbag. Oh let's we got a really really really nice email titled GDI banter much appreciated this came in from David who said I was having a really crappy day this weekend. I tuned in admittedly an archaic phrase. We don't even know David to hear GDI from Friday and it really lifted my spirits. Thank you hope you guys know you provide more than just tech news. Thank you David glad to hear that very very glad to hear that. Yeah absolutely. And you know everybody's got a bad day so hey we're all in this together right. Shout out to patrons at our master and grand master levels including Justin Zellers Tim deputy and Tony glass. Also thanks to Patrick Beja Patrick. It's been a crazy week for you. What's been going on insanity. That's what's been going on. Hey you know what you work from home right probably maybe you work from home and if you do you might have issues that you want solved about working from home. You know who has been working for home from home for a long time Tom Merritt and myself and wonderful coincidence. We have a new show about how to better work from home and keep your sanity when you're doing so. What's the name of that show you might ask work insanity. It's a wonderful pun. I'm very proud of it. You can get the show on your podcast app just look for work insanity or go to work insanity.net. It will redirect you 15 minutes every Monday. It's very quick. You can't really afford not to listen so go check out work insanity. I 100% agree with everything Patrick just said. No it's really really been fun putting this together with Patrick. So I'm so proud that people get to actually see it at work insanity.net. You can always support our show at any level at daily tech news show dot com slash patreon and we appreciate you doing so. The advertising dollars out there aren't that great right now but we don't care because we've got you appreciate that. Our email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com you got something on your mind send it there. We're live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. You can find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frog pants dot com. Diamond Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.