 Coming up on DTNS T-Mobile gets closer to being able to buy Sprint web accessibility heads to the Supreme Court And why eating crickets is not only industry 4.0, but also good for you This is the Daily Tech news for Friday, July 26 2019 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from studio feline. I'm Sarah Lane and from Relatively balmy Southern California. I'm Roger Chang the show's producer joining us very happy to have Aaron Carson staff Reporter from CNET back on the show Aaron. How are you? I'm doing well. Thanks. Thanks for having me We were just talking to Aaron on good day internet about her cosplaying at Comic Con You can read that story of CNET, of course Or if you're not already a patron get our conversation at patreon.com slash DTNS I would recommend doing both of those things Thanks for chatting with us about that Aaron We are going to be talking with Aaron about eating crickets and there is a technology angle to it for sure But let's start with a few tech things you should know It is Friday numbers Friday Alphabet announced it earned $14 and 21 cents per share in Q2 on revenue of $38.94 cents which beat analyst expectations search Advertising revenue rose 16% paid clicks increased 28% on the year Other revenue which includes cloud and pixel hardware Generated six point one eight billion dollars in revenue up thirty nine point five percent on the year on the earnings call CEO Sundar Prachai said that the cloud unit had reached an eight billion annual run rate doubling since February of 2018 Alphabet's other bets revenue which includes the non-Google companies like Waymo and Loon rose 12% to 162 million dollars, but lost almost one billion dollars in the quarter Amazon reported it earned five dollars and 22 cents a share on revenue of 63 point four billion dollars beating expectations on revenue But just missing those expectations on earnings Amazon web services grew revenue 37% on the year Amazon's other category Which includes its ever burgeoning online sales grew revenue 37% and physical store revenue was flat on the quarter at $4.3 billion CEO Jeff Bezos said the introduction of prime one-day delivery Raised costs more than they expected, but produced accelerating sales growth. So he's not worried What's that confirmed it now has 400 million monthly active users in India Facebook had previously announced that the app had 250 million users in 2017 so it's quite a jump from that Counterpoint research estimates that India has 450 million smartphone users overall Although what's that also is available on feature phones including those running chaos All right, let's talk a little more about the big news this morning the US Department of Justice has approved An agreement for the merger of T-Mobile USA with Sprint the merged company has agreed to sell wholesale network access some of its spectrum licenses and the boost Virgin and Sprint branded prepaid businesses to dish network as Part of an agreement with the Department of Justice the Department of Justice wanted to create another Competitor if it allowed T-Mobile and Sprint to merge so the merged Sprint and T-Mobile must also provide access To a few hundred actually maybe even close to a thousand retail locations depending on how you look at it And dish and the merged T-Mobile must agree to support eSIM Which could encourage the adoption of eSIM for its part dish promises to deploy a 5g broadband network capable of serving 70% Of the United States by June 2023 now this doesn't end the merger We're not ready to close yet 13 US States as well as the District of Columbia have sued to block the merger so that will need to be resolved before the merger can finally be called closed and The FCC hasn't actually technically approved it either. They've expressed approval But the FCC still needs to have its formal vote which should be coming soon How how much do we think that the 13 US States who opposed the merger might slow this down? Even assuming that it's going to go through eventually That's hard to say because the states are a little more stringent than the Department of Justice seems to have been about Not wanting to raise costs for consumers not wanting to reduce competition and a lot of the attorneys general involved in that have already Spoken regarding this particular agreement saying it doesn't go far enough that that the dish Agreement isn't going to create a viable competitor at least anytime soon Which means there'll be less competition which they say will mean higher prices. I I'm kind of on the fence on that one to be honest It sounds to me like they are giving dish spectrum They're giving them retail locations and they're giving them MVNO's boost and Virgin as well as Sprint's MVNO Prepaid business. So they're setting them up. Well, but yeah, I mean Dish doesn't have any pole access right now So it's going to take a while to roll out their own service even if if they are Having the license for the spectrums, which means they would have to pay T-Mobile Sprint merged entity to get network access Which they will get access as part of this agreement, but it still costs money. There's a lot of questions there, but I Think this is probably the best you could do if you want the mobile the merger to happen Whether those 13 states are gonna let it happen. I don't know Aaron. What do you think? I think this is all just a reminder that this is not something that gets settled quickly We've been in this kind of situation for more than a year now so Yeah, there's definitely more ahead. I think it'll also be kind of interesting to see Just like the effects of how much further, you know, how this pushes the industry more towards 5g as well Yeah, I I like that they're giving dish a lot of tools I I do see that it's not rock solid that dish will be able to pull this together I mean other hand dish is very motivated because it's television business even with sling TV Is not looking promising as far as continuing to develop revenue for them So they need another revenue generator and a phone service could do that whether they have the expertise to pull it off Is really the big question until reported revenue declined by 3% on the year But revenue and earnings still be an analyst expectations and Intel's Q3 forecast is ahead of expectations as well On the earnings call CEO Bob Swan said that anxiety over trade uncertainty Drove a pull in of client CPU orders in the quarter in other words What he means is they sold more chips because companies stockpiled in advance of trade disruptions Two factories are now producing 10 nanometer chips and 7 nanometer is still on track for 2021 Intel also said it had resumed some product sales to Huawei in compliance with US regulators Yeah, Intel's not out of the woods yet by any stretch, but the 10 nanometer Factories I think surprised people how how good the ramp up is going there 7 nanometer still being on track is of course good news There is the expectation and question that you know trade disputes are not going to keep tweaking the sales up Forever, but it sounds like they'll at least carry on into Q3 enough for Intel to forecast a little better Q3 than they would have otherwise Whether they can bring back their market share dominance a little more is going to be the big question for Intel going forward Because they are they are facing declining market share It does seem like Bob Swan is continuing What Kersanich had sort of tentatively started which is focusing Intel on fewer markets Getting rid of them the modem business to Apple is is a more extreme version of that Kersanich was was doing things like selling off the Streaming TV development. They sold that to Verizon now Swan seems to be focusing it even more on Let's do what we do well and and march forward there That's a little bit of a risky decision though because you have you have less diverse markets to be able to play inside of I Do I do I do think this is a good report for Intel even though some of the revenue is down By numbers it's better than everybody expected it to be down and it's not down as much as people expected. So overall fairly positive Twitter revenue was up 18% over the last year with monetizable daily active users at a hundred thirty nine million up 14% on the year that daily Monetizable active users is a new metric this report Twitter is measuring users who are logged in and can see ads on a daily basis Not just seeing an embedded post Which is in a way more accurate just somebody Third-party Twitter App users like myself and if your focus is on advertising you want to say well These are the users that could potentially see an ad US revenue for Twitter was up 24% While international revenue rose 12% if you're curious Japan is Twitter's number two best market for revenue after the United States Twitter made seven hundred twenty seven million dollars in advertising a hundred fourteen million dollars on data licensing Advertising continues to be the predominant revenue source for Twitter and CEO Jack Dorsey Said that reports of spammy or suspicious behavior on Twitter dropped 18 percent. Well, yeah, I don't know about that one That's the one I did but Okay Yeah depends on who you're following and who your followers are I suppose but yeah, I mean it This all looks pretty positive for Twitter Yeah, considering that in the past Twitter has had you know face challenges attracting new users and retaining the users It has like this could be a sign of progress Yeah, it doesn't seem bad a lot of people are criticizing the the metric of monetizable daily active users because they say well This isn't comparable to anybody else. Nobody else does this so you can't look at Twitter's number But it's the smarter metric isn't it wouldn't this actually you would think that you know Facebook and Google and and other large social networks that are in Twitter's camp would would say Well, you know if Twitter's doing it then we need to do it as well because it actually makes more sense as a metric Yes, and no though if they if it made so much sense. Why didn't they do it before now? Well For them the monthly active user is a bigger number, right? Because over a month you can show a bigger number what Twitter was doing was seeing their monthly active users go down While their daily active users weren't so reporting daily active users was good Reporting monetizable daily active users even better because that number kept going up and up So that's the criticism is like well. Yeah, you can justify this But you're cherry picking the one metric that looks good for you Well, but at the same time monthly active users if I log into some something you know any service whatever it may be any platform once a month I'm not really using it that often, but I'm still counted in that number if I'm a daily active user I am I am very important for whatever company I am I am logging into so I I think it's smart For Twitter to be leaning into that number Yeah, Eric do you have any thoughts on on this new metric? Oh, I'm in on the new metric there'd probably be a different CNET person Detective about that, but but yeah, I mean it's it's you know in the kind of the broader life span of Twitter and how much time there was for a while where it seemed like things were just kind of going south. It's Always always interesting to I was reading something. It was kind of interesting. It was I'm talking about kind of their continued Investment and like live events like, you know sports like they're going to be Yeah partnering with like NBC universal on some limited coverage of the Olympics and whatnot and Really leaning into that idea that for a word shows or sporting events are kind of similar things There are times when people like really do flock to Twitter to talk about what's going on Three years ago Guillermo Robles filed a lawsuit against Domino's. Yes that Domino's alleging that The 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act applied to websites and apps of businesses with physical locations And said Domino's was part of that a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Robles Domino's argues that the federal government has not published rules on how to make websites ADA compliant only international standards exist in 2017 the Department of Justice reversed a 2010 announcement that it would issue rules for website accessibility Domino's now has asked the Supreme Court to hear the case the Chamber of Commerce the restaurant law Center in the National Retail Federation have all submitted a friend of the court briefs and CNBC notes that to 2200 lawsuits were filed over website accessibility in federal courts last year. Yeah, so Springport probably won't get to Deciding whether to take this up or not until the autumn session It will not necessarily be heard by the Supreme Court They could decide to just let the federal court decision stand in which case Robles wins Or they could hear it again. In which case they could rule either way. I there is some merit It's it's easy to for me Anyway to want to take the side of Robles and say yes Accessibility everywhere and Domino should do this and Beyonce comm should do this Everyone should do this because Beyonce comm is being sued too But there is some validity I think to the Domino's argument that well wait a minute if we spend a bunch of money Making our site accessible and then the government comes out with some new regulations because of administration changes and now We aren't meeting those compliances because we didn't have the guidance. That's going to be costly We want to wait until we're sure what the requirements are for these websites before we spend the money on it but I mean has as a Corporation you could always say that right you could always be like well the government might change some rules So we're not going to put money into this Well, yeah, but it's not about changing the rules though. It's about having no rules So in at least when the rules are changed you can lobby against the change in rules And you can say to someone suing you I am following the rules that exist right now There's no rules that exist for the for the websites to follow Yeah, I mean I think that aside from the specifics of the case something that kind of came to mind is that this under Lines how big of an issue accessibility is still intact because we're even just talking about like a like a basic website That you might go on to order pizza So like you the Pew Research Center has a stat that says that Americans with disabilities are 20% like less likely to go online at all And so and so I think it's you know, it's a difficult situation because we are seeing You know more companies and people being starting to be more mindful of features that could help folks with Accessibility issues, but I think that a lot of advocates would say that they'd prefer things We're just kind of baked in to the product from the get-go. Yeah After all of my you know devil's advocate arguing just now the one thing I want to make sure to say is Domino's should make their website and their app accessible anyway Whether whether it's going to help them or pace or not, right? Like Saying well, there's no guidance. So I shouldn't be sued is one thing saying there's no guidance So I'm not going to make it accessible. That's just wrong Make your site accessible You'll you'll get more people spending money on your site that don't spend their money right now because they can't That's why Robus is filing this lawsuit He twice tried to use the website to order a pizza and couldn't because it wasn't accessible and he's visually impaired So Just just do it. It's the right thing to do and and maybe you win your court case. Maybe you don't I don't know. Maybe there's something where if they tried to make their site accessible now it would undermine their case There's always weird stuff like that, but the right thing to do is to make it accessible All right, 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 Uh comicon tbs was given out protein bars as a promotion for the upcoming tv show snow piercer Which uh like the movie snow piercer tells the story of a train with the last remnants of humanity living in an icy post apocalyptic world So the protein bars were made with cricket powder because well when it's the end of the world Maybe bugs are only the thing you're gonna have to eat erin you got to taste one of these cricket powder protein bars How was it? I did indeed and I am happy to report that it tasted like peanut butter and jelly And not cricket Wow Now Is that because it had other ingredients in it, right? Not just the cricket powder, right? Yeah, so the the cricket powder is just you know one ingredient along with a you know bunch of other stuff including like whole peanuts and uh fresh strawberries and and whatnot and uh, you know, I think the big distinction that These folks are trying to make is like in the show The bug bars are not good. They're not they're kind of this terrible jellied bug mixture and At comicon the company that's behind these bars the fire food group is actually trying to present you with something That you like you you might eat actually and not hate So the texture was just like a normal protein bar. Oh, yeah I don't think I would have known that there was cricket in it if I hadn't Been aware in advance I've heard cricket has a nutty taste and you have actually tasted roasted crickets prior to comicon, right? Correct. Yeah, I have a cricket eating experience. Uh, the the thing that kind of stands out to me is like this multi aftertaste Uh, which I I find delightful and like the chocolate whoppers, but for some reason in crickets It's like don't like it quite as much go figure um, but I will say having had some other food that is maybe not the whole roasted crickets, but say like a granola or even a chocolate chip cookie that's made with cricket powder That's that's uh, you don't get quite as much of that undertone in there Because it's ground up and it's just kind of often the rest of the ingredients Now these bars come from a company called aspire food group out of austin texas, which you've reported on previously as well They have a 25 000 square foot building designed for cricket raising and what I noted from your article on this is they have robots For feeding the crickets. They have industrial sensors that monitor 30 million data points things like temperature and humidity They use machine learning to analyze the data to optimize things like down to the hour things like time and temp So this fits the definition of industry 4.0 industry 4.0 Is this idea that we're going to combine sensors and data analysis and machine learning and robotics Uh to revolutionize how industry is done and it looks like the the cricket food makers are already doing that Yeah, they're on it. I mean I think for them one of their big goals is to Optimize how they grow these crickets. So these folks want to know What is the optimum temperature and humidity and whatever other metric for a cricket at 3 p.m In the afternoon on day seven of its life cycle And I mean that's that's really just to get like the the best cricket possible for harvesting And I'm sure there's people like okay great, but why why Why do we need anyone even making crickets? Those people are there's probably plenty of people in the audience are like I don't want to eat crickets Why do I need to eat crickets? Sure? Yeah, and that's yeah, I mean that has to be question number one um So as fire is basically making this pitch that this is a matter of sustainability of like environmental sustainability When you compare the resources that go into Raising livestock, you know the kind of meat that a lot of us eat on a daily basis Whether it's cows or pigs or you know Any of that it takes a lot less land and water produces a much smaller carbon footprint to produce Crickets and you can raise a lot more of them and a lot shorter time frame And so they're kind of presenting this idea that in order to be more environmentally Friendly we really need to kind of dial back how much Like meat we're eating It's just it's it's more sustainable Uh to get your protein from crickets crickets are high in iron. They're high in protein calcium and uh The united nations estimates at least two billion people already include bugs in their diets of various forms So it's really just getting over the ick factor, right? Sure. Yeah, and I think that this you know speaks to the idea of how much a mindset Can impact our kind of dietary habits When you see something like two billion and there are other stats that Go even you know beyond that as far as how many people in this world or how many countries in this world eat bugs on the regular And and and for reasons of like they're good or they're tasty You kind of get this idea that maybe this is our hang up, you know But I think that something that's worth noting because I remember when I originally interviewed The ceo and co-founder of a spy or if he was saying like look You'd be forgiven for not wanting to take something that you found in your backyard That's dirty and from the ground and put it on your mouth But you know what they're saying is like this is not that we're not expecting you to go into your backyard and catch your dinner I mean you can't if you want but you should probably follow a lot of procedures to make that sanitary, right? It's it's funny You mentioned that because we had some wild mint growing in our backyard and I told my wife like hey This is actually mint we could use this and she's like did the dog pee on it? I'm like, oh Yeah Maybe I we could wash it. She's like I don't know. So yeah, it's it's a whole different situation And it reminded me of the economist did on its future of the history of the future podcast recently Regarding eating bugs and crickets was part of that the fact that potatoes Were initially thought unfit for human consumption when they were brought to europe europeans thought they caused leprosy They thought because they were not mentioned in the bible and grew underground. They were devils apples That was a nickname for potatoes and it wasn't until frances king louis the 16th and maria entoinette Yes, that maria entoinette started to push for potatoes to be used And frederick the great mandated the cultivation in prussia in 1756 that potatoes changed their image People felt about potatoes at one point the way you probably feel about eating crickets And maybe the the point there is we need like some kind of a cricket influencer, you know Right. Who is our modern day frederick the great or maria entoinette? Yeah, well because back in the day where were were potatoes coming from Well, they were coming from overseas. They were from this weird far off land At least like europeans were concerned and and you know, which may have been looked down upon for a variety of reasons, right? so the idea of eating crickets, uh, even if it's Nutritionally a great idea, you know, there there's something to get over that as well Well, you know, it's weird because that people have such a hang up about eating insects because when you eat a prawn Or eat an lobster or eat a crab Not that far off really and This is the weird thing my wife loves prawns But she will not eat the ones from a chinese restaurant because they leave the head on the legs on it just looks gross to her It's like well, what if you just take these and you just pull out the The portion that would be considered the meat, right? You leave out the eyes Leave out the mandibles the legs I think I mean, you know It wouldn't be too bad. You just But then you also get into the whole sort of like people not really understanding what they're eating You know, if you if you take out all the that's like 80 percent of the processed food we eat Well, sure, but you know, I I don't know if you know, I think I think that Everyone being a little bit more woke about what they're eating is a good thing in general And and part of that is knowing that yes something that you might really enjoy might have had a head And legs or a tail like for example, I was mentioning earlier in good day internet There is a natural coloring agent they use and for food coloring But they just call it natural coloring, but it's for this blue color In some instances, it's essentially just a ground of beetle like they take the beetle and they roast and they grind it into a powder to make Yeah, and they call it natural flavors And so I mean, you know, you're probably eating an insect And when you're a kid you eat an insect or two either is it dare or accidentally Erin I I think that the the company Aspire in Austin is trying to do a lot to get around that right there While they do have some packets of full crickets A lot of their products don't have the legs on or just powders that that are providing protein directly into a bar like you had Yeah, absolutely. And they're also making an effort to Kind of create I think a little bit of of mental space, you know the way that we don't say the reading cow We generally say beef or work versus pig. They have a product called a keta So you don't have to sit there and be like, well, you know, what do I want to snack on? Crickets, you know some some some just nice the way for a keta A keta is the new beef. There you go. You've heard it here first folks I I don't know I There's a lot of regulations about not having bugs in you know Like you're not allowed to have more than a certain amount of bugs parts per million in your cereal and stuff So there's some some regulations. They're going to have to change too to be like, no, no, we meant these bugs these bugs are These are sanitary. They've you know, they've they've been treated. They're meant for human consumption But it is in the end if you if you can get past thinking about it just protein, right? Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. Sometimes there are bug stories Sometimes there aren't you can submit your own and vote on others at daily tech news show reddit.com We're also on facebook. We have a group facebook.com slash groups slash daily tech news show I know we will get emails about eating bugs. Uh, but what did we get emails about from previous show? It actually wasn't about bugs. This one came from paul and it was on the subject of retweets from yesterday's show Paul says I have to think that the problem is going to have to be fixed by an adjustment of social norms And any engineering fix would probably just be gamed immediately. That said I encounter this problem more on facebook when my feed is just flooded with shares What I would like is a way to just block all shares We're on twitter retweets that don't add anything to the post or the conversation I think this would make social media more pleasant and perhaps tackle the rt problem in a backward way by in By de-incentivizing Blindly sharing or retweeting something without having to put some skin in the game How do you determine whether it's contributing something to the conversation? I think that's the difficult part there or or if it's a blind share rather than something that you really cared about Yeah, that's a tough. I like the idea that paul has here. Yeah Yeah, but it starts to get into the gaming situation of like, well, how do you determine whether It is adding anything to the conversation Well, it almost seems like what paul's saying is the the quote retweet is the way to go Don't have anything extra to say then you shouldn't retweet it because then you're just sort of passing something along without without Offering your opinion, but at the same time that isn't always the case Yeah, I don't know. It's a it's a good thought though. And and I think the the idea of I wouldn't mind having an option To just turn off retweets sometimes like hey, you know, I just don't want to see retweets So let me see my timeline without the retweets. See what it looks like. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you there Aaron Carson A wonderful person to retweet Thanks for being with us today on the show on dTns and let folks know where they can keep up with the rest of your work Yeah, so you can always find me on cnet.com and on twitter speaking of which I am at Aaron Carson Excellent and retweet Aaron Yes, uh, do that. Also, uh, support us on patreon. Uh, we have lots of great, uh, con content there That is extending the show including good day internet a a larger version of the show where we talk about other things Roger Chang had his weekly column go up, uh, yesterday If you if you're at the associate producer level or up go check out all the great ways to support our show directly Be our boss at patreon.com slash dTns We also have an email address and that email address is feedback at daily tech news show dot com We're waiting for your email. 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