 Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Philip Shane, Paul Boyer, and Brad. Coming up on DTNS WhatsApp plans to become a super app. Netflix introduces gamer handles and what Apple's really up to with mixed reality. This is the Daily Tech News for Monday, August 29th, 2022 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. I'm Roger Chang, the show's producer. And joining us, the chief technology officer at Skidmore Owings and Merrill Rob DeMillo. Welcome back. Thank you, folks. Nice to see everybody. Good to see you too. Let's start this show with a few tech things you should know. NASA delayed the launch of its space launch system rocket after an engine bleed issue caused an engine to not reach the appropriate temperature range at launch time. The next attempted launch will be Friday, September 2nd at 12.48 p.m. Eastern. They spent so much money on it. Sony acquired the mobile game developer Savage Game Studios. The studio hasn't launched any games, but its co-founders worked on some games you probably played. Clash Clans, Angry Birds, et cetera. With that acquisition, Sony plans to launch PlayStation Studios Mobile, which will operate separately from the console division in order to, quote, reach new audiences unfamiliar with PlayStation and our games, end quote, to which I add, and give us money. Late last month, Pinterest launched the invite-only collage-making app Shuffles on iOS. The app has quickly proved popular, hitting number one in the lifestyle category and in the top 20 of non-gaming apps in the U.S. on August 21st. Sensor Tower reports it's now number 66 overall in the U.S. app store and tops the charts in Ireland, New Zealand, and the U.K. Elon Musk's attorneys, subpoenaed whistleblower and former security chief of Twitter, Peter Zatko, aka Mudge, we talked about Mudge last week on the show, and the complaints that he filed with the U.S. SEC, accusing Twitter of, among other things, material misrepresentation and omissions about security and privacy protections built into its platform. Among that were some allegations about the number of bots on the platform, something that Musk has been on about a lot. Zatko has been ordered to provide documents related to the impact of spam on Twitter's business, any documents related to illegal activity at Twitter, as well as materials related to the end of Zatko's employment by Twitter. Musk's lawyers will depose Zatko on September 9th, so he has to give the documents and then they'll interview him about stuff, and that will be under oath. The trial is set for October 17th. India's top mobile carrier Reliance Geo said it will spend $25 billion to roll out 5G service in the country, starting this Diwali, which happens in October. The rollout will deploy standalone 5G architecture, not relying on existing 4G networks. Plans to extend 5G to every town in India by the end of 2023. Speaking of Reliance, one of the biggest companies in the world, they've got something going on on WhatsApp. But before we get to that, it's good to remember that in many parts of the world, there are super apps that everyone relies on. Users in China, for example, do everything in WeChat. They pay the rent, they buy tickets to things like sports and concerts, they get food delivered. Super apps generally make their money off the payment processing fees, off of subscriptions to premium features, and of course, ads. So while WeChat is definitely dominant in China, Meta's WhatsApp has a big giant footprint in India with more than 400 million users. That's about 20% of WhatsApp's global user base. A lot of Indian WhatsApp users. Meta sees business messaging as its way to make money, and in April, the company received approval from the National Payments Corporation of India to extend its use of UPI payments on WhatsApp in India from 40 million to 100 million users, giving it the ability to let companies set up a variety of shops on the platform. For starters, the good old Reliance Industries we were just talking about is setting up a grocery service called Geomart on WhatsApp, J-I-O-M-A-R-T. To try it out, if you're in India, you can text hi to Geomart's number, and you'll get an in-app shopping experience without having to leave WhatsApp. So like Instacart, but you don't have to go launch Instacart. Users will be able to browse Geomart's entire catalog, make UPI supported payments, and arrange delivery all within WhatsApp. Super apps, obviously huge in China, huge in large parts of Asia, but they are almost entirely WeChat. Like that is the example, right, Rob? Everybody talks about a Super app, you talk about WeChat. Yeah, WeChat in China is what WhatsApp is trying to be in India, right? And WeChat has the support of the Chinese government in various ways, so it makes sense. The gamble here for Metta is that folks in India who are used to bouncing from app to app to app are going to want to stay in one app to do all their purchases. Yeah, and this is what everyone who's not WeChat wants to replicate, right? There's Grab is trying to be a Super app in Indonesia and Singapore. You've got Metta who's been trying to figure out how to make WhatsApp into a Super app somewhere. They've been doing things in Brazil to probably, you know, try to increase payments there, and they've run into trouble with Brazilian courts over and over. This looks to be the most likely way to become a Super app. Do it in India where WhatsApp is incredibly popular, so you already have the user base, and partner with the biggest tech platform in India, particularly a giant in the telco space. So people who are using Reliance Geo for their service are likely to want to use GeoMart. This seems very smart on WhatsApp's part, or on Metta's part, I guess. This just seems like a slam dunk. You have so many users who at least are using WhatsApp, Reliance Geo, and potentially both, probably both, and you can do everything from within the app. Is this a good idea, you know, to give Metta that much more power? I mean, you could argue that Super apps are too dominant, but it's also about convenience for people. I mean, if I had this sort of situation where I could do a lot of things within apps that I'm already using for just kind of chatting socially with my friends or, you know, various communications, I love that idea. I love the idea of not having a bunch of separate apps for a lot of different things, but it just, you know, there are a few different ways you can look at this. Yeah, I don't know if the catch is on in the US or Europe because of the privacy culture here, right? There's so much more suspicion of one app having everything and what they're going to do with that data. There's almost an allergic reaction anytime an app moves in that direction here. Well, it's also usage patterns, right? Here everyone has got 300 apps on their phone, right? And so they're used to bouncing between DoorDash and SD card and a bunch of other things. So I think staying inside of one app is going to feel a little claustrophobic to people in the US. Yeah, and if they could build up the trust, then they would have to overcome that usage habit of like, no, no, but I go to this app to do that. I don't stay in an app. Yeah. I wonder if a super app will ever catch on in the US or Europe, honestly, either one. I just don't see it happening. I mean, we just don't. So WhatsApp, I get notifications from WhatsApp every so often and mostly from my friends who don't live in the US. It's not an app I'm using on a daily basis just because there aren't enough folks that I know who are using it. And yes, iMessage is kind of my main app because I'm an iPhone user. WeChat, I don't use at all, but I'm quite familiar with how much people love it for all the things. So yeah, I don't know about the US here. We seem to beat to different drums than the rest of the world on many things. I was just in Italy for a couple of weeks and we chat, I'm sorry, we chat WhatsApp. They need to change the name. WhatsApp was everywhere. I didn't see anything that was using it as a super app yet, but definitely every shop vendor had a WhatsApp placard outside with the QR code. So it might gain some acceptance there. Yeah, it can make some inroads. I could see that. I just don't know if it can overcome, you say, the habits. It would take a lot. Not impossible, but it would take a lot. Like starting a new game service, for instance. Oh gosh, yeah. So Netflix's efforts to get into mobile gaming have been fairly modest so far. We've certainly talked about it on this here show. But it's steadily added to its catalogs of games that subscribers can access ad-free, some of which already were based on existing Netflix intellectual property. The company made a bit of a bigger splash back in April when it announced it would launch an Exploding Kitten original series in 2023 based on a mobile card game that a lot of people love. The first time one of its games would proceed streaming content with the same IP. Yeah, so they will make Exploding Kitten's content after the game comes out. One of the hallmarks of a robust gaming ecosystem though, you see this on PlayStation, you see this on Xbox, is the gamer tag, the gamer handle, what you call yourself. Your gaming handle lets you present your identity to the world separate from your actual name or even your username. It's used for knowing who's on your team in multiplayer games as well as seeing who's on the leaderboards because you always gotta know who's winning. Yeah, so Netflix has launched the ability for users to create gaming handles. So granted, for now it lets you use them in games like Majang Solitaire, Bowling Ballers, Heads Up, Into the Breach. You might be familiar, you might not. In fact, Into the Breach was the first to get it on July 19th. So your profile name and your icon aren't being used. Instead, other gamers see the gamer handle. A lot of people think that the gamer handle is really important. Developer Steve Moser first noted the feature and has also found references in the Netflix app to the future abilities to invite users to play games. And of course, there's the whole leaderboard thing. This goes along with recent news that Netflix has been hiring people with backgrounds in cloud gaming. Netflix is taking this pretty serious. They're going slow. They're not trying to gain attention at this point. But we opined with Scott Johnson not too long ago that that's what Netflix is up to. The way they started their streaming service in 2007 by just putting it out there and saying, hey, if you find something you want to watch on there, you know, if you've got it in your DVD queue, it'll show up there. Maybe you'll want to use it. And then eventually it took over the world, right? I think that's what Netflix is hoping they'll do here is just kind of slowly test things out, try things out, hire some cloud gaming stuff until they finally have things where you turn around and go, well, wait a minute, I want to play that. Oh, and they've got gamer tags and all that kind of stuff. Great. I didn't even know they had built that. I expect people to say, if you're not following every little nugget as it leaks out like this. Yeah, I'm up to minds about this. There's part of me which is, you know, hey, Netflix, stay in your lane, right? But there's another part that understands the idea to use the technology that they already have in place to try and increase their ad revenue. The issues I have with this are sort of analogous to the Super App concept. Their market is passive viewing, right? Just sitting on your couch and having a beer and watching a movie or whatever it is that you're doing. It's not necessarily the same audience that will take up gaming. So they obviously did their research and they obviously think that there is a market there for it. So I'm probably not right. It just doesn't seem to flow for me. I mean, I think the whole Netflix, stay in your lane thing is exactly what Netflix has been doing very successfully for some time. And now understands that, ooh, streaming services, there are many to choose from. And a lot of people aren't going to keep paying for Netflix if they have other choices and other places that they want to watch things. Where other streaming services aren't really getting into this yet is the whole, well, if you're already here, maybe you want to play a game based on some IP that Netflix is part of. I think that as slow of a rollout, like you mentioned, Tom, as it has been, I think that Netflix thinks this is where we become unique again. Where we can offer something that nobody else is offering. They're testing it. They're learning. They're in learning mode. They're not ready to convince people to come play games at Netflix. They're just sort of floating things out on the water to see what stays afloat and what sinks. And that's what they did with streaming. In some ways, it's different. In some ways, it's similar. But when Netflix started streaming, everyone said, stay in your lane, Netflix. People want DVDs. They want to watch on DVD. Nobody can stream. Nobody has enough bandwidth. Nobody can stream a video. And Netflix played a long game knowing that eventually people would. Video games are a little different. They're the same in that it's like, hey, it's entertainment, right? One's lean back. One's lean in. But we're in two of the biggest entertainment industries in the world, movies and TV, and possibly video games. On the other hand, going from DVDs to streaming was a technical barrier that they surmounted. Going from TV shows and moviemaking to video game making is a creative boundary. And as you rightly pointed out, Rob, it's a different type of content. It is. I'm not following the analogy of staying in your lane from DVDs to streaming because it's still content delivery. When you're talking about moving to gaming, you've now got a two-way connection. I'm pretty well versed in cloud technologies at this point. And I've also hired folks from cloud gaming technology companies to work on some of my stuff. It's not the same animal, right? So they are obviously putting a lot of time and effort and research into this and keeping an eye on Stadia to see how Stadia's market is picking up, which it is, by the way. It's kind of interesting. But they have to try it carefully. They have to because it is so extremely different to have a two-way communication between the viewer and the servers. Yeah, I think you're right to point out that it's a different business. Netflix has done different versions of its business, right? The delivery method was different between DVD and streaming. The content acquisition aspect was different between buying things from stars and creating House of Cards. But video games is a much different enterprise than TV shows and movies. They've never gone that far out of their lane. Sorry, Sarah, we have to keep saying it. Yeah, it's fine. I'm used to those sort of jokes. But one of the things that I'm not currently a Netflix subscriber, just for various reasons, I'm in other streaming services. But when I think of Netflix, I think of how you said, Rob, having a beer, sitting on the couch, watching some stuff, maybe binging some stuff. And I think, for me, the whole idea of Netflix gaming, I'm sitting on my couch with a remote control, playing a game, well, maybe. But the mobile gaming thing is important to at least remind myself that, oh, yeah, Netflix is accessible in lots of other ways besides me sitting in my living room in my underwear, watching something passively. And there are a lot of opportunities, not just for Netflix, but for a lot of companies to be able to make the most of this. So Netflix has hit its first real competition since it started its streaming service, right? Disney Plus and Paramount Plus and HBO Max, whatever Zaslaw is going to do to HBO Max, right? But so they've got some uphill work to do in their production and content delivery methodologies. And I would be more vocal against this if I found out that they were stealing my production side to fund this stuff, especially in times like this because their productions, you could say what you want about them, but they're excellent. The Sandman is excellent, right? They've done a lot of really, really creative, interesting things, and that should not get robbed. You should rob Peter to pay Paul. Well, folks, if you want to know if Netflix should stay in their lane, rob Peter to pay Paul or just survive on its merits, let us know. Feeling social, get in touch with the DTNS audience on the socials, DTNS show on Twitter, and DTNS pics, DTNS P-I-X on Instagram. As we get closer to the expected announcement of Apple's much reported on mixed reality headset, we keep getting some new information, just dribs and drabs. We've heard that the software has been in development for a long time. Bloomberg reported on references to R.O.S. back in 2017. Apple referenced RealityOS in pre-release builds of iOS 13 back in 2019, and it looks like maybe that name, RealityOS, is going to stick around, showing up again this year in App Store upload logs. What else have we found, Sarah? Well, Tom, I'm glad you asked. We also recently received some possible details about the name of this mixed reality hardware. Bloomberg reports that trademarks were filed for RealityOne, RealityPro, and RealityProcessor in the U.S., the E.U., the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Costa Rica, and Uruguay. All filings reference virtual and augmented reality headsets, goggles, glasses, and smart glasses. Now these trademarks were not actually registered by Apple. They were registered by Immersive Health Solutions. Which was incorporated in February by another company called the Corporation Trust Company. And the Corporation Trust Company, despite its Orwellia name, is actually kind of well-known as a company that files trademarks on behalf of other companies who want to avoid people knowing that they filed those trademarks, right? You sign a deal with Corporate Trust Company and they say, great, we'll file the trademark and agree to give it to you as soon as you're ready for it. They are the same company that filed a trademark for RealityOS. But it's a fair bet that they are filing these trademarks on behalf of Apple, either that or we have another Cisco iPhone situation brewing, but I'm guessing it's on behalf of Apple. And just a reminder that although the device isn't expected to be announced at Apple's event next month, Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a very good track record on all things Apple, now expects Apple to make it public early next year. We just don't know. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman expects that Apple's first mixed reality headset will use an M2 system on a chip and 16 gigs of memory on the headset. Yeah, and if you're like, wait, next month, I thought it was in a week. Those are both true. It's not quite September yet. So yeah, we're not we're not going to hear about we're not going to hear about Apple's RealityOS at the announcement coming up next week. I wouldn't think. I mean, maybe a teaser, but that's very un-Apple. Exactly. Yeah, they wouldn't do that. Oh, Apple. What do you think we're going to see from Apple? It's very bold and very Apple like to call something reality. We're the company with the reality that operating system for reality, the headset called reality. I mean, it's a better word than meta. I'm going to give it to them. Okay, if that's what it's going to be. I don't know, Rob, what are your feelings? I've said this on the show before that I'm a big proponent of AR. I'm less excited about VR for a thousand reasons that we can we can list off here. I think there's a couple things happening. So Apple's been trying to get into this game for a while, literally since Google Glass, actually, maybe even a little before that. So it's been going on for a long time. They're realizing how hard it is. It's really hard to track objects in the real world and interspersed CGI on top of it into a user's visual field without having them throw up. And so they either have solved something or they believe they're going to solve something very shortly. I also think that the marketing uplift that you get from any Apple product, you know, again, Apple, right, is going to help the entire market float up if they're successful. Yeah, the reality one or the reality pro could do to the quest what the iPhone did to BlackBerry, right, which isn't immediately squash it, but just pull the rug out from under it. Yeah, reimagine what everybody's used to. Yeah. And Sarah, you're right. I mean, it's first of all, it's a better name than Meta. And I suspect it will be a better experience than Meta. I mean, I, you know, I got to say I am a quest user on an almost daily basis. And there are things that I don't love about it. But I mean, I also think it's just one of the most fun ways to, you know, have immersive reality or whatever Apple Shell company was calling it for, you know. Immersive health solutions on your head. Immersive health solutions, which in a way it really is because I'm doing a lot of like exercise stuff, you know. Yeah, that could be true, right? Yeah, but, you know, I also welcome, you know, let's see, let's see some competition. Let's, you know, fight to the death. Let's make this all better for everybody. The health, the health market, it's a smaller market. And approaching, you know, healthcare providers and using this as almost an enterprise insert into that world is very similar to what Google's doing with the next generation of Google Glass. It's a very limited audience. It's very enterprise based. It's not a public release yet. But going into these sort of quiet, like covered environments will give both those companies a chance to work on these products to make them consumer-ready. I don't like doing predictions as much as scenarios. And a scenario that I think could fit the facts is the reality one is akin to the Apple Watch, right? It does a lot. Apple's been working in this space by measuring your health. It also is going to work great with Apple Fitness. And it's for your home health and exercise. And they oriented towards that saying, yeah, games, the metaverse like Neil Stevenson, we're not there yet. This is something you can do for real that will help you now, the way they have marketed the Apple Watch. And then the reality pro is what you're talking about, Rob, where it's like, and then in a more clinical setting for the professional use when you're rehabbing, et cetera, et cetera, we've got the reality pro that helps you do that. I think that's a scenario that fits a lot of these facts. We'll see. Well, switching gears just a tad. If you're not familiar with the ivory trade, it's been illegal for decades globally, but that has not stopped elephant poaching. To do something about that, 17-year-old Annika Puri spent two years creating something called ELSA, which is short for elephant savior, a machine learning software prototype that analyzes the differences in movement patterns between elephants and humans in thermal infrared videos. Because drones are looking for this, but she noted, well, humans and elephants move very differently. This is something that we could improve upon. ELSA uses a $250 FLIR-1 pro thermal camera with 206 x 156 pixel resolution, plugs into an iPhone 6, then is attached to a drone, then the system notes in real-time whether objects on the ground are human or elephant. Four times more accurate than existing drone detection methods on existing footage, says Puri, but still needs to be tested on raw video. It could also be used to track populations of species. We're just general research as well, so elephants, great example, but this could definitely do other things. Puri's project won the Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication at a top award at the competition's Earth and Environmental Sciences category at this year's Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair. If you're not familiar, it's the world's largest international pre-college STEM competition. Yeah, this is genius, because what Puri did was say, well, when you're looking at this video as a human, you're looking at pixels, and those pixels move, but it might be hard-pressed to tell if it's a human or not. We can train machine learning and say, this is how an elephant moves, this is how a human moves, automatically tell me whether those pixels are a human or an elephant in a way that a human can't, and it looks like it works. In which case, if it works, then you can train it to look for like, oh, we just want to tell how many monkeys are in this population because they're endangered, and we can track that with the drones as well, because you can tell by movements which monkeys are which and track them. This is great stuff. Yeah, I think this is wonderful, and the fact that she's a teenager makes it even more wonderful. There's a long-storied history in the last five to seven or eight years where teenagers can get a hold of advanced technologies, and they learn very fast. There was Ben Choi, who created a prototype for a prosthetic arm that basically ran off of brainwaves to move the arm, and part of their motivation, if you look at all of the teenage inventors over the last few years, is to help humanity. They don't have a profit line that they have to worry about, and I would argue they're even more altruistic than university researchers who have to deal with grant money and the rest of it. There's a little bit less of like, but this is the way we do things, which as adults, we all can fall into that trap to have somebody say, and if you read her story in the SmithsonianMag.com, which we'll have in our show notes, it's a really great story. She said, I went to India with my family and I saw all these things that were made out of elephant tusk ivory for sale, and I was like, isn't this illegal? Why is this happening? Well, what's going on with the poaching, trying to crack down on the poaching industry? What's wrong? Well, they've got drones, but the drones don't work very well, and here's how it can work better, and it's genius. Yeah, it is. Machine learning is available to everybody at this point, so the fact that she's used that, it's just great. There's no downside to this story at all. No, it's good. Innovation. Thank you, young people. All right, let's check out the mailbag. Let's do it. This one comes from Jeffrey. Jeffrey was writing in about our conversation of a camera that could perhaps blur certain things out of an image and leave other things in an image, particularly video. Jeffrey says, Sarah mentioned teaching it what you looked like and blurring you out, and then Tom mentioned it might be a bit hard to do and get everybody to use that camera, so everybody's using the same thing. Jeffrey says, I, for one, would like that. I have cameras outside my house, wouldn't put any inside, but if I could have it edit me out, then I would get it in a heartbeat. Clearly this won't happen for a long time to be able to make my own camera that edits me out of my house, but it's a great use case for when it could be possible. Now, to be clear, if you didn't hear this story, you may not realize this was a camera that was built physically not to reflect the photons of a particular object. We weren't sure if it could be used for humans. We were speculating, because once this camera is built, it can't be changed. Whatever you train the machine learning to design the lens not to see, that lens, once you build it, doesn't see. So it's not like on-the-fly editing, but I like what Jeffrey's saying. He's like, yeah, just build all the cameras in my house so they can't see me, and then I'm fine. I can walk around my house. I thought that was pretty good. Smart idea, Jeffrey. Good idea, Jeffrey. Thanks to everybody who writes in a lot of great ideas all the time. Keep them coming. Feedback at dailytechnewshow.com is where to send that email. Also, thanks to Rob DeMillo for being with us today. Rob, where can people keep up with your latest? Well, there's... you can probably go to the About Me for me. If you go to About Me slash Rob DeMillo, you'll find me. You can find me at s-o-m dot com under the People's page. So I'm pretty easy to get hold of. Well, it's so nice to have you back on the show. It's been a while. It's been a while. Yeah. Don't wait so long next time. Also, a special thanks to Harrison Ward. Harrison is one of our top lifetime supporters for DTNS, and we love to shout y'all out when we can. Thank you, Harrison, for all the years of support. Yeah. You know, it's not no surprise that people are cutting back right now, and so we are, you know, we are down a few patrons on the month. Going into September, so we really, really appreciate folks like Harrison sticking with us, and any of you listening on the free feed who want to get a little extra stuff, get the ad-free version, if you can't afford it, we appreciate you always at patreon.com slash DTNS. Speaking of patrons, stick around for our extended show, Good Day Internet. What joys will we talk about? Probably food. You can also catch this show live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. eastern. That's twenty-hundred UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live. We're back doing it all again tomorrow with Allison Sheridan joining us. Talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogpants.com. Diamond Club helps you have enjoyed this program.