 Coming up on DTNS, why iPhone users suddenly love widgets? Facebook plans for a chaotic US election and robots and satellites from Microsoft Ignite. This is the Daily Tech News for Tuesday, September 22, 2020 in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt and from Studio Redwood. I'm Sarah Lane and a very tired Patrick Beja from the forests of Finland. And I'm the ship's producer, Roger Chang. We were just talking with Patrick about the Xbox and the orders and and wanting physical discs versus not wanting physical discs. Sarah was talking about her camera setup. We got all kinds of good stuff on good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash DTNS. Now a note to Seamus Lavery. We probably won't talk about battery day today. But if there's something big comes out of it, we'll definitely talk about it tomorrow, Seamus. Yes, I got all your messages. All right. Now a few tech things you should know. There are nine different sizes of Apple's new solo loop Apple Watch bands because they don't have clasps. Mac rumors reports that customers who got the wrong sized band are told they must send the entire watch back, not just the band, because it's considered a set. Some users have reported being able to exchange just the band in the store. Google's area 120, I think we should say 12 Oh, it should be 12. Google's area 120 introduced tables, a work tracking tool that automates email reminders for overdue tasks, chat messages from new form submissions, and moving and updating tasks. Tables can import data from spreadsheets, share data with Google groups and assign tasks to Google contacts. Tables is available now with both free and paid plans. Jabra announced the elite 85t wireless earbuds for $229. The elite 85t have a six microphoto array for voice calls, four mics are used for active noise canceling features and one two millimeter drivers for improved sound. Jabra claims 5.5 hours of continuous listening with noise canceling on and 25 hours more 25 hours more with the case preorder start next month, chip in in November. I want them. AMD announced the Athlon 3000 C series and the Ryzen 3000 C series processors for Chromebooks. Some of the specs of these chips are identical to chip designs that are already found in Acer's Aspire five and Dell's Inspiron 15. But AMD says it wanted to rebrand the chips as Chromebook specific CPUs. Royal was one of the first companies to show off a foldable screen device at CES 2019, and has announced its latest foldable. The FlexPy 2 tablet has 5G and Snapdragon 865 or 865 chipset and a 4550 milliamp hour battery. The FlexPy 2 is available available for 9,999 yuan, about $1,470 US dollars. Walmart announced a partnership with Quest Diagnostics to deliver at home COVID-19 kits by drone. That trial is live right now in North Las Vegas and will launch in Chictawaga, New York in early October. After a temporary suspension on paid extensions this year due to fraudulent transactions, Google has announced that over the next several months, paid Chrome extensions are out of there, cease to be available. Developers haven't been able to submit new paid extensions since back in March, and the free trial option offered by the Chrome Web Store will also go away on December 1. Devs who still want to monetize their extensions must migrate to another payment processor and a new licensing API. And Microsoft just announced it has exclusively licensed Open AI's GPT-3 language model. That's the one that auto generates text. We talked to Andrew Main about it. Open AI released GPT-3 in July. Open AI says, quote, the deal has no impact on continued access to the GPT-3 model through Open AI's API. So you're not losing access if you've been using it. Microsoft isn't stealing it away. What Microsoft says it's getting is the access to the underlying code of GPT-3. So the API is going to stay the way it is. Alright, Patrick, let's talk a little more about widgets. Indeed, iOS 14 brings widgets to Apple's phones for the first time. Something Android has had since time immemorial or when it launched in 2008. iPhone users are creating tons of viral videos and images on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. An app called Widgetsmith, an app for making widgets, was the top free app on iOS on Monday. Number two was ColorWidgets. Widget apps have been installed about five million times since iOS 14 was released on September 16. Yeah, I put this in here because, A, it's a crazy trend that's happening where everybody's like sharing their, like, look what I've done with my iOS home screen. It looks nothing like iOS, right? So customized. Yeah. And then immediately followed by three Android people scoffing at them, like, I've had this forever, which is true. I've never been much of a widget person on the Android side. You know, I've used some headline stuff and a clock and this and that, but I actually just prefer to like make it easy to get to my apps. So the widgets I've been using on iOS are the one that actually suggests the apps you might want to use next because I find that really handy to just have that on the home screen. It reduces the amount of times I have to go into the drawer and all that sort of stuff. And then I've been trying the one where in the corner it just either shows you the weather or some news headlines or photos and just seeing how that works. But I haven't done much, like, true customization like some of these people have. Yeah, I'm with you. And I I only installed iOS 14 yesterday. So there's some time yet for me to get used to all the cool stuff that I can use and not just use iOS how I've been using since 13 came out, which just seems like a long time now. But I find that everything that's on my home screen, and I'm going to sound like somebody who just is resistant to change, everything that's on my home screen is there for a reason. I swipe down. And there's a lot of, you know, my frequently used apps. If there's an app that isn't either on my home screen, or in recent used, you know, the first couple of letters, then it comes up because I've so many pages of apps, I wouldn't know where it was otherwise. So it's, it works for me, but it is a little chaotic. So I see where widgets can simplify stuff and give more precedence to the things that I really do use the most, like the weather app type thing. I'm looking at that all the time. Am I, you know, do I need the Uber app on my home screen? No, so I did a little rearranging this morning. So that's at least a good thing that came out of this is me kind of being like, well, what's really important? Maybe I don't need so many apps on my home screen, but I'm telling you the widgets, even the small ones, they really push a lot of stuff out. So I have to figure out what, because I don't care if it looks cool and customized really. I don't know how much I care about that. I don't care about colors. And maybe that's just me not being a cool tiktoker. I do care a little bit about the colors and design, especially, you know, iOS has been starved for customization since it launched. And I think this is why you're seeing the explosion of all of this because you can make it a little bit more your own. So I did go and download the, which one is it, the widget Smith app. And it's pretty cool. Let's you do widgets. And I felt, okay, it's free. Maybe you can pay for it to get more features because the amount of widgets you can add is pretty limited. There's a subscription. It's not a one time payment. It's a subscription that you have to pay to add different widgets. And that's where I was like, okay, this is BS. I'm stopping this right here. iOS is going to stay the way it's always been, which has been fine and functional. Well, you get other widgets without having to pay for the widget Smith. But yeah, that's the one everybody's using to really customize, like turning their screen into Windows 95 icons and stuff like that. Yeah, it's a pretty cool app, but it's just that, that, you know, I would pay for it. Subscription, though, it's like, I have enough of those. Yeah, no kidding. Well, if you have a really cool home screen that you'd like to share with us, feedback at dailytechnewshow.com would be a great place to start. Love to see him. All right. So we've had a day to get used to the idea that Microsoft will acquire Bethesda. We know it increases Microsoft's game studios from 15 to 23. We know that Microsoft said that it will let Bethesda run as its own division means marquee titles beyond Forza and Halo. So Patrick, what are your thoughts? Yeah, it's a little bit more than Bethesda. It's Zenimax, of which Bethesda is one studio. There are a few others, but it's it's really interesting. I think it shows it's first of all, obviously it's a gigantic move by Microsoft. It's a really important one until now. They had bought well known studios, but they were more in the double A space than the really big productions, triple A type of games. And now this is Microsoft saying, all right, we know we've been saying it's good to have games on old platforms and to be at now it's exclusives. That's what matters. And of course, Microsoft is not really playing the same game as everyone else has been playing for the longest time because they want you to play their games on any platform you can. But it's still, in a sense, their own platform because it's the game pass and it's the games they publish. So it's their things. And I very much suspect that most of the big games that are going to be coming out of Bethesda and those other studios are not going to be on any platform. They could publish them on PS4 or PS5, I mean. I don't see that happening for the big, big ones. Of course, they're going to be on PC and Xbox, but those are going to be reasons to get the game pass. If they could have gotten game pass on PlayStation or on Nintendo, which Microsoft said initially, well, we'd love to do it. And a few months ago they said, apparently Sony is not interested. So and Nintendo neither. But so they're going to put these big games as an incentive for people to get game pass. And that's a form of exclusivity. You know, it makes me wonder, because that all makes sense. And I think you're absolutely right. But the Microsoft approach outside of gaming has been we're the cloud provider. Whatever gets you to use our stuff and therefore our cloud services we like. So we don't care. We're going to put Android on our Microsoft Surface Duo. We're going to put our stuff out on iOS. We've changed. We're not trying to lock you in. I wonder if at any point this makes it possible for them to move to do that in gaming, which is we make money when people buy games. And so we want to put the games out wherever and game pass is their Azure in that calculation. And maybe they even use this as a some leverage to say, gosh, if you if you put game pass Nintendo Sony on your console, you'll get access to all of these exclusives. You know, I don't know. It's it's interesting. I'm not saying they're going to do it, but it raises the question. I mean, I don't think they're not going to put any games on any other platform. They do put out Ori and the Blind Forest and the Will of the Wisps on the Nintendo Switch. So they're not opposed to having that the game pass proposition is a little bit different because then it encourages players to not purchase other games as much. If so, if Sony puts it on their system, yes, they might get some money from the game pass subscription, but then they lose money on other games that won't be purchased because everything is on game pass. It's I think it's a little bit of different because if they just start putting every game out on other platforms on their own, then there are games publisher. There are not a games, you know, platform anymore. They just publish games. So I think they're still going to pull back on that aspect. Yeah, like they're a software publisher, not a operating system platform. Well, I mean, I know we have to move on, but they have just changed. They have dematerialized the platform. It used to be a hardware box. Now it's their game pass service, but it's still a platform and they want people to use that platform instead of any other. Facebook's head of global affairs and former UK Liberal Democratic Party Leader, Nick Clegg, also former deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, told the Financial Times that Facebook is prepared to, quote, restrict the circulation of content, end quote, on and after Election Day in the United States. Clegg said, quote, there are some break glass options available to us if there really is an extremely chaotic and worse still violent set of circumstances. He did not give details on what this would mean, but we can look at what Facebook did in Sri Lanka and Myanmar in the past where the company reduced the reach of content from rule breakers and limited the distribution of sensationalist borderline content during chaotic elections there. A source said Facebook has studied 70 different potential scenarios. High stakes decisions will be made by a team of executives that includes not only Clegg, but Chief Operating Officer Cheryl Sandberg and of course CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who will have veto power over any decisions. Facebook has set up an election operations center to monitor activity during the election. So they appear to be taking the problems seriously this time around and not just reacting on election night anyway, but trying to prepare for possible consequence. You know, the thing that bothers me about this is the on and after Election Day part of this. Yes, you should be restricting content that is inciting riots, you know, and creating chaotic scenarios for people. But wouldn't you want to do that before an election? Not, you know, after an election starts upsetting a bunch of people because maybe they read a bunch of junk on Facebook. You know, it's it's this is me taking Facebook to task a little bit and it's not the only social network that has this problem. But it feels like, oh, yeah, things get really bad. Then we'll kind of, you know, kick into high gear here. I think it's a little bit you're right there. They should they could and maybe should be doing more before the election. But I also think that after the election, it becomes easier to act on things because the threshold for something going wrong is easier to detect. I think what, you know, no one is saying, but everyone is thinking is the scenario where President Trump loses the election and then contests the results in a way that could lead to unrest. And that is a lot more clear cut than having to decide before the election what is or isn't, you know, OK for it to be on on the Facebook platform. Yeah, I also think it's a it's a little bit scary to see all of this, but I think it's incredibly important that everyone is prepared for something like that at Facebook. And I really hope that Twitter and, you know, any social media and I include YouTube in that category is preparing for those scenarios. I think it's really important. Yeah, the last thing I want to add to this is I imagine what Facebook would say is we're taking preparations for election problems now, right, which you may or may not think they're taking enough election preparations now. But there is a there is something to the idea that the more you restrict content, the more you restrict content accidentally that shouldn't have been. And so I think what they're saying, what they're trying to say is we don't we don't think it's worth restricting the amount of content accidentally that's tougher restrictions would do now because it doesn't really stop that much. But if it got really bad, we'd go ahead and sacrifice that those that accidental restriction to stop really damaging stuff. Just just trying to get into the other side of what they might be thinking there. Well, the most popular messaging apps in most parts of the world are WhatsApp or Telegram. In China, it's WeChat. But tech in Asia has a report that in Vietnam, it appears to be a local app called ZOLO. In fact, ZOLO is the third largest app in the country behind Facebook and YouTube. But in front of Facebook's Messenger, Instagram, TikTok and even Twitter, ZOLO has 52 million monthly active users and ZOLO pay use is rising with it. ZOLO was designed for Vietnamese users, Vietnamese users with free stickers compatible with Vietnamese language and topic specific chat groups designed for Vietnamese culture. ZOLO is made by Vietnamese Vietnam's first unicorn startup ZNG, which operates other popular apps like Zingplay. I found this really fascinating because it's an example of taking a market and saying, you know, sure, we could make an app for the rest of the world and try to apply it in every market, or we could focus in on a market and super serve it with what's specific to that market. And I think especially in markets outside the U.S., where you're like, well, I'm looking at all these American made apps and they don't really work for me, but I guess I could make them work. That could be very compelling. I think there has to be a need for something like that. In this case, it seems like the the language issue was something that was an unserved need or it didn't work as well in the other apps. I also wouldn't be surprised if maybe they tried to expand to countries that are geographically close to them. It's surprising how sometimes that even in a digital world that is, you know, that has no barriers and frontiers, sometimes that's how it works in countries that are neighboring are more likely to adopt these kinds of apps. I don't I don't know that this is going to happen here, but it happens a lot in Africa as well. Some apps are very successful there and expand to other countries that are close by. Yeah, no, it would be interesting. Like, could this expand into Thailand? Could this expand into Myanmar? That's a very interesting question. I'll be I'll be interesting to see if they do that or try to replicate like let's start a Zalo for Thailand, not take Zalo from Vietnam and put it in Thailand or, you know, the startup ZNG that makes Zalo there. They're clearly onto something. 52 million monthly active users might like a few more apps that ZNG makes rather than having to expand Zalo and that just be your only worldwide model that a lot of other apps use. Or they just add functionality to Zalo and make it the we we chat of which it looks like they're doing a little bit of that already with pay. BlizzCon has recently taken place in November in Anaheim, California, but like most conferences, it will not happen in person and it will not happen in November. Blizz Blizzard Entertainment announced that it will offer an online only conference on February 19 and 20th, 2021 and call it BlizzCon line, which I apologize for making you say that because I saw on Twitter that you're not taken with that name. It hurts me. It's I used to work for Blizzard. I love the company. I love most of the games they make. I think this name is really bad. But yeah, that's not super important. Why? But what would you call it? I'm just curious. BlizzCon online, you don't have to be clever. All right. All right. What do you think? Like the fact that, you know, BlizzCon has had a very strong online presence in the past with like a direct TV integration and online integration, I think makes it probably one of the better conferences to go online because they have a lot of experience at delivering their content online. This is taking it up another level. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, for those who don't know what BlizzCon is, there are many gaming conferences in the world. This one is probably the biggest private kind of conference, meaning for only one company about only those games. And there is a big keynote presentation where they announced the big games at the beginning of the conference, which is available for everyone to watch for free all over the world. But then you have a couple of days full of conferences that you had to pay for if you wanted to see them and panels and presentations and stuff like that to see them if you weren't there. The tickets cost hundreds of euros if you wanted to go there. I think it's going to work out pretty well for them, because as you said, they've done it in the past. And also it's interesting that they just, you know, they are so used to having that BlizzCon for big announcements that they can't not have it. Like what are they going to do? They're just going to put out the press release. They have to have a big hoopla about the new games they're going to announce. And this is going to be an important one because people are starved for Blizzard game. It's been years since they had significant releases. So this is hopefully going to be a pretty big one. 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. Microsoft Ignite is going on. We're going to whip through a few of the major announcements there, like Azure Orbital that connects satellites to cloud computing. Azure Orbital is a cloud based satellite data processing platform. If you know AWS's ground station, it's similar to that. The service connects satellite operators so they can control their spacecraft through the cloud and integrate the data from their satellites with cloud based origin processing. So if you're like, well, wait, what does that mean? It can be used for things like weather imaging. So companies on the ground can take weather images and process them monitoring equipment at remote locations like oil rigs, ground communications routed through the satellites. Makes that easier. You can do it through the cloud. Norway's KSAT will use it for satellite connectivity. Luxembourg's SES is going to use it to provide communication services. Other partners include Viasat, Emergent Technologies, Kratos, Cubos and US Electrodynamics. Microsoft touted its software designed modem that lets it bring data off satellites into Azure data centers without needing to add specialized hardware as a big advantage and select Microsoft customers will be invited to use it in private preview. This is such a fascinating aspect of cloud technology in general, but cloud infrastructure is obviously when you're communicating with an orbital device spacecraft. Yes, exactly. You do need to take into account some things that you're not really worried about when you're just connecting two things that are stationary on the planet. It's interesting that companies, multiple companies now have had to develop technologies and software and hardware, I'm guessing, for these kinds of needs. The species is advancing, I suppose. Yeah, so instead of each company having to figure out how to get their data down from the satellite into the cloud, Microsoft's going to provide a service. Yeah, they just, you don't worry about it. Just we'll take care of it. Just send it to us. We got it. Software design modem. It's all good. Microsoft also announced the launch of Premonition, a robotics and sensor platform for disease outbreaks. It was developed in partnership with the National Science Foundation's Convergence Accelerator Program and academic partners like Johns Hopkins University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Microsoft's also working with Bayer on understanding vector borne diseases. So you can apply it to that. It's working on a test site both on its campus in Redmond, Washington and Harris County, Texas. That's where Houston is for monitoring mosquito borne disease. Robotic traps in this case detect mosquitoes, identify them, like they recognize the mosquito and then decide whether to capture them or not. It's been able to identify 10,000 mosquitoes in a night and scan more than 80 trillion base pairs of genomic material for biological threats. It then can scan for anomalies and make predictions. For example, Microsoft says it found a cow infected with a virus based on what it found inside a mosquito's belly. Put that one together in your head. It's coming into private preview now, but this one, this one's hard to wrap your head around, I think. Yeah, I mean, even though I know it doesn't look like this, my mind immediately goes to a robot kind of going up to a cow and being like, hmm, you know, with a microscope. But I think you've got a problem, Mr. Cowell. But yeah, especially in areas where disease outbreaks are because of weather or diet or, you know, all the above are a little bit more endemic. This is very cool. I love the idea of it called premonition as well because they're robots. You know, think for themselves now, space and robots is what Microsoft is. I know it kind of makes the next one feel a little mundane, but it's got some cool stuff. Microsoft announced new features coming to teams, not space or robots. Virtual commutes reflecting during commute time can increase productivity 12 to 15 percent, according to Microsoft. But if you're not commuting these days, you don't get that reflective time. So you can schedule a virtual commute on teams at the beginning and end of your day starting in the first half of 2021. Meditation breaks in partnership with Headspace can be scheduled as part of your virtual commute or as its own break during the day. Microsoft says maybe like right before you do a big presentation to kind of help you focus. Microsoft says 30 days of Headspace resulted in a 32 percent decrease in stress in a study. Workplace analytics is providing the ability for managers to get data on workers, like after hours collaboration, focus time, meeting effectiveness, cross company connections. All users will be able to use the analytics to get recommended actions for changing their habits to improve productivity and well being. If you unplug at the end of the day, it's going to give you credit. It'll help you reclaim time to focus, reduce your meeting overload. Features like that are coming in October for managers and rolling out to the rest through 2021. There's also new together mode scenes, coffee shops, conference rooms, auditoriums and later this year. Machine language will scale and center participants better in that together mode. If you're like, what's together mode? It's what they use in the NBA games to put everybody together in the stands. Dynamic view is getting custom layouts for how content shows up during presentations. That's when you're standing in front of your presentation on the video. You can point to it. Breakout rooms, the ability to split a meeting into smaller groups and then you can pop around to the different groups and then bring them back into a larger meeting later. There's also recaps meeting recordings, transcript chat and files shared in the meetings chat and attendee registration with automated emails, streamlined calling view and new devices. Some USB peripherals with dialpads, Microsoft team displays, which are kind of like an Amazon Echo show, but for teams, team panels for outsiding meeting space. When you get back into the office, audio codes, Polly and Yealink will all offer affordable team phones designed for common areas as well. So much stuff coming to teams. Well, I hope all the bosses who never really wanted me to take reflection time or meditate during the day will will understand our new normal. And I'm not talking about you, Tom, but but but in general, I mean, a lot of this stuff is like, OK, well, it still seems pretty, you know, regimented. And I think a lot of this makes a lot of sense. It totally depends on the team. I don't use teams. So I'm not totally I'm not totally sure what makes teams better than Slack and vice versa. But I I think that if I were in a more traditional business environment, working from home for the first time and trying to get used to making sure that my day is as balanced as it was when, you know, we were all going somewhere, this would be some welcome features. All right, a few other things for McKnight to wrap up Microsoft's giant 85 inch Surface Hub 2S will arrive in January 2021 for twenty one thousand nine hundred ninety nine dollars and ninety nine cents. Microsoft claims that the Hub 2S has helped bridge remote teams and central response locations for hospitals, health care providers, education organizations are replacing things like whiteboards and projectors with it, even if they're not bringing in classes or bringing in employees. Microsoft announced Azure Communication Services that lets developers add a voice, including telephone and video calling chat and text messages to their apps through a new set of APIs and SDKs is very similar to Twilio. Microsoft also offers translation tools through this and the services are encrypted to meet HIPAA and GDPR standards. Microsoft Edge's browser coming to Linux finally, starting with the dev channel. First of these previews will go live in October. A new outlook for Mac design launches in mid-October and machine learning and Azure Cognitive Services launches Metrics, Advisor, Bot Framework Composer, Automated ML UI and more to help simplify the creation of new models for companies. Well, thanks to everybody who participates in our subreddit. A lot of Microsoft lovers in there submit stories and vote on them at dailytechnewshow.reddit.com. What's in the mailbag today? Oh, Kirol said that our conversation on Amazon Sidewalk reminded him of Helium's IOT network based on the LowRaw protocol. Kirol says it looks like Amazon's project is kind of competing with that. This free spectrum at 900 megahertz seems to be the same. They may be using LowRaw, but with different protocol on top that supports mesh, Helium's LowRaw1 does not. WAN. Another difference is that Amazon doesn't have a program to encourage participation and increase coverage like Helium does. I'm sending this because I heard Sarah wondering, who may need this? And you were wondering, Tom, why not just use 5G? The answer is for the same reasons why Helium network is attractive for battery powered devices with very low data requirements, long range, and you want to break out of the cell carriers influence. Thank you, Kirol. Good stuff. Shout out to patrons at our master and grandmaster levels, including Chris Smith, Mark Gibson, and Reid Fishler. Also, thanks to the very tired, but very eloquent, as always, Patrick Peixach. Patrick, where could people find the rest of your work? Thank you. Well, I guess one thing to plug would be work insanity. We just talked about how virtual commutes could be good. And that's a drum I've been banging on work insanity for a long time. Well, not commutes, but some kind of taking time to be a little bit less tired or take a few breaks. And things like that are more eloquently put in work insanity, a podcast I do with one Tom Merritt that helps you work better, especially in these troubled times. Go check it out, folks, work insanity dot net. Of course, you can get all Patrick stuff at notpatrick.com. Don't forget Monday, October 5th, we start our creators theme week. We look at how technology has changed and it's still changing how people create things, visual effects, costume and props, narrative game design and more. You won't want to miss it starts Monday, October 5th, and you will be the first to know things like this. If you support us at patreon.com slash DTNS. Our email addresses feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Send us those iOS home screens and other things too. We're live Monday through Friday for 30 p.m. Eastern 2030 UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back tomorrow with Scott Johnson. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Hope you have enjoyed this program.