coming up next on Tech news today Snapchat is about to hit the web with its own online magazine Apple hits yet another roadblock in China that could stop sales of its iPhone 6 and 6 plus uh your emoji on Twitter is valuable to advertisers a closer look at differential privacy and free pizza no more thanks a lot T-Mobile all that and more coming up next on Tech news today this is Twi bandwidth for Tech news today is provided by cash fly at CAC fly.com [Music] this is Tech news today episode 1537 recorded Friday June 17th 2016 this episode of tech news today is brought to you by weal front well front is a lowcost automated investment service and the most sophisticated way to invest your money whether you’ve got millions or you’re just starting out visit wealthfront.com TNT and sign up to get your free personalized Investment Portfolio that’s wealthfront.com TN and by zerto virtual replication and Disaster Recovery technology it gives you the confidence to keep your business moving forward no matter what comes your way zerto empowers you to protect and recover your it assets move to the cloud and know you’re ready for anything get a free Readiness assessment for your data center at confident cio.com and by ZipRecruiter are you hiring with ziprecruiter.com you can post to 100 plus job sites including social networks all with just one single click so screen rate and hire the right candidates fast try zi recruiter with a free 4-day trial right now at ziprecruiter.com TNT oh hi this is Tech news today this is the show where we talk passionately and curio curiously curiosly curiosly about technology I’m Megan Jason Howell let’s see okay here’s our Challenge and then let’s not actually do it because it might get annoying but let’s see how many fake words we can make up curios curios I like it um should we talk about news instead yes instead of the whole fake word thing okay let’s use Real Worlds only okay Snapchat that’s a real word right uh Snapchat knows its core users as such it wants to direct content at them it’s going to keep them even more engaged than they have been ready that must be the reason behind his new effort an online magazine that they’re calling real life every weekday a new article will be published around topics like privacy Beauty and relationships with a focus on living with technology topics its users are probably already pretty tuned into real life won’t be an inapp experience but rather a site meaning this is in some way Snapchat’s kind of experiment away from mobile and into the web itself uh launches officially on June 27 though the site is up right now reif mag.com with kind of an introductory post to I guess give you an idea give you a sense of of what it’s going to be it kind of just looks like a a Blog to me I don’t I I started looking into it I mean right now it looks like a Blog it’s very un Snapchat like right uh the editor is Nathan jurgenson he’s a sociologist and a social media theorist which is fascinating to me because I like I like to play a social media theorist on TV uh he says one the most interesting things he says I’ve I’ve argued that online and offline like body and mind aren’t like two positions on a light switch a perspective I’ve called digital dualism instead all social life is made of both information and material it’s technological and human virtual and real I think my brain just exploded right there yeah I’m just I was just trying to follow along to be honest it’s like it’s like uh social Network um superp position being in two places at one time is basically what yeah I mean coming from a company that we’ve known previously for uh you sending pictures that you want to disappear that’s you know that’s how they started uh whatever pictures those might be or you know now the filters where you can put a flower crown on or a fox crown or you can steal someone’s you know art makeup art and then put that filter on your face it just is very UNS Snapchat like yeah um you know and they’ve been they’ve been playing around with Brands as well inside the app uh with the stories and kind of you know bringing in I I don’t know how often the the brand aspect is used with you know content from Discovery and all the different companies that are feeding information in there but they have been kind of playing around a little bit with this like we’re not just a messaging platform we’re also a way for you to stay connected with things and that seems to be what this is uh potentially all about they don’t have it’s not monetized necessarily yet but they do say that you know potenti down the line that might be something uh that they’ll play around with also different formats so right now it’s just written word they could experiment with video and uh other stuff like that and I don’t know I would guess if they’re experimenting with video maybe they that would have its own channel inside Snapchat so you can get it through the App instead of just having to be on the web yeah I mean I I feel like uh up till now Snapchat seemed very Southern California to me and now this whole thing seems very Northern California or east coast very like you know just the dualism of social media I’m excited about it I’m curious to know whether you think this next part of SN kind of like an extension of snapch Snapchat news is uh Southern California Northern California uh since we’re already talking about Snapchat we might as well talk about the AR glasses we spoke about this a few months back we’ kind of heard about it bubbling up here and there they acquired uh virgin lab secretly back in 2014 virgin lab uh is a company that was building Google glass-like products well apparently the result of that secret acquisition has been sitting on Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel’s face we can thank the paparazzi for tracking him to Corsica on vacation uh for taking shots that show off the um round but still kind of clunky looking glasses uh that look I guess similar to the ones that uh virgins was creating you can even see the little cameras up in the corner on the frames photos were taken months before anyone knew a single thing about Snapchat’s Hardware uh plans so you know potentially right around the time that the acquisition happen so maybe maybe this was like a test case thing but I still don’t understand a world where Snapchat releases smart glasses but you know social networks messaging platforms they’re they’re all experimenting in so many different directions I suppose it’s not too far out out of the realm of reality yeah and and I’m fascinated by the paparazzi point to the cameras on the you know you’re so used to like Paparazzi being like who’s he with like how much weight has she lost but it’s you know it’s the Business Insider Tech section Paparazzi it’s like what is that camera on his glasses what kind of augmented virtual reality is that I think I’m better with this kind of Paparazzi than than the other Paparazzi cuz um I’m interested in glasses with cameras at least I had the Google Glass on my face so I I would like to check this out I just don’t understand how it how it works in the world of Snapchat how how it actually makes sense in the long run but yeah you’re always snapping and receiving snaps I don’t I don’t know and I live video a new thing they’ll get into live video well let’s move on Apple has another China problem the Wall Street Journal reports that the Beijing in intellectual property Bureau has ruled that the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus violate a design patent of Chinese smartphone maker shenzen Bali Apple has been ordered to stop selling the iPhone 6 and the 6 Plus in Beijing but according to a statement from Apple sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus have continued since the company has appealed to the administrative order p in review by the Beijing IP court now shenzen Bali is a small company unknown virtually unknown outside of China and this sort of sounds like a move on the part of the Chinese government uh that seems more and more threatened by Apple and Gadget has photos of the shenzen Bal 100 c phone I don’t know if we just looked at those uh so we can see how similar the two phones are that they are if you’re watching the video version which looks looks nothing like an iPhone but but I think a lot of people said the same thing about you know this Samsung iPhone thing I mean it it really is in the eye of the beholder I suppose whether you know what similarities are transfer over and what what though yeah and the eye of the beholder in this uh instance is the CH you know is the Chinese government so I think they’re really I mean China is I mean apple is such a popular brand in China and I think it’s beginning to make them nervous I mean in April our iBooks and iTunes movies were banned um so I think they’re just kind of moving they’re being more more strict about what they’re allowing in apple just uh recently lost a lawsuit with a leather company that makes Luggage in the country that’s stamped with iPhone so I mean they’re getting it from all directions here and yesterday we talked about DD the how much money Apple invested in DD and that sort of seen as a way of you know for Apple to say like you know a peace offering well you know we’re going to invest in your company too so let us in Let Us sell more iPhones yeah not to mention Tim Cook met uh you know visited China back in May for those very same efforts what I find interesting about this is when you try and look up the brand you know the 100 C brand or the 100 plus I think there’s actually video of The 100 plus uh that I put in there as well I was able to find that through a lot of looking um you know there’s no official website for the brand uh you said that it was owned by shinzen Bali marketing uh marketing Services the full name CNBC tried to track them down the phone number that was listed was disconnected the email that they had failed delivery um Beijing business today says uh from from their kind of Investigation into this that they don’t appear to be a patent troll but just the the fact is they haven’t had any new products for a really long time um so I don’t know it’s it is very bizarre right it’s it’s like this official word that yes they’ve ripped you know they’ve ripped Apple’s ripped them off and we have to stop them selling their product in China uh based very Loosely on these you know on this company that is practically impossible to find any about M so uh one of the things I’m most excited about from Google IO uh from a few weeks back is how Android apps are coming to Chrome OS and it appears Google is wasting no time in making that a reality it was their plan all along to kind of get this going pretty quickly today they announced that the Asus Chromebook flip it’s the first device to gain access to the Play Store all it requires is for users to get uh onto the developer channel of Chrome OS at least for now that will ultimately push an update to the flip that’s going to include the Play Store on the desktop so that users you know can right away basically just access the tons and tons and tons to put it you know lightly uh of Android apps on their Chromebook um the Asus flip is a touchscreen device I you know when I saw this at Google IO I was like I don’t know why I would why I would get an Android tablet because you know moving forward I would get one of you know one of these Chromebooks that’s capable unfortunately my Chromebook Pixel is the earlier one and it’s not going to be cap capable of doing this so I’m going to have to upgrade at some point uh but they have a huge list of Chromebooks that are support that will be supported by this uh pretty pretty soon by the end of the year basically I actually have the Asus Chromebook flip in my home and have been wanting to use it but unfortunately have I have lost the charger so uh as we discussed earlier I’m going to bring it in to you Jason we’ll find a charger and then you can play around with it show off the Android apps on the Chromebook I’m really curious to see it everything that I saw at Google IO things were super fluid it didn’t look like a hack job it looked like it would be about as native of an experience as you would want cuz that’s exactly what it is there’s no emulation or no you know no middleman in the process it’s basically they’ve figured out how to how to code it into the Chrome OS to just run it natively and uh that just seems like a no-brainer to take a productivity you know device like a Chromebook Pixel and bring all those Android apps into it I love that they’re pushing this out right away actually um the uh the the flip is the first device but we’re going to see it hit the Chromebook R11 and the Google pixel uh Chromebook Pixel 2015 so the sequel to to my uh laptop sometime by the end of J of July so very soon and then a whole list of other devices by the end of the year I’m excited well Twitter can now track and deliver ads based on what emoji you use advertising age reports that emoji based targeting will be available to all advertisers through Twitter’s select ads API Partners this will start next month July 17th which coincidentally is World Emoji day I’m certainly excited I don’t know how you’re going to celebrate World Emoji day but uh Twitter says 110 billion emojis have been tweeted just since 2014 uh and they say now you can advertisers can connect with people based on their passions like what food they eat or what makes them cry while they’re laughing that sort of thing what makes them cry while they’re laughing that sounds painful how do you how you convey this with an emoji uh I guess a crying while laughing there must be one that’s the that was actually the most popular it’s the screenshot on the dang article you’re too optimistic to use the crying while laughing emoji but that’s the one I use the most that was like I think the word of the year last year an Oxford you’re right you’re right apparently this just shows how little I actually use Emoji in my in my spare time yeah you’re not a really big Emoji user you know I’m more of more of like a lazy emoticon kind of person I’m stuck in my old ways basically is what it comes down to um but I think this actually makes like when I first read this I was like okay that’s really silly like okay yeah Emoji is such a big deal that we got to start you know targeting ads to it it makes actually a lot of sense if Emoji uh is an extension of communication which is exactly what it is right it’s basically like shorthand it’s like you know instead of writing this word I can you writing these words to convey a feeling or a meaning I can just put this picture there and it takes care of and you move along if it’s shorthand for communication then why wouldn’t you you know I guess my my main question is how accurate is uh an emoji of like someone putting you know a pizza or a hamburger in in their message how accurate is that as a way to you know to convey to an Advertiser yes I’m interested in getting that coupon for a pizza like I don’t know I don’t know how that translates well yeah they were saying that they you know they know they already know where you’re from like they know where you’re tweeting from so if you’re from Chicago and you’re tweeting a pizza then you that makes you know you might it might be as simple as like here’s an ad for some pizza place nearby you but it might be much more complicated you know much me a much more complicated algorithm I think this is also a way of Twitter saying to you know here’s a way that we can make money like you know just saying we’re viable because we know what you’re tweeting and that’s another way that advertisers uh can you know Target the audience I mean just just yeah it’s very simply saying uh a lot of tweets are full of emoji and you can use that and that’s why we’re a valid company or or a lot of tweets are full of emoji and we can’t monetize on those tweets right now the way things are so let’s do that and now suddenly we’ve opened up the the the field and we’ve got a lot more potential of making money you’re absolutely right yeah I think emojis say a lot about a person personally I think the fact that you don’t even know what the crying while laughing emoji I mean what does that say about me I don’t know but advertisers know and they’re going to start putting ads true anyone knows the advertisers yeah email us at TNT twit.tv if you know what uh makes Jason special about not using the crying while laughing afid what what what ads would you send to Jason because he doesn’t even know what the crying while laughing emoji is email us so uh all this week I have been waiting patiently for someone to explain Apple’s new Buzz phrase differential privacy Brian Clark from the next web is here to save the day but first let’s take a minute to thank our sponsor wealthfront now you invest for the long term you should for your family’s Financial Health or for your Financial Health if you try to do it all by yourself especially if you want to do it the right way it’s complex consumes a lot of your time but luckily there’s wealth front traditional advisers charge huge fees between 1% and 3% of what they manage but with wealth front you pay one quarter of 1% a year that’s 25 basis points zero commissions and no hidden fees that’s less than $5 a month to to invest a $30,000 account there are no additional charges for any of wealth front’s Services you can get started investing today with as little as $500 so unlike other financial advisers wealth front will not bog you down with dozens and dozens of questions they have simplified their risk identification process which allows you to begin investing sooner it only takes a few minutes to sign up at wealthfront.com it goes right to work monitoring your portfolios around the clock and takes action as soon as an opportunity arises wealthfront portfolios are based on Modern portfolio Theory and they’re designed to adjust according to your personal risk tolerance while staying Diversified and tax efficient wealth front is transparent and accessible you can view and track all your accounts in one place and now wealth front can track both your wealth front and your non- wealthfront bank and brokerage accounts that they will provide in a summary of all your assets you can see every trade that wealthfront makes on your behalf in your dashboard on your desktop or with their mobile app wfront manages almost $3 billion dollar in client assets and it’s growing rapidly every day so what do you waiting for invest in your future today with wealthfront visit wealthfront.com TNT to sign up and get your free personalized Investment Portfolio you’ll see the customized allocation they recommend for your profile and just for twit listeners if you sign up to invest wealthfront will manage your first $15,000 entirely free of charge and that’s for life so join many twit fans who have seen huge success with wfront and claim your offer today at wealthfront.com TNT all right so earlier this week at Apple’s WWDC keynote we heard a bit about differential privacy Brian Clark from the next web is joining us to tell us a bit about why it’s such a big deal even though most uh seem to kind of gloss over it a little bit welcome Brian hey I I feel like you’re setting everyone up for disappointment when Megan said that I was here to save the day it’s it’s okay I I did notice that you did not put your cape on and that’s all right we’ll we’ll forgive you this time I was hoping we could shoot a little further down the hole a little and say that I’m just not going to confuse everyone right okay you’re not you’re going to make us a little less confused I’m going to try Okay so maybe we’ll get to we’ll get to the Emoji with uh no mouth to that state can we get to that state if we speak an emoji that’s where I’d like to get on differential privacy right now I’m at the crying tears Emoji but Jason doesn’t know what that is it’s true thank you thank you for pointing that out again I appreciate that so first things first what exactly is differential privacy and how is Apple integrating it into its platform okay um in my opinion differential privacy is probably the most important announcement that Apple made at WWDC it’s also probably the one that we’re covering the least uh it’s not as sexy as Emoji unfortunately but I think it has a huge impact in how we’re going to use mobile phones moving forward uh it’s it’s a cryptographic method that’s a lot like encryption but it gives Apple the ability to kind of peer behind the curtain and uh extract some of this data so there’s two things you have to understand one um apple is going to be using more of our data than ever before and in order to make everyone okay with that they kind of have to throw out something like this differential privacy to make them realize they’re not going to be misusing it uh it’s kind of complex but it’s the best way to sum it up would be to say it’s it’s two data sets one with your data one without your data and then by comparing the two we’re able to gleam a little bit of information out of it without really divulging a user’s identity so we all know what’s coming so Megan the day you get fed up with Jason and you decide to come work at the next web uh Apple can determine your salary uh at the next at Tech News Today by comparing say a spreadsheet from when you were at Tech news today uh compared to the one right after you left Tech news today and the difference will be your salary so that leaves two really big problems though the first one is that if you don’t add noise to each entry that a user contributes to this data set uh it’s really easy to isolate a user and figure out who added the data so so that’s the first problem the second problem is if this user information ever leaks you really have to kill the database and start all over if you’re not willing to do that then you’re compromising everyone that’s in the database and you can reveal their information and thiso oh sorry I didn’t mean to no no go ahead I was just going to say this approach is not um is not isolated to just apple right this is this is I mean are others using this right now um we don’t really hear about it I think the reason that we’re hearing about it so much now is because Apple knows that they need a lot of this data in order to kind of progress the machine learning and artificial intelligence that we’re all going to come to know and love uh it’s going to make for a better user experience but the problem is we’re more privacy con more privacy conscious than ever so this is kind of their way of getting everyone on board with it so is it different than just uh anonymized data I mean that’s what we sort of always hear when you know that that our the things that we’re entering online are anonymized is Is this different than that um yes no I mean it’s still anonymized data uh the difference is what a lot of companies do with your Anonymous data is they don’t they can’t reveal who you are so I don’t know that Jason’s looking for the best pizza in New York City uh I do know that someone is but it’s Anonymous so uh what differential data does is it allows you to use the data in aggregate without revealing any individual user so when someone contributes to this data set it it adds to it and by comparing them we can say we can get signals that are usable without actually revealing who they are so that they’re not put in user profiles which is a lot of other people what a lot of other companies use so do you think this is uh more of a marketing Ploy on Apple’s part just like a a differentiating them from Google saying you know just throwing a phrase out there like differential privacy which you said wasn’t their creation but like maybe they are the ones making it you know a household phrase for some of us anyway do you think it’s just a marketing tool for them or is it a real thing that we can count on and look too and and see that they’re doing it differently than Google it’s too early to tell but Apple’s always really been a champion for user privacy so at this point I I tend to I tend to side with them when they bring something out this like this that it’s not a marketing Ploy it’s something they’re genuinely genuinely wanting to protect us with um are there downsides to this approach yeah if it’s done wrong it can reveal it can reveal the data that they’re trying not to um but Apple’s taking steps to prevent that too so like I said earlier by adding noise to each signal that you’re adding to the database it it keeps you from finding individual users um and then the other problem is about the if the database becomes compromised you have to kill it so what Apple’s doing to protect users is they’re controlling how much data a single user can contribute to a database uh so rather than just tracking everything you do on your smartphone they’re tracking like Jason’s example looking for pizza and it’s just contributing to that one small database um and then periodically they’re going to wipe these databases and then start a new with new users contributing so all of the data that has been collected before is going to be wiped out basically and new users will contribute the same data that keeps them from having to run into situations like with the FBI where they might have had to turn over user data because now they just don’t have it right and that’s a big that I think that’s a big priority for Apple at this point you know in their pursuit of Security is to just make it so that they are removed from the equation as much as possible um so moving on to a different story actually you wrote a story about a small town in Idaho that I’ve actually never heard of I’m a boisey native so I was amazed like I was like wait a minute I’ve never heard of the town of Aman or Aman uh Idaho population almost 14,000 uh they’re doing things a little bit differently when it comes to how it manages uh the isps that serve the area what’s different here actually I was coming on knowing that you were from Boise and I was going to ask you how to pronounce the name but dang it I wish I could tell you he knew you were from Boise because of the Emoji probably uh he probably learned yeah he’s a marketer Yeah Yeah from my experience as a reporter I know that nobody in Boise knows anything about Emoji that’s smart that’s smart not accurate but it’s smart uh so yeah so what are they doing differently here uh basically that City created a full fiber Network for the citizens of Ammon Amon um and they’re kind of re renting leasing it to isps and each ISP now has to compete for business because all of the residents can can shut off service switch to a different service and they say that it’s about as simple as disa or removing an app and installing a new one so if you’re ever fed up with like a universally hated ISP like Comcast uh you could really easily just stop and go to a new one so why this small town I mean why why are they doing it and not every place I guess how are they doing it yeah mainly because Idaho is the tech center of the world it’s true very true ESP especially like East Eastern near Idaho Falls Idaho definitely totally Tech yeah um the the gist of it was that they they started to do a project where they wanted to install a fiber line from one government building to another government building within the city and it it was just some stupid High ridiculous quote that they were getting like 80,000 plus a monthly maintenance Fe just for connecting two buildings so they decided you know we could build this entire network and we can kind of just just give it a try and see if if this can work so it’s kind of a a testing ground a Proving Ground and it’s going on in Idaho which kind of surprised me too and uh Financial incentive for the town itself do they uh potentially gain from this kind of setup at some point uh right now they’re taxing each user $10 to $15 a month uh the goal is to get $3,000 from each user over a 20e span uh using the tax and a $16.50 utility fee uh so at some point assuming this works they will become profitable for it very interesting and I will move there I was gonna say I might have to move back to Idaho then I think we’ll all move there we bedroom exactly yeah we can all we can all room together it would be fun uh Brian Clark from the next web really appreciate you uh coming on and talking with us about not one but two stories today it was our pleasure having you on today thanks guys yeah where can people follow your work online other than the next web.com your Twitter nextweb uh Twitter at Brian Clark uh Facebook hey Brian Clark that that should get just about all of my work excellent thanks again Brian have a great weekend thanks Brian all right guys we’ll see you see you well Christopher Buckner writes about our discussion last night about Watchdogs 2 he writes firstly let me State out by start out by stating that I am a black man I hate that it comes to this but it seems people read sexism racism into every criticism these days he says the First Watch Dogs game was a flop because the developer Ubisoft Rush rushed the game before it was 100% ready Watchdogs 2 should be viewed with scrutiny for that alone and I don’t believe Ubisoft should be let off the hook just because they made the main character black if you have to vote with your wallet if you want the Paradigm to change and if you can’t get it to change then maybe there isn’t really a problem to begin with after all there are plenty of games with diverse characters these games come out all the time so we also got a few other emails about this topic thanks to everyone for writing in and uh posting comments on YouTube as well I know sometimes we use the term Gaming Community to label an entire group of people uh and I want to stop doing that I want to be doing that I know it’s it’s a diverse Community uh and I know we’ve talked before about like whether uh you know we talk about Gamers being one way or that you know that way and uh and yeah coming up next do you want a fuel cell plug-in hybrid possibly made by Apple well kind of dive into that a little bit but before that let’s take a minute to thank the sponsor of this episode that’s zerto it’s it asset protection disaster recovery and Cloud continuity for confident cios confidence can make or break businesses in today’s it World it can mean the difference between hesitation and action success or irrelevance Zero’s cloud-based business continuity Solutions are today’s cios and it Pros with a confidence to know their systems are ready for anything with zerto you can recover downtime you can test new technology and move to the cloud in a matter of clicks and you’ll be maintaining business continuity in the process zerto virtual replication technology gives you the power to simplify your migrations switch to new infrastructure faster and get quicker Roi in a matter of clicks you’ll know your data is protected by breakthrough hypervisor based software that puts the power of continuous replication at your fingertips you migrate to the cloud with no disruptions with Enterprise class software that empowers you to to seamlessly and safely move virtualized workloads between public private and hybrid clouds you’ll get complete comprehensive data protection in one smart solution for bcdr and you recover from any disruption with checkpoints every few seconds along the way protect and recover files virtual machines and applications from any point in time all sorts of protection here see for yourself how zerto simplifies your data replication and your Disaster Recovery plus get a free Readiness assessment for your data center all you got to do is go to confident c.com that’s confident cio.com and we thank zerto for their support of tech news today it is time to talk about cars and we are excited to welcome back expert and Senior analyst from Navigant research Sam Abu alamid welcome Sam hey Megan and Jason how are you today I’m doing good we were hoping you would come up with a green screen for those people watching the video and uh you came through you came through thank you that’s that’s one of uh Ford’s uh prototype self-driving fusions uh from uh a test they were doing a few months ago at their Arizona Proving Grounds where they ran the car uh at night in complete darkness and complete lights out mode so they had gone around during the daytime and used the lar to map out the the whole track and figure out where all the landmarks are where where basically where all the uh the cactus were uh so they could use those to locate the vehicle in the dark uh using the lar and then they ran it around the track with the lights out and all the all the um instruments covered up so there was no lights inside the vehicle or anything and they just ran it around the track well it looks a little bit like it’s about to drive into you it’s not is it it’s parked it’s cool yeah it’s parked it’s turned off right now all right well last week in Germany uh Mercedes-Benz announced plans to introduce the glcf cell in 2017 a fuel cell plug-in hybrid the electric motor at the rear axle will get current from a combination of a 9 kilowatt hour lithium ion battery and a hydrogen fuel cell uh you’re going to have to explain that to me uh also you um this started you thinking conjecturing about Apple’s future plans uh so that’s what we want to talk about um can you unpack this for us a little bit uh what’s exciting about this car and what does it make you think about um in terms of what Apple might do well first of all with regard to Apple as you said it’s complete conjecture I have no information about anything specific that Apple’s doing and it’s just one of those times when I got started thinking and a bunch of dots started appearing and so I decided to write something that connected them but with nothing to back it up so as far as first of all fuel cell uh hydrogen or fuel cell is basically a device that uh you put in in this case hydrogen and oxygen and it reacts uh with a catalyst and produces electricity and water so it converts the the hydrogen and oxygen into water and electricity and so uh a fuel cell vehicle like like this um Mercedes or the Toyota marai uh are electric vehicles they’re not battery electric vehicles but they are electric vehicles and um you know they use an electric motor to propel the vehicle uh and in this case what uh Mercedes has done is they’re using a smaller fuel cell stack and also a smaller battery to make a plug-in hybrid fuel fuel cell uh and what that does uh because they’re uh using the battery fuel cells like to operate in a constant output mode they don’t like to fluctuate up and down like your engine does when you’re driving around and so they’re more efficient if you can run them at constant speed and then you can use a smaller fuel cell it’s less expensive so what Mercedes has done is they’ve combined it with the a lithium ion battery that gives them about 25 hours um or 25 miles of driving range just on the battery and then the battery is good at putting out power when you need need to accelerate and recapturing it when you’re breaking so it it takes the Peaks and the fuel cell handles the the constant load that that’s going on in the car while you’re driving so you uh you heard about this and then it made you uh think about a project that Ford did uh almost a decade ago that you got to see that was shelf tell us about that yeah so back in uh two at the 2007 Detroit Auto Show uh Ford showed a concept there that they called the Airstream uh which was a mini van and it was called the Airstream because it was aluminum it had a polished aluminum body there it is look you know it was inspired by the the classic Airstream Van or trailers and uh it had a very similar type of Powertrain architecture fuel cell and a and a plug-in hybrid or plug-in hybrid battery system um the this concept the Airstream concept ran but it it didn’t actually um uh use the the fuel cell powertrain it like most concept vehicles you know you have a spec sheet and of what they say is in the concept but to make the concept moved it just had a regular engine however um a few months before they showed this concept they actually did build a a prototype Ford Edge one of their their crossovers their midsize crossover utility uh with that fuel cell hybrid powertrain in it and I had an opport they showed it off at the Washington Auto Show a couple of weeks after they showed the Airstream and then a couple weeks after that I did get a chance to go for a drive with that car around Dearborn so I I drove that vehicle around uh for about an hour around Dearborn and uh the Ford engineer that um gave me the lowdown on on this vehicle and gave me a tour of their fuel cell lab in Dearborn was a gentleman named mujib B Jaz he was the uh the manager of Ford’s fuel cell engineering program at the time um and at the time Ford was planning to build a fleet of maybe a hundred of these for for pilot testing to put into the hands of regular consumers and and drive them around and gain experience with it well of course 2007 into 2008 we all know what happened with the economy and and so uh there wasn’t much extra money around to fund these sorts of projects so the project got killed um the the concept of the fuel cell hybrid did come back uh with a couple of other uh manufacturers with Audi they showed one a couple of years ago and now Mercedes is putting the GLC in production um but Maji B Jazz left Ford around 2009 he went to A123 Systems which is a battery maker as their CTO and then um in early last year early 2015 um his name popped up again in in uh my news feeds uh when Apple was sued by A123 Systems for poaching a bunch of their employees for what we found out shortly after that was Project Titan their car program Apple has never publicly spoken about what project Titan is uh but based on the people associated with it you know we all believe that they’re developing a car and Muji Jaz um I reached out to him um he’s I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with him but he’s never spoken about what’s going on at Apple uh he’s maintained radio silence in proper Apple fashion uh and so this story you know just kind of tied all these things together as one possibility of what could potentially happen with apple with an apple car and you also talk about how you think Apple might get into the mobility on demand uh Serv can you explain what that is yeah so um one of the things that uh that we’re projecting a lot of people are projecting happening over the next 20 30 40 years is that uh as we have more and more people around the world moving into urban areas uh in 2014 for the first time we had more than half the world’s population living in cities uh we now have 41 so-called mega cities that have populations of more than 10 million people and as we have more and more of these these mega cities around the world uh particularly in Asia uh but also even here in the US and and Europe um the problem of urban congestion is going to be a bigger and bigger problem and so electric vehicles are great in terms of dealing with the air quality problem but they don’t do anything about congestion and so what what we’re all projecting what most of us are projecting is that um in cities you’ll have fewer and fewer people actually owning individual vehicles and it’ll be a migration towards autonomous electric vehicles uh that you can summon on demand sort of what Uber and Lyft have been talking about uh and we think that in in most urban areas start you know from the 2030s onwards um most vehicles are going to be of of that type so people won’t own Vehicles they’ll just uh have a vehicle that that shows up when they need it and I I think that if Apple does get into the car business which I’m still not convinced they will but if they do that’s a model that would actually make more sense sense for them uh because one of the problems that they would have is like Tesla um Apple would not want to deal with the the franchise dealer system that we have here in the US where um they they’re not allowed to in Most states in the US car makers are not allowed to sell cars directly to Consumers they have to go through franchise dealers and that’s a long story we won’t get into but uh that’s why uh Teslas are only allowed to be sold uh directly to consumers in about 20 States uh and and apple I don’t think would want to get into that kind of scenario so if they went to a Mobility on demand model where basically you know you pay a subscription fee and you would have access to an Apple car and sort of a a car sharing uh type of program but um with more premium vehicles um they would own the vehicles they don’t have to worry about actually selling them and they could do it in limited locations where you’ve got more affluent customers uh that would be willing to pay a premium price for for access to Apple cars so in that uh Future Vision of yours where does Tesla fit in I mean those are cars that are pretty relatively advanced in self-driving Technologies but seems to me always will be a car that some person wants to own as their own where do they fit in yeah I think um Tesla Tesla is definitely moving in that same direction that’s why they’re uh working so hard on developing autopilot um they want to get to a point where they can have autonomous vehicles Elon Musk has talked about this this Mobility on demand uh type a model uh where instead of individuals individual owners owning Tesla vehicles they would essentially subscribe to a Tesla Service and have access to a vehicle whenever they need it so you know they would open up their app or or on their Smartwatch uh they could summon a vehicle and it would be there take them to where they need to go and then it would go off and pick up someone else so another reason to get a Tesla while you can so you might be the last person to be able to own your own Tesla yeah well I mean you still you’ll probably still be able to buy a Tesla for a long time to come um it’s just you know the the probably the bulk of their sales will shift to that kind of model and then that also gets them around the whole problem of not being able to sell direct to Consumers well Sam thank you so much for joining us it’s always uh enlightening to hear what you have to say sam Abul El samid is a contributor at Fords and a senior analyst with Navigant research uh where’s the best place for people to follow your work online um you can uh just check uh Google my name uh you can find me on Twitter you can find me through Navigant research.com and also find the work that uh my colleagues do there the syndicated research reports that we publish uh and the custom research that we do um and like I said just Google my name and you’ll find me in all the other places like my blog and and on Forbes and um Facebook and Google+ and Twitter and all those places man it’s like you own the internet I try to be everywhere thanks Sam thank you Sam we talk soon thanks guys bye all right TNT’s fan of the day is Sandra purle SL SL purle on Twitter who says I was watching on my iPhone now I’m listening to 1464 again on Echo after Megan triggered it and I’m assuming there’s like a thank you very much that uh didn’t make it into the Tweet um but yeah you did that Megan what what just by saying um Alexa play Tech news today on TuneIn just by saying that yeah just by saying that saying Echo uh play Tech news today on tune in because you might have changed your your name your trigger word to Echo so now what you’ve done is triggered everyone that has one just you’re covering your bases aren’t you you’re smart you’re smart uh show us how you watch or listen to TNT whether you wanted to listen to it or whether we played it for you uh just record a video or take a picture of yourself or your setup post it on Instagram Google+ Twitter or Facebook and use the hash how IAT TNT and we’ll find it after the break if you switch to T-Mobile for free pizza so we have got some news that could be potentially devastating but first let’s take a minute to thank zip recruiter the sponsor of this episode are you hiring do you know where to post your jobs to find the best candidates if you want to find the perfect hire you need to post your jobs on all the top job sites and with zip recruiter now you can posting jobs in one place isn’t enough to find quality candidates don’t leave this up to chance hiring is the most important thing you do in a day if you’re hiring someone with ziprecruiter.com you can post to more than 100 job boards including social media networks like Facebook Twitter and Google+ all with a single click just post once and watch your candidates roll into zip recruiter easy to use interface zip recruiter offers optimized pages that look great on any screen add their unique mobile apply process for more visitors and applicants find candidates in any City or industry Nationwide so no more juggling emails or calls to your office you can add multiple users to your account quickly screen candidates with real world questions using free form multiple choice or yes no formats view candidate responses in conjunction with their beautifully formatted resumés rate them and hire the right person fast we just hired our new editor using zi recruiter so find out today why zip recruiter has been used by over 800,000 businesses more than 100 million candidate applications have been delivered right now you can try zip recruiter for free by going to ziprecruiter.com TNT that’s ziprecruiter.com TN and we thank ZipRecruiter for their support of tech news today so you remember how T-Mobile had its uncarrier event and announced that subscribers would get a new perk called T-Mobile Tuesdays that would shower them with free Frosty Dairy desserts movie rentals tickets to Warcraft and free pizza we can strike free pizza from that list at least until T-Mobile finds another partner apparently Domino’s saw so much demand that is decided to pull out of the promotion for a good uh CEO of T-Mobile John leer blamed dominoes and published their internal memo that explained the move the the memo basically admitted that it put a ton of stress on the stores they had to you know there were limits built into this right not every store didn’t have to Grant every single free pizza order that came through I think they were limited to like a 100 per store or something like that but I mean just think about that alone right like take take your normal orders on a Tuesday and then add a 100 on top of that potentially Domino saw three to four times the normal volume for Tuesdays and uh just said it was it was too much pressure to put on on the franchises part of me wonders if this was all like a plan by John leer like just to say oh look how many T-Mobile subscribers are like he had like I can’t believe he’s only blaming Domino’s like he has to blame himself too like you those are numbers that you would know like you would know how many people would probably take advantage of this and if you don’t then you don’t know enough information about the people that use your service I’m mad when someone takes away free pizza and I wasn’t even getting any free pizza yeah and you don’t even like pepperoni pizza so like pepp especially pepperoni that curls up on the edges don’t talk to me that the little pepperonis uh but yeah I I think you can’t offer someone free pizza and take it away I know he’s looking for someone else but what’s everyone going to do on Tuesday I’m fed up we can’t take this anymore yeah yeah well you know there were there were some holes here um one of the things that I that um we learned you know just now actually and I didn’t realize this before and maybe this was something that was over you know a big oversight is that with team mobile if you were on a family plan they would allow you to claim one pizza for every line on your family plan not one pizza per account uh I don’t know if that would necessarily affect the total number of you know uh pizzas that a particular location might have to give out like they’re probably going to tap it out anyways because there are a lot of T-Mobile subscribers that probably cashed in on this Cara I know you you had a couple of free pizzas as a result yeah car Cara is the one that that told me that it didn’t only apply to postpaid um you know that it actually applied to prepaid I was like oh okay so I tried it out I downloaded on Tuesday I had my finger hovering over the get the pizza button and I just kind of realized like actually like I don’t want it so why do I feel like like obligated like I have to get this free pizza today so I saved you a little bit of headache Domino’s you’re welcome I don’t I don’t like this at all is it bad for the brand what do you think I I don’t no to give something and then take it away I think so I mean they also gave stock are they going to take that away if too many people like take up that take them up on their offer for free that would be a bigger story I think probably would all right well that’s it we’ll stop talking about pizza pizza was like a recurring theme this uh this evening TNT records live every Monday through Friday at 4 P PM Pacific 7 P p.m. Eastern 12: a.m. UTC twit.tv live you can be part of the show by emailing us at TNT twit.tv you can also leave us a short voicemail about pizza at 260 TNT show you can find us on Twitter we are at tech neww toay TV we are on Google Play music for our Android friends iTunes for Apple friends chomecast Apple TV so much more find all the ways to subscribe at twit.tv TNT and if you want to tweet at me I am Megan send some emoji and I’m Jason how on Twitter thanks to our technical director Cara Cole and Mario for running the prompter and all the folks who help us uh run this show every single day thanks to you for talking Tech with us today will’ll see you all on Monday bye everyone and I even said tomorrow [Music] probably