[Music] Coming up on Tech News Today, Instagram launches new private parts. It’s It’s messaging. Also, Yahoo has a mail nightmare among a few others. And Twitter wants to control your cable box. All that and more coming up. Netcasts you love from people you trust. This is Twit. Bandwidth for Tech News Today is provided by Cashfly at [Music] cacch.com. This is Tech News Today for Thursday, December 12th, 2013. Tech News Today is brought to you by shutterstock.com. With over 28 million highquality stock photos, illustrations, vectors, and video clips, Shutterstock helps you take your creative projects to the next level. For 25% off your new account, go to shutterstock.com and use offer code TNT1213. And by Proxpn. Proxpn is a virtual private network that allows you to use the internet the way it should be, anonymously, and without oversight. For 20% off your new account, go to proxpn.com/twit and use the code TNT. Welcome to Tech News Today. I’m Tom Merritt. I’m Sarah Lee. I’m Isaac. I’m Jason Howell. And this is the show that keeps you up to date on the most important stories in the tech world. Puts them in some context for you. Starting with the top 10 stories of the day in the news feeds. [Music] Instagram announced Instagram Direct today at an event in New York City. The messaging service lets Instagram users on iOS and Android send text, video, and of course, photo messages to each other privately. The system works similar to the Twitter direct message in that you can only send messages to somebody who follows you. Messages must be tied to a photo or video as well, and you can send messages to up to 15 people at a time. VC firm Andre Horowitz believes in the future of Bitcoin. So much that the firm has dropped $25 million series B into Coinbase, joining existing investments and earning a seat on Coinbase’s board of directors. Coinbase holds over $600,000 Bitcoin wallets, which Bitcoin owners use to store the digital currency in the cloud. And it also helps people buy and sell bitcoins through exchanges. It charges a 1% transaction fee for buying and selling bitcoins. The Soul Central District Court says Apple can still sell iPhones and iPads in South Korea. Now, Samsung filed a lawsuit in that court saying that Apple violated three of Samsung’s mobile patents and asked for about $95,000 in damages. The court said that the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPad 2 do not violate these patents. Samsung said it would review the ruling before deciding whether to appeal. It’s probably going to appeal. Yahoo’s partial mail outage is stretching into its third day. The service went down Monday at 10:27 p.m. due to a hardware failure. Yahoo announced last night that web, mobile, and pop versions of the service seem to be fully restored, and they’re working on IMAP. The company expects all mail to be delivered by Thursday afternoon. The National Library of Norway is digitizing every book in its collection, making the text searchable, and making all books available to read online. Norway also has agreements with a bunch of publishers to allow anybody with a Norway IP address to access copyrighted material. The digitization of the entire collection, which literally goes back to the Middle Ages, will take 20 to 30 years. Actually, the project started in 2006. The Alliance for Wireless Power is launching a brand, a new brand of wireless charging called Rezense. It’s a mashup of the words resonance and essence. Rezens uses resonant wireless charging that uses electromagnetic resonators that can charge devices at a distance. That means your devices don’t need to be right on top of a charger like the chi standard by the wireless power consortium, the alliance for wireless power accounts LG, HTC, Qualcomm, Broadcom, Samsung, and Intel as its members. The Federal Patent Court of Germany ruled that Microsoft’s European Union patent for its file allocation table is entirely invalid. Microsoft gets licensing deals from many Android device makers partially based on the strength of that very patent. In fact, Microsoft got a German court to ban all Motorola Android devices from sale in Germany in July 2012 on the strength of it. Microsoft will appeal the decision and has fought off challenges to it before. Several piracy groups have asked privacy groups that is have asked the Federal Communication Commission, that would be a very different story if they were pirates, to declare phone companies to be in violation of the Communications Act when they sell subscriber information to third parties, including the CIA. The action is in response to a New York Times report last month that the CIA pays AT&T more than $10 million per year for access to its subscriber data. Reuters reports US wireless carriers are close to agreeing with the US Federal Communications Commission on a new policy to make it easier for consumers to unlock their phones. The agreement is expected to ensure providers notify customers when their phones are eligible to be unlocked and require unlocking requests to be processed or denied within two days. FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler will appear at the House of Representatives hearing later Thursday where the policy is on the agenda. After all of those rumors of Microsoft considering Ford CEO Alan Malali as its next CEO, Reuters reports Ford is going to press Mali for a decision on his future. Apparently, the Ford board is annoyed and Malali’s future will be discussed today when the board meets. Reuters sources say that even if Malali doesn’t take the job with Microsoft, he it’s unlikely he will stay at Ford throughout the end of 2014. This episode of Tech News today brought to you by shutterstock.com. At shutterstock.com you can find the perfect image or video for your next creative project. You got something you want to create? Go to shutterstock.com. You can choose from over 28 million highquality stock photos. But they also have illustrations, vectors, and video clips in that pile as well. And they source their images from all around the world, adding 20,000 images every day. So every time you sit down and look at Shuttertock, you’re going to find something new. but they review every one of those images to make sure they’re quality before they add them to their library. You can choose individual image packs or a monthly subscription, whatever the best deal is for you. And uh you can download 25 images a day with the standard subscription. Once you pay for an image, you can download it in any size. You only pay that one price. They give you the images you need. I’ve used them for book trailers. I’ve used I use it for the it’s a thing website. Shuttertock is a global marketplace. Uh and so you’re going to get great stuff. You can even search by mood. I needed an I needed a guy who looked angry. I just searched for angry. I got all these great videos and pictures of people being angry. Uh you could try Shuttertock today by signing up for a free account. No credit card needed. Just start an account, begin using Shuttertock to help imagine what your next project could be like and save your favorite images to a light box to review later. Helps you organize. Once you decide to purchase, use offer code TNT1213. And new accounts will receive 25% off any package. That’s shutterstock.com for 25% off new accounts. Use offer code TNT1213. We thank Shuddtertock for their support of Tech News today. All right, joining us now to discuss the stories of the day. Always good to have Marshall Kirkpatrick, CEO and co-founder of Little Bird on the show. How’s it going, Marshall? Great. Thanks so much for having me. Always good to have you. And we got some cool stuff to talk about today. Let’s start with that weird Instagram Direct thing that finally got announced. Sarah, well, do you think it’s weird, Tom? I think it’s a little weird. All right. Well, I’ll tell you a little bit about and you guys can make your own decisions. Uh, users can now, along with posting photos on Instagram, as we’ve all been doing, and liking and commenting on each other’s photos. You can now send text, video, and photo messages privately to each other. Uh, Kevin Cystrom was on stage at the Instagram event. it went live at uh 10 uh 10 10 a.m. uh Eastern time in New York City. He says, you know, it’s not just about photos. When you think of communication and moments, uh texting and messages are part of that. Photos are just one component. So, what can you do? You edit a photo in Instagram as normal. But then you could either post it publicly or send privately to between one and 15 people. Now, you can’t just send text. There always has to be a photo involved. at least at this point. So, it’s not totally unlike what’s going on with Instagram, but it does give you control over sending a photo to a group. And if the friend you’re sending the message to is online, their avatar lights up. It’s kind of grayed out otherwise. So, you have an idea of who has seen your message. Not unlike again in Facebook groups where it’ll tell you how many people, you know, if there’s five people, three people have seen the message. And you kind of have a you you have a a measure of who’s looking at your stuff. Tom sent me a picture of one of his dogs this morning and I could see who else had looked at the photo um as well as me. Kevin Cester says, “Now we know about the, you know, that Snapchat is such a big deal and there’s a lot of group messaging apps that are that are doing very well globally and we’re not either of those things.” He says there’s definitely a space for ephemererality, which is a great word in general, whether it’s text or photos or videos, but Instagram is focused on capturing the world’s moment. The important part of Instagram direct is being able to go back to photos in order to have that conversation. If they’re not there anymore, you can’t have that conversation and see who’s liked it. So he’s like, “This whole photos are alive for 5second thing. That’s not what we’re doing.” Which again I think is, you know, that works with Facebook ethos as well where everything is kind of there forever in your timeline. So who’s Instagram chasing? Marshall, I’ve got I’ve got my thoughts. What are yours? Oh, I think that they are jumping right into into a big conversation that lots of people are having. I don’t know if they’re chasing anybody. Um, I mean, time is a is an incredible rich thing that you can play with a lot and uh put that on the phone and it’s fun. Uh Alexis Madreal had a really good post this morning on the Atlantic uh arguing that the stream metaphor may have crested last year and now people are slowing things down and looking more at at what Robin Sloan calls uh stock as opposed to flow uh content. But then on the other end, we’ve got this real time push personalized content and even faster than that anticipatory experiences. And uh and it’s nice to see people start getting in and and experimenting with the nitty-gritty of of uh of time and conversations. That’s how I see this more than than chasing, you know, that it doesn’t seem like these are for the the naked pictures of yourself that you want people to keep uh or anything like that. It’s it’s just an evolution of the market that follows on to Twitter’s uh elevation of the direct message on their mobile apps that we talked about yesterday. It fits right into that trend you’re talking about, Marshall, where these apps are saying, you know what, people are slowing down and they are wanting to have a more of a conversation and that is one of the things behind WhatsApp, WeChat, Snapchat. Uh so instead of going a head-to-head and saying, “Well, we’re going to change. We’re going to pivot.” They’re not doing that at all. They’re trying to take advantage of the trend and and the impulse and say, “Okay, if you would like to share a photo with people, here’s how here’s how you can do it better. here’s here’s how to have more control of who you’re sharing with it and what and what you can say to it because privacy is at the top of people’s minds these days and you say different things when you know anyone can see it versus when you know oh it’s only going to say Sarah and my sister-in-law and my wife and a couple of friends right so I I think it’s weird because it is kind of combining the circles metaphor from Google with a little bit of the direct message metaphor from Twitter but I think it’s interesting yeah that’s what I was thinking about it was like ispe that Instagram is doing this when there’s Facebook groups that does a similar thing if you wanted to send out messages. If you wanted to do this with uh with Google Plus circles, you could do this if you want to do this with path. Path has that limited functionality as well. So, is it anything more special about the the version that Instagram is doing other than the fact they have tons and tons of users, but it just seems like, okay, it’s another it’s just a checkbox feature, like great, we can send you images, but I was reading some people’s Twitter feeds today and they were saying you can’t send back an image as a response unless you initiate a new conversation. So, it’s not exactly fully baked yet. Well, I think a lot of this too has to do with the fact that Instagram is wildly popular, particularly with young people who have their accounts on lock because they don’t want parents or prying eyes to see the sort of photos that they’re sharing. If you have this feature to be able to selectively say, every once in a while I’ve got I’ve got this photo that’s just like I don’t want it to be public. I don’t want anybody who knows what my username is to see it. Now, you’ve solved the issue of having to have your account locked all the time because you can share certain things publicly and certain certain things privately. And I think that Instagram wants uh the as many profiles as possible to be searchable and indexable and and and more of that that open sharing thing. So it it makes perfect sense to me. I think that has a lot to do with it. It’s pretty remarkable to uh it’s pretty remarkable to think about how far the world has come so quickly. I mean, how how long ago was it, Sarah, that you and Kevin Rose were on screen savers trying to get people to wrap their heads around the idea of a a news website where users submitted the news stories and everyone said, “Whoa, you know, what could that be?” And now we’re uh it’s so fine grain. We’re really getting into the details here and it’s getting really sophisticated. Site had its day in the sun. That was nice. Very web two. You know, another site that had its day in the sun is yahoo.com. And they’re they’re they’re trying very hard uh to to get uh their mail delivered. Uh here’s a little bit of what’s been going down since yesterday. As we mentioned in the news feeds, 10:27 p.m. hardware fail. Uh the issue has been harder to fix than we originally expected. They reported POTP mail was working last night. They expect all the email to deliver this afternoon. Yahoo also experiencing blowback at this same time over a shutdown of email and web hosting services. Uh it partnered with AT&T on. They sent an email to small business accounts warning them that on August 6th, anyone who had an AT&T Yahoo small business account would have to accept new terms of service and privacy policy before September 30th. Then they gave an extension to November 22nd, but some small businesses still didn’t go do that. and November 22nd, their sites went away. Now, that’s you could say, “Wow, they should have been paying more attention or maybe or maybe not.” But Yahoo has been bad about communicating. Techrunch was pointing that out today that they they’ve had all kinds of people complaining on their Facebook account. They’ve had a hard time answering all the phone calls they’re getting from all these small business users. So, obviously, they had a hard time communicating that to people. And then we have the email outage today which at first was not communicated uh very well out of the gate and they they’ve started to put more updates up uh and they’re starting to let more people know uh what’s going on. But this is this is kind of a critical moment for Marissa Meyer. This is the first big controversy over the service and how it works uh since we’ve since we’ve seen her take over. Marshall, how’s her company doing here? What what do you think this means for Yahoo at this point? Well, there’s such a a gradation of of sophistication on the the internet. I remember I was talking to someone yesterday about how uh when Facebook made a big change, even though they had to their login process a couple years ago, uh Readwrite Web wrote about it uh ended up high in Google search results and people landed on our article confused about why Facebook was red and not blue anymore. And uh and upset that they didn’t know how to log in. Um and uh a lot of the world is on that level. you know, they Google for Facebook and and Yahoo for Bing or I I don’t know what. Uh and so we who are here talking about the difference between uh Path and Snapchat and something that Instagram just announced an hour ago uh probably need to remember, yeah, just where the rest of the world is a lot of times. But I I mean that’s uh you know, stuff happens and uh and this might have been a mistake, but uh but you got to make decisions and move forward. Mark Suster says that in uh in startup land uh executives need to know that that at best 70% of their decisions are going to turn out well. Uh so you just got to make lots of decisions and and adapt quickly. And I think that Yahoo is is kind of feeling like a startup sometimes too in that. So it’s inevitable that they’re going to uh make some risky decisions and and have to deal with some fallout. I think one of the oddball things I’m looking at this Yahoo thing and how they’re dealing with their outage. You can go to Yahoo help or you can go to their Tumbl blog or you can go to their Twitter account. But I would think something of this magnitude should be on the front page of yahoo.com. And I’m looking around for the for some kind of like special not notice for those who use mail because if they’re going to try to communicate this message, obviously they can’t do it via email. I mean that’s a silly kind of idea, but how else can they get this message out to say hey look we’re there. we’re working on it as opposed to just saying go to our tumb blog and it’s not it’s not anywhere on yahoo.com. I think that’s the kind of thing like front page a little note saying hey there’s something up we’re working on it just to communicate a little bit better right it’s not as if you can hide the fact that some people have no access to possibly the only email they’ve ever used. So yeah you want it to be as front and center as possible you know if it’s if if your hardware is failing well make the messaging work. Make sure that it’s it’s very clear to somebody who doesn’t even understand that Yahoo might own Tumblr or where to find things like that. Front page, biggest headline you could see. Here’s what’s happening. Here’s what you can expect. Meanwhile, Twitter trying to take control of your television. They’re What are they doing with Comcast is? Okay, so Twitter and Comcast, they have this deal called See It. And what it is, it lets you control your cable box using Twitter. So you’d see a tweet about a show and you could click a see it button and that will either tune your cable box to that channel or you can set up a recording or you could even watch on an on on your mobile app. Now Comcast reach deals with nine new channel and TV service providers. So they’re expanding this program so you’ll be able to uh get ABC and Networks AMC Crown Media Family Networks, Discovery Communications, Fox and the three carriers. They have Cable Visions Optimum TV, Charter, and Time Warner Cable. They should all support see its watch now links in tweets as soon as the first quarter of next year. Now, you don’t need to sign up for Comcast for this. And originally, the platform was pretty limited. It worked with Comcast Xfinity and networks owned by NBC Universal because Comcast owns NBC Universal. Marshall, you know, I was looking at the story this this morning. I’m like, is this expansion a big deal, a medium deal, a small deal? Because I’m not really sure if this is great or not. It just seems like an interesting story, but I can’t get my head around it. Well, it ain’t no cable access TV. Uh, I’ll note that it sure would be great if that was an open data standard that uh any video provider, any video publisher could uh could link into to cross those platforms. But instead, you know, uh yeah, um but it it uh it smooths out the user experience of crossplatform media consumption. And I I expect that in time it will uh become as as natural as DMing your friends uh photos and knowing which ones of them have looked at it. Yeah, I I am always a skeptic, as anybody who’s been listening to this show for a while knows about the the uh necessariness, the necessity rather, of of a second screen. Like, I just don’t say, “Yeah, okay. It’s kind of a cool thing to say like, all right, I’m going to be able to, you know, just click a button uh and and be able to tune my TV somewhere else, but it I I don’t see myself actually doing that in practice. uh you know, if I’ve got an Xbox One, I can just talk to my TV, too. And I don’t really use that in practice. So, maybe I’m just being old and resistant to this, but what is cool demo technology doesn’t seem to be something that people are really going to use all that much in their regular life. I don’t know. I I I think I don’t think that Twitter and Comcast have put this together just to say, eh, let’s just see who clicks on it. I think this is actually going to be one of those things where in five years we’ll all say, remember when people were talking about a show on Twitter and then you just have to like figure out how to see it. Before we had all of these one-stop shop buttons where you know just like throw you into the appropriate app or or be able to control something on your cable box. It seems weird to me too. You know, I’m I I’m also still one of those people who’s with with a few exceptions not really using Twitter to talk about mainstream media and what is available to watch, even if I’m watching a lot of stuff, but that might change as the tools get better. Yeah, I was just thinking like every time a new episode of Madmen would go out or Walking Dead or any of these things or Breaking Bad, I’d go on a Twitter fast. I would not look at Twitter at all. Uh it’d be interesting to see that if there was a see it button and it actually brought you to the AMC app. I think the expansion to these networks, it shows that we can see more content on this. It’s not just like Fox, it’s like Fox’s network. So FX, FXX, and the other brands they have there. So we could see a lot more content being delivered via apps. I think if you can find it’s all about finding D, finding these shows and finding these videos. If it’s I think the cable box integration is pretty neat, but if it the integration with apps to me, that to me is more intriguing because if I can just go on my iPad and click a button that takes me to the NBC app so I can find the video, that to me makes it so much simpler because I don’t want to think where the heck these channels are on my cable provider or where did I even put the app on my iPad anyway because there’s enough apps that are going there anyway. All right, let’s take a quick break and thank our sponsor for today’s show, ProXPN. Proxpn is a global VPN that works with almost any internet connection. It creates a secure encrypted tunnel through which all your online data passes back and forth. And in fact, if you’re out at a coffee shop or you’re in the airport uh or anywhere on a public Wi-Fi, you really should be using a VPN as part of your suite of security measures. 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We thank Broxpn for their support of Tech News Today. I am a big fan of the ASUS pad phone and so is IAZ and it’s finally coming to the US officially. Yeah. Next at Q2 of 2014, Asus’s CEO Jerry Shen says the pad phone is coming to the United States. The pad phone was introduced way back in 2011. That’s like a lifetime ago. And it’s that phone that docks into a tablet shell. So your phone can also be your tablet. Uh the Asus pad phone has been available in Taiwan. And according to Shen, this company sold over 10,000 padphones between April and August. Uh the Padphone Infiniti, that model sold 200300 units a day between June and August in Taiwan. They like to test things out in Taiwan. Uh Shen says that UI is really important to Asus. They’ve got lots of engineers working on how their version of Android is is going to be. Uh the pad phone also has a high light mode, also known as owl mode. So when you toggle this thing, it actually combines the four sensor pixels into one. It simulates a larger pixel site. So it’s like the HTC1’s ultraixel camera, but in this case, you actually have the option of a 13 megapixel image or a 3 megapixel image with this owl mode. And Shen says once the pad phone launches in the US, Asus will have no problem tackling Europe with the same product. Marshall, what do you think the US response is going to be to the pad phone? because you know when the note was introduced I was like from Samsung that sounded nuts but it seems like people are more amendable to these these different form factors. I don’t know if there was a if a pad phone fought a fabt who would win. Um I uh I like to keep things simple myself with an iPhone and an iPad but um I you know things things do change quickly so we’ll see. I mean, I liked the pad phone because at first we all kind of I don’t know, made fun of is not the right term, but it was there was that great presentation about the the glorious Padphone, right? The skepticism. Sure. And you know, okay, well, Padphone Infinity sold 200 to 300 units a day between June and August in Taiwan. I I I think it’s kind of exciting. I I want this to be better than it usually is to be honest. I I always want the idea of I’m going to have one device that carries all my data and then I can just kind of plug it in to something uh and and and now it works as a tablet and then I plug it into something else and now it works as a desktop. Uh I just I just really would like that to work. I’m still skeptical on the pad phone, but I’m excited that you know if I wanted to I’d have a chance to buy it even if it is next spring. Uh, but is does cloud make this unnecessary? Does the fact that like, okay, well, you know what? I don’t need to go through the trouble of plugging a device in if I can have all my data in the cloud. Yeah. I don’t know if cloud necessarily takes care of it just because sometimes you have one device or the other and you go, why hasn’t this updated yet? Do I have to hit sync? What’s going on? Uh, Evernote’s a good example is every now and then I’ll write a note on my phone and I’m like, why hasn’t it updated to my iPad? I have to deal with that. I think I mean I’ve always loved the idea of of one device for everything just like you Tom. I’ve when the UMPC came out I was super excited. When the OQO little device came out with docking stations that seemed like a an interesting idea but so far nothing has really become the all-in-one device. We see in the PC space all of these different form factors coming out trying to figure out what’s the next iteration. Is it a tablet? Is it a tablet plus? Is it a keyboard? Is it a twoin one? But Asus actually does have success with its transformer line. So, if they can explain to people, you just take your phone, it’s the same device, and pop it into this tablet, it’ll work. My only fear is that the tablet shell without anything in it doesn’t really do much. And that’s kind of a hard deal. As long as if the pricing is too high, it doesn’t seem like a great value proposition. Meanwhile, Shopify out there raising tons of money. Sarah, what are they going to use it for? Well, they’re going to use it to help businesses, small and large, sell their wares and keep customers happy. Shopify has raised 100 million um in in in its latest uh round of funding. I’m all about the funding rounds today. Um and and really people the Wall Street Journal has a really nice write up about what Shopify has started out as and what it’s going to and says this is to give Amazon and eBay a run for their money in the arena of merchant software and services. What Shopify does if you’re not familiar with the company at all is it helps merchants, let’s say I have a bunch of stuff to sell, uh be able to sell uh everything easily online as well as uh in a point of sale type of a thing in a retail shop. It was founded back in 2006 and originally focused on helping small businesses with sales online. So, let’s say you run a t-shirt business and you’re like, I don’t know, I’ve got to be processing some payments. That’s what Shopify did. And I remember knowing them uh in that way. They’ve grown a lot though. They’re headquartered up in Ottawa, Canada. They have 350 employees and they have a lot of big names. For example, Tesla uses Shopify as its uh backend online. uh Goldieblocks uh who has been in the news regularly and Dodo Case both startups uh that have stuff to sell fashion brands Black Milk clothing is one of the brands that use uh uses Shopify so it’s not just for a certain kind of company big and small and this year they moved from just online commerce into like I said point of sale they’ve got a software optimization uh to run on tablets like the iPad if you’ve got a coffee shop and you want to use Shopify on the back end so it’s kind of interesting you hear, ooh, well, if you’ve got something like Shopify that could allow you to decentralize uh the process of of buying a bunch of goods and services like Amazon would be considered that. And then you’ve got some solution in store that challenges a company like Square or PayPal uh or or or any of the online uh payments that that uh that that lock into the whole cash register and that sort of thing. Well, Shopify is poised to kind of do it all. Yeah. I I wonder if it shouldn’t be focusing on one thing more than the other. Marshall, how closely have you followed Shopify’s uh expansion? Not super close to be honest, but I’m I’m excited to see, you know, this battle between Shopify and Square and presumably iBeacon from Apple is in there somewhere. And uh I mean in a broader sense of uh software to real world Uber is expanding beyond cars and uh just five minutes ago this app called MindMel just launched in uh in the iTunes app store that’s been written about a bunch that listens to the words you use in uh in conversation and serves up uh proactively uh digital assets it thinks that might be useful in your conversation 30 to 60 seconds later uh for web conferencing you know imagine commerce being augmented in that kind of anticipatory fashion u and it uh yeah it’s it’s awesome I think that uh that growth by companies like that and multiple companies in particular uh just means more innovation and and competition for quality of service to the rest of us so it’s exciting I think what’s most interesting to me about this is the idea that we are not seeing seeing the end of the brickandmortar store. Instead, we’re seeing the internet moving back into the brickandmortar store. So, right, when eBay came along in the early part of the of the 20th 21st century, it was, “Oh, that’s the end. Amazon, eBay, they’re going to they’re going to blow away the brick and mortar stores. Everybody better get online.” Now, what we’re seeing is companies like Shopify saying, “Well, you know what we ought to do? We ought to also make it easy to take payments in person because people still want to do that.” that there was an interesting story we talked about on Sword and Laser this week about how kids prefer books over ebooks. They want the physical books uh for loads of different reasons. So, I think this idea that well, everything will be digital in the future is starting to prove to be wrong. And what’s going to be right is there’s always a balance between it. And Shopify, they just think this is emblematic of that. Shopify is saying, “Look, we’re an online store and we’re going to still be an online store, but there’s still people going to buy things in person, and we want to cut to that business, too. And the people who are selling things online are still going to be selling things in per person. So, we want to cut that business just like Square, just like PayPal, just like everybody else.” Oh, don’t forget drones, right? That’s part of the story, too, right? The Amazon drones. So yeah, the the uh melding of of the online and offline and the mobile and yeah uh real time anticipatory and uh and then comes drones. I was looking at this. I’m like does does spot Spotify sorry Shopify does Shopify need a marketplace like Square’s put together? I mean Square makes it very easy to buy in brick and mortar. you can keep your inventory that way. But Square went out of its way to create its own marketplace where you could have this one home for this. Shopify is giving solutions to I’m looking at their site now over 80,000 online stores. So while the back end might be the same, they don’t really necessarily have like a directory or anything like that. Is that well you know they they do Shopify has its own app store which is not I mean it’s not like Apple’s app store but it is uh designed to if you’re a merchant well what kind what kind of sale what kind of stuff are you selling? what kind of solution do you want to provide for your customers? So, there is a bit of an allocart model uh to Shopify, which is great. It’s not just one solution, which is why it works so well for large public companies as well as smaller startups. All right, let’s finish up with a way to protect your data. Uh this isn’t just a personal issue anymore. This is an issue for all kinds of people. Switzerland has 55 data centers and some of the strictest data protection laws. Personal data in Switzerland is considered legally a precious good needing a judge’s order to be handed over. Uh there’s a story uh from the AFP about a data center called Deltalis, 200 meters inside a mountain with 15,000 square meter bunker around it. Biometric scanning, anti-uclear steel doors. It’s an old it’s an old bunker from the Cold War. The data center itself is about 600 square meters. In addition, yesterday three more Swiss banks joined a crackdown on wealthy US citizens evading taxes. About a hundred of the country’s 300 private banks are expected to participate. So you have two ends of the spectrum here. On the one hand, you have data centers in Switzerland saying, “Hey, we are known for for privacy. We’re known for being independent and neutral, and people want to store their data here because they think it’s more secure and be away from prying eyes.” But you also have the Swiss banks starting to cave for the first time in history really to allowing a foreign power to come in and look into the accounts. And it all goes back to the the banking collapse and the banking scandals and prosecuting people for malfeasants as part of that banking collapse. So in the long term, can you trust your data anywhere? But in the short term, which probably matters more, is it the location of the data center in Switzerland? Or is it the the SLA? Is it the service level agreement? Is it the fact that you trust the company to actually deliver on the encryption and the protection? Uh that’s more important. Marshall, I’m curious what you think of this story. Well, Switzerland has uh has been good for lots of things for a long time, and uh I can imagine this being uh an interesting turning point in the the uh the story of the world’s economic activities shifting away from uh from the United States. Um and I I was reading in Al Gore’s book the future uh for example that it was this year that the uh the uh G collective G&P of the world’s developing economies uh is expected to surpass the collective GMPP of the uh the developed economies of the world. So there’s, you know, we’re uh we’re at a period of of uh great transition and and trust and data and moving it around uh outside the United States. It makes sense as part of that larger story. Do you guys going to be moving your data to Switzerland anytime soon? Sarah is not with the uh the NSA stories. It doesn’t seem like there’s borders or like walls or anything that’s really going to stop anything even if it’s protected uh as as a precious resource or whatever they want to call it or precious good, excuse me, protections are only as good as as uh as they can be and it’s only a matter of time before whatever agency wants to spy on anything. So, while it may be more protected than others and it’ll take longer to crack, I don’t see my stuff moving to Switzerland unless maybe Google wants to do that. Come on. And I mean, haven’t you seen the Born Identity movies and the James Bond movies and pretty much any other movie where there’s like hidden money in a Swiss bank? It’s like that’s what where all the that’s what the spies do. They go to Switzerland because they know it’s better. Not anymore. You totally changed my mind. You’re right. I’m moving all my data to Switzerland right now. I mean, now it’s the data center. It’s more secure potentially. That’s better. I don’t know. I like Switzerland. They’re very neutral. Yeah. Well, so Swiss banks did shut down Julian Assange’s u bank account back in the day, right? A couple a couple years ago. So this is Yeah, there there’s a change. There’s a sea change in the banking part of it. Uh we’ll be curious to see how that plays out. To the Cayman Islands. To the Cayman Islands we go. Actually, to the randomizer we go. Safe there. diversity. Straw poll today with 42% of the audience voting for 3D printing pen that lets surgeons draw cells on damaged bones, speeding recovery thanks to the inevitable Captain Kipper who submitted this to our subreddit. Uh, this is really cool. It’s a biopen that allows surgeons to draw layers of healing cells on damaged bones and cartilage. Uh, and it’s entering clinical trial. It’s close to entering clinical trials. The creators have given it to the folks at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Melbourne, Australia for some further refinement. And the pen extrudes cells mixed with a biologically friendly material like seaweed extracts and it’s encased in a gel which can then be painted on in layers and then cured with an ultraviolet light as it’s painted on. So you could just fix a bone during surgery with this pen. Just draw some cells there. Done. Your bone’s good again. This is absurd. And I mean in a good way. Like uh my dad was an orthopedic surgeon, so I’ve seen I’ve seen surgeries like this. The idea of being able to just start printing like cells over something to in to have healing be faster. That’s we’re living in the future. I’m I’m really liking this stuff. You know, we’ve got tablets, we’ve got 3D printing pens, we’ve got 3D doodlers, so you can draw in 3D space. I mean, let’s be honest, a tablet is pretty lame compared to an artificial hand that can feel. What if that tablet was like a teleresence robot that was using the 3D printed pen printing? print cells out of your tablet. There we go. I mean, that’s the next logical step. You need 3D printers for I can imagine a future where some parents neglect to use a 3D printing pen to draw an augmented exoskeleton on their children before they send them off to school. And I think that will constitute neglect. If you don’t do it, it’s neglect. All right, let’s see what’s on the calendar. there. Valve’s Steam OS is going to be available for individuals and OEMs on December 13th, which is tomorrow. That’s Friday the 13th, which is wacky and wild. That’s all I have to say about that. You know what’s also wacky and wild? The emails we get. Incoming message. I don’t know how wacky this is, but it’s another one from Rich and Lovely Cleveland. It says, “Tom and Posi, I think the Twitter redesign to put DMs front and center is all part of their effect to make the service easier to get into for new users. While Twitter is still growing users at a good pace, the barrier to entry is still steep. Forget about Twitter etiquette. Twitter wants to let people know about its basic functionality. I think Sarah and Izz were spot on when they said it’s all about getting people into the mobile app and keeping them there as long as possible. It’s the same reason they’ve made their camera functionality more fullfeatured with filters, editing, etc. The refocus on DMs might also help out brand pages. For some reason, that baffles me. People like to follow their favorite brands on Twitter. I could see brands incentivizing people to follow their accounts with the promise of DM links to deals and the like and Twitter could charge for this privilege. Not a thought I necessarily enjoy for the platform, but going public has put generating revenue front and center for the company. Yeah, those are good points and I think I think those are all the kinds of things that I would expect Twitter to be using this for. And uh it I just I just wonder why they hadn’t done it before. But maybe Rich put his finger on it. Maybe it’s the the public pressure. is like, “Yeah, we really should make good use of this.” Combined with that idea that Marshall was talking about earlier when we were talking about Instagram of of just the general difference in the way people are communicating these days. Got another email from Sean. This is in response to me uh talking about uh Red Bull TV coming to Chcast and saying, “I didn’t know that that was actually a thing.” Sean says they’re actually one of the best places to watch Fringe Sports this year. They carry the entire UCI, which is a type of mountain bike series. One reason I keep cable is for sports, says Shawn. This may free me to cut the cord. I talked to my parents into getting one and a friend uh and a friend out of Roku into one. Still waiting on Tabcast from my phone browser. Tabcast. And that’s when you can send a browser tab too, like you can like you can do already do on the laptop. Got it. Well, thank you Sean and thank you everybody else for watching and listening and thank you Marshall Kirk Patrick for joining us. Great insights as always. uh let folks know where they can find what you’re doing these days. Well, I am over with my team at getittlebird.com where we’re discovering experts and influencers in any market for sales marketing and anybody that wants to learn about and engage with the cutting edge. So, come and check it out. Get littleird.com. Go get it. Go join it. Go take it for a spin. You’re going to love it. Thank you, Marshall. Don’t forget you can have a voice in what stories we cover at our subreddit technew.reddit.com. You can also email us tnt twit.tv. Call us on our phone line 260 TNT show and visit our website at twit.tv/tnt. We’ll be back tomorrow for Friday the 13th with Darren Kitchenen and the stories illustrated by Len Peralta. We’ll see you then. [Music]