[Music] on Tech news today the nsa’s quantum computer augmented reality contact lenses and Android on the desktop coming up next netcast you love from people you trust this is TWiT bandwidth for Tech news today is provided by cashfy at c.com [Music] it’s Friday January 3rd 2014 and this is Tech news today welcome to Tech news today I’m Mike Elgen I’m sarane and I’m Jason Howell Tech news today delivers the top Tech news in 30 minutes or less let’s get straight to our top news the NSA is trying to build a quantum computer that could crack nearly any encryption according to a new report in the Washington Post the story is based on documents provided by Edward sowden the nsa’s computer would be exponentially faster than regular computers but it won’t be easy to build it’s not like they have it right now Quantum Computing is feasible but it’ll probably be a few years before anyone will be able to build one especially the NSA the nsa’s project is part of a research program called penetrating hard targets yikes 4K videos coming to YouTube Google’s planning to demo 4K video using its new own vp9 video Codec which challenges the h.265 video Codec standard because it’s open it’s royaltyfree and very fast at least according to Google the company’s vp8 codec which was released in 2010 had a bit of a lack of Hardware support but this time vp9 gets support from 19 major Hardware Partners like LG Sony Panasonic Samsung sharp tashiba arm Intel broadcom and others are you ready for augmented reality contact lenses I’m not a company called Inova freaked everybody out last year at CES by demonstrating Google glass-like smart glasses called I optic but ones that use contact lenses to focus the virtual image well don’t look now because they are back this time in aega staff will be wearing the prototypes of the product last year it was just styrofoam dummy heads and the system uses glasses to house the electronics and battery and special contact lenses to focus the image and improve the illusion that screens are floating around in the air the Ina eye optic glasses could be on the market even before Google Glass walking the CES floor is a bit like a scavenger hunt to find the best tech and then your feet hurt and that’s kind of a mess this year CES organizers are using Apple’s ibeacon to make it a little bit more fun it’s an official game you download the CES iOS or Android app and then you collect badges every time you encounter an i Beacon at the event the first first three players to get all the badges gets a yet unspecified prize and I hope it’s maybe a new pair of shoes or something I Beacon as Apple’s indoor positioning system that uses Bluetooth low energy or Le CES is using ibeacon products from radius networks Facebook is getting sued for sharing private user messages with advertisers the class action lawsuit claims that links shared on Facebook are quote intercepted and shared with advertisers and marketers in violation of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act and California privacy and competition laws links are treated as likes which affects the advertisers advertising displayed to the user Facebook denied the allegations the lawsuit demands $100 per day of the violations for each user or $10,000 per user live video streaming is coming to Google Glass the company behind the app is hang with they already make IOS and Android apps that live stream video to anywhere between one and thousands of viewers now the company plans to announce hang with for Google Glass it’s still in beta but it’ll be at CES on Tuesday Google Glass users can already do Google Plus Hangouts with up to 10 people but not Hangouts on air that’s what’s live streamed to the public Grace note is launching a new internet radio platform today it’s called Grace note Rhythm the company is calling it radio as a service customers can be just about any kind of business anything from anybody who needs elevator music to Calypso for a bar or something and the Rhythm service lets them create something like their own custom Pandora complete with the ability to like dislike or skip songs Grace note president Steven White told venturebeat that Rhythm could be used for car dashboards even internationally unlike Pandora which uh is only us Grace note is a music data company that was recently acquired by Tribune media for $174 million the Rhythm API should become available to to developers in February good news football fans who are also cord Cutters that’s me according to a report in variety Fox plans to live stream the Super Bowl for free that’s the good news the bad news is it’s only available to us users sorry rest of world the other bad news is that if you want to watch any other NFC postseason game you need a subscription to Comcast or AT&T Erse or cable vision or another Fox partner Super Bowl Sunday is set for February 2nd well that’s our top news and let’s turn to the conversation Sarah what’s going on with AT&T it seems like they’re scared of somebody yeah well geeku had a ran a story this morning that AT&T is going to be offering a credit to T-Mobile customers who switch from T-Mobile to AT&T now it sounds like it’s sort of in response to a news conference that T-Mobile has set for Las Vegas next week rumors plan that it’s it’s planning to do basically the same things to AT&T and other carriers as well the idea is that it would offer up to a $350 uh uh switch fee well not switch fee that they would give you $350 and that would cover the cost of early termination fees which of course is one of the reasons that people don’t leave some of the big carriers the funny thing about this is is it sounds like AT&T wants to beat T-Mobile to the punch and say well we would we would also like to pay you to come to us from T-Mobile yeah and AT&T has already we’ve seen AT&T and Verizon both Bend to uh T-mobile offering a lot more flexible plans cuz T-Mobile for a while was supposed to be bought by AT&T that whole thing fell apart us Regulators wouldn’t allow it m then it kind of turned into well T-Mobile is a it’s a little guy but they’ve got the best plans because what have they got to lose and they’ve actually found some success with subscribers that way yeah they seem to be leading the market um uh companies especially AT&T seem to be responding to T-Mobile as opposed to the other way around and you you notice they’re not offering this service for the other carriers it’s T-Mobile in particular that they seem um afraid of and I think it’s not T-Mobile as a company it’s T-Mobile’s model the uncarrier model where they try to get out of the whole um subsidies and and lock in and contracts and all that kind of stuff which is really AT&T’s bread and butter in Mobile it’s funny because for a long time uh and I’m I I’m a Verizon subscriber but I had AT&T for quite a while it’s one of those things where you say well you try to pick the the the lesser of the evils but you know that you’re kind of getting overcharged and the customer service is bad and I T-Mobile has its problems as well from from people I know who who use T-Mobile but in general you’ve got the CEO John leer who’s who’s who’s kind of taking pot shots at AT&T on a regular basis and at least people who work in the media that’s kind of fun to watch and you figure a company like AT&T has really enjoyed just being huge for so long and Verizon even even larger and if you can watch a smaller carrier figure out how to win over some pretty stressed out uh people who don’t want to pay and don’t like these early termination fees and these crazy group plans that aren’t very good deals at all that’s a really good thing yeah it could change the market yeah it it very much could and any sort of innovation is great um in AT&T’s defense they have really good coverage in most areas I have uh uh a mixed marriage my wife uh has T-Mobile I have AT&T and um you know it’s very often you know I I complain sometimes about at& she complains sometimes about T-Mobile but when it comes to coverage AT&T usually beats them out so um interesting story and we’ll see what else um AT&T does to sort of protect themselves against the mighty T-Mobile yeah never thought I’d hear you say that Acer introduced an all- in-1 PC that’s as big as the Apple iMac and has a screen with identical resolution it’s not a Windows PC it’s an Android PC a 27 in all-in-one Android called the Acer ta 272 now this thing has wide viewing angles and 10-point capacitive touch it’s a desktop you know think of it as a as a as an Android tablet that’s a 27inch Android tablet mounted to the desk it’s got a quad core processor from Nvidia and it has 16 gigabyt of ram so it’s it’s not a wimpy system it’s suggested price is around th000 bucks ,99 you’d probably be able to buy it for a lot less than that as front facing speakers this to me sounds like a really appealing product I I think that desktop touch Computing is is uh is coming and it’s going to be mainstream eventually it’s great to see uh something like this at low cost coming out I mean I is is touch desktop something that you ever had an interest in well this it was going to be my question is like okay well if it’s desktop PC that’s running Android that sounds cool but am I touching it do I have the opportunity to go back and forth with a keyboard cuz that doesn’t necessarily work for the the app focused sort of square home screen type thing the desktop the desktop part of it is weird to me and it’s not because I don’t like a bigger screen or a dedicated place to sit and do some Computing I have that at home and I’m not looking to get rid of my desktop PC anytime soon but it kind of gets weird when you have to be touching your monitor right you you have to have a completely different setup and I don’t know that all of the I mean office chairs and the desks and and everything that kind of goes along with having a place you’re going to sit and do your office stuff is that conducive with a touchscreen environment maybe I’m crazy maybe it’s not that weird to have the monitor a little bit closer to me so that I can touch it but it still feels like a hybrid thing yeah I think the I think the sweet spot is a is a combination of the size and the angle I think the bigger the touchscreen is the more appealing it is to use as a desktop touchcreen because you know you you you take advantage of this vast area and it’s that’s the payoff whereas if you had a if you had a iMac or or one of these things with a a screen bigger than 27 inches you know let’s say you had a 40 inch screen uh that’s too big to just use as a regular desktop however it’s a touch thing you can use it as a table the angle is important too I mean if you look at how people have been working uh historically people work on tables uh draft Drafting and engineers and Architects work on drafting table type angles that’s a very low angle what you don’t want is the gorilla arm Factor where you’ve got this thing that’s vertical and your going like this all the time with your arms out that’s a that’s a horrible way to to work and it’s uncomfortable I don’t think anybody wants that the key for for this category I think will be to lay it flat now having said that I don’t think this is going to take the market by storm I don’t think they’re going to be putting Apple out of business anytime soon and I don’t think it’s going to be a big challenge for for Microsoft in the in the short term but I think the whole industry is trying to get to desktop touch Computing and you know Microsoft tried to do it with Windows 8 had to back off on the touch user interface stuff uh Apple’s trying to sneak in little touch user interface things into OS 10 and Google’s uh Google’s way is to just let the industry do it and and here Acer is stepping up and doing it well good for Acer it’ll be interesting to see how much people really take to something that’s clearly not mobile you know I mean it’s a mobile operating system that’s not in a mobile format and maybe you don’t actually want to walk away with that desktop computer and go anywhere but it’s a it’s a psychological thing it strange line because it’s it’s definitely also like you said a desktop computer but when I think of desktop and I think of no keyboard like that doesn’t work for me I do think that touch is a big movement right now and actually my prediction for last year was that touch was going to be really kind of one of the big trends and we’re we’re starting to see that and especially you know kind of hopefully moving into the the major desktop Solutions but not having a keyboard just kind of boggles my mind I don’t know how you do that on a desktop like that doesn’t seem productive well I think that uh and and hopefully you guys are going to be talking about this on All About Android uh and going into it in depth but I think that the sweet spot is to have onscreen keyboards for lightweight use to do a lot of stuff that people traditionally did with uh with these kinds of uh input you know writing writing emails and stuff like that with voice command eventually again I’m not saying that this this is the way that people are going to be using this device and the other thing is that you’re always going to want physical keyboards for people like me for example who’s you know who’s write write a lot of stuff and I’m very comfortable with with a keyboard so it’s it’s really about the the right kind of keyboard the keyboard in a in a very large screen would fit would actually be placed right on the screen sure uh uh and then of course the the the other missing thing is apps if you have a very large screen 27inch screen running apps that are designed for a phone it’s going to be weird kind like Fox News if you’ve seen Fox news’s big set they have these big screens but then everything is Big the icons are big it’s all too big so you know you really have you need more industry involvement in this than just one uh hardware company uh creating a a a colossal tablet basically sure so so blackberry and Alicia Keys it sounds like they they’re breaking up like oh they’re breaking up from her fake job uh all right so less than a year after Alicia Keys was uh named the global creative director for uh well it was Rim at the time at an event last January it was the same time that the company announced Blackberry 10 OS it was long awaited and they wanted to make a splash uh she was she she was she was part of the team and it was kind of funny because before joining the team at Rim Alicia Keys had her own iPhone app she was actually uh very she was she was uh she she had a fanboy yeah girl and and she had a very active Instagram account which was only IOS and Android at the time and that kind of had to get abandoned soon after uh the the Blackberry team had announced that she was their creative director she had sent a tweet that had had had it was from I don’t know if it was the official Twitter app but it basically said what device she was sending it from and it was an iPhone a lot of tech people laughed and said haha see approves that she’s not really a Blackberry user um so you know it’s a little bit of a rocky road she’s not the only celebrity SL performer that’s been tied to a product I know Lady Gaga and Polaroid that was CES a couple of years ago I think nobody’s really sure what she does for them either so this is it’s not as if it was that bizarre but especially one year ago the whole future of blackberry was so up in the air I mean Blackberry 10 I mean I kind of predicted it would be dead on arriv Ral I don’t know that you could exactly say that that’s what happened but it wasn’t the splash that they wanted it to be what do you think I mean do you think that Keys is like I can’t do this anymore you guys or it just kind of ended up being a partnership that wasn’t made in who broke up with whom I mean you could see it going either way either either Alicia Keys didn’t want to be associated with a losing company uh or the company didn’t want they they may have decided to to terminate her contract earlier in the year after the iPhone incident because it was so embarrassing even today here we are talking about the the the iPhone Fiasco uh the whole point of of having a phony baloney title like like that is that you have an an evangelist somebody who just lives and breathes your product and here she was living and breathing an Apple product I think that this whole experience with blackberry and Alicia Keys May kind of end the whole fake uh creative director as far as I’m concerned you’re not a creative director unless you’re in meetings all day right I know creative directors they they uh they work very hard and it’s it’s just weird uh and if you’re going to do something like this if you’re going to give somebody a fake title make them director of engineering get him in there designing products and see what happens that that would be that would be really really awesome love to see her uh designing products well Robert darer Jr is now was it Lenovo I don’t want to get that wrong but he’s no no HTC right is HT yeah I there are too many celebrities proving products and it’s like he’s Iron Man but he’s himself but because everything everybody thinks he’s such a cool Iron Man and you say well there’s sort of a geek thing involved and it never really works in my opinion I I know who is buying any of these products because their favorite music artist who won some gramys uh said that they liked it as well it always seems like a sham to me on the other hand uh people like Alicia Keys have uh enormous numbers of fans who are very devoted I I see her on Google+ and elsewhere and they’ll do anything she she ask them to so maybe there’s some way to integrate huge stars like Alicia Keys but giving them a fake title is probably uh a bit much much for the the cynical media well Dreamworks Animation Studio that brought us Kung Fu Panda Shrek and Madagascar is getting into the tablet business the studio is teaming up with fuu which makes tablets for children to launch another line of of kids tablets called The Dream tab it’s launching at CES of course as is everything else it’s probably going to cost about 300 bucks they’re planning a 12-in version for the future as well I guess uh I guess the big tablets are going to be with us uh this year uh and they’re here to stay the DreamWorks characters are integrated in the UI so for example when there’s a dialogue box or something they’ll be Shrek will be harassing you about you know doing some you know asking you to to yes no close whatever um and um you know they’re using it like a cable channel and to me this is going to be the controversial thing about this it’s think about it you you give a child a tablet from a media company like DreamWorks you’re essentially giving them a TV with one station and so I think that’s going to the the controversial thing about it is do you really want to uh give a a tablet that is optimized around a specific content media brand you know not having small children of my own I can only speak with a babysitter’s level of authority but I do know that kids tend to watch the same thing over and over they kind of just want to watch something and if there’s a movie or maybe a series that has gone over well they’ll watch it a million times in a row so in a way I don’t know that this is is a bad idea MH but as a parent then you’re kind of yeah you’re choosing a Content brand you’re not giving you’re you’re not you’re not buying a device for a kid where you have that much control over what they’re watching and it’s it’s kind of like in the the day and age of YouTube I know a lot of kids are just watching videos on YouTube and you watch whatever you want there’s a million other stuff if you like a certain kind of genre so it does seem limiting but I don’t know I mean maybe there’s a Shrek fan out there that’s like that’s all my kid wants watch for the next four years they they’re also promising that in the future this tablet will work with DreamWork branded toys there’ll be wireless connections to various things and the kids will be able to be a second screen to some other device or something like that uh and to their credit I guess it’s to to their credit they’re also showing programming from Nickelodean Disney cartoon network uh and not just DreamWorks stuff ex uh exclusively um but the dream Dreamworks content will be front and center and yet another interesting thing about this is they’re going to be creating a lot of exclusive content that will be made just for this tablet for the users of this tablet so it’s it’s a new world uh I think for uh content creation uh organizations with money you it’s and it’s kind of a simple thing if you think about it you partner with a company that’s already making the kind of devices that you want to uh brand and make and then once the device is in the hands of kids you can you can subsidize it to a certain extent kind of the Amazon model where where you subsidize the sale price and then you make money later by essentially you know let’s face it it’s like a commercial for DreamWorks toys and and merchandise and things like that so oh can you imagine when kids got this extra 30 minutes of a show that the other kid doesn’t have it’s like yeah it’s like a 100 Happy Meals right there right exactly this is like a Trapper Keeper it’s like customizing your tablet can I point out one really nerdy Android thing either they’ve skinned their tablet to look a lot like honeycomb in the control and user interface or it is actually running honeycomb I hope that’s not the case that’s hilarious maybe uh maybe twit should launch AI tablets how about that other people develop our apps we develop our Hardware yeah there we go yeah we just it will run nothing but twit programming 247 coming to you soon all right well that’s uh the conversation uh let’s see what we have in other news Canadian and European researchers and Engineers have created a space gecko robot designed to crawl around in the holes of spaceships doing repair work the robot is called Abigail and it uses microelectronics that mimic the toes of geckos if you remember from biology class geckos have millions of tiny hairs that bind to surfaces at the molecular level giving them superhuman grip uh and allowing them to climb on everything well this robot does something similar to that um I think uh I don’t know what you think but I when I see this I think iroot needs to get on this technology and build a Roomba that will clean my windows and crawl around on the outside of my house doing work clean the crayon off the walls you know how hard it is to get my new landlord to clean the outside of my windows it’s impossible actually she is refusing so yes I would love this as well you need a robot landlord be ideal H just let’s just robotize everybody be so many fewer arguments out there Sarah what is the most expensive smart bracelet you’ve ever encountered glad you asked Ferrari is working on a smart bracelet and it’s only going to run you $189,000 but it’s worth it you guys because it’s going to get you access into exclusive clubs around the world and in places like Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong and even let you order drinks or summon what it calls a dedicated lifestyle person it’s kind of like a personal assistant I guess by tapping a button on the bracelet so before you’re like this is crazy how many diamonds are on this thing the project needs a lot more money it has less than $100,000 raised in Angel funding so far we’ve only seen mockups of the product suggest that it’s using NFC and Bluetooth LE to be able to communicate but in general it’s one of these things that really really rich people who don’t have enough to do will probably like very much I assume that at $189,000 it comes with a Ferrari no oh the car is not included no it’s jeweled so you’ll have bling on your wrist and you basically have a slave who you can summon around the world all right well I’m not exactly sure what you can make them do but they’re going to come when called so fair enough there’s that fair enough well that’s our show next week is wall to–all CES announcements and discoveries so tune in for our coverage all week long in the meantime uh up vote the stories you’d like to see us cover on our subreddit at technew today. rdit email us at TNT twit.tv call us at 260 TNT show and visit the tech news today website at twit.tv TNT thank you for joining us we’ll see you Monday [Music]