This Week in Google 259 (Transcript)
Leo Laporte:
It's time for TWiG - This Week in Google. Jeff and
Gina are here, Kevin Marks is here, he's going to spank me a little bit later
on. We'll talk about in-app purchases and why the Kardashian game is actually
pretty good. It’s all coming up next, on TWiG.
[Intro] Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by
Cache Fly at Cachefly.com.
Leo: Bandwidth for This Week in Google
is provided by Cachefly. C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com. This is TWiG - This Week in
Google, episode 259, recorded July 23rd, 2014
What's a Kardashian?
This
Week in Google is brought to you by Squarespace, the
all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional
website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and ten percent off, go
to Squarespace.com and use the offer code TWIG. And by Lantronix, makers of the Xprintserver. Print from any Android phone, tablet, Chromebook,
even a Kindle Fire, to virtually any printer. For more information,
visit Xprintserver.com/twit and enter the code TWIT to recieve free shipping on your order. And by Full Sail University. Full Sail offers both online and campus degree programs, centered on real world
experience in the entertainment, media, and technology industries. For more
information, visit FullSail.edu/twig.
It’s
time for TWiG - This Week in Google, the show where
we Google, and talk about Google and all the Googleverse,
and the Facebook and the Twit. We got the old gang all together, I'm so happy
to see Gina Trapani, in her office. Hi, Gina.
Gina Trapani: Hi, great to be here.
Leo: I saw you yesterday, in All About Android, looking at that one plus one phone that Jason
had.
Gina: Dang, that is a nice looking phone.
I don't know, it really was like, I like seeing signage and mod on the back of
a phone.
Leo: Isn't that kind of cool, yeah?
Gina: Yeah, it made me really happy, it
was like hackers legitimized. I like that phone, I think it’s one of the few
non pure Google phones, technically non pure Google phones that I really want. I was
excited Jason had it.
Leo: It’s a great price, unbelievable.
Also here, Jeff Jarvis, that's him. You hear that baritone. That's JJ, he's a
professor.
Jeff Jarvis: Basso profundo!
Leo: I'm sorry, the basso profundo, of Jeffrey Jarvis. He is... Look at him, he's a professor of journalism at a University, the
city University of New York. Author, he's a published author of public parts
and what would google do, and Gutenberg the geek. Blogs at buzzmachine,
actually your latest post will be fodder for today's conversation. Also with
us, good to have him, Mister Kevin Marks, in his garden.
Kevin Marks: Hi, nice to see you. I actually
even have orange juice, my treat, to drink today.
Jeff: Oh, you're so obnoxious Marks.
You're outside, you have the breeze, the good weather, and no you have your...
Leo: This is how my mom got us to move
to California, from Rhode Island. She said you could go out on the front porch
and pick an orange from the tree. Little did I know, that's how they got the Jodes to move from Oklahoma in Grapes of Wrath. Didn't work out so well!
Gina: I miss it. I miss the weather, and
picking oranges off the trees. I have to admit, I really do.
Leo: What's the weather in Brooklyn?
Gina: We'll, look at the temperature, it’s
fine. But if you walk two blocks and you're instantly soaked, and then you're
getting on the subway and surrounded by smelly people. It’s just a different lifestyle, it’s just a different way of life.
Jeff: My office is right on Times Square,
and I had lunch on the other side of Times Square, and you know, I always said
San Francisco was brilliant, because there are two San Francisco's. The San Francisco that tourists see, the one that residents never
go to. Folks, no San Franciscan ever goes to
Fisherman's Wharf, they don't ride the cable car, right? So it’s a separate
city, just for the tourists. It’s kind of brilliant. New York now has a
separate city - it’s called Times Square. No New Yorker walks through Times
Square and hugs a Guatemalan refugee in their Elmo suit. No New Yorker, you
know...
Kevin: Except that one radio host...
Leo: Or the naked cowboy.
Jeff: No New Yorker. Right,
the naked cowboy. No New Yorker does any of that, but I had to actually
walk through it, and it’s torture. Torture! We don't
go to Bubba Gump Shrimp, we don't do any of that.
Gina: It’s true!
Leo: You know, we have in studio with us today, Ranger Craig. He's the Ranger at Alcatraz, one
of the rangers. And Craig, do a lot of locals visit Alcatraz, or is it mostly
out of towners?
Ranger Craig: Mostly, when they have someone from
out of town...
Leo: If they're there, they're towing
somebody from out of town along with them. I've been, of course, to Alcatraz, it’s
a wonderful tour. Highly recommend it. Craig has always said, come and I'll
give you a special behind the scenes tour and I keep meaning to drag the kids
there, and I just haven't gotten around to it.
Jeff: I think we should try to have the
show from there.
Leo: One of the cells? Don't they let
you... Isn't there a night tour where they let you
spend some time, like, extended time in the cells?
Craig: There's a night tour.
Leo: There's a night tour, yeah. I don't
know... Anyway, enough of that. Let’s talk about this. The first phone with the words, Cyanogen on the back. This is the One Plus One, the phone you cannot get
from One Plus. They just put five thousand more invites out. I don't... What's
your speculation, Gina? Maybe you guys have talked about this on All About Android. They call it, the... What do they call it? The
killer... The high end phone killer? But, it’s three hundred fifty bucks, for the 64gb version, which
this one is, I think. And it has all the specs of a high end phone.
Gina: I think this has a shot at becoming
the new nexus. And by saying that I mean, the phone of
choice for power users who want the kind of pure experience with a few extra
settings, like, cyanogen is basically like stock plus a little extras, but no
crappy extras, right?
Leo: And you still somehow, and I don't
really understand this, maybe you can explain this, you still get Google
services. The Google apps are on here, play store is on here.
Gina: Yeah, they clearly got Google
certification, right? Because Google doesn't let any phone carry the Play Store
or any of the proprietary Google apps unless they're Google certified. And with
that agreement, and I don't think all of the terms of that agreement have been
disclosed, but there's certain home screen placement and that kind of thing,
right? So you're not dealing with an alternate app store, you get the Play
Store and all that stuff. But it’s Cyanogen, and the phone itself is actually
pretty gimmick free, and it’s a pretty straightforward
phone. There aren't seventeen front facing infrared cameras, there's no
scrolling on the back, there's no crazy. It’s just a flat phone, but it’s a
high end phone, it’s a beautiful phone, it’s sleek and doesn't have a lot of
extra crapware. And it’s pretty plain looking, but
the geeks will love it.
Kevin: This is the one that looks like a
Nexus 5, isn't it? It basically looks like a Nexus 5, but it’s...
Leo: It’s bigger. It’s 5 & 1/2 inches.
Gina: It has that silver... Edge there. Um, the back feels good, right? In the cyanogen
branding, I think is powerful for Android hackers and nerds.
Leo: it’s super cool. What I don't know,
and I don't know if Jason knows this yet, is the bootloader unlocked on this? Do you know yet Jason? He says he's pretty sure it is, but...
So, it’s hard to figure out exactly. Do you mind if I put it in recovery mode,
Jason? Let me try rebooting it, because as it rebooted into clockworkmod or... Or twerp or what? I mean...
Jeff: Gina... I'm not saying that this is
ever going to be a big point for regular consumers, but if a regular consumer
happens to pick one up and get it, are they going to be befuddled by any of
this, or to them does this look like an android phone that just happens to be
different?
Leo: The boot loader is not unlocked,
but unlockable, says Jason.
Gina: It's a straightforward android phone, you know that, I think would be pretty self-explanatory.
Leo: The issue is, you can't get it! You have to... You know. You have to get an invite or
something, it's weird!
Gina: Right now.
Jason: Now I can find a few places... Right, and so does PandaWill.
Yeah, I've found a few places.
Leo: And a premium. So, what it sounds
like, I don't know how much the availability is, it sounds like they're somehow
getting it from somebody that had an invite maybe and reselling it. I don't
know. Right... Expanse is reputable, but I buy the way you don't see on
Expanses front page, I don't know.
Gina: The scarcity certainly is working
in their favor marketing wise.
Leo: It’s a marketing thing. Would you
get this over the G... Oh, yeah, it’s been available
like in onesies and twosies. I can't figure it out.
Are they, is there some constraint on manufacture or is it all marketing? It’s
all marketing, isn't it? And yet at some point you've got to open the pipes.
There's no point in great marketing if you're not going to sell millions of
these.
Gina: Right, yeah. I'm not sure... I'm
not sure...
Kevin: It may be a roundabout thing as
well.
Leo: Maybe they're hand making them, one
by one, with small...
Gina: Chiseling Cyanogen in the back.
Leo: It’s just...
Kevin: Well, they maybe it’s that it’s not
completely perfect yet and they're debugging it.
Leo: But, let me say this. If you put
out this exact phone, which Opo may have, because I
think the fine 7 is the same phone. If you put this
exact phone out, without any of the marketing hype, and you just put it on the
market with all the other flagship phones, does it stand out? I guess price
wise it does.
Kevin: It stands out price wise.
Gina: Price wise.
Kevin: Because it’s... It looks like the
other ones but it’s a lot cheaper, it’s about half the price of the Samsung
flagships.
Jeff: Market price on Ebay is running $450.
Leo: even then, it’s still a great deal.
It’s $150 to $200 less than the comparable flagship phone. I love seeing this Cyanogenmod logo on it, when you're booting it up. Now this
is... Of course we, anybody's rooted a phone and put on custom firmware is used
to this, but it’s still kind of cool to see it on a phone. And Cyanogen stands
to make some money, because they're selling themes so you you can customize this, with Cyanogen themes.
Gina: How are they selling those themes, though. Those themes, they're not in the play store.
Leo: There's an app called Themes
Showcase.
Gina: Gotcha.
Leo: And they're typically a buck. Oh,
wait a minute. Here's a buck ninety nine, here's $2.23, here's $3. Maybe it’s third parties selling this, maybe it isn't Cyanogen.
Jeff: I had to quit the nexus five and
nexus seven google+ cruxes. All Google+ did was say, "Look at my
theme!"
Leo: It’s so boring. And when they say
theme, they show the lock screen. Often with a scantily clad
woman on it, and icons that look good but you could never use. It’s
like, come on.
Jeff: You know this is a problem. I get
on this show and now I'm ready to go buy this phone somewhere.
Leo: Stop. Stop. Because, the Moto X
Plus One someday soon, they said summer. That gives
them 'till a couple of months. The LG G3, a lot of people are raving over this
phone. It’s got some... It’s the first ultra HD phone.
Jeff: Nexus six...
Leo: That's a good question, are we
going to see a Nexus 6 sometime?
Jeff: Our dear friend Matt Cutts said, others said, don't despair the Nexus line.
Leo: Yeah, but that doesn't mean we're
going to make one.
Kevin: That's boring because my son just
bought a nexus 5 yesterday. He's going to be grumpy with me.
Leo: I see no evidence that there's a
nexus 6.
Jeff: I don't either.
Kevin: His previous phone was a Galaxy
Nexus, which was three years old. He's actually very happy with his phone, but
if they come out with a better one tomorrow, he'll be cross.
Leo: Actually, I have to say, if this
were in widespread society, if the one plus one were in widespread
distribution, easy to get, you could walk into a phone store... This is the
replacement for the nexus 5, right?
Kevin: Yeah, there are those that are
saying it looks like a nexus 5. Is that a bit cheaper?
Leo: It’s cheaper and it has a better
screen.
Kevin: Whats its
storage?
Leo: Sixty four gigs.
Kevin: So it’s twice the storage, yeah?
Leo: For three fifty.
Jeff: But how much time for an update? It
was time for an update, right, and a regular consumer buys the phone, it works and it’s Android. How does it get updated? Is it automatic
updated?
Leo: They've promised automatic updates.
They've promised that within a few months of the L release, they will have L
for it.
Jeff: OK, in a few months, OK...
Leo: But what release means, I would
guess, and Gina's going to crack me on this, but release means when the source
code for L is released, not when the L is released, because they can't get to
work on that until the source is released.
Jeff: Right. Right. When has the Lag been running? We
don't know, it’s been so long since we had an actual
release.
Kevin: It’s usually after they already
release, it’s to the point when they've actually released it, then they release
it to the public.
Gina: Google consumers release, there's
the IOSP release, and then there's Cyanogen's release of their software on the
OSP. Right, so there's going to be a little bit of lag. But I imagine that the
moment the Cyanogen has been updated for L, this phone will get to be updated.
Kevin: That's the thing with my son buying
a new nexus 5, was that it then said there's a software update. It basically
made him run three software updates in a row, to get up to 4.4.4.
Gina: Sounds like windows all over again.
Service pack three!
Kevin: Make all the updates google, it’s
not that hard.
Leo: I have to say though, there's only
one phone that allows you to get a digital tattoo to unlock the phone. This is
so weird. It’s a tattoo, temporary, admittedly. That you put on your skin, they
say it lasts five days. It'll let you unlock your phone, your MotoX only, by tapping it to your flesh.
Gina: Wait, what?
Jeff: Are we sure this is real...?
Leo: You can buy now, pack of ten, from Vivalink.
Gina: Is it magnetic? What is it?
Leo: It’s an NFC tag in a, really it’s a
sticker, okay? And Motorola has done this for a while, so they've had the clip.
That's the clip, and if you buy a set of these stickers, which I have all over
the place. But there's the tattoo. And it looks cool. It’s a sticker.
Kevin: Not so much a tattoo, it’s a wart.
Leo: It’s a wart! I'm waiting for them
to inject something subcutaneously that will let me unlock my phone.
Gina: Prove your identity.
Leo: It’s really just an NFC.
Jeff: what was the science fiction movie
where you had the port in your wrist.
Leo: Well there were a couple of those.
Wasn't there the one where... Logan's run where you had the little clock. But
then there was more recently one that would actually give you a countdown.
Kevin: Well there was existence, where
there was a port in the back of your neck when insects went in and out.
Leo: That doesn't sound good. I don't
want insects in my port!
Jeff: I saw discussion on the Google+ Chromebook discussion that Indev there was a flag you could set so that you could unlock your computer with your
phone. That wasn't working yet, but I think it was out...
Leo: That's actually very risky. There's
an app for the Mac called Knock, that lets you knock
with your iphone on your mac and unlocks the mac. But
it’s very risky because unfortunately, when I installed it on my Mac, Sarah
Lane got permission to unlock my Mac. I don't know how. But it’s not what I
would call secure. So...
Gina: Oh, that's a bummer.
Leo: The movie was, In Time, and you
were thinking of Johnny Mnemonic, I think was the one with the port where the
insects could get in there... Wasn't it Johnny Mnemonic? That was the Keanu
Reeves as a...
Kevin: Existence, yeah, that’s what I was
thinking.
Leo: That sounds creepy. Existence.
Kevin: Ninety nine, yeah, Okay. I'm old.
Leo: The insects was the key.
Kevin: This is Cronenberg,
said, Okay, we're going to send insects into their.
Leo: David Cronenberg has a fascination with insects, starting with The Fly. Something
creepy about Cronenberg. A
weapon against trolls? Could it be? Matt Cutts says he's created a patent troll, or there is a patent troll solution, called
License on Transfer at LOTnet.com. Companies like Newegg, Dropbox, cannon,
google, have agreed if they sell a patent the other companies in the group will
get a license to that patent. Oh, so it only protects you if you're in the
group.
Gina: I don't understand this. If you sell a patent...
Kevin: Depends on the license group,
right?
Leo: Explain it.
Kevin: And I need to read this now.
Jeff: I need you to explain it to me.
Leo: So this is what they write on their
front page. "Dear Industry Colleagues. Have we formed Lotnet work in 2005, and if every operating company had joined that year...
Approximately ten thousand..."
Kevin: Are they actually becoming a
cartel?
Leo: This has actually got to be
illegal. How much does it cost to join?
Gina: I kind of don't trust them, because
it’s written in Coldfusion.
Leo: Oh my god!
Kevin: Really?
Leo: That's depressing.
Gina: Look at the CFM.
Leo: Ohhhhh...
Gina: Listen, I've programed in PHP so
I'm the last person to be judgey about programming
languages, but this website... I don't know, I spent some time on that and I
still kind of don't get...
Leo: So the idea is you sign an agreement,
you execute it, you send it to them in Beaverton Oregon, there is a modest,
they say, administrative fee. Lets' see how much it costs. Well, depends on
revenue. If you're a small company, less than ten million dollars in revenue, it’s
only $1500 a year.
If you're a billion dollar a year company, it’s $20000
a year.
Gina: The idea is that this is that this
defrays cost to anybody in the group that gets around patents.
Leo: They say they won't sue you, they
say you're basically buying a license.
Jeff: It reduces the value of trying to
sue over a patent, because so many people have a license to it.
Leo: That's the other cost, is that if
you join, you are now a member and you have to adhere to these terms, so... If
you sell a patent, absolutely they'll reduce the value.
Kevin: This is like second grade
blackmail. So if they sell a patent to a troll, then you get protected against
the troll for 41500 a year. So it’s a protection racket for people or companies
who have lots of old crappy patents that they want to sell off to trolls.
Leo: Google has joined it.
Kevin: Like blackberry for example.
Blackberry is about to be this problem, because they're going down the toilet
but they have patents, so they're going to sell the patents off to trolls.
Leo: Right, and in fact, had they been a
member of this group, they might have gone down the toilet sooner.
Kevin: But if they do that, then the
patent trolls will pay less for their patents. Because they
can't sue the people that have lots of money.
Leo: Matt Cutts has stopped his run. Has pulled over. There's steam
coming out of his ears. You don't understand this.
Gina: But he's on leave, he's hanging out
with his wife. I hope he's on a beach somewhere.
Leo: You know we'll get a call from him
in three months, he'll say, "I just was in there..."
Jeff: He put up a picture of roses he
gave to his wife, and my response was, "So you did stop and smell the
roses."
Leo: Nice. Isn't that great? Good news,
Google is bringing free Wifi to New York City phone
booths.
Gina: I was like... I'm trying to
remember where the closest phone booth is to me, and I have no idea. I don't
really think they're still around...?
Leo: Is this an Onion article?
Jeff: If you look at the picture, Gina,
you realize that there are ads all around the streets of New York, and that’s
what a phonebooth is now. See that? Doesn't that look
familiar? See? You don't think of it as a phone booth, you think of it as a
billboard.
Gina: You're right. You're absolutely
right. Sandy did sort of make phone booths useful.
Leo: Yeah, you need phone booths.
Kevin: When I was working at BT, this was
one of the things that I was saying, is that we have all these big red boxes in
the street. Wouldn't it be great if they were Wifi hotspots. They were like, "Yeah, that could work, but
that's going to take a lot of changes to the phone booths." But it
actually makes a certain amount of sense, because the phone booths are in the
places, they've been taken out of all the upscale neighborhoods already, but
they're in places where people will still actually use them, so they'd be good
places to fill in the Wifi hotspots.
Leo: And you get Wifi for eighty five feet, at least, around each sight. And phone service, free 911
and 311 calls. 311 is information. The city is also encouraging people who want
to do this to offer cell phone charging stations. That would be useful. Short
local calls for free.
Jeff: I want to stand there in the middle
of the street with my phone plugged in, in Times Square. I'm going to get Elmos coming up and trying to hug me and get paid. No. No.
Leo: You may wonder, you may think hey,
doesn't Bell Atlantic, or actually now it’s Verizon own those phones? No.
Verizon and all the big TelCos long ago gave up pay
phones and sold them off to smaller companies. Currently the payphones in New
York City are owned by ten different companies. I actually know one of the guys
who does this. It’s very interesting business. He
bought his phones from AT&T. AT&T was a small enough business, and been
growing smaller all the time, AT&T just didn't want to deal with it. He
says, for me, it’s still a billion dollar business. But for AT&T it’s like
who cares? He services phones all over the country. Almost all of them are cell
phones, they're not connected to a landline, they look
like a payphone. Yeah, isn't it? It’s an interesting business. He says, well
look in front of Wal Mart, in lowering communities
and the bodegas and the small stores.
Jeff: But how do you use a phone card?
Leo: He used to sell phone cards. In
fact I think he still does phone cards, I think that's how he got into the
payphone business. And he says, really, this was so interesting to me, the real
business is how do you collect the coins. Because
people are using coins, so this guy is great. And don't remember the name of
the company or I'd give him a plug. He's a father of one of Henry's best
friends at college, and so I was visiting Henry and I sat and talked to this
guy for a couple of hours, about the business, and I was fascinated. He makes a
very good living on this, and what happened is that the key is efficiently
picking up the coins.
Jeff: There's the first user case I've
heard for coins.
Leo: Maybe. I mean, I think you probably
can use cards and so forth. Remember, where these are and how they're used.
People still want to drop a quarter and make a call. You don't have a phone, or
you lost your phone, or whatever, you need to use a phone. It’s basically
loaning you a cell phone for a fee. And he's actually developed algorithms, he
says very much like UPS or trucks don't turn left. They've developed algorithms
to efficiently collect the coins, the more efficiently the more money you make,
and he's branched out. He's become in many states, the guy who services the Nestle's freezer cases. Because the same algorithm
used to pick up coins from pay phones, have become very useful in delivering
ice cream sandwiches. And actually, this was the other thing, those
freezers are heavily instrumented. He said, we need to
know when to bring ice cream and how much ice cream. And I said, well do you
count them or something? He said, well we do have sensors inside the thing, but
mostly we just weigh the thing. There's a little sensor and when it gets light
enough, time to send the truck. Because we have all the
flavors.
Gina: Wow. That is interesting.
Leo: The world is an amazing place.
Jeff: it is.
Leo: And I think there's
lots of businesses like these, where people say, that's not exciting or
cool.
Jeff: We get so caught up in
entrepreneurship. This is a real entrepreneur who sees an opportunity.
Leo: And software is what made him
successful, because it’s the software that tells the trucks where to go. By the
way, it’s true, UPS does not turn left.
Gina: Oh wow.
Leo: Because a left turn is time
consuming...
Kevin: Except in the UK where they don't
turn right.
Leo: But then they don't turn right. And
they do it sometimes, there are places they'll turn left, but the software
that's routing the UPS driver or the ice cream truck guy is smart enough to let
it turn left somewhere it can be done easily and effectively, like a one way
street, but not where it will be turning left into a two way street, onto a two
way street. Because you've got to wait until traffic get by.
Jeff: I imagine a guy in brown shorts who
just decides, I'm going to be a rebel today and turn here!
Gina: I'm going to take a little break in
the intersection.
Leo: Yeah, really.
Jeff: In related news, Google is offering
free Wifi in Uber black
cars, in Philadelphia. It said in the rundown somewhere.
Leo: This is smart. Google is doing the
little, the breadcrumbs thing. You know you don't have to make a whole loaf,
just add up enough crumbs and you get Wifi everywhere. But you don't want to come up against regulators. Hey, it’s just in
the phone booths. It’s just in the Ubers.
Jeff: We got the metro wide Wifi, Philadelphia went through a big project to bring
routers and every phone pole and the government got involved in this and it
never happened.
Leo: You know what happened? Comcast and
Verizon and AT&T went to the state legislatures, they got laws passed in
more than thirty states, banning municipal Wifi.
Jeff: speaking of phone companies, Josh
Marshal who's a wonderful wonderful journalist, he
has a great tale today. He got a five thousand dollar bill, I think it was, from Verizon. And he's not a Verizon customer. So they tried to
call Verizon to say, what is this. And he has to
verify his number, but of course he doesn't have a number to verify he's not a
customer, to say I'm not a customer so he can't get a bill. First they tried to
say well this is a government requirement to have an emergency phone line, and
then they gave that up, and then when he canceled two years ago, two of the
lines self-replicated. And they're saying that it’s Josh's responsibility to
pay the money. This is going to keep going on and on.
Leo: This is slamming.
Jeff: It’s a Verizon equivalent of the
Comcast call we talked about.
Leo: These monopolies... And people
complain about Google.
Jeff: I've got to go through files, I was
saying, I pay for fifty megs. It was the story that,
they're now going to go symmetrical, same up same down. Yay, let me write a check here and I can do a screenshot and put that up and be
happy. But I'm paying for fifty and got twenty five. Now you've got Verizon and
you gotta go through the whole magilla.
Leo: I'm convinced that Ryan Block Comcast call, isn't something Comcast likes, because they
don't want to talk to you. So what they really want you to do is dread getting
on the phone. This we know, we know this is true, Comcast reps get ranked down
if the calls get too long, if they take too many calls. The worst thing that
can happen is if someone calls once and calls again, if it wasn't resolved.
Best thing to do, just don't call us. And generally that's going to make them
money, because what do you do to cancel...
Kevin: I think it’s cool but the boss is
up, because my Comcast bill is now three hundred dollars a month.
Leo: Do you not dread them, do you not dread that call?
Kevin: It’s like, gosh do I actually want
to go and do this today?
Jeff: It’s not worth my health,
literally.
Kevin: And then we control them that way.
Leo: I'm going to call Comcast tomorrow.
I'm saving it up for a day off. Because... I know I'll be on the phone all day.
Kevin: Do it on the show, Leo, there you
go!
Jeff: Yeah!
Kevin: This call is being recorded for
service reasons.
Leo: By the way, you do have to say
that, in some states. California is one of those states, you have to tell them. it’s a two party state, you have to tell them you're
recording. I want to give them more money. I want to add Turner Classic movies.
Jeff;
You've been trying to do that for weeks now.
Leo: I know... I tried on the website,
okay. There's no way to do it on the website, you can upgrade your package,
which I want to do but as soon as you do that on the website it says, OK, make
your installation appointment. But I don't need an installation, I just... So
I, Okay, clearly the website, they want you call them or something. But I
didn't want to call, because of Ryan Block. So I did the chat. And I chatted
and I explained to the guy, and the guy says, Okay. This is half an hour later,
and you can tell the guy is doing thirty calls at once on the chat, because
there's long pauses, and he'd say, are you still there? And then he says, okay,
now log into the website and add the package. I said, but I did that now it’s
going to want an installation. He says, oh just ignore that. Okay... He says
schedule an appointment, it doesn't matter when. Okay, I'm very nervous because
I know a truck is going to show up tomorrow, so I schedule an appointment, and
then he says, okay now. this is the Comcast chat
representative. He says, now, that you've scheduled an appointment you're going
to get a new chat with someone else. Tell him what you told me. But I just told
you... So now I tell him, and he says okay, I understand. He doesn't say
there's not going to be a service call, he says okay I understand. The first
guy says bye. And then another half hour goes by. This is in chat, another half
hour goes by. And they say, so you want to downgrade your service. I said no.
No. And I'm so afraid, that they're going to cut off my internet or they're
going to do something bad, that I just disconnected.
Gina: you should have been like Omg fml kmn you're killing me. Chat
that.
Leo: So I think Comcast wants us to have ptsd. They really don't want
us to have any interaction at all, because the likelihood...
Kevin: The goal is for me to go oh god,
three hundred bucks a month, ok but can I face calling them that much?
Leo: it’s worth it not to talk to them.
A twin cities man is upset about the way his family was tweeted on a southwest
airlines flight. He was asked, he was in a flight from
Denver to Minneapolis with his kids on Sunday. He was asked to get off the
flight, because the gate agent didn't like a tweet he wrote about her service.
Before boarding, the man Doth Watson, and the agent had a disagreement, Watson
says I was left, you know. Very upset, very embarrassed, very humiliated. He's
an A list passenger, that means he gets priority boarding. But the agent
wouldn't let his kids board with him. A six year old
and nine year old, they said well you can get on, but your kids can't. And Doth said, fff ttt. Alright. Real nice way, this
is literally a quote. "Real nice way to treat an A
list." That's their, you know, priority
guys. "I'll be sure to tweet about it." And he did. He tweeted,
"Wow, rudest agent in Denver. Kimberly S, gate C39. Not happy at
SWA." Got sat down, family sat down, they kicked him off the plane.
Jeff: And then. And then...? They forced him to erase the tweet before
they would allow him back on.
Gina: What?
Leo: His kids are crying, literally. Six and nine years old. He said there was no use of
profanity, there were no threats made, there was nothing other than, you know,
the tense exchange between the customer service agent and a customer, and a
tweet. The customer service agent, said I'm going to
call the cops. I feel threatened. She said you cannot board the plane, until
you delete the tweet.
Kevin: Wow. Talk about abuse of authority.
Jeff: Streisand the fact for that one.
Kevin: mmhmm
Leo: They've apologized for the
incident.
Jeff: They can't. He says he's never
flying southwest again.
Leo: Apparently they gave him fifty
dollar vouchers. Which he can never use because he's never
flying that airline again. The new corporate behavior is, screw your
customer, then apologize, say we're going to
investigate this.
Gina: That's crazy.
Kevin: The point is that they used the
reaction. That was my thing. I clicked on a link this morning, and I got fished
by a lot of ads. That was lovely, so I tweeted about it and Yahoo concierge
services, saying, 'we're trying to explain about fishing to you'.
Leo; At first when you tweet it, you know Comcast Cares.
First when you tweet it, they jumped and they did something. Now, and this
happened about a year ago because I remember I tweeted about Comcast and I got
a call from Comcast executive whatever, it wasn't a call to say I'm sorry we're
going to fix this. It was berating me. And so that's the new thing, is oh my God
let’s not fix the problem.
Jeff: Under what basis, what did they
say?
Leo: I can't remember She was mad that
I... I don't know. I hung up on her. Let’s move on. I don't want to talk any
more about this. I just feel like there is some trend here that is not a
pleasant trend.
Jeff: Everybody watch twitter tomorrow
for Leo's Comcast call.
Leo: No I stopped tweeting because I
don't want the executives to call me and yell at me. They're going to win
because they're a monopoly. There's nowhere I can go. So we are held hostage.
Jeff: There really is a fear that they
would just cut you off, just to F you.
Leo: It’s worth three hundred dollars a
month, not to get cut off.
Kevin: No, I don't want Comcast to cut me
off. That would be annoying.
Leo: I spent two hundred dollars a month
to go to Comcast business so we would have unmetered hundred megabit service with no bandwidth shaving.
Kevin: That's two hundred a month, I'm
talking about my domestic one, and that's cheaper.
Leo: It’s worth it, but wait. Because I thought of course Comcast one company,
they'll cancel the domestic. So now I'm paying, even though I don't have a router ,they came and took the router and put the business router
in, but they didn't cancel my regular internet. So I'm paying for two
internets, and then I have to make a call. And I'm not going to... Because I'm
deathly afraid that they will... You can call. But I'm deathly afraid, what I
don't want to do is come home and Lisa says the internet is not working. You
know that's what’s going to happen!
Kevin: It happened to me, it happened here
when I was in Paris. Got a call from my wife saying the internet is not
working, and it had to do with that Comcast chat thing in Paris. I'm like can you fix this thing? No, I do not have that information, I can tell
you where to get that information but I'm in paris. they just cut my
family off the internet. Stop it.
Gina; Coming home to spouse rage,
while the netflix thing is spinning around your head
like this is the worst thing. It happened to me last night, I came home and it was like GRRR. I got the GRRR,
why does the internet suck so bad?
Leo: I get that one too.
Kevin: A couple of weeks ago we actually
called Comcast out because the TV stopped working. The guy found under the
house, the hub that they plug the UHF connectors in that it had been down there
so long that rats had nibbled it or something, and it had just got to the point
where the TV stopped working. It just hit that point there, that there were
enough bit’s being dropped that it could no longer send us tv. And we were wondering, it's kind of a bit slow, and he's like well this is what happened.
Jeff: Did they charge you for the service
call?
Kevin: No, they didn't charge for the
service call, they replaced that piece, and they unplugged the cables that were
going to the ruined one.
Leo: Occasionally it does happen, and
I've had this happen, that you get good service, so it’s not universal. And I
don't know, Jeff, you've gotten contacted, I'm sure. But I got contacted by Comcast
reps they need. It’s just a mess. It’ss a systems problem. Here's a good thing coming out of the EU
I think. Google has been told by the EU to stop calling games with in app
purchases free. Apple has also been told the same thing, but apple hasn't done
anything about it, yet. But we know these in app purchases are really the big
cost of games, sometimes they cost a lot more than up-front costs. So, starting
in September, the google play store will no longer use the word 'free' for any
game that requires in app purchases. It’s also going to come up with some
targeted guidelines for games to prevent encouragement of children to buy
items. This is an ongoing problem, Apple got sued and
settled a class action lawsuit by sending us all gift cards because of in app
purchases by kids. The EU says Apple has regrettably not provided any solution
or timetable. Apple's response, "Apple takes great pride in leading the
industry in parental controls that are incredibly easy to use. We over the last year, have made sure that any app that enables
customers to make in app purchases is clearly marked, by court order. We have
also created a kids section of the app store, with even stronger protections.
Our goal..." Blah, blah, blah, blah. "And we
will continue to work with the EU members in response to their concerns."
Kevin: This is a plague on gameplay, isn't
it?
Leo: That's really the larger one, I
mean, yeah. Kids are going out and buying fish and you know every once in a
while I'll get about ten emails from the iTunes store, each of them two dollars
and ninety nine cents. These things happen. The worst plague is you think
you're getting a free app and it’s just unplayable unless you give them more
money.
Gina: We were talking about this last
night. There's kind of a difference between the apps that are, effectively
impossible to play unless you pay for something, right. Like, you can do very very limited stuff in it. Verses the apps that you can do,
you know, a fair amount, but where's the line? How do you draw the line between
those two?
Leo: Well we, in our reviews for when we
do this in a more formal way, but always when I review a free app, I'll explain
in app purchases and I'll review the point of view of how playable is it if you
don't. After my bad experiences with the Simpsons tapped out, I joined the
program...
Jeff: It’s not just games either right?
Tim O'reilly recommended an app, which is a very good
app and I'll probably pay for it. I'm not going to resent the money, I'm going
to pay. I'll totally be up front, it’s called Sleep At
Android. It monitors your sleep, Sleep As Android. And
you know, I've got these things, on my wrists that I
can't get to. That do that, but this you put, this is wacky. You put the phone
on the mattress.
Leo: It could be worse. It could be in
your underpants.
Jeff: And so, because of motion and
noise, the sensors, this is the power in these sensors. It sees how much you
slept and the great thing is, I compared it to my wearable, and it’s pretty
similar. So it gives me, here's... Let me see if I can find a graph. So here's
a graph of my sleep.
Leo: This is like if it fit...
Jeff: Yeah, but I don't have to wear
anything.
Leo: here she is, she's putting it in her bed.
Jeff: Here's the other thing about it...
Leo: So you don't put it under the
mattress. You have to put it next to you?
Gina: So it’s on the mattress next to
you, okay.
Jeff: It’s on the mattress, I tried it
out last night and I put it on the nightstand. Didn't work as
well.
Kevin: It’s supposed to see if you wiggle,
yeah.
Leo: That's creepy.
Jeff: And if you want...
Kevin: This doesn't work if you sleep with
dogs, does it?
Leo: Or anybody in bed with you! This is
for the loner.
Jeff: If you want to, it will record your
snoring.
Leo: Oh I do want that!
Kevin: Does it know who's snoring though?
Jeff: So I don't know, in any of these
apps, it tells me how much of my sleep is deep. Nobody tells me what I should
have. How normal it is. Does anybody know?
Leo: It’s so funny, they all say, I've
done this and it said, you were restless eighty nine
times. Is that a lot? Is that a little? I don't know.
Jeff: It gives you zero data. So I had
this good night. I had fifty two percent deep sleep cycles.
Leo: That's good. That's very good. What
you're supposed to do, everybody's different.
Jeff: I was snoring twenty five per cent
of the time.
Leo: You're supposed to say to yourself,
how do I feel today? Do I feel good? Then that's a good number. Do I feel
tired? Then that's why.
Jeff: I always feel crappy and tired.
Leo: me too. What they don't take into
account is those of us over a certain age are tired all the time.
Gina: It feels like they could put those
numbers into context based on other users' data and that they should. I'm going
to say it’s their responsibility to do that. I have a deep aversion to apps,
and I've built an app that shows numbers, but, my argument against somebody
inside the thinkup is what does this number mean? It’s
a tough thing, right, without context what does twelve mean.
Leo: Wait a minute. Here's a nice
feature. So, if the alarm goes off, it gets you out of bed. You have a giant QR
code next to the mirror in the bathroom and you can stop the alarm.
Jeff: Or you could have it ask
questions...
Leo: The alarm gets you out of bed. You
unplug the phone, you go in the bathroom, and you show it your QR code. You're
awake. Otherwise you couldn't do that. If you were asleep.
Jeff: Like other things, it'll pick the
moment to wake you up. So the other morning it woke me up half an hour earlier
than I wanted.
Gina: Yeah, that's not cool. Not cool.
Leo: It plays you lullabies.
Jeff: It’s a cool app.
Leo: So presumably a lot of these are in
app purchases.
Jeff: So anyway, yeah, so if you want to
hold on to and do some of that it’s $4.95. Again not much money, and I don't
resent that, but I just want to be up front.
Leo: It will work with your cues, so you
can have the cues slowly wake you up. The cue lights can slowly come on. It'll
work with your pebble, so if you have a pebble, you can just wear the pebble
Chad. I wonder if it worked with Android Wear, that would be cool.
Chad:
Yeah, I already have this app.
Leo: Oh, you already have it.
Chad:
I don't use it... The thing is, for a while it’s funny
though, you mentioned it waking you up thirty minutes early. There's kind of an
idea that you should be woken up when you're in a light sleep cycle, so that
was actually what I was looking for. I just kind of got over that.
Leo: You said, what you're going to do
is set a range. And if you set the range, don't set it before you want to wake
up. Set it so that it'll wake you up sometime in a half an hour after you want
to be woken up. Otherwise it'll get you up earlier.
Chad:
Exactly. And thats what they
gear Four did, when I had an iPad app setup for that. I just kind of grew out
of that. Now I just want to wake up when I need to wake up, and and monitor what time I go to sleep.
Leo: The QR coach is... See the problem
is, I know people like this, they'll hit the alarm unconsciously and it turns
it off. And they go back to sleep. So there's, they give you, you could do math
problems. You could shake the phone a certain amount, or you can find sheep. Or
you can do the QR code. So it forces you to... I think this is kind of cool. I
have to point out though, I'm in the google play
store. Maybe it’s different on the phone, but here it doesn't show me what the
in app purchases are on the website.
Jeff: That's my point.
Leo: It should. Apple does that.
Gina: It should. The difference between
this and spending six hundred dollars playing the Kardashian game, right,
because you can't do anything unless you... The Kardashian game, isn't it? It’s
amazing how well it’s done.
Leo: By the way, great game. Yeah, it’s
wonderful.
Kevin: I just read an article about it and
thought five hundred dollars on that?
Gina: Well that's right, that Jezebel
writer. It’s easy, right? But you basically can't do anything unless you buy
the K stars or whatever.
Leo: Ashley is trying not to buy K
stars. My daughter is playing it. She says the really annoying thing is it
keeps sending you notifications, "Your fans are losing interest, quick,
play now. Do something Kardashian like!" You're not playing Kim
Kardashian, you're playing her friend. You're not even her friend, you have to get to know her.
Kevin: It’s like Kim Kardashian.
Jeff: I am so proud to say I haven't the
faintest freaking idea what you're all talking about, and I'm staying that way.
Leo: You know. You know the Kardashians! Who was it... There was a member that...
Jeff: I know who they are.
Leo: There was a member of congress that
said, "What's a Kardashian, is that a machine?"
Gina: They're actually, for you Jeff,
they're an amazing brand. That's just embraced every single platform, right. And
this app, the fact that this app is doing so well, it challenges my notion that
these are not smart people, right? These are smart people.
Jeff: But it proves that Faust lives.
Leo: It’s John Dingell, who is among the
oldest members of Congress, he's eighty eight years
old and apparently doesn't know anything about the Kardashians. It’s fun to
follow him on twitter, I guess.
Gina: yeah, I mean, Instagram is like
their thing.
Leo: "I'm the last original author
of the clean water act, but I have no idea who or what a Kardashian is, and I
rarely play games. Staff has now informed me of what a Kardashian is, I'm only
left with more questions." I'm following him. I love him... This is good. So yeah... I was going to check this on the phone, do they
tell you on the phone, whether there's in app purchases? Like on the phone
entry.
Jeff: I just found another app from these
people called MindDroid. It’s an auditory visual
stimulation device. A mind machine, psycho walkman. It provides each of your brain hemispheres
with a signal, either audible or visual, with a slightly different frequency in
order to stimulate your brainwaves. Then it says, at the bottom. Caution, shall
not be used by users suffering any epileptic or cardiac symptoms. I don't think
I'm downloading that.
Leo: no... Hey we gotta take a break, I forgot that we have this. I'm just
having so much fun talking with you. This is really just like, sitting around
having a beer, talking with friends. Kim Kardashian, by the way, will make $81
million on that app this year.
Jeff: See that's the redistribution of
wealth. It’s like the lottery. You know. People stupid enough to play the
lottery suddenly get lots of money.
Leo: She won the lottery when she was
named Kardashian. You know what my daughter did not know and what I think a lot
of people who know who the Kardashians are, because they got famous because of
reality television. But you and I know that the reason that their dad was the
first Kardashian, he became famous because he was on the defense team for OJ
Simpson.
Jeff: I think that's what it was, yes.
Gina: I am in the midst of watching
season eight. I've just watched all eight seasons of the Kardashians.
Jeff: Gina! Ginaaa!
Leo: Is it good?
Gina: Yes. It is... Great trash TV. I
mean, it just is.
Jeff: I'm shocked! I'm shocked! Shocked!
You've crushed me! I thought you were so much above the flotsam of the world,
Gina. Oh no, you're human!
Gina: I'm trying not to be judgemental or hoity toity or
over intellectual. The Kardashians are a huge brand, I didn't understand who or
what they were or why people cared about them. I started watching the show, and
yeah. I sort of get the appeal. I won't go into my Kardashian thing, but
particularly with this app, I find them a fascinating brand. I think they've
done an amazing thing across lots of different platforms. I think there's like,
really interesting interplay of gender and media and like, who's a personality
and publicity and privacy and, like, just, you know, they made a show that has
a lot to do with it.
Jeff: Or did you just find it all just
now.
Leo: You've got to wonder, I mean, their
father Robert Kardashian was the first celebrity in the family. Friend and defender of OJ Simpson. He died in 2003. You've
got to wonder... By the way at the age of 59. So... But you've got to wonder, what he would have thought
of all this. What did he...
Gina: That's sort of a recurring theme
amongst the family.
Leo: Oh, they refer to him.
Gina: Yes. They talk about him a lot.
Leo: Interesting.
Gina: And so I guess, the mom was
actually friends with Nicole Simpson and was really upset. It’s sort of
contributed to their divorce. Whatever. I'm not going
to get into it... And then she married Bruce Jenner and Kendall and Kylie...
Leo: Wait a minute - she married Bruce
Jenner?
Gina: Yeah, Bruce Jenner is like... Her current husband. Yeah. And they had two kids. They're
off the...
Leo: The swimmer?
Gina: Not triathlete, the race guy. The track guy. The seventy six Olympic medalist.
Jeff: He's a swimmer.
Leo: He's a swimmer. Remember the...
Jeff: And have you looked at his plastic
surgery recently?
Leo: Way out of control.
Jeff: Oooooohhhhhh.
Leo: Okay now we have to look up Bruce
Jenner. He is, according to his website, the world's greatest athlete.
Jeff: I remember sitting there,
saying," Tacky Americans."
Leo: He's married to Chris Jenner, who
was Chris Kardashian.
Gina: Exactly.
Kevin: The decathlon is pretty cool.
Leo: Oh he was a decathlete? I thought
he was a swimmer.
Gina: Yeah, no the decathlon.
Leo: Wait a minute... Kendall Jenner
goes topless channel... I'm sorry. I've lost... I've lost control of this show.
Jeff;
Make some money, Leo.
Leo: I want to play this game now. I
want to spend some of that money on Kim Kardashian, Hollywood starlet or
whatever it’s called. Superstaar. But it’s not cheap. Have you played the game?
Gina: I have not. I have actually
resisted the game.
Leo: I'm going to put it on Jason's one
Plus One phone.
Gina: I watch the shows. I don't want to
spend any more hours on these people. But I do find them fascinating as a brand
and as a marketing tool.
Leo: Abbey really likes the game, she says it’s actually a really engaging game.
Gina: Yeah?
Leo: Actually two, but you know. Our show today brought to you buy the one place in the world
that wants to bring better websites to the world. Better websites to all, for
all, through Squarespace. Have you played the Kim
Kardashian game, Henry? No.
Jeff: Would you admit it to your father
if you had?
Leo: Would you admit it if you had?
Gina: My god the entire chat room, is
like so disappointed in me. I'm really sorry you guys.
Leo: Now Kim, if you want a site that
never goes down, consider Squarespace.com. The best hosting, the best software,
let’s you design the site. You don't need a team, it looks like you've got a
team, but you don't need a team with Squarespace. You
start with their gorgeous twenty five designer templates, but not merely
gorgeous. What you don't see is under the hood. That these
templates are engineered to be state of the art, web technology. They're
mobile responsive, that means they look great on any
sized device. And look at that, to get started you don't need to give them a
credit card or anything, just your name, email address and password. Now you've
got it for two weeks. Play with your templates, add your content. You can
import your content from an existing site if you've got one. And then change
the template. You don't have to re add the content or anything, the template is completely separate from the content. That's another way it’s
very sophisticated. Also e-commerce is built into each and every template.
That's nice. Squarespace is just fabulous. I'm so
impressed with their commitment to quality to their customers. They have the
best support ever, all from their offices, which is nice in New York City. So
you're talking to someone who really knows what's going on. They're available
for email and chat 24/7, the customer help site has self-help articles, video
workshops, webinars. It’s just great
,and you'll get all of that for free, for the first two weeks at
Squarespace.com. If you decide to buy, it’s very affordable. It starts at eight
dollars a month, and that includes the domain name for free, if you sign up for
a year. They have apps, the squarespace Metric app
for iPhone, and iPad lets you check site stats. Like page,
unique visitors, social media followers. They've got a blogging app. You
can post of course, you can also drag and drop images, change layouts, monitor
comments on the go. It’s just a, it’s really impressive what they've done.
Squarespace.com, it’s free to start just click the get started button. All I
ask is that if you decide to buy, you're going to get ten percent off if you
use our offer code, T-W-I-G, TWiG. Squarespace.com,
use the offer code TWIG for ten percent off when you decide to buy. Google's
offering a million bucks for a better power inverter. Inventers, hustle on
over. This is a prize. Part of the little box challenge. Kevin, what's a power
inverter do?
Kevin: It changes AC to DC, basically.
Leo: Oh, it’s the brick that we have on
every device we plug in. Because AC is what's coming out of the wall, and most
batteries want DC. What's wrong with the existing power inverters?
Kevin: Good question. They probably waste
too much power.
Leo: Yeah. We believe, says Google, that
inverters will become increasingly important to our economy. As solar pv batteries and similar power
sources continue their rapid growth, more broadly similar forms of power
electronics are everywhere, of course, in laptops, phones, motors, drives,
electric vehicles, wind turbines... We expect that innovations inspired by this
million dollar prize will have wide applicability across all of those areas. So
there's a number of different kinds of inverters, I guess.
Jeff: Can they also make them lighter?
Leo: And they do, you know, they're
wasting power, because they get hot. And we do know that inverters, if left
plugged in, will use power even when there's no draw.
Gina: Whenever google puts out these
calls for, either, bug bounties or crowdsourcing invention, you know it’s a
really hard problem, because if the brainiacs at
google haven't figured it out...
Leo: That's a good point, that's a
really good point. I love this page for the little box. The little box
challenge, littlebox challenge.com. Wait a minute, let me start it over again. It starts with they're
squishing a truck. Think shrink, it says. And then a giant
dog trying to get in a little tiny dog bed. The Japanese, Tokyo subway
station where they're stuffing more people into the car during rush hour. A
kitten in a cup, using a hose to vacuum... I can't continue to narrate this...
So little box challenge is...
Kevin: Oh, sorry, so I had it
backwards. It’s the other way
around. It’s the thing that makes AC
from DC.
Leo: Oh, that’s
inverter. Okay.
Kevin: That’s the inverter,
right, sorry. Yeah, it’s—
Leo: Oh, it takes it from
solar panels and batteries, inverts it—
Kevin: Yes, and then gives you
AC to run existing things.
Jeff: Or from your car battery
to make a laptop work.
Leo: Got it.
Kevin: Yes.
Leo: So this is something
less common, but very important if you’re trying to do solar energy for
instance.
Kevin: The obvious answer is
well why are we making AC when the things at the other end are turning it back
into DC again, so if you’re going to cut the middle man out, that makes more
sense. We go through this process and
replacing all our lights with LED, which actually want DC, but they have to
have a transformer in them to turn the AC into DC because we’re screwing them
in AC sockets.
Jeff: Did we mess up? Was Edison right?
Leo: Should we have gone DC?
Kevin: It depends what you’re
doing. DC is better short range. AC is better at long range.
Leo: That’s the whole point
of AC is that you can have a power plant and at a distance, it can send power
at a distance because it’s alternating the current.
Kevin: Yeah. It’s easier to scale it up to very high
voltages and transmit it because it ends up being an oscillating transmission.
Leo: Right.
Kevin: It’s a wave you can
guide along wires, but the DC is much better for short range because you
basically when you’ve got AC it’s doing all that all the time and you’ve got to
put it through a capacitor and clip it off and make it into a DC thing so that
your screen isn’t flickering all the time.
Leo: So thanks to our
chatroom who are all experts on all of this, they say,
for instance, that you probably have an inverter in your laptop for the screen,
that hams notoriously hate inverters because they’re noisy. They put off a lot of RF. They’re used to export power back to the grid
is what one of them says.
Kevin: Yes, the other thing is
the grid runs AC, and so if you’ve got a giant battery or this other thing then
you would need to basically give them a wave form that they like the look of to
feed into the grid.
Leo: And Google’s saying they
want to get it smaller, so applicants have till September to register their
team, the end of September. Then next
year, registered teams will submit a technical approach, so you have about a
year to get working on this thing. You
have till July 22, 2015. In October, 18
finalists will be notified of their—this is something NetFlix did this with the NetFlix prize where they wanted to
get a better recommendation engine. I
love this idea where commercial entities will say, “Hey, this is so
important. We’ll give a million dollars
to somebody who comes up with a better way of doing this.” The X prize.
Jeff: The great thing about
the NetFlix thing was the honor of winning became so
important, people spent more than a million dollars to win the million dollars.
Leo: Right, right.
Gina: Yeah.
Leo: It really fosters
innovation. It’s a great idea, and
there’s a lot if you want to know more at LittleBoxChallenge.com.
Kevin: But the other half of
this is saying, “Well, are there ways we cannot need to have—running AC around
the house and then having something like this connected to every device…
Oops…to every device you’re using—
Leo: (Laughter)
Kevin: —is less than
ideal. Especially with LED light bulbs
and things like that, you’re literally putting one of those into every light
bulb socket—
Leo: Yeah.
Kevin: —just because that’s
what you’re running around the house, and you can actually run DC wires, the
LED bulbs could be that big rather than the size of the bulbs they’re
replacing. There’s a bunch of stuff that
will mean this will make more sense over time as we start running more DC
around the house. Yes, it’s a transition
technology as well.
Leo: (Laughter) Apparently,
I’ve just been informed that a visitor to our studio has brought me an entire
pepperoni pizza.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter) Aww, that’s so
sweet.
Jeff: That’s beautiful.
Leo: It’s because I did one
on Twitter, the pepperoni industry would have been calling me, but thank
you. That’s very nice. Actually, it would have been the ham and
pineapple industry (laughter) that would have been giving me a hard time.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Google, the day after we
did the show last week, Google announced its second quarter results. Great quarter. Revenue up 22% year over
year, $16 billion. They talked
about the Lenovo transition for Motorola Mobile, and that was included as part
of that. Let’s see. Let me just look at some highlights
here. Net income $3.42 billion. That’s up a few hundred million from last
year. I’ll take it. That’s more than a billion a month. That’s good. Discontinued operations did hit that a little bit. Our sites generated revenues of 10.94
billion. Partner networks or partner
sites 3.42 billion. They don’t mention
how much they made on Chromebooks. Interesting to know.
Jeff: Was that the beginning
of a smart-ass line there?
Leo: Yeah, it was. It was. Yeah (laughter). No. One thing they do point out—no actually, I like Chromebooks,
and I’ve come around to your way of thinking.
Jeff: And they sold a million
of them to schools last quarter.
Leo: Yep. One of them I bought for our 6th grader, Michael.
Jeff: Oh, that’s right.
Leo: It’s really nice. For $200, it was the Acer CES 720. Very nice.
Jeff: That’s a nice machine,
right?
Leo: Yeah, for $200 it’s
amazing.
Jeff: Did the school give you
a choice of what to buy or are they all bought—?
Leo: Well, the school gives
the students one. Is it a one-to-one
program, Lisa or do they have a pool that these kids share? It’s a one-to-one program, so the school does
have the budget I think partly through nonprofits like the—two to one. Oh, that’s interesting. Two kids, one Chromebook. That’s going to work well.
Jeff: That’s not a—yeah.
Leo: (Laughter) Then we
thought well, they’re so inexpensive, Michael should
have his own, so we just got him one. But I think that’s great. I think
that’s a really great program.
Jeff: And they laugh at the Chromebook. They
laugh!
Leo: They get money from the
Petaluma Educational Foundation, which is a nonprofit, which we support for
that. So that’s cool. Income tax rate. I don’t know how long this has been going on,
but both Google and Apple are at great pains to point out they pay a lot of
income tax despite the Dutch turnaround and the Indonesian Polynesian upside
down cake or whatever they use.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Twenty-one percent, the
effective tax rate. That’s
less than I pay, but it’s good. I
think I once had an accountant who said, “That’s about where you want to shoot
for, 20%.” Same guy said—
Jeff: Don’t I wish.
Leo: “Go take more
deductions.” (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: But plan for a third,
yeah (laughter).
Leo: Plan for a third, but
pay a fifth. Twenty
percent. What do you think? Yeah, we’re in California. We’re in a high-tech state. They don’t say federal income tax rate. They say our effective tax rate, so I don’t
know.
Kevin: Are they counting across
all countries?
Leo: I don’t know.
Kevin: Is that averaging
between the tax they don’t pay in Ireland and the tax they do pay in America or
what?
Leo: Next time I want you on
that analyst call, Kevin Marks.
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: Thank you for the pizza
my friend. This looks like good—where
did this come from? Mary’s. Now if anybody wants to send me a Pepe’s Pizza, just fly out.
Male Voice: Have you ever
heard don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Leo?
Leo: I’m sorry.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter).
Gina: Ohhh.
Leo: I love it wherever it
came from. Headcount,
52,069 full-time employees. Of
that, 3,485 were Motorola.
Jeff: Because I remember we
did numbers on this show for Google employees when it was hitting over 20,000
as I remember.
Leo: Yeah, 52,000, huh?
Jeff: Jeez.
Gina: 52,000
Leo: All the tech companies
actually reported pretty good results this quarter. I don’t think anybody had a bad quarter
except Blackberry. I don’t even know if
Blackberry had a bad quarter. They might
have had a great quarter.
Kevin: Microsoft took a big
charge, but…
Leo: Microsoft had to take a
charge for the layoffs, over a billion-dollar charge for the layoffs.
Kevin: But also a big charge
for the tablet, not doing very well.
Leo: Yeah. They did that this quarter or previous
quarter?
Kevin: This quarter.
Leo: They took a big
one. More. Yeah, because they took more than a billion
on service a couple of quarters ago. Re/code, Kara Swisher, the most powerful tech journalist in the
world. She can start a fire with
her eyes.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter) That’s why she has
to wear those glasses, yeah.
Gina: That’s why she wears
those glasses.
Leo: That’s right.
Gina: Yeah, I was going to
say. That’s why she wears those
aviators.
Leo: She’s used her mutant
powers to determine there have been no Google Spotify acquisition talks,
none. There you go. That said, Spotify
co-founder and CEO, Daniel Ek, did indeed meet with
Google executives about various and substantive commercial deals at YouTube,
Google Play, and Android. But one source
reflecting many others said, “Don’t shoot me with your eyes, and there has not
been a single conversation about Google’s interest between the two.”
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: “There was never a
price, never a negotiation, never anything. Please don’t shoot me with your eyes.” All right.
Gina: You guys talked about
this with Shira, the New York Magazine profile?
Leo: Yeah, what do you think
of that? We also talked about the Elle
Magazine profile of Tabriz. Did you see
that?
Gina: No, I didn’t.
Leo: Aww.
Jeff: Aww.
Leo: I’ll have to bring that
back because we wished you were here. So
tell us about what you thought of the (laughter) picture of Kara on the beach.
Gina: (Laughter) That was
great. I really enjoyed it. I learned things that I didn’t know. I thought of course the things that stuck
with me were the personal stuff. Like I didn’t realize that Mossberg had walked her down the aisle
because her mother is not supportive of her relationship.
Leo: Awww, ohhh.
Gina: That was interesting to
me. I didn’t realize that they had that
kind of close personal relationship. Yeah, it was a great piece. You
know, Kara’s such a personality. She
just makes a great story, so many great quotes.
Leo: She’s been on our shows
of course many times. In fact, as I
pointed out last week, those dogs that she’s holding in the ivy pooped on our
floor once.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: I like that she tells
various founders that they dress like Ellen. That also made me laugh.
Leo: That’s apparently her
line.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: You dress like a lesbian
is her line. She uses it on many people
apparently.
Gina: I aspire to dress like
Ellen, so I would take that as a—
Leo: I think Ellen dresses
quite well.
Gina: I do too
(laughter). I want to search for her
stylist.
Leo: However, having said
that, I’ve got a little kudos to Google’s top hacker, Parisa Tabriz “who appears to wear black almost exclusively. ‘It’s slimming,’ she says shrugging, not that
she needs to worry about that. She has a
simpatico face, always worn bare, that could easily elide from one ethnicity to
another and a classic Gap-in-its-heyday sleek tomboy aesthetic: dark-washed
jeans, clean-line crewnecks, and Chuck Taylors, with the occasional bomber
jacket thrown on top.” We talked about
this last week, Elle magazine’s profile of Parisa Tabriz whose official Google title is “security princess.”
Gina: Security princess, okay.
Leo: You didn’t see this?
Gina: I didn’t. This is going into my queue right now.
Leo: Get that Elle magazine
out of the trash and read it.
Gina: I know. I missed out. I always read Elle.
Leo: Do you?
Gina: No, I don’t (laughter).
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: Not even close. Not even close. Are you kidding? (Laughter)
Kevin: She just appears on the
Kardashian game.
Gina: Do I look like I read
Elle? I am wearing a gray t-shirt. (Laughter)
Leo: Actually, as Jeff and I
concluded, in your absence because we didn’t have an actual woman, that this
actually is a surprisingly good piece, part of Elle’s women in tech series that
despite that one paragraph, which is a little bit much—
Gina: A little much.
Leo: —it really does talk a
lot about some real stuff and does promote the idea that women can be
successful in a tech environment. She
talks about the idea that women can be successful in a tech environment. She talks about the challenges of that, and
it’s pretty good. Doesn’t
hurt that she looks good in black.
Gina: She can rock those Chuck
Taylors.
Leo: Oh, those Chuck Taylors
look good.
Gina: I had no idea that Elle
was doing a women in tech section. I don’t know how I feel about this.
Jeff: Hello, Elle. Hello, Elle. Guess who you’re missing? Oops
wrong way. Guess who you’re missing.
Leo: I guess the “L” word in
this case stands for lovely. (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: There’s a whole article
here from December, “Why We Need Women Who Code,” featuring a movie star
pretending to use a computer.
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Copyright 20th Century Fox.
Gina: And it’s a photo gallery
of women.
Leo: Yeah, it’s a photo
gallery.
Gina: it always is isn’t
it? Isn’t the women in tech list always a photo gallery?
Leo: They’re so good
looking. You’d never know they were
nerds.
Gina:
I know, can you believe it?
Leo: Can you believe?
Gina: And then she took off
her glasses and let her hair down and she was beautiful.
Leo: Ohh,
why Ms. Tabriz, you’re beautiful. Actually, there is a gooder article
(laughter)—
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: —if you follow the links
to “Why We Need Women Who Code.” Actually does profiles of female coders and founders, and it talks about
how they learned to code, being a woman in the field, and so forth. So it’s kind of neat.
Gina: Yes.
Leo: Yeah. I mean, they’re doing something. There’s somebody from Code for America, some
engineers at various companies. Hey,
it’s Elle. What did you expect?
Gina: That’s true. That is true.
Leo: Let’s take a little
break here.
Jeff: I—
Leo: What?
Jeff: Nope, I just want to
make sure we get to “right to be forgotten” for my rant of the week.
Leo: Jeff, we still have the
change log, which we’ve missed.
Jeff: That’s right. We are just— (Whistles)
Leo: Jeff’s rant of the week,
coming up, but first, let me show you my box. This, my friends, is an amazing device. We’ve talked about Lantronix before. Their xPrint Server line, which takes any
printer, even dumb old USB printer and puts it on the Wi-Fi network and makes
it compatible. Now the first one
we showed made it compatible with air print, but this is the one you really
want. This makes any printer compatible,
almost any printer, 4,000 different printers, compatible with Google
Print. That is very cool. Google’s cloud print means that you can print
from your Android or cloud device, but you can also—I could print to my home
printer because I use one of these from here over the Internet. This allows your USB printers to be shared
over the network. It automatically
discovers them, sets them up. There’s no
software to install, nothing to download. You literally open the box, plug it in, and
voila! You are printing via cloud print.
The cloud print edition is $149.95, supports up to 10 network printers and 8
USB printers simultaneously. We’ve
talked to people who’ve used these. In
fact, I talked to an administrator at a school who said, “We had printers all
over the school. We wanted to make it
easy for people to print wirelessly. I
plugged this in and I’d never seen anything so easy. No configuration necessary. It just works.” It’s really, really cool. If you’ve been looking to get cloud print to
work with your older USB printer or you just want to turn a printer into a
Wi-Fi printer, this is awesome. It will
even work with the Chromebook. It will even work with a Chromebook (laughter).
Jeff: Uggh. Of course, because
everything works with a Chromebook.
Leo: Android.
Jeff: Why would you even doubt
something good would work with a Chromebook?
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: Actually, it’s more
surprising that it works with a Kindle Fire. Even works with a Kindle Fire. Now here is the site, xPrintServer.com/twit to find out more about it. If you decide to buy it, use the offer code
TWIT, T-W-I-T. You’ll get free
shipping. XPrint,
this is such a cool technology. xPrintServer.com/twit. Make any printer, even that old funky USB printer a Wi-Fi printer that
supports cloud print. That is
awesome. XPrintServer.com/twit. All right. Let’s do the changelog first, Jeff. Hold that rant.
Jeff: I will; I will; I will.
Leo: Because I want to eat
some pizza. (Laughter)
Jeff: Priorities (laughter).
Gina: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: It’s time. Play the trumpets.
Announcer: The Google Changelog.
Leo: And now ladies and
gentlemen, the latest from Google with Gina Trapani.
Gina: Good news for Windows
users who are also using Chrome. In the
latest beta version of the Chrome browser supports Microsoft’s DirectWrite API. What that means for you is that typography fonts look really good. You can see there in the screenshot there on
TechCrunch—it’s actually maybe not as easy to see. You can kind of see the top one is without
the update, and the bottom one is with. You can see the fonts there are much, much clearer and better
looking. So you have to be a Windows
user on a machine that runs at least Vista in order to see it, and you need the
Chrome beta. So very
nice there.
Leo: And you want the Chrome
beta because the old Chrome killed your battery.
Gina: Ahh, was that true. The current stable version on Windows is a
battery killer?
Leo: The updated Chrome
because frankly it, yeah, it was killing Windows batteries.
Jeff: Was it just on Windows
machines?
Leo: Yeah, it wasn’t Mac or
anything else.
Jeff: Well, puuugh! Who cares
about that?
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter) Aww man.
Leo: Jeff doesn’t care.
Jeff: Get a Chromebook. Get a Chromebook.
Gina: Windows is like the
Kardashians of operating systems (laughter).
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: Jeff is like puuugh.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: Oh, Gina, Gina,
Gina. Ohh.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: So you do need to be in
the beta channel, not canary, but beta channel for this?
Gina: You do, you do. You need the beta to get the good-looking
fonts.
Leo: I don’t know which
version of Chrome has now fixed the battery life issue. I don’t know if you have to—I’ll find
out. Keep going.
Gina: That just came out
today, by the way.
Leo: Okay.
Gina: Or this best week.
Leo: This is not Typekit? This is a
different thing. This is for your
desktop?
Gina: This is for your
desktop. This is Windows on desktop,
chrome beta, fonts look much better. Uses Microsoft’s DirectWrite API on the
desktop. Google Maps for Android
is getting an update that’s rolling out now. A couple of few nice updates that are probably hooked
into Android Auto. So you’ve got
some voice actions when you’re in navigation mode. So you can do how long until destination,
show traffic. Bicycle directions now
display elevation, including elevation comparison for multiple routes. So you can say, “Hey, show me which route
involves less climbing.” Your places now appears on a slideout nav menu. The voice
icon replaces the person in the search bar that used to load places, and the Uber car now shows in the car tab of navigations instead of
just public transportation and walking. So Uber in the cities where Uber’s available will show up. So nice update to Google Maps there, and I
believe that that’s just Android. The
Google Play app on Android is updating to a new version. I haven’t gotten it yet. I keep tapping my settings icon. You can download the APK, but it’s kind of
the first introduction in material design that you’re going to see in the
Google Play Store. So basically, when
you first load the app, it looks pretty similar to what you’ve got now, but
when you navigate down to an app page, you’ll see that those are redesigned. So it’s got the new material design
animations and it’s got a new white background. App’s have, you can see on the Chrome, Chad’s got that up on the screen
there. Apps have a video trailer. We’ll have that prominently displayed at the
top. Bigger app
screenshots. As you scroll
downward, the page begins to gradually cover up the space where the trailer
was. Is pushed off
screen. That’s material design
motion. And when you select “read more”
in the app changelog at the top, you can see
full-screen view with the information about the app description and changes. Just a much nicer app page
in the new version of the Play Store. I haven’t gotten it yet on my phone, but that is rolling out now.
Leo: Yeah, I don’t see it on
mine either, yeah.
Gina: Yeah. Android Police has an APK you can download or
side load, but I’m waiting for it to hit my phone over the air as the kids say.
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: Google Drive has been
updated with filter views for spreadsheets. So this is for real spreadsheet nerds, pretty cool stuff though. There’s a new filter views feature, so you
can sort and filter your data on view only spreadsheets, and then you can share
that filter view with a URL. So you can
turn on this temporary filter view from the toolbar or the data menu, sorry, to
make adjustments to filter your data and sort it. Then you can share a link to that particular
sort and view, so nice update there for spreadsheets. And finally, ahead of the Android One
rollout, this is part of Google’s reaching the next billion users on Android, Google’s launched Maps in Hindi on both the Web and
Android. So the Hindi version of Maps is
available to those using Google Maps on Android 4.3 and up. So you can set Hindi as your language
preference in order to access it. They’ve done translations that tried to stay
true to the dialect but also read correctly, but they are taking suggestions
and corrections from users. So makes a
lot of sense before Android One gets released that India would have (laughter)
in the native tongue, so good for them.
Jeff: You know the phone I do
want to get is the Android One. I want
to get an Android One and just show people how you can do an amazing phone for
so little money.
Leo: This is not available in
the U.S. but available in India or...?
Jeff: Will be.
Gina: Yeah, it will be. Right. It’s not out yet. I’m actually not sure when the release date
is, but yeah, I interested to get my hands on the Android One too because it
sounds like a really nice low-end phone. Stock Google, good updates. Yeah, so it’s India and other developing
nations. So the maps will now have
support for India and native speakers.
Leo: And then play the drums.
Announcer: Is the Google Changelog.
Leo: So I’ve been doing
research. Couple of
things. First, they do not show—
Leo: Huh?
Jeff: Pepperoni is good.
Leo: Pepperoni. Excellent. Good choice.
Jeff: That’s the research.
Leo: Love the pepperoni. Got to love the pepperoni. Also, they do not show in-app purchases on
the Google Play Store, even on the phone. They do that on Apple. I think
that’s something Google should do.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: Doesn’t
it show it lower on the screen there?
Leo: I thought it did, and I
don’t see it.
Kevin: What’s this?
Leo: Well, I’m looking at
Android. That has in-app purchases,
right?
Gina: Yeah, that has an app—so
it’s right below the screenshot. No?
Leo: I see top
developer. I see rate this app. I see what’s new,
description. Maybe if I expand
this—
Jeff: Maybe it’s trying to
show you.
Gina: You’ve installed it?
Leo: Huh? Yeah. Or maybe it’s because I installed it?
Gina: Yeah, like right below
the screenshot right there. It says
in-app purchases.
Leo: Oh, all right. So maybe it’s because I installed it.
Jeff: Oh, right.
Leo: Oh, yeah. There it is. In-app purchases. But it doesn’t show you what they are. It says here in really fine print right above
how big it is because everybody wants to know it’s 7.62 megabytes, it says in-app purchases. But it doesn’t show you on—zoom in will you? On the Apple Store, it will actually give you
a list of in-app purchases and their costs, which is really nice. I mean, that gives you a much better idea
what could this potentially cost me.
Gina: It would be nice to see what is the average amount of money users spend on this app as well.
Leo: Oh, wouldn’t that be
nice?
Jeff: Oh, that’s interesting.
Kevin: Oh,
there you go.
Leo: Yeah, because that will
tell you how much you need to spend really.
Gina: How much you could
expect to spend.
Leo: Yeah, how much could you expect.
Gina: How much does a typical
user…
Leo: Wouldn’t it be a great
line, “You can expect to spend $300 on this app over the lifetime of the
purchase”? That would really kill some
of these freemium apps. I think it’s a
blight on the app store these freemiums. I understand the developers make tons more
money when they do it free plus in-app purchases, but that’s because they’re
tricking people.
Gina: Well, right, yeah. I mean, it’s a little misleading, right?
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: We were talking about
all about Android last night. For the
impact on developers, if Google’s going to categorize apps with in-app
purchases separately from free apps, then that does hurt developers,
right? Because users are going to say,
“I want something that’s free.”
Jeff: Yes.
Gina: So you’re going to be
taken off the top free list. You’re not
going to be listed as free, so I feel like if you’re being more honest that
this isn’t a free app. But you know some
in-app purchases apps you really can do a lot for free and then they offer
something extra. I think it’s going to
make developers really think should this be in-app purchase or should I just
charge someone upfront to use it, right?
Leo: Right. Well, that’s why I like your idea. The average user has spent. A histogram would be nice too, but that’s a
lot of real estate. The average user has
spent this much on this app is a really valuable statistic, especially when you
launch the Kardashian app and it’s $400. That might tell you something.
Gina: Yeah, I mean, I would
love to see that, and if my kid is trying to install an app, I’d like to see what’s the average customers have spent on this app.
Leo: What could this cost me, yeah. So I also
did research on the Chrome thing, and I don’t think they’ve fixed it. This is from Tech Times. “Google has finally acknowledged a problem
that has been reported to Google since 2010 that a flaw in Chrome accelerates
battery usage in Windows laptops. It has
something to do with the tick rate. When
most browsers, including Chrome, are in active use, they run the clock at a
tick rate of about a millisecond.” Maybe
one of your smart people can explain that to me. “But when browsers are open in the background
but not active, all of them except Chrome for Windows just ease up and they
reduce that tick rate to 15 milliseconds. That cuts consumption about 25%.” Chrome for Windows 1 millisecond no matter what, background or
foreground. A clock tick apparently is a
measure of how often Windows wakes the processor. The processor sleeps while inactive, waking
at predetermined intervals. In other
words, having Chrome open on Windows will basically keep the processor
going. It won’t be able to sleep, and
this is something that’s not so hard to fix. And they say, “We have prioritized working on an update to fix the
issue.” So the stop gap,
if you’re using Chrome, close it if it’s in the background. Don’t put it in the background. Just close it. Apparently, Mozilla and IE do not suffer from
these issues. On Macs, Macs work
differently, so Chrome for Mac is not affected by this problem. So there you go.
Jeff: So you know, Leo, that
white watch band?
Leo: Ugly?
Jeff: Well, yeah. It looks like you’re a retiree in Florida
wearing white shoes
Leo: I thought it made me
look like eurotrash.
Jeff: Oh, well, maybe. Yeah.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: Oh, well, would you like
to see my monkey?
Gina: I like it. It’s different.
Jeff: (Laughter) I don’t know.
Leo: So here’s the deal on
this. You’re probably wondering. I’m talking about my Android Wear Watch. I got the LG specifically because it had a
white band (laughter). No, there’s a
black and there’s kind of a goldish metal, but the goldish metal comes with this ugly white band. But here’s the good news is that the standard
22 millimeter watchband so you can replace it with any watchband. So I just haven’t gotten around to going out
and buying some other watchbands. I wanted everybody to know I’m wearing
Wear. No question. Why is Leo wearing that weird white rubber
wrist thing? That’s his Wear Watch.
Jeff: Yep. He’ll be off his parole soon.
Gina: You can strap it to your
forehead…
Leo: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: By the way, I kind of
like—Android Wear, it is definitely not anything anybody needs to run out and
get, but if you use Google a lot—
Jeff: But I like it.
Leo: —like Google Now. See? It’s a birthday and it shows full screen the person’s picture from
Google +. It says, it’s Adam Marshal’s birthday today. He
doesn’t have much of a picture, but I can see the Giants beat the Phillies in
14 innings. That was last night. A game that ended at one in
the morning. I can see
stocks. See that my Fire Phone
shipped. Hey, that’s exciting.
Gina: Oh, nice!
Jeff: Ohh.
Leo: Nice. These are notifications for various
apps. When you slide this over, I can
see what the high will be, what the forecast is for four days and that kind of
thing. I don’t know. It’s got my calendar and my steps. These are all Google Now and then it’s got a
picture, which is kind of cool.
Jeff: Craig Newmark put a picture of my birthday message on his watch
and he said he was frightened.
Leo: Yours was great. I loved it.
Jeff: It looked kind of scary,
yeah.
Leo: Yeah, because you were
like peering over it, right?
Jeff: Yeah, exactly.
Gina: (Laughter) I remember a time
when birthdays were like a big deal.
Leo: Aren’t birthdays a big
deal, Gina?
Jeff: That was before 40.
Leo: What do you mean? You don’t celebrate.
Gina: No, no, no. I do celebrate birthdays. I’m saying in a time, once upon a time,
before social media, before I had this really huge list of friends, right, on
various—a friend having a birthday was an unusual occurrence. But now every day.
Leo: Now every day, three or
four friends.
Gina: It’s somebody’s
birthday. Not to devalue your birthday,
Jeff. Happy birthday
by the way.
Jeff: No, I hate
birthdays. I hate it. I hate it.
Gina: Aww.
Jeff: Sorry I brought it up.
Gina: Aww, all right, all right, all right. It’s just not a big deal. Like it used to be if a friend had a
birthday, we were going out and celebrating.
Jeff: Right.
Gina: It was a big deal and it
was an unusual rare occurrence, and now I feel like I’m just birthdayed out. I’m
like, “Oh, it’s…”
Leo: Another birthday.
Jeff: That darn Internet. It ruins everything, even birthdays!
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: Even birthdays. Social media has ruined birthdays. That’s what I’m saying. Facebook specifically. But Google + does it too.
Jeff: Kardashian makes it all
better, doesn’t it, Gina?
Gina: (Laughter) Give me K stars for
my birthday people.
Leo: I didn’t know this. I mean, the Android comes with a variety of
watch faces. I just have a plain digital
watch face, as you probably saw if you were watching the video. But apparently, they’re going to have a new
API that will let you do custom watch faces. And I like the idea of having—I mean, this one on this—
Jeff: I put on one. I got a new ones.
Leo: You can download them
from the Play Store. I don’t know how
they’re doing it, but…
Kevin: People are reversing
through the API, yeah.
Leo: Oh, okay.
Gina: Developers are hacking
around the API and Google’s actually asking developers to wait until they ship
the API so that you can kind of do the right way or the way that Google wants
you to do it.
Leo: This is Wayne Piekarski posts. “As
we work on finalizing the API, we would suggest not posting your apps
publically to Google Play until there’s a stable published API.” So where’d you get that one? That’s nice.
Jeff: I got this. They’ve got one called Squares and they got
one called Circles for the new one, and it’s very nice. It’s online, but from a company called Smartwatch Face Company. The only thing is I could be wrong. I could be absolutely wrong about this, but in my imagination, I think
it actually increased the battery wear.
Gina: Mm-hmm. Oh, increased?
Jeff: Not sure about
that. Might make the
battery worse off.
Leo: Ooo,
I like that one Kevin. That’s not a
standard—that’s not a stock face.
Kevin: That’s the Matrix one,
yeah. That’s a developer one. It’s just like the Matrix display.
Leo: Probably should not
download these though, right?
Kevin: Well, you know. You download them from the app store on your
phone. They’ve basically reverse
engineered the watch face API. They
don’t do any particular harm, I don’t think, but they’re going to release a
proper version of the API soon. But that
one’s open source, the Matrix one.
Gina: Oh, cool. That’s cool. I look forward to Dribble being filled with
watch faces.
Leo: I’m waiting for the Moto
360. I mean, I want a round one.
Jeff: Oh, yeah. We all do.
Leo: Yeah. Really make a big difference.
Jeff: Then we’re going to see
can Apple top this, and it’s topable, but we’ll see
what they do.
Leo: I don’t know. I don’t know. There are those, and I think everybody on Mac Break Weekly I think is in
the category believers who think that Apple will do what they did with the
iPod, the iPhone, the iPad, reinvent the category. And then I’m in the other camp that I feel
like I don’t know if Apple’s got the mojo anymore, and I don’t know if this is reinventable. I hope
I’m proven wrong. I’d love to have
something that—I mean, this is right now just kind of nice. It’s nice.
Jeff: Fun. It’s nice. It’s nice.
Leo: It’s nice.
Gina: Apple’s got an aesthetic
and a sense of style that no other company has, and there’s aesthetics and
style involved here.
Leo: Yeah, that’s true.
Gina: So I mean, Apple can
change this from a like this is pretty cool to I absolutely must have that
because it’s part of my identity and it’s a statement
about who I am. It’s a fashion
statement.
Leo: I think Apple’s will
certainly be more jewelry-like.
Gina: Mm-hmm.
Jeff: Gina, have you lusted
after an Apple product in the last year and a half?
Gina: No. I mean, I’m sitting here at my Mac, and my
iPhone, my development iPhone is the old 4s. I’ve definitely looked at the newer iPhones. I guess the 5s now.
Leo: You develop on a
4s. Wow.
Gina: I do. I just never bought a new whatever
(laughter). And I have an iPad 2, and
there were times when I thought I should probably upgrade, but there are such
incremental upgrades now.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: It’s never been like I
have to have this. Not in a long
time. I think the iPad maybe was the
last time.
Jeff: On Windows Weekly when
you were complaining about your Mac, so I was on the Mac that I use for the
show, and I was going into the chatroom to make fun of you and tell you to get
a Chromebook.
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: But of course, my Mac
crashed (laughter).
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: Macs are perfectly fine,
and I can do things on the Mac that I can’t do on the Chromebook. But I still have my Pixel and I was using it
this morning.
Jeff: Ooo.
Leo: I like my Pixel. I think a Chromebook is a tool for a very specific situation. I don’t think it’s a universally appropriate computer. All right. We’re going to get ready for our rants.
Gina: Oh, yeah.
Jeff: Just one, just one, but
it’s a topic we’ve done often.
Kevin: Well, I may have one
too, but okay, you go first.
Leo: Oh. It’s rant time. Let’s get ready to rant. Oh, I’ll get sued if I say that.
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: I’m thinking of
replacing a number with the techno panic of the week.
Leo: Let me take a break, and
then we’ll get our rants of the week.
Jeff: Oh, sorry. I didn’t know that was a tease.
Leo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s all
right. That’s all right. I didn’t telegraph it.
Jeff: Yeah, yeah. No.
Leo: You know, in just a
moment, we’ll have Jeff Jarvis’ rant of the week.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: But first, this word
from Full Sail University. Full Sail
offers both online and campus degree programs giving your real-world experience
in areas that I think people are really interested in. social media
marketing but also search engine optimization, Web metrics analytics, online
consumer behavior. That’s their
marketing degree. They have an online
master’s degree for people who want to keep up with modern marketing
skills. But they also have programs on
entertainment, media, technology. Full Sail University’s online and campus
degree programs center on real-world education and experience with industry
technology and workflow. Through their
innovative curriculum, you’ll get your master’s degree in a year. That’s nice. They have a LaunchBox program. That’s the Project LaunchBox that gives you a MacBook Pro preloaded with Apple’s complete line of creative
software tools, as well as degree-specific sets of pro level applications. That’s kind of nice. In addition to Internet marketing, Full Sail
offers a variety of master’s degrees in related fields. Business
intelligence. You know, if you
knew business intelligence, big data, you would be in big demand these
days. This is an area that’s just about
to explode. Innovation,
entrepreneurship. Henry should do
that. Henry wants to become an
entrepreneur. And new
media journalism. Sorry Jeff. To learn more about Full Sail’s master
program and internet marketing or any of their related programs, go to
FullSail.edu/twig. FullSail.edu/twig, and we thank them so much for their support of This week in Google. The right to be forgotten. The jury’s still out on whether this is—I
mean, at first, I completely dismissed it as stupid.
Jeff: Oh, no Leo.
Gina: Oh, boy.
Leo: Just winding you up,
Jeff.
Jeff: Oh, no. Do you know what you are? You’re a human Slate Magazine.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: But now that I think
about it, don’t you think some people should be—there needs to be some
mechanism for people to kind of—
Jeff: Well, like the guy who’s
based in the Netherlands who wanted the Wall Street to take out the fact that
it did a feature on a tantric workshop that he’d attended 20 years ago.
Leo: Well, that’s kind of
legitimate.
Jeff: No, it’s not. It was in the Wall Street Journal.
Leo: All right.
Jeff: By the way, my theory
is, he knew the Sinatra effect would come into effect.
Leo: He wanted people to
know.
Jeff: So actually, eh wants
ladies to know I’m certified in tantric.
Leo: He’s a tantric
expert. Hey ladies. Hey ladies (laughter).
Jeff: So the EU is now going
farther. They’ve invited in Google,
Bing, and Yahoo are going to come in to have a
discussion about this. And according to
the Wall Street Journal, two even more abhorrent things are happening with
this. One is that EU regulators are
pressuring Google to stop telling the media properties and others whose links
are taken down that they’ve been taken down. So there’s no opportunity to appeal. The free speech right of these organizations is clearly affected. Obviously, they’re upset that newspapers when
a story is taken down, as in the case of the Wall Street Journal tantric story,
do a story about it because they have something called free speech. They’re allowed to, EU. Get with it. The second problem is the EU regulators are also, according to the
journal, upset that Google is restricting the deletions to the country domains,
the EU country domains, not across Google.com. So here’s the EU, as far as I read that, saying no, we want to erase
things for the whole freakin’ world. Great precedent. Put that in the hands of China and Iran. Aren’t you people thinking? This is about rights that
operate in transactions, and when you go too far to kill the fly, you’re
affecting other rights. This is just
dangerous and stupid and it’s not going to live forever because it’s affecting
media companies and it’s affecting journalism. I said from the beginning it would, and I
just want to say one more time it’s stupid.
Leo: To me, I always focused
on just the impracticability of it. Obviously, it’s stupid, but also it’s impracticable for a lot of
reasons. I mean, they’ve already picked
one, which is that this stuff is global. But also, how is Google to know—I mean, what’s the process. Is Google supposed to set up a tribunal?
Jeff: They have. There’s a whole large committee now to do
this for them.
Leo: That’s ridiculous.
Jeff: They didn’t ask me. And they have paralegals doing it, and now
what’s going to happen too is Bing is just catching up. Bing hasn’t been doing this, so now Bing’s
going to do it too.
Leo: Oh, have they been
required to do it.
Jeff: Oh, yeah. They’ve been required to. Google is doing it first.
Leo: Ahhh.
Jeff: So what you’re going to
see is uneven enforcement of this. So
Google takes this down—you know, Google has rejected some. There was one example in the Journal’s story
of something said to some kind of service company. No, this link may be of interest to people
who are considering using your services. As in ahhh, this guy sucks. There was a whole separate case having
nothing to do with this in France where a blogger wrote about a restaurant,
complained about the restaurant, and was fined something like 4,000 euros, a
fair sizeable amount of money—
Leo: Oh, this is ridiculous.
Jeff: And was fined more, was
held more liable because she was more popular and her file, her posts raised
higher in Google search. So she was
liable for being popular on Google.
Leo: And her post was really
that she didn’t think the service was very good?
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: Admittedly, she was a
little over the top the way she described it (laughter), but she—
Jeff: Welcome to the land of
free speech.
Leo: It’s called
reviews. I mean, imagine if you as a
reviewer for many years were subject to this kind of thing. We don’t like what you said about our movie,
our TV show, so we’re going to have you pull it down and fine you.
Jeff: There are still people,
Leo, who want to jail me for not liking Babylon 5.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: Well, that’s true.
Jeff: (Laughter) Wait, I want to
show you something. I’m going to—
Leo: How do they square this
with that? I mean, how do they square
this with the legitimate reviewers and the press?
Jeff: They don’t. They can’t.
Leo: She was fined
$3,400. She was forced to pull down the
negative review on her blog, which only a few thousand people see. It’s just bizarre.
Gina: Yeah, that’s not okay.
Leo: It seems a societal
issue though, right? What’s really sad
is she now says, “I will never say bad things about a restaurant again. It’s too dangerous.”
Gina: Uggh.
Leo: That’s sad. She’s a French blogger, Caroline Doudet. She wrote,
“The place to avoid in Cap-Ferret Il Giardino (laughter). She talked about the bad service and stuff, and even the guy who owns
the restaurant said, “Yeah, we were having a bad day. I admit it, but this is harming my business.” (Laughter) Yeah, that’s the idea! She has 3,000
followers. A Bardot judge said that’s a
significant number, so we’re going to fine you. You bad person you. How dare you review that poorly?
Jeff: Can’t people see the
implications of these decisions? Can’t
they see the unintended—I mean, it would be generous
to call the unintended consequences. They’re just idiocies, but they have an impact.
Leo: Incidentally, if you go
to the way back machine, you can read the review. She took it down, but it’s still here.
Gina: Now it’s an article of
note (laughter). I mean, now it should
be available because it’s part of this story.
Leo: Right, right.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: But of course, it should
be available either way.
Leo: And I can tell you, if I
ever go to Cap-Ferret, where ever the hell that is, I’m not eating at Il Giardino.
Gina: You’re convinced?
Leo: I’m convinced
(laughter).
Gina: She was silenced, so it
must have been true.
Leo: Must be true.
Gina: (Laughter) It makes it more
true, doesn’t it?
Leo: How do you solve this
though, Jeff? Courts will do these
things.
Jeff: You rule to
principle. This is the problem with
legislating and doing court decisions to technologies. Gee, the Internet’s made this worse. I mean, look at it this way. Would we tolerate, would Europe tolerate the
idea that you’d go into every library and take out the library catalog cards
for books that people don’t want you to find because they didn’t like it? We would never tolerate that, so what makes
the Internet okay to censor but books not?
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: Because we think books
are holy.
Leo: Well, maybe that…
Jeff: Well, the principle
would say, speech is speech no matter what the medium. If you won’t do it in books, don’t do it on
the Internet. Again,
one more time. Europe, of any
place on earth, should see the danger and damage of rewriting history—
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: —and restricting
knowledge.
Leo: Yeah. What WWII? There was no WWII. What are you
talking about? Jeff wrote a eulogy for
Forbes, which is now—
Jeff: Not quite a eulogy. It got sold.
Leo: And you actually talk
about Lewis DVorkin who kind of you said performed a
miracle with Forbes by rescuing the dying brand, but he rescued it by killing
the patient.
Jeff: A bit.
Leo: A bit. Good article. Good blog post.
Jeff: It’s a little media
wonky for this show probably, but—
Leo: Well, I’m a media wonk,
so naturally I’m very interested.
Jeff: The long and the short
of it is that the brand was dying. DVorkin’s a really smart editor and he came in and he used
as a candy for contributors to come in, 1,500 I think contributors. And again, I’m all in favor of being open,
but the quality was not of the high quality that Forbes journalists had
had. And then they also opened it up to
advertisers under what we now see going all over the world in native
advertising it’s so called under what they call brand voice. So when I see a link to Forbes on Twitter, I hesitate three beats. It could be a good journalist. It
could be a good contributor. It could be
a stupid, bad contributor. And it could
be just a really wordy ad for an advertiser. I don’t know which. And that
affects the brand.
Leo: It devalued it.
Jeff: Yeah, it did. And they still managed to get I don’t know
how much money supposedly they valued at 475 million, but they were going to
try to sell the whole thing. They
couldn’t do that. They maintained a lot
of stock. I’m guessing they probably got
less than 200 million cash; 45% or more of that went to Elevation
Partners. So the thing’s still
alive. He rescued it to that extent, but
yeah, I think the baby and the bath water are out the window.
Leo: And I, of course, always
admiring your sagacity and intuition and insight, I like the line where you
say—and I can’t wait to read this white paper you’re writing that we have to
shift to businesses based on known relationships with people as individuals and
as communities rather than as a mass. And that’s what we do at TWIT, and I think you’re absolutely right.
Jeff: Oh, this white paper
will put you to sleep.
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: I’m trying to finish
editing this or do my first run of editing this week, and I have to do it
because this is what I do. You know, at
the university, but no, you don’t want to…
Leo: But no, but this is what
we kind of do instead of mass media—the title of the Medium post is “No Mas
Mass Media,” which I like. But it’s what
we do. We don’t do mass media. I think of us as artisanal media, hand-crafted—
Jeff: Yeah.
Leo: —for an intelligent
audience.
Jeff: I talk about you all the
time. I met the new president of
Guardian U.S. today and I was just telling him about the wonders of TWiG today.
Leo: Well good.
Jeff: I think it’s a great
example of how exactly you can focus on—(a) you can be entrepreneurial at a low
cost, and (b) you focus on communities and understand what the communities want
and keep your ear open to the communities.
Leo: Right. Well, you have to now. You really have to. And Kevin Marks, you said you had something
to rant about.
Kevin: Well, partly because I
was listening to this show last week, and you were talking about the Google+
names thing.
Leo: That’s why you’re on the
show.
Jeff: Right.
Leo: I forgot about
that. So I screwed this up royally.
Kevin: Well, the rant that I
did at Google IO ignite, which you can play if you want, but I can give you a
recap of it instead. It comes down to
the way programmers tend to simplify the world and then get grumpy when the
world doesn’t fit their simplification.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: (Laughter)
Kevin: And Google world names is a huge example of that because it wasn’t ever
you have to have a real name. It was you
have to have a name that our algorithm thinks is a name.
(Audio recording starts to play)
Leo: Oops. I accidentally started playing it, but we’ll
play it later.
Kevin: Play it if you
like. It’s five
minutes.
Leo: That’s one of the
beauties of Ignite Talks.
Kevin: Yes, they don’t take that
long.
Leo: Yeah, I don’t want to
take five minutes up, but we’ll play it at the end of the show.
Kevin: Okay, so the thing you
were saying was you were referring to it as real names and verifying names, and
that was only of the appeals procedure. The point was that if you put up a thing that they thought wasn’t a
name, then they would get into an argument with you over whether that was
really your real name or not. Then you’d
have to send government documents to Google and things like that. Whereas, what they had said consistently was
you just have to have something that looks like a name to us because we want
things that look like names because then we’ll have a better community because
people will think the other people are real people. So all it did was incent the spammers to use
American-looking names. So it was
disaster from beginning to end. I’m glad
they finally stopped doing that, and that’s good, but in sort of the
presumption that it ever did anything to make a better conversation, I think is
wholly unproven.
Leo: Okay.
Gina: I think that’s fair.
Leo: Yeah. That’s fair. And I understand why they felt it would help, right?
Kevin: But Google, they’re
supposed to measure these things.
Leo: Well, maybe that’s what
happened. Maybe they—
Kevin: Well, yeah, but for
three years?
Leo: Yeah, that’s a long
time.
Kevin: That was internal—when I
started ranting about it on Twitter, I got stuff from
people who were at Google at the time saying, “Well, the best thing is we don’t
have to argue about it internally anymore.
Leo: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: Well, demonstratively it
didn’t do what—because as you pointed out, spammers just made up real-looking
names. That’s all.
Kevin: Yeah.
Leo: So really the policy
wasn’t to have real names. The policy
was to have real-looking names. That’s
not a very good policy.
Kevin: Yes.
Leo: (Laughter)
Kevin: Yes.
Leo: That’s doomed to
failure.
Kevin: Right. And the point is you need to look at
behavior. If you’ve got a chatroom here
that anyone could be any name they like and half of them are like web XYZed, but they get kicked out if the do something dubious.
Leo: Yeah, we base it on
behavior. Right.
Kevin: Yeah. And the problem with that is that actually
involves—
Leo: It takes work. Yeah.
Kevin: And that’s why Google is
wary of it because they didn’t like doing things that require humans.
Leo: We can do it only
because we have a fabulous crew of volunteers, as many as 15 or 20 volunteers,
who spend a lot of time in the chat. And
what we learned of course is that you have to make it on behavior because bad
behavior whether it’s in a real name or not just degrades the place to the
point where nobody wants to be there.
Jeff: Yeah. I’ve long said that as long as I can name
a-holes by name, ergo name doesn’t stop you from being an a-hole.
Leo: Right. It’s time I think. Thank you, Kevin, for correcting that.
Kevin: That’s okay.
Leo: It’s time I think to
talk about our tip tool number of the week. Kevin, I’ll let you do the honors because you don’t have an official
role in all of this. If you’d like to
give us something you[‘re excited about. Every time you’ve done this, by the way, it’s
been something addictive that I’m mad about.
Kevin: The link I’ve picked
today is just a silly thing that I thought was wonderful and I think you’d like
to see, so just look at my first link.
Leo: Perfect for Geeks. This is Ali Spanola who discovered that she needs to be wearing one of these at all times. This is some sort of steady cam for your
beer.
Kevin: It’s a steady cam, but
it’s a steady cam for beer. So you can
dance and your beer will stay stable.
Leo: (Laughter)
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Kevin: Because you were talking
about beer as we were waiting for the show to get started.
Leo: Yes.
Kevin: I thought this was
something you could use.
Leo: Is this fake?
Gina: Yeah, how does this
work? How does this work?
Kevin: This is how steady cams
do work. They isolate the movement—
Leo: Gyroscopes, it’s all
with gyroscopes.
Gina: Okay.
Jeff: I don’t know,
Kevin. I don’t know, Kevin.
Kevin: (Laughter)
Jeff: I’m not buying it.
Leo: I think if they were to
make this, I think it would be very, very popular.
Kevin: I’ve seen steady cams
that do do that, but that may well be fake.
Leo: Not that well.
Gina: Yeah, that looks pretty photoshoped.
Kevin: Well, he’s being careful
not to go too near it.
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: Yeah (laughter).
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: He’s kind of
mesmerizing. He’s like the dancing
baby.
Jeff: Stop the poor man. He’s doing this forever.
Leo: I can’t stop watching.
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: That’s actually a really
question I’ve been meaning to ask. When
you stop watching an animated gif, do they stop moving?
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: Does the tree fall in
the forest? Does the light stay on in
the refrigerator?
Leo:
I mean, I’m really puzzled. Like is there a universe of animated cat gifs
right now—
Gina: That
are just frozen?
Leo: —doing stuff?
Gina: Or do they all just
go...?
Leo: Or do they just all say,
“Well, have a smoke”?
Jeff: (Laughter)
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: What happens to the
animated gif when no one’s watching?
Gina: (Laughter) Gif like no one’s
watching.
Leo: Just call me Bishop Leo. Only Kevin will get that joke, and it’s a
very long way to go to get it.
Kevin: Yes.
Leo: You got it though didn’t
you? Took him a little
while. Kevin’s Ignite talk is at
the official Google developers blog or YouTube
channel. And is it all of it on here or
no, just your talk? Oh, no, you’re in a
portion of it. So you’re 46:26 in.
Kevin: I put the link with my
timestamp in.
Leo: Aren’t you a smart man?
Kevin: Yes.
Leo: I did an ignite talk
once, and I love it.
Kevin: That’s the other thing I
want to actually recommend to people is that Ignite Talks are both fun to watch
and fun to do. And they’re fun to watch
because you get ten of them. They’re
five minutes long, so even if one’s bad you can just zone out for a bit. They usually come with beer and audience
participation. But they’re actually fun
to do, so the patent is you get 20 slides that also advance every 15 seconds.
Leo: Period. That’s it.
Kevin: So this means that you
have to practice. You can’t just sit
there and waffle and go on for an hour. You have to make sure what you say will fit with it, which means that
the talks better too. But then when
you’re actually doing one, you can never lose your place for more than 15
seconds because the next slide will come up.
Leo: (Laughter) So it can be
comedic. It’s kind of like a slam.
Kevin: And then it comes back
in later. Brady Forrest runs these all
over the place. They’re often at
conferences.
Leo: I think they were
invented by O’Reilly weren’t they?
Gina: Yes.
Kevin: Brady Forrest runs it
for O’Reilly. There was a thing called PechaKucha, which was the same idea—
Leo: Right.
Kevin: —but with slightly
different timing.
Jeff: Which by the way is not
pronounced PechaKucha, but I cannot pronounce how
it’s supposed to be pronounced.
Kevin: (Laughter)
Jeff: If you go look up the
audio, there’s an audio pronouncer.
Leo: It’s because it was a
Japanese word.
Jeff: No, it’s something
else. It’s like Indonesian or something.
Leo: Finnish.
Jeff: Finnish?
Kevin: Finnish, okay.
Leo: It says it was devised
in Tokyo in February 2003, but maybe it’s a Finnish name. twenty images in 20
seconds.
Gina: What?
Kevin: So 20 slides for 20
seconds each.
Leo: Oh, oh. Okay. By 20 seconds.
Kevin: it’s 20 slides in 15 seconds. It makes it
shorter.
Leo: I like Ignite better.
Kevin: It is a Japanese term,
apparently.
Jeff: If you search on PechaKucha announcer, the first YouTube video.
Leo: Pe-cha-Ku-cha
(assorted distorted pronunciations).
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: P-e-c-h-a-K-u-c-h-a. I’ll
leave as an exercise for the viewer. Thank you very much.
Jeff: Yeah (laughter).
Kevin: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter) I don’t know why it
struck me as so funny, but you don’t even know.
Leo: (Unintelligible sounds) You have to watch
our video of what is it called? Pronunciation Book? The YouTube channel. Have you seen it?
Kevin: Yes, the one that just
pronounced everything wrong, yes.
Leo: They pronounce
everything wrong.
Chad: Pronunciation Guide.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Leo: Pronunciation
guide. YouTube.com/pronunciation
guide. You can’t stop laughing.
Chad: We have I think a
10-minute video that I have shown everyone in the office and every single time
I show it to them, everyone busts out laughing.
Leo: One of them’s real. So
somebody did it real for real and then somebody said, “That’s bad.” Then they did a fake one. I think it’s Pronunciation Manual? I wonder if they have PechaKucha? I don’t know.
Video: Propolio, prohilakitac. Propolio. Canolioneolio. Canolio? Nonolio.
Leo: I wonder if PechaKucha’s on here.
Video: Assthma. Asthhma. Assthhhma. Vagena. Vangena.
Leo: Whoever did this was
truly inspired (laughter). Gina, your tip of the week.
Gina: Actually, before I do my
tip, I just got an e-mail. The subject line from Amazon, “Congrats. Here’s a list of your apps that have been
approved for the Fire Phone.”
Leo: Yea!!
Jeff: Yea!!
Gina: Yes. My app got approved for the Fire Phone, and I
guess the Fire Phone’s coming out because you’ve got a shipping notification,
and I’ve got an app approval notification.
Leo: Yep.
Gina: So we’ll seeing the Fire Phone soon.
Leo: I will get mine
tomorrow. They announced it’s going to
come a day early.
Gina: Nice.
Leo: And I’ll be reviewing it
both on the radio show this weekend. I’ll show it on TWiT and then I’ll do a full review
on Before You Buy on Tuesday.
Jeff: Did you see Pogue has
now hit the depths of desperation, the absolute depths of desperation. You’ve got to watch this Pogue thing.
Leo: Well, now everybody as
usual with a new phone, Walt Mossberg got it; the Verge got it; Gizmodo got
it. Did Pogue get one?
Jeff: Oh, where is it?
Leo: It’s on his tech channel
I’m sure. David Pogue,
no longer with the New York Times. Maybe he doesn’t get these things. A spark of potential? Is it that one?
Jeff: He plays and old
professor or something (laughter).
Leo: David really is a
character.
Jeff: Oh, it’s really just—
Leo: (Laughter) This is the
ad. We’re going to have to skip the ad,
but…
Jeff: —desperate thing you’ve
ever seen. Jay Rosen tweeted—maybe
somebody can find it.
Chad: If you mute your video,
I can play it.
Leo: Okay, go ahead.
Video: In the touchscreen phone
era, gestures have taken on a new meaning.
Leo: This is not it.
Chad: No? This is not it?
Jeff: No, this is beyond,
beyond, beyond belief how awful it is.
Leo: You know, I got a review unit too, by the way, on the list. The box came. I was so excited. I opened it on
Saturday. It was very exciting. A UPS box from AT&T
Dallas. Inside, I didn’t know
what to expect because I didn’t’ know what was going to come. They didn’t tell me ahead of time. I open it up. “Oh, there’s a Fire Phone inside.” I open it up, there was no phone in the box.
Jeff: What?
Gina: What?
Leo: It was an empty box.
Kevin: (Laughter)
Leo: We contacted the people
(laughter), the PR company. They said, “What? No, we sent you a phone. UPS must have stolen it.” I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I looked at it, and it was nicely
sealed. Anyway, we sent it all back to
them and said, “You figure it out.” There was no phone in here. Fortunately, I videoed the opening of it so that I have proof that I did
not, no sleight of hand—
Gina: Oh, you did an
unboxing. That’s smart, yeah (laughter).
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: (Laughter) Okay, all
right. All right, all right, all right.
Leo: Here it is. I got the link here in the chatroom. Thank you Scooter X.
Jeff: It’s a smartwatch. I’m
sorry. It’s a smartwatch.
Leo: Oh, smartwatch. This is not it.
Jeff: Smartwatch OS.
Leo: That was the Walt
Mossberg review of the Fire Phone. I
would pretty much agree with him. He
thought it was nothing to get excited about. All right. Keep going, Gina. What else?
Gina: Yeah, let me do my tip.
Leo: Yeah.
Gina: I realized that we
haven’t talked a lot about Bitcoin here on this show.
Leo: We have not.
Gina: I’m not sure why. I’m sort of fascinated by Bitcoin mostly
because of the technology versus the sort of gold-digging community. I feel like there are the technologists and
the gold diggers. I’m more on the
technology side of it (laughter) because it is a fascinating technology. But Google now support Bitcoin conversions
from the search box. I’m not sure if you
covered this in last week’s show when I wasn’t here, but you can go to the
Google search box. Probably already know
you can do currency conversion for all different kinds of currency. So you can say, “Ten U.S. dollars in euro,”
and it’ll tell you how many euros. Well,
now you can do ten USD to BTC and it—
Leo: So BTC is the
abbreviation for Bitcoin.
Gina: BTC is for Bitcoin,
yes. So you can see how much Bitcoin
converts to U.S. dollars.
Leo: And a graph of how
you’re losing money in Bitcoin.
Gina: And a graph of how
you’re losing money in Bitcoin (laughter).
Leo: That’s actually visa versa. How
you’re gaining money now, yeah.
Gina: How you’re gaining. It’s how you’re gaining.
Leo: One Bitcoin $620. It’s kind of stabilized around that number
for a while.
Gina: it’s kind of stabilized
about 600, yeah. This is courtesy of Coinbase, which is a pretty good Bitcoin wallet.
Leo: That’s the one I use, I
think. I can’t remember.
Kevin: But they don’t translate Dogecoin.
Leo: Nobody translates Dogecoin. That’s why
we use Dogecoin. We don’t want to be part of the corporate oligarchical structure.
Gina: Once Google started doing
this, I tried to add BTC to my stocks on Google Now—
Leo: Ohh.
Gina: —and it was an option,
but it just never shows up, so I can in my stock settings and put BTC. I mean, it’s not a stock, right? It’s a virtual currency, but it’s kind of
interesting to see Google—it feels like a moment of mainstreaminess with Bitcoin.
Leo: Yeah.
Kevin: The
what do you call them? The twins.
Leo: Oh, the Winklevoss. The Winklevoss twins.
Kevin: Are launching an
exchange rate Bitcoin fund whose symbol will be coin.
Leo: C-o-i-n
really on...?
Kevin: Yes, so you can buy
Bitcoin over the counter from E*TRADE or whatever.
Leo: Oh, Lord.
Gina: From E*TRADE or
whatever? Mm-hmm.
Leo: Yeah.
Kevin: So in the same way
you’ve got dollar tracking ones, there will be a Bitcoin tracking on and they’ve
been going through the regulatory nonsense to do that.
Leo: If anybody’s going to
make money in Bitcoin, it will be the Winklevoss twins. Jeff, you have a number?
Jeff: Yeah, I want to mention
this first that the—God bless you, America—1,067,779 people sent comments to
the FCC about net neutrality. And if you
want to feel a little bad about democracy, that’s less than the 1.4 million
that went to the FCC over Janet Jackson’s nipple, but let’s remember that was
mainly about angry bots sending the message, so…
Leo: Oh, really? Is that true that the wardrobe malfunction at
the Super Bowl, the complaints were coming from bots?
Jeff: Well, in essence Parents
Television Council.
Leo: Yeah, they were people,
but they were people without a will of their own.
Jeff: All right, so this week,
I give you a choice, Leo.
Leo: Okay.
Jeff: The ten questions that
are now banned from Google interviews because they were too stupid or 15 top
Eric Schmidtisms.
Leo: Oo,
God. Those are both great! How can I pick? Can you do one from each?
Jeff: Uh, why don’t you go to
the Schmidtisms and pick?
Leo: You’re going to put this
on me, huh?
Jeff: Well, there’s some
sympathy here. A lot of what he says
he’s right about and it’s wrong and he said to me once, “It’s death by Twitter. It’s out of
context.” Nonetheless, they’re pretty
funny.
Leo: I don’t know. I think...
Jeff: Some of them are very
right.
Leo: I complain so much about
crappy CEO interviews that I really should support this.
Jeff: I do too. There’s a few…
Leo: Here’s a guy who speaks
his mind, however crazy it is. One day,
we had a conversation where we figured out we could just try and predict the
stock market. And then we decided it was
illegal, so we stopped doing that.
Jeff: (Laughter)
Gina: (Laughter)
Leo: Yeah, I really like
that. The pictures help.
Jeff: Yeah, they do.
Leo: Google’s staggering
collection of personal info. Would you
prefer someone else? Is there a
government you would prefer to be in charge of this? Hmm?
Gina: (Laughter)
Jeff: Which I actually agree
with.
Leo: On getting caught on
Google Street View. “With Street View,
we drive by exactly once, so you can just move.” You see us coming. Get out of the way. On chance. “Serendipity can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.” (Laughter) What does that even mean? Those
are the Schmidtisms. And let’s just try—give me one interview question banned from Google
interviews.
Jeff: Oh, okay. Go ahead and pick your way through.
Leo: Oh, it’s a slide
show. Round manhole covers. Because everybody knows why
manhole covers are round. To look like the next thermostat.
Jeff: Piano tuners.
Leo: Piano tuners. How many piano tuners are there in the world?
Jeff: Well, the answer….
Leo: Yeah?
Jeff: We’d answer however many the market dictates. If pianos need tuning once a week and it takes an hour to tune a piano
and a piano tuner works eight hours a day for five days a week, 40 pianos need
tuning each week. We’d answer one for
every 40 pianos.
Leo: And then you’re supposed
to show that work and then show maybe some calculations about roughly how many
pianos there might be. It doesn’t matter
if you get the answer right on these. People don’t do these anymore, do they? These interview—
Jeff: They don’t do this
anymore.
Leo: I think it’s deprecated.
Kevin: These are the banned
ones. That was the point. But no, just because—
Jeff: That was the bad ones.
Leo: Well, what’s a good one,
Kevin Marks? If you were going to hire
me tomorrow for British Telecom, what would you like to know?
Kevin: (Laughter) Well, the thing is
that these brainteaser things were very popular.
Leo: Yes.
Kevin: But they don’t actually
tell you anything useful because they just tell you whether you’ve seen that
kind of question before. It’s like any
of these assessment things.
Leo: Yeah. They’re too well known now.
Kevin: My son’s teaching SAT
prep this week and he’s helping students get their SAT scores up a lot, which
you’re not supposed to do in theory. It’s supposed to be an objective assessment, but actually, if you sit
down and do ten tests in a week—
Leo: Apparently, you
can. You can.
Kevin: —and look at what you
got wrong, you can get better at this stuff.
Leo: Yeah, yeah.
Kevin: And it’s not any of
these things. Many of these assessment
things don’t actually make sense. There
was a really good article on model view culture, which I’ll stick in the chat,
about how we do engineering recruitment and how it ends up being an “are you
like me” question—
Leo: Yeah.
Jeff: (Laughter) Yeah.
Leo: Isn’t that really the
truth?
Kevin: —rather than a is this useful. It
referred to Joel Spolsky’s “Guerilla guide to
Interviewing,” which Joel then took off the Internet because he was ashamed of
the old version of it.
Gina: Yeah.
Kevin: But the original version
of that, of his guide, is very much the sort of gleefully saying the unwashed
masses are stupid and I need to find the bright ones. And the bright ones will understand these
things that I’m saying to them. And
literally it was the Chicago question and it’s those kinds of things. And what it comes down to is are you—the
other thing he said in the original piece was pick something that they say that
you know is true and say, “Well, that can’t be true,” and get them to defend
it. So basically, troll them in the
interview to see how they respond to it, which is—
Leo: Why troll your
interviewees? Let’s just have a civil
conversation.
Gina: Let’s put someone in a
terrible power relationship and then threaten them.
Kevin: You’re selecting people
in crappy chatrooms. So
sorry. Go ahead, Gina.
Gina: No, no. Let’s put someone who’s totally not in a
power position and someone who’s disempowered.
Leo: Right. It’s a power trip.
Gina: And then have the person
in power say, “You’re wrong” and then see how the disempowered person
reacts.
Leo: Ha, ha, ha.
Gina: It’s a ridiculous
thing. You know, I haven’t done a
developer and engineer interview in years and years because I’ve been lucky
enough to freelance and start my own business and all that, but I really want
to be in one of these interviews where they ask—what was it in the internship? If you
were shrunk down a half an inch and stuck at the bottom on a blender, how would
you get out?
Leo: I love that one
actually.
Gina: Because I would like to
just look at the interviewer in the face and be like—
Leo: What’s wrong with you?
Gina: —“Is this the question
that you’re deciding whether or not to hire me? Because if this the question, then this is not
the right place for me to work” and get up and walk out. Because it’s true. It’s just so indicative of stupidity. I mean, it’s fun to
look at this article now, what questions have been banned. But it’s so crazy that Google fell into this
trap at any time.
Leo: You know what? It’s very hard to hire people.
Jeff: Yeah.
Gina: It’s extremely
difficult. It’s extremely difficult.
Leo: Yeah, it’s true.
Kevin: Getting people to
actually write some code can be a good thing. That’s not necessarily a bad idea. Getting them to do it on a whiteboard? May not be ideal.
Leo: Yeah, that’s Australia,
yeah.
Kevin: And Google itself has
backed away from this. When I was
interviewing for Google, there was—of banned questions. There was also a sort of poll of these are
fairly good questions. What do you
think? And then tell a discussion board
to try and make them better. But it was
still very hard to not get people to play gotcha when they’re interviewing.
Leo: I’ve got to wrap this up
because this is the party for the third anniversary of the Brick House, and there’s a lot of people gathering.
Jeff: Ohh.
Kevin: Ohh.
Leo: It was three years ago
tomorrow, but we’re not going to be here tomorrow, so three years ago tomorrow
that we opened the Brick House for the first time, July 24, 2011.
Gina: Three years. Crazy.
Leo: I know. Isn’t that hard to believe. We had a big parade and everything.
Gina: How did that happen?
Leo: So we’ve got pizza. Thank you and (laughter) we’ve got a pretty
good audience, so thank you all for being here. We’re going to celebrate in just a bit. Coming up, Tech News Tonight. I’ve got to end though with David Pogue’s
review of wearable watches. I think this
is the one.
Jeff: This is the depth, yes.
Leo: Yale Online University
A.D. 2052.
David Pogue: Welcome back,
students. In this virtual class, we
examine the desperately primitive early efforts of your ancient ancestors to
develop technologies for the—
Leo: What is he wearing? A sleep mask?
David Pogue: Learning about
these crude devices is useful for context. Without knowing where we’ve been, how can we know where we’re
going? In previous virtual meetings,
we’ve looked at the UNIVAC I, one of the earliest computers; the Apple 2
showing the computer shrinking to desktop size; and of course, the—
Leo: All right, I can’t bear
this. We’ll leave this as an exercise—
Jeff: It’s just desperate.
Leo: —for the viewer. (Laughter) Thank you very much everybody. Kevin Marks, really appreciate it. Anything you want to plug, Kevin, before we go?
Kevin: Just the usual
indiewebcamp.com and you set up your own website. There’s a community of people to help you do
that.
Leo: I really want to do this
thing.
Kevin: Known thing, yeah.
Leo: Known. He e-mailed me and I’m just waiting. I guess they want to get it off of whatever
weird database they were—
Kevin: They’re getting to the
point where they can do hosted staff.
Leo: Okay.
Kevin: But he’s based that side
of the bridge as well, so you should just get Ben to drop by some time. That would be fun.
Leo: I will. We’ll talk to Ben. Thank you, Kevin. Appreciate it. Jeff Jarvis at the City
University of New York. He blogs
at BuzzMachine, author of “Public Parts.” Great to see you once
again.
Jeff: Always good to see you.
Leo: You’re not so pink
today. You look good. Gina Trapani, before the
candles burn down (laughter). Founding editor of Lifehacker, you’ll find her
now at thinkup.com. Get your think
up. It’s so awesome! Thank you everybody.
Gina: Free trial.
Leo: Free trial?
Gina: Yes,
sign in. If you have a Twitter or
Facebook account, full free trial.
Jeff: Oh, yea.
Gina: Two weeks, no credit card
required. Just try it out. Thinkup.com. Just sign in.
Leo: We started this show
three or four days ago, but (laughter) we’re going to wrap it up now. We do it normally 1 p.m. Pacific, 4 p.m. Eastern
Time on Wednesdays. Thank you for
joining us, and we will see you next time on This Week in Google!
Gina: Mmm. Look at that cake.
Leo: Thank you
everybody. Happy third anniversary Brick
House!