This Week in Tech 531

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech! Georgia Dow is here. Harry McCracken is here. Robert Scoble is here. We've got lots to talk about, including the big Microsoft event, what happened with last pass (that's not so good), and a little bit of review and conversation about the new Steve Jobs movie. It's all coming up next on TWiT.

NETCASTS YOU LOVE FROM PEOPLE YOU TRUST, THIS IS TWIT! Bandwidth for This Week in Tech is provided by CacheFly at cachefly.com. 

Leo: This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, episode 530, recorded Sunday, October 11, 2015. 

I Hate Unicorns

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It's time for TWiT: This Week in Tech, the show where we cover the latest tech news with a very smart panel of people starting with Robert Scoble. The Scobleizer joining us from half moon bay, he is of course at rackspace.com and spends more time with startup folks. You got a really good interview with the guy who does that weird new camera. We're going to ask about that.

Robert Scoble: Yeah. 

Leo: Everybody is curious about that. It's got a bunch of lenses; it simulates DSLR with a bunch of camera phone lenses. 50 mega pixels. We'll talk about that. Also here, Harry McCracken. I still call you the Technologizer from fastcompany.com. Great to see you.

Harry McCracken: I always enjoy hearing that. 

Leo: You'll always be the Technologizer to me. How romantic is that? Also with us from beautiful Canada, from Montreal, it's Georgia Dow of iMore.com. Great to see you again, Georgia.

Georgia Dow: Thank you for having me. 

Leo: I see you're VB8 has joined you on the set.

Georgia: It gets lonely.

Leo: I forgot to cancel mine. I ordered this version when it came out, and it's coming this week. I've played with it enough now that I don't really care if I get one.

Georgia: You're done. 

Leo: I'm done with it already. I forgot to cancel it. It's not cheap! It's $150!

Georgia: It's a really expensive toy. 

Leo: I guess I'll put it in patrol mode and let it wander the studio. 

Georgia: Until someone's pet eats it. 

Leo: Yeah. So, golly. I don't know where to start. There's stuff that's easy to talk about and easy to understand and then there's stuff that's hard to talk about and really hard to understand. I suppose it's our duty to cover both. That's our duty here at TWiT. I don't know if I want to start. I'll start with a more accessible one. Then we'll talk about Google's amped because that's not easy to talk about. What do you got there? He's got the camera!

Robert: There it is. 

Leo: Oh. It's a picture of the camera. You fooled us. Now he had a non-working model, right? Or did he have a working model?

Robert: He had a working model inside, but they were using it. The CEO brought one out to show me. 

Leo: We can't really judge this yet, because the only pictures we've seen of this are ones on their website. 

Robert: He showed me the full res, and they look good, but I need to go and shoot with it against a five d mark 3 and see if it really stands up to that kind of comparison. I have a feeling the first one probably won't, but it will get close enough for most people to say that's good enough for me. Let's go. Where he was really going with this is the camera industry needs disruption. The camera industry, most of the camera industry is being done away by this thing. My iPhone.

Leo: I have to say, the new iPhone has a pretty good camera. 

Robert: It's an amazing camera. The video on it, the steady cam, the pictures are good enough, and good enough for most people is putting a picture on Instagram. 

Leo: So this camera is from light.co and if you go to the website you can see the video of it. It's the size of a camera phone, but that's not a phone. That's the whole thing. 

Harry: It's quite a bit bigger than a camera phone. It's the size of a VHS tape.

Leo: And the advantage is I don't have to bring lenses with me and the camera is lighter than a DSLR or what?

Robert: Right. You might correct me on the number of lenses; I think there are 13 lenses and 13 sensors. Some of which are photo sensors some of which are wide angle sensors, and then it joins images together programmatically as you shoot them to make these sort of zoomable photographs where you can zoom in and out at will in a way that you can't on an iPhone with very high resolution. 

Leo: Zoom is the big thing missing from camera phones, frankly.

Harry: It's almost the only thing missing at this point.

Leo: Yeah, at this point the quality of the image is good, video is excellent, but you just have one focal length.

Harry: You can't zoom and your ability to crop is somewhat limited. This seems less like it's trying to be a step up from a camera phone and more like it's trying to cram the stuff that people like about SLRs and mirrorless cameras into a smaller pack edge. It sounds like this first one is sort of... it's like version 1.0. The idea is that over time, they'll be able to cram it into a smaller and smaller package. 

Leo: There's 16 cameras in it, that's why it's called the LC, but only ten fire at the same time. 

Harry: They're all aimed in different directions.

Leo: If you watch Robert's video and you look at the way it's got little mirrors, it's a crazy idea. I'm not sure that I agree with you... certainly the camera industry is stodgy and companies like Nikon and Canon have really been slow to adopt modern technologies. But it's not like things aren't happening. The lightro, remember the Pho Veon processor? Both of these...

Robert: But these aren't coming from Nikon or Canon. 

Leo: No, and I agree. I think it's probably the case that Nikon and Canon are not going to be the innovators and what we are really seeing is the birth of computational photography. 

Harry: This thing what's most interesting is not the hardware, it's the computer science and the fact that they're taking all these images and crunching them together and simulating stuff like optical zoom in a way that nobody else has done before.

Leo: The images look very nice. 

Robert: That's how they're getting a decent image quality, right? They're taking low quality cell phone cameras. The sensors are coming along because of the cell phone industry, but they're taking 16 of those and joining them together and getting rid of some of the defects that you'll notice on a single one of those sensors. 

Leo: Again, computational. 

Robert: It's a pretty crazy industry. I was just in the MIT media lab and they have a whole group dealing with computational photography. I think we're seeing the start of a new kind of camera. This gives us a little taste of the future. It's funny. I used to work in a camera store back in the mid 80s. 

Leo: I forgot, that's right. 

Robert: I was one of the first people to sell an auto focus and an ultra maxim SLR and I remember the pros would come in and say, "That's a piece of sh**, I'm never buying one, I'll never use auto focus" I was like... dude. 

Leo: They saw the price. $1,699!

Robert: 1299 right now. 

Leo: Summer of next year, we're way off. 

Robert: Unless you got 200 dollars burning a hole in your pocket, which most of us don't. 

Leo: For 1299, you can get a very nice Sony A7 Body with a decent lens and get a great image. Admittedly, there may be some secret sauce here, zooming, that might make this better. We'll let Robert buy one next summer. 

Robert: They're giving out several to the pros. We'll see what Karen Hutton or Thomas Hawk says about it after they've had it for a couple weeks. They're going to be the ones who judge whether this comes out to the standard of an SLR. Otherwise, it's just comparison to an iPhone. Most people don't care about their photography that much. They're taking selfies or whatever. An Android phone does just fine for that. This is going after the higher end of the market and is really trying to show a new area of photography where it'll eat away at the DSLR market. I don't know yet that it will do that at first, but if you see this as the starting point of a new kind of camera, in five or ten years I can certainly see this thing disrupting SLRs and the bigger camera companies in a huge way because the software is going to get better, the image sensors are going to get better. You're right. This computational photography is something that will not stop and it will keep coming at us.

Leo: And who knows where the next big thing is going to come from? So it's worth looking at these, even though it's appropriate to be skeptical and take a wait and see attitude. Lots of news. Microsoft had an amazing event on Tuesday, shocking us all, at least shocking me with it's very first laptop. We'll talk about last pass being sold. The new Steve Jobs movie, I just completed an interview we're going to air on the new screensavers next week with its director Danny Boyle. I know you saw, Harry, we'll talk about that because it opens October 23 nationwide. There's a lot to talk about. Georgia Dow is here from imore.com, Harry McCracken from fast company and the Scobleizer, Robert Scoble. We're going to get to more news in just a moment, but first a real quick plug from GoToMeeting from Citrix. I love Citrix GoToMeeting. I know a lot of you do conference calls. Conference calls can be death. Oh my god. They drone on and on, you're sitting there, and you know that half the people doing the conference call are playing video games, the other half are doing draft kings. Nobody is paying any attention at all. That's why you've got to use GoToMeeting, because it's much more engaging. You're going to see not only the screen, but you're going to see the people in your meeting. They're sharing their screens with you; they are also sharing their images in HD quality. It feels like you're actually in a meeting, in a room, face-to-face. It's a great way to present to future customers because you can show them the PowerPoint, but you can also see them, they can see you. You get the body language, and the bonding happens. It's great to keep a team in touch, because nowadays, teams are everywhere. Again, we deal a lot with third party companies doing development and stuff for us. It's so nice to bring them to the same room as us, using GoToMeeting. It works on your iPhone, your Android device, your tablet, your desktop. Everywhere you are, you can even present from your iPad, which is super cool. You can be sitting out in the yard, enjoying the sun, having a meeting. GoToMeeting. I want you to try it today free for 30 days. Visit gotomeeting.com, click the "try it free" button. It will take you just a minute to get going. That's the other thing that's so great at GoToMeeting. The set up, the installation, it's almost instantaneous. That's important, because you don't want your clients and colleagues jumping through hoops to meet with you. You want to make it easy for them. Set up meetings fast, try it free for 30 days. gotomeeting.com. All right. Let's talk about the Steve Jobs movie. I don't want to leave, Georgia, I don't want to leave you and Robert out, but Harry and I saw the movie and the list of things that are completely made up in the movie is longer than the movie itself. Yet, we just talked to Danny Boyle, both Danny Boyle and the author of the movie, Aaron Sorkin really asserted that we're not photographers, we're painters. I asked Danny Boyle right away is this a biopic? He said, "Absolutely not. We're not trying to get the facts of the matter. We're trying to get the spirit of the person." I don't think you could pick anybody harder to figure out than Steve Jobs. Even people who know him well are divided over was he a jerk? Was he a saint? Was he a brilliant marketer? What was he?

Harry: Which is why some of the people who are characters in the movie like the movie, and others said this is completely wrong. 

Leo: The funny thing is Woz was paid $200,000. He was the only paid consultant. Although, I know Sorkin talked to a lot of other people about it. Woz is so mis-represented in the movie--

Harry: It's terrible. Mr. One Note.

Leo: He keeps asking Steve when are you going to acknowledge the Apple 2 team? 

Harry: He's still doing that in 1997 in the movie.

Leo: When are you going to acknowledge the Apple 2 team? Woz himself said, "I only did that once. It wasn't to Steve Jobs. I called Scully, 30 second call, in which I said the Apple 2 team is really unhappy. They're about to leave, you really should give them a pat on the back." That's it! And yet it seems like that's all Wozniak cared about. By the way, the subtext about that, I don't know if that was intentional, is I'm the Apple 2 team, when are you going to acknowledge me? And there is a big showdown between Jobs and Wozniak, which might be a little truer to life in which Wozniak says you keep calling me Ringo, and you say you're John. You're not John. You didn't write these songs, I wrote these songs, I created this, I am not Ringo. Of course Jobs in the movie called him Rain Man. He's insulting, he's patronizing. He talks down to him, and yet they're obviously old friends. How true to life is that?

Harry: I think it's pretty clear that this movie should have been called Aaron Sorkin. He's the defining personality, rather than Steve Jobs. I think there are countless instances where it feels Aaron Sorkiny. You should not say to yourself that probably happened or that accurately represents the dynamics of two people. 

Leo: You make an excellent point. Everything that Aaron Sorkin does is absolutely about Aaron Sorkin. But this more than ever.

Harry: He's up front about that. Another example of that in the movie, John Scully keeps going into the Steve Jobs keynotes many years after they stop talking to each other. In reality, after Scully had Jobs pushed out in 1985, they never spoke again. In the movie, Scully keeps coming to Keynotes and they keep having these father son talks. That's not only inaccurate, that's the opposite of the truth. 

Leo: Although the truth in there is that Scully to this day regrets being portrayed as the man who fired Steve Jobs. That has been the bane of his existence ever since. And that's really in the movie. It's just that... sometimes the movie reflects a real spirit but doesn't reflect the fact at all. The thing that's most upsetting to me, of course we focus a lot as you've already heard, we're not going to spoil the movie since you... It's hard to spoil a movie about a real person, but if focuses on his relationship with Lisa, the daughter he did not for a long time acknowledge. The thing that was hard for me is they never once mention his wife. They never once mention his other children.

Harry: They never mention the fact that Lisa actually lived with him several years before their heartfelt reunion happens in the movie. 

Leo: I actually spent a long weekend with Steve and Lorraine their son who was two, and Lisa in 1994. They were a loving family. Lisa was very much a part of the family and so while I don't have much of an intimate connection to Steve Jobs, the Steve Jobs I saw was not very much like Michael Fastbender. 

Harry: Not at all. Certainly there are glints of the real Steve Jobs in there. The moviemakers are not obligated to show the whole guy. In the movie, the last scene is in 1998, before a lot of Steve Jobs triumphs came, and they're not obligated to tell the whole story, but if you go in there thinking that everything in there is more likely truth than not, you'll be deceived over and over again. 

Leo: There is a character that is true, which is from being a very harsh and difficult person to work with to being very softened by his family, in this case just Lisa, but by his family, and he did in fact, and of course the authors of "Becoming Steve Jobs" point this out, much more mellow. When he returned to Apple, he was a much better manager, much better person, and much more effective as well. You see that in the movie. That's the character's journey in the movie. 

Harry: Part of it is the decision to make it about these three keynotes.

Leo: By the way, you never see the Keynote! It's the moments before the keynote.

Harry: It works great in terms of entertainment and cleverness, but all the things that ever happened to Steve Jobs have to line up to these moments. So he has to get back together with Lisa during a keynote even if in fact it happened years before. 

Leo: You were saying, Robert, that you know somebody who worked very closely with Steve. 

Robert: Andy Gregnon who is actually in the second movie, the Man in the Machine movie, briefly. He worked for him for nine years. Mark Benninghof after the second movie came out...

Leo: The Kutcher movie was awful. 

Robert: Yeah. 

Leo: It didn't even succeed as a movie. At least this succeeds as a movie. It's probably a brilliant movie. Maybe Aaron Sorkin's best. 

Robert: Beninghof's point was that these don't show the magic of Jobs. Why he is Jobs. They show some of his failings and they do a pretty good job of showing that, but they don't show what made Steve Steve. 

Leo: There's no heart in this man, especially in the beginning. The beginning is painful. First scene is very difficult. He's very harsh. It makes you wonder why anybody would continue to work for him. There was more to it than that.

Harry: You're telling me the products might have shown more of the reality if they had showed the pain of creating the Macintosh, for instance.

Robert: Here's an example that Andy told me, and then I heard from other people too. Andy went to AT&T to pitch AT&T on a visual voicemail, and AT&T basically laughed him out of the room. He said, "You're nuts. You have no idea how hard this is. We're not going to be able to do it." So he went back to Steve Jobs and he called it crying to Mommy. Cried to Steve and Steve took care of the problem. When I met the CEO of AT&T I asked his side of the story, he said, "Yeah. Steve came over and I got a five year exclusive deal out of Steve for that." So we don't see those insights. How is he able to convince people to do something they didn't want to do? That's the key, because he is an asshole. You talk to anybody that worked in the group, although his image is being cleaned up now by people who used to work for him. He was very harsh to work for. He got you to do something you didn't think you could do. When you did that, you created something interesting and new and I don't know that the movies have gotten that yet. 

Leo: I guess the only reason I bring it up is I know that there's a lot of interest in it. We've been watching, reading the trailers like tealeaves, watching with great interest. This is a really interestingly made movie. It's a very interesting script by Aaron Sorkin. Danny Boyle does a great job directing it, but do not go there thinking you're going to see anything that is truthful in terms of what happened or even in terms of how these people actually were. 

Robert: Sorkin's earlier movie about Mark Zuckerberg was completely...

Leo: If you thought that was untruthful, this was far worse. The Social Network, which I think was also a great film, the big lie in it was that Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook to meet girls when in fact he was with the woman he has now married and is having a child with. He was not single even then and was not looking to meet girls.

Harry: Not particularly ostracized from society.

Leo: What you don't get from The Social Network is an insight into who Mark Zuckerberg is. The sad thing is a lot of what we think about Mark Zuckerberg is colored by that movie and I think the friends and family of Steve Jobs are very concerned that Steve's legacy will be colored by this.

Georgia: That is the big problem when you make a movie about someone who is a real person. Already when someone is an icon, we want to either deify or vilify someone that is in that standing. In the end, when we see something on media that's visual, we believe it to be true. It's really difficult to change people's opinions once they've seen a film on that. They just believe it and most of us are rare in that we don't want to spend more effort or time unless we're really a strong fan or opponent to someone so you're just going to accept that on Face value. It does a disservice to the family and friends of someone that cares about someone that's dealing with a movie that is coming out saying things that aren't true. I feel the same way about poor Woz. He's already someone who takes a good deal of slack in the media. 

Leo: I feel bad for Woz because Woz is a sweetheart.

Harry: He's a sweetheart and he's an extraordinarily important person in the history of technology. Neither of these two movies have come within a country mile of explaining why Woz is such an important person. 

Leo: You almost wonder why Woz... Woz never says anything bad about anybody. He was a consultant in this movie, he can't be really happy about how he's portrayed in this movie. he has said publically, for instance, the thing that is the most damaging to both parties is the shouting match that they have before the iMac launch in the auditorium in front of everybody. Woz says, "I wasn't even working at Apple at the time." 

Harry: He was long gone.

Leo: I wasn't there. This didn't really happen. Yet he was reluctant to say anything bad about the movie. In fact, he says he likes the movie, which is also unfortunate. I wish the public at large could understand this has nothing to do with reality. Go see this movie because it's a good movie, it's a work of art, but it has nothing to do with reality. The thing is, the reality that we've lived through is so amazing and so dramatic and carries so much importance in it, that I wish somebody would do this justice. They can't. 

Robert: Leo, the drama of this Industry, and it's not just Apple, is it's a nerd playing in a lab building something. 

Leo: It's not interesting.

Robert: I'm walked through lots of R and D labs and lots of places where they make movies. You go through Marvel and meet all the cool nerds who build the movies, and they're typing code into a screen.

Leo: Maybe it can't be done, but I think of things like Stephen Levie's Hackers. I think of Pascal Zachary's Showstoppers, I think of Tracey Kidder as the soul of the new machine. There have been great books that have actually dramatized real life events factually. If you haven't read those three books, read those books. So it is possible... 

Harry: Hackers would be a great movie. 

Leo: I think it would be. I don't know if I would trust Hollywood to make it. Part of what you're seeing is a culture war here. It's true Aaron Sorkin doesn't like technology and geeks and I think Hollywood is a little afraid of the power up north in Silicon Valley and they would very much like to cut these guys down to size and I think a little bit of that is leaking down as well. Anyway. 

Robert: Woz's brilliance is that he was the last person to build an entire computer in his head. A personal computer.

Leo: There's a great story in the Hollywood Reporter about the making of this movie. Somebody is saying why haven't they done a movie about Larry Ellison? Larry Elison's daughter is a film producer. They approached her for money for this movie. She took a look at it and passed and you have to think she was under pressure from Lorraine Powell Jobs and others.

Harry: Who was supposed to play Steve Jobs?

Leo: Christian Bale. Remember she's the number one shareholder in Disney. She wields a lot of power in Hollywood. She did everything she could to kill this film.

Harry: She called Sony. 

Leo: It's a fascinating story. Read the Hollywood Reporter behind the scenes and you'll see how much drama went on with this movie. We know a lot about this because of the leaked emails. They ended up putting it in turn around and then Universal picked it up. Amy Pascal who was the president of Sony Pictures entertainment at the time said it was one of the biggest mistakes she ever made to let this movie go. It's a fascinating story. According to early box office, it's not out nationwide until October 23, but according to early box office from the small release, it's doing quite well. That's why Tim Cook was a little nasty about it. Companies like Universal are capitalizing. It was four years anniversary after the death of Steve this week. Capitalizing on Steve Jobs without doing him any favors. 

Robert: Yep. And Apple doesn't like you living off their brand. You know that. The day he died I was at Apple's headquarters doing interviews. They were watching who was being interviewed. They came up and tapped me on the shoulder and said "You've given enough interviews now."

Leo: This is not your time; this is somebody else's. 

Robert: They're very protective of the brand and very good at it. How many other companies have a room where...

Leo: I wish instead of Steve Jobs they'd call it Steve Jonas. Then we could all say what a great movie. Don't know what it's about. That's how they used to do that, isn't it? 

Harry: Steve's sister wrote a novel loosely based...

Robert: there is enough drama in all of these things to make a... Just that AT&T story is one. The other one that Andy tried to hire somebody out of the cell phone Industry and Steve said you're not going to hire anybody who is an expert at this. You're going to hire people who don't know how to build a cell phone.

Leo: Remember how William Randolph hated Citizen Kane. But it wasn't about him, was it? 

Robert: A lot of the hard work that goes into these products is working on the Chinese factory line to make sure the finish is right. 

Leo: That's not that interesting I guess. But I think you could make that interesting. 

Robert: I think it's interesting. Is it a Hollywood movie interesting?

Leo: I think if you made an effort, and it wouldn't be a movie, because that's only two hours. You'd have to do one of those HBO mini series. You'd have to do a real halt and catch fire. If you made an effort to make it absolutely accurate and well done, I think it would be the best thing ever. Don't you? We've launched an amazing era. This is amazing stuff and it's changing the world. I don't think it's... You know what? That's what TWiT is for the last ten years. A weekly recounting of the drama and pageantry of the tech industry. I love it. 

Harry: I did love the look and feel of the movie. Maybe one of the single best things about the movie is that the first third was short in 16 MM, the middle third in 35 mm, and the last third in digital, so it starts out with this total 80's feeling and it gradually gets up to the present day. They don't shove that in your face. 

Leo: Danny Boyle did a great job.

Harry: He is such a good visual story teller.

Leo: He really is great. I asked him about the beginning because they have a clip from Arthur C. Clark talking about the future that's really a wonderful stage setter. He said I can't take credit for that, it wasn't in Aaron's script, it was my editor who said I found this piece of video on YouTube and they put it on the beginning. Actually, it's a really good beginning. All right. Enough about Steve Jobs. Actually, one more thing, because Andy Inhatko on MacBreak Weekly said as an Apple fan, I would urge people not to see it in the first two weeks. He says the only thing that matters to Hollywood is the box office in the first two weeks. He said if you want to see it, see it on cable, see it later. See it a month later. Just send a signal to Hollywood. Maybe that's not a bad idea. Just wait a little bit. 

Robert: It's funny. My friend really does not like Steve Jobs and we decided to stay home. 

Leo: Interesting.

Robert: Even he is like... one of Steve's strengths is he never looked back either. He would hate this show so far. He would be like let's talk about that new camera, man. That's actually the interesting stuff. Something new!

Leo: He's right! I got to agree with him. And that's crap. Scandal in the world of unregulated world of fantasy sports. Do you have this in Canada? Fan duel and...

Georgia: No. Not only do we not have it, I still don't understand. What is fantasy sports? Why are people spending money? How do you make money? I don't understand. 

Robert: Is this part of the East board's revelation as well? 

Leo: I think I can sum this up in a few sentences for people who want to know. Fantasy sports started with fantasy baseball, there's fantasy football, and I suppose you could do that with any sport. Originally it was just a fun thing among friends and you'd play the whole season. The beginning of the season you would have a draft, simulating the actual draft in the NFL. You would pick your team, but your team could be composed of any active players in the league. Your friends would pick their team, you had a limited budget, and then each week, as you watch the game, your team would score points. Six points for a touchdown pass from Tom Brady, if he's on your team, that kind of thing. Each week, you'd assess and at the end, somebody would win. It was a fun thing; people are very passionate about it. Yahoo and others quickly got into it as a backend for it. So it would be very easy for you to play fantasy sports. Originally, you had to do it all with pencil and paper, but with Yahoo you could do it, they would calculate your results each week and all of that. That's not what these are though. What these are though is something that resets every week. There's real money involved. You put in real money. It's basically like horse racing. That's why it's legal, as opposed to casino gambling, because they say it's a game of skill. You still pick a team, you put money in, but you're not betting against your buddies, you're betting against everybody else who has put money in. According to the ads from draft kings and fan duel, you can win a lot of money. Tens of thousands of dollars. 

Harry: Millions.

Leo: Millions. It's just like horse racing. It's something called pair mutual betting. There is a pool of dollars being put in by all the participants, the company takes it's cut, and the rest is distributed among players. Just like horse racing. It's technically legal, even though online gambling is illegal in the US. State by state it's regulated in person. But, it's also apparently a little bit corrupt. One of the things, just like horse racing, if you could get the results ahead of time. You could easily win. Apparently employees of Fan Duel and Draft Kings have been playing on the competitor's site, winning money because they get information before it would go public. By the way, the other thing that's very important if you're considering playing this, I don't know if anybody has, but in anything like this, but especially like this, there are many many what we call fish. People who are going to lose, and there are small numbers of players who are going to win, who know what they are doing, and they actually know how to play the game, and they're going to beat you. All the advertising for Draft Kings and Fan Duel is to get more fish in the game, because the more fish in peri mutual betting, the more people that put money in, the bigger the rewards for the people who really know what they're doing. You're somewhat at their mercy. This is a conflict of interest if they allow their employees to play. Now both sites are banning their employees from playing fantasy games for money on any site. Fan Duel has asked former US attorney general to perform an audit. What's really going too happy is it's going to be made illegal eventually. New York attorney general has opened an inquiry into all of these sites. It's gambling. There's no question about it. It's gambling. 

Georgia: So aren't all of the people going to have their friends or family members bat for them?

Leo: What's to stop them, right?

Georgia: Right. It's like, if they still really want to, and I did read that most of the people that work for the companies are people that enjoy doing this, so they must enjoy doing it quite a lot and they're just going to have some pseudonym. It's going to continue happening, because having all that insider knowledge, how are you going to not take a peek and make that

Leo: Especially when it could be 2 million dollars, right?

Georgia: Yeah.

Robert: You're living in a day where money is tracked everywhere. I work for a public company, if I did insider trading or told you something about what's happening in my company, it will get tracked back. Because you're going to trade hard on that if you believe me, and you're going to get caught, and I'm going to get caught because they're going to come down on you and you're going to give me up. 

Georgia: But if it's your wife or your daughter or your son, it's allowed.

Robert: If you win two million dollars, that raises all sorts of flags. How are they going to get you the money? 

Georgia: If it's your family it doesn't matter. You can just keep it. 

Robert: The SEC is going to start looking into this stuff. All money now is tracked.

Leo: It's going to be very interesting. I think these companies are acting very quickly because the last thing they want is a congressional investigation and a move to make this stuff...

Robert: You can get away with stuff like this for a while, but... if you start getting away with it, you're not going to do it just once. You're going to do it over and over again. You're going to get caught.

Georgia: What I was saying though is that friends and family members are not allowed to do stuff for you. That's not against the law. It would be if we were running... if we were running a contest, my friends and family would not be allowed to participate. 

Robert: True.

Leo: Not really a tech story, but I couldn't resist. All right. It's sort of a tech story. None of this would exist if you couldn't do it online. That's what makes this such a high stakes game. 14 billion dollar industry in the next few years. 

Harry: Before the Internet you had rotisserie baseball. 

Leo: that was fun. Jack Dorsey is CEO at Twitter. 

Robert: Yay Jack!

Georgia: Jack is back.

Leo: Really? Is he going to save them?

Harry: I think he has as good a shot as anybody. 

Robert: Save them. I was just in Brazil and I saw a taco truck and it had Twitter and Facebook icon on the side of it. Twitter is one of those things that I don't think needs to be saved yet. It's not even in the place where Apple was when Steve Jobs came back.

Leo: I agree with you. I think Twitter is on the face of it a massive success. But here's why it needs to be saved: They're a publically held company, the stock market expects huge growth as it does of all tech companies, ridiculous growth. Twitter is not growing fast. It's at 300 million and almost holding. In the past growth has been fueled by bogus things like bots and spammers. So the stock market is already and soon maybe even more significantly punishing Twitter. Why does that matter? Because that's the currency in Silicon Valley for employees. So if you have an under valued or a poor performing stock, it's hard to get good employees, so you can see the death spiral that ensues from not having growth that the stock market expects. It's a shame, because I agree with you. Twitter as it stands today could and should continue forever. It's a useful thing. 

Robert: That's not true because Facebook is actively coming up. Executives at Facebook have told me they want to come after Twitter and take away even more of what Twitter is seen as a leader in which is journalism and real time news. The moments thing that they did this week is aiming at stopping the bleeding on news and also getting new users to see there's some value here. This is the real problem with Twitter: how do you join Facebook as a new user? It's usually your friends who force you to sign up. Hey, why don't you sign up for Facebook so we can tag you in this photo? 

Leo: Everybody you know is already there.

Robert: Everybody you know. But there are still people who aren't on Facebook and they are still getting dragged onto Facebook.

Leo: But as soon as you get there, it's everybody you know. It's like going to a nice bar where everybody knows your name.

Robert: Twitter, on the other hand, the reason you sign up for Twitter is because you hear about it in the media or at a sporting event, or something like that. Follow the Kardashians, follow Leo Laporte, follow CNBC. Whatever. When you follow that thing, that's all you see on Twitter and you don't see that there's any other value. So Twitter is trying to provide other ways to get you from just being a follower of TWiT to being a follower of Twitter, bigger Twitter. More Twitter, so that you get more addicted to it and you stick around and you see some value in it and you tell your friends to get on Twitter because it's cool. I don't know...

Leo: So onboarding is the problem. 

Robert: Onboarding is one of the problems.

Leo: If you're going to grow. 

Robert: Yes. Twitter has 300 million users around. 

Leo: So we're the wrong people to ask because we're already there and we've cultivated our Twitters.

Harry: I love it just the way it is and I hope it doesn't change. 

Leo: Look, five minutes ago, Andy Ihnatko posted a picture of him meeting the kid from Moonrise Kingdom, Jared Gillman. Right below that, Terry Bradshaw fed up with the NFL's domestic violence program. Below that, Darwin's 1838 pro and con list for getting married. It's full of... It's like your mom's attic. Full of treasures. Or something. Amy Winehouse. Turns out Amy Winehouse was a thumb sucker. Who know? If you watched Twitter, you know. 

Robert: Harry and Leo, this is the problem for us. I keep asking my audiences, I've been doing a lot of speaking lately, and I asked, who has posted in the last week to my audiences? Invariably...

Leo: Nobody.

Robert: That's not true. 70% say Twitter, 95% say Facebook on average. Zero say Google Plus. 

Leo: Even the Google Plus fanatics...

Georgia: Stop trying to make it happen. It's not going to happen.

Robert: Linked in is about 40 to 50%. 

Georgia: LinkedIn is the biggest stalker in the world. 

Leo: Really? You have some strong feelings about this, Georgia?

Georgia: I am constantly getting this person on LinkedIn would like you to follow them, and these are people I don't know. These are people that are clients. None of them are actually doing this. I've had someone that passed away posting to my...

Leo: What?

Georgia: It's really unpleasant on many levels. I have strong feelings of animosity towards LinkedIn.

Robert: And that's where I was going. When you actually sit down with these groups of nerds and you ask them what they feel about the systems, invariably they get to what you just said about LinkedIn, was it's just noisy and not good and I don't like being there, and Twitter is noisy. What I keep hearing. People say I like using Facebook more. I don't like reading on Twitter. You unpack on it, and the feeds aren't as good of quality, the noise level is quite high. I can't show you because my camera is broken.

Leo: What is Jack do to fix this?

Harry: Jack has the authority to tell people this is the direction we're moving in and this is the way it's going to be because he's a founder. 

Leo: give us some background. He was one of the people who started Twitter. 

Harry: There are a whole bunch of... depending on who you pay attention to, different people are...

Leo: They all claim they invented it. 

Harry: But Jack is clearly one of them. Then he basically got booted out. Then he came back a few years ago as chairman, but not deeply involved. More recently he became acting CEO and now he is going to be CEO. 

Leo: He is the only person who has been fired twice from Twitter. 

Harry: He does have two imposing jobs because running the square is not a side gig. These are both companies that need to figure out their future. It's not obvious where they're going. But he has the authority to make change. Twitter has changed shockingly little in its history. The fact that we're still arguing over whether 140 characters works moving forward or not is amazing to me. I don't want them to do more than 140 characters, but if anybody was ever going to convince me that it makes sense or could figure out a way to make it make sense, I think it's Dorsey. 

Leo: So he's done two things immediately. The day after. He's announced, I don't know if he's announced, but there will be layoffs. Thousands of people. As you mentioned, he created this new tab called Moments. I'm sorry, I should say this correctly. He finally said would you please release this? They've been working on it for a while. This is curetted news. None of the things here come from my Twitter feed necessarily. Some editor has decided that this is what's hot on Twitter. It's kind of like the trending list, and it's news focused. It's today, there's news, there's sports, there's entertainment, and there's fun. There's not tech, interestingly. 

Harry: It's not granular at all. Now it's not all that interesting for me, but there is an interesting template that's interesting. If the day comes where they have hundreds of topics or thousands of topics, something like Flipboard, this could be a really cool way to explore it. Right now it is so hard if you're interested in a topic to find it on Twitter. This is a format that could work for that. 

Georgia: It's wonderful because it makes the barrier for getting knowledge immediate for Twitter instead of having to figure out who do I follow to find the news that I'm interested in, it gives you a nice curetted view of news that is interesting to most people that are on Twitter and then you can choose to follow that news link. Interestingly enough, Leo, we always talk about Canadians and I do not have moments on my Twitter feed.

Leo: You don't have moments? It's US only?

Georgia: I don't have it. Neither does Renee. I updated specifically for it, and I am sadly dejected.

Leo: I wouldn't be. 

Robert: Georgia and Harry, you've mentioned flipboard. This site, along with Apple's news are really making you wonder what the future of flipboard and maybe Nuzzle and other systems are. Nuzzle is tied into Twitter.

Leo: Nuzzle does a better job for me than the Twitter moments. Nuzzle is based on your friends on Facebook and Twitter and it kind of tries to Curate the news. Jonathon Abrams, this is his...

Robert: But Harry laid out where Jack could take Moments, and by making it more granular and making it about who you're following, moments could grow into a Nuzzle killer and really take away their oxygen. Or just buying Nuzzle and putting it into moments. Make it a page of moments where you can see your top news from your friends and for me, it works extraordinarily well because I'm following 40,000 hand picked people on Twitter. 

Georgia: 40,000 hand picked people.

Robert: Yes. I've been on Twitter for a long time.

Georgia: I have 110, and I can't even look at my Twitter feed because it's just a mass. I scroll to the top each time. I don't us Twitter at all.

Robert: On my screen it's just scrolling down. 

Leo: Don't get Robert started Georgia. He will tell you how to make Facebook or Twitter be so much better. It's lists. Isn't Lists the key?

Robert: I have List, but right now it's just scrolling down the side of my screen and it's fun to watch.

Leo: Do you use tap bot? What do you use?

Robert: Just the Twitter app. 

Leo: Twitter app. One of the things that will be interesting of course is Dick Costolo, Jack Dorsey's predecessor, was a guy who tried to kill third party apps and tried to focus everthing back to the Twitter app and the Twitter website. I don't know how Jack... the early days of Twitter, it was all about third party developers or third party apps. I don't know how Jack feels about that now. 

Harry: Realistically, if you're introducing something complicated like Moments doing it in a way that Tweetbot can grab it seems...

Robert: I don't see them supporting developers. It's six months, nine months, two years from now... who knows?

Georgia: They see drop off from their own users because people like the format of their applications then I'm sure they'll make sure that it's open for developers. But if they notice that people are going to Twitter because they would much rather have control over their own eco sphere.

Robert: To satisfy their investors they need to monetize their streams, and that means having control of where the ads are going to go. That's why they messed with the developers and cut off all the development, because they needed that control to satisfy the stock market. I don't see that changing because they're a public company. Also, let's be honest. If you're a smart machine learning to engineer, are you at Twitter right now?

Leo: That's an interesting question. Where are you? Are you at Facebook? 

Robert: Uber.

Leo: Uber?!?

Robert: Uber is a pre IPO company and it's growing very quickly and it's becoming a brand that a lot of people like. I love Uber.

Leo: It makes me kind of sad that brilliant developers coming out of school make the calculus where am I going to make the most money? As opposed to where can I make the biggest difference? 

Robert: If you want to make the biggest difference, go into an R&D lab. I was at Park last week, which is where Steve Jobs bought the Macintosh from, stole the Macintosh. Whatever story you want to believe.

Leo: According to Aaron Sorkin, he stole it. 

Robert: According to the Park people, they gave him a million dollars of pre IPO stock before his visit, which is today worth more than a million dollars. 

Leo: He bought it. 

Robert: It was sold at not a very high price because the executives at Xerox didn't know what they had.

Leo: Uber is the hotness in Silicon Valley. Wow.

Robert: Look at the unicorns through thuranos. Any of the pre-IPO companies that have billion dollar evaluations. 

Harry: Slack.

Leo: I hate freaking unicorns. I wish they'd never been born. 

Harry: I wish there was no such thing as unicorns.

Leo: Really, I think... of course we've been saying this for years, that money ruined Silicon Valley. 

Harry: You've been saying that since 1970. Some of us have been saying that.

Leo: I have. 

Robert: What's really happened is the nerds won. 

Leo: Now it's all about...

Georgia: They realized that they were no different than regular people wanting to make a profit on what they made.

Robert: The money came in and they made a lot of money. When I grew up, nobody had a personal computer, right? Only the nerds wanted one. The engineer types, the people you would see at a maker fair. They're the ones who wanted a computer. 

Leo: I may have Unicorns, but I still love Nyan cat. So. You see? I'm not all bad.

Harry: There are a lot of smart machine learning people who aren't at any company because a lot of them are still in Accademia. There are ones who are chasing after the biggest pay day, I don't think that's in any way true of all of them. 

Leo: Let's face it. There are still bright people at Google and Microsoft and Apple. 

Harry: They did a great job of scaling up even though Facebook is a pre IPO company. 

Robert: Here's where the talent is, Harry and Leo. I was just in Sao Paolo Brazil, and I toured a company called New bank where people are waiting six months to get their new credit cards. It's a really cool company. It's a Secoia back company and they're white hot. They're hiring the top talent and they're trying to convince the machine-learning experts who understand how to do all sorts of fun stuff with algorithms from fraud detection to customer acquisition to showing cool stuff on your expense reports. All of that requires a pretty smart programmer to do and they can't get enough people. This is a Sequoia company and it is the best in Brazil. That's the worldwide talent hunt right now. If you're one of those guys or girls, are you at Twitter right now when you know there's a new bank out there that is white-hot and that has a huge future in front of it? Or go to flipchart, the commerce system in India. Addressable market that they're attacking is so immense that there's going to be several billionaires that come out of that company. 

Leo: By the way, if you're wondering where Dick Costolo went, he ended up writing one day a week for Silicon Valley on HBO. So now they've got Dan Lyons and Costolo. He was a comedian before he became CEO of Twitter. I think that's actually a good acquire for Silicon Valley. Let's take a break. When we come back we've got to talk about Google, got to talk about Amazon, got to talk about Microsoft. We haven't even mentioned the new Microsoft stuff. There's lots to say. 

Robert: Hololens!

Leo: Hololens. Ah. We hardly knew ye. Robert Scoble is here. The Scobleizer from rackspace.com, Harry the Technologizer McCracken from Fast Company and Georgia...

Robert: I used to work at Fast Company. That's a cool place to work. 

Leo: Really? That's right. And Georgia... I've got to come up with a nickname for Georgia. Georgia willkickyourass Dow from iMore.com. 

Georgia: I like it.

Leo: She's a black belt in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. 

Georgia: I'm not a black belt.

Leo: What color belts do they have?

Georgia: They go by a different color scheme. But I'm not actually a black belt. 

Leo: What's the highest belt?

Georgia: The highest belt would be a black belt with a red stripe, but I'm not. I got my championship without being a black belt.

Leo: Wow. Okay. So she's a Canadian champion. Either way, you don't want to see her in a dark alley. 

Robert: Now you know why I didn't come into the studio, Leo.

Leo: Yeah. You don't want to mess with Georgia. She's a dynamite pack. Our show to you today brought to you by Gazelle. I know there's a lot new stuff coming. Looking forward to the new Nexus phones from Google to new phones, the 950 XL from Microsoft, maybe you're still hankering after an iPhone. Oh that's so last week. What are you going to do with the old stuff? I'll tell you what. You're going to sell the old stuff at Gazelle so you can make money so you can buy the new stuff! Gazelle is an online marketplace for buying and selling used gadgets. You can shop from a variety of certified pre-owned electronics, or get cash on the barrelhead for your old device. If you're tossing your old phones and tablets in a drawer to gather dust, it's like throwing away hundred dollar bills. Just go to gazelle.com, find your device, get an instant quote. Guaranteed for 30 days. Shipping is free. Payment is fast, but you've got 30 days to decide. But I like that. You can buy the new Nexus phone; say all right, Gazelle send me the box. I want to ship it back. Every device worth more than a buck the shipping is free, but it's also a good place to recycle. They will buy broken stuff. Broken iPhones and iPads. Gazelle. Now, if you're looking to buy, they sell certified pre-owned devices. Great prices, shop for iPhone 4S through 6 Plus. They've got iPads, Airs, Minis. They even cater to the Android user with a variety of Samsung Galaxy phones. The new iPhone is in store, the new iPad will be soon to follow, but now is the best time to buy a certified pre-owned device, because those old devices are getting unloaded right now at Gazelle.com. Every device fully inspected, backed with a 30-day return policy. Without contract, you're going to find great prices for a replacement phone. The kids break their phone; get them a nice replacement on Gazelle. Devices are available in Good and Excellent condition. Good means gentle wear and tear, but in every case, that 30-point inspection process insures that they've fully functioning. There are no scratches on the glass, things like that. All the devices, and you have 30 days to return it. I want you to go to Gazelle. gazelle.com to buy to sell. Gazelle. We thank them so much for their support of This Week in Tech. I actually bought a surface book. I'm excited by it. 

Georgia: It was really exciting. I loved the one more thing moment.

Leo: Yea, because—as is often the case with everybody now, even Apple, the rumor mill pretty much nailed everything. In fact Panos Panay who was part of the presentation on Tuesday, even chided the press, saying “Would you guys stop giving out our secrets?” But of course he did it in a friendly, gentle way. So we knew and they confirmed, there were 2 new phones, the 5.2” Lumia 950, the 5.7” 950 XL, both with 20 megapixel PureView cameras, USB-C charging which is nice. And Microsoft’s doing this Continuum device which allows you to dock your phone, they demonstrate this, and use it as a desktop PC

Robert: That’s pretty cool and I met with that team when I was out a couple months ago. And they’re really doing some cool work.

Leo: This kind of is the payoff for One Windows, you know, having Windows look the same on desktop, on tablet on a phone, having a universal app platform. This is good.

Robert: And that’s the problem. Because this industry’s not supporting Windows Phone and it’s not about to start supporting Windows Mobile Devices. And neither is Microsoft. Every single person I met with up there is holding an iPhone or an Android phone, and they know that they’re losing, or they lost. And so when they come, when they start really shifting and come out with an Android phone that I can do Continuum on, that’s going to be a big day. And I think they’re already working on that.

Leo: You think they’ll do it? Do you think they’ll keep selling phones?

Robert: I think they will sell phones, but I don’t think that they’re going to be so focused on just Microsoft anymore, you know? I think there’s a new humility up at Microsoft, there’s a new organizational structure. And I saw it across the campus. Satya really is shifting who Microsoft is, how they think about themselves and where they’re going to bring products out to the market. And I think this last week is a good example. It felt like you know, and Apple event. And it was very exciting. They’re bringing interesting new products that people care about to market.

Leo: They started with an awesome demo of the HoloLens that probably is nothing like reality but …

Harry: That’s the issue with some of their, with the HoloLens.

Robert: Let’s talk about HoloLens.

Leo: So they had, they show this, “Hey we’ve got a rig that will let you see the HoloLens,” and they’ve got a red camera with some, with a lot of gizmos on it. And some guy comes out and he makes a fist and gun folds around this. Oh, we can show this. The guy by the way, well chosen, looks exactly like one of us. He’s wearing a hoodie.

Georgia: Looks a little different from me.

Leo: Doesn’t look like you. Looks like one of us fat gamers. And immediately through the beautiful wood paneled Pacific Northwest walls comes spiders and robots. And he starts shooting them and they appear to be actually coming through the wall. And this is, what I really like about augmented reality is you, actually the game comes a part of the room you’re in, which I think is really cool. But this is, they’re showing this thing as if this guy’s seeing all around him and the whole room—that’s not the HoloLens we’ve seen.

Harry: Not the one I saw a few months ago. Although they haven’t released it yet so it’s possible it’s gotten better since then.

Leo: That was the news is that it will be Q1 for the dev kit.

Harry: For the three thousand dollar dev kit.

Leo: So you think, Robert, with your inside—because you worked at Microsoft, you know those guys well and—

Robert: I know people who are working on the HoloLens team and I know the guy who invented some of the patents that got sold to Microsoft, Ralph Osterhout who built, who built ODG, this little company which is right across the street from the ball park in San Francisco. And he’s building, been building military glasses for a decade. He was one of the key people who built the night vision goggle. The problem, and the press keyed in it, is the viewing angle on HoloLens. That video makes it seems like the monsters are all the way around you and that you are perceiving them that way. Not true.

Leo: As they would be in virtual reality.

Robert: Not true. There’s a screen in front of you which is like a 55” screen a few feet from you. And it has a small viewing area. And the rest of it is blank. And this is the problem that they’re going to have to fix. And I don’t believe they’re going to be able to soon. Now Osterhout once he sold those patents to Microsoft started over. And he’s gotten the screen up to about a 75” screen. But it still is a screen. It still has edges on the side of it. And he keeps hinting that he has a way to make it a little bit more wrap-around. 

Leo: So is it BS that Microsoft did this demo and at no point in the demo did they say, “Oh, by the way, it doesn’t look at all like this.”

Harry: They have a history of kind of doing that which I think is dangerous for them. Because HoloLens is really cool and if they raise people’s expectations even above its actual coolness, people might be disappointed. 

Georgia: You’re absolutely right. Microsoft is always giving people this—promising things that they can’t deliver and then what causes, what happens in peoples’ psychology is that we end up with expectational debt. I would be completely happy with a small screen that I can interact with various things that may be helpful to me if I’m doing anatomy, if I’m looking at the internals of the brain to be able to interact with that would be phenomenally cool and I would love it. But people end up expecting something and the only way that we know that we’re actually happy with something or not is what we expected and then what actually delivered. And so unfortunately what Microsoft often does is they show lots of cool things so they get great press but then people who have never actually tried HoloLens, they don’t know that this is completely different then what they get, are exceptionally disappointed with that even though it’s massively cool and it’s a first gen device. We shouldn’t expect that much from it. But Microsoft unfortunately doesn’t understand the psychology of what they put out there that they can’t deliver on will make people actually very angry and very frustrated. 

Robert: Well and let’s be honest. We’re going to start hearing about this company called Magic Leap which Google has invested half a billion dollars in. And I hear they’re about to get another round of funding. Ted Schilowitz, I went down to 20th Century Fox and visited with Ted Schilowitz who’s the futurist there at the movie company. And he said that Magic Leap is Google’s first trillion dollar idea. And he said where HoloLens has a screen in front of you, Magic Leap has no screen. And therefore if Magic Leap, even though we know that Magic Leap is 3 to 8 years away, if Magic Leap starts showing of demos before Microsoft can really start getting a market going for HoloLens, they’re going to just Osborn the whole market and everybody’s going to wait until the Magic Leap comes out.

Leo: You must be hearing something with Magic Leap. How are they going to project—

Robert: Yes you have a screen. You have a screen but it’s projecting into your eye using a very unique optical system. I don’t know exactly how it works but everybody who’s seen it, I’ve talked to 5 people so far that have seen it, and spent a lot of time in Fort Lauderdale seeing Magic Leap. They say it’s absolutely mind blowing.

Leo: Well this is why AR is more exciting to me frankly than VR because you’re still in your world. It can be a user interface. It’s more than just gaming. VR is really about gaming or tourism or something. But this could be a new UI. This could be—and I don’t understand why Microsoft would be interested in it for that reason alone.

Robert: But the problem is, and I just interviewed Jack, Jack, Jack, Jack, who’s Jack? The co-founder of Oculus Rift, Jack McCauley. He was the chief engineer at Oculus and now is running a lab at Cal Berkeley to figure out how to tell where your body is in these virtual worlds, so he’s building these sensor worlds. He says the software, and he’s not the only one, the software for AR is going to be much harder because of this expectation problem. Because if I want to look at my desk and say, “Put a Monopoly game on my desk,” and have it appear, the software to do that is way harder than to put me in a virtual world and have me play in a completely virtual world. And so our expectations are going to be much higher with AR and they’re going to be harder to meet technologically. You’re going to have to have faster GPUs, faster systems than we have the capabilities to build right now. This is why Oculus and Valve have to be tethered to a big ass PC.

Leo: Have you played with the new Mattel View Master?

Robert: No, but—

Leo: (Laughing) this is what you want. It’s so awesome.

Harry: Yea, Cardboard is really cool. And Cardboard starts at $15.00

Leo: Yea, this is a $30 device. It’s hard to describe and like all of these really hard to demo, but we demoed it earlier, in fact I think in our promo you’ll see it. What happens is that you can buy additional software but you get the starter pack. This disk, you put this disk on the ground and it somehow interacts with the viewer. You put your phone, it’s still it’s like Cardboard, you still have to have a phone but it works with a lot of phones. I tried it with a Nexus 6. And when you look through the viewer at this disk you see animals on it and trees. And you pick up the disk, they’re floating on it. It is definitely an AR experience. It’s very hard to describe. This is a toy for kids that’s $30.

Georgia: There’s also the 3D coloring books from Crayola where you can color these specific pages and then you take a look at it through your iPad or your phone and the creatures that you colored are actually now in 3D and kind of moving around.

Leo: Super cool. It’s kind of like Osmo isn’t it?

Harry: That’s very cool.

Leo: That’s the one where—yea. So I think that we’re nibbling around the edges of this big experience, this big AR, virtual reality experience. But Cardboard is cheap. And it’s hear now. And it actually works. I was blown away. I’m looking at this, I’m sure kids would be, and there’s animals on this disk and I can pick it up and I still see the world around me. It’s really kind of an amazing experience. So. So, there.

Robert: So there.

Leo: We can wait for a while for Magic Leap and Oculus. I think Oculus is a way off despite their bullish pronouncements.

Robert: Well we’re getting, we’re getting Oculus in the 1st quarter of next year along with Valve. The question is when does everybody—all the nerds that I’m talking to, we have $1500 bucks burning a hole in our pocket. I’ve been saving for a while. I’m buying the first one. The question is, when is my wife going to want to play it and when is it going to go mainstream? In other words, and that’s 5 years in the future. You know, first of all you can’t get excited about these things unless you try them. And how many people can try a 15 minute demo going into Best Buy or something? 100,000? 500,000?

Leo: Well that’s one of the things Oculus is going to apparently do. What they apparently do is put these demo units in stores.

Harry: You’ve got to see it done. I think that Microsoft, by charging you $3,000 for the dev kit for HoloLens, I kind of assume that’s less about their actual costs and more about telling the world “This is still a developer thing. Don’t get too excited. Just now, this is for those of you who will build these apps rather than for consumers.”

Robert: And I think that all of these products at some level are aspirational for the company. It’s like key, Microsoft has a future. We’re going to build this for a long time. It’s going to be a 10 year product. And we’re going to invest in it, right? And that gets people excited. It gets employees excited and it gets customers excited. It gets us excited. I’m excited.

Harry: Same thing for Facebook. They’re not doing Oculus because they want to make it into the gaming business. They’re doing Oculus because they think it might be how people are social 5 or 10 years from now.

Georgia: That’s such a really sad thought, but probably really true.

Harry: It is a little scary.

Georgia: But there are also, they have to think about a new way of gaming and a new way to interact. So Oculus, there’s a really cool game that Oculus came out with Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, where you’re trying—

Leo: Oh, I love that.

Georgia: Isn’t that amazing? You’re all working as a team to defuse—so it makes me feel like I’m on Mission Impossible, and we’re all working together to defuse a bomb. And each person has a different set of the rule book in order to help the one person in order to defuse it. And so you work as a team. Which makes perfect sense and you’re not going to go through the same sickness with motion sickness is a huge problem for Oculus right now.

Leo: What’s cool is it social too with real people, right?

Georgia: Yes. Yes, and you can play that as a family, with friends. It’s something that you’ll all have a lot of fun to be able to do and I think that that’s going to be one way that Oculus together instead of separating them.

Leo: By the way this works on Gear VR. So if you have a Samsung phone you could just get the $99 Gear VR headset. You put that on, you’re now the diffuser. You see the bomb. They don’t see the bomb they only see the paper manual and they try to talk you through it. Which I think is brilliant. I think this is exactly the kind of game you want to play.

Robert: By the way Francine Hardaway corrected us. The View Master’s $107 on Amazon right now.

Leo: What? No. That’s wrong.

Robert: She said she was going to buy one. She went to there and looked at it. So.

Harry: Maybe somebody is scalping them.

Jason Howell: Must be because they’re $30 and Wal-Mart and Target.

Leo: Yep.

Robert: All right.

Leo: Because it’s just a plastic holder. It’s like Cardboard. Because all of the smarts, and this is why Gear VR is also smart, all of the smarts are contained in your very own pricey, thousand dollar smart phone.

Robert: There are some different. Merge VR has a phone one. I should have brought it up here but I don’t have one. Which is nicer to wear than the Cardboard. And ION VR puts a couple of shutters in there and a little bit of compute to try to keep you from getting sick which is going to be a problem with these things, particularly in the more advanced media. One guy took me down the Grand Canyon on a river raft and I started feeling nauseous on it wearing Samsung’s Gear VR.

Leo: That’s why I like AR because AR doesn’t have that problem. Because you’re not tricking your inner air.

Georgia: You’re actually seeing it. Right.

Leo: You’re in your environment. 

Georgia: You’re seeing the real horizons instead of seeing a virtual one which causes that real—

Robert: Except now you’re going to have lag and other issues. Because you’re going to have that expectation problem where it doesn’t stick on the table the way you think, the way your mind thinks it will.

Georgia: Right.

Leo: I’ll bring in my Gear VR and we will play. That would be a fun show I guess. May be the most boring thing in the world. We’ll play the game maybe next week.

Georgia: That would be amazing.

Leo: Yea.

Georgia: That would be so much fun. That’s so exciting.

Leo: And you could actually be there. You don’t have to be in the room with me Georgia because you could have the manual right there.

Georgia: I’m all in it. I’m all in it.

Leo: And I’m just sitting here. All right, we’ll play. Next week.

Georgia: Awesome.

Leo: What is it? Nobody move and—

Georgia: Keep Talking and Nobody – nobody move (laughing). Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes.

Leo: Nobody move, I’m about to explode. That’s how I play it. So that, ok, so Microsoft launched their event with that, the HoloLens. Really exciting. Maybe deceptive but very exciting. They also showed an Xbox video with games that are you know, not new. But I guess they were trying to juice people up. They showed the new Band. That comes out October 30th. See, that looks pretty good.

Georgia: It does look really nice. It looks sleek and comfortable to wear which I liked.

Leo: You’re a fitness band fan, Georgia. 

Georgia: Yes.

Leo: Right now Apple Watch, is it for you?

Georgia: Yes, I’m using the Apple Watch. But I have to say that Microsoft’s Band looked really nice. I think that it was very seamless. Is it anything more than what I already have? No. But I think that the look is, I think that a lot of women and men would feel comfortable wearing it. Where I think the Apple Watch is a little bit big and cumbersome.

Leo: Yea, it’s only $250. Only, I say only, that’s expensive. But it’s about what the Fitbit Surge costs. It’s what these higher end fitness devices. It has GPS in it. It measures air quality. It has a bunch of sensors. 

Georgia: But it didn’t seem to be waterproof which seemed like them dropping the ball on an area where a fitness band really could go. And they would put themselves out of the running with the Apple Watch which is, you know, water resistant yet.

Leo: Yea. Wouldn’t that be nice? I would really—It also is great for golf. Which I don’t play but they actually showed in the video, you could see a radar map of the golf course and get measurements and it would keep track of your swings. That was in conjunction with a 3rd party. I think that was kind of an interesting product. It’s a little expensive but I think for the high end fitness market it’s not-- $250 is still less than an Apple Watch. And it might be interesting. I think somebody here, I think Megan is going to get one so we can review it. They announced 2 new Windows Phones which we’ve already agreed, who cares? They announced the—which is a shame because Windows Phone is great. It’s sad but it is. It’s dead in the water because it doesn’t have Google services. There was a rumor I saw that Google might, they’ve settled their patent issues with Microsoft, that they might actually start now doing Google services for the Window Phone. That could save it.

Harry: That would be a big deal.

Leo: So it’s the show stopper for me. But and they announced the Surface Pro 4 which was about what you would expect. Kind of a logical successor to the Surface. Which has been very successful for them I think.

Harry: And the new one has a way better touch pad. Like the one part of the Surface hardware up until now that was not pretty impressive was it had this teeny, tiny touchpad.

Leo: You know I think I’m not alone when—I resist the idea that I have a tablet with a kind of janky cover that is sort of a keyboard but not really a very good keyboard. And not a really good trackpad. Even if they make it better it’s still kind of almost an afterthought. I want a laptop.

Harry: It feels like less than an afterthought on the new one. I haven’t seen one in person but at least the size is good now.

Leo: They responded anyway to those issues.

Georgia: Though the look is still kind of cheap looking which was sad to me. You now, the red or the blue. It kinds of stands out as really loud. I don’t know.

Leo: But here’s the good news. And no one knew this. This was a rumor out of nowhere. Paul Thurrott said, “I had been given this as a tip a day before and I didn’t believe it so I didn’t run with it.” Microsoft announced their very first laptop, the Surface Book, with the wackiest hinge you’ve ever seen. But on the other hand, this looks like a really nice laptop. Priced like a really expensive laptop, but a really nice laptop which I immediately ordered because, well, that’s just who I am. Although if you go to the pre-order you might realize that it is even more expensive than you think. The starting price $1,499. What do you get for that? You get an i5, 128GB of storage and 8 GB of RAM. And you don’t get a dedicated GPU. The least you can spend for a dedicated GPU is $1,899 you get an i5, 8GB of RAM and a 256GB drive. And it goes up from there. I decided to opt for, not the top of the line which is $2,700 bucks.

Georgia: Wow.

Harry: I wonder when anyone spent that much for a laptop.

Leo: That’s a lot for a laptop. But for $2,099 you get an i7, you get a dedicated GPU. It’s kind of weird. The GPU is in the base because even though this looks like a rock solid laptop, they’re using an interesting latching mechanism that uses a memory wire that when you charge it, the wire shrinks, releases the latches. So it’s an electronic key. It’s right on the keyboard to eject the screen. You press it, there’s a recorded click apparently, not a real click and then you can remove the screen. 3000 x 2000, 13.5 inches. Really high resolution touch display with 1,024 levels of pressure. 10 point touch.

Harry: Only 3 hours of battery life though so I’m a little unclear.

Leo: Well, on that pad. On the separate thing. When they’re together, they claim 12 hours.

Harry: Yea it’s great then but I’m not clear why you’d want to remove that if you only had 3 hours of battery life except in a pinch maybe.

Leo: Yea. You can remove it, flip it, flip the thing around as a convertible. And I don’t like convertibles where the keyboard is now on the table. So this is a better way to do a convertible out of that. You just flip it around and close it on top of it. That’s probably how you’d use it if you wanted to use it as a tablet. It comes with a pen. They’ve heavily magnetized the pen on the new Surface and the new Surface Book.

Harry: Finally.

Leo: So it goes whack. Paul Thurrott says it almost leaps out of your hand. Whack! On to the side of the thing.

Harry: Like the biggest unsolved problem of anything with a stylus is you never know what to do with the stylus.

Leo: Where does it go?

Georgia: You always lose the stylus. It’s somewhere in the couch.

Harry: And Apple didn’t bother to do anything with its iPad Pro.

Leo: It’s crazy clothespin. Is your BB8 getting upset?

Georgia: It’s not me, it’s not me. I thought it was you.

Leo: It’s not me. Robert?

Robert: (Laughing).

Leo: Oh, he’s up to something.

Georgia: He was ready for me to take the hit for that one, too.

Leo: He is up for something. He’s got something going on. What do you think of this hinge though? This—I don’t even know why they did this hinge?

Georgia: I love the, I love it. It’s so cool. It’s like an icicle where it bends in and out it’s called the fulcrum hinge which is so cool because it’s going to stop at whatever point you would like it to. But it really bothers me that it does not close seamlessly. It looks like a middle space.

Leo: It’s like a clothespin, yea.

Georgia: And that bothers me.

Leo: So the reason that they give for this fulcrum hinge is stability of the laptop. It is one of the problems on, especially on thin, light laptops. And now you’ve got a big battery in the screen and stuff.

Harry: It’s certainly an issue with all the Surfaces.

Leo: They tip. You push it and it tips over. So the idea of this fulcrum is actually it changes the center of balance so that it’s much more, they say much more stable. It also, and I think that this is probably not an insignificant reason for it, makes it visually distinctive. You know what you’re seeing, right? It’s also the first laptop ever to have the Windows logo on it. Which you may not know if you watch TV because you see the laptops on TV all the time with a Windows logo on it. Product placement, but now there finally is a laptop with a Windows logo in the lid.

Harry: I’d love to know what Microsoft’s goal is exactly. Weather they say this is a cash cow or is it aspirational so that Dell and HP—

Leo: That’s what I think.

Harry: -- rip it off?

Leo: They’re showing, they’re showing the OEMs. And it was telling that they compare it to Apple. They compare all this stuff to Apple because they don’t care if Apple’s mad. They don’t want, they can’t compare it to Lenovo or Aces or Acer or HP.

Harry: Are there Mac fanatics out there who are going to dump their MacBook Air to get this?

Leo: No. Well—

Georgia: You know what? It’s kind of interesting because I really like it. If I did not have a laptop and I was not already really invested in the Apple ecosphere I would think about switching because I use a lot of Microsoft products. So there wouldn’t be a huge change. I usually type out, I use Excel, I usually use Power Point and though I sometimes use Key Note and I use Word. But the fact that I know that all Apple products are going to work, it’s going to work really easily, it’s not going to break down. If it breaks down I can bring it to the Apple store. And the barrier to entry when you’re learning something new and I’m not sure about how to navigate on my screen makes the big change of once you’re comfortable with working on a certain computer, the odds of changing are really slim. And I think that that is across the board for people unless you’re in technology. And so you have to learn many different, you know, OS’s which is just a difficult. So that’s why they train it with kids in the schools.

Leo: Right.

Georgia: Because they get comfortable and then once they get comfortable they’re not going to want to learn something new.

Leo: I have to say as a long-time Mac computer user, I am intrigued by this. And I did order it. And I’ll tell you for one reason. I don’t think Apple’s ever going to put Touch into OS10. 

Harry: Probably not.

Leo: And I think I’m not alone. I mean you’re sitting there with an iPad, Harry. But after you use an iPad for a while, don’t you reach out and touch the screen?

Georgia: You’re right.

Leo: I am not against, I know Apple is religiously against the idea, they think, “Well, your arm will get tired,” or I don’t know what. I really think Touch is not a bad thing. I think that screen, it’s 3 x 2 which is interesting, not 16 x 9, it’s an aspect ratio that you see on the iPad and you see on the Chromebook Pixel but never on a Macintosh. It’s got a stylus and really—now, we’ll have to see how much latency there is. It’s not going to be an iPad Pro I’m sure. But I feel like this might be a compelling product and you know, Georgia, after all, the difference between OS10 and Windows is small frankly. They’re all computers. I mean it’s not, it’s not—

Georgia: No, I agree with you. I would love to be able to reach out and touch the screen. I think that it would make it much easier for when I’m interfacing with things. And sometimes I do. If I’ve been using my iPad for a while, then I’m actually going to reach out. And I’m upset that I can’t move something where I exactly want it. I find using a trackpad annoying and tedious to be able to change things, to be able to draw, to be able to use a stylus directly to the screen. It’s one less point, it’s one less point that I would have to interface through. And so that would be nice for me. And I think that that’s a huge bonus on Microsoft’s.

Robert: My kids don’t understand how to use a computer without touch (laughing).

Georgia: Right, right.

Leo: Right.

Georgia: It makes sense.

Robert: Yea it’s interesting that Microsoft is opening a new New York store right by Apple. Like 2 blocks down from the Apple, the key Apple store. And it looks like it’s going to be a showpiece store. And I think that’s why they’re doing this. They need products in their store that represent their brand to the public. And they don’t really care what Dell thinks anymore. I think you guys nailed it. It’s copy Apple when you have to and then innovate when you can and here’s a good example where some innovation’s come in.

Leo: The one thing I’ll miss is the command line. One of the reasons I use a Mac is because I love having a UNIX command line and all the UNIX tools available to me from that command line. If I could solve that, and I don’t know what it’s going to be, if it’s Cygwin or PuTTY.

Harry: What do you use them for?

Leo: I don’t know. Actually (laughing) I don’t use it all that much, but when I use it—

Harry: I do that once every other year.

Leo: I fire up e.max, I like to do—

Harry: They’re good for troubleshooting occasionally.

Leo: Yea. Yea, and I just like the command line. I don’t know why I do. I will probably look at, you know, Power Shell or Cygwin or something to see if I can get that duplication. But really most of the time what you do on a computer these days are you’re in the browser, right? And Chrome looks the same on a Windows machine as on a Mac.

Harry: And looks the same on a Chromebook.

Leo: That’s true. I love my Chromebook.

Robert: I mean a million people today are buying a new smartphone. And they don’t even know what the hell we’re talking about because many of their customers don’t use laptops or desktop computers. You know, we’re a dying breed.

Leo: When will Apple invent Touch on laptops?

Robert: When it can prove there’s a market.

Harry: The iPad Pro is their answer there, at least for the next few years.

Leo: Yea. And I’ll probably buy that too because I think that’s intriguing. I’m not sure who the winner will be. I think this is very intriguing. The difference is Windows has plenty of apps for it. Because Microsoft bit the bullet and did Windows 8 and really said, “We’re going to go Touch,” there’s a lot of support for Touch in the OS and in the app store.

Harry: There is. I still get frustrated though with the Surface. It’s nice as the Surface hardware is, if you use like Photo Shop and Corel Painter and 6 or 7 other desktop apps, they all react to Touch differently. And in no case is it ideal.

Leo: And the targets are small. It’s hard to try to close a window with Touch.

Harry: The reason I’m excited about the iPad Pro is at least it is a device where every single app is kind of consistent in the UI and every single app is Touch first, still not true with Windows.

Leo: Right. Well, we’ll see and I’ll certainly do a review of it. But I think this was, I think cool for a number of reasons. For one thing, nobody knew that Microsoft had this up their sleeve. And even people like Paul Thurrott who heard didn’t believe it.

Harry: Microsoft is actually pretty good. Microsoft is actually better than Apple these days with keeping the big secrets really secret. Because that was also true with the original Surface. I went to that event and they did really show all the stuff that they had managed to keep completely secret.

Leo: Yea, yea.

Georgia: I think that because Microsoft is not as secretive in the first place though, people are not, you know, gunning. The Apple Store is a huge story where Microsoft is like, “Eh, Lumina. Meh.” You know, like no one’s really eating up those stories, so.

Robert: You know I used to work at Microsoft. And the interest in Microsoft products just is not even close to that of Apple’s.

Leo: Right.

Robert: You know, Microsoft’s business model caused the anti-secrecy, right, because they had OEM’s building all the devices for the new versions of Windows. And there was no way to keep a secret. Now that they’re building their own branded stuff it’s a lot easier to keep a secret because you can control the entire line of who’s touching that product and keep them quiet. It’s the supply chain issue.

Leo: Well, Georgia, if you and I are going to switch to Windows, then we probably should watch the new bio pic. Not Steve Jobs but Michael Dell.

Michael Dell (movie): Remember what we do is to eliminate the middle man and sell custom ordered PCs made from stock parts direct to the consumer. That’s it. Everyone with me?

Georgia: Love the hair.

Michael Dell (movie): Good. Hi. Nothing new to report at Dell. We haven’t made any new computers yet so we’ll just keep selling the old ones for now. Ok, bye.

Male Actor 1 (movie): Now this is just an early prototype.

Michael Dell (movie): It looks great.

Male Actor 1 (movie): Thanks.

Male Actor 2 (movie): Don’t you want us to turn it on?

Michael Dell (movie): Na, just start shipping.

Male Actor 1 (movie): But we need to make it great.

Michael Dell (movie): No. You need to make it cheap.

Female Actor 1 (movie): What is project MP? A mouse pad?

Michael Dell (movie): Free with every shipment.

Male Actor 1 (movie): Who are we as a company? What do we stand for? 

Michael Dell (movie): Don’t think different.

Georgia: Do people still use mouse pads?

Michael Dell (movie): Think same. And guys, we’ve got to make these laptops really, really thick with the fans in the back so they can see them cooling down.

Narrator (movie): One man set out to change the world.

Michael Dell (movie): Let me just… oh, there we go.

Male Actor 3 (movie) Why would the E be like that?

Michael Dell (movie): I don’t know. Doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

Narrator: Michael Dell. Rated PG-13. Starts Friday.

Leo: (Laughing).

Georgia: (Laughing).

Leo: Thank you, Conan. We’ll come back with lots more. You’re watching TWiT with Georgia Dow from iMore.com. Harry McCracken from Fast Company and the Scoble-izer. Ahhhhhh! What’s your Halloween costume going to be?

Robert: I have no idea. I’m probably going to be on a plane somewhere. Ahh, no, come on. Come on, you’ve got to do Halloween.

Robert: I don’t know.

Leo: Do you do Halloween?

Robert: Not really. My kids do Halloween.

Leo: I realize what I’m going to be. I’m going to be Paul Blart mall cop. Because I’ve got the Segway, I’ve got the cop shirt. All I need to do is grow a mustache, I’m in. I’ve got the gut.

Robert: I’m Elon Musk.

Leo: Be Elon Musk. I did a terrible thing the other day.

Robert: What’s that?

Georgia: Uh oh.

Leo: I put down a deposit on the Tesla X.

Georgia: Beautiful. Beautiful car.

Leo: I can get out of that if I want to, right? If I change my mind?

Georgia: No, no, you’re stuck now.

Leo: (Laughing) I think I have to buy one now. It’s a year. It’s one of those—I fall for these every time. They go, “Oh, don’t worry, it’s going to be a year. You can change your mind.”

Robert: You’re going to give up your Audi?

Georgia: You can sell your BB 8. So don’t worry.

Leo: My Audi’s a lease. So it runs out in October. That’s about when I’ll get this thing. It has doors that go like this.

Georgia: The doors are super sweet.

Leo: It goes like this.

Georgia: I don’t know how I’d get out of my garage though. I might be stuck in the garage.

Leo: And I could put my Segway right in it. It’s got lots of space (laughing).

Robert: I love the Tesla, man.

Leo: You don’t drive a Tesla. Do you drive a Tesla?

Robert: I’m jealous. I’m waiting for the $45,000 one.

Leo: That—well, you can thank me and those who have gone before because apparently we’re buying really expensive Teslas so that he can make in a couple of years the Tesla for the rest of us.

Georgia: Is that really why you’re doing it, Leo?

Leo: Yea.

Georgia: Is this an altruistic act?

Harry: We all appreciate it.

Leo: Sure. Right?

Georgia: Is that what you’re telling everyone?

Leo: Yea. I’m an altruist.

Georgia: I’m really psyched and I’m just buying it to help others.

Leo: I care. I care about humanity. Can you tell when somebody’s lying—I mean, you’re a physiologist—by just looking at them?

Georgia: Yes.

Harry: It’s philanthropic.

Georgia: Yes I can. It’s a skill.

Leo: (Laughing) yes I can. Oh, here comes my wife. Shh. Ix-nay on the esla-tay. Out show today brought to you by Squarespace. You know it’s so funny because for a long time I thought that I, I really thought that a part of my job was to have a WordPress site so I could experience what it’s like to modify the templates, to update every 48 hours with the new fix to avoid the security flaws. And I finally just threw in the towel the other day. I said, “I’ve been doing Squarespace ads for like 10 years. Maybe I don’t need to have my own self hosted WordPress Blog.” And it’s kind of embarrassing. It’s so easy. It was so nice. I’ve set it up. And we’re going to make, I’m just going to flip the switch as soon as I get my server ops to tell me how to do that. But gosh Squarespace is great. If you go to leoville.tv you can see the beginning. I started with a cover page which is what I really like about Squarespace is that it’s really easy to set up a basic, beginning cover page. It’s kind of your, I don’t know, your business card on the internet. And if actually you take away the lower third Squarespace you could see at the bottom it’s got all of my social, the links to all my social media and it’s got a LinkedIn. It’s just a really—you can even put like—this is the front cover. So you click the blog and I was able to get my entire blog imported from the WordPress Blog going back to I think I started in 2001, 2002. It’s really easy to embed content. The tweets, they came in there automatically. The Instagram comes in there automatically. I’ve even decided to do an events thing. This is one of things the templates are so great. They have things for you know, all kinds—like I have my photographs. That’s the only event. But there’ll be more events soon. I can have a little photo blog. And then you can use the portfolio app to show your portfolio. I just, I mean, I’m thinking, “You know, Squarespace really is great. (laughing).” It makes it easy to create a—I’ve known this but I’ve known it academically, you know? And now I’ve finally done it, it’s like wow. This was easy. This was fun. And this took be an evening of just having fun, frankly. You can create a professional website, a blog as I’ve done or a store. If you’re a band they have templates for bands, for restaurants. Incredible 24/7 support. I didn’t have to call the support at all because it was just like, pfft, so easy. And you know if I decided I want to try a different template, you just click the template. Boom. It’s done. All of these templates are state of the art. You know what inspired me is we were talking to Jason Calacanis, he was on The New Screen Savers a few weeks ago. And somebody asked on the show, you know, how much should it cost to get a new website? Where do I go to get one? And he said, “You’d be crazy to design your own website these days. You should hire a designer,” and all that stuff. Because companies like Squarespace have done it. They have the best state of the art templates. Mobile responsive, all the technology that you want. You don’t want, it’s crazy to reinvent the wheel, and you get e-commerce and you get hosting that never goes down. And it’s affordable. $8/month when you sign up for a year. I signed up for a year. I thought, “What the heck?” That’s nothing. And you get $100 in Ad Words credit when you sign up for the business or commerce plans. It is just gorgeous. So if you’ve been waiting, if you’ve been trying to do it yourself, waiting, if you’re a new business, if you’re a restaurant and you have a site that you’re not the happiest with, you know there are companies that really frankly prey on businesses, that prey on brides and stuff. And says, “Oh, no, we do all the wedding.” Don’t do that. You can do it. It’s better. Squarespace.com. Try it free for 2 weeks. Just click the Get Started button. No credit card needed. All I ask if you decide to buy, I forgot to do this. I’m so stupid. Use the promo code TWIT and you’ll get 10% off.

Georgia: You didn’t use your own promo code?

Leo: I didn’t even use my own promo code. I’m such an idiot. Squarespace. What a moron. Squarespace.com. You use the promo code, get your 10% off. Squarespace. Build it beautiful. 

Georgia: Do it for Leo. He needs to get someone there.

Leo: Do it for me. I’ve got to pay for the Tesla. No, I was just blown away. Yea, there’s pictures on here that I’ve never—I just really had fun doing this. And what was amazing is, you know my real concern was how do I get 15 years of blog content from my old platform to my new platform? It was really, really easy. It just kind of happened overnight. It was easy to hook it up to hover.com. I just love this. Yea, that’s our wedding picture. I don’t think anybody’s ever seen that.

Georgia: It’s beautiful.

Leo: Yea, it was just the three of us.

Georgia: That’s exactly what you want. Less people.

Leo: It was weird. We did it and this is not a fake. This is not photo shopped. This actually happened. I was looking at my phone and the giraffe looked over my shoulder.

Jason: That is not fake either.

Leo: This is not fake either. This actually happened. There was a meteor in the sky.

Harry: Where did you meet a giraffe?

Leo: That was at the San Diego Zoo, the safari. You go out in a tram and you go feed the giraffes. And they’re out there and they just reach their necks over because you’ve got bamboo shoots or whatever you like. And I was looking at my phone. I wasn’t paying attention. And the giraffe just kind of nuzzled me. And Georgia, it was a great moment. It was like, “Oh, yea. I should be paying attention to nature.”

Georgia: Right, instead of the phone.

Leo: Instead of the phone.

Georgia: But then again, nature was paying attention to the technology as well, so.

Leo: Yea the giraffe was actually very curious (laughing). He really was.

Georgia: Is he tweeting?

Leo: He was tweeting. I think I tweeted that picture. I Instagrammed it or something (laughing). All right, moving on. I’m so embarrassed that for all these years—I’ve done Squarespace sites for friends and stuff before. But I just felt like, “Oh, I really, probably true. I really need to understand how, you know, how hard it is. I have to do it the hard way.” And it—I don’t know what I was thinking. It’s so much easier. Let’s see. We covered the Microsoft stuff, right? Nothing more to say there. We covered the Steve Jobs. Oh wait. I don’t know how to talk about this. Harry, you’re sophisticated.

Harry: I claim to be.

Leo: AMP. Accelerated Mobile Pages. We actually did a very deep dive on This Week in Google on Wednesday. We had Kevin Marks who’s a developer and really worked at Google and understands web standards and all of that. This is their response to Apple’s news.

Harry: Facebook.

Leo: Facebook’s news initiative to medium. Publishers apparently are interested—I don’t know why a publisher would want to do AMP. But I guess they’re interested in making their stuff look better and be more usable. And Jeff Jarvis who was also on TWiG point out that a lot of companies now like BuzzFeed, they don’t have, they don’t care about a home page. They put their content everywhere. Vice does this as well. The idea is that it doesn’t matter where you read a Vice article. On Facebook, on Twitter, on you know, on Flipboard, as long as you’re reading the article. And nobody goes to a homepage anymore. Nobody goes to newyorktimes.com to read the paper, right? You’re much more likely to deep link into it from some other source. So AMP is an initiative at making pages load more quickly on mobile and desktop. You can actually try it for yourself if you go to google.co/ I think it’s amped. And then you’ll get a Google search page. But the pages you find will be AMP-ed up pages. And it’s G.co/amp. Yea. And you should probably do this on mobile. But there’s all sorts of new things. There’s a carousel. It’s—can somebody explain why A. I guess I understand why Google’s doing this. They’re doing it in conjunction with Twitter. It’s open source. It’s all on GitHub. But it’s weird. Like it—you can’t use Java script. Google has to approve any Java script that you use. There’s no image tag, there’s no IFrames, there’s no embedding. You have to, everything kind of has to go through this subset of HTML with the goal to support caching, to support speed. And you know, Wordpress.com has already said, “We’re going to support it.” Pinterest has said, “We’re going to support it.” I presume Squarespace—I bet you anything they’re going to support it. So if you’re using a publishing platform you might get the benefit automatically. But why would somebody want to use a constrained, a limited version of HTML?

Harry: And it’s—

Robert: Here’s why. Go ahead, Harry.

Leo: First Harry, then Robert.

Harry: I mean it’s part, it’s a reaction I think to a couple of things. One of which is Facebook did something very similar that within the world of Facebook, Google is doing, also wants to speed up your pages but in a more open way.

Leo: Everywhere. On the open web.

Harry: I think Facebook did it in part because media companies have a pretty shaky history of figuring out how to make their sites good. A lot of media sites are horribly slow and are not usable on mobile devices.

Leo: And these new ad networks don’t help either.

Harry: And the ads are really hurting you because you’re bogged down by enormous amounts of JAVA script. They’re taking Java script out partially because there are so many sites that are unusable because there’s all this JAVA script tracking you and bogging down the experience. And Google has always worked under the correct philosophy that when you start to get slow, people just abandon you. So speed is usability. And I think they’re trying to lead media sites in the right direction by doing this. And I basically like the idea because media sites do need help on this front. They’ve done a terrible job. And if, the fact that it’s a little more open makes it appealing. 

Leo: Robert, why? And why, if I’m the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal should I consider this? Why if I’m Leo Laporte should I consider it?

Robert: Because you lose fewer readers when you get faster. And we know this from tracking users and Facebook tracks everybody. Google tracks everybody. And we’ve talked about this—

Leo: But isn’t this going too far? It’s, you can’t do half the thing that the web is supposed to be able to do. 

Robert: Here’s the deal. You’re on a mobile phone. You see a headline. You click on it. And you count. And on the average website, it’s usually 5-8 seconds. On Facebook’s approach it’s instant. Because it’s pre-cached that stuff underneath the webpage. Sort of how Flipboard got so fast. Why did Flipboard feel so nice and fast? Because they pre-cached everything underneath the web page so when you clicked that link it was already there and it would pop up.

Leo: Right.

Robert: And I know I get, I go away from pages that don’t pop up. And if Facebook knows this, Google knows it.

Leo: Well that’s why we use ad blockers.

Robert: That’s another reason, right? Because you remove a bunch of stuff. I mean one of the tech blogs is one page is like 30MB now and if you’re reading that on a mobile phone it takes forever, right? And it kills your data plan too.

Leo: Yea, there’s quite a few tech blogs, there’s quite a few tech blogs I can’t read on my mobile because there’s popups that cover things I can’t close them. It becomes an exercise in frustration. You actually cannot get to the content.

Robert: And there you go. Because Facebook is not in the business of frustrating its users. And neither is Google and neither is Twitter. They need to figure out a way so that when you’re on a mobile phone, you click a link and it pops up. And it makes you feel good and you use that 5 seconds to read the damn article. By the way, that 5 seconds could be reading the article a little bit deeper and you get another ad. It improves your monetization which is what Jack is being asked to do by his investors, right?

Leo: Right.

Robert: And so, it’s easy for me--

Georgia: And didn’t Google also say that they’re going to rank higher on Google itself? So, that’s—

Leo: That’s what scares me.

Georgia: Yea.

Leo: That’s Google using its power in the marketplace to promote a technology that’s, you know, Google’s.

Robert: And Facebook is doing the exact same thing. You know, Washington Post, I’m seeing a lot more Washington Post lately because they’re using the Facebook technology. And they’re going to all their media partners and saying, “Do you want to let Washington Post take all your users? Because it’s the same darn articles you all are writing. Let’s be honest. Why don’t we just put all the traffic over to Washington Post and keep you from being seen because your articles take 8 seconds and piss off our readers?”

Leo: I feel like though there must be an answer that doesn’t involve going this far and doing this in Google’s camp, you know?

Harry: Well I would hope that media companies would have the fear of God put into them and in some cases would improve their own technologies. I think this stuff will raise the bar for user experience and it will be harder to get away with crummy sites, overloaded with ads and Java script that bog you down.

Robert: Yea and how do we get the industry to start doing the same? I don’t know. The real problem is a lot of these media companies can’t afford to hire really high end programmer that knows how to do this stuff right. And even if you can, they’re usually focused on making ads work properly because that’s where the money is.

Leo: Well there are incentives to use these ad networks and you know, and then they end up junking up their pages when they get to the bottom of the inventory and it’s belly fat ads and punch the monkey. I just feel like, I wish Google wouldn’t use its clout in its search to kind of—and by the way, we don’t know how much it’s going to improve your score, right Georgia, or do we?

Georgia: No, we don’t. But just by saying that, and when you know, your Google rank is going to change the amount of page views, people are incessantly lazy and are not going to be clicking through pages and we really don’t have very much brand loyalty when it comes to news or information. We want to get what is fastest, best. So Google just by saying that, even if it’s only marginally true is going to kind of push people to try to increase their ad revenue by getting a better Google search rank. So it’s going to change it. And is it wrong? Yes. But if you were Google wouldn’t you do the same thing?

Leo: Feels like they’re reinventing the web or they—I feel—

Robert: They’re being forced to by Facebook.

Leo: They want to have Google Web.

Georgia: For example.

Leo: Yea.

Robert: And Apple, right?

Leo: By the way, Apple—what are your thoughts on Apple news? I find this really not useable. Now the links, for a while the links weren’t working. I don’t want Apple to aggregate my news.

Georgia: I don’t, I don’t like aggregated news in any way, shape or form. I like to search out for stories that are interesting to me. And so I don’t think that I’m the person that’s going to really use it. The same thing though for Google. I really don’t want them to curate news for me. I don’t like one large network being in control of what is being, you know, in control of what is the information that’s going to be given to me. Because I think that’s too much control for too many main companies. And you know, information is power. And so if it’s, if there’s a lot of stories that are anti-Google, they might really push that down on the importance list and it might rank a little lower. So they control, you know, which I understand. I fully understand. If I was Google I would probably do the same thing. I wouldn’t want to have a lot of bad press about a product that people don’t like. But I think that that’s why you know, you have to control the amount of power that large, conglomerate companies have.

Leo: Now you’re European. Now you’re talking European.

Georgia: (Laughing) I’m from a Socialist country, so, isn’t that already where it comes to?

Leo: Oh, that explains it. Jarvis was so upset about this European Court of Justice invalidating a safe harbor agreement between the United States and the European Union that would allow US companies to kind of say, self-certify compliance with privacy rules in the EU. Now they’re saying that there’s no safe harbor and that every company that does business in the EU including Google and Facebook has to adhere to the privacy regulations of each and every country in the EU. Which is very scary because that’s a difficult thing to do. On the other hand, I understand a lot of privacy advocates applauded this. So I don’t know what to say. Feels like it breaks the internet also. Feels like there’s a lot of things going on to break the internet. Stop it. Knock it off. Hey, did you miss anything this week? We had some good shows. You know what, I’ve got a little cut down I’d like to show you. Some of the things you missed this week on TWiT.

Narrator: Previously on TWiT.

Leo: It says, “Look at a reel.” Oh! Oh! There’s little animals on my reel! Oh I wish you could see that.

Narrator: Windows Weekly.

Leo: A showmanship A+. We’re talking about the new Surface Book.

Mary Jo Foley: When they showed a laptop I think I would have jumped out of my seat and like yelled (laughing).

Leo: Yea. Yea.

Paul Thurrott: They made a device that was laughable. By anybody. Even legless Joe over here.

Mary Jo: Hey, what?

Narrator: Home Theater Geeks.

Scott Wilkinson: This week’s guest geek is Rikki Farr. The story of your father and how that got you sort of into the whole music business is quite fascinating.

Rikki Farr: Yea, I’m waiting to order my chili dog and I suddenly hear this voice behind me go, “Oh, I know who you are. You’re the boxer’s boy. I’m John Lennon. I’m with the Beatles over at the Indra Club.” He says, “Come one over.” I found my drug of choice. And it was the music.

Narrator: Security Now.

Steve Gibson: Wifatch. It behaves just like a worm. It hardens the security of its host devices. It will retroactively remove any preexisting malware that it finds. The do-gooder, vigilante worm.

Leo: He’s quite a Robin Hood.

Narrator: TWiT. Making the world safe for technology.

Leo: If you missed that interview that Scott Wilkinson had with Rikki Farr, he’s the guy who produced the Isle of White Festival, he does impressions, he does—it’s amazing. If you’re a fan of Jimmy Hendrix and The Who and you know, The Beatles, you’ve got to watch it. It was an amazing Home Theater Geeks. Twit.tv/htg. Tomorrow on Triangulation, the founder of F-Secure, security guru Mikko Hypponen will join us. He is an amazing guy who’s been covering this scene for years. For years I recommended F-disk, going back to the early 90s as the antivirus of choice. And he really will have a lot to say. And if you missed The New Screen Savers yesterday, we had the creator of TOR on, Paul Syverson. And he’s going to come back and do a full Triangulation with us. Next week, I already did the interview, some of you saw it, Danny Boyle, the director of the new Steve Jobs movie, will join us on The New Screen Savers. So a lot of good stuff coming up. Our show today brought to you by Braintree. Mobile app developers, I’ve got something for you. If you have to get a payments API into your app or your website and you’re wracking your brains, look no farther than Braintree. Braintreepayments.com. With a few lines of code, I mean literally 10 lines of code you will be ready to accept Apple Pay, Android Pay, PayPal, Venmo, credit cards, even Bitcoin. And when new technologies come along you just go to your control panel and you check the box and there it is. They do it all for you. It’s secure. They have great fraud protection. Fast payouts to you. And your customers are going to love it. I mean you don’t have to, you know, go much farther than the references they provide. Braintree payments are used by Uber and Lyft. I mean that’s what makes Uber awesome is the payment system. Uber and Lyft, competitors. They use it. Both of them. Hotels Tonight and Air B&B. They use Braintree. GitHub uses Braintree. It’s really the best solution. Maybe you’ve seen the 1 touch SKD that gets you—this is what Uber uses—you don’t even have to do a checkout. You know what, here I did an interview with the general manager for Braintree Mobile. His name is Aunkur Arya. And he talked a little bit about this. The next big thing for online retailers.

Aunkur Arya: Contextual commerce is bringing the buying experience inside of a newsfeed or a consumer platform and not requiring the consumer to have to click away to a merchant’s website to complete a purchase. So it’s really talking all of the really good demographic data and allowing consumers to buy where they’re comfortable discovering things. So the same way that consumers love to do a one-click buying experience with Uber and Air B&B, they’re going to want to do that experience with some of these big consumer platforms that they’re highly engaged with.

Leo: I think this is technology from Harper Reed’s company that Braintree just recently acquired. Anyway, Modest? Was it Modest? I think that was the name of it. No matter what you’re selling, Braintree is awesome. Fast payouts, continuous support. From your 1st dollar to your billionth, you’ll see fewer abandoned carts and more sales with Braintree’s best in class mobile check out experience. Have I convinced you? How about this? Your first $50,000 in transactions fee free. Find out more. Braintreepayments.com/twit. Look no farther. You have found true payment nirvana. Braintreepayments.com/twit. I’m just going to read the headline. You guys can comment. Blackberry’s CEO wants to sell 5 million phones a year.

Robert: Good luck with that.

Leo: (Laughing) you know, you can say it all you want. John Chen told The Verge his goal is 5 million smartphones a year but this is the 2nd part of that sentence, which will be necessary to make the business profitable. If that doesn’t happen, Chen hinted Blackberry may exit the handset business altogether.

Robert: That sounds more serious—oh, go ahead, Harry.

Harry: That kind of reminded me of Donald Trump talking about why he might get out of the Presidential race. Because Chen was talking about the scenarios under which Blackberry would get out. Which is the first thing you do before you decide to get out.

Leo: Yea. I mean he’s already thinking about it, right? He’s already got a number. That’s kind of a giveaway.

Robert: They’ve always insisted that making an Android phone isn’t going to be profitable enough to stay in the business. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Leo: And now it’s their last, best hope, right?

Robert: Well they should have done it two years ago, you know, when they still had people who were customers and still had a lot of brand value. There are still people I see on planes with Blackberries.

Leo: Oh, sure.

Robert: But are they going to be willing to give up their Blackberry and be the last people on earth that haven’t joined iPhone or Android and jump over to Android. You know, I don’t know. That’s a—

Leo: They’re smart. So this is the new Android phone from Blackberry. It’s called the Priv or the Priv.

Harry: Priv.

Leo: Ok. But it’s the first sellable private. And it even almost reminds me a little bit of Blackphone or some of these other phones that are kind of aimed at being secure. At least Blackberry has some history and tradition of that. So it could be credible that they might. And as you say, Robert, there are a lot of business and government people who still believe in Blackberry. They’re currently on a pace to sell about 3 million phones a year. So it’s not maybe such a stretch to say 5.

Harry: But it’s not, I mean even if they did do well on Android, it’s not so clear that even the Android phone business is a great idea these days either, so.

Leo: It’s a race to the bottom. It’s like being in the PC business.

Harry: Maybe there’s some scenario in which they somehow are able to charge enough. But there’s no direct profit in there.

Leo: 600 is what I think I heard.

Robert: It’s interesting Leo, you talked on your commercial about developers though. We haven’t talked about Amazon at all.

Leo: What do you want to say about Amazon, big boy?

Robert: The hot news was the IoT, the Internet of Things API and STK that they came out with.

Leo: I think Amazon doesn’t get enough credit for being a disruptive business, do they?

Robert: Yep.

Leo: They look like a retailer. They’re so not a retailer.

Robert: No, you know, when I speak I talk about Amazon Echo. And it’s real interesting that, usually it’s only about 1% of the audience that has an Echo. But everybody loves it who has it. Do you have one?

Leo: Yea, I do. We’ve been around long enough, haven’t we, Harry and Robert and Georgia, to know that when everybody is talking about something, there’s something going on you know. It happened with the Palm, it happened with the TiVo. It’s not a guarantee to success, it just means that there’s something exciting. Do you have an Echo?

Harry: I do and I think Amazon’s been pretty clever about how they roll it out. It’s the opposite of the Fire Phone where they held a huge press event and bragged about it. But the Echo they rolled it out quietly. And I’m still more excited about the potential of Echo than the actual device. But I definitely think there is something there.

Robert: What do you us it for, Harry?

Harry: I use it for listening to podcasts and musical apps.

Robert: So you say, “Alexa, play TWiT?”

Leo: It’s made for podcasts?

Harry: I use it as an alarm clock.

Leo: Yea, it’s great for TWiT. So you can say, you can listen to TWiT live. You say exactly that. I won’t say her name, but “Echo listen to TWiT live.”

Harry: I use it a lot with TuneIn.

Leo: On TuneIn.

Robert: We can turn on everybody’s Echo in the world. Alexa—

Leo: Stop it, stop it, stop it. Stop it. That is one flaw. They need to have more than two names for that. Every-- I’ve been begging for this. Same time with OK you know who, and hey you know who. Every one of these phones should allow you to customize this phrase. Motorola is the only company that ever did that. But I should be able to have my own phrases.

Robert: Let’s go back to the developer’s story because that fits in here. They have become the default for innovation on the cloud. 

Leo: Didn’t they fire the entire Fire team?

Harry: Not all of them but a bunch of them.

Leo: What is it, A29 or whatever they were? A9?

Harry: A9.

Robert: Yea but if you visit a startup and you ask them you know, “What have you built on?” Instagram is on top of AWS. Flipboard is on AWS. Newbank is on top of AWS. And you know, that’s why we’ve announced a deal with Amazon as well. On Rackspace.

Leo: Oh really?

Robert: Yea, we’re now providing support for—

Leo: They’re a direct competitor aren’t they?

Robert: Not anymore.

Leo: Ah.

Robert: We’re best of friends now.

Leo: You’re talking about—

Georgia: That’s why he wants to talk about it now.

Leo: You’re talking about Amazon Web Services which you’re right. Everybody runs on. In fact, again this is an example of how Amazon in a stealth way is a disrupter. By making Amazon Web Services, they really made it possible for anybody to create an app startup or a web startup. Because in the past, I remember when Kevin Rose started Digg. He had to buy a ColoSpace and he had to buy servers and he had to set up servers. It was a lot of money. And it was complicated. Now you just spin up an Amazon Web Service instance and you’ve got a proof of concept all the way up to a full scaled service. So revenue’s been very good for AWS by the way. 

Robert: You’re going to see us provide support for AWS, Azure, OpenStack and our own cloud.

Leo: Interesting. That’s a smart way to go actually for Rackspace.

Robert: Yea because let’s be honest. We couldn’t keep up with the innovation that Amazon was investing in. They just had way more engineers than we could ever afford.

Leo: A billion—it’s a billion dollar business on 6 billion in sales. I mean they really know what they’re doing there.

Robert: But, you know, they’re not good at service. I was hanging out with the geek who built Coachella’s sensor network and their badge system and it’s all built on AWS and he was having a lot of trouble even getting through to their team. And so.

Leo: Wasn’t Google Drive down on Friday?

Harry: Yes. Google Docs. I guess Google Drive.

Leo: Google Docs was down. So that’s the other thing. When you hear stories like that it scares people. Because if Google can’t keep their servers up—

Harry: Yea, at Fast Company we do a lot of our keeping track of our stories in a Google spreadsheet which we briefly could not get to.

Leo: That’s scary.

Robert: Yep.

Leo: If Dvorak were here, he’d say, “I told you so. Cloud. Bad idea.”

Robert: Well, you know, holding your servers down in your basement’s a bad idea too. You know—

Leo: They can go down there too. They can go down anywhere.

Robert: Absolutely. And the chances that you have a nerd keeping them up to date and keeping them, you know, watching them to make sure they’re not too hot or the hard drives aren’t burning out is a whole other thing.

Leo: Amazon for a long time has been talking about making a pay TV service. They are apparently at it again. According to sources with Bloomburg Business Week they’ve reached out to CBS and NBC about carrying their channels on an on-line pay TV service. A cord cutter’s dream. Doesn’t mean they’re going to make those deals because a lot of people like a little company called Apple have been trying to make those deals for a long, long time. And the networks are understandably a little slow to embrace this. Dan Rayburn, we’ve talked to him on the show before, he does a streaming media blog, said that “Content owners were approached by the company.” I didn’t know this. Did you know this, John? Amazon bought Elemental. So the streaming hardware that we use because Colleen Kelley told us to buy it, when you watch our live streams, it’s encoded by something called an Elemental. Didn’t know this but Amazon bought them. Did you know that? Oh, they knew that. Why didn’t you tell me (laughing)? So that’s an interesting business for them to get into. And they have AWS for IoT which is what I know you were talking about, Robert. Tell me what that means. It means…

Robert: They’re, so if you’re a company like Union Pacific. You’re putting sensors underneath the rails to watch, to listen to the trains going overhead. If you’re a company like Cantaloupe in San Francisco you’re putting a package inside vending machines that’s going to talk to the internet. And you’re going to use this new AWS IoT STK to glue it all together and do new things with all those sensors that are around.

Leo: Hmm. So it’s kind of like Amazon Web Services for the web, but only instead for these little devices.

Robert: Yea, so think about it is you know—

Leo: Makes it easier to create an IoT device.

Robert: Now Nest is on Google’s. But let’s say you’re building a new thing to you know, build a new kind of desk with a sensor for instance. You’re going to use this STK to hook the sensors in the desk to the cloud and so you can do stuff on the cloud.

Leo: I kind of spit up my coffee a little bit when I read yesterday, or maybe it was on Friday, that LastPass was acquired by LogMeIn. I love LastPass. I know many geeks use it. We use it for, we use the enterprise version for business, I use it. It’s a password vault.

Robert: I use it too.

Leo: And they said, TechCrunch said $110 million to Joe Siegrist and company. Joe was really pretty much, I mean he created LastPass himself and ran a very reliable and secure service that a lot of geeks trusted. I especially trusted it after Steve Gibson took a look at it, talked with Joe, looked at the source code. Joe was very kind to let him look at the source code and gave it thumbs up. LogMeIn, eh, I’m not so sure that I trust them as much as I do LastPass. So I don’t know… what do you guys?

Robert: Well, keep in mind LogMeIn is a pretty cool system that you can share your Mac or your PC and get into it with your other devices. So that requires a lot of trust as well.

Leo: They’re a remote access company. I know a lot of people who have been unhappy with how LogMeIn has run the service. They had a free version which people recommended for a long time. Killed that. They apparently still have considerable number of bugs that people have been complaining about. But most importantly, the history of LogMeIn and Hamachi, another acquisition that they basically killed, worries me a little bit.

Harry: Just in general, I mean it is a useful reminder that if you are going to trust somebody with something that is as important as keeping your accounts safe, you don’t know what’s going to happen to them. And better they be acquired than they go away. 

Leo: Right.

Harry: But maybe best of all they keep on doing what they’re doing especially if you entrusted them, because you’re like the people running up.

Leo: Right. Yea, it’s a challenge and there are other choices. What do you use for a password vault?

Harry: You know I jump around a lot because I like to know what’s going on there.

Leo: Smart.

Harry: And tried all of them. I’ve tried like Dashlane, My Password.

Leo: My problem is I kind of get invested in one. I’ve got hundreds of passwords in LastPass. OnePassword, Dashlane, RoboForm AI—

Robert: The one I usually hear about is OnePassword.

Leo: KeyPass is open source but doesn’t have the flexibility. What do you use, Georgia?

Georgia: I use OnePassword or my brain (laughing) so—

Leo: Your brain is the thing you should not use.

Georgia: I really shouldn’t use it because I will forget my password to absolutely everything. OnePassword is happy and it keeps everything there for me because it’s just, there’s too many passwords to use or I’ll end up using the same password for everything which is a horrible, horrible idea.

Robert: Yep.

Harry: I have a basic issue. I do a lot of stuff on mobile devices where it’s a lot harder for any of these services to be as good as they can be.

Leo: But LastPass solves that, you know. Now they solve it with a little bit of, you know, it raises a little bit of an issue because in order for them to solve it, they have to store your passwords. Now you encrypt it with your passphrase and only you know that. They say they can’t decrypt it and I believe that’s true. Steve seems to have verified that. But that is certainly a point of failure because if somebody could get, and there was some concern that maybe they did get the password vaults stored on LastPass’ servers, they could use brute force to bang at them until they got into them. And of course somebody gets your password vault, you’re dead in the water. That is the worst possible scenario. Now LogMeIn has my password vault. I think for the time being I’ll continue to trust them. But it’s time to maybe start looking at some alternatives. I’m sure Steve will be doing that on Security Now on Tuesday. Don’t know what else to say about it, but yea, these things happen. But it’s the same thing when Radio Shack went bankrupt. They sold the Radio Shack customer database. Now you may have agreed to the privacy statement at Radioshack.com or when you joined the Battery Club, but now somebody else has got it. What’s their privacy rule, you know?

Harry: Luckily I no longer have any of the same information that I did when I was a member of the Battery Club, so.

Leo: (Laughing) this is good news. Computer Science is now the top major for women at Stanford. Maybe we’re going to finally break this glass ceiling.

Robert: I hope so.

Leo: It’s awfully lonely here. 214 women are majoring in computer science. That’s 30% of the majors in that department. So it’s still not a majority. Human biology which had been the most popular for women slipped to 2nd place with 208. But women are about 30% of the comp-sci majors at Stanford.

Georgia: Better. It’s improving for sure.

Leo: Better.

Georgia: We’re still a far aways off, but change is slow. Change is slow and it used to be a field where women kind of felt excluded. Like if you don’t see other people in the job we actually don’t think that that’s something we can do. We’re mimics by nature so by bringing your girls, giving them Bitsbox so that they could learn how to code, bringing them to work, that type of thing. And in media and on shows, having more women visible in technology will help them know that there is a place there for them as well.

Leo: Very nice. We’re done. You guys rock. Georgia Dow, what you writing for, what you writing about for iMore.com right now?

Georgia: I haven’t written anything in a little while (laughing). I’m busy writing, I’m doing a conference on the 21st and 23rd in Indianapolis and so I’ve been—yes, it’s going to be on Flow States with Applications. It’s a developer’s conference. And tickets are on sale until the 13th. So I’m busy doing that right now and trying to get all of my slides and make sure that everything flows well into itself. And so we’re going to deal with the psychology of applications and how to make a better app.

Leo: I love that. Flow. Apps should flow. You should be in a flow state.

Georgia: You should. Those are the best applications.

Leo: I love you because you cover both anxiety and flow states. You’ve got both ends of the spectrum.

Georgia: Yes, yes. Yes I’m also doing a sleep. I did a special series for sleep which is I think really one of the number one issues that I see coming up where people are not sleeping as well as they should. They don’t have good sleep hygiene and we don’t, we haven’t taught people how to sleep better and so we—yea, it’s a horrible thing. It’s one of the issues that I deal with and so we released a DVD on how to sleep better.

Leo: Wow. Is that on anxiety-videos.com or is that somewhere else?

Georgia: Yes.

Leo: It is. That one I’m going to get for sure. I don’t have anxiety issues, but I don’t sleep well.

Georgia: It’s a really good one and I use the techniques themselves to help myself through the night. And it works exceptionally well.

Leo: That is a great, great video cover.

Georgia: You like the picture?

Leo: Babies know how to sleep.

Georgia: Sandra picked out that one.

Leo: When we’re born we know how to sleep.

Georgia: We do. We actually mis-learn how to sleep by a lot of bad habits by parenting and noise and just sleep is considered as bad and we’re not being productive when we’re sleeping. But the biggest issue is that we actually become more productive, eat less, feel healthier if we sleep more because our brains are being cleansed of all of the neurotoxins that they build up though the day, all of the refuse. So it’s also a preventative from dementia.

Leo: I wish I could remember to get this. Sandra Reich and Georgia Dow of the Montreal Center for Anxiety and Depression. It’s anxiety-videos.com. I’ll write it down that way I won’t forget. Thank you, Harry McCracken. The technologizer. You’ll find him at fastcompany.com. Always great. Thank you for bringing Marie. Where’d she go?

Harry: She’s over –

Leo: Oh, she’s talking to Lisa.

Harry: Deep in conversation.

Leo: That’s trouble. That’s trouble brewing (laughing).

Harry: Yea, I tried to read her lips but I can’t.

Georgia: They’re talking about the car.

Leo: That’s trouble a-brewing. Actually we’re trying to hire Marie. She’s so good at PR. She’s one of the best ever.

Robert: She sure is.

Leo: And she’s brought us great guests and we just love her.

Harry: She’s not here to hear you saying all these nice things about her.

Leo: That’s ok. She’ll hear about it later.

Harry: She’ll revisit them.

Leo: Thank you, Harry. It’s always great to have you.

Harry: It’s great to be here, Leo. Thanks so much.

Leo: And of course the Scobalizer, by old friend, Robert Scoble.

Robert: What’s up?

Leo: I’ve known you as long as I’ve known anybody in tech. We started working together in the early 90s.

Robert: Yea. When you were on KGO radio.

Leo: KGO. Yep.

Robert: It was awesome.

Leo: Yep. And you’re doing so great. And I’m so proud of you. 

Robert: Thanks.

Leo: And I just feel like you are on a roll and this second half of your century is going to be really good.

Robert: Yea, so far it’s going good.

Leo: Yea.

Robert: Last week was amazing getting to see that camera and everything else.

Leo: Nice.

Robert: Tomorrow I’m speaking to a bunch of Swedish Entrepreneurs, so.

Leo: Really?

Robert: Kick off the week to a good start.

Georgia: Awesome.

Leo: You’re going to talk like the Swedish Chef and do this and—

Robert: Yea. Hopefully I see some cool startups.

Leo: No, don’t insult them. Hey thank you everybody. That’s my job. I’m glad you were here today. We always have fun and if you would like to join us each and every week, the best time to come by, 3:00 PM Pacific, 6:00 PM Eastern time, 2200 UTC. That’s when we do TWiT on Sunday afternoon. If you can’t watch live though, on-demand video always available for all of our shows at twit.tv. Little program note. When I was setting up that Squarespace site I kind of changed the DNS for Leoville.tv and it turns out somehow that I don’t understand, we used to in the old days, we used leoville.tv/podcasts as the podcast URL. We’ve long ago abandoned that. The podcast URL is now feeds.twit.tv. But apparently, maybe it’s not just, maybe somehow iTunes has the old feeds in some cases. Maybe not in the US, maybe in Mexico. I don’t know. But if all of a sudden you see there is no podcast feed anymore, re-subscribe and make sure you’re re-subscribing to feeds.twit.tv not leoville.tv. And I guess what I’m going to do is I’m going to go change the domain server and fix it and put it back the way it used to be until we figure out why that happened. That’s like from, that’s like from the old days of TWiT. That’s when I was, that’s when the feeds where on my server (laughing). I don’t know what happened. So don’t subscribe to leoville.tv/podcasts anymore. Do subscribe so you get every podcast whenever they’re available right away. That’s the whole point of those feeds. If you’d like to be in the studio with us, oh, we’d love to have you. It’s a great studio audience today. Thank you all for being here. You just have to email tickets@twit.tv so we’ll put a chair out for you. And I guess that’s—is there anything else, Jason Howell? Besides thanking you our fine producer for the job you do each and every day.

Harry: Yay.

Jason: I will accept that and I think that was about it. That’s all I was waiting for was that. Thank you, Leo.

Leo: (Laughing) Jason’s really too good to be the producer of this show. He hosts a wonderful show called All About Android. It is a much watch every Tuesday evening at 5:00 PM. But we just love having him around, so, the more I can get the better I am. Thank you everybody for being here; we’ll see you next time! Another TWiT is in the can.