Tech News Today 521

Tech News Today Episode 521

Tech News Today 521: Glued, Not Screwed

Commercials come to Skype, generic top-level domain madness, Android - iOS nerd fight, and more.

Submit and vote on story coverage at technewstoday.reddit.com

Hosts

• Tom Merritt (@acedtect)
  • TomMerritt.com
• Sarah Lane (@SarahLane)
  • SarahLane.com
• Iyaz Akhtar (@Iyaz)
• Jason Howell (@RayGun01)
• Andy Ihnatko
  • ihnatko.com

News Fuse

• Today, ICANN revealed the 1,930 applications in the first flight of generic top-level domains or gTLDs. ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom and ICANN Senior Vice President Kurt Pritz unveiled the list of applications at an event in London, streamed live off ICANN’s website. This begins a 60-day public comment period. Companies have 7 months to file any disputes over concerns like trademark. We'll review some of the awesome TLDs like .unicorn that may be coming your way in 2013.

• You can thank iFixit for a quick teardown of the Retina MBP. Like the MB Air, the new Pro's RAM is soldered to its logic board, meaning you can't swap it out later. It's also got proprietary screws and Flash memory, and the battery is glued on, rather than screwed in. In short, you'll end up replacing the entire assembly if anything goes wrong. iFixit also confirmed that asymmetric fan blade spacing, with components made by Apple's BFF Samsung. It's got a beefed up battery & 2 Broadcom chips with 802.11n dual-band support and Bluetooth 4.0.

• Guess who won the 2012 Millennium Technology Prize? Nope, it wasn't me. The winners are stem cell scientist Dr. Shinya Yamanaka and Linux creator Linus Torvalds. This is the first time the award has been split. Torvalds' work was praised as benefitting humanity.

• Get ready for Nerd Anger! Ads are coming to your Skype calls. Conversation Ads displays advertisements inside of the app window during one-on-one audio calls. The ads only appear for users who don't have a subscription or Skype credit, and so far only works in the Windows client. If you don't want your age and gender targeted, you can opt-out, but all ads will be location-targeted.

• WSJ reports the US Department of Justice investigators have questioned Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and other cable providers as part of a "wide-ranging antitrust investigation into whether cable companies are acting improperly to quash nascent competition from online video". the DOj also spoke to streaming providers Netflix and Hulu so help determine if cable providers who also sell internet should be data capping their video competitors but not their own video services.

• Good news almost everyone! You'll be able to get the Samsung Galaxy S III in the United States without delays caused by pesky injunctions. That's bad news for Apple - the company tried to get the S III banned in the States. Its request was denied by the honorable Judge Lucy Koh who said the court order would overload her calendar since she's in charge of one of the many Samsung/Apple patent lawsuits.

• Samsung Mobile announced plans to introduce TecTiles, programmable NFC tags that can be used to automate actions on NFC-enabled Android phones. The company will sell TecTiles in packs of five, online and in-store through AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, and T-Mobile stores, for $15. Proposed uses including a tag that mutes phones in movie theaters, store tags that provide coupons or other info, or a bedside tag to change phone settings.

• Are FB games on the outs, and if so, is Zynga doomed? AppData, a service that tracks FB and app data, reports that Zynga's daily active users dropped 8.2% May, & this week, Zynga shares dipped below $5 for the first time., if that wasn't enough, analysts at Cowen & Co published a prediction that the market for games on FB was in an "accelerating user tailspin." This is going to make Zynga's entry into the Chinese market with its partnership with microblogging service Weibo verrrry interesting.

• Cnet reports that Amazon is closing on deals with the major music companies that would give Amazon music a bigger cloud presence. Amazon already has Sony Music, EMI and Universal Music Group and is finishing up negotiations with Warner. Cnet does not have details as to what new features Amazon would roll out, but the guess is bringing its music service to the same level as Apple's iCloud - and a deal could be announced within weeks.

• Twitter posts just got bigger. In an announcement today the company introduced expanded Tweets. Companies like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal can embed a headline and even the introduction to an article within a single tweet. The expanded Tweets will be rolling out on Twitter's website and mobile site today, and coming soon for iOS and Android.

Discussion Stories

• .blog, .lol, .foo: Google, Amazon top list of global TLD applications
• The new internet names: a plain english explanation
• List of TLDs applied for
• How Tech Giants Are Playing The Icann Domain Game
• G+ thread on favorite names
• 1,930 applications announced today
  • $185,000 application fee (non-refundable, show you are qualified to administer it, pay annual fee of $25,000
  • Multiple applications for the same TLD result in an auction. 731 applications conflicted with another applicants request.
  • 11 companies applied for “.app”, nine applied for “.art”, seven for “.news”,
  • Google submitted 101 applications, Facebook none at all. Donuts (a domain name registry service) submitted 307 applications.
  • 60-day period of public comment followed by 7 months for companies to bring formal objections. ICANN and WIPO will resolve disputes.
  • New TLDs go live in early 2013
  • Vint Cerf brings up the question, do we need these? “Hundreds of new brands and generic names to add now ? I see no benefit in that. Many companies fear that they will soon must follow hundreds of new Internet extensions to ensure that their names never be abused. They have a point.”
  • ICANN CEO Rod Beckstrom “The Internet is about to change forever,” Beckstrom said, claiming that the new gTLDs would create a “solid foundation of greater choice and competition.” --Some companies fear they now have to make defensive registration
  • .google, .android, .chrome, .gmail, and .youtube. But others were more generic (such as .cloud, .car, .map, and .mail), or targeted at lifestyles or demographics (.dad, .kid, .baby, .family, .mom), or simply “creative” (.lol, .love, .fun, .foo, and .boo). Amazon was close on Google’s heels, with 76 of its own applications—some of them (such as .cloud, .mail, and .app) in conflict with Google’s.
  • Is Amazon really looking to develop its own mobile phone? Look, it’s registered mobile, calls and talk. Is Google looking to move into more focused content plays around a specific vertical like the family? Look, it’s registered baby, kid, mom, dad and family.

• MacBook Pro with Retina display dismantled by iFixit, revealing soldered RAM
• Apple Spokesperson Confirms New Mac Pro Designs Likely Coming in 2013 (Update: Not iMac)
• Discussion points
  • MacBook Pro is a lot less user serviceable - what do you think about that?
  • Is this going to turn off "pro" users?
  • Should Apple point out that RAM isn't upgradeable in the configuration screen (when you're picking one)?
• News on the desktop front
  • Forbes says new iMacs and Mac Pros are coming next year
  • An email from Tim Cook says that "Our pro customers are really important to us...don't worry as we're working on something really great for later next year."

• The iPhone may be late to features, but only Android users care
• What iOS 6 Says About Mobile Fragmentation
• Is Apple fragmenting the iPhone?
• Is iPhone too slow with features?
  • Add photo attachment to email
  • Turn by turn directions
• Is iPhone Fragmented like Android?
  • iOS6 will not work on iPad 1 or iPhone 3G or older iPod Touches.
  • FaceTime over cellular networks, 3-D map fly-overs, and expanded Siri capabilities: iPhone 4 (which is about two years old, but still available for sale) gets none of these three features. Neither does the iPhone 3GS (which, unbelievably, is also still for sale). The iPad 2 gets the 3-D fly-overs, but not cellular FaceTime and not Siri.

• WordPress, Tumblr and Facebook: Threading Social Through the Blogosphere
  • earlier this week Automattic (parent co. of Wordpress) introduced FB plugin for wordpress.com or hosted wordpress sites
  • features: publishers cross-post WordPress content to FB Timelines, Pages and activity feeds, adds widgets such as “Like” and “Subscribe” buttons, recommendations bar and a FB-integrated comment system.
  • yet another company using FB social graph to make logins easier, help drive traffic and discussion
  • Wordpress platform almost 10 years old and just last year started bundling in social features
  • In 5 years Tumblr has grown to hosting nearly 60 million blogs. WordPress powers around 74 million blogs. About 50% are hosted by WordPress.com.
  • Tumblr integrated with Facebook’s Open Graph in April, their numbers are only trending upward. Tumblr saw 2.5x growth during the month after integrating with Open Graph
  • Automattic projects $45 million in revenue this year, VIP service & other products available for purchase. Tumblr introduced first paid advertising in May after CEO David Karp said he wasn't interested in ads
  • 3rd party comment systems are threatened... Disqus, Livefyre, etc. How can they compete w FB?

• Roku CEO: Blu-ray will be finished in 4 years
  • Roku CEO Anthony Wood spoke at the TV of Tomorrow show in San Francisco: “Will people use Blu-ray players in four years? I don’t think so"
  • also says streaming performance on Blu-ray players doesn’t compare to the experience on a dedicated set-top-box like the ones his company sells.
  • could there be Blu-ray player built into Roku’s platform?
  • right now a lot of streaming happens on game consoles, but Wood says “New customers don’t go out and buy game consoles to stream video""
  • Roku sees growth in next-gen roku boxes and smart tvs
  • Roku made $100 million in sales last year, Wood says number of devices sold tripled year-over-year. BUT the company missed its projected sales goal by 500,000 units.

• AMD Adds ARM Processor as It Looks Beyond x86
• AMD's mountain: how the second-place PC chipmaker hopes to build cheaper, better laptops
• Microsoft charges Tablet OEMs a whopping $85 for Windows RT
• AMD announced it is integrating ARM processors in its upcoming x86 chips
  • Starting next year, AMD chips will integrate ARM's Cortex-A5 processor with TrustZone security technology
  • AMD has ambitions in the tablet market, but a spokesman said its use of the Cortex-A5 will be solely for security purposes.
  • TrustZone is a set of instructions that help secure mobile devices, mobile payments and streamed content.
  • The ARM license is also AMD's way to catch up with Intel, which is integrating security features gained from its acquisition of McAfee last year.
• AMD's marketing director for Fusion APUs, PCs, tablets, low-power embedded John Taylor talked to TheVerge about the company's strategy
  • says Intel's ultra book initiative is forcing homogenization of the laptop market, hard to differentiate
  • TheVerge suggested that since AMD is lower cost, couldn't that mean better hardware overall for laptops sporting AMD processors? "I can tell you from a trajectory standpoint, that's what we're pushing for, because it's in our own best interest,"

Calendar

• Would you like an Acer Iconia Tab A700? Pre-order it now for $450
• Microsoft to issue Xbox 360 update next week with 'behind the scenes improvements'
• ChevronWP7, an unlocking tool on Windows Phone, is shutting down on August 11th, but existing devices unlocked with a ChevronWP7 token will start to re-lock on August 11th. Devices will re-lock if connected to a PC running Microsoft's Zune software.
• Apple and Oracle have released simultaneous Java updates for OS X for 10.7 Lion and 10.6 Snow Leopard - a critical patch that contains 14 new security fixes.
• Tom, Iyaz, and TWiT engineer Alex Gumpel will be covering the Windows phone summit at 9 am PT on Wed 6/20

INCOMING

Email

"Tom, Sarah, Iyaz, Jason, and random excellent guest....

In Tuesdays episode-520- you talked about navigation, and the switch from pnd's to navigation on smart phones. It IS moving to phones, but, out in the cornfields of Northern Illinois, we have areas that have no coverage by either Verizon or ATT.

I have used our Garmin along with my iphone at the same time, and, there have been several times when the phone just plain stopped navigating. The Garmin is way more dependable in that situation.

We have used our GPS Drive app with great success, closer to civilization, but there is still a good reason to have a dedicated device. Would imagine there are tons of areas, like Montana, southern Illinois, Vermont, that are in the same navigation boat...

Always enjoy the show!

-- Tim"

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Production Information

• Edited by: Jason
• Notes:

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