This Week in Google 251 (Transcript)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWIG. This Week in Google. Jeff has the day off. Gina Trapani's here along with Mike Elgan. And the big story breaks. Apple buys Beats, our analysis. Plus what's going on at TrueCrypt.org and a whole lot more. We'll even drive some driverless cars. It's all coming up next on TWIG.

Netcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by CacheFly at C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y.com.

Leo: This is TWIG, ‘This Week in Google’. Episode 251, recorded May 28th 2014.

You Forgot About Dre!

This Week in Google is brought to you by Hover.com. Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names. It's simple, it's honest and it's easy to use. For 10% off your first purchase, go to Hover.com and enter the promo code TWIG5. And by Personal Capital. With Personal Capital you finally have all your financial life in one place and get a clear view of everything you own. Best of all, it's free. To sign up go to PersonalCapital.com/twig. And by Square Space. The all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own personal website or online portfolio. For a free two week trial and 10% off go to SquareSpace.com and use the offer code TWIG. It's time for This Week in Google. The show that covers Google, the Cloud, the Googleverse. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff Jarvis is in an aeroplane, otherwise he would be here, but filling in for him, and quite ably, our News Director, Mr. Mike Elgan, host of TechNews Today, every Monday through Friday on the networks. It's good to see you.

Mike Elgan: Thank you.

Leo: Rabid Google Plusser.

Mike: Yeah. You can just call me Jeff Jarvis and I'll try to support the Chromebook Pixel and Verizon.

Leo: You like Chromebooks.

Mike: I love Chromebook Pixels. The Pixels...

Leo: But, you're using a Mac.

Mike: I'm using a Mac. I was on the fence. I needed... After trying Chromebook Pixel for a month, I went on the Chromebook Pixel diet, I just couldn't give up that high quality screen.

So, I was between a MacBook Pro Retina and a Chromebook Pixel, for the record and now I regret it.

Leo: It's a tough one. You regret it?

Mike: Kind of, kind of. I long for the simplicity and assurance of knowing everything is in the cloud.

Leo: Mike has 3.3 million followers on Google Plus.

Gina Trapani: Wow!

Leo: Yeah.

Gina: Popular man.

Leo: Wow is right.

Mike: A little point about that. It's kind of interesting because there's been controversy about whether Google Plus is weaning, when they're going to kill it, all that kind of stuff. I sort of measure the rate of getting new users as a metric for incoming new users for the service itself, because I'm on the, what do they call it?

Leo: Right. The justice with user rights, right?

Mike: The justice with user rights. And it hasn't changed a bit. The, it's the same rate.

Leo: The same number you get every week.

Mike: Right. I get, I get 2000 additional followers, circle friends or whatever you want to call them a day. And that has been consistent, you know, give or take a couple hundred

for two years.

Leo: Wow! Yeah.

Mike: And in recent days it hasn't changed a bit.

Leo: Wow!

Mike: Still getting new users, and those are people, not accidental users, those people are signing up to get, to follow me.

Leo: That's the key, because somebody's not going to circle you unless they're actually actively going to try to use Google Plus.

Mike: You have to take action as a knowing user to do that.

Leo: Right.

Mike: So that's pretty cool.

Leo: Also here, you heard her, Gina Trapani from smarterword.org. She's of course at Thinkup.com. They're in the offices right now. And, we will talk the Google, if you don't mind. Starting off with, well there’s some, a couple of interesting stories, but it's kind of interesting. Everywhere, in Google Plus you saw pictures of the self-driving car. Without, the new one, without the steering wheels, or breaks, where you sit in the back seat, and there's no driver in the front. And, I thought, you know, I'm seeing this all on Google plus, let me just check, it wasn't on Facebook at all for me. So, it's something Google folks are very interested in and everybody reshared it. Karis Wisher got a ride in the car, and there's a video, a promotional video that Google has put out as well.

Gina: Did you see anything about, on it, on Twitter for you Leo? I saw a few of my friends on Twitter talking about it. They were actually referring to the car, there was, one of my friends made up a little symbol for it, it was like you know, a zero, underscore, underscore, underscore, underscore, zero. And you know, uniformly on Twitter people were making fun of the design, and uniformly on Google Plus, everyone was just like, What? What?

Leo: Oh, Yeah.

Gina: So, it's so interesting to see how different communities respond. Particularly to Google, I think particularly to Google, and their sort of Google X products are very polarizing, I find.

Leo: I think it's almost too soon. Because the first reaction I had, first of all it's, Kara called it a clown car. It's a tiny little two seater. And the first reaction I had is, that look's just dangerous.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: I think the idea of an actual human sitting there with his hands near the wheels, I can handle. But, you're sitting in the backseat. This is straight out of the TV show Silicon Valley. You have no control and no override.

Mike: Well, this particular prototype has no controls. The real prototypes which are coming, they're going to build about a 100 of them, will have controls, they will have breaks.

Leo: This is just a demo. This is...

Mike: Yeah. The, I think that's probably more complex to have dual controls, and they all have a bunch of safety features. For example, they limit the speed to 25 miles an hour.

Leo: Yeah, looks like they were just driving in the parking lot.

Gina: Yeah. They were in the parking lot. Yeah. I found the video kind of fluffy, I’ll be honest. You know, they're in a parking lot, driving around 25 miles per hour. They had like a young kid, and an older couple, and someone sight impaired, vision impaired, and it just, it felt like, I mean it was certainly a marketing video. But, there was no explanation about, you know, my question was like oh, so no one can it the break? Or who's programming where they're going? There was no interaction with the car.

Leo: It's autonomous. This is not... There's nobody at the controls at all.

Mike: But to Gina's point, there isn't even an obvious mechanism for people to say where they want to go. There's a single button which starts it and stops it.

Leo: Go button.

Mike: And that's it. So, it's like "Okay go!"

Leo: Now, I've ridden in autonomous vehicles at CES. Chevy, I think it was Chevy had some urban, what I was going to say was Urban Assault vehicles, but they were designed for crowded urban areas. They were same thing, kind of a pod, one…, it was a one person, or maybe it was a two, yeah, I guess it was a two person pod. You had no control if the hood came down over you, and the idea was they could daisy chain them. One could follow another and you'd say go to school and so forth. And that didn't scare me because we were in a parking lot. This, I don't know there's something about... 25 miles an hour is not, you know, if you get in a wreck with a tree at 25 miles an hour it's not safe.

Mike: Yeah. Well, in the defense of the car, what they're actually trying to do here is accelerate the development of self-driving cars.

Leo: Right.

Mike: So, right now, if you put this electronics, this radar, and lasers and stuff, that circular thing at the top, on top of a Lexus, right, so, you're kind of, it's a halfway point. With a car like this, it's a purpose built car, you can have sensors built into the side, you can have… The front of it is very snub nosed, like the front of it just goes down immediately. That actually has a safety benefit and a navigation benefit because the sensors can see right down on the road. So, they're trying to sort of, step ahead of where self-driving cars are going to be, so they can accelerate development of it. So, that's a laudable goal. They shouldn't be raising expectations that these things are going to be on the road in a couple of years, but I think part of the goal here is to sell this to law makers and to the voting public.

Leo: Well, like I said, all I got was queasy. And by the way, it wasn't Kara. Kara was ride along. It was Liz Gannes who called it a clown car.

Mike: She's missing, messing up the metaphor though. A clown car is a car with lots of people getting into a...

Leo: A small car.

Mike: Exactly.

Gina: Yeah, it was like the opposite of a clown car.

Mike: But this, this makes me think of when they inevitably have a recall. All the cars are just going to autonomously go in en masse, back to the mother ship.

Leo: Somebody in the chat room said, "Of course you don't tell it where to go. Google already knows where you want to go". They just find the Google Now car and steer the car that way.

Gina: Or if you just tell your phone, like Google will drive, "Can you drive me to work?"

Leo: Yeah. They know. They know. Oh, I, I, makes me queasy.

Gina: Well, it’s delightful; it's kind of an obvious idea at the same time.

Leo: The fact that there's no override.

Gina: There are so many makes of cars, why don't we just make cars that are self-driving and starts. It’s kind of interesting, though…

Mike: That was the fictional comic idea they had in Silicon Valley, where of course, in that scenario, Hoolie which is the fake Google, if a guy got in the car and he ended up in a shipping container, and ended up in the middle of the ocean.

Leo: They said, "Let me get your car. We'll take you home". And he got in the Hoolie car and he says "Home" and the car says "Okay, here we go". And then all of a sudden for no reason at all the car says, "Woah! Wait a minute. We're re-routing" and it does a big U-turn. He gets in the shipping container. He can't get out and he's suddenly on an island that the Hoolie founder is building. It actually probably reflects a little bit of the real world thinking about autonomous...

Gina: The fear. The fear of all the robots taking over.

Leo: Yes.

Mike: Well that's...

Gina: And that's the thing. That is a huge cultural uphill battle in the marketing prospective, right, for Google to get consumers to accept this and be excited about it. And I think kind of video is the beginning of that. I just, I don't know; they have a lot of work to do.

Mike: The reason that works as comic writing is that we've all had that experience with Google maps.

Leo: We feel that way.

Mike: How many times has Google maps led you in the middle of the ocean or something like that, and you think, "Oh, it’s a good thing that my car isn't directly tapped into this thing. Or I'd be mighty wet by now".

Leo: I, I like the idea, you know, what Ford always said to me as well. "We’re going to start by driver assisting. We’re going to get you used to it by helping you". People are in fact, that's what Allan O' Riley said. People like to drive. We’re just going to give you tools to make you a safer better driver.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: My car does that. It knows when there's somebody in the, in the blind spot. It tells me if I try to go in that length or something.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: I mean it's good. That’s useful. I just don't really like the idea of not having any pedals, or there’s just no override at all.

Mike: Yeah, right.

Leo: Presumably, a real self-driving car would have it.

Gina: Yeah, I mean that was the thing about the scene in Silicon Valley when he was saying "No. Stop!" I mean, clearly, any car that does this would be designed to have some sort of override by the person and the, you know, I got the impression that the person back at Hoolie had said to the car, "Okay, now we're going to the island". Right, and then it changed route, and he wasn't able to override that, and you know, whatever. I, I was like this is clearly not how...

Leo: And he gets to the island and there's no humans there. It’s all robots. There’s no one to...

Gina: There’s all these Androids. It’s all Androids.

Leo: "You can't get home". Here’s a 25… Somebody sent me a Chevy Camerro crashing at 25. Well, that's a Volvo crashing at 25 miles an hour.

Gina: Okay. Well, that's not terrible.

Leo: You're not dead!

Gina: Ah, you're not dead, but you're pretty hurt. Your front end is pretty smashed.

Leo: You're not happy.

Gina: Yeah, yeah, pretty smashed up to the front wheels.

Mike: We had a conversation about this, with a BBC reporter who wrote about this on Tech News Today this morning, and Google is actually designing the navigation and the crash features to maximize human life, whether it's yours or someone else's. So, theoretically their system will deliberately kill you if it saves a gag or pedestrian. Yeah.

Leo: Really, so that was this... We talked a little bit on this at Twit 2. If there's a driver with a motorcycle, a motorcyclist in the left lane with a helmet and one without a helmet in the right lane, and you have to quickly swerve, do you go for the guy with or without the helmet. You're saying they will actually include programming that way?

Mike: What, what they seem to, they're vague about it, but what they’re saying is they take into account all the people around, pedestrians...

Leo: How many people will die?

Mike: Exactly.

Gina: How many people can we save?

Mike: And so, but, what we have...

Leo: Will they kill you to save a lot of other people?

Mike: Apparently.

Leo: It's my car. I should survive.

Mike: See. Is that the answer to that? I paid for this car.

Leo: No. I, I should survive because I'm in the car.

Mike: But that's, that's the decision people make when they get an SUV. That’s essentially what they're saying.

Leo: Right.   

Mike: We're, if there’s a crash, we win.

Leo: Every human makes that decision. That’s why people buy big cars.

Mike: That's right, exactly. They want to win.

Leo: That's why people aren't buying smart cars, because it looks like you'd lose. For sure. So the, I guess the, if you...

Gina: It's the premium, non ad supported version, you can say.

Mike: That's right.

Leo: That's what I want.

Gina: I expect that you prioritize my life over anybody else.

Leo: Right. I'm willing to pay more, for my car to prioritize my life. Wow! We're just by the way, we're being silly, but these are the kinds of things that are going to crop up more and more as we get towards an artificial intelligence world where the machines are going to start making ethical decisions.

Mike: And what's funny about that or what's actually not funny about that is the fact that we're comfortable with the status quo. We're comfortable with the fact that cars are so dangerous because people are such bad drivers.

Leo: Yeah.

Mike: We're willing to sacrifice those victims, but when a machine is making those decisions, even if fewer people die, we don’t like that and we don't want it.

Leo: This is thanks to the chat room and Wikipedia. This is called, known as the trolley problem. A thought experiment in ethics first introduced by Philipa Foot in 1967. The general form of the problem is this. There's a runaway trolley barreling down the railway tracks. Ahead, on the tracks there are five people tied up and unable to move. The trolley is headed straight for them. You are standing some distance off in the train yard, next to a lever. If you pull this lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. Unfortunately, you notice that there is one person on the side track. So, you can either hit the one person or do nothing, and the trolley will kill five people. What’s the correct choice? See, most of us would do nothing. I'm not going to choose.

Mike: They need to, they need to pull a rendition on Snidely Whiplash. Why are people tied to the tracks?

Leo: Why are people tied to the tracks? Actually, that wasn’t the original formulation. It had to do with a judge and jury and...

Mike: So, there's...

Gina: I mean, a human stands to emphasize with the individual, right?

Leo: Right.

Gina: Yeah, that's tough, right, and you could just do nothing and say, well, that was what's about to happen.

Leo: That's what I would do, and say "Hey, I'm washing my hands of it".

Gina: Yes.

Mike: But, you know, but this...

Leo: See Ya! Ha, ha!

Mike: Because this was, this problem was expressed in the sixties, they weren't dealing with. It’s even a greater level of weirdness when you're writing algorithms to make these decisions. But, if you're actually pre-emptive, and if you're in a trolley, and you have to make a quick decision, that's one thing, but if you were writing...

Leo: An algorithm is easier because it's dethatched from the reality of it. So, you can write an algorithm that says 'Optimize for minimal life loss'.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: That, and that is ethical and rational, and nobody's losing a life when you're writing the algorithm.

Mike: And you can see in advance what it's going to do theoretically I guess.

Leo: You say 'Maximize for minimal life loss'.

Mike: And then hackers are going to go in there...

Gina: And you know soldiers of war make this decision all the time, I mean people commanding; people in combat have to make decisions about...

Leo: Oh, crap! Apple just bought Beats.

Mike: Did they?

Leo: Did they?

Mike: They did. 3 billion, not 3.2.

Leo: It's just crossing the wire now.

Mike: Wow! Couldn't they have waited? Couldn’t they have done this during Mac Break Weekly.

Leo: I was wrong, wrong, wrong! This is from Peter Kafka who works at Recode, and there’s the link to the Recode article. Is there an Apple press release? That's what we really want to know.

Mike: Financial Times also has the story.

Le: Yeah. They were the ones who broke it. Is there any confirmation form Apple? Chad do you see anything there?

Chad: Actually the Financial Times broke the story in, and yeah it's...you know, I really don’t know.

Leo: The Verge says Apple's confirmed it, but I want to see Apple's confirmation. They're saying “what Beats provides us, is a head start”, says Tim Cook. “We could build about anything you could dream of, but that's not the question” he said in an interview. “The thing that Beats provides us is a head start, and it provides us with incredible people, kindred spirits”. Apple says it will keep the Beats hardware brand intact, as well as the Beats streaming music service. It also says that Beats Electronics co-founders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre will join the company as full time employees. Wow! I would have never guessed that. In fact I just, I didn't believe it at all, but apparently it is true and Apple is confirming. What was that article from, Chad? Was that the Verge?

Chad: That was Recode.

Leo: That was Recode. I don't see it on Recode's front page. I hope we're not…

Chad: Here's the full press release.

Leo: I hope we're not being punked.

Chad: No, on the… well, I mean, maybe. There it is.

Leo: Alright. I want to see this on the Apple site before I'll, before I'll submit, before I’ll give up.

Mike: You know the thing is we talked about this story for what a couple of weeks now, at least two and a half weeks.

Leo: Yeah.

Mike: Three weeks. And, there isn't much more to say other than the price is 3 billion rather than 3.2 billion.

Leo: I mean that's actually what the leak last, yesterday or the day before said. This is a little less than they said.

Mike: Right. They probably, Apple probably got a little bit, got a cheaper price because of the video, Tyree's video.

Leo: Actually the story was that because Apple found out there were only a 110,000 subscribers to the Beats streaming music service, which is very small compared to say the 10 million of Spotify.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: So, it's interesting, you know, one of the things if you search for Apple buys Beats, you find the April fools joke in the Lefsetz letter, which is a great letter for people who follow the music industry. Apple buys Beats but that was apparently a joke. This is not a joke. This as far as we can tell, Apple has bought Beats. I'm surprised. I really am surprised. And now it made sense they would confirm this before WWDC so that they could bring Dre up on stage. Here’s the press release from the Apple website.  Apple to buy Beats Music and Beats Electronics, total of 3 billion dollars, consisting of a purchase price of approximately 2.6 billion and approximately 400 million that will vest over time. Those are the handcuffs that keep Dre and Iovine in the employ of Apple. Jimmy Iovine said “I’ve always known in my heart that Beats belonged with Apple. The idea when we started the company was inspired by Apple’s unmatched ability to marry culture and technology. Apple’s deep commitment to music fans, artists, songwriters and the music industry is something special.” Wow! That’s a shocker. I really didn't believe it. Music is... Eddy Cue, “Music is such an important part of Apple’s DNA and always will be. The addition of Beats will make our music lineup even better, from free streaming with iTunes Radio" which already existed, "to a world-class subscription service in Beats, and of course buying music from the iTunes Store as customers have loved to do for years.” Subject to regulatory approvals, Apple expects to close in fiscal Q4, which is the next quarter calendar year. That would be sometime in the third quarter calendar year.

Mike: Walter Isaacson who's Steve Jobs' biographer predicted Jimmy Iovine would run Apple's Content Business and that acquiring Jimmy Iovine was a major reason for this and he also pointed out that Iovine and Steve Jobs were friends and kind of had a shared vision for music, and the reason for that was that Iovine and the music industry was choking on the, the growing dominance of the Ipod and Itunes in the early days. Iovine was saying all along that Apples, the future of music and that’s the way to go and that's the way to monetize music and so on, so he kind of won over Steve Jobs for that reason. He supported the Ipod and ITunes form the very earliest days.

 Leo: I'm, I frankly did not, I'm shocked. I didn’t think it was going to happen. It seemed like a very odd marriage. It’s the first time Apples ever bought Cool instead of inventing it and it is the biggest acquisition Apple has ever made.

 Mike: Another piece of information is the Beats music IOS app just dropped their yearly pricing to 99 dollars and now it's a free trial. So...

Leo: So, in other words, they dropped the paid subscription of Beats. Is that only on IOS? Let me see if I can get a free Beats subscription on Android here.

Mike: Yeah, they, they lowered the price from 119.88 to 99.99

Leo: Oh, so it's not free?

Mike: It's not free. I think there's a free new version, but then they have a subscription upgrade.

Leo: So, I mean, this was part of the story, I mean Beats is a new streaming service. I mean Beats acquired Mog some months ago, which was a very good streaming service but they hadn’t really got much traction, even though AT & T offered it as a family plan for people who bought AT & T phones. 16 dollars for unlimited users on a family plan. I broached that with my children and they said no way, we got Spotify. We don't want Beats. Interesting. Interesting. And of course Beats is on Android. I just don’t know if the deal will extend to Android. That will be an interesting move by Apple to say. Yeah we're going to make this cheaper, if you’re using IOS.

Mike: Apple's paying for the deal with 2.6 billion in cash and 400 million in stock. The New York Times is confirming that.

Leo: Right. Well, there you go. I guess we'll continue to cover this on Tech News Tonight. And as time goes by and maybe we'll get people on it to come and... Very interesting. I'm surprised.

Gina: I didn't, as time passed, I didn't really think this was going to, I didn’t think it was going to happen, especially…

Leo: I didn't think it was going to happen from day one. It just doesn’t make sense from my point of view, but obviously it made sense to Apple, so....

Mike: I have what you said about it on tape.....

Leo: Go ahead, play it. We recorded this because I knew I was wrong.

Mike: Yeah, Yeah, here we go, no, that's the change log. There we go, rewind.

Leo: "It was a rumor created by Dr.Dre and Jimmy Iovine in an attempt to sell headphones and stock or whatever". This was 17 days ago, Chad! "I don't know if Apple is interested in a company that is actually failing, failing, failing." Alright, alright, no need to rub it in. I asked to make the recording because I thought, you know if it really does happen, then you can mock me and listen.

Gina: And it's certainly a different Apple than the one, Gruber did this post on Daringfireball.net about like back in the day, I guess it was like 2000, there was a leak about an ATI radian getting included in the new Mac at the time and then Jobs was so incensed and Apple was so upset that they basically ripped every single mention of it from the Keynote at WWDC.

Leo: Yes.

Gina: You know they took it out of the machines, like we were punished terribly for just the leak. So, when the leak happened and all that time passed, I was like maybe this really isn't going to happen. But, Leo you didn't think it was going to happen because you don't think that Apple needs to buy cool or that Apple wouldn't buy cool.

Leo: I don't really understand what the benefit to Apple is. It’s not the headphone business. Although the revenue for Beats headphones was 1.3 billion dollars last year. It’s not the streaming music business, because it's a crappy streaming music business. Nobody, nobody would say that Apple couldn't duplicate a 110,000 subscriber streaming music business. Easy! In fact, Apple's always eschewed streaming music. They've ne-, you know they've had this opportunity for years and always turned away from it. So, it isn't the headphones, it isn’t the music business. It's got to be Jimmy Iovine , Dr.Dre and whatever brand value Beats has, and I guess it's a very, very successful brand, but I don't know how it enhances...

Gina: It’s the brand value.

Leo: Does it enhance Apple's brand?

Mike: You know, on Sunday on TWIT they said, well, you're too old Leo, you think Apple's cool still, but young people, people in their 20's and earlier don't think of Apple as cool. They think of Beats as cool. So, this would make them think Apple is cooler because they own Beats.

Leo: I find that very hard to believe. I also want to point out that a number of companies have owned Beats and dumped them almost immediately. HP owned Beats and dumped it, HTC owned Beats and dumped it, it's… If it's such a great deal, why did HP and HTC get out of the, it's business? It doesn't make sense to me at all.

Mike: They're probably concerned, they were probably concerned about the future of Beats, but being owned by Apply means that Beats has a really bright future. They have obviously the successful retail store chain ever, Apple does, and they'll continue to sell Beats in their stores, but now more tightly associated with Apple. They own 65% of the high end headphone market. That's the kind of position that Apple likes to be in. And you say, does this make Apple cool? Well, Apple is now Beats, Beats is now Apple. It doesn’t make the Apple brand cool, It means Apple is now in possession of the cool Beats brand. So, I think that's the next best thing to a halo effect. You know, financially it doesn’t matter, because this is pocket change for Apple and it pays for itself in 3 years, and I just think that it's kind of a no brainer. It’s highly profitable. These things are extremely profitable. You can build these headphones for 15 dollars and sell them for 200.

Leo: Yeah.

Mike: So, you know, business wise it's a fantastic business.

Leo: You know, Apple…

Gina: Well, that's a really good point, Mike.

Leo: Okay. Here’s my problem with it. Apple has never done that. Apple has always, I mean this is a, to me it’s a sad day for Apple. Apple has always said, you know, we're not building products to be cool; we're not building products for high profit margins. We’re trying to build the best products possible. And I don't think anybody can argue that the Beats headphones are in any respect a good product. So, it does, to me it's a complete mismatch. And I don't think Jimmy Iovine or Dr. Dre wo-, I mean, it must be for that. And I don't know how much they bring to the table. Surely any deal that Jimmy Iovine negotiated with the music industry is off the table as soon as Apple becomes a part of it. That’s a very different deal. Apple dominates the music industry; the music industry hates iTunes at this point because they're terrified of them. Apple’s been trying to make content deals with Comcast and other television companies, and there's some supposition that maybe Iovine could walk into those boardrooms and make a deal. I, I don't think these companies are swayed by personality. I think they're swayed by the business, and if the business doesn't make sense, they're not going to do it, however much they love Jimmy Iovine.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: So, we, it remains to be seen, I mean just because a company buys a company, doesn't mean it's a good idea, just to witness Time Warner AOL.

Mike: I think, I got to believe that there's something to the idea that they, what they purchased was membership in the tight knit community of the music business. You know, Iovine and Dr. Dre are now part of Apple, and these folks are the, you know, these people are inside the music business, way insiders right, so that comes across in two ways. First of all when it comes to making deals, it's not just the fact that Iovine himself can negotiate deals, but it's the fact that these Apple people are one of us, when they go in. This is the perspective by the music business. The other thing is that I believe that Beats music is viewed, has some the dynamics of a social network, and if you look at how Twitter, you know, part of Twitters secret sauce is that so many celebrities, so many famous people are constantly referencing Twitter. And, I think they want to have the celebrity obsessed music service, streaming music service, and social streaming...

Leo: This is so not the Apple I know. This is Apple that is all about surface, that is all about appearance. Not the Apple that’s about the quality content of the product.

Mike: Look at how quickly Apple changed when they fired Steve Jobs, when Steve Jobs left initially, and how quickly they changed when he came back. This is actually a very, very subtle change but the Apple that you know is Steve Jobs' Apple. And he's been gone for a few years now and this is the new Apple.

Leo: So, just to repeat. The breaking news is Apple has bought Beats for 3 billion dollars, 400 million of it in stock options that will vest over time. Jimmy Iovine and Dr.Dre will become Apple executives with the deal. They expect it to close pending regulatory approval, in the third quarter of this year. You know, well, we'll find out on, on, because Apple's got a big event coming up on Monday. We’re going to cover this live. You and I will be here in the studio, and Andy Nacco and René Ritchie will be at the keynote for WWDC, and they come up here for Mac Break Weekly. So, Monday we’ll be covering it starting at 10 am pacific. That’s where you're going to see, I think the reason they've announced this is you’re going to see Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine take the stage along with Angela Arendts, maybe Jay Blahnik, the new team, right. The new Apple celebrity star powered team. Maybe Jony Ive will step up there as well.

Mike: And is it too much to hope for Eminem? Who Dr. Dre produces.

Leo: He does. He discovered Eminem.

Gina: That'd be, that'd be great.

Leo: He discovered Snoop.

Mike: 50 Cents.

Leo: Bring Snoop and 50 up, although don't let 50 throw a baseball.

Mike: No .No.

Leo: ...whatever you do, because that guy is wild.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: I just, I think, I think it's a terrible, terrible idea and I’ll be very... there may be some interesting stuff that we'll learn later that makes it make sense, but I just don't see this really making sense at all.

Gina: Well, do we think Beats music is better than Ping?

Leo: No, it’s all the…Oh, Ping Yeah. Anything's better than Ping.

Gina: Remember Ping. Who would think of that one?

Leo: It's not better than iTunes radio. It’s not better than any of the other streaming services. Basically, I think all of them are seen as commodity services.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: When Jimmy Iovine launched the Beats music service, he said, Oh no, this is going to be all about recommendation. We’re going to get major celebrities and their playlists and I didn't see any of that happen with Beats. It was no better or worse, to be fair, than, Spotify, Rdio, Rhapsody, all other services. I subscribe to Google music, I’m sure you do too because we got that 7.99 deal. Same 20 million songs. In fact, I like the Google service because I've uploaded 25,000 of my own records to it. So, it knows my music as well as all of these other songs. I think it's a better service. I just don't see why, I guess if its Apple branded Beats, you know Apples been doing iTunes Radio for how many months? And no one knows about it.

Mike: Right. That’s right.

Leo: It has no presence.

Gina: Yeah, I haven't even tried it. I launched iTunes recently after a long time, and I was, I didn't know how to use it anymore. I had to move up the desktop Apple's like, I don’t, what is this?

Leo: Right.

Gina: It    just   changed a lot. Things are buried, it was hard to find playlists. So, Yeah, I haven't tried iTunes radio. I didn't even realize it was a new thing, or relatively recent one.

Leo: Very, very odd. Very odd indeed. Alright, let's take a break and get the Google change log here for you. TrueCrypt is gone, and there’s a very big story there, which we'll talk about and a whole lot more as week continue with This Week in Google, which is really about anything we want to talk about, at all. Our show today brought to you by Hover.com. I just registered a bunch of more domains with names like Hover.com. I love Hover.com. Hover is domain name registration and management made simple, made clean, made clear. I love. I'm a big fan of Hover. As soon as I could, I had Hover's, I had transferred all my domains over to Hover. They actually have a concierge service which I should have taken advantage of. It will do it for you, if you want to move over to Hover. Then the domain management is as simple as can be. They do allow you to do email, which by the way, if you say, oh, I’m never going to want a webpage. What do I need a domain name for? You need a domain name so that u can have a professional email address with your business name or your family name that you can then forward to Gmail. You’re not giving up Gmail, but you can forward to Gmail, and if you decide someday, that you know that Yahoo mail or some other mail is better, you never have to change your addresses. It’s your address for life. That's a very good reason to register a domain name at Hover.com. Right now, Hover of course, it got all the top domain name extensions, .com, .net, but they've also just got the .club which I really like. If you're the, I don't know, the International Order of Odd fellows here in Petaluma, you could have Petalumaoddfellows.club. You know, I think that...

 Gina: Neat!

Leo: Yeah. Don’t you think that's cool?

Mike: I’ll tell the rest of the members. 

Leo: GinaTrapaniFan.club. I think...

Mike: MickeyMouse.club

Leo: I think he probably already has that already.

Gina: That’s a planetary suggestion. Mickeymouse.club. I like that.

Leo: I love it. And Hover, you know when you register a domain name, they do not give you that, you know, 50 click up seller or anything. They going to give you Hover's privacy, free on every domain that supports it. That’s really important. Most people want that and they know that. They’ve got great service. Their no hold, no transfer phone service, mean when you call, a live person is ready to help and is empowered to help, and get you on your way without putting you on hold. And they're really great people. They’re Canadian. Of course they're nice. Hover.com. I want you to register your domain names there. Get that new .club domain name. FloridaRotary.club. Instead of Florida, you go to club.com. You know, that's cool .club. We got a, I got a bunch of .clubs the other day. What are you got? Let’s see of we can get Twit.club

Gina: I would Twitfan.club. I like that.

Leo: Twitfan.club

Mike: Navyseals.club. They...

Leo: Stop that. I love it. Is there a Twitfan.club

Mike: No.

Leo: There's Twitaddict.club, Twitadmirer.club, Yeah I like it. Twitfanatic.club

Mike: Hover.club

Leo: Hey one other thing, I tell you, if you decide to buy, please do me a favor, use the offer code TWIG and the number 5, and you'll get 10% off. Hover.com. Play the trumpets my friends unless we use the trumpeters up, because it's time for the Google change log.

Lot of buttons to push for Chad. First take down the Hover.

The Google change log

Leo: We'll fix it. And now Gina Trapani has the latest from Google.

Gina: Google have finally launched a mobile web version of the play store, so of you navigate to Play.Google.com on any mobile device you'll be actually able to navigate the site instead of getting the big stretched out desktop version on a smaller touch screen. You know, of course normally on an Android phone for example, a Play Store link would launch the native Play Store app, but the mobile web interface comes in handy if you're on non-Android device or if you're looking at an app or item that's not, you know, compatible with your current device. The new, mobile web version looks very nice and, kind of long overdue, got to say. Google releases virus total uploader for OS 10. This is a virus scanning app, which Google acquired, I think, back in 2012, and the uploader for OS 10, Google’s hoping to get more malware submissions to beef up Mac security. Basically you download the app onto your Mac, you run it, you can drag and drop a file to the Virus Total Uploader to scan it with over 50 internet virus solutions. You can drag and drop a folder; you can drag and drop a Mac application, or you can do the open with and, you know beef up security on your Mac desktop. Finally, Google is, the Chrome team is taking a hard line against malicious extensions, speaking of malware for windows users. Google is now blocking chrome extensions not listed in the Chrome web store, only for Windows users and only windows users.

Leo: What?

Gina: And they're disabling current extensions Windows users have installed that aren't listed in the web store. Yeah, this is a little crazy. so, you're a windows user, you got Chrome installed, you got maybe an extension installed that's maybe local or you didn't get from the chrome web store and it will be disabled in the current, the stable version of chrome. So, this new policy only applies ot windows users running the stable and beta versions of chrome. It doesn't impact people using Canary or Dev or Mac Linux or ChromeOS users. So, just Windows users. So, I don't know, we're all safer for it. If you’re a Chrome user on Windows do check out your extensions and make sure that nothing got auto disabled.

Chad: This drives me nuts. I use a...

Gina: And Google, Google is encouraging developers to upload their extension to the web store.

Leo: Chad?

Gina: Go ahead Chad.

Chad: Yeah. I use a extension called YouTube Centre because, for our job I need to download lots...

Leo: It's like a third party.

Chad: Yeah, you go and you download it off of GitHub and you can drag and drop it onto your extensions page and it will install but it's only locally.

Leo: That's really risk-, risky though.

Chad: Yeah, absolutely. I have to trust the source. I guess they just don't trust users to do that.

Gina: I wish that it had an Android, like, trust unknown sources checkbox, that you could say, hey, look, I know what I’m doing. You know, let me, let me run this. Because, I mean, look, you know, I don't know, there might be a reason why a developer might not want to upload their extension to the web store, a legitimate reason for example. So, Chad, what did you do? Did you wind up installing like the Dev, the Canary channel on your Netbook?

Chad: Well, I, actually, this is the first time I've noticed... when I normally have to do this on Friday's for a show that I do, and I’ll have to deal with that on Friday and figure out how to get around it, probably installing canary is what I’ll have to do and…

Gina: Yep.

Chad: Yeah, work around it that way.

Gina: That’s all I got.

Leo: And that's Google Change Log. Oh yeah. Play the drums slowly. Thank you Gina Trapani. I don't know what to make of this. I don't know if this is a hack, or if something serious is gone on with TrueCrypt. We’ve recommended whole disk encryption and file encryption for a long time, as the best choice, open source choice for disk encryption. In fact, there was a crowd funded project to audit TrueCrypt for security which is already got under way a little bit, and phase one is complete and there is a report. TrueCrypt, because it's open source I've recommended a lot, as a favorite choice for encryption, because you can see if the NSA or anybody else has a backdoor in it. But if you go today to TrueCrypt.org you're going to be very surprised by this notice, and I, you know, there's two possibilities, one that this is a legitimate notice from TrueCrypt, or the other is that it's been hacked, and I don't know which is the case, and nobody is reporting it yet. "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure as it may contain unfixed security issues. The development..." This has to be...

Gina: What? But this is Sourceforge. So, like...

Leo: Could it be hacked? "The development of TrueCrypt...

Gina: Yeah, right.

Leo: "The development of TrueCrypt was ended in 5, May 2014 after Microsoft terminated support of Windows XP". They’re encouraging you to migrate from TrueCrypt to Microsoft closed source BitLocker. I have to think this is a hack...

Gina: Yes.

Leo: But it's something we're going to watch with interest. Steve Gibb's is tweeting about it. He says he's seen a unsubstantiated rumor that has something to do with tonight’s interview with Edward Snowden. Brian Williams has an exclusive interview with the NSA leaker. I've got to think this has been a hack. This just doesn’t even look right.

Gina: Right. Because Snowden has, has talked about TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt is one the things he used.

Leo: He's recommended it, as have I, as has Steve for years. I think this is a prank. But, just got to point it out and we'll wait and see with interest, what happens. It doesn’t seem like it, this is how a open source project would terminate itself, with a recommendation to use BitLocker.

Mike: Yeah.

Gina: Right.

Leo: I think this is almost certainly a prank.

Mike: It’s not very funny.

Leo: I’m not laughing.

Gina: Yeah and there's got to be other places where TrueCrypt is... they have a Twitter account or another page? Truecrypt.org redirects to...

Leo: Yeah, let’s see. Sourceforge.

Gina: To Sourceforge.

Mike: Sourceforge. Truecrypt.sourceforge.com

Leo: You know that's a good question. Let me see if there is a Twitter account, because maybe they're saying something on the Twitter account.

Gina: Is TrueCrypt audited yet? Truecrypt.com

Leo: It is, that’s real. That’s actually a real site and that's the Crowdsource project that we're talking about, and as they say in part. There is a thread going on at Hacker News where people are talking about it, and in order of likelihood, Defacedsitetime just threw up a big announcement. Rogue code maintainer or Phase two of audit turned up something rather bad. I don't think it's the case. I think it has to be a prank. There is a new binary on there, which I would not recommend downloading. It’s a .exe file. Do not...

Mike: It's dated yesterday, so that the signature matches.

Leo: Which is a little concerning… That’s not how an open source project would terminate things however.

Gina: No, no. It isn't.

Leo: They've been hacked. I would almost certainly say, which is kind of sad. Could be a... Could it be? You're an open source expert Gina. Could it be a bad commit that would include a page change?

Gina: You know, I’m not, I haven't used Sourceforge, so I'm not sure how that works, but I know that on GitHub, yeah. You can manage the site, you know, you can manage the actual pages for the webs of the user facing website in GitHub. So, yeah, on GitHub that would be possible. So one could, could gain, if they got commit, gained commit access, commit master access to the repository could actually update the website to say, you know, use BitLocker instead.

Leo: Steve's pointing out as I mentioned, as it's mentioned on hacker news that the exe is signed by the same key as the normal TrueCrypt sign. The signature set is correct, but that means more, a bigger hack. If you ask me, I don't think that that's... I don't know what this means. This is not how thing would normally end. But, with any open source project, you know, things can go south in odd ways. We’ll follow this one.

Gina: With any software project.

Leo: Any, I'm sorry. Any project. Wow! That is just weird. We’ll follow that and continue to follow that with interest. And again, so now there’s two big stories for Tech News Tonight and if you want to go to breaking news, Mike Elgan, please be my guest. Wow! What a day this has been. What a weird, weird day. Let’s take a break while people can gather their thoughts, we can figure out what's going on here, and come back with more. We'll have some Google stuff. I'm sure.

Gina: We will.

Leo: Although the next big story is Yahoo planning YouTube rival. Okay, that's Google. It’s an anti-Google story. Our show today brought to you by Personal Capital. With Personal Capital you finally can get everything about your financial life in a single spot, know exactly where you stand. PersonalCapital.com/twig and you can find out more about it. Here’s the deal, I think, I need to kind of explain this. I’ve talked to personal Capital folks. In fact I've known them for two years when Ed, I'm sorry, Bill here is the Founder of Personal Capital, was on triangulation. He was on triangulation to talk about a lot of things, including money authentication, BitCoin and all that stuff. Former PayPal CEO and Intuit CEO, and he mentioned kind of off-handedly that I'm starting this new thing Personal Capital, and he talked about that. I joined it at the time. There’s a couple of routes you can follow if you're planning for your future, and most of you probably do this, I hope. You invest money, you save it. Maybe you have a brokerage account, or with one of the big online brokerages and you, you just kind of do it yourself and I bet you don't pay as much attention to it as you ought to. The other choice people have is to go to a bank or to one of the store fronts and get a broker and let him tell you what to do. Never went for that myself, I'm kind of like to do it myself. But in both cases you may not be getting the best advice. You may not really be managing your money right, and that's what Personal Capital is all about. It’s about empowering you to do the job right. Not more time on your part, but more information, better information. What you'll do is you'll go to personalcapital.com and you'll sign up for this free, free, free account; and I'll explain how it could be free in just a second, and you'll get a dashboard that shows all of your stuff. What you own, what you owe, what your investments, it'll show you how your portfolio is performing, and this is really important, and let's not gloss over it. Allocation of your portfolio, that's very important, how much is in equities, international equities, United States equities, how much is in bonds. You’ll learn all about that with a single click of the mouse. You’ll figure out what you're paying in fees for advisors and investments. It also has a 401K fee analyzer; it will tell you if you're wasting your money, you know, it's possible to really throw away your 401K, you don't want to do that, a mutual fund fee calculator and a lot more. Now here's how they make money. They are certified financial planners, and not everybody will get this treatment, but if you wish you can have advice from them. They’re not selling anything, they're not salesmen. They’re there to give you that advice, but if you want to just use the software, you can. It’s kind of the best of both worlds. Unbiased, useful information, all the data you need, and this is free. PersonalCapital.com/TWIG. It’s wealth management for the digital age. I invite you to try it out. No risk, no obligation, and I think you'll find it useful. And, you know, we love our fans. We want to make sure they're not eating Alpo once they're retired. We want to take care of you. PersonalCapital.com. I did it immediately and I love it. PersonalCapital.com/twig. We heard this rumor before that Yahoo was going to build its own YouTube. Ad Age is now confirming it, because Yahoo I guess is approaching creator and advertisers. So, you can’t keep this kind of stuff secret for too long. What do we know about Yahoo's YouTube? Anything?

Mike: Well, we know that they are...

Leo: Expensive.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: The ad rates are 50 to 100 % higher than YouTube. YouTube is not expensive, according to Tube Mobile which Chad always is recommending. The cost per 1000 is under 10 dollars for YouTube, which is actually, that's what radio is. It’s not what we are, we are a lot more. We are about 70 dollars. Yahoo is not commenting of course, but they have been approaching some big names on YouTube on saying, "Hey, you know what. We could give you some more money if you come over here, because along with that bigger ad bill they would also be able to pay more. They’re wrapping up talks according to Ad Age with  producers, plan a debut this summer. They wanted to do an upfront in April, that's where you go to advertisers and you tell them what you're going to do and sign up long term contracts. That did not happen. They’re telling YouTube creators more generous revenue sharing deals, or fixed ad rates that are higher, so, you know exactly how much you are going to make. Creators will be allowed to open their own channels, host their videos in Yahoo, just like YouTube, and just like YouTube, Yahoo’s video player will be embeddable on other sites, publishing dashboard. Chad, you’re, you're a YouTube guy. 

Chad: Yeah.

Leo: Would this be compelling? And the key is, it's not exclusive I think. 

Chad: It would have to not be exclusive, especially in the beginning, unless someone wants to take really big risk. The biggest issue that I see is YouTube is just a portal that a lot of people and lot of younger people use as...

Leo: That's where the views are. 

Chad: That’s where they are. They go to it like, like their home page, they show up there almost Netflix to find out what's going to entertain them today, and getting and changing that behavior is by far the hardest thing that Yahoo would have to do. I'm excited to hear that there might be competition.

Leo: It’s good to have new competition.

Chad: Absolutely.    

Leo: Absolutely.

Chad: Right now the, on the YouTube creator side, YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue, and if Yahoo was to come in and say, not only are we charging our advertisers 20 to 50% more. You’re also going to get 20 to 50% more form us, from our ad revenue, that, that would be some amazing competition.

 Gina: Yeah, it seems like that's the opportunity right? is to treat creators better than YouTube has been treating then. But then, it's just like Chad said, getting viewers to switch over, right because people aren't finding their videos embedded on web pages, right? They’re going to YouTube.

Leo: No. Yeah, Yeah.

Mike: And of course, there are going to be a lot of creators on you tube who feel like they are not getting and traction, not getting any traffic they want. There are a few stars, and we always focus on the big stars, but for every star there is a 100,000 people who are not able to really become famous, and they'll be happy to jump ship and try to become stars on the new network, if this in fact happens. Of course, Yahoo failed to acquire daily Motion for 300 million dollars some time ago. Marissa Mayer has basically been talking about building a YouTube like presence for Yahoo for a long time, and you know, essentially before Yahoo her only job was Google. So, she's been sort of aggressively trying to recreate Google at Yahoo to a certain extent, and this is a big, big part of it.

Leo: Isn't it funny how she's just doing the Google roadmap one after another?

Mike: That's probably why they hired her. Because, every time Yahoo tried to you know, compete in the new world where portals are no longer a relevant cultural phenomenon, Google is always there eating their lunch. So, I think to a certain extent they failed with multiple CEO's and when they went with Marissa Mayer they basically said, you know, let’s be the new Google. Let’s compete with Google on its own terms and she's been aggressively doing that, mostly using the old model, which is just keep buying things and keep shutting things down.

Leo: And that's going to be the problem. She’s going to face that reputation when she goes to creators and says, “please come here”. As long as it's not exclusive, I can see people doing it, they're not going to lose their YouTube presence, and they have the potential mix of more money.

Mike: One thing Yahoo has that is pretty powerful...

Leo: Tumbler.

Mike: Tumblr. Exactly. There is a huge network of a lot of young people and it’s a distribution network that's got a pretty good reputation among a certain crowd of people, and it's viral. It’s a highly viral social bloggy kind of service that is perfect for video.

Leo: You can't... right now, can you post video on Tumblr.

Gina: Definitely.

Mike: You used to be able to.

Leo: You can still?

Mike: Yeah.

Gina: Yeah, Yeah, and it works with a couple different sites. I’m sure that there are plenty of people out there who would love to make their living making videos. And if Yahoo can enable, you know, maybe couldn't do that with the YouTube deal, if Yahoo can offer that to them. And you know what; I don't know that Mayer is rebuilding Google. I mean, this makes sense because it's content right, and that's what Yahoo is. It’s content. Seems like she and the company is committed to making great content, and this what this, this seems like that’s, this is the direction it’s going in.

Leo: It does fit what Yahoo’s been all along, which is content.

Gina: right, right, right.

Leo: And boy, there's no better way to, you know, play the game, than to create a video site. Although, let’s not forget that Yahoo bought broadcast.com which was also many months ago, from Mark Cuban, made him a billionaire. And shuttered it within a year, well, you know. Good. Like you said Chad, let’s have some competition. Nothing wrong with that.

Chad: yep.

Leo: A great idea. Speaking of competition, Google, I have to admire Google, you know when they started Google Fiber they always said this isn't the business for us. We just want to show the path, and what's happened is in almost every market where Google has announced Gigabit Fiber, the other incumbents in the market have said, oh, we can do that. At first the reaction was, who was that from? Time Warner, oh we don't think our customers really want speeds like that.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: But now, everybody... Cox is going to start its Gigabit rollout in Phoenix, Las Vegas and Omaha, Nebraska. AT & T is starting gigabit rollouts as well. This is good. Google did the right thing.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: They kicked everybody in the behind.

Mike: And they have the best service out there. They really do. its, this Google Fiber is, and if you're in the cost per speed or no matter what metric you use, they just have the very best service and it's just fantastic to see them driving competition. I just hope that they get into all these cities. There’s a long list of cities that they intend to get in. As of today they're only in two cities, which is Austin and Salt Lake City, I believe. I'm sorry. I’m sorry. No, it's Kansas City.

Leo: Provo. Kansas, they started in Kansas City, then they moved to Provo, and then they moved to Austin.

Mike: They're looking at Austin. Austin’s probably next on the block.

Leo: Although Austin now has a number of choices according to Brian Wood.

Mike: AT & T. Yeah, and yeah, exactly. So, exactly as you're saying, but there's a...

Leo: This really bugs me, because all of these companies have said oh, we can’t do that. It’d be too expensive. Nobody wants it. And as soon as Google comes in the market, wait a minute, we can do that.

Mike: Well, but to their defense, essentially what AT & T's position was, is that all these companies have wanted to lay Fiber, wanted to do all kinds of things, and cities have been dragging their feet saying well you have to go through this process, you have to go through that process; and Google did something really bold. They said we're having a contest, we're having tryouts. Make it fast. And they had everybody competing against each other, and that competition, behind the scenes of that competition was city government saying you know what, we're just going to green light all this stuff that normally, we're going to get rid of all the red tape for you and we promise you we're not going to give you and obstructions. And then Google cherry picked those markets, and once they've got all that red tape swept away, other companies can then come in and say, well, if that’s how they're doing it, then we'll do it too. So, Google, I think the genius of this was the sort of Darpa Grand Challenge approach where you have a contest and you have city governments competing with each other. 

Leo: Right and the city governments woke up, and they're going to do the same thing, I presume for these other gigabit providers. Now, maybe Google will do exactly the same thing for open internet, open internet neutrality. They’ve said publicly at Google Fiber, “We don't charge for peering, and we don't have fast lanes. We think this is good for customers”. From the blog post, "we don't change... We don’t charge because it’s really a win-win-win situation. It’s good for content providers". I raise my hat here, because they can deliver really high-quality streaming video to their customers. It’s good for us because it saves us money. It’s easier to transport video from a local server; they're talking about caching, local caching, co-location. And Netflix has offered this, the open connect system for some time. Now, we had a great conversation, and I want to point people to the conversation we and yesterday on security now. Steve Gibson brought in Brett Glass who you probably know.

Mike: Yeah. I do.

Leo: We've all known for years. He was a long time writer for; he probably worked for you at PCWorld at some point.

Mike: I think he definitely wrote for us.

Leo: Yeah, he's also worked for InfoWorld, and I think he writes for PCMag, but he's also a Internet Service Provider. He does a wireless internet service in Laramie, Wyoming.

Mike: Yeah.

Leo: Oh, Larry had done that. And he was very adamant that any kind of internet regulation would be a bad idea, not just for him but for customers, and that the idea of net neutrality cannot in any way be pursued reasonably by the FCC without causing huge problems. And he actually, I think he made a very coherent case why the Title 2 regulation that we've been calling for, the Telecommunications Act regulation that would say the FCC declares the broadband providers common carriers. He says that's going to, the kinds of regulations that would bring in, would really become a problem. Then you've got the government really put its hands in the gears. So, he made a good case there. I’m not sure he made such a good case for wired internet service providers should charge edge providers as well as its customers, but it’s a good conversation. I highly recommend Security Now yesterday for that. And, thank you Google for making the world a little bit better place.

Mike: Well, you know it's funny that they as, you know they step forward in a blog post as an ISP, Google Fiber is an ISP. They said, you know, we don't believe in this payment for access, because guess who the number two is. It's YouTube, right, they're the payer.

Leo: Both sides of the equation.

Mike: Right. And that's a much bigger equation.

Leo: It's kind of what Brett said. It’s very easy for them to say this as an ISP, but you know what, frankly their business is on the other side.

Mike: Right. And they've never admitted to paying, but they only almost certainly have to.

Leo: They do do it.

Mike: They have to, and they do believe in co-location, which is where you essentially mirror everything. You mirror everything Netflix has in your servers to deliver it to the last mile. And that’s a good thing for everybody, and we need to constantly remind people that whenever we talk about net neutrality we're talking about the last mile. We’re not talking about peering relationships before that.

Leo: At all.

Mike: Right, at all. That’s a totally different...

Leo: It's not about the interconnects, it's about your driveway.

Mike: That’s right.

Leo: The information, you covered this, I’m sure on Tech News, a few days ago.

Mike: Yep.

Leo: The information said that Google is thinking via its Nest division about buying Dropcam. We love those Dropcam wireless cameras. We have them all over the studio. They’re Wi-Fi based. They’re going to be the next appliance to add, but do you think it would raise, Gina, any issues with people to know that you have a Google owned camera in your house?

Mike: Oh good heavens!

Gina: You know, with Nest and whatever I now have a child and am now at an age where I’m worn out talking about nanny-cams and that kind of thing.

Leo: Get a drop cam, you’ll love it.

Gina: Yea, is it great? Is it a great product?

Leo: They’re great. You can see our drop cams. I don’t know how many are up. Let’s see, twit.tv/dropcams, that is the website. Let’s see if any of them are up. We take them down, right because why, they break?

Mike: We don’t take them down.

Leo: There’s only one offline, that’s my office. I think somebody comes in and unplugs that. But you can see Chad at work here. We use it to monitor our reception desk because we don’t always have somebody at the front desk so we monitor the front door.

Mike: Once again, Google tends to line up with the rational argument and expects the public to be rational which they never are. It’s an emotional argument to say that we don’t want Google cameras in our house. In fact, we all have them already.

Leo: Google is looking at us right now.

Mike: You have a camera right there and you have Chrome opened, right? You have an Android phone, you have a tablet. These things have cameras in them. They’re already pointed inside your house, your life.

Leo: This is going to be a great couple of years and coming up on Google IO, WWDC. We’re going to hear about this. We’re finally getting to the point where we have consumer level home automation. And that’s going to involve cameras, it’s going to involve centers, it’s going to involve gadgets, it’s going to involve APIs. That’s really where we’re going to hear about at WWDC and all, so Google IO, lots of APIs. Remember two years ago, Gina was it two or three years ago? Google was talking about Android at home.

Gina: Android at home, and then…

Leo: Then silence. Nothing. I’m certain that that’s coming back this year. Everybody’s going to be talking about home automation. This drop cam is a play for home automation. Dropcam also makes a little inexpensive device that you can attach to anything. It’s a motion detector, so if that little device moves you get a notification. And the notification can tell you anything you want it to tell you. It has a sticker so you put it on the window. When the window opens, you get a notification that somebody opened the window.

Mike: I think it’s great.

Leo: It’s sensors.

Mike: We heard the rumor that Apple would be announcing something on Monday at the WWDC about home automation.

Leo: I think that’s going to get overshadowed a little bit by the new news.

Mike: Yea.

Leo: Maybe they will do it maybe they won’t do it. But I think a lot of attention will be paid to beats.

Mike: In the press that’s a developers conference and the developers won’t care about beats.

Leo: They don’t care about beats, they want to hear about home automation. Mary Maker, I’m going to put on a wig here. Just call me Mary. Every year Mary May Kerd does a presentation. She’s with the Kliner Perkins coffee buyers. Before that she was a Wall Street analyst. She’s considered probably the person to watch when it comes to internet prognostication. Today she did her annual state of the internet speech. Thank you Mary Maker. She puts her slides up every year. I’ll tell you, these are the slides. They’re rich with content so I haven’t had a chance to look at these. They just went up. We can talk a little about them. High level user usage trends, the big one to me, mobile data traffic is up 81%. Hugely accelerating growth and she says the video is the proprietor here. That’s it to me, interesting for our business, but it’s interesting in general. Tablets, 52% early stage rapid unit growth. She says tablets are very hot. Although I predict we’re going to see a drop off of tablets.

Gina: We’re not already seeing a drop?

Leo: Apple did. But that was one quarter so I don’t know if that’s enough.

Mike: It’s shifting away from the high end Apple disposable income people to the low-cost global inexpensive Android.

Leo: The take away from that slide is mobile data usage is very strong. 81% over the year. Smart phone users, only at… now in the U.S. it’s something like 80% are smart phone users. But globally, only 30% of the potential 5.2 billion mobile phone user base, only a third is smart phones. So there’s a big up side. But the up side is not in the U.S. You can see the trend is really growing.

Mike: Speaking of the U.S., and interesting stat here. She says that 97% of smart phone market share are made in the U.S. operating systems like Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and so on. 97%. Remember when the world…

Leo: Nokia is a U.S. company.

Mike: Not that that matters. Not that their market share is hugely…

Leo: Their platforms are pretty big.

Mike: That’s true. They’re now also in the Android business.

Leo: Look at these tablet sales graph. The green line is desktop PCs going down, blue line notebook PCs going up. But the yellow line, the one that just appeared all of a sudden in 2010 is already growing faster than PCs ever did. 52% of the market is tablet. We’re definitely in a post-PC era. I wonder though in the next three years what that graph’s going to look like. If it might just look like a big spike.

Gina: Yea.

Mike: Yea.

Leo: The reason I say that, I agree mobile is where it’s at. Mobile phones is where the big growth is going to be. But she says tablet has a lot of growth ahead of it.

Mike: She says 66%, which is two thirds of tablet owners, surf the web while watching TV. Two thirds of tablet owners.

Leo: That’s true in our house. Two thirds of us… I’m the only one sitting and actually watching the TV. Isn’t it true? It’s true. I watch the show. They’re doing their tablet thing and every once in a while they ask what happened. How about at your house Gina?

Gina: Yea, 100%. We’re on our phones and tablets and notebooks, yea.

Leo: It is so disconcerting to me. And now I know I am old. Because nobody pays attention to anything anymore.

Mike: You know Gina that’s not true. Your baby isn’t using a tablet, it’s two thirds at your house too.

Gina: She’s not but she demands almost my phone. When she sees my phone, she demands.

Leo: Internet advertising growing and mobile is up 47%. Still a lot of room for growth there.

Mike: That’s huge growth.

Leo: And that was the questions, was how do they monetize mobile. Apparently somebody has figured it out. Print remains way over index, that means it’s not good. Mobile app revenue, still trumps mobile ad revenue. You want to make money on mobile, sell an app. 68% of mobile revenue is apps. She talks a little bit about cyber threats. This is depressing. A vulnerable system placed on the internet today will be compromised within 15 minutes. 95% of all networks are compromised in some way. Let’s move on, shall we. This is a really great slide show. You really have to parse through it. As you can see, she loves dense slides. I would love to be at that event and see how long she spends per slide.

Gina: I’d like to see Edward review her charts.

Leo: Edward would not be happy. She’s talking about education. There is reason for optimism. Eight in ten Americans say they care about education. Graduation rates are rising from high school, that’s good. Online courses making a big difference here. For instance, year to year Conn Academy’s YouTube channel has grown 69%. ITunes, open university downloads up 59%. Seven million students enrolled in Coursera courses. That’s good. That really makes me happy. Here’s comparing duo-lingo which is a language platform we highly recommend with Coursera. It’s very much international. The red is North America on both these pie charts. And you can see that 29% of international, of users for duo-lingo are in Latin America, 30% are in Europe, 11% are in Asia. And it’s actually pretty well-distributed. This is kind of cool. 25% of Coursera users are in Asia, 23% are in Europe, 11% are in Latin America, 6% are in Africa. That’s pretty neat.

Mike: Although they’re wasting their time. The technology for simultaneous translation is getting really good.

Leo: Did you see that demo that Microsoft did at Recode?

Gina: No, what was that?

Leo: I’ll play it for you.

Mike: And I’ll sort of give a preamble to it. Microsoft demonstrated a future version of Skype that they said is coming out soon. That simultaneously translates, watching your conversation so you talk in one language and you say transfer this to German. Within a second the translation is on the screen and then it’s read by a computer. And then that person talks in a foreign language and it’s translated to English.

Leo: Now don’t feel bad, Google lovers. Because this is, I’ll skip around a bit. But don’t feel bad because you know Google is going to show something like this. Because Google’s got this technology. But this is really cool, I’ll go ahead and turn it up.

Mike: And that’s the guy that demoed it.

Leo: This is not the guy, but he’s talking to a German colleague. He’s speaking English, she’s speaking German. And Skype is simultaneously translating it. This is not the clip that I thought it was. The demo recode is perhaps better than this. Let me go back and find that.

Mike: We’re entering into a new world of translation where so many different apps are getting really great translation technology. It’s still not perfect. Even this isn’t perfect but it’s pretty darn good and very fast.

Gina: That’s neat.

Leo: I’ll show you Gina because you’ll want to see this. Let me get out of the ad.

Mike: Darn advertising!

Leo: There’s a Microsoft ad. Don’t you hate advertisements. This is it. So he’s speaking… oh wait a minute that’s actually translations. Let’s go back a little bit. He’s going to speak to his German colleague in English.

Mike: That was about a second, second in a half. Even I understood that.

Gina: Yea.

Leo: It’s actually kindergarten German.

Mike: There are some complex sentences later on.

Leo: Actually the English transcription isn’t perfect.

Mike: No. And the Germans in the audience said it wasn’t perfect either.

Leo: But it’s understandable, and that’s the key right.

Gina: Yea.

Mike: It’s still better than taking six weeks to learn a foreign language.

Leo: Could you imagine us doing shows with international contributors who don’t speak English sometime in the near future? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

Mike: We should do that on purpose.

Leo: They say this will be available in beta tests later this year. Burgerman on the other hand is excellent.

Mike: Yes, very clear. Wouldn’t it be fun? But really, ten years from now it’s going to be so great to have all this. On the one hand it will be great to be able to translate everything. On the other hand, it’s really going to suck the wind out of everyone’s motivation to learn a foreign language. Because what’s the point, right?
Gina: That’s true. That’s really cool. But doing a show like that, there’s a reason why on TV they edit it so that the translator is speaking kind of over the person. Right? Because it’s just so slow, there’s those long awkward pauses. If there was any cross-talk anywhere it would get weird. That’s why I like, I don’t know if it’s a Glass app or an iPhone app, where you pointed out…

Leo: Word Lens.

Gina: Word Lens. It changes it and it’s in the same file. That feels really seamless and magical to me. That Skype was pretty cool but that would be a long tedious conversation.

Leo: Google just bought Word Lens and I think Google if anybody is in the best situation. Google Translator is already phenomenal, and I imagine they’ll have this capability.

Mike: I believe in a category of computing that’s just getting off. I call it hearable computing, where you essentially have an earpiece where everything is language. So you talk to it.

Leo: Have you seen this yet, Gina?

Gina: No, but it’s on my list.

Mike: But that’s where we’re going. Think about translation. You talk, and it tells you…

Leo: so Keanu Reeves, sorry. Rivers Phoenix… Joaquin Phoenix is an attractive good looking guy. Yes he where’s high-water pants. But everyone in the future will.

Mike: That’s the most depressing fact.
Leo: I have to wear high-water pants. He is a little lonely. He’s just gone through a divorce. So he buys the new operating system, OS1. And you turn it on and you boot it up and it says hi. And you say hi. It amazingly enough sounds just like Scarlett Johansen. And she’s very cute and breathily And he says why do you do that? She says what? You take a breath in between. You don’t need to breathe, you’re a machine. She said, what do you, you’re pissing me off. She says that’s how humans communicate. And he says yea but you don’t need to breathe. And she says you’re hurting my feelings. She does in fact become more and more human. He falls deeply in love with her. And then it turns out, he’s not alone. His neighbors are falling in love. Everyone is falling in love with their OS1 computer. There’s a whole business of surrogacy. We’ll get into that later. I thought it was fascinating. The issues it raises are fascinating. And the UI is great because you’re just talking with it.

Mike: That’s what I mean, that’s user-interface. But basically imagine traveling. You were recently traveling in Turkey and elsewhere.
Leo: Thinking about Babel fish now.

Mike: So imagine you’re in Turkey and saying out loud, computer, or Scarlett Johansen. Whatever the command is to wake it up. And say translate from Turkish and then you walk into the bakery and it tells you what to say. And when the person talks, you hear the English in your ear. That’s a fantastic user interface for translation. The thing they got wrong in her is, yes Scarlett Johansen is the voice. But in the future we’ll easily be able to choose any voice, including Scarlett Johansen.

Leo: Didn’t he get a choice at the beginning? Would you like a man or a woman? He didn’t get that choice?
Mike: Maybe, but you’d be able to choose from any celebrity. In fact, Waves has a feature where you can choose Elvis as the person. We were using it the other day, and it was like coming up on the right, turn left.

Leo: I did not spoil her for anybody believe me. That was not a spoiler in any way.

Gina: I pitched this movie to my wife a few times. I was like the dude falls in love with an operating system. She’s like no.

Leo: You got to see it. It’s a beautiful movie.

Gina: It looks beautifully shot. I just have to watch it on my own. I don’t think it’s going to happen jointly.

Leo: Did you like it Lisa? No, Lisa didn’t like it. But she was working on her iPad the whole time so…

Mike: Yea. So life is part of the 66%.

Leo: You thought it was a little slow and boring.

Mike: Depressing.
Leo. You know and it is depressing. She found it very depressing.

Mike: It’s depressing because that sort of thing is definitely going to happen. There are going to be… in fact it already happens to a certain extent.

Leo: I want to know where I sign up. You have people marrying their pillows.

Mike: They carry them around on the subway. Yea it’s weird. Lonely people will have options, I guess.

Leo: I thought it was great. And I didn’t spoil it because there’s a lot more after that. In fact it gets really weird. And by the way, spoiler alert, Apple bought Beats. Okay, we’re moving on now. Let’s take a break. When we come back, our tips, our number of the… Actually before I do that, were there any other stories? There were a lot and we didn’t get to cover all of them. I know Gina wants to get out of here, and….

Gina: I have been combing through the true crypt source here which has been very depressing.
Leo: I’m going to absolutely say it’s a hack. There’s just no way this would be how it ends for true crypt. And the fact that it’s signed with a hash that works just means it was a deep act.

Gina: Yea, I mean certainly the latest commit, I mean the source code was changed. There’s just a bunch of process and insecure act.

Leo: Absolutely do not download that. It’s a lone-EXE file. As we know true crypt works across many platforms including of course Linux and Macintosh. So the fact is I think something bad happened here. It could just be one of the, I don’t know what the committer rules are for this project. Presumably, there are few trusted committers. If one of the went rogue…

Gina: That’s usually the case right. There’s a couple trusted committers.

Leo: Yea. What’s weird is that we’re not hearing from anybody about this. In fact the guy who’s a cryptographer at Johns Hopkins has been tweeting about it. He says he’s immediately contacted the developers at true crypt and has not heard back from them. So there’s a mystery here. And we’ll continue to cover that. Very strange if you go…

Gina: Very weird.

Leo: Here’s a picture by the way and now crossing the Twitter of Dre and IO Vene, writing the one infinite loop elevator with Tim Cook and Eddie Q. So there’s some happy and rap’s first billionaire. Dre has a quarter of Beats and so that means that he’s just got $750M.

Mike: It’s good work if he can get it.

Leo: Work if he can get it.

Mike: But is he a billionaire?

Leo: Well yes he has several hundred million. He was, it was Tyrese it wasn’t him who said that. But I think it’s probably pretty close. And by the way he doesn’t get all of the $750M right away because there’s $400M in unvested stock that he’ll get after sitting in a few board meetings. I just can’t imagine him as a full-time employee. At some point he’s going to be like it’s been fun but I have to get back in the studio. Don’t you think?
Gina: Yea, that does seem strange.
Mike: We’ll he’s going to be in the cafeteria, no.

Leo: The chat room says notice Tim Cook covering his wrists.

Mike: Hum…

Leo: And where is Eddie Q’s right hand? O’Mallick just tweeted Google has cars with drivers, Apple has Beats by Dre. I don’t know what it means but there you go. That’s today’s show in a headline. O must be watching. And what does Dre have on his wrists, it’s a nice watch but it’s not an iWatch, I guarantee you. Although Jimmy has his sleeves pulled down on his left hand too. Something going on there.

Gina: They would have taken their watches off, come on. They’re not going to be photographed, especially Tim.

Mike: There are already all kinds of things floating around, tidbits around this announcement. One of them is the official title of IO Vene and Dre are IO Vene’s title is going to be Jimmy and Dr. Dre’s title is going to be Dre.

Leo: That sounds right.
Mike: That’s their official titles.

Leo: Is that true or is that a joke?

Mike: That’s true. What are they going to be, director of engineering? What are they going to call them?
Leo: Alright, our show brought to you by our good buddies at squarespace.com. We’ve known them since practically coming out of the college dorm room. Now they are the place to go to create your wonderful, beautiful new website whether you’re a blogger, a photographer, an artist, whether you’re selling, you’re a poet. Square Space is hosting the best hosting ever plus the best software. They tie together their intimate connected… you always have the latest software, never have to worry about security. They have an incredible set of 25 templates, each of which can be customized to make a unique site. In fact, click any template, and then look at the various sites created with that template. And you’ll see these are all real sites. You’ll see what Square Space will do. Just incredible. This is a fine-art collection. Square Space is beloved among artists, photographers, creatives because it is so beautiful. You’re getting though state of the art engineering, gorgeous code if you look underneath the java script, HTML. And you don’t need to know any of that, they handle it. But you get state of the art mobile responsive design, every single Square Space template is enabled for e-commerce. In fact, even at the $8 a month level, you can create a site that can sell or take donations. Square Space is just knocking it out of the park. And man do they make it easy to get into the Square Space space. All you have to do is visit squarespace.com, click that get started button. You’re going to get two weeks of Square Space. They have recorders so you can get all your content from your existing site, including all comments, pictures, all the links so you can really see what it’s like. And then this is again, very modern. Just pick a different template and it all looks completely different. You don’t have to reenter anything. Everything just works. It all works on no matter what size screen you’re using. They have apps for iOS that are just gorgeous, award-winning in fact. Blog applets let you post and moderate comments there, Metric App which lets you measure your traffic, even your social media follows. You got to try it. Two weeks free, no credit card required. Start building your site right now at squarespace.com. Eight dollars a month when you sign up for a yea, and you get the domain free, and we’re going to cut 10% off when you use the offer code TWIG. Squarespace.com. What are you waiting for? I know you know about Square Space. What are you waiting for? Go to squarespace.com and use the offer code TWIG. Gina Trepani, tine for your tip of the week.

Gina: Android has now touchless reminders. So when you activate voice, you say okay Google, remind me to feed the dog at 4pm. You can now say, Google kind of pops up a confirmation box that you can tap and say yes remind me. Well now you can just say yes, and the reminder will be set. Fewer steps, you can control completely by voice. And this was sort of a silent roll out, but is working for most users now.

Leo: Google now gets better all the time. And I just got the new Google plus app on Android.

Mike: That’s amazing isn’t it. Isn’t it beautiful?

Gina: Yea.

Leo: It’s beautiful. It took me a little while to get used to it. I couldn’t figure out how to use it. Like how to get to photos.

Gina: I know they kind of, they…

Leo: They changed things around. And you know what, no more hamburger. And I think that the hamburger is now deprecated.

Gina: Hamburger is on its way out.

Leo: I keep seeing designers saying don’t ever use a hamburger. Nobody knows what it means. Nobody even knows what we mean when we say hamburger. You taught me how… it’s the lines where you slide. Yea, Facebook still uses it on their app. But it’s on its way out there too.

Gina: And man those photo stories are amazing. I really love the one you posted Leo. It came out really nice.

Leo: Thank you Google. I know, Google’s going to take over the world and we’re going to be really sorry. I for one am welcoming our new, I just love them. I just can’t get enough Google.

Mike: And by the way the performance of this app is really good too.

Leo: The new Google Plus for Android?

Mike: Yea. Much better than the old one.

Leo: It’s gorgeous. And because of Google Now, I now know that the Giants are five innings into a no-hitter with the Cubs. So there, there’s that.

Gina: Nice.

Leo: Nice. What do you want to share with use, Mike?
Mike: I have an app. Google within the last hour updated its Google camera app. And has a bunch of new features, for Android, the Google Camera app for Android. It’s available now in Google Play store. It has a new fisheye lens mode, which is really cool. You can set a timer, they used to have a timer function. I believe they took it out but they put it back in. So you can set it for 30 seconds and take a picture. It’s either a 3 second or a 10 second delay, not 30, so you can get into the group shot or whatever. Again, that used to exist. You can also capture landscape scenes with your left hand. And you can choose between 16x9, 4x3 aspect ratios and there’s a new creative panoramic mode of wide-angle and fisheye mode. The fisheye mode actually simulates a fisheye lens. So this is a variant of a photosphere so you end up with a circle rather than a 360 degree thing that has to be viewed in a special mode. So it’s really a kind of a nice update if you’re already using Google Camera, of course it will. You’ll be using it. But if you’re not using it, you’ll want to try because it looks really cool. It’s already a great little app but it looks even better with a few unique features.

Leo: Very cool.

Gina: The thing I liked about the Google Camera app is that it was a lot simpler than the built-in Android camera. So I hope that all these new features they’re adding doesn’t turn into that halo-menu effect, where you’re sliding up and down huge hierarchies of menus. Those sound like really cool new features. I’m excited.
Leo: I guess we’ll get that soon. I don’t think I have it yet.

Mike: They announced it around two o’clock pacific.

Leo: Okay, 44 minutes ago.

Gina: I should’ve gotten the change log.

Leo: You couldn’t have gotten it. They just announced it. I got a couple of crowd sourced projects to talk about. Everybody’s been saying you have to talk about Levare Burton’s kick starter project to bring back reading rainbow. I did not grow up with reading rain box. You did not, maybe Gina did. Chad definitely. It’s Chad’s generation.

Chad: I can go anywhere.

Leo: Oh dear. It was a PBS program that was very beloved. Levare Burton taught a lot of kids to read. Millions of kids are still illiterate. One out of every four children in America will grow up illiterate. That is just wrong. Reading rainbow was 1983-2006. 26 Emmys, Peabody award, but PBS cancelled it in 2006. He wants to bring it back. He did bring back the reading rainbow app, we talked about that. But he says it’s not going to be TV anymore. What he wants to do is reading rainbow in the classroom. He wants to raise a million dollars to do that. And low and behold, they just started this today I think, it’s already up to three quarters of a million dollars and going up fast. They’ll reach their goal in minutes.

Gina: That’s great, good for him.

Leo: If we can help put that over, I would love to do that. Let’s try to get Levare a call-back, because I think we can get Levare on Triangulation. We’ve talked to him before. He’s a great guy. The other one is something that Jeff Jarvis has to talk about. His friend Bill Gross, he’s been on the show, has a new affordable 3d printer on indie gogo. The matter mod T, a 3d printer that would go for just around $250.

Mike: That is elegant.

Gina: This thing looks amazing. This thing looks really cool.

Leo: Isn’t that neat?

Gina: And it’s not only that it’s a 3d printer that’s really affordable, but they want to make transmitting designs as easy as installing an app on your phone.
Mike: It looks like an Apple product.
Leo: It is beautiful.

Gina: I can send you a really cool coat hanger, as easy as sending you an SMS and you can just print it out right there on your desk. And you have it. It’s teleportation really in a way. I love maker bot, I love 3d printing. But this one seems like it’s really even within range of kind of a normal person. And if a lot of people have these, then sending designs and making designs will be a lot more prevalent. It’s a really cool project.

Leo: It’s a PLA printer. It would be able to print objects at 6x4x5 inches. Frog designed the printer itself, beautiful plexi-case and so forth. So I just wanted people to know about it and visit indie gogo. They’re trying to raise $375,000. They’re more than half way there, thirty-five days left. The campaign started today. This is another one where people are going crazy for it. Crowd sourcing is just incredible. If you search indie gogo for MOD-T, that’s the name of it. The Mod T printer that will now be able to teleport coat hangers, thanks to Gina Trepani. I’d like to send you a coat hanger, not wire, PLA. So there’s a couple of interesting kick starter projects. Hey folks, we’re out of time but I want to thank Mike Elgin for being here, taking some time.

Mike: Thanks for having me on.

Gina: Thanks Mike.
Leo: It was a good time for you to be here. We had some big breaking news, two big breaking news stories. You can catch Mike Monday through Friday, 10am pacific to 1pm eastern time, 17UTC for Tech News Today. Our daily news program. Mike’s really done a great job. Revitalizing it, redesigning it so that it is just really a great place to go. Not only to know what the big stories are but to understand the big stories.

Mike: That’s right.

Leo: We’ve been really focusing on that.

Mike: We’ve been focusing heavily on getting some of the best journalists in the business to come in and tell us about their scoops and exclusives. It’s really great, Jason Howl and I are having a great time, and it’s really exciting. We’re having fun.
Leo: Nice to have you, Mike. We really appreciate it. Thanks of course to Gina Trepani. We love you. Thinkup.com, if you want to sign up for the best Twitter analysis tool ever. I wish there was a way to get Google Plus into this.
Gina: We’re working on that. Instagram, Google Plus, Four Square.

Mike: It’s not easy with Google Plus is it?

Leo: They don’t make it easy. There is a read API, so I guess you can read it, right?
Gina: Yea we can read it and we can get comments and stuff. Their API isn’t as fleshed out as Twitter’s and Facebook’s. We’re still working on it.

Leo: You can probably only get public shares, right? So that’s only half of it.

Gina: That’s right.

Leo: Really? Less than half is published.

Mike: That’s what they’ve said in the past.

Leo: We talked a couple weeks ago when Kevin Marks was here. He’s big on the indie web project and we talked about this new With Known, used to be IDNO. Publishing platform, the design of which is you publish to your blog and then it publishes it out to Four Square, Facebook, and Twitter. But of course you can’t do it to Google Plus because there’s no write API. He set me up so I’m going to move my blog to that soon. I wish we could do this with Google Plus too. Anyway, thinkup.com, these are the insights. They will inspire conversation, replies outnumbered retweets.

Mike: Leo Laporte has a real potty mouth, using the F-bomb 25 times a day.

Leo: You still have, oh this is Facebook, this is fixed now. Two weeks…

Gina: We got to fix that data there, Leo. Sorry about that one chart. On the right, the three right points are correct. It’s the ones on the left that aren’t correct.

Leo: I certainly had a great week. Fourteen thousand friends a week, I’m gaining.

Gina: We switched from tracking friends to tracking followers. So I apologize. That is a bug in which we will fix.

Leo: Well I don’t care. I have a followers, not so very many friends. Not so very many friends.

Gina: We’re still in beta, making lots of improvements and launching new insights every week. Then we’re going to have free trials soon so if you’re not sure if it’s right for you, soon in the next few weeks we’ll have a free trial. Without committing right away.

Leo: I got the famous but enough about me insight. 67% of my tweets last week had I, me, mine, or myself.

Gina: 52 points, wow!

Leo: Normally I don’t talk about myself but I just felt like I had to this week. It’s all about me.

Gina: You had to share. It’s all about you, Leo. That’s a good thing, own it. No judgment.

Leo: I don’t think about it. I only tweeted seven times last week. It’s not a fair stat.

Gina: That’s true.

Leo: Okay you wanted it, I’m going to do it. I was wrong about Beats. Are you happy now? Are you happy now? We played the video. Why do we record that? Because there was a pretty good chance I would be wrong about Beats. I wanted to be wrong about it.

Mike: It would have been glorious if you would have been right. Because everybody said it was going to happen.

Leo: Thanks everybody. We appreciate your time. We know your podcast hours are limited. We’re glad you chose to listen to this one. We do TWiG every Wednesday, 1pm pacific, 4pm eastern time. 2000UTC on twit.tv. I love it when you watch live, and you’ll see some big stories sometimes. Something big will happen. But of course on demand audio and video available after the fact, twit.tv/twig. On stitcher, on iTunes, wherever there are better podcasts. Of course the best way to do it is to get one of those great TWiT apps, on the iPhone, on Android, Windows Phone, everywhere! Download the app. We didn’t develop them but we appreciate the developers that did. And start listening to TWiG every week. We’ll see you next time on This Week in Google! Goodbye!