This Week in Google 302 (Transcript)

Leo: It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google. Look who's here, Jeff Jarvis is in studio. Ron Amadeo, Kevin Marks and we're going to have Ron's big Google I/O preview. Stay tuned, there's a lot of Google to come next.

Voiceover: Netcasts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Google is provided by Cachefly.com.

Leo: This is TWiG, This Week in Google, episode 302, recorded Wednesday, May 27, 2015.

Macadamia Break Weekly

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It's time for TWiG, This Week in Google, the show where we cover the – whatever the hell we want to. It's my last show of the week and when you have someone as esteemed as Jeff Jarvis on the panel. What, he's here!

Jeff: I'm here.

Leo: That means it must be Google I/O.

Jeff: At headquarters.

Leo: Hey!

Jeff: It's good to be here, boss.

Leo: You pair Jeff Jarvis with someone like Kevin Marks and his birds. Kevin just reached behind him and got an orange off that orange tree. Amazing.

Jeff: Let's see you open it up.

Leo: Are they edible?

Mathew: They're oranges, yes.

Leo: I heard that tomatoes are poison. I just want to warn you.

Mathew: If you have any mice, I'll bring the cat in.

Leo: I love the cat. He was here last week. That's great. Also here for the first time, although he's been on All About Android many times. From Ars Technica, one of my favorite tech blogs, Mr. Ron Amadeo. Nice to see you, Ron.

Ron: Awesome to be here, this is really cool.

Leo: I'm thrilled to meet you. Big fan, read you religiously. We quote you all the time and I try, as a policy, always say, “From Ars Technica, Ron Amadeo writing,” although I mispronounced it all along. I kept called you Ron Trapani. So Ron Amadeo, I got it now. You cover Android – what's your beat?

Ron: Android, Google stuff.

Leo: You wrote a great piece on what to expect at Google I/O.

Ron: Yes, very long. I always try to go as in-depth as possible.

Leo: We talked about it on Sunday. I always feel like you kind of know – you have sources, right? You're not making this stuff up.

Ron: No. Kind of, sometimes. But most of the time, it is just research.

Leo: So is Android M really going to be Marshmallow?

Ron: No, no. We're just messing around with that. I just wanted to – I was bored writing this. This is me procrastinating. That's what the lead entry of this is.

Leo: You see? This is good to know. On a tech blog, when you see a big image with photoshopped text, that's a guy who doesn't want to write.

Ron: Right, I was just, “Oh, this is boring. Wait, I could take this Kraft Marshmallow bag and turn it into -”

Leo: That's the font. You actually did it well. Look at that.

Ron: And yes, too many people steal my pictures.

Leo: You're a Photoshop wizard.

Ron: You have to hide something in there.

Jeff: That's very good. You've even got it bent.

Leo: I'm mightily impressed.

Jeff: To heck with tech writing, go into design.

Leo: Before we talk about Google I/O – that's what you and Jeff are here for. You're not going to I/O, right, Kevin?

Kevin: Maybe. I haven't got a ticket but I may get a sneaky pass.

Leo: It starts tomorrow. Down to the wire.

Jeff: Kevin got himself a Google uniform so he can go wherever.

Kevin: No, I'll be wearing somebody else's badge but I have been known to wear yours in the past.

Leo: Ixnay on the adge-bay!

Jeff: You'll have to change your accent and sound American.

Ron: They livestream so much of this stuff, though, I don't know if it's worth going.

Leo: In fact, we're going to cover it. So I'll be here early for Mike Elgan. Mike and Jason are going – right, Jason Howell?

Jason: That's right. Looking forward to it.

Leo: So neither of them are going to be here tomorrow but I will be filling in for Mike with TNT at 8:30 a.m. And then shortly after TNT, we'll be going to our live coverage of Google I/O and we'll do what we always do. We'll stream the keynote live and then Gina and I – Gina Trapani is going to join me, Ron Richards and Aaron Newcomb. We'll comment.

Jeff: 2.5 hours, make sure you go to the potty beforehand.

Leo: I'm exhausted just thinking about it.

Jeff: If Larry comes out, it'll be three.

Leo: I hope Larry comes out. That was cool – like two or three years ago, he came out and answered questions, talked about Google Island. He'll never be allowed to speak. The PR people said, “Never let Larry on stage again.”

Ron: No, he's in charge. He can do whatever he wants.

Leo: I feel like there's got to be PR people saying, “You know, Larry.”

Ron: “We would really prefer -”

Kevin: The head of PR just left, so.

Leo: Oh, that's not good.

Jeff: That's right.

Kevin: [feedback] – went to Uber, so there's an issue with head of PR. So they've been able to do that.

Jeff: So they need PR help. If you're in PR, you go to where the stink is because that's where the money is.

Leo: God, I need some PR people. Boy, do we stink, so come on over.

Kevin: You've practiced on the various Google exec scuffs over the year, then Uber is probably a good place to go.

Leo: I guess so. If you can do PR – if you can explain Eric Schmidt, you can – sayings from Chairman Schmidt, you can do Chairman Kalanick. Hey, before we get into Google I/O, I just wanted to mention – and I'm curious. Here we have professor of journalism, City University of New York. We have an actual working member of the tech press, Ron Amadeo. We have Kevin Marks and I who just are on the beach.

Jeff: Picking oranges?

Leo: Picking oranges. So Vox buys Re/code. Now, Vox is the parent company for originally, the sports blog, SB Nation, but then they did this beautiful thing with The Verge. They launched Polygon, which is a gaming blog. They also have a Vox blog now. So they're kind of a growing tech site. They buy Re/code. Now, the first question I have – this isn't the end, by the way. There's another bigger fish coming along. But the medium-sized fish eats the litter fish in an all-stock transaction. I read something, and you guys would be better than I to explain this – explain to me, somebody said that means that Re/code had run out of money. Does that sound credible?

Jeff: I'm thinking that must be kind of what's going on. Dan Lyons and Facebook, I just put it up, had a post saying – he argues that simply, the economics of online publishing are disastrously bad, been clear for years. People keep trying, hot sites come along and get VC funding. He's saying, basically, there's no business model there.

Leo: So he's saying this is another GigaOm.

Jeff: That's what he's arguing with no facts here. People came in saying, “You don't have your facts right.” So I have no idea, but I do want to know what was the business with Re/code. Re/code did get an event business going.

Leo: The Code conference is huge!

Jeff: Big money.

Leo: Going on right now.

Jeff: Big money for it.

Leo: But GigaOm had a number of conferences as well. The old thinking was, the conference can save you. TechCrunch -

Jeff: What's funny, my entrepreneurial students this year – every year, there's some kind of cliché in their businesses. Five years ago, it was, “We'll be viral.” Now, everyone's saying, “We'll have events.” So events have become the cure-all.

Leo: I've avoided that like the plague. People often say to me, “Why don't you have a TWiT event or something?”

Jeff: I think you should.

Leo: No, I'm not doing that, sorry. Then I love this parry – by the way, I might mention that Dan, who was fake Steve Jobs and then he went to – what is it? He went to, like, not a tech blog but some social site. He was going to be their tech blogger and it didn't work out. He's got the best Boston accent ever. Then he was at Gawker for like a week – for no time at all. Now, besides working on a book which apparently he got a good deal on and that's why he quit Gawker, he's one of the writers for Silicon Valley. I'm convinced that Dan – I really wonder, you saw Silicon Valley this week? The Kevin Rose joke?

Jeff: I didn't see it, no.

Leo: I've got to show you the clip.

Jeff: Can you? Good, good.

Leo: I guess I can, without violating any -

Kevin: I assume they've hired him to do the fake Steve Jobs for their fake exec person.

Leo: I feel like he's the verisimilitude guy. He's the guy who says, “Oh, let me tell you -” Because this year especially has been really right on about funding, lots of in tech jokes. I don't know how I can play this – I think I can't legally play. Well, I mean I could do it illegally. I'll do it if I can do it. Let me see if Gizmodo – fittingly enough, Gizmodo might have the video.

Ron: We offer commentary and it's Fair Use. We're good.

Leo: It's commentary, we're commentary. Yes, they're just giving the quote.

Jason: They're giving screenshots and quotes.

Leo: So it's the guy – the jerk from Hooly, right? Who's talking to his board after a massive failure – this is not a spoiler. It's a comedy. And then he murders them all! “Question, what is failure to the ignorant or those in conventional industries? The recent Nucleus glitch.” Nucleus is his product that's a flop. “May seem like a failure in the negative sense, but we in the Valley know failures like this one are really stepping stones. To bring us the iPhone, Steve Jobs first had to bring us the Newton. To bring us Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg first had to bring us Wire Hog. Before he brought us Digg, Kevin Rose had to bring us a whole lot of useless things,” and he shows Pounce, Milk and Oink. “Then after Digg as well, for that matter.” So it's a dig, and I wonder, though, I have to ask Kevin if Dan – it's possible Dan had something against him. Or, more likely, he thought it'd be funny and why not? Would you mind? I wouldn't mind being skewered.

Ron: It's fun.

Jeff: Dan's kind of a negative guy. I mean, this post about Re/code, he then goes on to say about personal brands -

Leo: I love this. Can I read this?

Jeff: Go ahead, Leo. Please do.

Leo: “All that nonsense about journalists with big personal brands was just that nonsense. Walt Mossberg's power? Came from his association with the Journal. Pogh? Was better off at the Times.” He's at Yahoo now. “Lee Vue[?] is at Medium, who was better off at Wired. Nate Silver was better off at the Times, 5:38. The late David Carn knew this and I suspect Nick Bilton does, too.” Nick's still at the times.

Jeff: He'd be better off still writing about tech, perhaps.

Leo: Well, he's on the fashion page, but - “The old D Conference was powerful because it was attached to the Journal. Its descendant still draws an audience and commands a high ticket price, but it's still not the same.” He's talking about Code. You know, this is also – maybe there's some Schadenfreude.

Jeff: There is, but expectation. Listen, I think the only way – so was the business of Re/code great? If it was so great, they probably wouldn't have sold it. However, does Re/code work very well with Vox?

Leo: Especially for a stocks transaction, right?

Jeff: Yes, but does Re/code work well with Vox? Yes. Vox – I brought 15 German editors there a week ago and saw Lockhart Steele, their new boss. Vox is a really amazing company. Jim Bankoff has done a wonderful job. They have infrastructure, ad sales, audience, CMS.

Leo: Better yet, they have great CMS. Everybody loves the CMS. Ron, do you have a good CMS at Ars Technica?

Ron: Yes, we do.

Jeff: Does yours make paragraphs too?

Ron: The Ars Technica tech team is incredible.

Leo: There was an article in the New York Times saying the reason people go to work for Vox is because after the interview process, they then say, “Well, let us show you how you'll be writing your articles.”

Ron: I wrote posts in Text Edit on the plane on the way over here.

Jeff: That's the manly way to do it.

Leo: You're IRC, you're not using some fancy Slack. You're in IRC. You're a man!

Ron: I wrote a post on my phone from the mall once. It doesn't matter. Yes, you can poke with the browser and everything.

Leo: This is the best rumor of all and I just love it.

Ron: Oh, oh.

Leo: Is that the bigger whale is coming and apparently, Comcast was an investor in both these outlets. It's going to take them both in and they're all going to be Comcast companies. What a fate worse than death.

Ron: How crazy has tech journalism been lately? Like, GigaOm is gone and now there's zombie GigaOm coming back.

Leo: What's the zombie? I didn't hear about that.

Ron: Some company bought them.

Leo: Bought the name?

Ron: Right, they bought the name.

Leo: Om must just be dying inside. That's his name!

Ron: You don't know who's going to work there.

Leo: Yes, because Fortune hired five -

Ron: Right, everybody had jobs. They didn't stick around. But Verizon owns Engadget and TechCrunch now.

Leo: And HuffPo!

Ron: Right, and Comcast.

Leo: I'm just going to say, we're proud to be bloody independent.

Jeff: No, bloody and independent.

Leo: We are bloodied but we're still independent. But I feel like we've demonstrated – I don't know how, but there's a market for tech information.

Jeff: Yes, I think there is.

Leo: Ars does okay, right? Although doesn't Ars -

Ron: I'm spoken for with a giant media conglomerate.

Leo: Konde bought it, right. But Konde hasn't messed with it.

Ron: Right, yes.

Leo: Konde was very smart, just as they did with Reddit. They kind of let Reddit be Reddit, let Ars be Ars.

Ron: Yes, it was nice. I guess you know the worst possible outcome of all this acquisition stuff, Tech TV and -

Leo: Tech TV and Comcast, I know. That's why I shiver when I hear the Comcast one. It would make sense, Comcast bought NBC. They want to be a contact.

Jeff: Disastrous.

Leo: It's bad for journalism.

Jeff: It is, it is.

Leo: You don't feel like Engadget – Verizon running Engadget is going to be independently reviewing phones any more. As we know, CBS made CNET change their Best of CBS because they didn't like the hopper.

Jeff: Bad corporations – corporate politics matters. When I was at Entertainment Weekly, I had a top executive of the company come and we graded shows, movies. He did a grade point average of what we were doing every week and said we were being too mean to Hollywood, which is because they were merging with Warner Brothers.

Leo: I can tell you truthfully, the real reason that TWiT exists, the sole and only reason, is to be independent. Because I just don't want anybody to tell me what to do.

Jeff: You wouldn't listen anyway.

Leo: No, I'd be in trouble all the time. Although, to their credit, Ziff Davis was a good parent. They were a publisher, right?

Jeff: They were a publisher.

Leo: They were in a corporate parent, so for instance, we were going to publish a guy named Benny Wong, who I love, who was at MIT at the time and hacked the first Xbox. We were going to put him on and show everybody how to do it and where to got the chips. To their credit, Ziff Davis, at Microsoft as a big advertiser, would be furious. We were nervous, so we went to our management and said, “Well, we're going to do this.” They said, “Go ahead. Absolutely.” They talked to the lawyers and made sure we weren't breaking any laws, which we weren't. But no, they stood up for it. That's the difference, I don't think Comcast would.

Jeff: The only hope in a large company like Comcast is you can hide. It's so big they won't notice you.

Ron: They're busy running, what is it, NBC? Yes, Konde. Yes.

Leo: Do you ever got to the New Yorker and hang out, Vanity Fair?

Ron: No, the security is very, very high. I'm allowed to go to, like, my floor and the cafeteria and get harassed by security all the time. But it's really fun.

Leo: I bet, I bet. I think it's great. I've always thought the world of Ars and I was really pleased that they let Ars be Ars and you know, Ars used to – you're doing more lifestyle stuff than you did before but it's still very – it feels very like a blog for tech enthusiasts.

Ron: Yes, definitely. We have a culture thing.

Leo: But not like The Verge which basically went hog eyes.

Ron: Right. We'll do Star Wars and kind of stop it around that level, which is cool.

Leo: Look at it, you do great stuff. “The Female Mathemetician Who Changed the Course of Physics But Couldn't Get a Job.” That's great. “Nintendo's First Online Shooter, Splatoon.” “Sourceforge grabs Gimp.” Now, you're not going to see that on The Verge. This is great, still the best. All right, here's your – you're going to liveblog, this is it.

Ron: Yes, two hours of endless, endless -

Leo: Typity-typety.

Jeff: Ron, I've got to ask you a quick question first. WiFi always sucks. The cell lines are all jammed. How do you do it?

Ron: They let the journalists in early this year and there will be power and hard-wired ethernet. So awesome.

Leo: Wow, so they want you to liveblog.

Kevin: It's the opposite at Apple, but yes. The front row ethernet thing, a lot of conferences do that.

Leo: It's smart -

Kevin: You've just got to bring your cord with you.

Leo: It's also, I remember, Apple telling everybody, “Turn off your WiFi. We can't show off this feature.” You don't want to have that happen. Ron, what are we expecting? Will there be BMX-riding skydivers? Will there be a giant Rube Goldberg tick tock clock?

Ron: The fluff, I try not to deal with.

Leo: Well, you wouldn't know.

Jeff: Oh, come on. It's the fluff.

Ron: You'd have to talk to stunt coordinators or something.

Leo: I think they've gotten away from that a little bit, although was it last year, they had the -

Jeff: Last year was the clock.

Leo: No, the year before.

Ron: Yes, last year was just the Rube Goldberg thing.

Leo: And the giveaway was a piece of cardboard, which I thought was -

Ron: Yes, the hardware this year is weird. I'm just drawing a total blank. You always get goodies – right, they could give away a Pixel, which would be old.

Jeff: I don't think so. It's not that changed. People will say, “Oh, I already had one I didn't use. This is another.”

Leo: By the way, I've been investigating – I couldn't use the Pixel on any of the shows, the last generation. But the new – I don't know if it's Chrome OS? But you can now choose resolution in the Chrome OS, so I've got to bring it in.

Jeff: Now that you've ruined your keyboard on your computer here.

Leo: Hey, John Seleno[?], we've got to get a type C to HDMI cable.

Jeff: You have two other -

Kevin: Get one from Apple.

Leo: No, I know. I need video out so video comes out of that thing, like type C connectors. Yes, Apple has them. I bought one, $79.

Kevin: You could buy a Chromebook for that.

Jeff: Hey, hey! Fighting words, Marks. Fighting words.

Leo: Well, you could buy a Chrome stick for that, anyway. That'll be one of the things I'm sure they'll show, this -

Kevin: The Chrome Bits, I'm sure.

Jeff: I've got the geeks, when they gave away the watches, “Oh, you're going to get the square watch.” Oh. “You're going to get the round watch!” Yay!

Leo: Took them three months, but they finally got you the Moto 360.

Kevin: I never got the round watch.

Jeff: They were looking the gift horse in the mouth. You know, you're getting anything free? Take it!

Leo: This year, maybe a – the LG Urbane? I'm just taking a guess on what free crap you're going to get.

Ron: What goodies do we want? I mean, my only straight out guess is maybe they do a Chromecast 2 and everybody gets one of those?

Leo: What does – yes, that's one of the rumors you have on your Ars story. What does a Chromecast 2 have in it?

Ron: We've had Google executives publicly talk about, “There will be a Chromecast. We're working on new hardware. It's going to show off a bunch of multi-screen features.” So, you know, you have your phone on and something's happening on your phone while something happens on-screen. There's a lot of -

Leo: Like Hangouts might pop up while I'm watching TV?

Kevin: Not sure I love that.

Ron: I think what they've talked about is like, game controller stuff or, you know, you have some weird little viewfinder on the screen and there's a full game playing on the television, like a Wii U kind of thing.

Jeff: Last year, they did that whole thing with the multi-games in the one game and all that stuff. They never really did, right?

Ron: Yes, yes. But they – I don't know, they have so many holes in the Chromecast right now that it's just not up to the task of, I guess, modern videogames.

Leo: Well, as you point out, you could go to 80211 AC. You could go to 4K – although, I don't know, 4K on a stick? I guess you could go 4K.

Kevin: You could go 4K.

Ron: Android, in terms of keeping up with Android TV – they're going to do 4K and they have boxes coming out that will do AC and all this other fancy connectivity stuff. So they need to get that in a little package like the Chromecast. The Chromecast is two years old now.

Leo: Kevin would know, because – Kevin was one of the creators of Quicktime, so it's a – it would require hardware decode, right?

Kevin: For 4K? Yes, or it would require a CPU with – yes. You would want it to be -

Leo: It's not going to be the CPU. It's going to be hardware.

Kevin: You have to fit it in something that small – [crosstalk]

Leo: Heat and all that.

Kevin: Yes, so – eh.

Ron: They can do VP9 on hardware.

Leo: I guess the Raspberry Pi, I think, has hardware decode, I'm pretty sure.

Ron: There are some. I'm not sure.

Kevin: I'd be surprised if they do a 4K Chromecast right now unless they're just doing it to show off because the point of it is that, you know, it's everywhere and there isn't that much 4K consume yet. I'd put that out -

Leo: Well, there's Netflix and that's one of the chief features of a Chromecast is Netflix.

Ron: And Youtube does 4K, VR, 3D and every other weird -

Jeff: That's a fun point. If you want to show off what Youtube can do.

Ron: It's the Youtube stuff.

Leo: It's the Youtube-cast. Yes.

Kevin: The thing they could do better is the sound stuff. It's quite – I've not managed to get a Chromecast to give me decent surround sound.

Leo: Really? Maybe they didn't even license a Dolby decoder. Maybe they just -

Kevin: I mean, the problem is, they're feeding into the TV – I'm not sure. I don't know the details of what audio specs are feeding into the TVs there and how stable those are. So it may be they're just doing Dolby stereo and relying on the decoder elsewhere to do it. But I was playing with this before, thinking, “Okay, I've got all these things that'll work on Chromecast. Will any of them feed – find out went around to my TV system and couldn't get it to work.” [?] So that may be something – I don't know if that's a hardware limitation or just that they haven't spent time on it. But that would be something I would assume would be something you could improve.

Leo: That would be something that I assume only you would even know, that we are so – we don't care about audio. We've been conditioned by an iPod to listen to crappy audio. I never, ever hear anybody say, “I want better audio.”

Jeff: Does the Neil Young thing really sound better?

Leo: I don't know.

Ron: That's a no.

Jeff: That's an honest answer.

Leo: I bought it, I love it. I listen to it. I just bought – re-bought for the seventh or eighth time the entire Beatles Earth at 24-bit because I found a little USB metal apple that has the 2009 remastered and 24 – but I'll have to ask Kevin Tofel about this. But you know, it's really hard to separate psychology versus actual hearing, right? Sounds better to me.

Kevin: I think adding more sample rate or adding more bit depth doesn't actually help much. What helps? Setting more channels, particularly for the Chromecast. It's in the device that is most likely plugged into audible speakers. If there's one place in your home you have got decent speakers set up, it's attached to the TV. So that would make sense to me as a direction to move in and it basically, to me, is an audio thing as well. I've had this debate as Asset Music Tech with the Pono advocates and things. There's a lot of woo in the stuff they're selling.

Jeff: There's a lot of “woo” in the stuff they're selling? Whoo! Oh.

Leo: Whoo!

Kevin: They have guys, old music guys, who's hearing probably rolls off at 2K saying they can hear the difference and they say – the additional stuff is like fluorescent lighting versus natural lighting. They talk abuot a woo like that. Actually, practically, additional sampling in AB test is at 44K stereo – you can't really tell that apart from the higher stuff when you're actually doing critical tests. So adding extra bit death and sample rate is something you use for mixing, because there you want to move things by fractions of a sample because you're trying to fix phase and you want to do multi-layer fixing and balancing at high resolution before you mix down. So having them for studio recording makes it – [crosstalk]

Leo: Head room.

Jeff: I'm going to act like I understood that.

Ron: Yes?

Leo: Well, basically, it gives you room to move but once you're listening to it, you don't need that. Now, I'm also – here's what I – I know. I'm going to interrupt you briefly because we're going to get to the Nyquist theorem and all that. But here's what I've been reading lately. It's for sure the case that the super high sample rates of 192 kHz are creating distortion and weird effects that may be perceived by people like me and Neil Young as being better. You know, ringing and weird things, that's absolutely true. It seems to be even pretty serious recording engineers agree, sample – this isn't mastering, obviously what you're saying Kevin, that it may not matter later. But at mastering, a sample rate of, let's say, WCD, which is 882, would be fine. 882 24-bit would be as good as you ever needed, probably and Neil -

Kevin: The thing is, nobody masters at 48, 96 or 192. So they're already doing a sample rate conversion to 441.

Leo: Well, one of the things Neil Young said is that conversion, because it's not halving or doubling, is not going to be as good as if you did 882.

Kevin: [raspberry] Not really, not these days. The thing is, depending what you're doing, you do enough time stretching, mixing and bouncing around in the mix these days anyway that doing a sample rate conversion is practically – [crosstalk]

Leo: What's absolutely true is the room, the speakers, the reproduction – all of that has much more impact.

Jeff: Your age.

Leo: Your age, my years, all have much more impact than what the sample – the original.

Kevin: Yes, but the things that actually matter are more channels -

Leo: That's good. I'll buy that.

Kevin: If you have a 5.1 mix of something, especially if it comes to recording classical things, something like that and you have 5.1 speakers or 7.1 speakers, that is definitely better. You can hear that better. It'll give you a better sense of the presence of the room. There's more going on there. The challenge is, not many people have 5.1 or 7.1 speakers but the place you do have them is attached to a TV, you know, doing that with the Chromecast and the TiVO attached makes more sense than elsewhere. The other thing that matters is having isolated tracks, having multiple tracks that you can take apart and put back together again. That's something that is valuable for people who want to remix it, valuable for people who could potentially remix on the fly and that – there's a market for that. There are already people who sell – they call them stems. They sell isolated tracks of all different pieces of the mix so you can remake the mix yourself.

Leo: That's fun.

Kevin: That's also a valuable thing that they could sell as music and makes more sense than the Pono thing, whereas Pono, they're just saying, “We're taking the final mix and giving you more bits of the final mix,” which is great, but -

Leo: Well, it's all – I mean, to be honest, probably if there is a benefit to the Pono, it's also a higher-quality track and a higher-quality amplifier. They're using very good DAC.

Kevin: Yes, but you know -

Leo: I know.

Kevin: That's a bit much. Yes, the Apple Gear has actually got a pretty good DAC. Probably you're low-end Android has a DAC.

Leo: That's one of the reasons I say that people don't care about audio. This year would be the year that phones had better audio, you know, like better quality audio. I mean, nobody's made any effort in that.

[crosstalk]

Kevin: The difference there – the rise of headphones, good headphones, not cheap ones like I'm wearing means that there is an audience for better audio now.

Leo: That's true because everyone is wearing Beats. So we know.

Ron: Oh my God, no.

Kevin: The point is, if you go to the electronics shop now, like a third of the aisles are headphones.

Leo: You know why, Kevin? It's a very high margin business. You can take $10 worth of components and charge $400 for it because it's got magic sauce, just like the Pono.

Kevin: No, there's a bunch of that too. But some of it is, there is a difference between a speaker like this that I paid $10 and the one that goes over your ear.

Leo: I bought very expensive magnetic Planar headphones.

Jeff: You would.

Leo: They sound really good because I spent a lot of money – we're going to move on. This is not the – I don't think Google I/O is not going to be all about audio. But somebody in the chat room -

Kevin: One more little thing into this. So there is a structural problem that Google has, which is the latency of audio on Android.

Leo: Let's talk about that, because I've – there's this ten millisecond, kind of baked in latency that is a real problem. It's one of the reason I understand that you don't see a lot of performance – performing music apps on Android because the latency would kill you.

Jeff: Why is it there?

Kevin: Because it's like a really deep design problem in the operating system, so -

Leo: Why's it not fixed?

Kevin: The way Linux works is that it has a pull model for audio – is that the right word? Basically, the way – let me put it another way. The way this works, the old-fashioned way and underneath Android is Linux, which means it ends up buffers of audio and everything adds buffers to make sure it doesn't hit a gap, so you end up with more and more latency, a very good analysis of different Android phones and how much – [crosstalk]

Leo: Go to superpowered.com, has a really good article explaining this if you want to know more. It's the first time I'd ever heard of it.

Kevin: Well, the headline is burying this a bit because it isn't a ten millisecond problem, it's like 300 milliseconds for many of the phones.

Leo: It's additive because it's not just, it's here and there.

[crosstalk]

Ron: [crosstalk] – like every year, the way they do audio and performance. “Oh, we've got it down.”

Leo: Oh, they do? They know this. They've addressed it, huh?

Jason: They've addressed it a few years now.

Kevin: No, they haven't because they've got to structurally change the way the operating system works to do it. So the difference is -

Leo: Is it the Java VM or is it -

Kevin: No, no. It's the way [0:31:55.3?] work in the operating system. So the way [0:31:58.1?] work on iOS, there's a special interrupt that's just for audio and it has higher priority than memory paging and it's round robin called. Which means, you can build an audio pipeline that has very low latency because you can guarantee that it will happen every 64 samples. With Android, they're on the Linux model where if the audio pipeline is not working with buffers that small and it can't do the chasing the head thing where the viewpoint is chasing the right pointer because they can't guarantee that they don't cross whereas on iOS and Mac OS, they know they won't. What that means is, there's just more latency at every stage of the process.

Leo: So the problem is the kernel. You'd have to -

Kevin: Yes, you'd have to change the micro kernel to fix this. You would have to change the model – that article explains it. But you would have to change the way audio is processed as such, there are high priority interrupts on iOS pulling audio through the system and things feeding into it whereas on Android, you're pushing audio into buffers and the buffers are being played out.

Leo: So it ends up being not ten milliseconds but as much as 100 milliseconds each way or 1/5 of a second round trip, which is enough to really kill the beat. It's like whiplash. “Not my tempo!”

Kevin:  The process is doing the same thing, so it's not – on iOS, they made it pull the audio all the way through the process whereas on Android, because you're pushing it in, you push a buffer in and then when you're processing it, you push a buffer, pull a buffer, push a buffer, pull a buffer. So each stage in that chain makes it worse.

Leo: Is this still a problem in Lollipop?

Ron: Oh, yes. You still don't have music apps or mixers and -

Leo: No, I don't see any.

Jason: Any of them that you do see are like, made by third party – you know, third party hardware solutions.

Leo: Oh, interesting.

Kevin: You can't do it in software or you have to – basically, they have to write it once for each device.

Leo: This is not an issue for somebody listening to music.

Ron: No.

Kevin: But they placed – the reason this is – well, it can be an issue for listening to music. It means that when you do track skips and things like that, you get more lag. The Bluetooth playout has more lag on Android than iOS.

Leo: Oh, come on. We're not talking a second, we're talking a fraction of a second.

Kevin: No, but it can be a second. That's the problem, because by the time you've buffered out through a series of things that are all doing this wrong. You get that problem. The reason they're going to have to fix this is the VR stuff, because if you -

Leo: Yes, latency is death in VR.

Kevin: You've got latency when you're doing that and the audio isn't moving, you fall out of the world. Suddenly you're – the birds aren't staying over there when you turn your head, the birds are lagging.

Jeff: Is that a barf problem?

Leo: Oh, yes. Absolutely. But the barf problem is visual, I think, in most cases. But nonetheless, if you had audio latency, that's going to be a huge problem if your audio drags behind video. That's not a good idea.

Kevin: So in order to get the headset stuff working well, they're going to have to fix this and I suspect they are going to have to change the kernel to do this, which is a big operation. It basically means ripping out the guts of Linux, having a giant fit with Linux about it because he doesn't care and, you know, going through that process.

Leo: The chat room is saying this is actually Linux's choices that created this problem in the beginning.

Kevin: I put it the other way around. It's more that when they were doing Mac OS 10, they hired audio people who actually cared about this.

Leo: They paid attention, yes.

Kevin: You know, I was working with them at the time, so they were all musicians. They all wanted to use their Macs as effects processors and they didn't want to have thick racks in there to do it, so they insisted -

Leo: How is Windows on this?

Kevin: They also – Windows is the same problems. I mean, what Windows has is four separate overlays for doing API and audio, some of which are better than others because – but the basic level of interrupt stuff is still pretty bad, I think. They may have changed it more recently, I haven't written audio code on Windows for ten years, so -

Leo: Have any of the phones -

Kevin: It might have gotten a bit better, might be different.

Leo: - OEMs fixed this themselves, Samsung or Sony?

Kevin: There are some proprietary APIs, but then you've got a right to the Samsung API and things like that.

Jason: Yes, like this is AmpliTube specifically for Samsung devices.

Leo: Do you use this for your guitar?

Jason: Yes. This is guitar amp simulation.

Ron: And the Gear VR is basically the video version of this where, “We sat down with Samsung and tweaked their exact implementation of video to get latency down,” all that.

Leo: Yes, because they have to fix it for Gear VR and Oculus is using Android, right?

Ron: Yes, I mean, the Gear is an Oculus/Samsung project.

Leo: I want this. This is going to come out tomorrow. I don't know if Google will show it at Google I/O, but the new Nvidia Shield Android TV version. Before you run out and buy a Chromecast, this plays games, 4K movies – it's kind of a console with a Tegra X1 in it and three gigs of memory.

Jeff: How much?

Leo: $199.

Ron: Is that the only one listed?

Leo: So that's twice the 16 gig. I don't -

Ron: There is a rumored 500 gigabyte version. I've played with this thing and it's really nice. It is the next generation of Android TV, definitely. Like, I have a Nexus Player and that thing can't play 1080p videos quickly.

Leo: That's sad.

Ron: It lags all over the place and it's just terrible. But this thing, it was playing 4K video content at 60 frames a second, like buttery smooth.

Leo: Oh, I'm buying it.

Ron: You can plug all the stuff into the USB ports. You know, it's Android, so you can plug in webcams and storage.

Leo: Ecosystem is important because, you know, it's competing with me for my Xbox One. It would take the same slot, right? So Xbox One has a good ecosystem. I have a lot of great games, I mean, the best games, at least competitive to Sony. It's got most of the media stuff that I want to do.

Ron: It seems like Android TV with the Shield has a good hardware platform, but does anybody want to spend $200 on this when you can get an Xbox 360 for that much, probably?

Leo: That's true. Hulu Plus, Pandora, VEVO, Red Bull TV – I didn't even know that existed. Youtube, Crackle Plex – that's important. Tune In, we're on that. So you could listen to us. Games, though, these are Android games, aren't they? Basically.

Ron: Yes. Nvidia's going to try to do their own game store thing, but no. I mean, they're still Android games at the end of the day.

Leo: Yes, but I could play Doom 3. Come on!

Ron: So they have the 16 gigabyte version listed. GTA V is 65 gigabytes, so there's the difference between Android games and real games. They're just not on the same level.

Leo: Okay, back to Ron's – you didn't do this on a phone. Ron's outline of what we expect for Google I/O. So that's the Chromecast – maybe they'll show the Shield, too. I mean, it's their platform.

Ron: Shield One. Yes, the Shield's not out yet.

Leo: Well, that's maybe tomorrow, right? That's what I'm thinking, right?

Ron: Yes. That'll be your future Android TV box.

Leo: Android M? What do we know? Fingerprint API, which is nice. I like my S6 has the fingerprint reader, which I understand is not Samsung's but comes from – who's the fingerprint reader from? The same people who do the -

Ron: Synaptix?

Leo: Yes, Synaptix.

Jeff: Which is better, that or Apple's?

Ron: Oh, on the Galazy S6? It's really good.

Leo: It's pretty close. Maybe Apple a little faster. Pretty close.

Ron: But it's – on the Galaxy S6, it's Synaptix hardware but Samsung's proprietary API for the fingerprint stuff.

Leo: But now there will be a fingerprint ecosystem in M.

Ron: That's the guess. I mean, this is all research stuff that I'm hoping is coming out.

Leo: No, Ron. This is true.

Ron: “This is factual.” No.

Leo: This is the facts, Jacks.

Ron: No, but you need a fingerprint API so that developers can make stuff and so that OEMs will actually put a fingerprint reader in their phone.

Leo: The S6 is pretty good. I can use Last Pass, Samsung's web browser will let me log on to websites using fingerprint. I can use Google Wallet with it. You know what? It's more extensive than Apple's because on Apple, only Apple supports their fingerprint reader. No third party apps – well, wait a minute, no. Last Pass does. I'm sorry, I take that back. No, I lied. In fact, all the same stuff. Passbook works with it. I take it back. You shouldn't ask me about Apple stuff. I don't really understand Apple very well.

Ron: Okay. Well, hopefully, you'll be able to use your fingerprint to do Android Pay. The difference between that and -

Leo: From Wallet. How is that?

Ron: Right, exactly. The difference between that and Wallet is going to be branding?

Leo: The name!

Ron: Apple did their Apple Pay, so we've got to rename everything. You know.

Kevin: So they've got to relabel all the point of sale systems? They've already got logos on them. That seems -

Leo: No, they've just got those fish bones. It doesn't actually say, “Wallet.”

Kevin: They have a W on it. Yes, it's got the Google.

Leo: Oh. They should have called it Android Way and then they wouldn't have to change the W.

Ron: There's supposed to be some kind of API to let other apps plug into the Pay system somehow. I'm not sure what other apps want to do with that, but I guess Amazon could have you do fulfillment through Android Pay or whatever.

Leo: Of course, Samsung's trying to do the same thing with Samsung Pay. They bought Loop Pay. They're trying to work with swipe readers as well as tap to pay readers.

Ron: I would love to try Loop Pay. Like, it's in the phone and they need some kind of -

Leo: They haven't turned it on.

Ron: Right.

Leo: Do you use an S6? Is that your phone of choice?

Ron: No, I've got a Nexus 6.

Leo: I knew it.

Ron: I've got to stick with the stock Android. It's going to have Android M on it next week, so – tomorrow.

Jeff: Next week? Oh.

Leo: Developer version.

Ron: Sure, yes, yes.

Leo: He's special.

Ron: And I'm guessing.

Leo: And he's guessing.

Ron: But no, that's -

Leo: Did you get your Fi invite?

Ron: No, the Fi -

Jeff: Even you?

Ron: I know.

Leo: Even you? What about you?

Ron: Fi is tough. I don't know too many people that have even covered it.

Leo: We all got that email that said, “Before summer's over.”

Ron: Right. Check back in the summer. I think most of the people that got invited were people who said they don't have a Nexus 6 and needed to buy a Nexus 6.

Leo: Oh, that's evil. I thought we'd have an advantage as Nexus 6 owners. Oh, that's evil.

Jeff: I'm going to check my other email address.

Leo: Don't be – I know. You know what? Every day, I check for Google Fi. I'm such an idiot, oh my God. “Did I get the invite today?” No. What else? Let's go back to it.

Jeff: When you do get it, would you have the – if you were me, would you change your number to it? I've got an AT&T grandfathered unlimited account. Good news, it's unlimited. Bad news, I can't tether. Would you switch?

Leo: Well, you're not getting unlimited. I don't think Google Fi – I'm sure you've talked about this many times on All About Android – is a price competitor. It's the same price.

Ron: It depends. You get the option to save money if you don't use your internet.

Leo: Well, you get the option to do that with any phone. If you don't use data, yes.

Jeff: Or you pay for too much data -

Leo: Oh, you pay more? All right. I guess you only pay for what you use.

Ron: [crosstalk]

Leo: I'm drunk. I'm sorry. What does the M stand for, really? Marshmallow? Meringue Pie?

Ron: Just M. Just like last year. Last year, we had L.

Leo: Just L.

Ron: They're not going to say anything. It's just going to be M.

Jason: Although AOSP does have Macadamia Nut Cookie sprinkled throughout.

Ron: That's right, there's an internal program.

Jason: They do do that.

Leo: That's to just tease you. Wait a minute, Chris Michael in our chat room says -

Jeff: M&M? If it's going to be any candy, it should be M&Ms.

Leo: Or here's some macadamia nut cookies. Let's just try them to see if it would be a good operating system name, what do you think?

Jeff: I'm allergic.

Leo: To macadamia nuts or to cookies?

Jeff: Macadamia nuts, not cookies. Can't you tell?

Leo: No, you're like skin and bone. Somebody in the chat room, Chris Michael, said he got his Fi invite and you're right, he does not own a Nexus 6.

Jeff: Conspiracy theory.

Ron: I hope you're going to make back that, what, $600 on your hopefully cheaper cell phone service. You have to buy a whole phone.

Leo: Are you allergic, Ron Amadeo?

Ron: No, I'm not allergic at all.

Jeff: White chocolate macadamia, mm.

Leo: $1300 Intel Google Tag Heuer Smartwatch?

Jeff: No. Even I, Google schmuck that I am -

Leo: Would you buy that?

Jeff: No! This is going to be updated. It's going to be out of date, I mean.

Ron: Yes, all of this $10 billion smart watch stuff is ridiculous. I don't get it.

Jeff: Listen, I like this thing -

Leo: That's a Moto 360.

Jeff: But the software is the same. I would not spend huge amounts of money for that.

Leo: You know, this Apple Watch is looking mighty fine right about now.

Ron: It's square, I can't deal with square. Look, before all this Apple Watch stuff, we would do the Android Wear watches and if it was square, it was an immediate, “No. Get out of my face with that square watch.” Then Apple came along and all the sudden, square is fine.

Leo: Square is cool. All the kids are wearing square watches.

Ron: Whatever. No, it would be neat if they actually did $1400 worth of technology. What I'm sure they're going to do is take a $200 watch and put it in a $1000 case.

Leo: Or what is the Moto 360, now $150?

Jeff: Some ridiculous amount, yes.

Leo: Because, of course, they're blowing them out. Do you think they'll announce something on – no. Moto doesn't usually do that.

Ron: Motorola's working on a second one. They've been doing teasers.

Leo: I know, but they wouldn't announce it tomorrow.

Ron: Why not?

Jeff: Partners do come and announce things. You might have five new partners for the watches.

Leo: Hey, Android Car. We're starting to see some Android Car – I'm excited.

Jeff: Hyundai just announced that the Sonata's going to have it.

Leo: I am so ready for this.

Jeff: I am, too.

Leo: That will also be an M feature, yes?

Ron: That's a right now feature. You just plug your Lollipop phone – yes, that was a Lollipop thing. They announced this last year and because we're moving at the speed of car manufacture, it has only come out right now, which is just excruciating.

Leo: So I'd have to buy a new Hyundai?

Ron: Yes, or you can get a really horrible, ripoff Pioneer thing. The $700 one has a resistive touch screen, so -

Leo: Resistive is the worst.

Ron: Right, a plastic bubble that you poke. For capacitive, it will run you about $1400.

Jason: We had the – Phil Nickinson of Android Central was on the show last night. He's been playing around with that for the last couple of months from what I understand, the $700 resistive screen. He said it's actually not that bad, considering the fact that you don't do a lot of fine kind of dragging on it. You know, you're kind of hamfisting controls when you're in the car, so just going boom on a – you know what I mean? It's different. But no, $700 is expensive for something like that.

Ron: A Nexus 7 was $200.

Leo: It's that or buying a Hyundai.

Ron: True.

Leo: Do you have to buy a Sonata? Is that the only Hyundai that has it?

Jason: Yes, right now.

Leo: They're nice looking cars.

Jeff: The others will come out soon, the other brands will start soon. But this is the first car that will actually be out with it.

Leo: Our chat room says, “GM says 14 models of Chevy will feature Android Auto this year.”

Ron: Sorry. I was at that event yesterday. I wasn't sure what time that was but yes, Chevy – so Chevy's doing 14 models, which is basically their entire lineup because, I mean, they only have like 16 cars or something.

Leo: Now I do want a Camaro.

Ron: There you go. You could get that.

Leo: Yes. I'm not going to buy a Chevy Spark. I'd get a Volt.

Jeff: I'd get a Volt.

Leo: Volt's cool.

Ron: The new Volts are weird. They look like Honda Civics with crazy grills.

Leo: All right. I'll get a Malibu or an Impala. My grandma drove an Impala.

Jeff: So did mine, yes.

Ron: Yes, they had one there.

Jeff: Year after year.

Leo: The bench seats? I loved it. The Volt, Suburban, Colorado, Tahoe, Silverado, Camaro, Malibu and the Cruise.

Ron: Yes. Unless it's a transit van, it'll probably run Android Auto and Carplay.

Leo: I'm really feeling like this is the way I want to go, because I don't care what kind of car – I have a very fancy Audi. It's built-in system is junk compared to the state of the art in mobile stuff.

Ron: Right. Nobody over there has heard of a 60 frames per second animation, smooth plane or anything like that.

Leo: Are you kidding? It does have Google Map, you know, Google Earth in it.

Ron: From how long ago?

Leo: No, no. It's updated online.

Jeff: This is how -

Leo: So I can see the tops of roofs as I drive down the street.

Jeff: Didn't it drive you into a lake?

Leo: No, it didn't drive me into a lake. I was driving down my driveway and it thought I was in a lake. There's a difference – I was dry. That got fixed, it wasn't Google's fault. It was just a bad antenna. Finally, the Audi people said, “Oh, yes, we found it. It's a bad antenna.” And they replaced it. It's not been a problem since.

Ron: Well, it's good your car has connectivity.

Leo: Right, 3G T-Mobile.

Ron: Hyundai, they're like, “In the summer, you'll be able to upgrade the car on your own.” Because they've sold the cars already. They're like, “You'll be able to upgrade the car on your own by going to your computer, plugging in a USB stick, downloading the software, sneakernetting[?] it out.”

Jeff: Doing an image for your car.

Leo: I can do that with my Mustang and I never had the nerve, quite, to do that.

Ron: I'm like, the car really doesn't have WiFi. I can't – no.

Leo: No, I have a T-Mobile SIM in my car.

Ron: And a phone bill for your car?

Jeff: Lisa pays it.

Leo: I don't know. Somebody probably pays it. Yes, I think that – yes, actually, I don't remember. I think you pay yearly, I don't know. Hey, Lisa, do I have a phone bill for my car? Do I have a phone number for my car? Google Now, will there be changes?

Ron: Google Now – what should I say?

Leo: What do you know? What can you say?

Ron: Probably nothing?

Leo: Do you know something?

Ron: No.

Jeff: Don't lie to the man.

Leo: He knows something. Okay, we do this with Andy Ihnatko – just tug your ear if you can't talk.

Ron: No, the fun -

Jeff: He was lectured beforehand to tell you nothing.

Ron: By multiple people.

Leo: What did Aparna Chennapragada say to you?

Ron: Nothing.

Leo: How do you like that? I picked that right up, huh?

Jeff: That was good.

Leo: Aparna Chennapragada, my buddy.

Ron: Oh, I have what? Okay, Google Now API. Sure, yes.

Leo: Yes, you wrote it. This is what you wrote. So read this, whatever you wrote. That's – you know.

Ron: Apps will be able to, like – well, eventually apps will be able to supply Google Now cards on their own, like -

Leo: Yes, we knew that.

Ron: Right, there's a pilot program going on already, but that's what this is. It's just stuff that they're working on and all that.

Leo: Do you have a macro key on your phone for Aparna Chennapragada? You should.

Ron: No, I copy-paste and do extensive Googling to make sure I get all the vowels in the right spot. No, I'm excited about the virtual reality stuff just because it's – we know next to nothing and it's super scary.

Jeff: Good change of subject there, fella. Very good.

Leo: I think that I've been told by people in the know that we're going to see a surprisingly large amount of Cardboard.

Ron: Yes. The – who is it that just left, head of Google Search Design? To go work on the Cardboard and I'm forgetting his name. I'm very sad because I might see him tomorrow.

Jeff: We had it on the rundown last week, I forget.

Ron: Yes. You're going to go from billions of people to this little tiny Cardboard team from what we know, which says they must be working on some crazy new thing.

Leo: I don't know. If Cardboard equals Search, that's pretty good.

Jeff: Search?

Leo: Didn't she go from Search?

Jason: John Wiley is – yes, he was the lead designer of Google Search.

Leo: So you go from Search, which is the crown jewel to Cardboard? It must be becoming something.

Ron: There's been a Reuter's report that said they were working on a VR operating system because right now, you – right now, VR apps are really weird, like especially -

Leo: They're Android apps, right? With two windows?

Ron: Right, but launching them and getting into that mode is super clunky. Like, you know, you take the phone out, you start it. You stick it in the box and make sure everything's set up. The Oculus Rift is even worse -

Leo: It doesn't have like an RFID tag to launch? I thought it launched -

Jeff: That's how it started, yes.

Ron: They worked on weird little launchers and stuff, but this was supposedly like a whole operating system team.

Leo: Hey, [0:53:43.5?], Jason? How do you – when he has Gear VR, do you launch the Gear VR app before you put it in the helmet?

Male: When you connect it to the helmet, when you connect it to the microphone -

Leo: It senses it. It says, “Oh, I'm in VR.” Thank you. It's going to be obsolete tomorrow. Oh, you got the S6 version! Yay.

Ron: Fancy. Will it work with an Edge?

Male: Yes.

Leo: Can I wear it?

Male: You want to take the cover off the front.

Leo: Why? There's nothing going on. Don't you need the cover? What if I wear it like this?

Ron: That looks great.

Jason: That's how the kids wear it these days.

Leo: That's how the DJ wears it, yes.

Ron: Again, like the fingerprint stuff, this is a proprietary solution and Google kind of wants to do their own thing and get the system on.

Leo: You know, this is really comfortable. It's got nice eye cups.

Male: It weighs less. It's smaller.

Leo: I like it. And it was $200, right?

Jeff: How much weight does the phone add?

Leo: The phone is nothing. I have an S6. I wonder if I should get this. Why do you keep getting it?

Ron: You should put it on without the phone in, that looks great. Giant goggles.

Leo: Oh, I have to put it in the right – did I do it right?

Ron: That's got to be right.

Leo: It seems to have attached. It looks good with the S6 back in there. Now what do I do? Oh! It's talking to me.

Ron: Welcome to virtual reality.

Leo: Have you used this yet? Am I being the first person to use it? You shouldn't do that, Jason. You should get to be -

Jeff: What are you looking at, Leo? Whoa, Leo! Whoa, whoa!

Leo: Oh!

Ron: Leo has gone to another world.

Jason: So Leo, you saw it with the Gear VR.

(everybody groaning)

Jeff: That's got to be illegal.

Male: There's discussions on it from people, like, “I'm the guy who gets on a plane with a Gear VR.”

Jeff: I feel bad, there's going to be 20 pictures of you on Twitter.

Ron: I feel bad for whoever sits next to you. You'll probably be bumping into them and you'll be off in your VR wonderland.

Male: [inaudible]

Jeff: That's all?

Leo: Well, yes. There's nothing in it. You have to have a phone. How are you liking your S6? Have you had any lag problems, anything like that? No. I think they've licked those. It's not doing anything, it's in configuration mode.

Jeff: Glasses off, right?

Male: I took it off so you can see through.

Leo: Oh, that doesn't look at all dorky. You look like Bender. Doesn't he? He totally looks like Bender.

Jeff: I'm the Fly!

Ron: What does the outside world look like right now?

Jeff: It's like the fly would see, all kinds of little -

Ron: Oh my gosh, if you get the angle just right, it's giant eyeball.

Leo: I really want this now.

Jason: Leo, did you notice any sort of difference in the clarity of anything you saw?

Leo: It looks like it's still a little low-res.

Ron: It's the same resolution. It's a 2K screen or whatever, so it's not going to be.

Leo: It's like 720p, isn't it?

Jeff: If you wear glasses, what does it do?

Male: It has a focus ring up here, so as long as your – the focus length on this one, Leo, is a greater distance than the first one. It's also wider.

Leo: Now, is this the Innovator edition for Galaxy S6 Edge? I could have it tomorrow.

Jeff: Uh-oh! Do it, Leo. Go ahead.

Leo: I've got nothing to do. I can just watch it through the whole Google I/O speech.

Ron: Why don't you wait one day and see what comes out tomorrow so that it's not instantly obsolete?

Leo: That's exactly what I would do. “I got the VR – oh no.”

Ron: Wait, do it so they announce virtual reality stuff. It's dependent on you. Take one for the team.

Jeff: Wash your car.

Leo: Where did you get yours?

Male: Best Buy.

Leo: They have it in stock?

Ron: Impulse buy.

Leo: I see 2-5 weeks but you know, they lie. It's Amazon Prime, as soon as I log in, it'll be tomorrow.

Kevin: That lenses thing, that reminded me of an art project I saw this week. There's this thing called smallerandupsidedown.com and what he did was – it's part of the arts and residence at [0:58:09.0?]. He took the Photo Booth effects on the Mac or iOS and recreated them with physical bits of glass so you can just look through some lenses and make your face go square, have giant googly eyes and things like that.

Leo: Really, just looking through a pane of thing?

Kevin: Yes, so it's -

Leo: Smaller and Upside Down.

Kevin: It's a big lump of resin that's a lens that does the effects.

Leo: So it's a funhouse mirror.

Kevin: But it's a lens rather than a mirror, yes.

Leo: smallerandupsidedown.com.

Kevin: I thought that was funny, firstly because -

Jeff: You're easily amused.

Kevin: When those things came out whenever it was, five years ago? Seven years ago? We all played with them for a couple of days and then didn't use them anymore.

Leo: It sold more Macs – the Photo Booth sold more Macs than any other app on the Macintosh. “Oh, I like that.”

Kevin: For me, it was that weird thing of, “I remember playing with that with my kids.” It was a strange nostalgia but created physical. I thought that was quite a fun art project. But when Jeff put those lenses on his face, it reminded me of the, “My eyes just got really big,” thing.

Leo: By the way, are we eating the All About Android white chocolate macadamia cookies?

Jason: No, you are the first to christen the macadamia cookies on any TWiT show.

Leo: Who brought those? I thank you, whoever.

Ron: This is a terrible idea. I'm tempted to eat on air.

Leo: Did you bring them?

Ron: No.

Leo: Go ahead and eat, who cares? I eat all the time.

Ron: You're a professional podcaster person.

Leo: It's TWiG. You're a professional, all right. Google I/O – we're not – this is going to be a five hour show.

Ron: Smart home stuff, that's fun. So Google has – who have they acquired, Nest and Dropcam? Then this company called Revolve, which made a smart home hub, so kind of a thing that ties all of your -

Leo: Like SmartThings.

Ron: Blocks and – yes, SmartThings.

Jeff: They'll film it all and know when you have sex.

Ron: Sure, if you wear the FitBit or whatever, yes.

Jeff: Please wake me and tell me when I -

Leo: Last night? Really? I don't remember that. Okay, just checking. Macadamia Break Weekly, I like the name. The new thing -

Ron: The new thing is Brillo, apparently,

Leo: Right, the Internet of Things OS. Now, is this related to Android, do you think? Or is it -

Ron: What the report said was it's being made by the Android team. Why they did not just come out and say, “It will be based on Android,” is a little weird. But I can't imagine it wouldn't be. You know, it's kind of like when Android started, where you have this – you have a bunch of OEMs making this weird software that they're not used to making, so you have a lock company trying to make this Internet of Things software and Google just wants to come in and say, “Here's our software. It's free. Use it as the standard,” and everybody will use it to make your lightbulb communicate with your dishwasher and all that stuff.

Leo: That's kind of what Microsoft's doing. They're giving away Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi. They have two or three IOT skews for Windows – not that I – who would want to run Windows in an embedded environment? I mean, it just seems like a little – but there's, I guess, every ATM machine in the U.S.

Ron: Yes. I mean, Android seems like overkill for this stuff too when you can do it all on a little, like, micro controller and whatever else. So, I mean, all we basically know is that Google's stripping down probably Android to run on little things but we don't know why or why it's supposed to be better or anything like that.

Leo: If I were the CEO of Blackberry, I would say – I would be putting all my arrows behind QNX for IOT. They have a really nice, realtime operating system they bought and you're absolutely right. It needs to be something designed for embedded systems.

Ron: Yes. But then you need to make money if you're Blackberry.

Leo: Right, whereas Google doesn't.

Ron: Right, Google will just make money other ways. So you know, that's how Android works.

Leo: There's a printing press in Larry's basement.

Ron: “It's free. We have too much money, we're good.” And everyone else is just like, “Oh.”

Leo: What else? This is – I'm excited, actually. We start our coverage 9:30 Pacific, 12:30 Eastern Time, 1730 UTC, right after TNT. I'll be doing TNT tomorrow and then Gina Trapani, Ron Richards, Aaron Newcomb and I will cover Google I/O, all 2.5 hours. If we start at 9:30, we should be done by lunchtime.

Ron: Good luck.

Leo: If lunchtime is 2 in the afternoon. All right.

Ron: Then there's millions of sessions to watch and go to, everything else. Did we talk about privacy controls?

Leo: Oh, who cares? Google controls my privacy. That's the truth. Well, but they have to respond to what people are very much concerned about. Bloomberg said they're going to give users greater control over what apps know and what apps can do. You know, I feel like the controls are pretty good. How would they be different?

Ron: Well, it's all or nothing right now. They used to have app ops where you could go through and toggle, “I don't want Facebook to use my camera, don't want it to use my phone number.”

Leo: Apple does that. You have to ask – it'll say in the manifest what it wants but then, in order to get camera access or contact access, it'll ask. You can say no and the app will continue on. I mean, if it's Instagram, it may not be very useful, but -

Ron: Whereas Android, when you did app ops, you said no and the app crashed. So then they took app ops away and they're going to bring it back, apparently.

Leo: You know what? Speculation is one thing. It all happens tomorrow.

Jeff: If there were going to be a big surprise and you have not – even you have not gotten the scoop on.

Leo: What would that be?

Jeff: What would it be?

Leo: Google Now.

Ron: They can't do hardware. I mean, it really bugs me they're going to have a fingerprint API and no – nothing that has a fingerprint reader. I would love to see some kind of -

Jeff: How about a security dongle for you?

Ron: A plugin thing.

Leo: That's no good.

Ron: It's for developers. They could test, at least.

Leo: I guess. Well, they might do that.

Ron: The Chromecast would kind of be surprising. I mean, they've talked about it but I think we would hear more by now.

Leo: What would – how about an Amazon Echo? I really thought Google let Amazon get away with Echo because Google Now on an Amazon Echo – watch him carefully. I'm going to talk about this.

Jeff: [1:04:54.2?] get a response.

Leo: Google Now in a hardware device that sits in your house and listens would be really cool.

Kevin: That would be a thing to do with the Chromecast, right? If you put a little microphone in the Chromecast so it could pick up stuff -

Ron: Behind your television?

Leo: It's behind my TV, it's not going to - “Hey, hey! Yo, Cast!”

Kevin: I didn't say it was ideal.

Ron: I think we are due a smart home hub.

Leo: That would be good, a hub you can talk to.

Ron: Because they bought the SmartThings competitor, and they have Nest and all the smart home stuff that's not doing anything.

Leo: Google Glass, version two?

Jeff: No.

Ron: They just rebooted -

Leo: I love that reaction.

Ron: They just rebooted and have Tony Fidel in charge now.

Jeff: I actually just realized, I have a museum of dead technology in my office? I have to add the Glass.

Ron: Next to the Newton?

Leo: Hey, Jason. When you're done with your Glass, would you give it to me for my cabinet? You still use it, don't you?

Jason: You know, I still use it.

Leo: He does, he still uses it.

Jason: The only thing I use it for is recording video when I want a first-person kind of recorded experience of something.

Leo: When we did that great ad for Blue Apron, he was showing cooking and it's so funny. You put the Glass on and you cooked a whole meal because you had both hands and in order to do the same thing – we were doing a tip for the new Screen Savers and I was showing stir fry. Set up a camera, had to work around a tripod, didn't know if the angles were right. It was a fixed angle. It was such a pain.

Ron: And GoPros are $200? There's a hat mount.

Leo: I do have a GoPro with a head mount. I could have done that.

Ron: Yes, it's not $1400 and it's not a Nexus – it's not a Galaxy Nexus camera.

Leo: The quality was good, though. Look at this – sort of. It's a little green.

Ron: That's a camera from a 2011 smart phone.

Jason: Hey, I had it on me and all I had to do was make sure it was charged.

Jeff: He shaking it in and makes the camera jiggle.

Leo: Why didn't I think of the GoPro – I have the hat mount and everything. What was I thinking?

Ron: You bought into the hype.

Leo: I bought into the hype.

Jeff: Well, that's what Leo's all about.

Leo: I am the hype.

Jeff: He'll buy any hype design.

Jason: There was a time when Flipcams were a big deal, remember that?

Leo: Remember those?

Jason: Then everybody had one in their phone, so easy to buy the hype.

Leo: So Matt Cutts?

Jeff: He's got to be – I think he's going to be the first person on Mars or something. He's working on something super-secret, he's got to be.

Leo: There was an article and in fact, it mentioned him a few months ago, saying Google puts people on the beach because they keep them out of competitor's hands and they just say, “You know, enjoy. Relax and if you think of something you want to do, okay. But you don't have to do anything.” I feel like that's what Matt's doing.

Jeff: I think it is and I can see how – my line about Matt is always that you would think he's be the meanest guy on Earth, but he's the nicest guy on Earth.

Leo: We love Matt and Matt, if the next thing is doing podcasts, you know where your friends are. SearchEngineLand says there is a new head of Search Spam at Google, which was Matt's job. So Google has not named that person because he's not public like Matt was. Matt was really about – he did the web master videos and all that great stuff. He appeared here all the time.

Ron: So you're going to have rulings come down from an anonymous Google Spam person?

Leo: If I were them, I would do that. Wouldn't you? You don't want to be known as the guy -

Ron: Be hounded by SEO experts all day.

Leo: You're going down the mall, you're outside Hot Topic and somebody says, “Hey, you're Matt Cutts, aren't you?” That would not be good.

Ron: It's actually Matt Cutts and he's just tired of that.

Leo: You know, that's the best secret of all. It's still Matt Cutts, he just doesn't want you to know. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised. That's brilliant. Google has new head of Web Spam and by the way, Danny Sullivan. If anybody knows, it's Danny. “Won't be the new Matt Cutts,” so Matt Cutts still gets to be the old Matt Cutts.

Jeff: Well, Google's looking for a new head of PR. Maybe it should be Matt.

Leo: He'd be great for that. So Matt is one of the first 100 Googlers, maybe one of the first ten.

Ron: Is that so?

Leo: Yes, he was very early on. He told us, I've forgotten.

Kevin: I'm not sure he was first ten, but he was very early.

Leo: So he probably doesn't have to do much. He probably can just hang out. Yes, in Silicon Valley they do that. Remember, the guy – Big Head, he's beached at Hooly and he has a place up on the roof where the other people are beached at Hooly.

Jeff: So speaking of roofs, I went to Facebook yesterday. It was great and fascinating. Talking with the people there just about the wonky stuff I do, but I got to walk the roof.

Leo: The garden roof of the new place?

Jeff: Yes, it's quite amazing.

Leo: Oh!

Jeff: The building is a weird because as you know, when you go in -

Leo: It's like paint stripping.

Jeff: Well, at first it's a parking lot. It's a parking lot in the first level, so it's really kind of an ugly thing.

Leo: What? That's very hideous.

Jeff: Then you go up plywood and what they said was, they purposely made it look incredibly unfinished because that's what Facebook is. Facebook is always learning and changing and so it's nice. It's very nice. And then the roof is just – the amount of dirt – they have like this much soil.

Leo: But it's a green building. It's probably part of the lead certification.

Jeff: It's like that much. They were digging a hole for a trench of something and it was quite a dig.

Leo: That's got to be a lot of weight. You know who has that? Ford does, on the rouge plant. They're growing the fibers they use in the seats, right? Nine acres criss-crossed with trails. Did you take a walk?

Jeff: Yes, yes. I was meeting with somebody and he said, “Do you want to walk with me?” So we walked around the roof, it was great.

Leo: Oh, I see what you're saying. This looks like a crappy Silicon Valley apartment complex with the garage on the first level.

Jeff: Yes, so you go up the stairway and it's -

Leo: It looks like a Motel 8.

Jeff: [crosstalk] – by raw plywood. You get up and it's ever rawer than this. So the beams are all still bare and have the chalk marks on them, all that kind of stuff. But it's a very nice space.

Leo: That is so beautiful. They don't have a golf course up there, a putting range? They really should.

Jeff: They should, a little sand trap.

Leo: If Google were – I mean, if Facebook were a real company, they would. But because they're hip, they don't play golf. They play – they probably have an Ultimate Frisbee course up there.

Jeff: Well, you know, in the old days when Mark wanted to hire you, he'd take a walk with you.

Leo: That's a Steve Jobs thing. We're actually looking at using Facebook's parse, which we keep hearing about each year at F8. They bought them a couple years ago. But we're trying to figure out a way with our apps – we're going to do new apps once the new site launches, that you could use the app on your iPad and then pick up your S6 and it would leave off where you left off. But in order to do that, you'd need to have an account and parse does this for free for like, the first million users. Facebook just says, “Yeah, whatever.”

Kevin: Except then your account is actually a Facebook account is what you're telling me.

Leo: Well, I asked about that. You can sign up with Twitter, Facebook or have a standalone and I asked, “Is this a shared data with Facebook?” He said no. So you're right, though, Kevin. I want to look into that because I don't want – I know our audience doesn't want to be channeled into that ecosystem. But that would give you notifications, too.

Jeff: So whereas with Google, you go to a place to pick up the wires and things you need, at Facebook they have vending machines for it.

Leo: You mean, like, “I need an ethernet cable, let me run down to the vending machine?”

Jeff: Yes, or phone covers. I didn't stare at it.

[crosstalk]

They do? Oh, I didn't see that. I wasn't allowed in that room I guess. They have a model of the whole building and the model itself is just amazing. It's phenomenal.

Leo: Did you meet with Mark?

Jeff: No, but I saw him, so he's still in a fishbowl office. We walked by and we waved to each other.

Leo: Does it look like the office in the Social Network?

Jeff: I can't remember.

Leo: Where he fired Eduardo?

Jeff: No. The office he had in Palo Alto was the same thing, the three-sided fishbowl and so we walked by and waved.

Leo: It's not as opulent as Apple's new headquarters or even Google's new.

Jeff: I would not call it opulent at all.

Leo: No, it's interesting. Good for them.

Jeff: It sends a message that says, “We're in progress.” It says great things, exactly.

Leo: I like that, actually. I think it's risky when a company – it's always been said that when the company builds its massive corporate landmark headquarters, that's the first sign it's over. It's the beginning of the end.

Jeff: It's kitty corner from the Hacker Way, most recent headquarters.

Leo: Good, did they keep it? It's just growing.

Jeff: Yes, this is building 20 so it's not like building one.

Kevin: I think that's why they moved down there is so they could expand into the swamp, wasn't it?

Jeff: And boy, the swamp looks good.

Leo: Let's take a break and when we come back, we've got more. Kevin Marks is here. It's always great to have the [1:14:25.9?] himself, Mr. Indie Web. That's kind of – you're now Mr. Indie Web, indiewebcamp.com. Thank you for keeping on, fighting the good fight. I want to tell you what I want to do when we come back.

Kevin: Sounds good to me. I will alert the indie web core.

Leo: Please alert the team. Put out the bat signal. Jeff Jarvis, in the studio, in person.

Jeff: The flesh!

Leo: Do you always wear black?

Jeff: I pretty much do now, especially when I travel. It makes it a lot easier to travel.

Leo: No mixing and matching.

Jeff: I'm too old to do the Mark Zuckerberg grey t-shirt. It's a suit – Johnny Cash.

Leo: Johnny Cash, Men in Black. What the hell? Johnny had no hair – yes, he did. Anyway, Jeff's a professor of journalism at CUNY, City University of New York, an esteemed colleague. He also is the author of many, many great books, Gutenberg the Geek, the latest, Geeks Bearing Gifts and you can find his blog at buzzmachine.com. We're really pleased to have, for the first time on this show, Ron Amadeo of – Amadeo, not “A-matt-ee-oh.”

Ron: Yes.

Leo: Of arstechnica.com.

Ron: As long as you can Google it, we're good.

Leo: R-O-N A-M-A-D-E-O. The twitter is the same. You must come back virtually from Jersey.

Ron: Any time, I will come by.

Leo: Anybody who lives in south Jersey, you can be on this show.

Jeff: What's wrong with up north, huh? No.

Leo: Okay, north Jersey is a suburb of New York, right? Or is it south Jersey?

Jeff: No, it's its own land.

Ron: According to who? According to someone from south Jersey, no.

Leo: It isn't? Okay, Springsteen is from south Jersey, though, right?

Jeff: No, he's the shore.

Leo: I can't keep up.

Jeff: I grew up in south Jersey, part time.

Leo: I was listening to Jungle Run at 192 kilobits per second and now 24 bits yesterday. That sounded so good. I felt like I was in Jersey, I could smell the boardwalk.

Jeff: And the taffy.

Leo: There's a whole farm area – people think Jersey, they think factories.

Jeff: Oh, yes. I live out in farmland, horses out there.

Leo: It's the Garden State.

Ron: That's south Jersey. There's like a solid line -

Jeff: Jersey's all pine trees.

Ron: Yes, there's a solid line where it becomes all factories immediately.

Leo: That's the pine bearings out there. Mr. TV Critic? Greatest episode of the Sopranos where Paulie Walnuts -

Jeff: Stuck in the pine bearings.

Leo: In a track suit! I just like saying Paulie Walnuts. Our show today brought to you by those great folks at ziprecruiter.com. At ZipRecruiter, you can post to 100 plus job sites with a click of the mouse and this is why you want to do this. If you're an employer, maybe you just have a small business and you're looking for somebody. For instance, we are looking – I need a personal assistant to hang out my socks. So you -

Ron: You do?

Leo: Don't you? Everybody. So you could go to one or two job sites, but wouldn't it be cool if you just went to ziprecruiter.com and posted everywhere? 100 plus job boards, Twitter too, Facebook, Craigslist, everywhere. You might say, “But no, Leo. I don't want all those people calling and emailing me.” No, they don't. That's the beauty part. Their applications and responses come to you in the ZipRecruiter interface so you can quickly screen and find the right candidate. In fact, you might not have to worry about that because they have 4 million current resumes in their database. So you put a job listing up there, you could literally within a second get 1000 candidates you can quickly screen, rate and hire the right one fast. Just post once and within 24 hours, you'll watch those candidates roll in.

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The creepy line has been crossed.

Jeff: Uh-oh, we got to be there.

Leo: Google has patented – patents, I don't like to do these stories because as everybody knows, patents have nothing to do with products. It's just the lawyers.

Jeff: The writers read way too much into them.

Leo: But they have patented a way to predict what you like by accent.

Jeff: The story says this is offensive. Why is this offensive?

Ron: They're profiling by accent. No, it's not offensive at all.

Leo: (stereotypical Italian accent) “I would like a restaurant for tonight. I want to go to Amadeo's, they have very good pasta.”

Ron: That's where you would want to go, though, man. The Italians would know where good pasta is.

Leo: (Boston accent) “If you talk like a truck driver, you're going to get the best truck stop.” I don't – I doubt very much this is an actual product but it's kind of a fun thing. The patent implies the Germans prefer German food.

Jeff: I think that's safe. I think so too. Fried food, at least.

Leo: Is music coming out of you?

Kevin: It's not me, it's – [inaudible]

Leo: Careful, that guy's – okay.

Jeff: It's somebody's phone.

Kevin: I'm imagining a My Fair Lady service where you have to teach people to get different accents.

Leo: (British accent) “Governor, I'd like a meat pie.”

Jeff: How about a grammar searcher, if you don't use “whom” properly, we won't serve you.

Leo: That's good. I like that.

Kevin: If you use “whom” properly, they mark up the price a bit.

Leo: Oh, you know.

Jeff: Kevin, did you see John Oliver – not John Oliver, I'm sorry. Bill Mars, why does everybody have a British accent routine? Oh, brilliant. Absolutely.

Leo: Was this on his TV show?

Jeff: Yes.

Leo: Quickly, search.

Kevin: I'm just confused at this assumption there's one British accent.

Leo: Oh, God, there's so many. That's the beauty of it. You've got the Dick Van Dyke Mary Poppins accent. You've got -

Jeff: Okay, look up, “Brits for Brains.”

Leo: “Brits for Brains.” You know what I like is all of the – it changed in the '50s but prior to, you know, the method acting. Every actor in Hollywood had a faint British accent.

Jeff: Sorry, look up Bill Mars Brit for Brains.

Leo: Let's watch, the luck of the iris.

(video plays)

Jeff: There you go, Kevin.

Kevin: They're giving away my secrets. This is [1:22:35.2?], he's not from America.

Leo: Yes, he's from Krypton. It's true, so there you go. That's why we have Kevin Marks on this show.

Jeff: It makes us sound smarter. Actually, it makes us sound stupid next to him.

Leo: Periscope has come to Android, sad.

Jeff: At last!

Leo: At last, are you going to do it?

Jeff: Just before the show – I don't know. No.

Leo: Meerkat's been out a while on Android.

Jeff: Which I didn't do either.

Ron: We can simul-cast on Periscope right now?

Leo: I don't know what I think of these livestreaming apps. Of course, I spend a lot of money, time and effort creating an entire livestreaming studio.

Jeff: Now you're ahead of the stream.

Leo: At least my video is sideways.

Kevin: That's one of Mary Meeker's[?] points today is the rise of virtual video.

Leo: Well, thank you, Mary Meeker. She is a futurist, isn't she? So she does this every year, right?

Kevin: Yes, they just dropped the slide bomb at Re/code.

Leo: Oh, let's go look. It is a slide bomb, too, because she's not notorious for aesthetics. So Mary Meeker slide share 2015. She's what, a stock analyst? But she's famous – she's a VC, okay. She's famous because she's gotten things right in the past. Right?

Kevin: Yes.

Leo: Are you Periscoping?

Jeff: I'm seeing how much it irritates you.

Leo: It doesn't, it's -

Ron: That was free, so you just downloaded an app.

Jeff: How do I stop this thing?

Leo: No, continue. Give Jeff hearts. Here it is, internet trends, 2015. She gave it a code yesterday. “Outline: Internet, two-thirds of a generation in. Key Internet Trends.”

Kevin: Slide 22.

Leo: Slide 22, should I jump? Lots of people using the internet, a lot of them are on mobile. Companies rich.

Kevin: We can do this as a blip mode, this is great.

Leo: Oh, here's the evolution of content discovery. The VCR, 1975. Streaming radio, 2012. Now, it's Chromecast. The internet is 100% consumer but only 10% policy thinking. Key internet trends, lots of math? Smart phone subscriptions, up, up, up. Average GDP per capita in five countries with greater than 50 million population, $44 thousand in the countries with Google – I don't know what that means.

Kevin: It's like, people in developing world have less money than developed world.

Leo: Yes, people have less money in the third world. Mm-hm, okay. Time spent per adult user per day with digital media in the USA is going up! Man, mobile is a big slice of that going up too, but you know what's not going up? Other connected devices. Advertising and monetization equals … something. Time spent – ah, here we go. This is what I like. In media versus percent of advertising spending.

Kevin: She does this every year where she keeps saying there's this giant opportunity for advertising and it never appears. She's had this same slide pretty much for four years now.

Leo: That makes it simpler. She doesn't have to make a new slide. She is terrible at slides, I just want to tell you. These are the worst.

Jeff: Are we at 22 yet?

Leo: Is that the one? “New things, vendors, brands consumers should be excited about …” Get ready, get excited! Pinterest is adding cinematic pins.

Kevin: These aren't very exciting, these ones. These are like advertisers to be excited about.

Leo: Google Local [1:26:50.3?] ad, Facebook carousel ad, five-second video ads, buy buttons on Twitter, Facebook and Google – we mentioned that, that Google's going to put buy buttons in their ads.

Ron: I'm not excited about it.

Leo: “Something funny happened on the way to the small screen ...” She's got a little joke in there. Video then, here's the vertical video slide you mentioned and video now.

Kevin: The next one is like percentages vertical or something but I'm not sure – this is time spent by orientation.

Ron: Wow.

Leo: This is funny, given this woman is dedicated to a misuse of bar charts.

Kevin: That's not a bad bar chart.

Leo: This stacked bar chart, I don't like stacked bar charts because then you have to kind of figure out -

Kevin: It's good when it's something like this, where the top part is – [crosstalk]

Leo: Horizontal screens are losing ground to vertical screens.

Ron: So this is what these analyst people do all day.

Jeff: 2010 was, “Oh, you idiot, you're holding it wrong.” 2015 is, “This is the new way to hold it.”

Leo: “This is the future.” I've been saying that for a long time.

Kevin: So you've got the next slide here.

Leo: “Full screen video ads on Snapchat, nine times higher competition completion rate versus horizontal.”

Kevin: I'm thinking that maybe because the button – I can never exit anything on Snapchat.

Ron: Because it's the entire screen.

Kevin: With the other one, there's a back button but interesting that – that made some sense to me. Somethign that used to be seen in the Periscope things as well – it's like, “Oh, if your screen is that way around, might as well fill it up with video too, even if it means you're – you know, looking through a pillar.

Leo: “Reimagining continues, forget enterprise.” “Enterprise software used to be about making existing work more efficient. Now the opportunity for software is to transform the work itself.” That's completel meaningless.

Kevin: That's got to be the most boring tweet of the year.

Leo: I'm sorry. Oh, lord.

Kevin: There's quite a bit left. Anyway.

Leo: Yes, here we go. This is the blip – oh, no. Slide share can't keep up. I'm going too fast. Facebook messaging, Snapchat, one user, another user, context identity, more up close and personal, select top countries for mobile subscriptions, messaging plus notification equals a lot of text, reimagining content, interest growth, music, holidays, sports – this is better than Google Zeitgeist. You know what? There's still 137 to go.

Jeff: Jeez!

Ron: Oh my God!

Leo: Let me just skip.

Kevin: Get to 66.

Leo: 66?

Ron: Does she get paid by the slide?

Leo: You know what? People listen to her because she – “Users generating their content,” ala Periscope and Meerkat, “are recreating their internet?”

Jeff: What the hell does that mean?

Leo: I understand that. In other words, it's indie web. But it's what -

Kevin: That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. No, it's basically saying that people are reinventing their image now.

Jeff: We've been doing that for the last ten years.

Leo: It's what Joseph -

Ron: It was on the cover of TIME, wasn't it?

Jeff: Blondes, glitter, it's all us!

Leo: The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell. He said, “If you don't like the dominant culture, make your own.” That's what geeks have been doing since day one. “Users are recreating the internet, reimagining internet usage, 12-24 year olds remain trendsetters.”

Jeff: No.

Leo: I hate that. Social media usage among American “yute,” Facebook number one with “yute,” then Instagram.

Ron: What's a “yute?”

Jeff: I think the rumors of Facebook -

Leo: Thank you, what's a “yute!” Millenials smart phone behavior, “My smart phone never leaves my side, night or day,” 87%.

Kevin: Leo's like, “I've got six smart phones that never leave my side.”

Leo: It's funny, Michael, our 12-year-old, came in the room yesterday in my office and said, “How many phones do you have?” He said, “There's five phones there.” I said, “Yes, and I've got two in my pocket.” True story.

Jeff: And you never call anybody.

Leo: No, I hate the phone. “When I wake up, the first thing I do is reach for my fart – smart phone,” 80%. “I spend more than two hours a day using my smart phone,” 78%. We would all be in these.

Jeff: Yes, of course.

Ron: Sure. The alarm goes off, so you're going to turn your phone off.

Leo: “In the next five years, I believe everything will be done on mobile devices.” Everything. 60%, only 5% disagree.

Jeff: Redefining phone sex.

Leo: Oh, interesting, “everything.” Smart phone camera users, almost half at least once a day and to post on social media, 76%. Every other day, 22%. Pictures of things to do later is the number two. Pay bills, 21%.

Jeff: We're not even halfway through this thing.

Kevin: They don't actually have, like, to communicate to other people about stuff.

Leo: This is Millenial smart phone – well, these are the camera. But -

Kevin: But you know, one of my big use cases is sending a picture of something to my wife saying, “Is this the thing you wanted?” Or vice versa, saying, “Have you seen this thing?” Actually taking photographs of stuff.

Leo: Oh, we do that all the time. Yes.

Kevin: They didn't have a category for that, so I don't think they asked the question or maybe that's under – [crosstalk]

Leo: There's Periscope, a picture of Periscope. “Reimagining getting what you want when you want it.”

Ron: It's 197 slides, there's probably a picture of every single app ever made somewhere.

Jeff: I can't wait to get to the spoiler.

Ron: Is there like a too long, didn't read slide?

Leo: Design and concept – too long to read. Look at all the text on there.

Kevin: There's drones and stuff coming, hang on.

Leo: Drones? Mary Meeker discovers drones. Does she work on this all year? More drone thoughts, drone is driving a new way of big data collection and analysis, that's interesting. Consumer commercial drone development, ranking countries by government accomodation. I don't even see the U.S. on this list.

Jeff: That's another slide, Leo. Just add a slide.

Leo: It is the next slide. Appendix, we can skip that.

Jeff: Okay, so Appendix is 192 of 197.

Leo: Oh my God. Here you go, here's the numbers. Here's what counts. Actually, look at India. That's important. In 2014, 198 million internet users.

Jeff: Unbelievable.

Leo: In China, 632 but more than 35% penetration, so the real growth market here is India, big time, and we've mentioned that before.

Jeff: It's going to be phenomenal.

Leo: Then Nigeria, we talked about [1:33:23.9?] on TWiT on Sunday, Indonesia, Nigeria and Mexico. India, by the way, only 16% of the population has internet, so you have huge opportunity.

Jeff: It's up from 11%.

Leo: Bangladesh, 7%. That's infrastructure, right? The lack of wire. Well, there you go, ladies and gentlemen. Everything you need to know about 2016.

Ron: I'm so informed.

Leo: The future is here. The future is now. Okay, we can wrap this up. I'm exhausted.

Jeff: We haven't talked about a thing in the rundown, which is fine.

Leo: What do you want to talk about? Pick something.

Jeff: I don't know. I'm not sure there is.

Leo: I'm sad Mandriva has gone bankrupt, belly up. Mandriva was the Mandrake distro[?] of Linux that we installed most often on the Screen Savers many moons ago, it was the easiest to install. It came to a world where Slackware was the dominant Linux distribution and impossible to install. Mandrake came along and really made it easy. RedHat came after. I think – was Mandrake, maybe you remember, Kevin, a version of RedHat? Chat room would remember.

Kevin: Don't remember.

Leo: They sold Mandrake at Walmart, says DougPDX. I remember that! You could go to Staples and get a Mandrake box.

Jeff: That's right, I forgot that. Pretty good memories.

Kevin: I think basically, if you're in the market for that, you're basically on a Chromebook these days. That's the thing. So the Linux on a desktop is here, it's just that Linux on a desktop and phone – [crosstalk]

Leo: Right, it won but you don't know.

Kevin: Right, and to some extent, it's wrong because it stopped sort of [1:35:15.2?] Windows, which was always the problem with the Linux desktops. They were like one version of Windows behind.

Leo: Love Mike Masnick, Techdirt. He's talking about the New York Times. They did a profile of Fusion, which is this new network partly owned by Univision, partly owned by Disney. They've got – they hired some of the best -

Jeff: Incredible, smart people. Felix Salmon is one, Anna Holmes.

Leo: From the Atlantic, what's his name? Kevin Roose is there. However, from the faked – not faked, leaked Sony emails, according to two senior Fusion staff members who spoke on the condition of anonymity -

Jeff: Because they would be beheaded.

Leo: Disney put the organization on notice, it would not take kindly to coverage that dented its standing with consumers after Fusion published several stories about the hacker document trove from Sony. Fusion is not alone, in negotiations to create a Vice cable channel, Disney and Herst insisted on a clause protecting the companies in the event that Vice content embarrasses Herst or Disney in any way. God, am I glad to be independent!

Jeff: Wow.

Leo: So this is how we started, talking about how these big corporations do not understand editorial integrity.

Jeff: It comes down to one person protecting you. When I was at People magazine, which I confess, my editor Pat Ryan, may she rest in peace and God bless her, my mentor, would protect me. When I would criticize HBO, Michael Fuchs, the head of HBO, would scream up, “Fire that bastard!” It would come back down and she would say, “Eff you back!” And it would go back down.

Leo: But who's protecting people now? Is there somebody?

Jeff: Well, what I'm saying is, it comes to a brave boss or brave editor who – but the most insidious thing at a company like that is not necessarily what's ordered. It's what people think might be ordered. It's the chill you put on yourself.

Leo: Caesar's wife must be above suspicion. I don't know what that means.

Jeff: Where did that come from?

Leo: I think it's vaguely Shakespearian. I'm sorry, I didn't say it in an English accent. “Caesar's wife must be above suspicion!” Brilliant.

Jeff: I was with some Americans who moved to the Guardian and they said to the British – see if you have anything to say about this, Kevin. What would drive them nuts is the Brits would come up and say, “You okay?” And the Americans would say, “You know something I don't know? Is there something wrong? Do I look bad?” I thought it was just a British way of saying, “How are you?” True, Kevin?

Kevin: Interesting. I don't recognize that one.

Jeff: You don't, okay.

Kevin: Maybe they're trying to sound American, sort of say something to the Americans in some sort of reverse cultural thing of -

Jeff: “You're not okay.” It's that problem, yes.

Leo: Comcast, knowing that soon, the FCC will be taking comments – complaints, really, under the new net neutrality regime which begins in a few weeks – Comcast quickly, just the other day, fixed up its internet connection with level three. They've been going back and forth and a lot of this had to do with – originally, with Netflix but just in general with this whole idea of gatekeeping, I think. Paid tiers. So that's good. You know, you want to clean all that stuff up before there's actually teeth in the regulations. Wouldn't want that to get in the way. We mentioned GigaOm, acquired by Knowing.ly.

Jeff: We actually did more than I thought.

Leo: See, don't knock it.

Jeff: You should do this for a living.

Ron: We accidentally blew through the list, didn't we?

Leo: Well, we blew through your list. I can't wait for tomorrow, it's going to be exciting.

Ron: It is, yes. It's going to be a crazy, crazy keynote with bloody fingers.

Leo: We didn't even mention the new Photo app.

Ron: Yes, yes. Google+ is losing its photo section.

Leo: That's a question! Are they taking it out of Google+.

Ron: Sure, of course. What do you mean?

Jeff: Will it be in both places?

Ron: I would imagine it would share to both, but it'll be a neutral kind of photo.

Jeff: Bradley's, I think, in charge of photos and streams.

Ron: Yes, Google+ is going to be just a stream and it'll – it's not going anywhere.

Jeff: How many crossing stream jokes has he endured?

Leo: We will watch that with interest because that, I think, is the beginning of the end for Google+ if they take the photos capabilities out and externalize them into a Photos app.

Ron: I think Google's done with artificially propping up Google+, though. I mean, they just did the tweets in Search results thing the other day and they're just like -

Leo: Twitter won.

Jeff: The issue is that they do need streams. Facebook is a stream of attention. Twitter is a stream of attention, and so on and so on. Google does not have a stream of attention. Google is still on a page-based web.

Kevin: They have a stream thing in Google Now.

Jeff: Not quite a stream, how much time do you spend with Google Now?

Kevin: But that's a good way of looking at it. The point is not to dominate your thing, it's to send you the best that matter.

Jeff: What I'm saying is -

Leo: Isn't Google Now the result, not the end? It's what you're using that to get, is stuff.

Jeff: Problem is, the advertising model's going to be based on attention streams.

Leo: Well, I don't think they'd put ads in Google Now.

Kevin: Well, they kind of do. They say -

Leo: They do?

Kevin: Sure, they say places to go and visit, stuff like that.

Jeff: But that's not paid. Or is that paid? Maybe it is.

Leo: Is that paid? It doesn't say paid.

Kevin: Did you know it was paid?

Leo: That would be not cool, man, if it was paid and they didn't say it.

Jeff: This is the first time since I sat on the show, I just had -

Leo: You have a ton of stuff in there.

Jeff: No, I don't have that much.

Leo: It's because you're traveling. Google Now is so much better when you're traveling.

Jeff: I don't have Snowden in here for the first time. Every single time, now I have Tomorrowland. I wrote a post about Tomorrowland so now it's going to be there for weeks.

Leo: How did you like that?

Jeff: It was okay. I wrote a post on Medium arguing that the problem is, as I well know, that optimism doesn't sell.

Leo: Yes, cranky pessimism is the way to go. [1:41:58.7?] taught me that years ago.

Jeff: “You got a problem with that?”

Ron: He's the master.

Leo: He's the master, you can't – basically, because I'm Mr. Smiley Smile, I love it all. He said, “You're stupid, Leo. Don't do that. You can't go wrong dissing a new technology.” Occasionally, you say something bad about a mouse and people remember that for years but for the most part, you're right. Most new technology is crap, so it's a safe bet if you say, (growling). “Life sucks.”

Jeff: It goes beyond that. It's, “How's this going to ruin us?” My argument is that dystopianism is basically the ultimate hubris because it says your fellow men and women are too stupid to use this stuff. They're going to use it to ruin life. They're all idiots and I'm smarter than them because I can see this.

Leo: You know, you – it's funny, because you wouldn't think this. You are one of the most optimistic people I know.

Jeff: Why wouldn't you think that?

Leo: Because you're so cranky.

Jeff: I'm not cranky! God damnit! How dare you say that I'm cranky!

Leo: No, but you're really quite the pie-eyed optimist. You believe in the future of humankind.

Jeff: I am, I am! Yes. Even more than you do. You're an optimist too, but I think I'm even more than you are.

Leo: I'm an optimist but it's hard to maintain my optimism in the face of the truth about people. Are you an optimist, Ron? I think you're an optimist.

Ron: People say I'm rough on phones when I review them, but yes.

Leo: You should be.

Ron: I'm always optimistic about things.

Leo: I hope for the best but I have to say, almost every phone disappoints. There's yet to be the perfect phone.

Jeff: Oh, come on. Wait a second. Wait a second.

Leo: Give me a phone, and Ron and I will tell you what's wrong with it.

Jeff: Sure, you can find hope for what it can be but this is a miracle.

Leo: The Nexus 6?

Jeff: No, phones in general are a miracle!

Ron: Right, just the people in charge of making them are not very – okay. Every phone today is basically a game console. It's like the fastest possible specs you can imagine, like 8-core processors.

Leo: My S6 gets hot!

Ron: Like two case screens and -

Jeff: Queue Louis CK. “I'm flying over the Earth in a box and I'm complaining about it.”

Ron: Sure, but that doesn't mean that everything that is out is perfect and there's no way – what I'm asking for is a business phone. Remember like Blackberry, where you could have -

Leo: What?!

Jeff: Blackberry is your standard?

Ron: Not an actual Blackberry, but there's a market -

Leo: Something with real functionality.

Ron: There is a market for something that values battery life over just, let's make the numbers on the spec sheet as big as possible so the phone can – I have no idea what run crisis – like, what do they want to do with these 8-core processors and everything?

Leo: Right, who cares? But I think also, Jeff, it's stipulated that this is a miracle, that we have in our pocket more power – basically, a super computer. That's stipulated. That's not the issue.

Jeff: Yes, and then you get greedy!

Leo: All of these are that. Now the question is, but do they live up to – that's baseline, exactly. Miracle – we live in the age of miracles and that's the baseline.

Jeff: Here's the way I've been doing it – here's my Mathew Ingram argument the other day. Give me the business terms. Give me the terms of what would make a phone satisfy you.

Ron: Battery.

Leo: Apparently, Ron wants a Blackberry.

Ron: No, not a Blackberry.

Leo: Battery life is inadequate across the board except maybe the OnePlus One. The OnePlus has decent battery life.

Ron: I charged my phone at 8 a.m. today because I had to get up to go to the airport.

Leo: Where are you now?

Ron: Oh, I've charged it twice today.

Leo: Yes, I carry a battery.

Jeff: Jeez, I don't have that problem.

Ron: Well, when you're traveling and going to be up for however many extra hours I'm going to be up for today, changing timezones and everything -

Leo: My phone does pretty well with battery, I will grant you that.

Jeff: What else?

Ron: Nothing.

Jeff: Just battery, you're satisfied?

Ron: No. Just don't give me a 2K screen. Don't give me 8-core processors.

Leo: I love my 577 dpi.

Ron: What does that say, approximate 12 hours left?

Leo: Look at that. Is that a OnePlus One? What is that?

Kevin: That's the Nexus 6. It has 12 hours left.

Leo: That's such a lie. That's called standby.

Ron: Right, look at all your notifications. You have 10 thousand of them because you haven't looked at your phone in three hours.

Leo: That's called standby, friend. They do that on Google+ all the time. They show that graph and then the question is, “Have you turned your phone on at all?”

Kevin: Okay -

Ron: Then every phone is as thin as possible and it's like -

Kevin: Screen hasn't been on much yet.

Leo: What's the screen time, not much?

Kevin: Little graph there.

Ron: That chart, so useless.

Leo: What is the little ticks and nicks?

Kevin: I think it's a useful chart. Basically, it's saying of the time that was spent there, what was on where and what was causing the drain. So I've got a decent WiFi network connection, so that's not causing the drain whereas if it's bad, then you get little yellow stripes there and then you see slips in the thing. The screen on little bands there, you tend to see it slopes down there. It's more useful – it isn't projecting like 12 hours left.

Leo: That's what's wrong with it is it takes Kevin Marks to explain it to you.

Kevin: See, I find that a useful diagnostic.

Leo: I actually downloaded G-Sam Battery Monitor most of the time because I find that a little more granular.

Jeff: I have – what's it called, here?

Ron: I have two hours left on my phone and I've charged it twice.

Leo: Look at that graph.

Ron: It's gone up and down, up and down all day.

Jeff: I have Battery Guru on. Is that worthwhile or not?

Leo: That does nothing. Take it off. In fact -

Kevin: As a matter of fact, up there if your reception is bad, it's working harder -

Ron: It's warm right now. It's been in my pocket, I haven't done anything.

Jeff: Mine is as cool as a cucumber.

Leo: My iPhone doesn't feel anything. It doesn't love anybody. It is a cold, hard slab of glass and metal. It feels nothing -

Jeff: Notice you said that in a British accent.

Leo: Let's get our tips, tools, numbers, things and all of that.

Kevin: One more thought on the phone.

Leo: Yes?

Kevin: I had a fascinating conversation this week with Quinn Norton about this because she was doing that project I was talking about. She says she likes to write on her phone and there is now this small cult of people trying to find the Android phones that still have physical keyboards because they like to write on their phone and like having the physical keyboard. It's hard because the market's moved against them. It's another one of these things, like she really likes being able to write on her phone. She has a lot of reporting from strange places. Having a QWERTY keyboard, she can type fast enough on it, it's great. Having a screen she has to keep wiping because she's somewhere where – [crosstalk]

Jeff: I can see that she and Ron are going to be on an island cult somewhere – the Blackberry cult.

Ron: No, no. That's a great example, though. You have all these companies and everybody makes the same phone.

Jeff: That's a good point, yes.

Ron: Nobody tries to make one with keyboards and one with a really long battery, it's just as fast as humanly possible.

Jeff: The fault there, I would say, is not the manufacturers. It's, as always, the telecos because the telecos don't want to sell too many models.

Kevin: And the reviewers, but yes. No, because the reviewers give you a checklist and say things like, “Has this got a good enough screen?”

Leo: I think, actually, that is true, that we are somewhat at fault and have been for years with the feature charts not just for phones, but for software. You can blame us for Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Word because we just have feature lists, right? “Well, it's got all the checkboxes.” It's all people ever wanted. I agree, it's our fault. I take all the blame. I try – we try to do something called – I like to think of as functional reviews now. We don't look at speeds partly because a website is a better place for that. You can look at numbers but, you know, video and audio is about emotion and about feeling. I think it's better for communicating how you feel about a phone and what the experience of the phone is like. So we try to focus on that, more a functional review.

Ron: The interface response time, all that. Yes, I hate when they hold the phone and read off a spec sheet.

Leo: Right. You can see the specs, that's not a problem. But what is it like to be using it? We try to do that with our review show. What does it feel like? Should you buy this? What does it feel like to be the owner for a couple of weeks? How was that?

Ron: It's hard because every device is so good that the baseline is just like, “Well, this has 1% more than this for -”

Leo: Battery life often is a killer, a dealbreaker on a lot of these.

Ron: Half the time, the biggest difference is the design. The outside looks different.

Leo: That's why I like the Edge. Oh, it's so pretty, like a fine jewel.

Ron: The screen curviness doesn't bug you out?

Leo: It totally bugs me out. No, it's horrible and there's all sort of spurious touches because you're holding the screen. But -

Ron: But you love it.

Leo: But it feels beautiful in my hand. It's gorgeous.

Jeff: It's hand candy.

Leo: It's beautiful.

Ron: See, that's what matters. It doesn't work right but it looks pretty.

Leo: Also, that's exactly what I'll talk about is, “Hey, this is the most beautiful phone I've ever used.” It really is. However, you've got this little issue.

Ron: I mean, they're all so close now.

Leo: It is. It is pretty close.

Ron: That's what you want. I want something – I want a phone that's just nice because everybody has the same processor, amount of memory, screen resolution and so.

Jeff: I have a super computer in my pocket and I'm complaining.

Leo: No, we love our little phones.

Ron: Because you had to spend $600 on one of them and you want your money's worth.

Jeff: I spent $300 for my Osbourne One. Oh, yes.

Leo: I've got one in the basement.

Jeff: I spent $3000 for my Neq Impact printer. I had to rewire the parallel cables.

Leo: Nipon Electric company. Mr. Marks, you got something, a tip? You want to talk about – oh, you've got indie web coming up, Indie Web Camp.

Kevin: I want to talk about Indie Web Camp. So Indie Web Camp – indie web, I've talked about before. It's the idea of using the web for your own purposes, not for the company's purposes but Indie Web Camp is the heart of this, which is -

Jeff: Indie Web Camp, where everybody sleeps alone because they're independent.

Leo: Oh, I thought just because they couldn't get laid.

Jeff: No, no! I didn't mean that!

Leo: That might be true too!

Jeff: I meant they're all independent. Sorry, Kevin. I was trying for a gag there.

Kevin: So what I'm trying to say is, Indie Web Camp is an iOS feed channel, it's a website, a whole bunch of things but at its core, it's an annual camp over a weekend in Portland. This year, it's July 11 and 12. There are also other sites being set up as well. I'm not sure if they're all up yet, but people are talking about having a parallel one in Brighton, England and possible one in Europe as well.

Jeff: That'll be the smart one. I'm sorry, I'm trying again.

Kevin: Previously, we've had standard ones in different places and there's several this year, too. Last year, we had some going on in different part of the world, so that's going on here. But the – going up to Portland for the 11 and 12 of July is when this will be going on, doing this. The format is usually the first day, we get together and talk about what we've done on our sites, ideas and things. Then the second day, we sit there and hack on something until we've got something new and interesting. At the end of the second day, we show off what we built. So it's a fun weekend of working on your own site and working with people doing the same thing. We've – I've found it very useful over the past four years, I think it is, I've been going. So just wanted to mention that if you're interested in web development, have a look at that. Also go to indiewebcamp.com and look at our chat room if you'd like.

Jeff: And thank you for the work you do. It's important.

Leo: I agree. I use Withknown as my blog platform. Leoville.net is there and it's just great. I really want to figure out, Kevin – maybe while you're at Indie Web Camp, you can put a little bug in Aaron Jo's ear because we're going to Europe at the end of June. Actually, it'll be before the camp. I want to be able to journal from my trip and Indie Web Camp on mobile still doesn't – it's hard to upload video and audio yet. I just want it to be kind of a full tool I can journal from. We're getting there. They've made amazing progress. It's really kind of cool. Now, when I Instagram, it goes right there. I mentioned that last week.

Kevin: Audio and video are harder because there's just not the support there at the web level. Basically, the hard part – I think Ben wrote about it this week. The hard part is, it's very hard to get the phone to do the transformation before it uploads, so by default, the web stuff is to upload the RAW version, which means it takes forever. So you need a client-side app to translate it from the full to the compressed version before you upload and that's the piece that's not quite to date yet. So it may – the answer may be a companion app that does that and you can then post those.

Leo: Okay. I'll take anything.

Ron: Then they're going to render video on your cell phone battery.

Leo: Oh, oh. You've got a number for us?

Kevin: Well, it's the [1:55:29.9?] of business, [1:55:31.1?] versus bandwidth.

Leo: It is.

Jeff: What was it? I saw a bored Elon Musk -

Leo: That's a great Twitter account to follow.

Jeff: Something about how you're going to do a video of watching your battery go down. Ruin the punchline for everyone watching. This is a weird number, kind of a confession. In the past, when it comes to number time and I've grasped for straws, I've gone to the Millward Brown brand value ranking, right? So I looked at it this year and it said Apple has re-taken the number one position from Google. “Apple's brand surged 67% in value.” Well, how the hell do they know that?

Leo: It's magic.

Jeff: So I looked up the methodology and it's a bunch of smoke and hooey.

Leo: We've talked about this before.

Jeff: We have? Yes.

Leo: I think with you.

Jeff: So they take -

Leo: Maybe on Mac Break Weekly because it's kind of goofy.

Jeff: “We take the financial value and multiply it by brand contribution, which is expressed as a percentage of financial value. The result is a brand value. Brand value is the dollar amount a brand contributes to a corporation.” What? They measure such things supposedly as whether it's meaningful, different and salient. How do you measure that?

Leo: It's the richest company ever, that's good.

Jeff: So I apologize for ever using this number.

Leo: Number one, “We're number one.” Get them a foam finger. It's actually pretty amazing, given that they're actually doing better than when Steve Jobs was alive.

Jeff: Qualitatively, that's true.

Ron: Does anyone agree with that?

Leo: Does anybody agree with that? Well, financially.

Ron: I mean brand -

Jeff: Brand value, I think I agree with you, Ron. No.

Leo: I think brand value is going up, absolutely.

Jeff: It is going up? No, no.

Leo: Look at this watch. They've got people paying $17 thousand for it.

Jeff: How many schmucks bought it?

Leo: 30 thousand a week, yes. Yes. That's a million a month.

Ron: That's interesting, like the first Tim Cook product, I guess.

Leo: I don't think it succeeds as a product, to be honest, but it's selling like hotcakes.

Ron: That doesn't hurt the brand?

Leo: Well, in the long run, it might. Actually, that's a good question. Short run, no. But long run, it might. I don't know.

Ron: This is a new thing. I mean, it's probably pretty hard to screw up the iPhone, but -

Leo: That's the thing. It's hard to come up with a successor to the iPhone.

Ron: Yes.

Jeff: You guys were just a minute ago complaining how imperfect it was.

Leo: Nothing's perfect, Jeff. We know that. But it's pretty good. I'm just saying, that's the challenge. If you had the most successful – I would say, arguable, the most successful product in the history of the world in the iPhone, how are you going to do better than that? Water, okay?

Ron: Make it faster. That's always the answer and apparently, bigger and thinner.

Leo: Bigger? Bigger, faster, thinner. Do you have anything you'd like to share with us? I mean, we don't have to. I don't know if we're surprising you, but any tool that you like to use? What's your phone? Have you found a phone with a perfect keyboard?

Ron: I don't want a keyboard!

Leo: It's not you that wants a keyboard.

Jeff: He wants the battery. Quinn wants a keyboard.

Ron: No, my favorite tool is a gigantic battery that's this big that I can carry with me.

Leo: I found, there's one company that makes a Qualcom 2.0 quick charger battery.

Ron: Yes, yes. I've heard about those.

Leo: That's nice to have. It's called Aukie. It's almost 20 thousand milliamp hours or something. It's enough to charge the phone a few times and it's the standard size of all these cigarette pack batteries. So I carry that around in my briefcase and that's going to give me three charges. In about an hour, I'll have full charge, which is nice to have. There it is, A-U – no, that's not it. Right company but they make a quick charger. There it is, that silver thing.

Ron: It's just a battery with a -

Leo: You've seen these a million times but it's the only one I know that's Qualcom quick charge 2.0 certified. It's only 10 thousand milli amp hours but that's still four charges. It would work with the Nexus 6.

Ron: Maybe your Galaxy S6? Maybe not.

Leo: It does work with the Galaxy S6, yes. Just fine. Isn't that weird because it's an Exynos? But somehow it does quick charge.

Ron: It's just more voltage, so it shouldn't be too hard.

Leo: It's just more voltage, from your mouth to God's ears. Ladies and gentlemen, Ron Amadeo from Ars Technica, arstechnica.com. You must read him every single day because – no, seriously. I do. So you should too.

Ron: That's awesome, thank you.

Leo: He's really a great resource. We don't do reporting, we do commentary. I'll let you hardworking fellas do the reporting, get out there and -

Ron: Start tomorrow. I'm ready.

Leo: You're going to liveblog the whole thing on this?

Jeff: What time are you showing up tomorrow morning?

Ron: I don't know. I need to go see Andrew and talk about that. Early, very early.

Leo: When are you showing up tomorrow?

Ron: When we get done drinking.

Leo: Is it at Moscone West? The big one.

Jeff: About 7, I think I'll show up. Moscone – yes, I think so. The press, they escort upstairs.

Leo: Is it the little one?

Kevin: The West isn't the big one. The big one's the underground one.

Leo: Yes, yes.

Ron: Everything's at West, isn't it?

Leo: West is where Steve would give his -

Jeff: Hallowed ground.

Leo: His iPhone keynote was at the West. The iPad was not, that was Erba Buena Center. All right, we'll cover it tomorrow. I'm excited. We'll be watching and I'll look for your shining faces in the audience and your tweets. I'll follow your liveblog at Ars Technica.

Jeff: How much Periscoping will be going on?

Leo: I'll be looking for Kevin Marks to sneak in.

Kevin: I'll see if I can sneak in. If I'm going to sneak in, I'll probably go in the afternoon. I won't get up at the crack of dawn to head up there. I will probably watch it from home.

Leo: You're the kind of guy, you like to go to the seminars.

Jeff: The real stuff, the conferences.

Kevin: Also, the thing about the keynote is, you can pretty much do as much watching the stream and tweeting as sitting in that room. Everyone else is just sitting there wasting time anyway.

Leo: Absolutely. I love doing what we do. People often think I'm mad at Apple because I don't get invited to Apple events. No, I would still be here because as long as they stream it – the hard thing is when they don't stream it. But then we're needed more than ever to analyze the liveblogs.

Ron: I was way more informed when I didn't write and I could sit at home and watch everything. Now I have to deal with logistics and all kinds of things.

Leo: 9:30 a.m. Pacific, 12:30 Eastern time, we go live right after TNT tomorrow morning. Gina Trapani will join me along with Ron Richards and Aaron Newcomb. It's going to be good. Going to be fun. We shall have fun, you and I. I thank you for being here. Thanks, Kevin.

Kevin: Thank you.

Leo: Have fun tomorrow, Mr. Jeff Jarvis. Thank you for being here. So nice to see you braving -

Jeff: Wonderful to be here.

Leo: Braving the bridge to be here. Did you get lunch yet or are we going to -

Jeff: We got lunch, thanks to you. Thank you for lunch, a very good lunch.

Leo: Ron Amadeo – what'd you get?

Jeff: I had the salmon BLT. It was good.

Leo: Oh, yes. That's great. Arstechnica.com, thank you for being here.

Ron: Any time, it was fun.

Leo: Really nice. We do this show right after Windows Weekly, usually – right after the beer. If you hear the beer pick, then you know it's Jeff soon. 1 p.m. Pacific roughly – 1-ish. 4 p.m. Eastern time and that'll be 2000 UTC at live.twit.tv. Yes, we're going to keep doing the live stuff. Forget what I said. I gave up. You can also find us on demand – I know. I'm impulsive. I was upset.

Jeff: With good reason.

Leo: You know, what happened is, I was serious about it but then I realized, that's not going to do anything. Jerks will be jerks regardless and Lisa talked me off the ledge. She said, “Don't worry, we'll figure it out. We'll find a way.” You know, I also heard from like 8 million people. That didn't hurt. So you have been heard. You can also get on-demand versions of this show and all shows, including the specials, at twit.tv. This show is at twit.tv/twig, youtube.com/thisweekingoogle, iTunes, all the places. Your podcast app -

Jeff: You got the new deal with Spotify! It's a big deal!

Leo: It's not on Android yet, so it's on iOS. I know, it will be. So it's on iOS and even then, you have to go into the iOS app, go to settings and it'll say, “Do you want the new features?” You say yes and then, your interface will change and you'll see a shows button, audio and video, all our shows. This is a great – I mean, we're really excited about this and apparently – you know, they've been claiming this for a while. Apparently, I was told by their PR, whoever, their technical contact said, “If you're going to have a podcast, you've got to have TWiT.” So thank you, Danny. We're really thrilled about that and it's not the end of the news on that in that regard. There will be more and more ways to consume, not to mention a new website next week and -

Jeff: Is it next week? Oh, all this work, all this money is finally paying off? The API is out?

Leo: Not yet, the API is not. There's people – right away, right now, going, (mimicks typing). But we will be soon. Probably – I was hoping June 1, now I'm thinking -

Jeff: You had given up hope and now you have it back.

Leo: Well, I never gave up hope.

Ron: Do we get a preview?

Leo: I don't know how well it's working right now. The images aren't – the certificate isn't there. So let me just see, probably not. Let me just see if we get the images. No, the images are still broken. So you get a bad experience because that's not the layout at all.

Jason: I'm not getting your feed but if it's not getting the images, let's not show it.

Leo: No. I'll tell you. This is the key live on-demand apps, we're going to have a link to the apps, subscribe, we have a schedule now that actually works. It's just a Google calendar stuck in there. Hey, why – I found out what it costs to rewrite Google calendar and I said, “Oh, no. Maybe we'll just use Google calendar.” You'll be on here, people.

Jeff: Yay, I'm a person.

Leo: We're going to get pictures. Yes, it's all there. We'll tell you when it's – well, we don't have to tell you. You'll know. You'll go to the site and go, “What the hell? It all changed. It's all different.”

Ron: And then they'll complain. They always complain.

Leo: The complaints will begin. It's okay.

Jeff: Because you need a bigger battery.

Leo: Batteries. Thank you for joining us. We'll see you next time on This Week in Google. Bye, bye!