Speaker 1: Get in tech with Technology with Text stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: dot Com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
Speaker 1: I am Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren and we wanted
Speaker 1: to take a look back at the year what was
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen and some of the big tech news stories,
Speaker 1: and it turns out there quite a few. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna divide this up into a couple of episodes, And
Speaker 1: before we get started, I wanted to do just a
Speaker 1: little bit of explanation of how some of this is
Speaker 1: going to play out. In the past, we have often
Speaker 1: kind of commented on the stories as they happened throughout
Speaker 1: the year. That's generally what we're going to do today.
Speaker 1: But for any story that continued to develop throughout the year,
Speaker 1: we're just gonna tell as much of that story as
Speaker 1: we can when it first started happening, more or less,
Speaker 1: because we find that that's a lot easier to follow
Speaker 1: than to say this happened in January than we do
Speaker 1: stories for February, March and in April. Hey you remember
Speaker 1: the thing that happened in January, Well here's where this happened,
Speaker 1: all right. Yeah, there's a couple of places where we
Speaker 1: either are are waiting until a larger event in the
Speaker 1: chain happened to to break it during our timeline or
Speaker 1: exact yeah, exactly. In some cases we'll be talking about
Speaker 1: the biggest part of the story and we may say, oh,
Speaker 1: early in the year this happened, but we wanted to
Speaker 1: do it in such a way where you could get
Speaker 1: kind of the encapsulated version of that news story all
Speaker 1: at once, as opposed to spread out throughout the whole year.
Speaker 1: So any um, alien historians listening to this for like
Speaker 1: extreme accuracy purposes, just you know, slow down and take
Speaker 1: it all in. Also, welcome to the Gregorian calendar. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's exciting. So let's start, I suggest starting with January two,
Speaker 1: an excellent month of the Gregorian calendar to start with. Yes, okay,
Speaker 1: So the first thing that I have written down, we
Speaker 1: we kind of we didn't go day by day for
Speaker 1: the year, but we kind of lumped them together and
Speaker 1: stuff that happened in various months. The first story I
Speaker 1: wanted to mention was that that was when Kim dot
Speaker 1: com did a little press event where he unveiled his
Speaker 1: plan of the mega website. And you know, Kim dot
Speaker 1: Com of course was one of the founders of Mega upload,
Speaker 1: and a year earlier, back in two thousand twelve, had
Speaker 1: his home rated by various law enforcement officials, and so
Speaker 1: this was on the anniversary of that big raid. He
Speaker 1: unveiled this new service called mega which is a file
Speaker 1: hosting service that also includes encryption so that you can
Speaker 1: share files. You can you can upload a file and
Speaker 1: share it with people, and you can encrypt it so
Speaker 1: that anyone you don't want to share it with doesn't
Speaker 1: know what the heck you're messing with. So it's kind
Speaker 1: of a work around on some of the issues that
Speaker 1: Mega upload had where, you know, anyone who owned copyrighted
Speaker 1: material and saw it up on Mega upload would say, hey,
Speaker 1: you've got to take that down that belongs to me.
Speaker 1: This way they can all they can say is there's
Speaker 1: stuff up there that may or may not belong to me,
Speaker 1: but I can't tell because it's all encrypted. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: this is part of a kind of law your theme
Speaker 1: of of a encryption and be uh file sharing kind
Speaker 1: of issues. It turns out that that's something that I
Speaker 1: doubt is going to go away anytime soon. Yeah. When
Speaker 1: we next have a story that has kind of one
Speaker 1: of the tragedies of this one is so close to
Speaker 1: your heart. Um. This was a research in motion or
Speaker 1: a rim renaming itself BlackBerry and uh and launching the
Speaker 1: BlackBerry ten os UM and then kind of not really
Speaker 1: going anywhere after that. There were if you remember, back
Speaker 1: in two thousand twelve, there were a lot of analysts
Speaker 1: saying that BlackBerry ten os was going to be the
Speaker 1: make or break product for BlackBerry, that it was only
Speaker 1: if that that that new overhaul of the smartphone operating
Speaker 1: system that would be what would end up either saving
Speaker 1: the company or it wouldn't be enough. And while BlackBerry
Speaker 1: is still around, it's certainly had a really rough year.
Speaker 1: In two thousand thirteen, they went so far as to
Speaker 1: say they were entertaining offers for people to come up
Speaker 1: and buy the company. However, uh, just recently, relatively recently
Speaker 1: as of the recording of this podcast, CEO John Chen
Speaker 1: sent out a letter to customers, enterprise customers meaning giant companies,
Speaker 1: saying that BlackBerry was no longer looking for a buyer.
Speaker 1: They were going to to go this alone. They were
Speaker 1: going to continue to cater to their enterprise customers, but
Speaker 1: they were not going to try and sell off the company. UM.
Speaker 1: However they are basically any investors are being um, it's
Speaker 1: being recommended that investors sell off their BlackBerry stock. Things
Speaker 1: are not looking in the business industry like this is
Speaker 1: fun to go. When city groups said they're changing BlackBerry
Speaker 1: to sell that was that was not a good news
Speaker 1: item for BlackBerry. So it continues to be a really
Speaker 1: rough year. Uh hey, you know what, have you ever
Speaker 1: wanted to be in pictures? I am in picture sometimes? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Have you what about moving pictures? I'm I'm in those
Speaker 1: yeah occasionally. Yeah. I like I like being in them.
Speaker 1: I really like them when they are six seconds long. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: there's an app for that. What Twitter had purchased this
Speaker 1: this little company called Vine in twelve and in January
Speaker 1: unveiled the iOS vine app. Yep, And this was what
Speaker 1: let all those would be iPhone movie makers out there
Speaker 1: use their phones to create six second long looping videos,
Speaker 1: which some people did, and it was just kind of
Speaker 1: like ridiculous stuff that hardly anyone outside of a small
Speaker 1: group of friends would have ever taken notice of. Other
Speaker 1: people were using it as an actual means of artistic
Speaker 1: expression and using in a very kind of creative way.
Speaker 1: But I mean, it's challenging. Right. It's just like in
Speaker 1: a way when you talk about the different types of
Speaker 1: fiction and how the shorter you get, the harder it
Speaker 1: is to write. So, for example, a good novel is
Speaker 1: hard to write, a good novella is harder to write.
Speaker 1: A good short story is really hard to write because
Speaker 1: as you're restricting yourself, every single word counts even more
Speaker 1: than it would in a longer form. So you've got
Speaker 1: a six second movie, You've got to find a way
Speaker 1: of saying what you want to say in six seconds
Speaker 1: that really has an impact. And there's some people who
Speaker 1: are really good at it. Oh yeah, yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: also a terrific medium for for just main kind of stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: that's that's short and easy. And I saw some really
Speaker 1: cute ones this here. Yeah, I saw some great ones
Speaker 1: as well. But you know, I I don't really feel
Speaker 1: comfortable limiting myself to six seconds. I need a little
Speaker 1: more than twice that, i'mount Is there anything out there
Speaker 1: for me? Well? In June, actually Facebook kind of caught
Speaker 1: up when they announced Instagram Video, right, that would allow
Speaker 1: you to do fifteen seconds of video and see there
Speaker 1: a lot of people were saying, you know, Facebook is
Speaker 1: playing hardball here by not allowing Vine to live on
Speaker 1: Facebook and instead having this competing product that could live
Speaker 1: on Facebook. Meanwhile, Vine, of course, is doing quite well
Speaker 1: on Twitter. So you've got these two giant social media
Speaker 1: goliaths that are kind of, you know, trying to to
Speaker 1: push the other one out of the picture. As it
Speaker 1: turns out, I mean, I don't I don't know what
Speaker 1: the figures are because I didn't look them up. All
Speaker 1: I know is what my direct experience has been I've seen.
Speaker 1: And maybe it's because I'm not a big Instagram person,
Speaker 1: that's probably the main reason. But I've seen way more
Speaker 1: Vine videos, and I've seen Instagram videos. I know more
Speaker 1: people personally making Instagram videos than I do personally making
Speaker 1: Vine videos. But overall, I have seen more propagation of Vine. Interesting.
Speaker 1: So you know, this obviously is all anecdotal, So it
Speaker 1: could very well be that, you know, and I mean,
Speaker 1: there's way one of us is on the money here. Well,
Speaker 1: those and and those are those are trends of two
Speaker 1: you know, thirtiesome things who work in the tech sector,
Speaker 1: and and so you know this grain assault, but so
Speaker 1: what about you know, sticking with Facebook, they also in
Speaker 1: January launched something that I don't had a lot of
Speaker 1: buzz around it at the time. That was an interesting idea.
Speaker 1: It was called graph search, and this would let you
Speaker 1: use Facebook as a search engine to look for really
Speaker 1: weird stuff. Like the examples they gave were always odd,
Speaker 1: so uh. An example I said was, I want to
Speaker 1: know what kind of music people who really enjoy planetarium's
Speaker 1: happen to like, and I could do a search on that,
Speaker 1: and Facebook has of course all that information of what
Speaker 1: people have liked and you know anything. Yeah, so then
Speaker 1: they would come back with well, people who said they
Speaker 1: liked planetariums also said they really like you know, I
Speaker 1: don't know Manner Asterman, which would make total sense that
Speaker 1: that would be an example. But it's this kind of
Speaker 1: deep graph search, whereas a social search kind of thing. Um.
Speaker 1: I've only played with it a little bit and it
Speaker 1: doesn't seem to work that well for me. But it
Speaker 1: may just be that I'm using it wrong and then
Speaker 1: I'm too old. I haven't. I haven't experimented with it
Speaker 1: very much. But um, but I think that since the
Speaker 1: trends of overall Facebook getting older, I've probably indicates that
Speaker 1: it's not that you're too old. It's just that it's
Speaker 1: not as functional as they had perhaps hoped it might be.
Speaker 1: That's very kind of you to say. I'd like to
Speaker 1: think that it's their fault, not mine. Also in January,
Speaker 1: Canonical announced that they would bring Ubuntu, the Linux distro,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a distribution of the Linux operating system.
Speaker 1: They would bring it to the mobile platforms. They would
Speaker 1: create a smartphone version of a Buntu in the near future.
Speaker 1: That's the story would play out over two thousand thirteen,
Speaker 1: and it was not a particularly successful story either. In July,
Speaker 1: they announced a crowdfunding campaign to try and raise money
Speaker 1: on I think it was Indie Go Go for what
Speaker 1: they were calling the Ubuntu Edge, which would have been
Speaker 1: the first smartphone to feature this operating system. However, they
Speaker 1: hit a little bit of a roadblock. Yeah, they had
Speaker 1: a thirty two million dollar goal and they only made
Speaker 1: nineteen of that. Actually are they They fell short by
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen million dollars. I thought, I feel badly that
Speaker 1: my kick started campaign didn't fund, But um I got
Speaker 1: more than halfway to where I needed to be and
Speaker 1: they didn't quite make that. So well, but that's still
Speaker 1: I mean, they they still made. I mean, I'm having
Speaker 1: a lot of trouble subtracting right now then. Um but
Speaker 1: but I mean, but that's still you know what, like
Speaker 1: like eleven million dollars that they raised. I'm just saying
Speaker 1: that's not terrible. Yeah, no, it's they didn't they weren't
Speaker 1: hunting for cash, but they didn't have enough to go
Speaker 1: through with what they planned. Did some subtractions so hard? Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we only like to add on tech stuff.
Speaker 1: We hate taking stuff away. The Ubuntu Edge would have
Speaker 1: been eight thirty dollars to buy outright if it had
Speaker 1: come into existence now since then, back in December of
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen, Canonical announced that some other as yet
Speaker 1: as of the recording of this podcast, and I should
Speaker 1: say recording this on December twelve, so so and anything
Speaker 1: that we get terribly weird of, especially towards the end,
Speaker 1: that's one of the reasons we're also terribly weird people.
Speaker 1: So that also plays the department. But anyway, Canonical has
Speaker 1: said that some unnamed manufacturer would be producing the first
Speaker 1: ubun two smartphones sometime in two thousand fourteen, and it
Speaker 1: may very well be that by the time this podcast
Speaker 1: goes live. We will know who that manufacturer is, but
Speaker 1: as of the recording, we do not. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: we have a very sad story to round out January
Speaker 1: of two thousand thirteen, which was on January eleventh, two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Uh. Swartz was one
Speaker 1: of the people who worked on Really Simple Syndication RSS. Uh.
Speaker 1: He was. He was a hacker and an activist. He
Speaker 1: was He was a deep member of all of these
Speaker 1: communities that were based around the building of the Worldwide Web. Yeah.
Speaker 1: He was very much involved in the development of Reddit.
Speaker 1: He was very active with Creative Commons, and he was
Speaker 1: a proponent of the idea that information wants to be free,
Speaker 1: and in fact had been charged with breaking and entering
Speaker 1: by m I T Campus police when he was using
Speaker 1: unauthorized He was using a computer to download massive amounts
Speaker 1: of documents from j Store, which is you know, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a it's an academic um database of papers, and
Speaker 1: presumably with the intent of distributing them freely, because information
Speaker 1: wants to be free. Uh. He you know. M I
Speaker 1: T eventually decided not to pursue charges, but the federal
Speaker 1: government did not have that same point of view. They
Speaker 1: actually when after sworts On on multiple charges under the
Speaker 1: Computer Fraud and Abuse Act UH Sports, his lawyers offered
Speaker 1: to have a plea bargain, but the prosecutors refused the
Speaker 1: plea bargain. Yeah, they were being really I mean, and
Speaker 1: the sentence that they were putting out there was thirty
Speaker 1: five years in prison and about a million dollars in
Speaker 1: five Yeah, and there were other you know, things tacked
Speaker 1: onto there. This actually prompted a big discussion in the
Speaker 1: tech world about whether or not the federal government was
Speaker 1: trying to use sports as an example to try and
Speaker 1: frighten other people by going after sports with such gusto
Speaker 1: and refusing to do any sort of plea bargain. And UM,
Speaker 1: two days after the denial of the plea bargain came through,
Speaker 1: that's when Sports committed suicide. And it was this is
Speaker 1: a very complicated issue. You can't just point a finger
Speaker 1: and say because of this, this other thing happened. I mean,
Speaker 1: it didn't stop people from trying. Oh absolutely, if you'd
Speaker 1: like to learn more about sports and UM and all
Speaker 1: of this this hubbub leading up to this tragic event.
Speaker 1: In particular, UM, we did a memorial episode on February six.
Speaker 1: That was during kind of my learning curve of the show.
Speaker 1: I will warn you guys, right, Yeah, so there are
Speaker 1: several of the stories we'll talk about kind of relate
Speaker 1: back to some of the episodes we've done. I mean, obviously,
Speaker 1: whenever anything really big happens, we like to try and
Speaker 1: at least give some context to it on text. So
Speaker 1: definitely check that one out. But now we're ready to
Speaker 1: move on to February, which twenty eight days as a
Speaker 1: rule are plenty. Yeah, February in this case, UM had
Speaker 1: had the beginning of kind of the saga that Intel
Speaker 1: went through during the course. Yeah, here's another one. Like
Speaker 1: you know, BlackBerry had its own saga, Intel's had one,
Speaker 1: although Intel's is is definitely different from Blackberries. Blackberries the
Speaker 1: company that people are always kind of predicting that this
Speaker 1: year will be the end of BlackBerry type thing. No
Speaker 1: one's predicting that for Intel. But yeah, they had announced
Speaker 1: in February at the All Things deconference that they were
Speaker 1: going to be launching an Internet TV service by the
Speaker 1: end of the year, and in July they had announced
Speaker 1: that the name of the service was going to be
Speaker 1: on que I didn't realize how quickly the story had developed.
Speaker 1: I mean, I didn't realize it was only July when
Speaker 1: they named it and now actually a month ago back
Speaker 1: in Nova Member, they started looking to offload it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they're looking to try and sell it off to someone
Speaker 1: for around five million dollars. And you might say, well,
Speaker 1: why would a company in the very beginning of the
Speaker 1: year say they're really going to push to get into
Speaker 1: this world, this internet television world that no one has
Speaker 1: yet really cracked. You know, You've got a lot of
Speaker 1: big companies that are all vying for this, including Apple
Speaker 1: and Google. Why would they say they really want to
Speaker 1: do it? And then they kind of bailed on it.
Speaker 1: And well, here's where the story is a little more complicated.
Speaker 1: It's because the people who were in charge at the
Speaker 1: end of the year were not the same people who
Speaker 1: were in charge at the beginning of the year. Yes,
Speaker 1: uh Ceo, Paul UHLINI thank you, I always I can
Speaker 1: never say that, and yeah, well good luck on the
Speaker 1: next one. Yeah, he stepped down and was replaced by
Speaker 1: Brian Krisnitch. I'm gonna say it's Crescentitch, even though someone's
Speaker 1: gonna tell me that that's an inappropriate pronunciation, but that's
Speaker 1: what I'm going with. But yeah, it was, it was.
Speaker 1: It was a move where I'm with two minds of this.
Speaker 1: You know, I like seeing companies promote from within. I
Speaker 1: think that that's a valuable thing to do. But there
Speaker 1: were a lot of analysts who said that the problem
Speaker 1: Intel faces is not that, you know, they are abusing
Speaker 1: their their talent, it's that they have kind of adhered
Speaker 1: to a similar strategy for so long that what's really
Speaker 1: needed is some new blood to stir things up. And
Speaker 1: they're look that as being a little bit old and
Speaker 1: stagy in terms of management. Yeah. So, and Crecentag is
Speaker 1: someone who has been with a company for more than
Speaker 1: two decades. So when he stepped up a CEO, some
Speaker 1: analysts were saying, well, this is a sign that Intel
Speaker 1: is not ready to move forward. Uh and and some
Speaker 1: have argued that the on q story where now they're
Speaker 1: trying to sell off on q is, is evidence of that.
Speaker 1: So that's where they are right now. Um, something else
Speaker 1: happened in February. We got our first look at one
Speaker 1: of the next generation consoles now current generation console. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: Sony got the jump on Microsoft. There they announced the
Speaker 1: PlayStation for at their own personal event in New York.
Speaker 1: It was invitation only and I didn't get an invite,
Speaker 1: so just follow along with all the live blogging. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they showed off the system. They really stressed that the
Speaker 1: system was for gamers, and that's going to be important
Speaker 1: later on in the year when we move on to
Speaker 1: the other big console. They talked about how the PlayStation
Speaker 1: four would allow you to not only play games, but
Speaker 1: share your experience. You know, you could stream stuff on
Speaker 1: things like twitch tv. I think it was twitch TV,
Speaker 1: and then they could all you could also, UH, at
Speaker 1: least at some point, be able to hand over control
Speaker 1: of your game to someone else. So if you just
Speaker 1: can't get past that third level, if you just can't
Speaker 1: get that boss fight, you can just pass. Everybody calling
Speaker 1: Lauren up in the middle of the night. Lauren needed
Speaker 1: to get past this guy for me. He keeps hitting
Speaker 1: me on the head with a fish, and then she
Speaker 1: would fix it for me, and then I could continue
Speaker 1: to play UH and so owe me so many coffees
Speaker 1: the next day. You'd be awake at three in the morning.
Speaker 1: If I had said ten in the morning, Oh snap,
Speaker 1: a little inside looking I guess that's just me anyway.
Speaker 1: So Sony would go on to E three and uh
Speaker 1: and after some pretty fierce competition between Sony and Microsoft.
Speaker 1: I would say that most journalists by the end of
Speaker 1: E three were at least some might say prematurely calling
Speaker 1: Sony the winner. Yeah, I mean the winner. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: um yeah, and then it did. It did pretty well
Speaker 1: on its release, although I mean it's hard to compare
Speaker 1: to the Xbox One is we'll talk about a little
Speaker 1: bit later because Microsoft isn't really releasing numbers. But um,
Speaker 1: but Sony has said that they sold a hundred I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, one million units um, and they were only
Speaker 1: selling the console in two nations at that time. So yeah,
Speaker 1: a good job for them. Uh. Next, we have one
Speaker 1: of the spawns is of our show occasionally Netflix. Right,
Speaker 1: they introduced their original series House of Cards. That was
Speaker 1: the first original series that they had come out with. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: they and and of course the way Netflix does it
Speaker 1: is different from the way you would watch a show
Speaker 1: on TV. You know, on on television you get it
Speaker 1: week after week, so you get one episode per week
Speaker 1: and then you have to wait a week to see
Speaker 1: the next one. Netflix said Okay, we've produced this series
Speaker 1: and we're going to serve up the entire season at once,
Speaker 1: so so you can you can already mainline it just
Speaker 1: and you can just set aside a weekend and just
Speaker 1: watch Kevin Spacey be progressively more and more nasty. I've
Speaker 1: watched some of this and he is amazingly amoral in
Speaker 1: this in this show. I haven't caught it yet, but
Speaker 1: um but they did. They did release also following that,
Speaker 1: um the next season of Arrested Development, and also the
Speaker 1: first season of Orange is a New Black, which I
Speaker 1: have not Oh it's so good. Um uh. And yeah,
Speaker 1: there was overall a trend in of more companies doing
Speaker 1: more original series on streaming video on demand. Yeah, Hulu
Speaker 1: had already launched a couple of scripted series in two
Speaker 1: thousand twelve, and they continued to do that in two
Speaker 1: thousand thirteen, and Amazon Prime same thing. They had produced
Speaker 1: a couple and they were working on more. So you
Speaker 1: can see shows on all three of those services. And
Speaker 1: those aren't the only three, but those are the three big. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you want to learn more about that, you can
Speaker 1: see our episodes about streaming video on demand UMU. Primarily
Speaker 1: videos in the stream which came out September. There you go.
Speaker 1: So before we get onto the next half of the
Speaker 1: first half of two thousand thirteen, I think I think
Speaker 1: the Q two is really what you would say, they're
Speaker 1: Q two. Okay, before we go on to Q two,
Speaker 1: let's take a quick break to thank our sponsored all right,
Speaker 1: let's march on with March of two thousand thirteen, and
Speaker 1: Lauren judges me. Some things, by the way, remain consistent
Speaker 1: throughout two thousand thirteen, including Lauren shaking her head and
Speaker 1: just staring at me with disapproval. Hey, at least I
Speaker 1: don't laugh uncontrollably anymore. I feel like that. Yeah, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: just once she got over the the laughter thing, now
Speaker 1: I just get the judging. So that's fine. That's my friend.
Speaker 1: Matt refers to that as my laugh number twenty one,
Speaker 1: nervous laugh number twenty one. Apparently I have a lot
Speaker 1: of them. Mll It's good to be versatile. So moving
Speaker 1: on to March two thousand thirteen, Um, what just really quickly,
Speaker 1: T Mobile did something pretty pretty unheard of in the
Speaker 1: four major carriers of cell phone services in the United States. Right,
Speaker 1: Europe is gonna go like this is such old news
Speaker 1: in the US, it was. It was pretty Uh, it's
Speaker 1: like a Maverick move. Yeah, they introduced no contract service
Speaker 1: plans yep, which uh, you know doesn't necessarily mean that
Speaker 1: you would be better off with that versus a contract one.
Speaker 1: It would be a case by case basis, but it
Speaker 1: did mean that it suddenly, you know, US customers had
Speaker 1: more options. So it needs to be seen how this
Speaker 1: is going to affect the rest of the industry over
Speaker 1: the next few years. But I'm very curious to see
Speaker 1: if this move ends up being something that's transformative or
Speaker 1: if it's just a little blip in the radar. Its
Speaker 1: too early to say right now. And in other relatively
Speaker 1: small news that made perhaps a bigger splash in our
Speaker 1: personal lives, Google announced in March that it was going
Speaker 1: to shut down Google Reader. Yeah. This is what caused
Speaker 1: me to say, no, that's that is literally what he did,
Speaker 1: like in the middle of the office. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 1: it was pretty bad. Yeah, Um, that's that. That was
Speaker 1: their RSS service. Yeah, that was if you wanted some
Speaker 1: sort of RSS reader, this was one of the ones
Speaker 1: that could work pretty well. You could divide it up
Speaker 1: into different categories and stuff and there were plenty of
Speaker 1: other options out there, oh yeah, and and Google suggested
Speaker 1: many other good ones as replacements. Exactly, they weren't. They
Speaker 1: were like, we understand that some of you are very
Speaker 1: passionate about this, but the problem is that even with
Speaker 1: all of your passion, you're still very few vocal minority. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So it was one of those things where as a company,
Speaker 1: I totally understand why they were doing this. They were saying,
Speaker 1: you know, we've got a lot of projects. We have
Speaker 1: to devote some attention to all of them, and it
Speaker 1: makes more sense for us to go ahead and shut
Speaker 1: down things that are not terribly successful so that we
Speaker 1: can devote that kind of time and attention to something else,
Speaker 1: which really, in the long run became sort of okay
Speaker 1: because March was also the month that Google announced their
Speaker 1: their beta of Google Glass. Yeah, Project Glass. You know,
Speaker 1: it seems so weird, Like I imagine that because I
Speaker 1: have a pair of these, Um, technically the office has
Speaker 1: a pair of these. They're just in my possession. They
Speaker 1: kind of reside with Jonathan most I turned into golem
Speaker 1: with the ring he does. Yeah, very I've led a
Speaker 1: couple of people wear them, But I get real ansy um.
Speaker 1: But anyway, Project Glass was the it. You probably see them.
Speaker 1: They're the glasses that have the little bitty cube on
Speaker 1: them where you can use that as a screen and
Speaker 1: take pictures with them, take video. We do some apps
Speaker 1: to navigation, some web search connects by a bluetoo their WiFi,
Speaker 1: a little bit of a vocal command in there, so
Speaker 1: that you don't say, okay glass to take a picture,
Speaker 1: take a video, record a video, recorded video, take a
Speaker 1: picture yet. Yeah, because I had a lot of fun
Speaker 1: with that a dragon con. I went drunken and people
Speaker 1: will be like, you took my picture with the future,
Speaker 1: and I'm like, yes, I did. So I think I
Speaker 1: think Jonathan got more people coming up to him to
Speaker 1: ask they could take a picture of him taking a
Speaker 1: picture of something with his Google Glass. Yeah. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: was not the celebrity in that room. Google Glass was
Speaker 1: the celebrity anyway. Yeah. It's it's a program that has
Speaker 1: recently opened up a little bit more. They've allowed some
Speaker 1: of the pioneers of the Google Beta program to uh
Speaker 1: invite a couple of other people to join. So I
Speaker 1: think it's it's either two or three. I haven't received
Speaker 1: the email myself. Yet, but it's two or three people
Speaker 1: that you can then extend an invitation to and then
Speaker 1: they have the option to join, although that option comes
Speaker 1: with a pretty hefty price tag. Yeah, it's all for
Speaker 1: a headset, pretty expensive stuff. And it is still a
Speaker 1: prototype version. This is absolutely not a consumer level. No.
Speaker 1: I understand that it's an updated version of the headset,
Speaker 1: but it's still it's still kind of a beta headset.
Speaker 1: It's not not meant to be the kind that you
Speaker 1: would get, assuming this ever becomes an actual consumer product,
Speaker 1: the ones that you'll see in stores will probably look
Speaker 1: a little different. Um. And then there's a Kickstarter story
Speaker 1: we have to cover. It's we don't have to, but
Speaker 1: I thought it'd be interesting. So, you know, kickstarters mostly
Speaker 1: meant for for or we tend to think of kickstars
Speaker 1: being meant for people who for a small independent projects. Yeah,
Speaker 1: some artists who want to get something a project off
Speaker 1: the ground, or maybe it would be entrepreneur who needs
Speaker 1: a little starting capital but has a really strong idea.
Speaker 1: But in this case, it was creators of a cult
Speaker 1: television show that had a passionate but relatively small following,
Speaker 1: that show being Veronica Mars. They decided to hold a
Speaker 1: Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising two million dollars
Speaker 1: so that they could produce a Veronica Mars movie that
Speaker 1: would be set approximately the same number of years after
Speaker 1: the series it ended as actual time had passed. Uh,
Speaker 1: And it met that initial goal in eleven hours. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then eventually raised five point seven millions, so they
Speaker 1: went above what they their original projection was. By the way,
Speaker 1: a two million dollar budget for a movie is incredibly small.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, and I wondered then, and I still wonder now.
Speaker 1: If the kick started campaign was less about raising money
Speaker 1: and more about demonstrating that there is an audience for
Speaker 1: that particular film, I would strongly suspect that they're going
Speaker 1: to get investment from other sources. Yeah. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: that they're able to even complete a full thirty minutes
Speaker 1: on two million dollars. I'm sure. I'm sure that they could.
Speaker 1: If they really wanted to mus be like the Veronica
Speaker 1: Mars Suck puppet Show, it would be the light version. UM.
Speaker 1: Also in March of this year, UM Facebook CEO Cheryl
Speaker 1: Sandberg published her book Lean In, which was kind of
Speaker 1: uh follow up piece to a Ted talk that she
Speaker 1: had done back in I believe, um, and and this
Speaker 1: is this is more of a women in industry sort
Speaker 1: of thing than a tech news thing in particular. But
Speaker 1: you know, Sandberg is is the leader of one of
Speaker 1: tech's biggest companies. And so therefore the publication of a
Speaker 1: book about what it's like to be a woman in
Speaker 1: tech and and a woman in big business is is
Speaker 1: a is a pretty big thing. And it's and it's
Speaker 1: a big issue, um, you know, especially when you consider
Speaker 1: the kind of dismal percentages of women in tech and
Speaker 1: women in leadership. I did. I did a guest episode
Speaker 1: of a run Stuff Mom Never Told Use Stems series
Speaker 1: on November six, if you want to go check that out.
Speaker 1: But um, but yeah, it's like only like a quarter
Speaker 1: of professional computing occupations in the US are held by women,
Speaker 1: and um, only twenty of of chief information officer positions
Speaker 1: at the at the fortune to fifty companies are held
Speaker 1: by women. And so you know, these are these are
Speaker 1: big things, and and the trends are not seeming to
Speaker 1: get better right now. So so I think it's really
Speaker 1: cool that you published this. Then it became a huge
Speaker 1: news item, right because that could potentially inspire other women
Speaker 1: to go into a field that that traditionally they might
Speaker 1: feel like there's some social or cultural pressures to keep
Speaker 1: them out, when in reality we benefit from being able
Speaker 1: to take advantage of talent, no matter where that talent
Speaker 1: might fall across the field. Of course, yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and at the very least encourage more discussion about the
Speaker 1: issue and why this is, yes, exactly, raising awareness is
Speaker 1: a great thing. Moving on to April, we only have
Speaker 1: one item for April because it's a foolish month. We
Speaker 1: don't like to spend a lot of time there. But
Speaker 1: but it but it was a Google thing and pretty Google. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it made me wish that it was a
Speaker 1: different town with an that starts with a that they
Speaker 1: had talked about Google is moving Google Fiber into Austin, Texas,
Speaker 1: and in fact, you know they're already doing that now,
Speaker 1: but that this was back when they announced that that
Speaker 1: was going to be the next city they were targeting. Right,
Speaker 1: Initially it had only been in Kansas City. Yeah, both
Speaker 1: Kansas cities, but yes, because there are two of them
Speaker 1: way by a river. But yes, yes, Kansas City was
Speaker 1: the initial proving grounds of Google Fiber in Austin, Texas,
Speaker 1: out of all the different places in the United States,
Speaker 1: was the next one. So keep Austin weird at an
Speaker 1: incredibly high download rates. So for all my friends in Austin,
Speaker 1: I hope you enjoy your one gigabit per second download speed. Yeah. Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: I will continue to make smoke signals at the top
Speaker 1: of my house in hopes of connecting to Gmail. Moving
Speaker 1: on to May. So, uh oh boy, you remember doing
Speaker 1: this podcast? Yeah? Okay, So this company called Defense Distributed,
Speaker 1: I mean, and and and really mostly this guy named
Speaker 1: Cody Wilson, who was the founder of Defense Distributed, figured
Speaker 1: out he designed a three D printed gun only used
Speaker 1: one um like basically a hardware store nail to pin
Speaker 1: everything together and everything else was something that you could print,
Speaker 1: assuming you had the the appropriately sophisticated three D printer
Speaker 1: and and the appropriate plastics to use it, because if
Speaker 1: you were to use weaker plastics, you could have a
Speaker 1: catastrophic failure of your of your weapon, which could cause
Speaker 1: injury or death. All right, we we did a whole
Speaker 1: episode about that on May twenty two, and um and
Speaker 1: I was, I mean, I remember being fond of it.
Speaker 1: I haven't listened to it in a minute. But there
Speaker 1: was a lot of really interesting information and press about
Speaker 1: all of this, and it was a firing pin, not
Speaker 1: like some kind of like lynch pin of the gun
Speaker 1: I miss spoke a moment ago. But it was funny
Speaker 1: because I remember in that episode we certainly didn't give
Speaker 1: Cody Wilson much quarter. And I haven't felt a lot
Speaker 1: differently since then. I understand at least what his expressed
Speaker 1: motivations were. And I mean, I I get it, and
Speaker 1: it's not like it's not like it's a world we
Speaker 1: live in now where we can somehow take that away.
Speaker 1: It was going to happen sooner or later. And I
Speaker 1: think that it was an interesting political statement. Um. I
Speaker 1: I kind of do appreciate the um anarchist sort of
Speaker 1: bent of it, of of just going like, no, really,
Speaker 1: you need to be paying attention to this technology because
Speaker 1: this is in fact what it can do. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: just wish he had been a little less cavalier about
Speaker 1: the whole thing, because that that kind of rubbed me
Speaker 1: the wrong way. I was like, I get off my lawn,
Speaker 1: don't shoot me. Um. But yeah, since then, we've seen
Speaker 1: some other developments. For example, there's a company called Solid
Speaker 1: Concepts that printed a three D gun in metal, not
Speaker 1: in plastic, showing that they you could actually do this
Speaker 1: with again, uh sophisticated three D printer. Obviously, the metal
Speaker 1: ones are not ones that you're going to find the
Speaker 1: consumer market. These are right right, and I mean even
Speaker 1: the plastic ones that you would need for something like
Speaker 1: this around like ten dollars and they're talking pretty expensive.
Speaker 1: You could probably buy a lot more guns traditionally, yeah,
Speaker 1: or even rent one for for more choply than that.
Speaker 1: And then Philadelphia is the first city in the United
Speaker 1: States that has passed legislation banning the printing of guns
Speaker 1: within that city. Although how they would ever expect to
Speaker 1: actually yeah, how I don't know if it's an enforceable law.
Speaker 1: Maybe they can work together with the n s A
Speaker 1: and creep on people a lot, right, The n s
Speaker 1: A knows everything you're printing, so you know, it can
Speaker 1: just be a little tag team. They just can't. They
Speaker 1: just can't let it be known that they found out
Speaker 1: from the n s A because the n s A
Speaker 1: is supposed to be for four and each We'll talk
Speaker 1: more about the n s A later. So May it
Speaker 1: was also the month when the other big console company
Speaker 1: announced their entry into the war for the next generation
Speaker 1: of consoles. Right, Microsoft finally unveiled their Xbox one. Yep,
Speaker 1: so they first they put to bed the whole idea
Speaker 1: of it being called Xbox seven twenty, which is good
Speaker 1: because one of their initial ideas. Yeah, those of us
Speaker 1: who have trouble with math would rapidly have problems in
Speaker 1: a couple of generations. I'm referring to myself with that,
Speaker 1: by the way. So Microsoft unveils Xbox One, and mostly
Speaker 1: at that first event when they first unveiled it, they
Speaker 1: weren't really looking at the games so much. Yeah, unlike
Speaker 1: PlayStation's uh idea for their launch, they were really talking
Speaker 1: about all of the other media center factors that that
Speaker 1: they were planning, right, Yeah, things like being able to
Speaker 1: control your cable box and and have some interactivity with
Speaker 1: things like sports. Sports played a big role in that
Speaker 1: initial announcement, including things like getting stats on players in
Speaker 1: real time that kind of stuff. And also they talked
Speaker 1: a lot about the the kind of peripheral abilities of
Speaker 1: the console, specifically the new version of Connect with all
Speaker 1: the voice and gesture controls, but not so much on games.
Speaker 1: It wouldn't be until E three before Xbox really started
Speaker 1: talking about the games that would be coming out for
Speaker 1: that system. And unfortunately, also at E three, they made
Speaker 1: a few announcements that were very unpopular amongst the gaming public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the big one being that the Xbox One was going
Speaker 1: to require a persistent connection to the Internet or else
Speaker 1: it would not work, and people like that it needed
Speaker 1: to phone home like once a day or some thing
Speaker 1: like that in order to you know, confirm that you
Speaker 1: were still using entirely up and up software and then
Speaker 1: you hadn't stolen anything, right that that all the copies
Speaker 1: of everything you were running and actually belonged to you
Speaker 1: weren't being used by someone else, that kind of thing,
Speaker 1: and people objected to it. They said, well, you know,
Speaker 1: not everyone has a persistent Internet connection and they want
Speaker 1: to buy your product, but they can't use it. And
Speaker 1: eventually Microsoft ended up backing down on a lot of
Speaker 1: those initial stances, and um, they also said that as
Speaker 1: a result of making those concessions, some of the features
Speaker 1: they had planned for the Xbox would no longer work
Speaker 1: because they required that first element that they had backed
Speaker 1: off on, and that got people upset too. And I'm like, well,
Speaker 1: you can't win, guys. You gotta you have to be like, well,
Speaker 1: either I'm okay with all of it, or I'm okay
Speaker 1: that a lot of it goes away if they take
Speaker 1: away the one thing that I really hate. I I
Speaker 1: think that they probably could have found workarounds for some
Speaker 1: of those, and that some some of those workarounds might
Speaker 1: still be coming in the next several months. But these
Speaker 1: are these are things that they may find a way
Speaker 1: of implementing in in other ways further down the line.
Speaker 1: I mean, just like the PS four, the Xbox one
Speaker 1: doesn't have the full functionality they talked about. Yeah, although
Speaker 1: it did sell the same one million units in twenty
Speaker 1: four hours that the PS four did. Yeah, it's just
Speaker 1: they I think they were in eleven countries and not
Speaker 1: just two. So I mean, so it's it's and yeah,
Speaker 1: and they're being a little bit more squirrely about their numbers.
Speaker 1: Like I think I said earlier, they did at one
Speaker 1: point say like in in eighteen days, we sold something
Speaker 1: like more than two million units, or essentially they were
Speaker 1: saying that the sales were exceeding their expectations, and so
Speaker 1: they weren't being so upfront with exactly what their expectations were.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they're selling quite well, probably from what I
Speaker 1: can tell mostly this is anecdotal, probably not as well
Speaker 1: as the PS four at least initially. But you know,
Speaker 1: these things are going in. This is a long tail
Speaker 1: type of game, and it's gonna We're gonna have to
Speaker 1: see when, especially yeah, since since a lot of the
Speaker 1: games that they're talking about being really hot are not
Speaker 1: going to be out until at the earliest, right right.
Speaker 1: I like the games that are the launch titles for
Speaker 1: both of these consoles are I've mentioned this before. They're
Speaker 1: not games that particularly strike me as you know, must have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's none of them. None of them are the
Speaker 1: killer apps. So I'm still waiting. Um. Moving on, Yahoo
Speaker 1: bought Tumbler for one point one billion dollars, which is
Speaker 1: so much money. I mean, I mean not the Tumbler
Speaker 1: isn't worth it. I think it's a very up and
Speaker 1: coming um social media platform. Absolutely, and uh and everyone
Speaker 1: on Tumbler was really, really, really worried about this because
Speaker 1: the image of Tumbler is young and hip and silly
Speaker 1: and and full of irreverence, full of reverence. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and the image of Yahoo is basically the polar opposite
Speaker 1: of all of that. Yes, the company that has the
Speaker 1: name Yahoo with an exclamation mark at the end of
Speaker 1: it is just a bunch of old fuddy duddies. What
Speaker 1: it's not international business machine people, come on not. Nonetheless,
Speaker 1: there was some concern, especially considering the way that Yahoo
Speaker 1: has in the past handled a lot of it's large,
Speaker 1: large design decisions and commenting decisions. And I mean, I
Speaker 1: think Yahoo was the original site on which I decided
Speaker 1: that I can't read comments on the Internet anymore. I
Speaker 1: can understand that. Yeah, And to be fair, the Yahoo
Speaker 1: executives have all said that they have no plans of
Speaker 1: screwing up Tumbler and doing anything different. But as long
Speaker 1: as it's just a change in ownership but not a
Speaker 1: change in administration, than things should go pretty well. But
Speaker 1: we're gonna wrap up this first episode about a look
Speaker 1: back on two thousand thirteen with possibly the biggest story
Speaker 1: of We wish we could save this for the end
Speaker 1: of the last episode, but it happened in the middle
Speaker 1: of the year, so we've got to talk about it.
Speaker 1: It's it's the only one that I referred to in
Speaker 1: my notes entirely in caps lock about Yeah, okay, So
Speaker 1: what we're clearly talking about is when Steve will Hit
Speaker 1: actually explained how his invention the graphics interchange format, how
Speaker 1: you were supposed to pronounce the acronym uh and it's jeff,
Speaker 1: which is wrong, and I won't do it. No, it's right.
Speaker 1: That is so right. That's the only clear way to
Speaker 1: say it. Gift, gift is gift because if you put
Speaker 1: a T at the end, it'd be gift. It wouldn't
Speaker 1: be jift. Jeff is a peanut butter gif is graphic.
Speaker 1: Gift sounds ridiculous, jiffun graphic, gift graphic it makes sense,
Speaker 1: Jeff graphic. No, you don't have graphics. I have graffics.
Speaker 1: Do you have a park for him? Welcome to Giraffic Park. Alright. So, anyway,
Speaker 1: that wraps up this first episode of our look back
Speaker 1: on twirteen. Tune in next time when we find out
Speaker 1: what happened at the end of the year. So we're
Speaker 1: gonna wrap this up. If you guys have any suggestions
Speaker 1: for future topics of tech stuff, if you have a
Speaker 1: specific technology wants to talk about a company, or if
Speaker 1: any of these things that we have not gone in
Speaker 1: depth about you'd like to hear more on. Yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: you're like, Hey, I really want to have a full
Speaker 1: minute discussion about gift versus Jeff. Let us know if
Speaker 1: you are that person, Write us an email. Our address
Speaker 1: is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us
Speaker 1: a line on Tumbler, Twitter, or Facebook. You can find
Speaker 1: us with the handle text stuff hs W and Lauren
Speaker 1: and I will talk to you again really soon for
Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
Speaker 1: have staff works dot com