Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners, thanks to all of you, including Reed Fishler, Larry Bailey, and Michelle Serju. Coming up on DTNS, the quest to make brain implants longer-lived, Netflix's real strategy with gaming we've cracked at this time, and why is TikTok taking over the world? This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday, August 17th, 2022 in Los Angeles, I'm Tom Merritt. And from Studio Redwood, I'm Sarah Lane. In Salt Lake City, I'm Scott Johnson. And on the show's producer, Roger J. My friends, it's so good to be back. Thank you for letting us do Experiment Week, but we're very pleased to be back with Scott Johnson, even though I did get to see Otis, the dog, in person. It's true. No fair. It was kind of worth it. No fair. Yeah. And he minded his manners. He was the most late. Good boy. All right. Let's start with a few tech things you should know. And yet another signal that we may be headed for a chip glut rather than a shortage. Reuters notes that tech companies have reported slower annual cloud revenue growth this past quarter. Google Cloud slowed by 8%, Microsoft Azure by 6%, and AWS more than 3%. Slower cloud growth could mean slower build-outs of data centers and data center build-outs are one of the biggest drivers of chip sales. In addition to that possibility, all three companies indicated they planned to hold on to equipment longer, sometimes up to six years in order to save some money. One countertrend is the rise in autonomous cars and hopes for a booming metaverse sector. Speaking of the syllables, meh and ta, Mehta will disable new political, electoral, and social issue ads during the week prior to the November 8th U.S. elections. Ads running prior to that week will continue to run, but Mehta will disable most edits during that window and will continue its policy of not allowing posts or ads that misrepresent details of the voting process or spread misinformation on the, quote, outcome of an election. Speaking of elections, TikTok went live with its midterms election center in the U.S. This provides state-by-state voter registration information, vote-by-mail instructions, polling place locations, all taking information from the National Association of Secretaries of State. TikTok partnered with Ballotpedia to display candidates on local ballots, and election results will be displayed thanks to the Associated Press. Nikkei Asia sources say that Luxure Precision and Foxconn have started test production of Apple Watch production in northern Vietnam. Apple has reportedly also asked for test production lines of MacBooks to be set up as well. Apple has been moving some production out of China, we've talked about that in the past here on the show, and the company moved some iPhone 13 manufacturing to India earlier this year and plans to assemble iPads there as well. Yeah, it takes time to move that stuff, but it's happening. The Verge and Windows Central sources say Microsoft is going to release the next major update for Windows 11 called Sun Valley 2 on September 20th. That's my wedding anniversary. The update will add tabs in File Explorer, a new task manager, app folders in the start menu, new live caption and voice access accessibility features, and new gestures for touchscreens. Windows Central also reports Microsoft plans to release its first moment update. That's an update that adds features, but off the two big yearly cycle, before the end of 2022. Logitech announced headphones designed to slide onto a MetaQuest 2 headset called Chorus. These connect to the VR headsets USB-C port for power and are designed to be kept on the device between sessions. Shipping in September for $100. Ah, that's a classic find-and-need-and-fill it situation. Well done Logitech. I mean, I gotta tell ya, it's, you know, the MetaQuest 2, the... This is actually something I would buy. You are welcoming this idea. I am, yes. Alright, let's get into some TikTok news. Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon is letting its employees test TikTok-like features in its app. Yeah, that's right. Amazon is testing TikTok-like features in its app. So they're gonna show you a photo or maybe a video of products that you can share with other users. If you are like, wait a minute, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they all copy TikTok. Yes, Amazon's doing it now. The test is called Inspire, that's the name of the plan. It appears as a diamond widget on the homepage of Amazon's app. That's according to Israeli-based artificial intelligence firm Watchful Technologies. If you tap on that widget, it'll show you a feed with a stream of mostly images, although there are some videos in there, which shoppers can then like, share, but most importantly, buy. For now, this is separate from Amazon's influencer program. That's the one that lets creators have their own personalized pages and create videos promoting items for sale. I expect that if they stick with Inspire and it works, they might merge those programs together in the future. Yeah, it could be. According to an annual report from the UK's Office of Communications, a.k.a. Ofcom, or Ofcom, I don't know which way you said. Young adults in Britain now spend more time watching TikTok than broadcast television. That's a lot. This is based on two separate surveys, one from IPSOS estimated those 15 to 24 ages, 15 to 24, spent 15 minutes per day on TikTok. A separate survey by broadcasters, audience research board found at 16 to 24, watch 53 minutes of broadcast TV per day. In that group, less than half watch more than 15 minutes a week on public service channels like BBC or ITV. So a lot of people. I'm not sure I heard you right. It's how much for TikTok and how much for broadcast TV? For TikTok, it's, oh, 15 to 20. I'm sorry, I messed that up. 57 minutes. Yeah, 57 minutes on TikTok versus 53 minutes on broadcast television. Yeah, big, big difference. Four minutes. Yeah, yeah. So why is this happening? I mean, this turns into like, we are the old, we don't get it. But, but, but breaking that down a little bit.  But going back to the, you know, the Amazon TikTok type thing, it's like, I think some people would be shaking their heads like, why though, Amazon? But if it's all about showing off stuff that then you can buy because you're already at Amazon, that makes more sense to me than doing it on TikTok. No, I actually get why the platforms are imitating TikTok. Some of it isn't going to work. Some of it is, you know, you, imitating the successful thing isn't always the best idea. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't. Maybe it'll be good for Amazon. We'll see. I'm going to guess it's not going to work, but why not try it? I just, I, my theory on why TikTok has become the predominant thing is not based on it being younger. Younger folks always enjoy the new good thing in greater numbers than older people because as you get older, you get more stuck in your habits. So it doesn't surprise me that the new big thing would be most popular with the younger users. I think what's nice about it is that you don't have to work at it. With TikTok, you don't have to choose. With Twitter, with Facebook, you have to manage your feed. You have to unfollow people and follow people and decide, oh, what's the balance of people I should have here? I've always argued that my Twitter feed works great for me because I put a lot of work into it to, you know, prune out the voices that I didn't enjoy hearing, but without creating an echo chamber. But that's work. TikTok isn't work.  If you're not liking something, you easily swipe away from it, but you don't have to choose. You don't have to work to maintain that feed. You still follow people and all that, but that's, that's not how most people consume it.  No, I was just going to say, I think you and I are in the same boat, Sarah. We're both, you know, Gen Xers, but we both enjoy TikTok. We both like to sit there and kind of get lost in it. And part of the reason is exactly what Tom says. They do all the work for you, the algorithm adheres to what you like, and you just sort of get what you get, which is why I always, I don't know, my ears go up a little bit when I hear stories like more people are getting their news from TikTok or more people are getting their this or that from TikTok. And I think, well, okay, maybe that's true, but it's such a non-traditional way of getting it because it's such a random way of getting it. There's no sort of, let me go in there and follow a chronological list of today's news items or a chronological, chronological list of whatever from anybody, unless you're going to individual accounts. Otherwise it just feeds it to you even on your follow list that just feed you the latest and the things they think you're going to want to see the most. But it's also so easy to be like, eh, I don't like this one. Let's bounce out. If you're watching some sort of, I don't know, the BBC was one of the examples in the story. It's like, well, there might be a story or two that you're not really all that into or isn't relevant to you and you just sort of deal with it because it's linear television. And this is totally different than that. It actually reminds me, I've probably told the story before, but back in 2006, I was in China for the first time in Beijing and staying with a local there.  And he was like, oh yeah, I don't watch TV, I just watch YouTube. And I was like, what do you mean? What do you mean you just watch YouTube? He's like, everything's on YouTube. You just have to know where to look. And at the time I was like, that seems so chaotic. But this is, I feel like it's the next generation of exactly the same thing. Well, and that's the funny part of this 9 to 5 Mac story on the TikTok numbers also notes a Pew Research Center poll that found 95% of US teens watch YouTube. And it's kind of become TV for them as well. In fact, I think it was Rob Dunwood on SMR podcast a couple of weeks ago was saying his daughter was like, hey, are you on TV? Because they were putting clips of the tech John up there. And he's like, no, I'm not on TV. It's just YouTube. She's like, that's TV. Right, right. In a lot of cases, they're literally watching it on the television, which makes it as much TV as it's ever been. So yeah, yeah. Well, Netflix launched gaming back in November, wasn't that long ago, but you know, we're going on a year. Let's you play mobile games for no additional charge if you're already a Netflix subscriber. Of course, there are around two dozen games available on both Android and iOS, but not many folks seem to be playing them. Aptopia recently estimated that fewer than 1% of Netflix's subscribers are playing its games on any given day. Downloads declined from December until May. You know, so there's probably a little uptick of curiosity. Hasn't really seen much surge since season four of stranger things reversed the trend as people played the two stranger things games. You may consider Netflix gaming strategy. Sounds like a flop, right? Well, you also might be a person who considered Netflix's streaming strategy a flop shortly after it was launched back in 2007. Protocols at Janko. Retgers has a deep dive up on Netflix's gaming strategy. So Scott, tell us more about that. All right, so Rickers points out the small numbers should not be a surprise to people. Netflix hasn't launched any new titles, although they've got some in the wings. They're old games, some not as old, some older, that were launched somewhere else first, like Steam, other consoles. Netflix doesn't advertise it and the gaming service at all. Really, they just have like a banner ad on the app while you're using it. Almost looks like an ad inside the app, which turns people off. This is not the final form of Netflix gaming. It's basically in learning mode. But there are some hints as to what Netflix might be up to doing right now. So here's some of those ideas. Netflix wants to make sure or makes wants to make and launch their own titles. Netflix has acquired three game studios, including next games. And Netflix has multiple job postings around games that describe building a game studio tech lab with people who quote, learn fast, iterate quickly, unquote. Netflix also seems to want to build a cloud gaming service, which has been rumored for a bit. How do they know that? Well, according to this, one job posting says, quote, we are looking for a rendering engineer to support our cloud gaming service. It seems like we got our answer. The job description talks about rendering games on cloud appliances and developing SDKs for game developers. Yeah, this is how Netflix does things. In 2007, when commenting on the new watch now feature that came at no additional cost with your Netflix DVD by mail subscription. Netflix CEO Reid Hastings said, mainstream consumer adoption of online movie watching will take a number of years due to content and technology hurdles. The time is right for Netflix to take the first step. Over the coming years, we'll expand our selection of films and we'll work to get to every internet connected screen from cell phones to PCs to plasma screens. Now, compare that prescient 2007 statement. To last June, when Netflix's director of game acquisition, Leanne Loom said, we're still learning and experimenting and trying to figure out what things are going to actually resonate with our members. And cloud streaming, I would argue, is in about the same place that video streaming was in 2007. You can do it, there's services, but they're not widespread. They don't have widespread adoption and nobody knows which one is actually going to catch on yet. Netflix has said publicly that it plans to build franchises that span across movies, TV shows and games, and that's what it's doing. It's building the platform for that. So I would argue, Scott, that the fact that they've got all these titles that are not original doesn't matter. In fact, the fact that these are mobile games doesn't matter. This is them just floating some bread on the water to see what the current is like. You are not wrong, I think, in that entire summation. And funny enough, in the last week or so, actually almost exactly to the week, I set out to play every single Netflix game currently available. So I can talk about it more on my show core tomorrow. And I have happy surprise, everybody. We're talking about today on DTNs. So this is a perfect place for it. I played everything that they have thus far.  I'll tell you now. I think they have a better shot at this than maybe even Apple Arcade has. And hear me out for this real quick. The games I played, some of them, as a few in particular, are better than anything on offer on Apple Arcade. They may not be as new. They might be also retreads that have existed on other platforms. But they're excellent games and they're huge gets to have on this service. The ones I would point out would be Into the Breach, Point P, which you do not sleep on Point P. It's an amazing game. Moonlighter is incredible. And Arcanum Rise of Akan, all four of those games are top shelf amazing games. In particular, Into the Breach is an incredible game. And anybody who got to have that on their service as an available title is winning in my book. Now, they got a huge stuff on the way. Spirit Fair, Reigns of Three Kingdoms, Terranill, which is a game that's not even out anywhere yet. So it's going to be a simultaneous release. Plus some other own stuff. They've got a chess game based on their popular chess show they had. I forgot the name of it. All sorts of stuff like that on the way. And I'm not saying that this is going to solve it for them or be the big success everybody is waiting for or worth the millions they're pumping into it. We don't really know. But they are making quality games or they're putting quality games out there. The long term of it is, of course, unknown to everybody. But I could not agree more with your point about their strategy. This is how they did it with streaming movies. This is how they'll do it with these games as available through app stores. And it's how they'll do it when they start doing cloud based gaming. And they've got the money in the pockets to sort of throw money at it and experiment. This isn't a do or die situation for them. So everybody wants to look at it and call it a flop already. I think are cutting them short. I mean, yes, is it perfect? No, they've got lots of issues right now. If I want to get a game on the service, I have to know what I'm looking for and find it in the app store or find the weird little banner that's squished between all the categories in Netflix and click it. It's a pain to do. That's on the iOS side, on the Android side. As far as I know, it's the same. You got to jump through similar hoops. It's not easy. It's not intuitive. It's not as simple to say something like Apple Arcade. But I will say so far the stable of games, it's been quality over quantity number one. And if they can maintain that and continue to put out quality products, both already known products and some of their own, I think they have a real shot at this, at least in the mobile space. And nobody else is really making a try at it the way, say, Apple and Google are with their various initiatives. So I don't know. I'm not ready to count them out yet.  So there's that. Take it for what you will, everybody. Yeah. I think it's really interesting that they're doing cloud streaming. I think that is a perfect play. Learn as much about gameplay from mobile. Maybe continue to do some mobile Apple Arcade like stuff. Because like you say, it does seem to be working. And then take these first party titles of the studios that you have bought and the developers that you have hired and put them on a streaming service. You're good at streaming. And at first it's going to look like Netflix Watch Now did in 2007. We're going to be like, well, there's some good things on here, but it's not a lot. And before you know it, it's the streaming service that everybody wants. And they spin it out and start charging you separately for it. But for years it's going to be part of your Netflix subscription. And the only other thing I would say to put a pin on this would be if you have a Netflix subscription and you have a cell phone, there is zero reason for you not to be playing into the breach. It is one of the best games of the last few years. So don't sleep on that game either. Go play into the breach. Trust me, you'll love that game. You're not getting any sleep because you're listening to this guy. Well, folks, are you feeling social? Let us know what you think of these or any of the other thoughts on our social networks, DTNS show on Twitter and DTNS pics. P I X DTNS pics on Instagram. You may recall when Niko Monford was on the show a couple of weeks ago, August 1st. Indeed, we talked about the first US brain computer interface or BCI from Synchron, one of two BCIs approved for implantation in the United States. The other type we mentioned at the time is the tried and true Utah Array made by BlackRock Neurotech. Utah connection. The Utah Array was developed by Richard Norman in the 1980s at the University of Utah. It's a square electrode grid of around 100 tiny filaments. Each one's about a millimeter long. These are very small. The electrode is installed in the motor cortex and connects to a small coin sized pedestal on your head that is then wired to a device. They are trying to figure out how to make it wireless, but right now it's wired to a device that amplifies and decodes the signals. It reads neural activity and send those signals to control devices like a computer. The first, the way they did this was a person controlling a computer cursor with their mind. You can play video games. You can control a robotic arm, prostheses, things like that. About 30 people worldwide have Utah arrays. And the good thing about having tech that's been around that long is it lasts. That's important when it takes brain surgery to replace your device. Not something you want to be doing a lot of if you can help it. Wired's Emily Mullen highlights some of the challenges to extending that durability in an article called This Man Set the Record for Wearing a Brain Computer Interface. Indeed. So 36 year old Nathan Copeland has been paralyzed from the chest down since a car accident that happened in 2004. He has four total Utah arrays in his brain. The first one has been there for seven years and three months. The longest continuous run ever in tests like this. Ian Burkhard, leader of the BCI Pioneers Coalition held the previous long run, but his was swapped out in 2021 last year. Longevity is important.  You don't want to have to swap it out all the time. Jane Huggins, director of the University of Michigan Direct Brain Interface Laboratory, told Wired, quote, it feels like it's on the borderline of being practical. So what do we need to make these things more practical and to last longer so you don't need multiple brain surgeries to swap out these devices? Yeah, I would like to have. Yeah, it seems like an honest question. A few brain surgeries as possible. Utah arrays have lasted up to 10 years in monkeys, but over time the perlin, it's the material they coat the filaments with starts to degrade as well as the fact that your brain just gets irritated by having those filaments in there over time. Inflammation happens. Scarring happens. All of that impedes signal detection and they just don't work as well as they did when they were fresh, just like your phone, you know, it slows down over time.  That's why they get swapped out to increase longevity. Blackrock Neurotech is testing adding silicon carbide to the perlin filament material. That would extend how long the material lasts before it degrades. A group at MIT is looking at hydrogels to be a coating material that has similar elasticity to the brain. Company called Paradromix is developing arrays with thinner filaments. Those might be less disruptive to the tissue, cause less of that inflammation and scarring. And scientists at the University of Pennsylvania are even developing filaments grown from stem cells. So they would be the material of the brain working with the brain. Another possibility is something called neurogreens.  But that one right now is only being tested in rats with their skulls removed. So that one's a bit ways away from being used in people. It does look like we have a little bit of work to do before BCIs become commonplace, right? I mean, yeah, like if I was thinking the other day, what if we were at some reason in a dinner situation that came up, something came up about implants, and why don't we have them yet? And what would they give us? Well, we want our HUDs and we want all our fancy abilities and everything.  Maybe I can just get one.  It's just a thing they can do. And while that may be true, the obvious immediate focus of this is and should be people who need it the most. So it's that weird thing of I hope less people need it. But since some do, I hope they keep making the tech cool. Does that make sense? It's like a weird twisted thing in my head about not wanting people to get hurt so that we can so that we can perfect this technology. But at the same time, these are huge jumps. It's really cool. The whole scar tissue part of this. I mean, somebody who I had surgery last year and not in my brain, but I did and scar tissue in the body is very real. It's a normal thing. It can it can get a little bit out of control, at which point, maybe it's cosmetic, maybe it's something else to deal with. But that's pretty standard. That's what the body does with foreign objects. One at your brain. You have to be really careful about that stuff because you introduce a host of other problems. And I just I love the idea of where this is going.  Yeah, it does make me wonder if the the the winning application of this, the thing that makes it widespread figures out how to not need surgery or minimally invasive surgery. Maybe it just goes into the skull and works wirelessly somehow to detect signals rather than needing to be implanted into the cortex. If somebody figures that out, then you avoid all of this. Not that this isn't important research because it absolutely is. But but a lot of times that's how innovation works is you do this and you see the problems and then you figure out from this. Oh, well, what those electrodes are doing is this and I can read that from outside. Maybe I, you know, figure out this cap that can do the same thing. I'm not saying that's what's going to happen, but it feels like that's what has to happen for this to become white. That's interesting because you're not necessarily saying we need full absolute mobility out of this. Eventually that'd be nice too. If somebody could be walking again and moving normally. But there are applications potentially down the road where I just put a patch on the side of my head and I can do. I don't know a remote computer function while I do something else with my hands. Like there are there's there's ways to think about this to go far beyond the current if you need the mobility, then you get the brain surgery. Right. That's why you need to keep researching these, but for less critical uses. Yeah, maybe there's something else we can do. Sure. Well, keeping on the scientific train here on the show, Texas biotech company Colossal Biosciences is teaming up with scientists at the University of Melbourne to bring back the extinct thylacine. You might say, what's that? It's the Tasmanian tiger. The thylacine was hunted to extinction back in 1930. Thanks poachers because of a government program that paid for kills. Colossal believes it can use the thylacine's closest living relative, the noombat and CRISPR, which is clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats to make resurrection of the species possible. Scientists are divided on whether projects like this could help increase diversity by reversing extinction, or where the money is better spent on preventing existing species from going extinct. Colossal is the same company working on splicing woolly mammoth genes into elephants to bring back the woolly mammoth. The scientists at University of Melbourne have formed the tiger lab, which stands for Thylacine Integrated Genetic Restoration Research. Because there's two R's, I prefer to pronounce it tiger. Yeah, tiger lab. This is very controversial, but the conversations article did a great job of finding five scientists who had very nuanced but different views. Some of the please don't do this. Some of the people on the don't do this were like maybe, but I don't know if we're there yet. I think we need to do more to preserve existing species first. There was one guy who's like no, we need to put all of our energy into preserving existing species before we start bringing them back any time. And the longer we wait to bring them back, the better the technology to bring them back is going to be. It's actually kind of was persuaded a little bit by that one. How many times do you think Jeff Goldblum was quoted in the comments about you thought you bothered to think you could but didn't think about whether you should? Yeah, absolutely. With the woolly mammoth for sure. Like the woolly mammoth has been gone for a long time. So bringing the woolly mammoth back brings its own risks of like, yeah, but this isn't part of the recent diversity. Whereas the Tasmanian tiger was within the last hundred years part of the ecosystem. So arguably you're bringing the ecosystem back into balance at that point. Yeah, plus our dream of having a woolly mammoth in the house it's finally, there's a chance. There's also that. I would like a mammoth and a Tasmanian tiger. I've got a backyard. You are all welcome here. Many mammoth. House mammoth. House mammoth. Alright, let's check out the mailbag. Someone comes from Alan. This was due to our conversation with Shannon Morse yesterday about Tiktok, I'm sorry, Spotify audio reactions. And we were kind of going, okay, what's this good for? Alan says as you were describing the new Spotify feature with audio reactions, it struck me it was kind of like an audio version of Tiktok. Especially if they allow eventually reactions to excerpts and reactions to other reactions. Anybody who's familiar with Tiktok knows that reaction to those are very popular. Yeah. No, that seems right. That seems to be what they're pointing towards there is the audio of Tiktok. Man, if Spotify could really crack becoming the audio of Tiktok, and while all these other platforms are just trying to straight imitate it, that might be the move, right? I mean, it's I don't know when it's when it's straight audio, I mean and listen, many people are listening to the show and say we don't even watch the video version of the show. I get it. But when you're talking about audio reactions and audio stuff, I just it seems messy to me, but maybe I just haven't seen it implemented well enough. They also don't talk about whether there's a limit or not. If that's like a 20 if I don't want to listen to some guy ramble on for 20 minutes about the Beatles. That was the key of Tiktok originally is that it was yeah, a shorter a shorter thing at least on Tiktok. I can tell kind of generally how long the reaction video is going to go. In this case, you know, make it if you tell me it's 10 seconds or less, you might have something. Well, the show is not 10 seconds or less but it is over. It's almost over, Tom. We have people to thank though. First up, Tiktok fan himself, Scott Johnson, Scott, we missed you last week. What has been new? Well, I did my own experiment and played all the Netflix games. Didn't really make a show about it though, but I will this Thursday because I do a show with a couple of friends called Core. It's a gaming show all about video games, the industry, what's happening in it and of course games were playing, but it's a bigger, wider picture. In fact, I'd say it's a lot like DTNS, but for video games. So check it out. If you have never heard of it before, go find it wherever you get your podcast. Again, it's called Core and you can find all the details if you need them at frogfans.com. Excellent. We also have a brand new boss to thank. The boss's name is Tyler. Tyler just started back in us on Patreon. Thank you, Tyler. Yeah. And welcome. And because Tyler decided to back us on Patreon, I will add to this show that Mark German says the Apple announcement is going to happen September 7th. See, if you become a patron, good things happen. Speaking of patrons, stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. We talk about all the things, tech and otherwise. But if you'd like to catch the show live, we'd love to have you. We are live Monday through Friday at 4 p.m. Eastern, 20 hundred UTC. Find out more at dailytechnewshow.com slash live back doing it all again tomorrow. But Justin Young, talk to you then. This show is part of the Frog Pants Network. Get more at frogfans.com Timing Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Hey there, NJ, Route22.com here with another frigid movie studio, video studio, top five deals of the week. We're not using a DSLR anymore, we're using a $70 cell phone. This week we're starting off with Ocean State JobLive, we love this place, we buy a lot of tea there, we dog treats and all sorts of stuff and what we look for every single week is crazy deals where we buy something useful and we get like free money to buy other useful things and that's a good way, I mean it's like a tricky way of just getting things for less. This week they have copper cookware things, spend ten bucks on these things, every ten dollars you spend you get a ten dollar crazy card to use for other things. We like that, I mean this stuff is not heirloom, you'll throw it out in a couple of years. This is Aldi, Aldi, Aldi, Aldi pretty much has everything cheaper than everywhere else, almost always. But we're going to pick one thing a week that we think might be worthy and this week it's a mandarin orange, you get three pounds of these little things for $1.99, we don't really stress the fruit too much. For kids, infrequently like no more than one a day, you can give them half an orange or half a little orange instead of juice, it's so much better than juice, there's fiber, there's bulk, I mean there's minimal fiber. There's some bulk, helps fill you up. Next up is Kings, this week we actually have a few items that because we normally never shop there but we scan their sales flyer to find things that are a win, a win. And I think we have a pretty good win here this week. There's three items that essentially water, I'm not bringing them up again, it's this high pH water that we think is pretty good but they have 1250 point whatever ounces of bottles of water for $20 bucks, $19.99, comes out to be like a $1.67 or something like that a bottle. That's a decent price, I think it's the best goings, additionally they have Bounty Paper Towels, which is the kingpin of paper towels in terms of quality but they're always the most costly and our sweet spot for paper towels is a dollar, I mean 1.5 cents per square foot, that's how much the best Aldi value pack has, so but it's 2.2 cents a square foot for Bounty of Kings this week, you gotta buy two packs for 25 bucks but I think it is the best value and I think it's better than Shoprite which has a similar sale where you gotta buy two for $12.99 but it's less paper, I think it's 12 equals 15. I did the math on the Kings, it's 560 square feet, I think you get only 400 something square feet with the Shoprite so it's a better deal than Shoprite. Speaking of Shoprite, we have a few items that we have featured this week and it's this Schweppes Seltzer, we love Seltzer now because we mix it with our Smirnoff Spiked Sparkling Seltzer, it's refreshing even in this freezing dungeon in, they have two for $12 packs for $8.88 and that comes out to about $18.5 cents per can which I think it's a good deal and it can't go wrong especially if you're using it as a mixer and this is the last time I'm gonna mention the Shoprite Shredded or Chunk Cheese, we like this stuff because I mean I'm telling you like unless you're eating it like as a like a wine review and you're tasting notes and stuff, Shoprite Cheese is great, I love it. It's always a $1.99 on sale for $1.99 or under, I mean I think one week a year it's up to the regular price which is $2.99 a bar or a bag but they have it on sale this week for $1.70, I'm not gonna mention it again until they have that once or twice a year sale where it's $0.99 a bar or a bag, that is a killer price and I stock up, I have like six or seven bars in the fridge now that you know you I'll give you a little kitchen tip in a couple weeks on what to do with those things you have a lot of them. Lastly I noticed they had a like a higher priced milk on sale horizon it's I think the least good of the of the organic brands for whatever reason they had some checkered history it's like $4.49, I just wanted to point out that Basil Bandwagon if you live near one they're mainly in the central part of Jersey, I think there's one in Clinton and one in Flemington, New Jersey they have this natural by nature organic milk which is very highly rated by Cornucopia Institute as one of the better organic milks to buy and that's always $3.99 every day no sales. Speaking of Basil Bandwagon, we might as well mention them, they have weekly sales which we don't really pay attention to as well as monthly sales. The monthly sales once a month we're gonna mention a couple items from their monthly sales and they're part of the independent choice grocers. I think there's a couple other in this in this viewing area. Dean's Natural Market is in Chester I think there's one in Basking Ridge and there's another one called Green Life over in Morristown. They have a couple things some great things because if you really study the file you can find things exceptionally cheaper than the supermarkets and a couple things that I want to mention this this clip is they have these traditional medicinal teas and it's $3.49 cheaper than it is online and it's about a dollar or so cheaper than it is at most supermarkets so that's a good thing you could stock up on for the rest of this month and they have some good flavors too not as good as yogi but we like we like traditional medicinal. MCT oil medium chain triglycerides is an exceptionally good thing to have in your routine and they have the now foods MCT oil for $17.49 this week which is cheaper than Amazon it's cheaper than all these places so keep that in mind if you want to stock up it's the 32 ounce jar of that glass bottle and lastly they have Matt's organic orange juice we don't do orange juice too much I don't drink it because it's just liquid fat my opinion but when you have children and they need a little bit of flavor besides water and milk we water it down you know three or four to one you know just you got to ease them into the full sugar juice but they have it for $5.49 which is like at least two or three bucks less than than other markets I've seen it like $8 or $9 of Kings and $8 at shop right so $5.49 from that's organic is a really good deal okay so those are our little items for this week but I do have my weekly tip of the week okay the tip of the week is more like a common sense reminder you should always know this really but it reminders are great just like they remind you to plow your driveway or remind you to be careful in the rain it's still important to remind people because people forget it's about sales you know you have your your 50% off sales sales are extremely tempted but my common sense tip of the week here is I only buy things on sale when there are things I normally buy like the cheese is like bacon for instance like I love bacon but I won't buy it until it's on sale because it's normally $8 a pound but I can give it for $3.99 a pound there's no reason to buy it when it's not on sale so avoid buying things you don't need just because they're on sale the sales are enticing they're tempting oh look at this this stupid thing I don't want or need is on sale and I'm gonna say $40 $10 whatever it is and you feel like like you won something that that's that's the whole interesting aspect of sales you feel like you won something don't buy it if you if you weren't gonna buy it at full price you know the only exception I have to this is let's say you buy like a cheaper branded mozzarella cheese and then one week if premium better brand truly better brand is the same price or cheaper than the brand you normally buy sure it lets you enjoy a more expensive item for the for less or the same price that of your normal ordinary Joe I'd be careful when it comes to buying things on sale because when you feel like you won it's not really true because you win if you don't spend the money buying things you don't need so that's it I went really long this week I'm gonna edit some time out of this but it's too cold in here I'm like I'm rambling because I'm freezing but I hope I'm trying to get better with this video editing and I hope that the new camera or the $70 cell phone I bought on eBay it's two years old it's actually takes great audio it's better than the audio I took with this DSLR I don't know what the deal is but I guess that's why everybody has a cell phone now have a nice week ahead and we're gonna work on the dates and times and I usually did this on a Friday I think I may have to move this to a Sunday so I can incorporate shop right a lot of times when I announced shop right sales on a Friday didn't start till Sunday so with that said have a nice week ahead and whatever I think it's winter right all right take care


I didn't leave work today thinking I'd be the last one here at parking lots empty. I then noticed that our mower, our experimental robot, is aimlessly going around clipping grass and leaving marks everywhere. Not really a care in the world, not really a thought in the world, and it reminded me of Fast and Furious Presents Hobbs and Shaw. Truth be told, there's a lot of movies I go to see and don't even bother reviewing because I don't have a lot to say about them, especially a review where you kind of know what kind of movie you're going to get going in, so you don't need to rely on the thoughts of others to make you determine whether or not you want to go see it.  I wanted something where I could go in, eat some Twizzlers, drink a Coke, and just think about nothing other than how does the rock do it all? How does he do it all? I'm a big Jason Statham fan. The guy doesn't seem to age ever. He's looked the same since I first saw him in Snatch, I think, which is a fantastic movie. I don't think he's made a movie even close to that today. Man, I'm hot too.  It's hot out, and I don't want to run the AC and ruin the audio that I'm sure is already stellar. But like I said, this Roomba Mower reminded me of the film, and I wanted to get something out there. So let's just talk about it briefly. This is a Jason Statham Dwayne Rock Johnson vehicle. You're going to see a lot of them. You get a good amount of Idris Elba, the villain of the picture. Idris Elba. I think Idris Elba. I don't know what it is. He's pretty awesome in it. He's a cool villain. Cooler than him, though, is his motorcycle he rides. That thing on command will fly over to him. He'll jump on it. He'll slide to it. It'll turn sideways, and then it'll pop back up. Vanessa Kirby, according to IMDB, is the female lead in this. She's fine. She's good looking. She does some cool stunt work.  As the s'more meanders through the grass, like a Ronan, a samurai without a master, I think about the script of this film and how it just, you know, at one point they'll be in Paris. At another point they'll be in Chernobyl. I don't even know where they're all at. The font doesn't even know what it wants to be. At some points it's that slick, cool, Hobbs and Shaw, orangish, yellow font. At other times it's just white, fast, and nefarious font. It's like they had multiple editors and different teams working on this film, so they're just churning out whatever works. The computer-generated stuff is, for the most part, pretty sweet. There's a cool clip online, and it's obviously extended in a film where Hobbs and Shaw are in a race car driving along, and Idris's character takes a motorcycle through the side of a bus, and at another point he goes under the bus, and it's all done really well. I mean, it reminded me of G.I. Joe, the live-action G.I. Joe movies. You know, it's not real. It feels like a Saturday morning cartoon in the best way possible, and yeah, it's just a lot of fun.  It could arguably be PG as far as I'm concerned. The way these guys speak to each other is like elementary slash middle school playground. No, not even middle school, because middle schoolers swear and stuff.   Oh my God, the mower's right next to my car.  It's become sentient. It does have some slick editing early on that I really appreciated, and it is never really done again, which is unfortunate, because the first like five to 10 minutes, we get to see the parallel split screen of Dwayne The Rock Johnson and Jason Statham's real life mornings. I guarantee this is like how they work out and how they eat and stuff, so I think they just had a camera crew follow them around, and then they made it into the Hobbs and Shaw montage. I wish that slick factor carried through the rest of the film, because they could have truly had something kind of special here. Instead, it falls very much into the later Fast and the Furious movies, just high octane explosions, nonsensical action. There's a scene where they have to daisy chain all these fast cars together, so there's these these brute guys just like throwing chains perfectly to hook onto the cars in front of them as they're going like 100 miles an hour, while the back rig is attached to a helicopter that's flying over the side of a mountain while the rock is hanging on top of it. It is just dumb beyond all dumb, but hugely entertaining, and that's what I wanted. End of the day, if you're looking for some fun PG-13 action, it's got you covered, and the movie does run at a good clip. There isn't a lot of slow moments because the acting here is nothing stellar at all, and there is enough like fun surprises. I was I was actually impressed with some of the the cameos they had in here. Overall, out of 10, I would give Hobbs and Shaw, I don't know, eight does its job. I think if they would have kept that slickness from the first 10 minutes moving on, we could have had something better, but as it stands, I could watch it again and just laugh at the nonsense, and yeah that would be it. Now if you excuse me, I need to head home. I am legitimately concerned for my life as this mower is barreling down on me at around four miles an hour. Take care.


So let's go ahead and get started with our spotlights this morning. Shutterstock is a company that if you work in the creative industry, you're probably familiar with it. And I'm very excited to have the VP of Technology Operations at Shutterstock here to talk with us today. So please help me welcome Chris Fisher. Morning, everybody. So a quick show of hands. How many folks in the audience are familiar with what Shutterstock does and what the business is? Great. So a fair amount of you. For those of you who aren't familiar, Shutterstock is a marketplace where photographers, videographers can upload their content. And we provide an opportunity for them to be able to sell that content to a broader market segment, people who need stock artwork for creating Christmas cards or a PowerPoint presentation or doing something like creating a catalog. Before we kind of get into that a lot, I want to talk a bit about what OpenStack is doing for our business. And I'll give you a little bit of a brief background in myself as well as Shutterstock's founding beginnings. So first, a little bit about me. I've been building scalable systems for about 10 years, as well as the teams that are responsible with managing those systems. From the get go, I've always been someone that's been really interested in high levels of automation and being able to build a very strong operational organization that can add business impact, not just manage your environment. I'm a huge, huge open source enthusiast. I mean, there are very few times that you can get me to buy a black box solution unless it's really, really exceptional. And that comes from a real belief that if things really get tough, you can control your own fate, get into the source code, figure out what's going wrong, and really solve your own problems. One other key point is that I have a pretty deep systems and network engineering background. I'm an ops guy by trade. The only language that I've coded effectively in is C, which is pretty much irrelevant in a modern web company. But I'm going to talk a lot about building the type of stack that your developers want to interact with. I really believe in it. It's done great things at other companies I've been at and at Shutterstock. And effectively, I think that's one of the key cornerstones of why OpenStack is something that's super effective for us. As a quick aside, I now spend most of my time, it seems like, learning how to use Excel and PowerPoint, and trying to explain to the rest of the executives and people out in the industry why these cloud systems are so important and so efficient. So a little bit on Shutterstock's founding beginnings. We were founded in 2003 by our CEO, John Oringer. He was our first developer, which from the beginning really created a dev-centric organization. It's pretty cool. It's from inception to our IPO last October and beyond. We've remained very focused on creating a great, great technology platform that developers really like interacting with. Our tech stack is another kind of note. Pre-dates the modern cloud. AWS was launched in 2006, maybe, I believe. And effectively, a lot of the modern technologies for building a cloud or interacting with the cloud just weren't there when we were already handling pretty large volumes of traffic. So a lot of the needs that we have are solved by OpenStack that provide us an environment that we can create a super usable cloud for developers, but at the same point help us alleviate certain constraints that come from having an application that's been around since pre-cloud days. So inside our organization, we have this developer ethos. And this isn't it. I wish it was this simple. But if you read through that document, you'll find that there are a couple of key themes that just happen over and over again. One, we build things that are core to our business. A lot of organizations really focus on the product. And I think that's fantastic. But we really ask ourselves if this functionality is core to our business, orchestration or deployment or the ability to speed development, we want to be building that. We don't want to buy an off the shelf solution. Secondly, we want to stay open source. Again, I kind of talked a little bit about when things get rough, it's nice to be able to read the source code. But beyond that, there are great recruiting efforts and great capabilities that come out of using community supported software. It's just something I believe so much in. And it's treated us really, really well at Shutterstock so far. Three, we want to invest in things that create collaboration and innovation among all the individuals at our organization. People don't talk a lot about how much tooling or your platform is important in that. It's really easy to think about process or being agile or having can band style type groups to really help foster collaboration and innovation. But if you get inside a lot of developers' heads, they think about collaboration and innovation via pull requests or working within a technology framework, everyone being able to write and read code. And this is another one of the key points why OpenStack is pretty great for our environment. And fourth, I think there's a lot of people out here who probably agree with this, just automate everything. If it's something you don't need a human to do it, don't. You'll find something better for that human to be doing other than sitting there and running scripts recurrently at midnight every night. So a little bit about the platform. It seems pretty easy to upload and download photos and videos, but it is a pretty large system that we've created at Shutterstock. It's got thousands of nodes across multiple data centers. We're managing several petabytes worth of storage in an open source technology called MogulFS, which is backed by all kinds of heterogeneous disc from white box servers to appliances that we buy from a company called Co-RAID using ATA over Ethernet. We also collect over a terabyte of logs every single day. That's about 70 times the volume that the Hubble telescope downloads to Earth. I realize it was put in space 15 years ago, and it's in geosynchronous orbit. But still, I like that stat a lot. And on the Ops side, as well as the Dev side, we remain being pretty language agnostic. We code in multiple different languages. The key takeaway from our application stack is we really try to go fast. We're pushing code hundreds of times a week, and we needed the type of platform that was going to allow us to do this and get lots of dev interaction. So a couple of challenges. We were trying to work with creating an environment that worked in low latencies. AWS, you can have pretty high latency between nodes. OpenStack, being able to create a cloud environment where things are sitting right next to each other, we could kind of conquer a lot of network latency problems. We also wanted to create an environment where the culture and the workflow of both operations teams and dev teams really was identical. Read the code, the documentation is the code, and interact with each other in a way that developers really understand. The goals, of course, are the same as many of you guys have. Have it, be resilient. And the other ones that we care about is keep it dev-centric, create an API-driven platform, and work as much as you can with being open source. So this is where everyone kind of screams like dev ops. Oh, dev ops is the way to do this. And I disagree. I think dev ops is a great idea. But when you have a singular dev ops team, you've just moved responsibility to another group of people that can also write some code. What we really want is a platform that creates a culture and a workflow where everybody, effectively, plays that role of dev ops. We want our developers, as well as our operations folks, writing code, sharing code, sharing knowledge, whether it's application or the actual infrastructure platform. So ultimately, what these things kind of create for your business is an environment where you have a super, super strong staff. Everyone can contribute back to the org. Everyone can write applications. Everyone is able to triage the same, communicate the same. We go crazy collecting metadata from all of these instances to look at efficiencies and resource planning within the groups. And it's a really powerful system where you can get everyone really working with the same platform, application side and dev side. So that's effectively, on this slide, when we really looked at what platform was going to help us do this the most successfully, we went throughout of OpenStack. It has great community support. We have the ability to get in the code and get 30. Everyone's building against an API, as opposed to looking at using config management systems like Puppet and Chef. That may be a part of your environment. But building against an API is something that developers are going to embrace a lot more. Everyone can read the code. And effectively, it encourages both ephemeral use and things that don't have persistent data, as well as allowing you to integrate with systems that do have persistent data. So thanks. If everyone has any quick questions for me, you can tweet stuff at me or send me an email. It's just chris at shudderstock.com. And thank you very much. Thank you, Chris. So don't leave yet. So when we've talked, one of the things that I found really interesting is you're obviously a technologist, and you were throwing out some great stats about the kind of environment you're running. But the thing that really hit me when we talked before was you have a business need, which is you have this application that has specific requirements that maybe don't fit into a menu-driven type technology offering. But you have developers who are developers, and they want to have an agile environment to work in. And so how does OpenStack allow you to meet both of those needs in your business? Absolutely. So one of the key points that's been OpenStack so successful for us is that at first, we thought we could solve this with just config management. We laid down a big puppet tree and tried to teach all the developers how to work with a DSL or in a right scripts to interact with controlling their environment. And it had some good success, but really, they kind of hated it. They were like, I just want an API to do this thing. And so effectively, as we've been transitioning our provisioning systems over to using OpenStack, we're able to get everyone to really be excited about, I can just write code that's going to call the OpenStack's API, interact with it, provision my VMs, do all this work that before they had to do in a language that was a little foreign to them. It didn't make a lot of sense. And at the same time, we keep our ops team very happy and that we know a lot about what the metal's doing. It's not completely abstracted into a way that we feel we're losing control. And so it's really helped bring those groups together in just a common language via being API driven.  Correct. All right, well, thank you very much, Chris. Thanks. So Shutterstock is focused on the needs of creative types and including individual creatives. The next user we're going to bring up is the