December 23, 2013 • 39 mins
What were the big news stories of 2013? We take a look at the first half of 2013 and the tech stories that caught our attention.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Get in tech with Technology with Text stuff from stuff
dot Com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren and we wanted
to take a look back at the year what was
two thousand thirteen and some of the big tech news stories,
(00:24):
and it turns out there quite a few. So we're
gonna divide this up into a couple of episodes, And
before we get started, I wanted to do just a
little bit of explanation of how some of this is
going to play out. In the past, we have often
kind of commented on the stories as they happened throughout
the year. That's generally what we're going to do today.
But for any story that continued to develop throughout the year,
we're just gonna tell as much of that story as
(00:47):
we can when it first started happening, more or less,
because we find that that's a lot easier to follow
than to say this happened in January than we do
stories for February, March and in April. Hey you remember
the thing that happened in January, Well here's where this happened,
all right. Yeah, there's a couple of places where we
either are are waiting until a larger event in the
chain happened to to break it during our timeline or
(01:11):
exact yeah, exactly. In some cases we'll be talking about
the biggest part of the story and we may say, oh,
early in the year this happened, but we wanted to
do it in such a way where you could get
kind of the encapsulated version of that news story all
at once, as opposed to spread out throughout the whole year.
So any um, alien historians listening to this for like
(01:31):
extreme accuracy purposes, just you know, slow down and take
it all in. Also, welcome to the Gregorian calendar. Yeah,
that's exciting. So let's start, I suggest starting with January two,
an excellent month of the Gregorian calendar to start with. Yes, okay,
So the first thing that I have written down, we
we kind of we didn't go day by day for
(01:54):
the year, but we kind of lumped them together and
stuff that happened in various months. The first story I
wanted to mention was that that was when Kim dot
com did a little press event where he unveiled his
plan of the mega website. And you know, Kim dot
Com of course was one of the founders of Mega upload,
and a year earlier, back in two thousand twelve, had
(02:16):
his home rated by various law enforcement officials, and so
this was on the anniversary of that big raid. He
unveiled this new service called mega which is a file
hosting service that also includes encryption so that you can
share files. You can you can upload a file and
share it with people, and you can encrypt it so
that anyone you don't want to share it with doesn't
know what the heck you're messing with. So it's kind
(02:39):
of a work around on some of the issues that
Mega upload had where, you know, anyone who owned copyrighted
material and saw it up on Mega upload would say, hey,
you've got to take that down that belongs to me.
This way they can all they can say is there's
stuff up there that may or may not belong to me,
but I can't tell because it's all encrypted. Yeah, this
this is part of a kind of law your theme
(03:00):
of of a encryption and be uh file sharing kind
of issues. It turns out that that's something that I
doubt is going to go away anytime soon. Yeah. When
we next have a story that has kind of one
of the tragedies of this one is so close to
your heart. Um. This was a research in motion or
(03:22):
a rim renaming itself BlackBerry and uh and launching the
BlackBerry ten os UM and then kind of not really
going anywhere after that. There were if you remember, back
in two thousand twelve, there were a lot of analysts
saying that BlackBerry ten os was going to be the
make or break product for BlackBerry, that it was only
(03:44):
if that that that new overhaul of the smartphone operating
system that would be what would end up either saving
the company or it wouldn't be enough. And while BlackBerry
is still around, it's certainly had a really rough year.
In two thousand thirteen, they went so far as to
say they were entertaining offers for people to come up
and buy the company. However, uh, just recently, relatively recently
(04:09):
as of the recording of this podcast, CEO John Chen
sent out a letter to customers, enterprise customers meaning giant companies,
saying that BlackBerry was no longer looking for a buyer.
They were going to to go this alone. They were
going to continue to cater to their enterprise customers, but
they were not going to try and sell off the company. UM.
(04:31):
However they are basically any investors are being um, it's
being recommended that investors sell off their BlackBerry stock. Things
are not looking in the business industry like this is
fun to go. When city groups said they're changing BlackBerry
to sell that was that was not a good news
item for BlackBerry. So it continues to be a really
(04:52):
rough year. Uh hey, you know what, have you ever
wanted to be in pictures? I am in picture sometimes? Yeah?
Have you what about moving pictures? I'm I'm in those
yeah occasionally. Yeah. I like I like being in them.
I really like them when they are six seconds long. Well, hey,
there's an app for that. What Twitter had purchased this
(05:17):
this little company called Vine in twelve and in January
unveiled the iOS vine app. Yep, And this was what
let all those would be iPhone movie makers out there
use their phones to create six second long looping videos,
which some people did, and it was just kind of
like ridiculous stuff that hardly anyone outside of a small
(05:40):
group of friends would have ever taken notice of. Other
people were using it as an actual means of artistic
expression and using in a very kind of creative way.
But I mean, it's challenging. Right. It's just like in
a way when you talk about the different types of
fiction and how the shorter you get, the harder it
is to write. So, for example, a good novel is
hard to write, a good novella is harder to write.
(06:03):
A good short story is really hard to write because
as you're restricting yourself, every single word counts even more
than it would in a longer form. So you've got
a six second movie, You've got to find a way
of saying what you want to say in six seconds
that really has an impact. And there's some people who
are really good at it. Oh yeah, yeah, And it's
also a terrific medium for for just main kind of stuff. Um,
(06:24):
that's that's short and easy. And I saw some really
cute ones this here. Yeah, I saw some great ones
as well. But you know, I I don't really feel
comfortable limiting myself to six seconds. I need a little
more than twice that, i'mount Is there anything out there
for me? Well? In June, actually Facebook kind of caught
up when they announced Instagram Video, right, that would allow
(06:48):
you to do fifteen seconds of video and see there
a lot of people were saying, you know, Facebook is
playing hardball here by not allowing Vine to live on
Facebook and instead having this competing product that could live
on Facebook. Meanwhile, Vine, of course, is doing quite well
on Twitter. So you've got these two giant social media
goliaths that are kind of, you know, trying to to
(07:11):
push the other one out of the picture. As it
turns out, I mean, I don't I don't know what
the figures are because I didn't look them up. All
I know is what my direct experience has been I've seen.
And maybe it's because I'm not a big Instagram person,
that's probably the main reason. But I've seen way more
Vine videos, and I've seen Instagram videos. I know more
people personally making Instagram videos than I do personally making
(07:33):
Vine videos. But overall, I have seen more propagation of Vine. Interesting.
So you know, this obviously is all anecdotal, So it
could very well be that, you know, and I mean,
there's way one of us is on the money here. Well,
those and and those are those are trends of two
you know, thirtiesome things who work in the tech sector,
and and so you know this grain assault, but so
(07:54):
what about you know, sticking with Facebook, they also in
January launched something that I don't had a lot of
buzz around it at the time. That was an interesting idea.
It was called graph search, and this would let you
use Facebook as a search engine to look for really
weird stuff. Like the examples they gave were always odd,
so uh. An example I said was, I want to
(08:16):
know what kind of music people who really enjoy planetarium's
happen to like, and I could do a search on that,
and Facebook has of course all that information of what
people have liked and you know anything. Yeah, so then
they would come back with well, people who said they
liked planetariums also said they really like you know, I
(08:37):
don't know Manner Asterman, which would make total sense that
that would be an example. But it's this kind of
deep graph search, whereas a social search kind of thing. Um.
I've only played with it a little bit and it
doesn't seem to work that well for me. But it
may just be that I'm using it wrong and then
I'm too old. I haven't. I haven't experimented with it
(08:59):
very much. But um, but I think that since the
trends of overall Facebook getting older, I've probably indicates that
it's not that you're too old. It's just that it's
not as functional as they had perhaps hoped it might be.
That's very kind of you to say. I'd like to
think that it's their fault, not mine. Also in January,
Canonical announced that they would bring Ubuntu, the Linux distro,
(09:20):
you know, it's a distribution of the Linux operating system.
They would bring it to the mobile platforms. They would
create a smartphone version of a Buntu in the near future.
That's the story would play out over two thousand thirteen,
and it was not a particularly successful story either. In July,
they announced a crowdfunding campaign to try and raise money
(09:41):
on I think it was Indie Go Go for what
they were calling the Ubuntu Edge, which would have been
the first smartphone to feature this operating system. However, they
hit a little bit of a roadblock. Yeah, they had
a thirty two million dollar goal and they only made
nineteen of that. Actually are they They fell short by
nineteen nineteen million dollars. I thought, I feel badly that
(10:03):
my kick started campaign didn't fund, But um I got
more than halfway to where I needed to be and
they didn't quite make that. So well, but that's still
I mean, they they still made. I mean, I'm having
a lot of trouble subtracting right now then. Um but
but I mean, but that's still you know what, like
like eleven million dollars that they raised. I'm just saying
that's not terrible. Yeah, no, it's they didn't they weren't
(10:26):
hunting for cash, but they didn't have enough to go
through with what they planned. Did some subtractions so hard? Yeah, well,
you know, we only like to add on tech stuff.
We hate taking stuff away. The Ubuntu Edge would have
been eight thirty dollars to buy outright if it had
come into existence now since then, back in December of
two thousand thirteen, Canonical announced that some other as yet
(10:50):
as of the recording of this podcast, and I should
say recording this on December twelve, so so and anything
that we get terribly weird of, especially towards the end,
that's one of the reasons we're also terribly weird people.
So that also plays the department. But anyway, Canonical has
said that some unnamed manufacturer would be producing the first
(11:11):
ubun two smartphones sometime in two thousand fourteen, and it
may very well be that by the time this podcast
goes live. We will know who that manufacturer is, but
as of the recording, we do not. Uh. And then
we have a very sad story to round out January
of two thousand thirteen, which was on January eleventh, two
thousand thirteen, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Uh. Swartz was one
(11:36):
of the people who worked on Really Simple Syndication RSS. Uh.
He was. He was a hacker and an activist. He
was He was a deep member of all of these
communities that were based around the building of the Worldwide Web. Yeah.
He was very much involved in the development of Reddit.
He was very active with Creative Commons, and he was
a proponent of the idea that information wants to be free,
(11:59):
and in fact had been charged with breaking and entering
by m I T Campus police when he was using
unauthorized He was using a computer to download massive amounts
of documents from j Store, which is you know, you know,
it's a it's an academic um database of papers, and
(12:20):
presumably with the intent of distributing them freely, because information
wants to be free. Uh. He you know. M I
T eventually decided not to pursue charges, but the federal
government did not have that same point of view. They
actually when after sworts On on multiple charges under the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act UH Sports, his lawyers offered
(12:44):
to have a plea bargain, but the prosecutors refused the
plea bargain. Yeah, they were being really I mean, and
the sentence that they were putting out there was thirty
five years in prison and about a million dollars in
five Yeah, and there were other you know, things tacked
onto there. This actually prompted a big discussion in the
tech world about whether or not the federal government was
(13:06):
trying to use sports as an example to try and
frighten other people by going after sports with such gusto
and refusing to do any sort of plea bargain. And UM,
two days after the denial of the plea bargain came through,
that's when Sports committed suicide. And it was this is
a very complicated issue. You can't just point a finger
(13:27):
and say because of this, this other thing happened. I mean,
it didn't stop people from trying. Oh absolutely, if you'd
like to learn more about sports and UM and all
of this this hubbub leading up to this tragic event.
In particular, UM, we did a memorial episode on February six.
That was during kind of my learning curve of the show.
I will warn you guys, right, Yeah, so there are
(13:49):
several of the stories we'll talk about kind of relate
back to some of the episodes we've done. I mean, obviously,
whenever anything really big happens, we like to try and
at least give some context to it on text. So
definitely check that one out. But now we're ready to
move on to February, which twenty eight days as a
rule are plenty. Yeah, February in this case, UM had
(14:13):
had the beginning of kind of the saga that Intel
went through during the course. Yeah, here's another one. Like
you know, BlackBerry had its own saga, Intel's had one,
although Intel's is is definitely different from Blackberries. Blackberries the
company that people are always kind of predicting that this
year will be the end of BlackBerry type thing. No
(14:34):
one's predicting that for Intel. But yeah, they had announced
in February at the All Things deconference that they were
going to be launching an Internet TV service by the
end of the year, and in July they had announced
that the name of the service was going to be
on que I didn't realize how quickly the story had developed.
I mean, I didn't realize it was only July when
(14:55):
they named it and now actually a month ago back
in Nova Member, they started looking to offload it. Yeah,
they're looking to try and sell it off to someone
for around five million dollars. And you might say, well,
why would a company in the very beginning of the
year say they're really going to push to get into
this world, this internet television world that no one has
(15:17):
yet really cracked. You know, You've got a lot of
big companies that are all vying for this, including Apple
and Google. Why would they say they really want to
do it? And then they kind of bailed on it.
And well, here's where the story is a little more complicated.
It's because the people who were in charge at the
end of the year were not the same people who
were in charge at the beginning of the year. Yes,
uh Ceo, Paul UHLINI thank you, I always I can
(15:42):
never say that, and yeah, well good luck on the
next one. Yeah, he stepped down and was replaced by
Brian Krisnitch. I'm gonna say it's Crescentitch, even though someone's
gonna tell me that that's an inappropriate pronunciation, but that's
what I'm going with. But yeah, it was, it was.
It was a move where I'm with two minds of this.
(16:02):
You know, I like seeing companies promote from within. I
think that that's a valuable thing to do. But there
were a lot of analysts who said that the problem
Intel faces is not that, you know, they are abusing
their their talent, it's that they have kind of adhered
to a similar strategy for so long that what's really
(16:22):
needed is some new blood to stir things up. And
they're look that as being a little bit old and
stagy in terms of management. Yeah. So, and Crecentag is
someone who has been with a company for more than
two decades. So when he stepped up a CEO, some
analysts were saying, well, this is a sign that Intel
is not ready to move forward. Uh and and some
(16:43):
have argued that the on q story where now they're
trying to sell off on q is, is evidence of that.
So that's where they are right now. Um, something else
happened in February. We got our first look at one
of the next generation consoles now current generation console. Right, Yeah,
Sony got the jump on Microsoft. There they announced the
(17:03):
PlayStation for at their own personal event in New York.
It was invitation only and I didn't get an invite,
so just follow along with all the live blogging. But yeah,
they showed off the system. They really stressed that the
system was for gamers, and that's going to be important
later on in the year when we move on to
the other big console. They talked about how the PlayStation
(17:25):
four would allow you to not only play games, but
share your experience. You know, you could stream stuff on
things like twitch tv. I think it was twitch TV,
and then they could all you could also, UH, at
least at some point, be able to hand over control
of your game to someone else. So if you just
can't get past that third level, if you just can't
get that boss fight, you can just pass. Everybody calling
(17:47):
Lauren up in the middle of the night. Lauren needed
to get past this guy for me. He keeps hitting
me on the head with a fish, and then she
would fix it for me, and then I could continue
to play UH and so owe me so many coffees
the next day. You'd be awake at three in the morning.
If I had said ten in the morning, Oh snap,
(18:09):
a little inside looking I guess that's just me anyway.
So Sony would go on to E three and uh
and after some pretty fierce competition between Sony and Microsoft.
I would say that most journalists by the end of
E three were at least some might say prematurely calling
Sony the winner. Yeah, I mean the winner. Yeah, so
(18:34):
um yeah, and then it did. It did pretty well
on its release, although I mean it's hard to compare
to the Xbox One is we'll talk about a little
bit later because Microsoft isn't really releasing numbers. But um,
but Sony has said that they sold a hundred I'm sorry,
I'm sorry, one million units um, and they were only
selling the console in two nations at that time. So yeah,
(18:54):
a good job for them. Uh. Next, we have one
of the spawns is of our show occasionally Netflix. Right,
they introduced their original series House of Cards. That was
the first original series that they had come out with. Yeah, yeah,
they and and of course the way Netflix does it
is different from the way you would watch a show
on TV. You know, on on television you get it
(19:16):
week after week, so you get one episode per week
and then you have to wait a week to see
the next one. Netflix said Okay, we've produced this series
and we're going to serve up the entire season at once,
so so you can you can already mainline it just
and you can just set aside a weekend and just
watch Kevin Spacey be progressively more and more nasty. I've
(19:37):
watched some of this and he is amazingly amoral in
this in this show. I haven't caught it yet, but
um but they did. They did release also following that,
um the next season of Arrested Development, and also the
first season of Orange is a New Black, which I
have not Oh it's so good. Um uh. And yeah,
(19:58):
there was overall a trend in of more companies doing
more original series on streaming video on demand. Yeah, Hulu
had already launched a couple of scripted series in two
thousand twelve, and they continued to do that in two
thousand thirteen, and Amazon Prime same thing. They had produced
a couple and they were working on more. So you
can see shows on all three of those services. And
(20:21):
those aren't the only three, but those are the three big. Yeah.
If you want to learn more about that, you can
see our episodes about streaming video on demand UMU. Primarily
videos in the stream which came out September. There you go.
So before we get onto the next half of the
first half of two thousand thirteen, I think I think
(20:43):
the Q two is really what you would say, they're
Q two. Okay, before we go on to Q two,
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsored all right,
let's march on with March of two thousand thirteen, and
Lauren judges me. Some things, by the way, remain consistent
throughout two thousand thirteen, including Lauren shaking her head and
just staring at me with disapproval. Hey, at least I
(21:04):
don't laugh uncontrollably anymore. I feel like that. Yeah, yeah, no,
just once she got over the the laughter thing, now
I just get the judging. So that's fine. That's my friend.
Matt refers to that as my laugh number twenty one,
nervous laugh number twenty one. Apparently I have a lot
of them. Mll It's good to be versatile. So moving
(21:25):
on to March two thousand thirteen, Um, what just really quickly,
T Mobile did something pretty pretty unheard of in the
four major carriers of cell phone services in the United States. Right,
Europe is gonna go like this is such old news
in the US, it was. It was pretty Uh, it's
like a Maverick move. Yeah, they introduced no contract service
(21:46):
plans yep, which uh, you know doesn't necessarily mean that
you would be better off with that versus a contract one.
It would be a case by case basis, but it
did mean that it suddenly, you know, US customers had
more options. So it needs to be seen how this
is going to affect the rest of the industry over
the next few years. But I'm very curious to see
if this move ends up being something that's transformative or
(22:08):
if it's just a little blip in the radar. Its
too early to say right now. And in other relatively
small news that made perhaps a bigger splash in our
personal lives, Google announced in March that it was going
to shut down Google Reader. Yeah. This is what caused
me to say, no, that's that is literally what he did,
like in the middle of the office. I'm pretty sure
(22:28):
it was pretty bad. Yeah, Um, that's that. That was
their RSS service. Yeah, that was if you wanted some
sort of RSS reader, this was one of the ones
that could work pretty well. You could divide it up
into different categories and stuff and there were plenty of
other options out there, oh yeah, and and Google suggested
many other good ones as replacements. Exactly, they weren't. They
were like, we understand that some of you are very
(22:49):
passionate about this, but the problem is that even with
all of your passion, you're still very few vocal minority. Yeah.
So it was one of those things where as a company,
I totally understand why they were doing this. They were saying,
you know, we've got a lot of projects. We have
to devote some attention to all of them, and it
makes more sense for us to go ahead and shut
down things that are not terribly successful so that we
(23:10):
can devote that kind of time and attention to something else,
which really, in the long run became sort of okay
because March was also the month that Google announced their
their beta of Google Glass. Yeah, Project Glass. You know,
it seems so weird, Like I imagine that because I
have a pair of these, Um, technically the office has
(23:31):
a pair of these. They're just in my possession. They
kind of reside with Jonathan most I turned into golem
with the ring he does. Yeah, very I've led a
couple of people wear them, But I get real ansy um.
But anyway, Project Glass was the it. You probably see them.
They're the glasses that have the little bitty cube on
them where you can use that as a screen and
(23:53):
take pictures with them, take video. We do some apps
to navigation, some web search connects by a bluetoo their WiFi,
a little bit of a vocal command in there, so
that you don't say, okay glass to take a picture,
take a video, record a video, recorded video, take a
picture yet. Yeah, because I had a lot of fun
with that a dragon con. I went drunken and people
will be like, you took my picture with the future,
(24:15):
and I'm like, yes, I did. So I think I
think Jonathan got more people coming up to him to
ask they could take a picture of him taking a
picture of something with his Google Glass. Yeah. Yeah, I
was not the celebrity in that room. Google Glass was
the celebrity anyway. Yeah. It's it's a program that has
recently opened up a little bit more. They've allowed some
of the pioneers of the Google Beta program to uh
(24:39):
invite a couple of other people to join. So I
think it's it's either two or three. I haven't received
the email myself. Yet, but it's two or three people
that you can then extend an invitation to and then
they have the option to join, although that option comes
with a pretty hefty price tag. Yeah, it's all for
a headset, pretty expensive stuff. And it is still a
(25:02):
prototype version. This is absolutely not a consumer level. No.
I understand that it's an updated version of the headset,
but it's still it's still kind of a beta headset.
It's not not meant to be the kind that you
would get, assuming this ever becomes an actual consumer product,
the ones that you'll see in stores will probably look
a little different. Um. And then there's a Kickstarter story
(25:23):
we have to cover. It's we don't have to, but
I thought it'd be interesting. So, you know, kickstarters mostly
meant for for or we tend to think of kickstars
being meant for people who for a small independent projects. Yeah,
some artists who want to get something a project off
the ground, or maybe it would be entrepreneur who needs
a little starting capital but has a really strong idea.
(25:43):
But in this case, it was creators of a cult
television show that had a passionate but relatively small following,
that show being Veronica Mars. They decided to hold a
Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising two million dollars
so that they could produce a Veronica Mars movie that
would be set approximately the same number of years after
(26:06):
the series it ended as actual time had passed. Uh,
And it met that initial goal in eleven hours. Yeah,
and then eventually raised five point seven millions, so they
went above what they their original projection was. By the way,
a two million dollar budget for a movie is incredibly small.
I'm wondering, and I wondered then, and I still wonder now.
If the kick started campaign was less about raising money
(26:29):
and more about demonstrating that there is an audience for
that particular film, I would strongly suspect that they're going
to get investment from other sources. Yeah. I can't imagine
that they're able to even complete a full thirty minutes
on two million dollars. I'm sure. I'm sure that they could.
If they really wanted to mus be like the Veronica
Mars Suck puppet Show, it would be the light version. UM.
(26:52):
Also in March of this year, UM Facebook CEO Cheryl
Sandberg published her book Lean In, which was kind of
uh follow up piece to a Ted talk that she
had done back in I believe, um, and and this
is this is more of a women in industry sort
of thing than a tech news thing in particular. But
you know, Sandberg is is the leader of one of
(27:13):
tech's biggest companies. And so therefore the publication of a
book about what it's like to be a woman in
tech and and a woman in big business is is
a is a pretty big thing. And it's and it's
a big issue, um, you know, especially when you consider
the kind of dismal percentages of women in tech and
women in leadership. I did. I did a guest episode
of a run Stuff Mom Never Told Use Stems series
(27:35):
on November six, if you want to go check that out.
But um, but yeah, it's like only like a quarter
of professional computing occupations in the US are held by women,
and um, only twenty of of chief information officer positions
at the at the fortune to fifty companies are held
by women. And so you know, these are these are
big things, and and the trends are not seeming to
(27:57):
get better right now. So so I think it's really
cool that you published this. Then it became a huge
news item, right because that could potentially inspire other women
to go into a field that that traditionally they might
feel like there's some social or cultural pressures to keep
them out, when in reality we benefit from being able
(28:17):
to take advantage of talent, no matter where that talent
might fall across the field. Of course, yeah, and and
and at the very least encourage more discussion about the
issue and why this is, yes, exactly, raising awareness is
a great thing. Moving on to April, we only have
one item for April because it's a foolish month. We
(28:37):
don't like to spend a lot of time there. But
but it but it was a Google thing and pretty Google. Yeah,
I mean it made me wish that it was a
different town with an that starts with a that they
had talked about Google is moving Google Fiber into Austin, Texas,
and in fact, you know they're already doing that now,
but that this was back when they announced that that
(28:58):
was going to be the next city they were targeting. Right,
Initially it had only been in Kansas City. Yeah, both
Kansas cities, but yes, because there are two of them
way by a river. But yes, yes, Kansas City was
the initial proving grounds of Google Fiber in Austin, Texas,
out of all the different places in the United States,
was the next one. So keep Austin weird at an
(29:19):
incredibly high download rates. So for all my friends in Austin,
I hope you enjoy your one gigabit per second download speed. Yeah. Meanwhile,
I will continue to make smoke signals at the top
of my house in hopes of connecting to Gmail. Moving
on to May. So, uh oh boy, you remember doing
(29:41):
this podcast? Yeah? Okay, So this company called Defense Distributed,
I mean, and and and really mostly this guy named
Cody Wilson, who was the founder of Defense Distributed, figured
out he designed a three D printed gun only used
one um like basically a hardware store nail to pin
everything together and everything else was something that you could print,
(30:04):
assuming you had the the appropriately sophisticated three D printer
and and the appropriate plastics to use it, because if
you were to use weaker plastics, you could have a
catastrophic failure of your of your weapon, which could cause
injury or death. All right, we we did a whole
episode about that on May twenty two, and um and
I was, I mean, I remember being fond of it.
(30:26):
I haven't listened to it in a minute. But there
was a lot of really interesting information and press about
all of this, and it was a firing pin, not
like some kind of like lynch pin of the gun
I miss spoke a moment ago. But it was funny
because I remember in that episode we certainly didn't give
Cody Wilson much quarter. And I haven't felt a lot
differently since then. I understand at least what his expressed
(30:48):
motivations were. And I mean, I I get it, and
it's not like it's not like it's a world we
live in now where we can somehow take that away.
It was going to happen sooner or later. And I
think that it was an interesting political statement. Um. I
I kind of do appreciate the um anarchist sort of
bent of it, of of just going like, no, really,
you need to be paying attention to this technology because
(31:10):
this is in fact what it can do. Yeah. I
just wish he had been a little less cavalier about
the whole thing, because that that kind of rubbed me
the wrong way. I was like, I get off my lawn,
don't shoot me. Um. But yeah, since then, we've seen
some other developments. For example, there's a company called Solid
Concepts that printed a three D gun in metal, not
(31:31):
in plastic, showing that they you could actually do this
with again, uh sophisticated three D printer. Obviously, the metal
ones are not ones that you're going to find the
consumer market. These are right right, and I mean even
the plastic ones that you would need for something like
this around like ten dollars and they're talking pretty expensive.
You could probably buy a lot more guns traditionally, yeah,
(31:51):
or even rent one for for more choply than that.
And then Philadelphia is the first city in the United
States that has passed legislation banning the printing of guns
within that city. Although how they would ever expect to
actually yeah, how I don't know if it's an enforceable law.
Maybe they can work together with the n s A
and creep on people a lot, right, The n s
(32:13):
A knows everything you're printing, so you know, it can
just be a little tag team. They just can't. They
just can't let it be known that they found out
from the n s A because the n s A
is supposed to be for four and each We'll talk
more about the n s A later. So May it
was also the month when the other big console company
announced their entry into the war for the next generation
(32:33):
of consoles. Right, Microsoft finally unveiled their Xbox one. Yep,
so they first they put to bed the whole idea
of it being called Xbox seven twenty, which is good
because one of their initial ideas. Yeah, those of us
who have trouble with math would rapidly have problems in
a couple of generations. I'm referring to myself with that,
by the way. So Microsoft unveils Xbox One, and mostly
(32:57):
at that first event when they first unveiled it, they
weren't really looking at the games so much. Yeah, unlike
PlayStation's uh idea for their launch, they were really talking
about all of the other media center factors that that
they were planning, right, Yeah, things like being able to
control your cable box and and have some interactivity with
things like sports. Sports played a big role in that
(33:18):
initial announcement, including things like getting stats on players in
real time that kind of stuff. And also they talked
a lot about the the kind of peripheral abilities of
the console, specifically the new version of Connect with all
the voice and gesture controls, but not so much on games.
It wouldn't be until E three before Xbox really started
(33:41):
talking about the games that would be coming out for
that system. And unfortunately, also at E three, they made
a few announcements that were very unpopular amongst the gaming public. Yeah,
the big one being that the Xbox One was going
to require a persistent connection to the Internet or else
it would not work, and people like that it needed
to phone home like once a day or some thing
like that in order to you know, confirm that you
(34:03):
were still using entirely up and up software and then
you hadn't stolen anything, right that that all the copies
of everything you were running and actually belonged to you
weren't being used by someone else, that kind of thing,
and people objected to it. They said, well, you know,
not everyone has a persistent Internet connection and they want
to buy your product, but they can't use it. And
eventually Microsoft ended up backing down on a lot of
(34:25):
those initial stances, and um, they also said that as
a result of making those concessions, some of the features
they had planned for the Xbox would no longer work
because they required that first element that they had backed
off on, and that got people upset too. And I'm like, well,
you can't win, guys. You gotta you have to be like, well,
either I'm okay with all of it, or I'm okay
(34:47):
that a lot of it goes away if they take
away the one thing that I really hate. I I
think that they probably could have found workarounds for some
of those, and that some some of those workarounds might
still be coming in the next several months. But these
are these are things that they may find a way
of implementing in in other ways further down the line.
I mean, just like the PS four, the Xbox one
(35:07):
doesn't have the full functionality they talked about. Yeah, although
it did sell the same one million units in twenty
four hours that the PS four did. Yeah, it's just
they I think they were in eleven countries and not
just two. So I mean, so it's it's and yeah,
and they're being a little bit more squirrely about their numbers.
Like I think I said earlier, they did at one
point say like in in eighteen days, we sold something
(35:31):
like more than two million units, or essentially they were
saying that the sales were exceeding their expectations, and so
they weren't being so upfront with exactly what their expectations were.
But yeah, they're selling quite well, probably from what I
can tell mostly this is anecdotal, probably not as well
as the PS four at least initially. But you know,
(35:52):
these things are going in. This is a long tail
type of game, and it's gonna We're gonna have to
see when, especially yeah, since since a lot of the
games that they're talking about being really hot are not
going to be out until at the earliest, right right.
I like the games that are the launch titles for
both of these consoles are I've mentioned this before. They're
not games that particularly strike me as you know, must have. Yeah,
(36:16):
so there's none of them. None of them are the
killer apps. So I'm still waiting. Um. Moving on, Yahoo
bought Tumbler for one point one billion dollars, which is
so much money. I mean, I mean not the Tumbler
isn't worth it. I think it's a very up and
coming um social media platform. Absolutely, and uh and everyone
(36:36):
on Tumbler was really, really, really worried about this because
the image of Tumbler is young and hip and silly
and and full of irreverence, full of reverence. Yeah, and
and the image of Yahoo is basically the polar opposite
of all of that. Yes, the company that has the
name Yahoo with an exclamation mark at the end of
it is just a bunch of old fuddy duddies. What
(37:00):
it's not international business machine people, come on not. Nonetheless,
there was some concern, especially considering the way that Yahoo
has in the past handled a lot of it's large,
large design decisions and commenting decisions. And I mean, I
think Yahoo was the original site on which I decided
(37:21):
that I can't read comments on the Internet anymore. I
can understand that. Yeah, And to be fair, the Yahoo
executives have all said that they have no plans of
screwing up Tumbler and doing anything different. But as long
as it's just a change in ownership but not a
change in administration, than things should go pretty well. But
we're gonna wrap up this first episode about a look
(37:42):
back on two thousand thirteen with possibly the biggest story
of We wish we could save this for the end
of the last episode, but it happened in the middle
of the year, so we've got to talk about it.
It's it's the only one that I referred to in
my notes entirely in caps lock about Yeah, okay, So
what we're clearly talking about is when Steve will Hit
(38:04):
actually explained how his invention the graphics interchange format, how
you were supposed to pronounce the acronym uh and it's jeff,
which is wrong, and I won't do it. No, it's right.
That is so right. That's the only clear way to
say it. Gift, gift is gift because if you put
a T at the end, it'd be gift. It wouldn't
(38:25):
be jift. Jeff is a peanut butter gif is graphic.
Gift sounds ridiculous, jiffun graphic, gift graphic it makes sense,
Jeff graphic. No, you don't have graphics. I have graffics.
Do you have a park for him? Welcome to Giraffic Park. Alright. So, anyway,
(38:46):
that wraps up this first episode of our look back
on twirteen. Tune in next time when we find out
what happened at the end of the year. So we're
gonna wrap this up. If you guys have any suggestions
for future topics of tech stuff, if you have a
specific technology wants to talk about a company, or if
any of these things that we have not gone in
depth about you'd like to hear more on. Yeah, maybe
you're like, Hey, I really want to have a full
(39:09):
minute discussion about gift versus Jeff. Let us know if
you are that person, Write us an email. Our address
is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us
a line on Tumbler, Twitter, or Facebook. You can find
us with the handle text stuff hs W and Lauren
and I will talk to you again really soon for
(39:32):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
have staff works dot com
Get in tech with Technology with Text stuff from stuff
dot Com. Hey there, everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I am Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren and we wanted
to take a look back at the year what was
two thousand thirteen and some of the big tech news stories,
(00:24):
and it turns out there quite a few. So we're
gonna divide this up into a couple of episodes, And
before we get started, I wanted to do just a
little bit of explanation of how some of this is
going to play out. In the past, we have often
kind of commented on the stories as they happened throughout
the year. That's generally what we're going to do today.
But for any story that continued to develop throughout the year,
we're just gonna tell as much of that story as
(00:47):
we can when it first started happening, more or less,
because we find that that's a lot easier to follow
than to say this happened in January than we do
stories for February, March and in April. Hey you remember
the thing that happened in January, Well here's where this happened,
all right. Yeah, there's a couple of places where we
either are are waiting until a larger event in the
chain happened to to break it during our timeline or
(01:11):
exact yeah, exactly. In some cases we'll be talking about
the biggest part of the story and we may say, oh,
early in the year this happened, but we wanted to
do it in such a way where you could get
kind of the encapsulated version of that news story all
at once, as opposed to spread out throughout the whole year.
So any um, alien historians listening to this for like
(01:31):
extreme accuracy purposes, just you know, slow down and take
it all in. Also, welcome to the Gregorian calendar. Yeah,
that's exciting. So let's start, I suggest starting with January two,
an excellent month of the Gregorian calendar to start with. Yes, okay,
So the first thing that I have written down, we
we kind of we didn't go day by day for
(01:54):
the year, but we kind of lumped them together and
stuff that happened in various months. The first story I
wanted to mention was that that was when Kim dot
com did a little press event where he unveiled his
plan of the mega website. And you know, Kim dot
Com of course was one of the founders of Mega upload,
and a year earlier, back in two thousand twelve, had
(02:16):
his home rated by various law enforcement officials, and so
this was on the anniversary of that big raid. He
unveiled this new service called mega which is a file
hosting service that also includes encryption so that you can
share files. You can you can upload a file and
share it with people, and you can encrypt it so
that anyone you don't want to share it with doesn't
know what the heck you're messing with. So it's kind
(02:39):
of a work around on some of the issues that
Mega upload had where, you know, anyone who owned copyrighted
material and saw it up on Mega upload would say, hey,
you've got to take that down that belongs to me.
This way they can all they can say is there's
stuff up there that may or may not belong to me,
but I can't tell because it's all encrypted. Yeah, this
this is part of a kind of law your theme
(03:00):
of of a encryption and be uh file sharing kind
of issues. It turns out that that's something that I
doubt is going to go away anytime soon. Yeah. When
we next have a story that has kind of one
of the tragedies of this one is so close to
your heart. Um. This was a research in motion or
(03:22):
a rim renaming itself BlackBerry and uh and launching the
BlackBerry ten os UM and then kind of not really
going anywhere after that. There were if you remember, back
in two thousand twelve, there were a lot of analysts
saying that BlackBerry ten os was going to be the
make or break product for BlackBerry, that it was only
(03:44):
if that that that new overhaul of the smartphone operating
system that would be what would end up either saving
the company or it wouldn't be enough. And while BlackBerry
is still around, it's certainly had a really rough year.
In two thousand thirteen, they went so far as to
say they were entertaining offers for people to come up
and buy the company. However, uh, just recently, relatively recently
(04:09):
as of the recording of this podcast, CEO John Chen
sent out a letter to customers, enterprise customers meaning giant companies,
saying that BlackBerry was no longer looking for a buyer.
They were going to to go this alone. They were
going to continue to cater to their enterprise customers, but
they were not going to try and sell off the company. UM.
(04:31):
However they are basically any investors are being um, it's
being recommended that investors sell off their BlackBerry stock. Things
are not looking in the business industry like this is
fun to go. When city groups said they're changing BlackBerry
to sell that was that was not a good news
item for BlackBerry. So it continues to be a really
(04:52):
rough year. Uh hey, you know what, have you ever
wanted to be in pictures? I am in picture sometimes? Yeah?
Have you what about moving pictures? I'm I'm in those
yeah occasionally. Yeah. I like I like being in them.
I really like them when they are six seconds long. Well, hey,
there's an app for that. What Twitter had purchased this
(05:17):
this little company called Vine in twelve and in January
unveiled the iOS vine app. Yep, And this was what
let all those would be iPhone movie makers out there
use their phones to create six second long looping videos,
which some people did, and it was just kind of
like ridiculous stuff that hardly anyone outside of a small
(05:40):
group of friends would have ever taken notice of. Other
people were using it as an actual means of artistic
expression and using in a very kind of creative way.
But I mean, it's challenging. Right. It's just like in
a way when you talk about the different types of
fiction and how the shorter you get, the harder it
is to write. So, for example, a good novel is
hard to write, a good novella is harder to write.
(06:03):
A good short story is really hard to write because
as you're restricting yourself, every single word counts even more
than it would in a longer form. So you've got
a six second movie, You've got to find a way
of saying what you want to say in six seconds
that really has an impact. And there's some people who
are really good at it. Oh yeah, yeah, And it's
also a terrific medium for for just main kind of stuff. Um,
(06:24):
that's that's short and easy. And I saw some really
cute ones this here. Yeah, I saw some great ones
as well. But you know, I I don't really feel
comfortable limiting myself to six seconds. I need a little
more than twice that, i'mount Is there anything out there
for me? Well? In June, actually Facebook kind of caught
up when they announced Instagram Video, right, that would allow
(06:48):
you to do fifteen seconds of video and see there
a lot of people were saying, you know, Facebook is
playing hardball here by not allowing Vine to live on
Facebook and instead having this competing product that could live
on Facebook. Meanwhile, Vine, of course, is doing quite well
on Twitter. So you've got these two giant social media
goliaths that are kind of, you know, trying to to
(07:11):
push the other one out of the picture. As it
turns out, I mean, I don't I don't know what
the figures are because I didn't look them up. All
I know is what my direct experience has been I've seen.
And maybe it's because I'm not a big Instagram person,
that's probably the main reason. But I've seen way more
Vine videos, and I've seen Instagram videos. I know more
people personally making Instagram videos than I do personally making
(07:33):
Vine videos. But overall, I have seen more propagation of Vine. Interesting.
So you know, this obviously is all anecdotal, So it
could very well be that, you know, and I mean,
there's way one of us is on the money here. Well,
those and and those are those are trends of two
you know, thirtiesome things who work in the tech sector,
and and so you know this grain assault, but so
(07:54):
what about you know, sticking with Facebook, they also in
January launched something that I don't had a lot of
buzz around it at the time. That was an interesting idea.
It was called graph search, and this would let you
use Facebook as a search engine to look for really
weird stuff. Like the examples they gave were always odd,
so uh. An example I said was, I want to
(08:16):
know what kind of music people who really enjoy planetarium's
happen to like, and I could do a search on that,
and Facebook has of course all that information of what
people have liked and you know anything. Yeah, so then
they would come back with well, people who said they
liked planetariums also said they really like you know, I
(08:37):
don't know Manner Asterman, which would make total sense that
that would be an example. But it's this kind of
deep graph search, whereas a social search kind of thing. Um.
I've only played with it a little bit and it
doesn't seem to work that well for me. But it
may just be that I'm using it wrong and then
I'm too old. I haven't. I haven't experimented with it
(08:59):
very much. But um, but I think that since the
trends of overall Facebook getting older, I've probably indicates that
it's not that you're too old. It's just that it's
not as functional as they had perhaps hoped it might be.
That's very kind of you to say. I'd like to
think that it's their fault, not mine. Also in January,
Canonical announced that they would bring Ubuntu, the Linux distro,
(09:20):
you know, it's a distribution of the Linux operating system.
They would bring it to the mobile platforms. They would
create a smartphone version of a Buntu in the near future.
That's the story would play out over two thousand thirteen,
and it was not a particularly successful story either. In July,
they announced a crowdfunding campaign to try and raise money
(09:41):
on I think it was Indie Go Go for what
they were calling the Ubuntu Edge, which would have been
the first smartphone to feature this operating system. However, they
hit a little bit of a roadblock. Yeah, they had
a thirty two million dollar goal and they only made
nineteen of that. Actually are they They fell short by
nineteen nineteen million dollars. I thought, I feel badly that
(10:03):
my kick started campaign didn't fund, But um I got
more than halfway to where I needed to be and
they didn't quite make that. So well, but that's still
I mean, they they still made. I mean, I'm having
a lot of trouble subtracting right now then. Um but
but I mean, but that's still you know what, like
like eleven million dollars that they raised. I'm just saying
that's not terrible. Yeah, no, it's they didn't they weren't
(10:26):
hunting for cash, but they didn't have enough to go
through with what they planned. Did some subtractions so hard? Yeah, well,
you know, we only like to add on tech stuff.
We hate taking stuff away. The Ubuntu Edge would have
been eight thirty dollars to buy outright if it had
come into existence now since then, back in December of
two thousand thirteen, Canonical announced that some other as yet
(10:50):
as of the recording of this podcast, and I should
say recording this on December twelve, so so and anything
that we get terribly weird of, especially towards the end,
that's one of the reasons we're also terribly weird people.
So that also plays the department. But anyway, Canonical has
said that some unnamed manufacturer would be producing the first
(11:11):
ubun two smartphones sometime in two thousand fourteen, and it
may very well be that by the time this podcast
goes live. We will know who that manufacturer is, but
as of the recording, we do not. Uh. And then
we have a very sad story to round out January
of two thousand thirteen, which was on January eleventh, two
thousand thirteen, Aaron Swartz committed suicide. Uh. Swartz was one
(11:36):
of the people who worked on Really Simple Syndication RSS. Uh.
He was. He was a hacker and an activist. He
was He was a deep member of all of these
communities that were based around the building of the Worldwide Web. Yeah.
He was very much involved in the development of Reddit.
He was very active with Creative Commons, and he was
a proponent of the idea that information wants to be free,
(11:59):
and in fact had been charged with breaking and entering
by m I T Campus police when he was using
unauthorized He was using a computer to download massive amounts
of documents from j Store, which is you know, you know,
it's a it's an academic um database of papers, and
(12:20):
presumably with the intent of distributing them freely, because information
wants to be free. Uh. He you know. M I
T eventually decided not to pursue charges, but the federal
government did not have that same point of view. They
actually when after sworts On on multiple charges under the
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act UH Sports, his lawyers offered
(12:44):
to have a plea bargain, but the prosecutors refused the
plea bargain. Yeah, they were being really I mean, and
the sentence that they were putting out there was thirty
five years in prison and about a million dollars in
five Yeah, and there were other you know, things tacked
onto there. This actually prompted a big discussion in the
tech world about whether or not the federal government was
(13:06):
trying to use sports as an example to try and
frighten other people by going after sports with such gusto
and refusing to do any sort of plea bargain. And UM,
two days after the denial of the plea bargain came through,
that's when Sports committed suicide. And it was this is
a very complicated issue. You can't just point a finger
(13:27):
and say because of this, this other thing happened. I mean,
it didn't stop people from trying. Oh absolutely, if you'd
like to learn more about sports and UM and all
of this this hubbub leading up to this tragic event.
In particular, UM, we did a memorial episode on February six.
That was during kind of my learning curve of the show.
I will warn you guys, right, Yeah, so there are
(13:49):
several of the stories we'll talk about kind of relate
back to some of the episodes we've done. I mean, obviously,
whenever anything really big happens, we like to try and
at least give some context to it on text. So
definitely check that one out. But now we're ready to
move on to February, which twenty eight days as a
rule are plenty. Yeah, February in this case, UM had
(14:13):
had the beginning of kind of the saga that Intel
went through during the course. Yeah, here's another one. Like
you know, BlackBerry had its own saga, Intel's had one,
although Intel's is is definitely different from Blackberries. Blackberries the
company that people are always kind of predicting that this
year will be the end of BlackBerry type thing. No
(14:34):
one's predicting that for Intel. But yeah, they had announced
in February at the All Things deconference that they were
going to be launching an Internet TV service by the
end of the year, and in July they had announced
that the name of the service was going to be
on que I didn't realize how quickly the story had developed.
I mean, I didn't realize it was only July when
(14:55):
they named it and now actually a month ago back
in Nova Member, they started looking to offload it. Yeah,
they're looking to try and sell it off to someone
for around five million dollars. And you might say, well,
why would a company in the very beginning of the
year say they're really going to push to get into
this world, this internet television world that no one has
(15:17):
yet really cracked. You know, You've got a lot of
big companies that are all vying for this, including Apple
and Google. Why would they say they really want to
do it? And then they kind of bailed on it.
And well, here's where the story is a little more complicated.
It's because the people who were in charge at the
end of the year were not the same people who
were in charge at the beginning of the year. Yes,
uh Ceo, Paul UHLINI thank you, I always I can
(15:42):
never say that, and yeah, well good luck on the
next one. Yeah, he stepped down and was replaced by
Brian Krisnitch. I'm gonna say it's Crescentitch, even though someone's
gonna tell me that that's an inappropriate pronunciation, but that's
what I'm going with. But yeah, it was, it was.
It was a move where I'm with two minds of this.
(16:02):
You know, I like seeing companies promote from within. I
think that that's a valuable thing to do. But there
were a lot of analysts who said that the problem
Intel faces is not that, you know, they are abusing
their their talent, it's that they have kind of adhered
to a similar strategy for so long that what's really
(16:22):
needed is some new blood to stir things up. And
they're look that as being a little bit old and
stagy in terms of management. Yeah. So, and Crecentag is
someone who has been with a company for more than
two decades. So when he stepped up a CEO, some
analysts were saying, well, this is a sign that Intel
is not ready to move forward. Uh and and some
(16:43):
have argued that the on q story where now they're
trying to sell off on q is, is evidence of that.
So that's where they are right now. Um, something else
happened in February. We got our first look at one
of the next generation consoles now current generation console. Right, Yeah,
Sony got the jump on Microsoft. There they announced the
(17:03):
PlayStation for at their own personal event in New York.
It was invitation only and I didn't get an invite,
so just follow along with all the live blogging. But yeah,
they showed off the system. They really stressed that the
system was for gamers, and that's going to be important
later on in the year when we move on to
the other big console. They talked about how the PlayStation
(17:25):
four would allow you to not only play games, but
share your experience. You know, you could stream stuff on
things like twitch tv. I think it was twitch TV,
and then they could all you could also, UH, at
least at some point, be able to hand over control
of your game to someone else. So if you just
can't get past that third level, if you just can't
get that boss fight, you can just pass. Everybody calling
(17:47):
Lauren up in the middle of the night. Lauren needed
to get past this guy for me. He keeps hitting
me on the head with a fish, and then she
would fix it for me, and then I could continue
to play UH and so owe me so many coffees
the next day. You'd be awake at three in the morning.
If I had said ten in the morning, Oh snap,
(18:09):
a little inside looking I guess that's just me anyway.
So Sony would go on to E three and uh
and after some pretty fierce competition between Sony and Microsoft.
I would say that most journalists by the end of
E three were at least some might say prematurely calling
Sony the winner. Yeah, I mean the winner. Yeah, so
(18:34):
um yeah, and then it did. It did pretty well
on its release, although I mean it's hard to compare
to the Xbox One is we'll talk about a little
bit later because Microsoft isn't really releasing numbers. But um,
but Sony has said that they sold a hundred I'm sorry,
I'm sorry, one million units um, and they were only
selling the console in two nations at that time. So yeah,
(18:54):
a good job for them. Uh. Next, we have one
of the spawns is of our show occasionally Netflix. Right,
they introduced their original series House of Cards. That was
the first original series that they had come out with. Yeah, yeah,
they and and of course the way Netflix does it
is different from the way you would watch a show
on TV. You know, on on television you get it
(19:16):
week after week, so you get one episode per week
and then you have to wait a week to see
the next one. Netflix said Okay, we've produced this series
and we're going to serve up the entire season at once,
so so you can you can already mainline it just
and you can just set aside a weekend and just
watch Kevin Spacey be progressively more and more nasty. I've
(19:37):
watched some of this and he is amazingly amoral in
this in this show. I haven't caught it yet, but
um but they did. They did release also following that,
um the next season of Arrested Development, and also the
first season of Orange is a New Black, which I
have not Oh it's so good. Um uh. And yeah,
(19:58):
there was overall a trend in of more companies doing
more original series on streaming video on demand. Yeah, Hulu
had already launched a couple of scripted series in two
thousand twelve, and they continued to do that in two
thousand thirteen, and Amazon Prime same thing. They had produced
a couple and they were working on more. So you
can see shows on all three of those services. And
(20:21):
those aren't the only three, but those are the three big. Yeah.
If you want to learn more about that, you can
see our episodes about streaming video on demand UMU. Primarily
videos in the stream which came out September. There you go.
So before we get onto the next half of the
first half of two thousand thirteen, I think I think
(20:43):
the Q two is really what you would say, they're
Q two. Okay, before we go on to Q two,
let's take a quick break to thank our sponsored all right,
let's march on with March of two thousand thirteen, and
Lauren judges me. Some things, by the way, remain consistent
throughout two thousand thirteen, including Lauren shaking her head and
just staring at me with disapproval. Hey, at least I
(21:04):
don't laugh uncontrollably anymore. I feel like that. Yeah, yeah, no,
just once she got over the the laughter thing, now
I just get the judging. So that's fine. That's my friend.
Matt refers to that as my laugh number twenty one,
nervous laugh number twenty one. Apparently I have a lot
of them. Mll It's good to be versatile. So moving
(21:25):
on to March two thousand thirteen, Um, what just really quickly,
T Mobile did something pretty pretty unheard of in the
four major carriers of cell phone services in the United States. Right,
Europe is gonna go like this is such old news
in the US, it was. It was pretty Uh, it's
like a Maverick move. Yeah, they introduced no contract service
(21:46):
plans yep, which uh, you know doesn't necessarily mean that
you would be better off with that versus a contract one.
It would be a case by case basis, but it
did mean that it suddenly, you know, US customers had
more options. So it needs to be seen how this
is going to affect the rest of the industry over
the next few years. But I'm very curious to see
if this move ends up being something that's transformative or
(22:08):
if it's just a little blip in the radar. Its
too early to say right now. And in other relatively
small news that made perhaps a bigger splash in our
personal lives, Google announced in March that it was going
to shut down Google Reader. Yeah. This is what caused
me to say, no, that's that is literally what he did,
like in the middle of the office. I'm pretty sure
(22:28):
it was pretty bad. Yeah, Um, that's that. That was
their RSS service. Yeah, that was if you wanted some
sort of RSS reader, this was one of the ones
that could work pretty well. You could divide it up
into different categories and stuff and there were plenty of
other options out there, oh yeah, and and Google suggested
many other good ones as replacements. Exactly, they weren't. They
were like, we understand that some of you are very
(22:49):
passionate about this, but the problem is that even with
all of your passion, you're still very few vocal minority. Yeah.
So it was one of those things where as a company,
I totally understand why they were doing this. They were saying,
you know, we've got a lot of projects. We have
to devote some attention to all of them, and it
makes more sense for us to go ahead and shut
down things that are not terribly successful so that we
(23:10):
can devote that kind of time and attention to something else,
which really, in the long run became sort of okay
because March was also the month that Google announced their
their beta of Google Glass. Yeah, Project Glass. You know,
it seems so weird, Like I imagine that because I
have a pair of these, Um, technically the office has
(23:31):
a pair of these. They're just in my possession. They
kind of reside with Jonathan most I turned into golem
with the ring he does. Yeah, very I've led a
couple of people wear them, But I get real ansy um.
But anyway, Project Glass was the it. You probably see them.
They're the glasses that have the little bitty cube on
them where you can use that as a screen and
(23:53):
take pictures with them, take video. We do some apps
to navigation, some web search connects by a bluetoo their WiFi,
a little bit of a vocal command in there, so
that you don't say, okay glass to take a picture,
take a video, record a video, recorded video, take a
picture yet. Yeah, because I had a lot of fun
with that a dragon con. I went drunken and people
will be like, you took my picture with the future,
(24:15):
and I'm like, yes, I did. So I think I
think Jonathan got more people coming up to him to
ask they could take a picture of him taking a
picture of something with his Google Glass. Yeah. Yeah, I
was not the celebrity in that room. Google Glass was
the celebrity anyway. Yeah. It's it's a program that has
recently opened up a little bit more. They've allowed some
of the pioneers of the Google Beta program to uh
(24:39):
invite a couple of other people to join. So I
think it's it's either two or three. I haven't received
the email myself. Yet, but it's two or three people
that you can then extend an invitation to and then
they have the option to join, although that option comes
with a pretty hefty price tag. Yeah, it's all for
a headset, pretty expensive stuff. And it is still a
(25:02):
prototype version. This is absolutely not a consumer level. No.
I understand that it's an updated version of the headset,
but it's still it's still kind of a beta headset.
It's not not meant to be the kind that you
would get, assuming this ever becomes an actual consumer product,
the ones that you'll see in stores will probably look
a little different. Um. And then there's a Kickstarter story
(25:23):
we have to cover. It's we don't have to, but
I thought it'd be interesting. So, you know, kickstarters mostly
meant for for or we tend to think of kickstars
being meant for people who for a small independent projects. Yeah,
some artists who want to get something a project off
the ground, or maybe it would be entrepreneur who needs
a little starting capital but has a really strong idea.
(25:43):
But in this case, it was creators of a cult
television show that had a passionate but relatively small following,
that show being Veronica Mars. They decided to hold a
Kickstarter campaign with the goal of raising two million dollars
so that they could produce a Veronica Mars movie that
would be set approximately the same number of years after
(26:06):
the series it ended as actual time had passed. Uh,
And it met that initial goal in eleven hours. Yeah,
and then eventually raised five point seven millions, so they
went above what they their original projection was. By the way,
a two million dollar budget for a movie is incredibly small.
I'm wondering, and I wondered then, and I still wonder now.
If the kick started campaign was less about raising money
(26:29):
and more about demonstrating that there is an audience for
that particular film, I would strongly suspect that they're going
to get investment from other sources. Yeah. I can't imagine
that they're able to even complete a full thirty minutes
on two million dollars. I'm sure. I'm sure that they could.
If they really wanted to mus be like the Veronica
Mars Suck puppet Show, it would be the light version. UM.
(26:52):
Also in March of this year, UM Facebook CEO Cheryl
Sandberg published her book Lean In, which was kind of
uh follow up piece to a Ted talk that she
had done back in I believe, um, and and this
is this is more of a women in industry sort
of thing than a tech news thing in particular. But
you know, Sandberg is is the leader of one of
(27:13):
tech's biggest companies. And so therefore the publication of a
book about what it's like to be a woman in
tech and and a woman in big business is is
a is a pretty big thing. And it's and it's
a big issue, um, you know, especially when you consider
the kind of dismal percentages of women in tech and
women in leadership. I did. I did a guest episode
of a run Stuff Mom Never Told Use Stems series
(27:35):
on November six, if you want to go check that out.
But um, but yeah, it's like only like a quarter
of professional computing occupations in the US are held by women,
and um, only twenty of of chief information officer positions
at the at the fortune to fifty companies are held
by women. And so you know, these are these are
big things, and and the trends are not seeming to
(27:57):
get better right now. So so I think it's really
cool that you published this. Then it became a huge
news item, right because that could potentially inspire other women
to go into a field that that traditionally they might
feel like there's some social or cultural pressures to keep
them out, when in reality we benefit from being able
(28:17):
to take advantage of talent, no matter where that talent
might fall across the field. Of course, yeah, and and
and at the very least encourage more discussion about the
issue and why this is, yes, exactly, raising awareness is
a great thing. Moving on to April, we only have
one item for April because it's a foolish month. We
(28:37):
don't like to spend a lot of time there. But
but it but it was a Google thing and pretty Google. Yeah,
I mean it made me wish that it was a
different town with an that starts with a that they
had talked about Google is moving Google Fiber into Austin, Texas,
and in fact, you know they're already doing that now,
but that this was back when they announced that that
(28:58):
was going to be the next city they were targeting. Right,
Initially it had only been in Kansas City. Yeah, both
Kansas cities, but yes, because there are two of them
way by a river. But yes, yes, Kansas City was
the initial proving grounds of Google Fiber in Austin, Texas,
out of all the different places in the United States,
was the next one. So keep Austin weird at an
(29:19):
incredibly high download rates. So for all my friends in Austin,
I hope you enjoy your one gigabit per second download speed. Yeah. Meanwhile,
I will continue to make smoke signals at the top
of my house in hopes of connecting to Gmail. Moving
on to May. So, uh oh boy, you remember doing
(29:41):
this podcast? Yeah? Okay, So this company called Defense Distributed,
I mean, and and and really mostly this guy named
Cody Wilson, who was the founder of Defense Distributed, figured
out he designed a three D printed gun only used
one um like basically a hardware store nail to pin
everything together and everything else was something that you could print,
(30:04):
assuming you had the the appropriately sophisticated three D printer
and and the appropriate plastics to use it, because if
you were to use weaker plastics, you could have a
catastrophic failure of your of your weapon, which could cause
injury or death. All right, we we did a whole
episode about that on May twenty two, and um and
I was, I mean, I remember being fond of it.
(30:26):
I haven't listened to it in a minute. But there
was a lot of really interesting information and press about
all of this, and it was a firing pin, not
like some kind of like lynch pin of the gun
I miss spoke a moment ago. But it was funny
because I remember in that episode we certainly didn't give
Cody Wilson much quarter. And I haven't felt a lot
differently since then. I understand at least what his expressed
(30:48):
motivations were. And I mean, I I get it, and
it's not like it's not like it's a world we
live in now where we can somehow take that away.
It was going to happen sooner or later. And I
think that it was an interesting political statement. Um. I
I kind of do appreciate the um anarchist sort of
bent of it, of of just going like, no, really,
you need to be paying attention to this technology because
(31:10):
this is in fact what it can do. Yeah. I
just wish he had been a little less cavalier about
the whole thing, because that that kind of rubbed me
the wrong way. I was like, I get off my lawn,
don't shoot me. Um. But yeah, since then, we've seen
some other developments. For example, there's a company called Solid
Concepts that printed a three D gun in metal, not
(31:31):
in plastic, showing that they you could actually do this
with again, uh sophisticated three D printer. Obviously, the metal
ones are not ones that you're going to find the
consumer market. These are right right, and I mean even
the plastic ones that you would need for something like
this around like ten dollars and they're talking pretty expensive.
You could probably buy a lot more guns traditionally, yeah,
(31:51):
or even rent one for for more choply than that.
And then Philadelphia is the first city in the United
States that has passed legislation banning the printing of guns
within that city. Although how they would ever expect to
actually yeah, how I don't know if it's an enforceable law.
Maybe they can work together with the n s A
and creep on people a lot, right, The n s
(32:13):
A knows everything you're printing, so you know, it can
just be a little tag team. They just can't. They
just can't let it be known that they found out
from the n s A because the n s A
is supposed to be for four and each We'll talk
more about the n s A later. So May it
was also the month when the other big console company
announced their entry into the war for the next generation
(32:33):
of consoles. Right, Microsoft finally unveiled their Xbox one. Yep,
so they first they put to bed the whole idea
of it being called Xbox seven twenty, which is good
because one of their initial ideas. Yeah, those of us
who have trouble with math would rapidly have problems in
a couple of generations. I'm referring to myself with that,
by the way. So Microsoft unveils Xbox One, and mostly
(32:57):
at that first event when they first unveiled it, they
weren't really looking at the games so much. Yeah, unlike
PlayStation's uh idea for their launch, they were really talking
about all of the other media center factors that that
they were planning, right, Yeah, things like being able to
control your cable box and and have some interactivity with
things like sports. Sports played a big role in that
(33:18):
initial announcement, including things like getting stats on players in
real time that kind of stuff. And also they talked
a lot about the the kind of peripheral abilities of
the console, specifically the new version of Connect with all
the voice and gesture controls, but not so much on games.
It wouldn't be until E three before Xbox really started
(33:41):
talking about the games that would be coming out for
that system. And unfortunately, also at E three, they made
a few announcements that were very unpopular amongst the gaming public. Yeah,
the big one being that the Xbox One was going
to require a persistent connection to the Internet or else
it would not work, and people like that it needed
to phone home like once a day or some thing
like that in order to you know, confirm that you
(34:03):
were still using entirely up and up software and then
you hadn't stolen anything, right that that all the copies
of everything you were running and actually belonged to you
weren't being used by someone else, that kind of thing,
and people objected to it. They said, well, you know,
not everyone has a persistent Internet connection and they want
to buy your product, but they can't use it. And
eventually Microsoft ended up backing down on a lot of
(34:25):
those initial stances, and um, they also said that as
a result of making those concessions, some of the features
they had planned for the Xbox would no longer work
because they required that first element that they had backed
off on, and that got people upset too. And I'm like, well,
you can't win, guys. You gotta you have to be like, well,
either I'm okay with all of it, or I'm okay
(34:47):
that a lot of it goes away if they take
away the one thing that I really hate. I I
think that they probably could have found workarounds for some
of those, and that some some of those workarounds might
still be coming in the next several months. But these
are these are things that they may find a way
of implementing in in other ways further down the line.
I mean, just like the PS four, the Xbox one
(35:07):
doesn't have the full functionality they talked about. Yeah, although
it did sell the same one million units in twenty
four hours that the PS four did. Yeah, it's just
they I think they were in eleven countries and not
just two. So I mean, so it's it's and yeah,
and they're being a little bit more squirrely about their numbers.
Like I think I said earlier, they did at one
point say like in in eighteen days, we sold something
(35:31):
like more than two million units, or essentially they were
saying that the sales were exceeding their expectations, and so
they weren't being so upfront with exactly what their expectations were.
But yeah, they're selling quite well, probably from what I
can tell mostly this is anecdotal, probably not as well
as the PS four at least initially. But you know,
(35:52):
these things are going in. This is a long tail
type of game, and it's gonna We're gonna have to
see when, especially yeah, since since a lot of the
games that they're talking about being really hot are not
going to be out until at the earliest, right right.
I like the games that are the launch titles for
both of these consoles are I've mentioned this before. They're
not games that particularly strike me as you know, must have. Yeah,
(36:16):
so there's none of them. None of them are the
killer apps. So I'm still waiting. Um. Moving on, Yahoo
bought Tumbler for one point one billion dollars, which is
so much money. I mean, I mean not the Tumbler
isn't worth it. I think it's a very up and
coming um social media platform. Absolutely, and uh and everyone
(36:36):
on Tumbler was really, really, really worried about this because
the image of Tumbler is young and hip and silly
and and full of irreverence, full of reverence. Yeah, and
and the image of Yahoo is basically the polar opposite
of all of that. Yes, the company that has the
name Yahoo with an exclamation mark at the end of
it is just a bunch of old fuddy duddies. What
(37:00):
it's not international business machine people, come on not. Nonetheless,
there was some concern, especially considering the way that Yahoo
has in the past handled a lot of it's large,
large design decisions and commenting decisions. And I mean, I
think Yahoo was the original site on which I decided
(37:21):
that I can't read comments on the Internet anymore. I
can understand that. Yeah, And to be fair, the Yahoo
executives have all said that they have no plans of
screwing up Tumbler and doing anything different. But as long
as it's just a change in ownership but not a
change in administration, than things should go pretty well. But
we're gonna wrap up this first episode about a look
(37:42):
back on two thousand thirteen with possibly the biggest story
of We wish we could save this for the end
of the last episode, but it happened in the middle
of the year, so we've got to talk about it.
It's it's the only one that I referred to in
my notes entirely in caps lock about Yeah, okay, So
what we're clearly talking about is when Steve will Hit
(38:04):
actually explained how his invention the graphics interchange format, how
you were supposed to pronounce the acronym uh and it's jeff,
which is wrong, and I won't do it. No, it's right.
That is so right. That's the only clear way to
say it. Gift, gift is gift because if you put
a T at the end, it'd be gift. It wouldn't
(38:25):
be jift. Jeff is a peanut butter gif is graphic.
Gift sounds ridiculous, jiffun graphic, gift graphic it makes sense,
Jeff graphic. No, you don't have graphics. I have graffics.
Do you have a park for him? Welcome to Giraffic Park. Alright. So, anyway,
(38:46):
that wraps up this first episode of our look back
on twirteen. Tune in next time when we find out
what happened at the end of the year. So we're
gonna wrap this up. If you guys have any suggestions
for future topics of tech stuff, if you have a
specific technology wants to talk about a company, or if
any of these things that we have not gone in
depth about you'd like to hear more on. Yeah, maybe
you're like, Hey, I really want to have a full
(39:09):
minute discussion about gift versus Jeff. Let us know if
you are that person, Write us an email. Our address
is tech stuff at Discovery dot com, or drop us
a line on Tumbler, Twitter, or Facebook. You can find
us with the handle text stuff hs W and Lauren
and I will talk to you again really soon for
(39:32):
more on this and thousands of other topics. Does it
have staff works dot com
TechStuff News
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Karah Preiss
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