Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/01 – Bluesky Launches

Episode Date: March 1, 2023

Decentralized social network Bluesky launches in the iOS App Store. TikTok adds wellbeing feature for families and kids. You know about eSIMs but say hello to iSIMs. Meta's entire four-year AR/VR roadmap. And I’m still banging the drum on laptops and smartphones where you can unroll the screen for more real estate. Sponsors: RelationshipHero.com/techmeme Links: Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter alternative Bluesky hits the App Store as an invite-only app (TechCrunch) Republican Bill That Gives Biden Power to Completely Ban TikTok Passes House Committee Super Fast (Gizmodo) TikTok rolls out new screen time controls, adds new default settings for teens and expands Family Pairing (TechCrunch) Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 phones are the first to support built-in 'iSIMs' (Engadget) This is Meta’s AR/VR hardware roadmap for the next four years (The Verge) Lenovo’s rollable laptop and smartphone are a compelling, unfinished pitch for the future (The Verge) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, March 1st, 2023. I'm Brian McCullough today. Decentralized social network, Blue Sky launches in the iOS app store. Tick-Tock adds well-being features for families and kids. You know about e-sims, but let me tell you about I-Sims. Meta's entire four-year AR-VR roadmap has leaked, and I'm still banging the drum on laptops and smartphones where you can unroll the screen for more real estate. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Social Network, Blue Sky, has officially launched in the iOS App Store as an invite-only beta. Twitter started Blue Sky in 2019 and spun off the project in 2022, and let me take this time to

editorialize just a bit. Nothing says decentralized like having a waitlist, right? Quoting TechCrunch. Blue Sky, the Twitter alternative backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and more testers are gaining access, though the app is still only. available as an invite-only beta, its app store arrival signals that a public launch could be nearing. We haven't heard much from Blue Sky since October 2022 when the team behind the project shared an update on the Blue Sky blog detailing the status of the social protocol that powers its new Twitter-like app, also called Blue Sky. A-T, originally called ADX or authenticated transfer protocol, is Blue Sky's main effort, while the Blue Sky mobile app serves to showcase the

protocol in action. Similar to the activity pub protocol that powers Mastodon, AT offers the means of creating a federated and decentralized social network. However, there's been some criticism of the project, notably from Mastodon and other developers who pointed out that activity pub, a recommended W3C standard, already powers a large and growing Fedaverse of interconnected devices. And that Fediverse has been gaining traction following Musk's Twitter acquisition as users left the micro-blogging network to try the open-source decentralized alternative mastodon. The latter has also benefited from the work of former Twitter third-party app developers who have since rolled out polished mastodon clients, like Ivory and Mammoth, most recently. Other companies have also committed to, or at least disgust

embracing the activity pub standard, including Flipboard, which announced its plans today as well as medium, tumbler, and possibly Flickr. Where that leaves Blue Sky's future is unclear. The Blue Sky Project, now a public benefit company, had originally been incubated within Twitter starting in 2019 when Jack Dorsey served as CEO. Twitter also provided its financial backing for years, though its founding was well ahead of the company's sale to current owner Elon Musk. The two execs, more recently, had discussed the idea of an open source protocol over text messages ahead of Musk's Twitter acquisition. In those texts, Dorsey explained to Musk that, quote, a new platform is needed, it can't be a company, this is why I left Twitter, end quote. Now the

Blue Sky app is out publicly and some users are being invited to try it. According to App Intelligence Data Firm Data AI, the Blue Sky iOS app debuted on February 17th and has somewhere north of 2000 installs. Given its invite-only status, this likely represents only the newly added beta testers at this time. The app isn't yet ranking on any top charts in the U.S., and it's not available on Google Play. We received an invite to the service and found it to be functional, if still rather bare bones, but a Twitter-like experience. Users create a handle, which is then represented as at username. Dot B-S-K-Y dot social, as well as the display name that appears more prominently in bold text, as on Twitter.

As a brand new app, Blue Sky's suggested user list didn't immediately impress with big names of public figures during onboarding. Macedon, meanwhile, has managed to attract more high-profile individuals in the wake of the Musk-prompted Twitter Exodus by comparison. The app itself presents a simplified user interface where you can click a plus-border. button to create a post of 256 characters, which can include photos. Though unlike Macedon, it doesn't prompt you for alt text for accessibility's sake. Where Twitter asks what's happening, Blue Sky asks what's up, end quote. The House Foreign Affairs Committee has voted 24 to 16 to give President Joe Biden the power to ban TikTok and other apps. Committee Democrats oppose the bill, and I think it still needs to get through all of Congress to get to the president's desk, and that

might be unlikely, but quoting Gizmodo, a fast-tracked vague Republican bill granting the Biden administration the ability to impose a nationwide TikTok ban moved a step closer toward legality on Tuesday after passing a vote in the House Foreign Affairs Committee. The sweeping new legislation, if passed into law, would grant the Biden administration the ability to totally ban TikTok or other foreign software companies believed to be involved in the transfer of, quote, sensitive data. Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, say the slipshod bill, Introduced just five days ago was haphazardly written and could potentially open scores of other benign apps to potential bans. Democrats on the committee strongly opposed the bill during arguments and amendments with ranking member Representative Gregory Meeks of New York,

claiming the unvetted overbroad bill, quote, causes more problems than it corrects. These are not just bad policies. They would actively undermine our national security, Meeks said. Republican lawmakers' intense obsession with banning TikTok could potentially inch this bill past the House, but clearing the Democrat's Senate majority is another story, with few Democrats likely willing to sign onto such an expansive broad bill, the so-called Data Act, will likely be reduced to the increasingly cluttered garbage bin of killed TikTok bans, end quote. But speaking of TikTok, TikTok has added new well-being features for teens and others, including screen time controls, default settings for

younger users, and expanded family pairing. Quoting TechCrunch, every account belonging to a user or under the age of 18 will soon automatically be set to a 60-minute daily screen time limit. Once the 60-minute limit is reached, teens will be asked to enter a passcode in order to keep scrolling. For users of TikTok's under 13 experience, the daily screen time limit will also be set to 60 minutes. If the screen time limit is reached, a parent or guardian will need to set or enter an existing passcode to enable 30 more minutes of watch time. The app will prompt teens to set a daily screen time limit if they turn off the daily 60-minute default and spend more than 100 minutes on TikTok in a day. In the company's first month of testing, it found that this approach increased

the use of its screen time management tools by 234%. TikTok will also send every teen account a weekly inbox notification with a recap of their screen time. TikTok is also adding new features to its family pairing tool, which lets parents link their account to their teens to enable content and privacy settings. Most notably, the company said it's in the early stages of developing a way for caregivers to filter videos with words or hashtags they don't want their teen to watch. TikTok is in the process of working with parenting, youth, and civil society organizations to design this feature. In addition, caregivers are now able to use family pairing to customize the daily screen time limit for their teen, including the option to select different time limits depending

on the day of the week. For instance, you can allow your teen to have more screen time during the weekends and holidays while restricting screen time during weekdays. The company is also bringing its screen time dashboard to family pairing. The dashboard includes information about how much time a teen spent on the app during the day and night, along with stats about how many times they opened the app. TikTok says that by providing this information to caregivers directly, they will be able to guide their teens, end quote. Qualcomm and Thales have announced the certification of the first commercially deployable iSIMs, putting e-sim-like functionality directly into a phone's main processor. coding and gadget. Never mind e-sims, your next phone might have a more advanced way to connect you to your

carrier. Qualcomm and Thales have confirmed the certification of the first user-ready integrated sim or iSim. It promises the same card-free digital sign-ups and security as ESIMs, but is built directly into a phone's main processor. Your phone doesn't need a dedicated chip, saving space, and hopefully money. The companies don't say which phones will be the first to use ISIMs. The technology supports the same remote provisioning standard as ESIMs, however. Your provider won't necessarily need to update its systems to support ISIM-based devices. There's no guarantee phone makers will pass any savings along to you, though. The reduced footprint could make room for slightly larger batteries and other components. More importantly, this might encourage more manufacturers to use

digital sims by making the tech easier to implement. With that said, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 is a high-end platform. You may not see wider adoption until more affordable chips, and thus lower-priced phones offer iSIM support. The timing is convenient, at least. Many phones now include ESIM support, while American iPhone 14 and 14 Pro models don't have physical SIM trays. The conventional SIM card is on the decline, and ISIM could hasten that transition by making its virtual counterpart, more commonplace, end quote. The Verge has seen what it believes to be Meta's internal four-year AR-VR Roadmap, which includes three Quest headsets, smart glasses with a display, and a neural interface smartwatch in 2025, followed by AR glasses in 27. Quote, the details were shared with thousands

of employees in Meta's Reality Labs division on Tuesday during a roadmap presentation of its AR and VR efforts that was shared with the Verge. Altogether, they show how Meta is planning to keep investing in consumer hardware after a series of setbacks and broader cost cutting across the company. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment for this story. With regards to the VR roadmap, employees were told that Meta's flagship Quest 3 headset coming later this year will be two times thinner, at least twice as powerful, and costs slightly more than the $400 Quest 2. Like the recently announced Quest Pro, it will prominently feature mixed reality experiences that don't fully immerse the wearer thanks to front-facing cameras that pass through video of the real world.

Meta has sold nearly 20 million Quest headsets to date. Mark Rabkin, the company's Vice President for VR told employees during the presentation, end quote. Finally today, a check-in from Mobile World Congress, I still want screen innovation, y'all. I'm still banging this particular drum. So let me introduce you to a laptop and a phone, both from Lenovo, where you can expand the screens by unrolling them. Quote, before we get into the concept laptop's signature feature, it's worth pointing out just how unassuming the device looks before its screen unrolls. Lenovo had the device sitting alongside its other laptops in a comfort suite, and not a single one of the dozen or so journalists in attendance clocked that it was anything other than a standard think pad. In its unextended form, it's got a regular-looking 12.7-inch display with a 4x3 aspect ratio.

That all changes with a flip of a small switch on the right of the chassis, at which point you can hear some motors whirring and the screen extends upwards. That switch causes a couple of motors in the laptop to spring into action, pulling the screen out, from underneath the laptop's keyboard to hoist it up, more or less vertically in front of you. It's an admittedly slow process on this concept device. From our footage, it seemed to take a little over 10 seconds to fully extend, but eventually you're left with an almost square, 15.3-inch display with an 8x9 aspect ratio. The device brings to mind LG's fancy and eye-wateringly expensive rollable TV that's designed to roll away when you're not using it.

Only in Lenova's case, the screen is rolling down into the last. laptop's keyboard rather than a small box, and it also can't roll away entirely. Once fully extended, Lenova's laptop screen has a small crease where its screen originally bent underneath the keyboard, but again, it's a prototype. In terms of resolution, the screen is 2024 by 1604 when it's in small mode, and 2024 by 2368 when fully extended. So in theory, at least, it's pretty usable without having to fully extend the display. The screen is supplied by Sharp, which is also the company Lenovo worked with on its ThinkPad X1 foldable laptops. Display competitor Samsung Display also has announced its working on rollable laptop displays with Intel, but its prototype didn't appear

to have a keyboard attached. When fully unrolled, Lenovo's rollable laptop has a weirdly tall display with an 8x9 aspect ratio, which the company points out is like having 2 16 by 9 displays on top of one another. It's not dissimilar to the dual screen Yoga Book 9i. We tried out at CES, and which is due to release in June, it's a form factor that should be useful for anyone who struggles to work on a single small laptop display and has considered buying an external display, or indeed an iPad, to work as a portable second monitor. Despite how polished the device looked in our demo, Lenovo is clearly nowhere near ready to release its rollable concept as a consumer-ready device.

I asked about durability, and Lenovo would only say that it's aiming to get 20,000 to 30,000 rolls the same ballpark as its foldable thinkpad X1. I admit this doesn't sound like much compared to the hundreds of thousands of folds that foldable smartphones tend to be rated for, but I guess you unfold and fold a laptop less regularly throughout a workday. The company was not forthcoming about how many roles the prototype can currently survive. Lenovo's other rollable device, it's demoing at Mobile World Congress, is a Motorola smartphone.

We've seen numerous companies including Samsung, Display, Oppo, TCL, and even LG, show off rollable concept devices in various stages of development over the years, but we've yet to see the technology breakthrough in a consumer device. Like a foldable, the idea is that a rollable smartphone can be small when you need it to be portable and big when you need more screen to get the job at hand done. Linowa's phone, which it's calling the Motorola Rollable smartphone concept, is all about taking a small square of a display and making it longer. It's almost like a foldable flip phone, but without a secondary cover display because it's the same screen the entire time. When all neatly rolled up, Lenovo's Motorola Rollable offers a 5-inch display with a 15-9 aspect ratio. Then with a small

double-tap of a side button, the screen unfurls to give you a remarkably tall 6.5-inch display with a 22-9 aspect ratio. Lenovo gets a lot of mileage out of this seemingly simple design. There are the obvious use cases like being able to watch a video at its native aspect ratio with no black bars or getting a larger screen when you want to write an email. Lenova's idea is that the phone will automatically adjust its screen to better suit different apps, and it hopes the final version will let users customize how big they want the screen to be for each use case. There are also some less obvious elements of the device because the rollable screen is rolling around the bottom of the phone, rather than disappearing inside its chassis. You're left with a small secondary display on its back when it's rolled up.

Software features for this include using it as a viewfinder when you're taking selfies with the phone's rear cameras. Lenova also has included a feature where the rear display plays cute eye-catching animations to get a child to look at the phone when you want to take a photo of them. That said, if the cover display on foldable flip phones from the likes of Samsung and Apo are anything to go by, finding genuinely useful things for diminutive screens like this can be a challenge. Another cool touch is that the display can hide the selfie camera and earpiece and rolls down to reveal them when you make a phone call or go to take a selfie. Like with the laptop, the Motorola rollable smartphone concept is a proof of concept, and there were a lot of questions Lenovo didn't have answers to, like how many rolls the screen can survive. There's no wording on price, and not even a hint on when the device could get a release. I wasn't given the opportunity to hold or use the device myself, end quote.

Nothing for you today. Talk to you tomorrow.