Tech Brew Ride Home - Wed. 03/16 – NFTs Coming To Instagram “Soon”

Episode Date: March 16, 2022

Meta has a new Family Center to keep kids monitored. Zuck says NFTs are coming to Instagram “soon.” Google’s Stadia strategy is coming into focus, and it’s interesting. Is Vimeo threatening longtime users to pay up? And a review of the latest iPad Air iteration. Sponsors: RocketLawyer.com/workconfidently IPVanish.com/techmeme and promocode techmeme for 70% savings Links: Instagram rolls out new safety tools for parents (TechCrunch) Mark Zuckerberg confirms NFTs are coming to Instagram (Engadget) Google casually announces Steam for Chrome OS is coming in alpha for select Chromebooks (9to5Google) Google Stadia is subtly reinventing itself to attract new games and gamers (The Verge) Microsoft says Windows 11 File Explorer ads were ‘not intended to be published externally’ (The Verge) Vimeo is telling creators to suddenly pay thousands of dollars — or leave the platform (The Verge) APPLE IPAD AIR (2022) REVIEW: IT’S THE NICE ONE (The Verge) FC Barcelona agree to sponsorship deal with Spotify, will rebrand stadium as 'Spotify Camp Nou' (CBS Sports) 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 TechMeme right home for Wednesday, March 16th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough today. Meta has a new Family Center to keep kids monitored. Zuck says NFTs are coming to Instagram soon. Google's Stadia Strategy is coming into focus and it's kind of interesting. Is Vimeo threatening longtime users to pay up? And a review of the latest iPad air iteration. Here's what you miss today in the world of tech. Meta has announced Family Center, a centralized hub of safety tools for parents, to supervise kids' activity across all of META's apps, rolling out right now for Instagram, quoting TechCrunch.

The new set of supervision features lends parents and guardians some crucial transparency into young users' Instagram habits. The tools will allow parents to monitor how much time a kid spends on the app, be updated about accounts they've followed lately, and who has followed them, and received notifications about any accounts they've reported. Those tools will roll out immediately on Instagram and are on the way, to Meta's VR platform in May and the rest of Meta's apps, remember Facebook, sometime in the coming months. The company characterizes the tools as, quote, the first step in a long-term journey,

though why it took so long to take these initial measures to protect teens from the unsavory side of its software, is less clear. For the time being, teenage Instagram users will have to enable the safety tools from within their own accounts, though the company says the option for parents to initiate the supervision mode will be implemented by June. Instagram also plans to build out more controls, including a way for parents to restrict app usage to certain hours and a setting that would allow multiple parents to co-supervise an account. In the last year, Instagram has faced intense scrutiny over its lack of robust safety features designed to protect young users. It technically doesn't allow anyone under the age of 13 to sign up for the app, though there are few

obstacles preventing kids from using social media. Instagram previously announced that it would apply AI and machine learning to the problem of making sure its users are 13 and older, but the company knows that children and tweens still easily find their way onto the app, end quote. Speaking of Instagram, Mark Zuckerberg said yesterday, NFT support will be coming to Instagram over the next several months and that users will, quote, be able to mint things within that environment, quoting in gadget. Speaking at South by Southwest, Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that digital collectibles would be arriving

on Instagram. We're working on bringing NFTs to Instagram in the near term, he said. He didn't detail exactly how that would take shape, but suggested people would be able to show off their existing NFTs and potentially mint new ones. I'm not ready to kind of announce exactly what's going to be today, but over the next several months, the ability to bring some of your NFTs in, hopefully over time be able to mint things within that environment, end quote. Speaking Tuesday, Zuckerberg also said that NFTs could one day play a role in the company's eventual metaverse, quote, I would hope that, you know, the clothing that your avatar is wearing in the metaverse, you know, can be basically minted as an NFT and you can take it between your

different places, he said. There's like a bunch of technical things that need to get worked out before that will really be seamless to happen, end quote. Google says that the gaming platform Steam has launched in Alpha on Select Chromebooks. Code changes previously showed that the PC Game Store would require a high-performance Chromebook to work. Quoting 9 to 5 Google, Google specifically said that the, quote, Steam Alpha just launched, making this longtime PC game store available on Select Chromebooks for users to try, end quote. That said, no other details appear to be live this morning, but we did reveal the device list last month.

As we noted at the time, at a minimum, your Chromebook needs to have an 11th-gen-I-Core I-5 or I-7 processor and a minimum of 7 gigabytes of RAM. This eliminates almost all Chromebooks, but those in the upper mid-range and high-end. This effort to let users play Steam games on Chromebook is codenamed Borealis. The plan was revealed by a Googler in January 2020, but the company has been relatively silent about it since. Google said today, you can, quote, check that out on the Chromebook Community Forum, end quote. We've reached out to the company for more details,

end quote. So playing Steam games on Chrome, cool. But this was more interesting to me. Google also revealed further details surrounding its Stadia plans, including letting developers offer trials, porting Unreal Engine and Unity games more easily to Stadia, while White Label Cloud Gaming Services will also be a thing. That last bit is what's super interesting. Imagine if you could publish a game yourself and anyone could play it anywhere without it necessarily being on any platform. Sort of like how Fortnite currently operates or Genshin Impact, but on steroids? Imagine clicking a link in a YouTube video and being able to instantly demo the full gameplay of a game. Along with that ease of portability news, it seems that the strategy Google is pursuing now with Stadia is basically

trying to become the development and distribution platform for all gaming developers. developers, quoting Sean Hollister in The Verge. The pitch, in short, sounds like this. For developers, it's free and easy to bring your games to Google's cloud platform and put them in front of anyone instantly. For gamers, Stadia is now a place to browse games you might like to try before you buy, no risk whatsoever. And if you like what you're playing, you can continue playing it as long as you like, wherever you like, for one simple payment at the end of your free trial, end quote. Is Microsoft putting ads in the middle of Windows an inevitability? It seems they might already have done this accidentally. Microsoft says an ad in Windows 11 File Explorer, quote, was not intended to be published externally and was turned off after a Microsoft MVP found the ad in the latest build, quoting the verge.

This was an experimental banner that was not intended to be published externally and was turned off, says Brandon LeBlanc, Senior Program Manager for Windows in a statement to the verge. While the ads weren't intended to be tested externally, it's clear Microsoft is capable of running them inside Windows 11, and the company's brief statement doesn't rule out ads appearing in the File Explorer in the future. This isn't the first time Microsoft has placed ads inside File Explorer either. The software maker added a large banner ad to the Windows 10 File Explorer in 2017, promoting subscription options for its OneDrive cloud storage service.

While the ads can be easily dismissed, there's still a frustrating experience in an operating system that's traditionally been ad-free. Microsoft has been experimenting with ads inside Windows for a decade now. It already places ads on the Windows 10 lock screen and in the start menu, and there have been plenty of instances of annoying pop-up ads in the task bar, too. Lots of Windows 8's built-in apps also had ads inside them, end quote. Yeah, and Apple has gotten really bad about spamming you for Apple Fitness or ICloud or a whole slew of things. in iOS. And if you dare to open the music app in macOS, you'll get spammed to join Apple Music. Why do you know this, Brian? Like who opens Apple Music? Nay, iTunes anymore. Well, see, that's one of the reasons I was happy to stop editing the metadata on the podcast episodes. Quick note that Foxcon

says it has received approval from Chinese authorities to partially reopen to Shenzhen campuses that it had closed on Monday, one of which makes iPhones, of course. Several Patreon creators say Vimeo is forcing them to pay thousands of dollars per year for a custom plan as Vimeo is shifting its focus to large corporate clients. Quoting the Verge Lois Van Barley, a digital artist based in the Netherlands, joined Vimeo 13 years ago as a student studying animation, back when it was still an indie creator platform. When Van Barley started making subscriber-only Patreon content in 2020,

Vimeo seemed like the best option for hosting her videos. Patreon itself didn't offer video hosting, and YouTube didn't have the same features to protect her work, like controlling where her videos could be embedded. I was already paying $200 a year, which I think is pretty expensive, Van Barley says, but I thought, well, it's a quality platform. She's uploaded 117 subscriber-only videos so far, and each one only gets around 150 views on average, Van Barley says. her most viewed video has around 815 views. So the notice Vimeo sent Van Barley on March 11th shocked her. Her bandwidth usage was within the top 1% of Vimeo users, the company said, and if she wanted to keep hosting her content on the site, she'd need to upgrade to a custom plan. Her quoted price, $3,500 a year. She was given a week to upgrade her content, decrease her bandwidth usage, or leave Vimeo.

Van Barley is far from alone in her experience. Several Patreon creators have received the same message from Vimeo in recent months, causing a tailspin of confusion and panic over potentially losing their video work. The ultimatums to indie video creators come as Vimeo is shifting focus toward large corporate clients, leaving longtime Vimeo users to scramble for an alternative. Vimeo bandwidth usage is calculated using factors like video plays, resolution, loading the player, and thumbnail image, downloading and live streaming according to the company's website. Overage charges aren't imposed unless an account reaches unusually high levels or is in the 99th percentile of users.

Vimeo places that threshold at around 2 to 3 terabytes per month. In communication with affected creators, Vimeo isn't shy about its policy to charge top creators more. On some high-consumption accounts, including your account, Vimeo has been losing money supporting its usage. Read email notices from company representatives. This has become problematic for our leadership team, and they made the job. decision to implement a fair use policy in which we reserve the right to charge the top 1% of bandwidth consuming accounts based on the amount of bandwidth they are utilizing, end quote. In a statement to the verge, Vimeo's head of communications Matt Anchin says that when a user

reaches the threshold, the company works with creators to accommodate their higher bandwidth needs, end quote. Hmm. Accommodate their needs by saying, essentially, nice decades worth of work there, wouldn't it be a shame if someone deleted it? and a quick review of the new iPad Air. Dan Seafurt at the Verge says it's super fast now with the M1 chip. Has a great display as always, but touch ID is not as convenient as face ID,

and the front camera is awkward in landscape mode, quoting his conclusion. The new processor and 5G aside, the iPad Air remains the iPad for those looking for a nicer tablet than the base model, but don't necessarily want to spend the costs or need all the bells and whistles, of the iPad Pro. It's got a modern design, more performance than most people will know what to do with in a tablet, and an excellent screen that works equally well in portrait or landscape orientation. It's not the iPad I'd recommend wholly replacing a laptop with, though it can work for certain laptop-like tasks when paired with an optional keyboard case. It's the nicer iPad for those looking to do iPad things, like reading, watching video, playing games, taking notes, and perhaps

writing the occasional email, but aren't planning on making it their only computing device. A lot of people will be wondering if they should get the air instead of an 11-inch iPad Pro, and I think the choice is easy. Buy the Air. You give up the Pro Motion Display, Face ID, a couple of speakers, and an extra rear camera with LiD, and the option for MM Wave 5G. Of those, Face ID is the one I'd miss the most, but I don't think it's worth spending $200 for. The whole time I was using the Air for this review, it was difficult to find something that stood out about it,

partly because we've seen so much of this before. That's not necessarily a problem, and the flip side of that is I was able to just use the air for a wide variety of things without finding much to complain about. Sure, I'd rather have Face ID and the mini-LED screen of the big iPad Pro would be great, but the absence of those things doesn't diminish the air's overall experience. What you get with the air is the same performance, capability, portability, and operating system, plus compatibility with the same accessories. It's a nice upgrade for someone coming from an older iPad,

with a home button. Really, that's just it. The iPad Air is the nice one, end quote. Finally today, Spotify has signed a sponsorship deal with FC Barcelona, including rebranding the soccer club's stadium to the Spotify Camp New, which is crazy. I'm old enough to remember when Barca was the last team in the football world that prevented ads on their game day shirts. This deal overall is reportedly worth $310 million. quoting CBS Sports. FC Barcelona have agreed to a sponsorship deal with Spotify to have the audio streaming platform become the club's main partner.

In addition with the deal, Barcelona's home stadium will be renamed Spotify Camp New, the first name change for their stadium in its history. The deal will reportedly beware $310 million over a four-year period, which breaks down to $75 million annually. In addition, Spotify's brand logo will appear on the front of both the men's and women's team shirts beginning in the 2020-23 season and beyond. Spotify will also sponsor SC Barcelona's training shirts beginning next season for the next three campaigns. The agreement was approved and signed off on by the club's board of directors, but will still be subject to ratification of the

extraordinary delegate members assembly, which takes place on April 3rd, end quote. Yes, Spotify CEO Daniel Eck is a huge football fan, and like me, actually, his number one team is Arsenal. He's even made a bid in the past to buy Arsenal from Los Angeles' Rams owner Stan Cronkey, which would be the best thing I could imagine. Although Arsenal is on the upswing lately, so I don't know, maybe leave things alone. We're playing Liverpool this afternoon. I've got my jersey on as I speak this into the microphone. If we somehow manage to beat Liverpool today, that is the surest sign I can imagine that somehow the machines have booted us into a new version of the Matrix.

I'll let you know tomorrow. Talk to you then.