 Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast. It is the week of February 17th, I had to look down to check it, 2014. I am Dieter Bohn. I'm David Pierce. I'm Ellis Hamburger. It took you a while. Yeah. Are you okay? I'm sitting in Josh's seat. He's not here. He hasn't been here for a while. If you weren't aware, Josh has a big announcement that I guess I'm making for him. Yes, you are. He's been tweeting about it. It's out there in the world that Josh had a baby. And it is a baby. And so that is... He still has it. He's not going to leave and not with us, except in spirit. Basically, all I know about Josh's baby is that Laura keeps tweeting. It's still there. It's still there. He's probably watching right now, so be careful what you say, Josh. Laura just keeps being like, we got a baby on Tuesday. Laura's very mad the baby can't read. I mean, what fun is it until it can read? Come on. Were we supposed to talk about the Verge baby vertical or is that still a secret? That's such a good idea. No, it's not. Just apps for babies? Well, it's about implants. Diaper reviews. Oh, I see. Diaper reviews. That's not bad. You can monitor the baby's vision and make sure their eyes are on the prize for their whole life. We don't want any losers. So it's basically like if you really are hell bent on getting your kid into an awesome preschool, you're all over Verge babies. Yeah, they all go to the Montessori schools, that kind of thing. No, no, no. I don't know about Montessori schools. Verge babies isn't about babies. Verge babies is about the same thing that the Verge is only it's staffed by Muppets. It's the Muppet babies version of the Verge. We all speak in high squeaky voices. We're perishingly adorable. But we cover the same thing all the time. I'm into it. Like the NSA, we just get really angry, but it's babies. So what do you think? It's adorable. They're so cute. They're so angry about the neutrality. Oh, prism. Crib neutrality is going to be the hot topic, I think. Oh my God. Okay, so it was a week. Yeah, it's been a week. It seemed like it was not going to be a week and then Facebook decided to make a week out of it. No big deal. Yeah. So they bought WhatsApp for a billion, no, I'm sorry, 16, no, maybe 19 billion. It's $16 billion in cash and stock plus $3 billion in restricted stock that vests over the course of three years. Okay, explain that in English because I have gotten this tweet a thousand times. That's all it is. Basically 16 billion upfront and 3 billion over the next few years. Is that so that the founders and employees will stay at the company? Among other reasons, yeah, I'm not totally sure on the structure of it. All that really matters is that it's the biggest deal to ever come out of a venture backed startup in history. Yeah, by a pretty wide margin. Yeah. And the even bigger deal is that WhatsApp is arguably Facebook's biggest real competitor for people's attention on mobile phones across the world and now they own it. You think? Yeah. I think WhatsApp is Facebook's biggest competitor. 450 million users right now? Active. Active. That's monthly, but then like some like over half are using it like once per day. Yeah, 70% just are using it every single day. But isn't WhatsApp like a fundamentally a one to one messaging thing, which is not what Facebook has ever seemed to have that much interest in? Not necessarily. The point is that it's private. Whereas Facebook, everybody has these ballooning friends lists that they cannot maintain, which you know, in some ways is a strength. You can post an update about it. Was that like a, I have a lot of friends humble brag? Yeah, it was. I was making sure. I think you and I both, we've been on Facebook since like a certain time during late high school, college when you watched your kind of social life bloom as you just added friends, friends, friends on Facebook. Sure. And it was like there was definitely a period of my life where every single person I met just like instantly added them on Facebook. And now we don't talk to- Who I saw at a bar, let's be friends on Facebook. And now we don't talk to almost any of them. No. Which in a way has kind of diluted the value of the ability to post to everybody. So what a lot of people are doing is using Snapchat, share with just a few people or especially around the world since Snapchat isn't as popular globally quite yet, they're using apps like WhatsApp to communicate with one person or with a group of people and they're posting the same kind of stuff like photos of friends and family, but they're posting it to private groups and there's no feed, but people are getting it all in their pocket. There's no desktop component. Everything is very, very urgent. And that's part of the reason that it's so sticky and so addictive. And they were one of the first apps to really take your phone book and turn it into your social graph. You know what's super weird to me though? So everybody is vital. What you just described is also Google Plus and that didn't work at all. The thing that's different about WhatsApp is it's not social in the way that we traditionally think of social. It's just, it's a utility app. It's pure. It's a messaging app. It's a texting app. Fundamentally it does other stuff, but it's a texting app. But it does it pretty well and it does it for a buck a year after the first year. And critically it works on everything. They made a solid J2ME app for feature phones. They've got it on Android, they've got it on Blackberry, they've got it on Windows phone, they've got it on iPhone, they've got it on Symbian. Is it really on Symbian? Yeah. I feel like all you did to say was Symbian and it'd be like, oh, it's everywhere. It's on every platform on the planet. And what they did was- Is there a Blackberry app? It was such a sleeper hit over the years. Everybody's been saying- How long has it been around? It didn't get much press. I think 2009. Yeah, yeah, okay. And it was one of the first true BBM replacements on iPhone. And they were actually on iPhone before push notifications even existed within iOS. So back then it was a status system so you could see what your friends are up to, just like kind of your AIM status. Just like Twitter. That was the original idea for Twitter was like status of the broadcast thinger. Right. And what they did was they made themselves a replacement for SMS, which made it really easy to understand. You don't have to explain to anybody in all these countries where WhatsApp is really critical to people's lives. You don't have to explain what it is. You say, you're spending a lot of money on SMS right now. Switch to this, your friends are on it, that's it. Yeah, I mean, that's the easiest thing ever, right? Is like I did some research on this yesterday and the SMS is $120 billion industry every year. That's a crazy number. And like most of that, I don't know this for sure, but I'm sure most of that is outside of the US. And it's all at some point going to be eaten by digital database. And texting is like the fundamental way people communicate a lot of places. Like you hear these stories about like people in Africa, there's all this infrastructure for sending money over text messages. And it's huge. And if you just show up and you're like, Hey, want to do the same thing, but for free, it's like, why not? That's what's kind of crazy too. It's hardly changed. So we should talk about the scale here. Cause like you, every year we look at like Apple's quarterly results, Oh, lots of billions and you kind of lose track. So I hear $20 billion and you just think, it's insane. So like, how can we put that in context? It's what, what percent of Facebook is it? It's just less than 10% of Facebook's market cap and it's 35% of the cash they had on hand. That's a giant number. That's crazy. And a board seat, which is also an investment. That's a big deal. So Apple's market cap is $474 billion. So this would be like Apple dropping $45 billion on something. Comparatively. The point is Facebook bought Instagram for a billion dollars and then it tried to buy Snapchat for 3 billion. And when those events took place, people were like, just like you did Deater. This is huge. A billion dollars. And then now this is multiple, multiple like degrees bigger than that. And I think that the reason is like with Instagram, there were a lot fewer users, but the engagement was good. And this, as Zuckerberg said, this is not only half as big as Facebook in terms of active users, just about maybe a half to a third, but the engagement is so high. Mark Zuckerberg said that this is the only app on the planet that has higher engagement than Facebook. Yeah. Yeah. He keeps, he kept on saying we're going to, they're going to hit a billion users. We see it coming and you look at the graph, their user graph and that seems obvious. Yeah. It's insane. This graph in this post that you wrote, which is really great, is just wild. Like it just hockey stick. Yeah. I just wrote this great post about it and you know, Zuckerberg's like mission statement for Facebook is connect the world's people. Right. And when we were talking about this piece, I was like, I always listened to that and heard like a mission statement snoozed. Oh, this is just words that some committee put together. I don't care. But it's supposed to be as broad and as vague as possible. Right. But it's not a mission statement. It's a threat. Like we were playing around for headlines for this thing. One of the headlines was like Facebook is no longer the social network. Facebook wants to be just the network. Yeah. I like, I look at Mark Zuckerberg now and I'm like, oh, he's going to control every way that most people communicate on the planet. And great. It's not just like he's the biggest social network. It's everybody has to, every, every, every has to talk through Zuck. As the mobile guy, Dieter, how many people in the world have phones? Do you know? Man, why you gotta put me on the spot like that? So I'll throw out a statistic that people were talking about this week is they're expecting 5 billion people to have like a mobile device by 2017. And now Facebook and WhatsApp are in better position than anyone to capture that opportunity. And so essentially what that says is, especially to investors, since Facebook is a public company, it says this is a huge opportunity to capture that just pure communication, talking to your friends. Like even if Facebook for some people is stale, this is something that's never going to be stale. And I think WhatsApp success proves that. Well, I mean, and you just like, you're, you're defining Facebook as like this one particular thing. And like, this is Facebook being like much more than just Facebook, right? Like Facebook.com might die, but like Facebook's never going to die. Right. So what does that look like to you? The next version of Facebook? I mean, it's Disney. Like Kara Swisher wrote this really great piece about this and she compared Facebook to Disney, which is brilliant. And just like Disney has all these different companies and like they find, you know, smart ways for their companies to work together. Like there's ESPN stuff at Disney World, but ultimately those two things have nothing to do with each other except that they're both owned by Disney. And like what, what they can do is that just brings them so much money that they can buy other things. And then some of them don't work. And Disney doesn't let them jeopardize each other. No, they don't. They're, they're totally separate companies. Disney, the only thing they have in common is like the CEO of Disney makes money from them. Right. With Facebook and the, and perhaps the infrastructure. And when Facebook acquired Instagram, people really were doubting whether Mark Zuckerberg was going to let Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom maintain control. And they did add ads, but if you look at the Instagram sign in screen, there's not even a sign in with Facebook button. Yeah. Okay. So there's clearly, and I think this is what's interesting about WhatsApp is there's, there's like, I see people's Instagram pictures all over Facebook now. They're everywhere. And it's like, there's, there's a really easy connection between those two things and they, like they win together. And I think there's huge opportunity for them to do that with WhatsApp where it's like, if you know, I don't think they're going to, I don't think they're going to as well. I think, I think Jan is no ads. He wants to stay independent. He's got a seat on the board. I'm saying like what Facebook offers them is, is a value ad. What Facebook can say is like, Oh, you want to talk to all your friends? You know who has all of your friends is, is me. It's right here. Yeah. And I can just plug in all your friends. I don't, you don't have to, you can use it however you want. And this is what happens. This is what Instagram is too. Like you can plug, you can say Instagram together as much as you want or not. And that's really smart. I think you are risking your brand when you put Facebook next to whatever, whatever it is that Facebook just bought. I mean, whenever it was WhatsApp, by the way that they just, yeah. Well, well I'm talking about any company that Facebook. Tell me more. What's that? I noticed that when a massive company, let's say Google or Facebook buys a smaller company that people somehow think that the smaller company, you know, maybe for good reason, they think they're selling out for $16 million. Basically they basically raid the app store comments saying, how dare they? I'm quitting right now. People don't want Facebook. Yeah, but people hate everything. I think that's this tiny, there's this tiny little group that forms the a hundred thousand people strong against the new Facebook and they get 38 people to like it. And that's like, but we, you know, we, we see that and that's like, I think most people, a, I think most people really like Facebook and B most people don't care. Like I don't think it's going to change anyone's WhatsApp experience. So that's it. There's, there's two things. One is it going to ruin WhatsApp? And I don't think so. I think it's going to hold up. I don't think it really does. They've killed a bunch of apps. Like they bought dropio, right? I really liked dropio and then they bought it and just immediately shut it down. I was pissed about that. So they've never kept something alive and ruined it. Yeah. The second question is, is this going to fix messaging? Like we, Ellis and I always complain like, Oh, messaging is fragmented. There's hangouts and there's WhatsApp and there's cacao and there's line and there's Google talk and whatever else. What was that third one you said? Yeah. I don't know. Cacao. Is that a thing? Yeah. Oh, it's huge. In South Korea, really everyone uses cacao talk. Yeah. Fair enough. All your friends. So with Facebook money, are they going to be able to like, I, I want the messaging fragmentation problem fixed, having one company in control of it isn't really my ideal solution, but at least it's a solution. If everybody just uses WhatsApp from now on. Sure. But there's no other way to solve your problem except that. No. Dieter, you're going to complain because WhatsApp isn't on desktop. You know who doesn't control? You want email. Yeah. That's what you want. I want email. You want in, you want faster email. I want SMS that doesn't gouge me. You want a federated standard that everyone agrees on, which is never going to happen again. We forgot how to make those. Right. Yes, we did. We just, they're slow and nobody can agree on one thing. Nobody can agree on what they want the standard to be, what they want, how they want it to work. Right. And that's why it's not going to happen. But so you, you just said WhatsApp. I feel like, I feel like you'd be pretty upset if everybody switched to WhatsApp and you couldn't text from your computer. Yeah, I would. That's the only reason I use an iPhone. Yeah. I message from my computer. I love texting on my computer. I just took SIM card out of my iPhone. Really? Yeah. Cause I broke it. Oh yeah, you're back. I dropped it. That's fair. Yeah, you did. So let's talk about some stats. Combined, combined these two companies command in the, an absolutely enormous portion of the world's photo uploads. Yeah, but that's a crazy number. Like I'm sure their Venn diagram is like. And, but you know what, you know what WhatsApp also has is 200 million voice messages sent per day. Yeah, that was surprising. And Facebook's calling has been, I don't know, a soul that uses it. Yeah, I forgot about that. People are happily. I got a voice message saying it's insane. I forgot about that. Yeah, people. I'm going to give away. I'm going to just keep going. You can't do it on the web for some reason. It's in their messenger app and you can hit the little I button in the messenger app and call somebody, but I don't know anybody that uses it, but this is clearly working for WhatsApp. And I think that this kind of hints at like a future where like Dieter was saying, Facebook controls, you know, all these communication pipes that people are using and Facebook doesn't care how everybody wants to talk, but they're going to buy any new company that develops a new way for people to talk that people love. And I think that that's the path that we're going down. I mean, Facebook is in some ways it's like too big to fail, but also too big to innovate in some ways, unless it's on a smaller scale, like with paper, which was built out of their creative labs. And people were saying the only reason they were able to build paper was because it was a group of like 10 people. So okay, huge ambition for Facebook. Insane. How pissed off is Google right now? So reportedly they offered 10 billion to WhatsApp and I think the information posted today that they were willing to beat Facebook's $19 billion offer. Really? Yeah. They real mad. I mean, if I'm WhatsApp, they made the right call. They absolutely made the right call. To go with Facebook instead of Google? Yeah. Google. I mean, you like, I ask you, Facebook has exactly. Google is the company that eats you. Yeah. Like they'd show up in four days later. They'd be like, just kidding. You're on the Gmail team. We'll never see you again. Bye. Like you get to deal with. Can I, can I pour a beer on the studio floor for Sparrow right now? Sparrow is exactly what I was thinking. Can I just do this right here? That was upsetting. My producer, John says I'm not allowed to pour the beer. Yeah. No, but it's like. Especially something like. First of all, I really do think, and actually if that's true and Google was willing to beat it, I actually think it says a lot about what WhatsApp is doing and what Facebook has brought to the table, which is to say, which is Disney, right? Like they, they have all this money to like here, you have all the money, all the resources and all the talent you could possibly need and also we'll leave you completely. I want, I want a Facebook theme park. That's the dream. It's like, give it time. Imagine Zuckerberg building Epcot Center. What if Disney just bought Facebook tomorrow? They're just like, well, you just bought Facebook and now we own Facebook. It's going to happen. You heard it here first people. It's not the Epcot dome, it's Mark Zuckerberg's teenage afro. It's just Mark Zuckerberg. No, it's his pecs. He just flexes. It's a giant building of his, nevermind. Yeah. I still really liked the story that they finalized the sale on Valentine's day. It was like Mark Zuckerberg's. Yeah. Yeah. Here's $19 billion. Congratulations. Happy Valentine's day. Wow. Mm hmm. Good Valentine's day present. So you guys use WhatsApp cause it's not, nobody in the US uses it. No. I mean, I also think that's partly what Facebook is buying. Like everybody talks about the next billion, right? And it's like, those are the people we want are the people. WhatsApp is currently there. Right. Right. And everybody is going to use WhatsApp and like it's already out there. And that's, I guess if you can't get there, just buy your way in and it's, it works. You really just need to look at one chart and there's this chart that, uh, that I found online sourced from a Onovo. Onovo. I don't know. It's a Facebook bought that too. Analytics. Yeah, they did. So what it says is, is countries, it basically has all the top apps in different regions around the world. So look at the United States, Facebook messenger is leading. But in a place like Spain of all the messenger apps, 97% of people use WhatsApp. Whereas 13% of people use Facebook messenger. And um, what's the, is there a name for this chart? Let me see if I can get the chart. Let me see if I can get it. I'm picturing it in my mind. Yeah, yeah. I'm sending it, I'm sending it over. No, but I think countries like Spain are not where it gets really interesting. Places like, places like China and places like India and places like Africa are where this gets interesting because those are the places that are now like really in a real way coming online fast. And there's this, I mean, we've sort of seen it with Facebook to some extent. Like there's this crazy inertia. Everybody talks about like, you know, you stop being cool and you die. And like, that's not true. Microsoft's not cool. Microsoft's doing just fine. Like Facebook's not cool in the US anymore and everybody still uses Facebook. That's why I think that all the companies that they're going to acquire going forward, unless they're like Aqua hiring or unless they're doing a, I think they're going to let them operate independently so they don't jeopardize what they built. That's kind of the conglomerate angle. Right. No, it's totally true. I mean, but I still think that like what part of what Facebook wants, this is that chart by the way, and this is wild actually. So you can see Facebook messengers, Facebook messengers. Look at that. Kakao killing it in South Korea. Killing it and then just nowhere else. That's great. What's funny, it's a big numbers and Viber, which are Rakuten just bought for $900 million. Come on. Isn't even on the chart. I don't see it. Yeah. I mean, like I, I do think this is the huge growth industry that nobody has been talking about for a long time because it's already so big. And there are billions more people to get phones in the next 10 years. And you know, everybody, nobody in Silicon Valley thinks about how important text messages are. Apparently they do. I mean, they do now. I mean, WhatsApp has been out there for a long time and even super popular for a long time. And like, I mean, even, even, you know, we, the press don't talk about WhatsApp. It's just like the huge company that nobody's ever heard of except that everybody uses. It's really bizarre. I don't, I don't talk about like my electricity bill either. Right. I mean, you know, ConEd in New York is the worst. My buddies all the time, by the way, if you, if you are listening to the show or watching the show and you work for ConEdison, I hate you. I hate you so much. So let me ask you guys, what other spaces, what other communication spaces could you see Facebook going into? I was just going to ask you that. What's next? What else? What other crazy popular apps out there? Now you have to, now you're on the spot. Yeah. There's nothing like, I don't know what's worth a bunch of money. Twitter, Twitter. Like I'm not totally kidding. What about video chat? I think they're too big at this point. Video chat? Like who cares about video chat right now? Skype is the only. Dude, teens man. Skype is like the thing. Teens are video chatting still. I don't know about you. I don't know about you. I think they're using weirdo apps like Oovoo. God, Oovoo. I was afraid you were going to say that. Doesn't Cisco own Oovoo? Not totally clear. I think they do. Yeah. Somebody does. But yeah, I mean that would be interesting except that I think, I mean that Skype sold for what was it, $8.5 billion? There's that. Yeah. Somebody beat them to the biggest player. That would be Microsoft. It would be Microsoft. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know what else there is. I think I could see them buying a really big social games company that has proven success. Well. Not just with one game. Yeah. I mean that's the Zynga thing. That didn't work out so well. Yeah, that went not great for them. I'm not talking about Zynga necessarily. I'm talking about something more like along the quiz up line of things that isn't freemium. That's more like- But is that- For Facebook at this point, is that a big enough play? It's about communications. You need to think of him as Zuckerberg as a robber baron. Instead of building railroads, he's building everything we use to talk to each other or buying it. No, I think, but- So games- Sure. If he wants to be everywhere all your friends are is really what it is. I don't think it's about friends. No? No, I think it's- I mean that's what Instagram is. Instagram is only sort of tangentially a communication tool. I think he wants to be the layer just above the pipes. Yeah. I agree. He wants to be between you and the wire. Is Facebook the next Comcast where everybody hates them and it turns out they run the world anyway? Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's upsetting. What's funny is that's what a lot of people think Facebook wants to be in developing countries. With Facebook for every phone, they're like, oh, I don't know what the internet is. I just know what Facebook is. Yeah. They build the login identity, but plumbing for a bunch of apps. People use it because it's easier to hit that button and create a new password for every single freaking app. Yeah. No, it's true. I logged into an extraordinary number of things with Facebook. Yeah. After you're like, no, I'm not going to do it. It's just terrifying. No, no. Then eventually you're like, fine. Once you do it that first couple of times, that's it. They got you. So you know, it's the fun underdog story of this is that the founders were rejected from Facebook and Twitter a few years ago as employees. And now they're like, what's up? And now they have all of the money. Sign that check. All of the money. Do we know how much the founders made? They probably don't split that up. I think they owned... They're definitely... One of them is going to Instagram picture their bank account. It's like six million for one of them. Yeah. I think Yann owned something like 35%. Because they only took a small amount of venture capital, right? So it was a very tiny number of people involved in this and they all made so much money. That's a pretty outstanding return. Yeah, they did good. Was it Sequoia that was the only company invested in them? So they invested, they had a $250,000 seed round from whatever. Sequoia invested $8 million. And then a little bit later, like, well, you know what? We should get an insurance policy. Let's get another 50 million. When they got the 50 million, the founder took a picture of WhatsApp's bank account. This is from a Forbes article and it was over 8 million. They hadn't got dug into any of that original investment. Wow. Yeah. Good company. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it was like 42 people? Yeah. It's crazy. They work out of some office with no sign. Hard to know who's doing anything there. They say just come around back and knock on the door. This is a front for the mob. I think that's what people were saying. It's definitely a front for the mob. I don't care what anybody says. Let's talk about something else that's fragmented and terrible. Wait, hold on. No, I have one more question and then we can move on. Got a good transition though. Wasn't that so good? Just come right back to that. It's too late now. Are you going to start using WhatsApp? Yeah. Yeah? For like two days. That's fair. Yeah. I'm definitely going to download it and be like, this is ugly because it is. It's so ugly. It doesn't matter. I hope, this is the one thing I hope Facebook pulls off is that they like, Facebook clearly has good design. Like the Facebook Messenger app is really beautiful. Well. It's really nice. And if they would just like some head of design at Facebook just needs to sit down with the WhatsApp guys and be like, listen, I understand that you're your own company. It's totally cool. You guys are green. I'm just going to punch you in the face every single day until you make your app better looking. Mm hmm. And then they're just going to do it. That's what I want. I think it's part of their charm. No, that's not a thing. No, it is. Look how ugly it is. It's so charming. No, no. Yes. Yeah, it kind of is. I think Snapchat's looks and bugs cultivated some sort of trust early on, I think, because you know, something is the underdog. Like it's very. Yeah, but if something is extremely polished and and, you know, you think the production value is big and you think there's a lot of money behind it and where there's money, people like there's trouble. Yeah. Right. Um, so here's what somebody just money. There's $16 million. So I have money. I'm not going to start using WhatsApp, but apparently it is so pervasive. It's everywhere in the world. It says you're busy right now. That's not possible. Well, I am busy sending you a message right now. I dare you. Are you on WhatsApp? Can I do it from my computer? No, I don't care. So somebody just tweeted at me, apping someone as in sending someone a WhatsApp message is in the Dutch dictionary. Actually I unless this guy completely made it up. Is this the verb now? I don't know. Do you app somebody? No. App me. No, I hate that. That's awful. But that's I mean, if it's in the dictionary, that's what it is. The worst thing about Google Hangouts is that I don't know what to say to somebody when I message them on Google Hangouts. Hang out with me. I'm like, hey, I hanged you. That's weird. Not going to say that. Like I outed you. Nope. That's not good either. That's not cool. It just doesn't work. I hanged you out. And Hangouts just doesn't work. I watched you. That's cool. It's so bad on iOS. I don't know, man. I'm going to app you. Definitely sounds like a deviant sexual act. Or like a sort of subtle thing you would say on the phone in case your phone is being bugged, but you're definitely going to murder them. This is all back to my theory that WhatsApp is just a front for the mob. And Facebook is like, they just bought the world's mob for $16 billion and now they can be in every country they want. That's my theory. I'm sticking to it. All right, let's move on. Loop wallet. So this is mobile payments thing, right? You had a good segue. You had a good segue. It's too late. It's gone. Let it go. It was about fragmentation. It was poetry. It was beautiful. I was excited about it. It's gone. It's gone. I only just learned how to spell segue. Seeg. That's how it sounds when you pronounce it. For those who don't know, it's S E G U E not S E G W A Y. The more you know. Ellis Hamburger, ladies and gentlemen. Fun fact. Okay. Loop wallet. So it's about loop wallet. Loop wallet. L O O P. Is pretty incredible. I guess it's really called loop. The technology at least. It's called loop. Yeah, yeah. The app's called loop wallet and there are two form factors out that you can order right now. One is a little square fob with a built in card reader and one's like a Mophie like case. Both of them have magnetic transistors inside of them that let you hold your phone up to any credit card reader. Not the ones with the little, you know, wifi sign on it that you're like, oh, what is that? Google wallet, MasterCard, PayPas. This is any credit card terminal. Well, over 90% of in the United States, you hold it up, you pick the card on your screen, you hit the button and it somehow beams this magnetic signal to the reader. It's all just like it's just a- It's like brute force, right? It's just like magnet. It thinks it's been scanned. I wasn't even aware that these reader heads could be communicated with over the air. So it'll work with almost everything unless you have to put your card in. That's great. But it doesn't actually work because everybody's like, what are you doing to my machine? Right. Are you hacking me? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's this shot in this video that we're playing now where you like, it might actually be this where you like lean over to the counter and you're like, it's cool. I got this. She was just pointing- I'm just going to touch your cash register for like 10 seconds. Look at her face. Look at her face. Don't worry about it. She's like, thank you. She has no idea what to do with you. This, you're like, it's fine. I'll just do it. She's like, what? She's like, you just robbed all of my money. No, in the cab that's cool. Just be like, you're not looking. Right. I mean, but the, I don't know. Like this, I don't know. So you wrote a review and I was editing this and we argued about this for like three days. I just, I am so unconvinced that this is even a good idea. So for like slim wallet people like me, I don't care. Right. And for people with really thick wallets- Do you have a George Cassanza wallet? Cause I do. And for people with really thick wallets- Although I do carry cash, so I have a little bit. I mean, you're a, you're, you're front wallet, right? No back wallet. What? No, get out of here. Come on. No. You're ruining your spine. You're destroying your spine. I actually, I, I, so I have to like buy new jeans like every three months because my wallet tears through the back pocket of my jeans. This is true constantly. Front wallet, man. No, that's ridiculous. You are just, where's, where am I going to put my chapstick then? So stop carrying chapstick around. Then what's no. Then my lips will fall off. I've been talking to people about Google wallet, like Chris Ziegler, and he was saying that when he tried to use it, even though it was officially supported at the stores he went to, they still didn't know what he was doing. Yeah. No, nobody does. And I think like that's the sort of conclusion you came to that I thought was really interesting is like, even if this works when you're like, Hey, can I pay with my phone? Somebody's gonna be like, what? No, it's not even just phones. Everything is broken and terrible in America when it comes to payments. We can't do chip and pin. Europe, everything is chip and pin. It's more secure. Explain what that is. I actually don't totally understand what chip and pin is. Your card has got two things on it. It's got the regular swipe, but it's got a little encrypted chip on it and then you tap it. So it's tapped to pay. So great. And then instead of signing, you have to punch in a pin. It's like two, two factors of verification. It seems incredibly logical. And they have so much less fraud than here. So much less fraud. And we're not doing it with no chip and signature because Americans. Signature is the most insane thing ever. Have you ever. I've never ever signed my name the same way twice in a row. It's never happened. I just walk up, I like scribble a bunch of things. Like if you steal my credit card, you can have all of it. My checkbook got stolen in college and they were writing checks to dominoes and whatever. So they were sending me the canceled checks after, you know, and they charged me for it. I'm dealing with the bank and it was the worst. And I like, you could tell instantly it was forged because they actually like signed my name in full and cursive instead of just like swirlies on the D and D trick. And yeah, I was like, come on, who does that? You're like, what do I actually sign my name? And then you're like, what did we just prove? I just told you it wasn't me. So so but chip and pin is coming to America, right? It's going to be a thing slowly. They're going to go chip and signature. So here's what's happening in 2015. At the end of 2015, this was actually also news this week, which was inconvenient for loopwad launch. It was like the same day, wasn't it? Yeah. I mean, it's not completely related because the magnetic part is only like half of what loops trying to do. But yeah, it certainly kind of undermines one of their one of their points. So what's happening here? Some camaraderie? She just loves me. That's all. He had a rogue wire that was starting to drive me crazy. So anyway, lost my train of thought. I was watching him at the same day. Bro Pat chip and pin. OK, so by 2015, end of 2015, if you don't buy a chip and pin reader for your grocery store or coffee shop, you are going to be liable for fraud and not the credit card companies. So that's basically a huge incentive for them to buy chip and pin credit card readers, which presumably by that point will also bundle in NFC readers as well. So this is what I don't totally understand is why and maybe I'm missing something here, but why have Visa and MasterCard not figured out a better way to solve this problem? Like they're just care renting money. So I guess they don't care. They care. But clearly, like where the those two things like loop wallet and the chip and pin thing make it very clear that the only people who can change the system are Visa and MasterCard. I mean, when you've got a duopoly, the no, but I'm saying VCR associations, right? No, but Visa and MasterCard can show up to the retail association and be like, hey, you're going to change everything in the next two years. And they're going to be like, oh, OK, yeah, we'll do that. So like Jack Dorsey rolls up and 80 percent of people are like, shut up. So you know, it's the full suit, bro. And then loop wallet shows up and they're like, what is that? Is Starbucks the only place in America where mobile payments are used as often as they are? I think I saw a quote. It was like more than 25 percent of its customers are using their phone to pay. I think McDonald's has a big thing. Starbucks is the biggest. People know what they're doing with Starbucks apps on their phone and it never ceases to impress me. You know how to do what? You know how to hold up a QR code to a reader and do this? I was like, I couldn't teach my friends how to do it. I have I have a bunch of friends. They don't use their phones. Any other stores? No, I have I have a friend who was like who makes a budget in Starbucks every month. She buys like a twenty five dollar Starbucks gift card, puts it on the app first day of every month, funnels it up. And then when it's out, it's out. She can't go back to Starbucks for the rest of the month. And I was like, that's the best system ever. And it's all on her phone. It's super easy. She hits the thing, pays with iTunes and it's done. And then like it's the best thing ever. And it's the same thing when you walk in, you hold up your phone and they know what to do. You know who else does a good job of that is movie theaters. And they're the only other ones that like when I walk in and I'm like, I have it on my phone. They don't freak out. Yeah. Otherwise everybody's like, why? Even like parts. I still get like I hand people my plane ticket and they like move it around and they put it on the reader and then this is it. It goes over. I just it's over here. And then it's like everybody behind me is pissed off. Like it's just not it's not good. So Ellis, you need to go, you need to head over. You're going to be on the news hour. No, no, no. I was, I was, I'm moved to a little bit later. We want you to get out. Just please, please, please go. If you want to get ZPower in here, that's cool. Yeah. We want to talk about a project Tango, which just got announced today and it seems completely terrifying and insane. It's like her. It's like what's happening in her where the person Scarlett Johansson inside the phone is seeing through the phone, popping out of a shirt pocket through his eyes and seeing the whole world. That's beautiful. This is the beginning of that, which is amazing, but also terrifying, which is like the best thing about everything that Google does. All right. So there's a, there's a video, I guess we're going to look at a little bit of it while, while you, everything at Google seems so friendly on the surface and now they've got the robo dogs with 3d vision. God, I'm in on that. I don't know. Sky nut. All right. Thanks Ellis. Oh sure. Let's check out this, this video. My name is Johnny Lee and I work in the advanced technology and projects group at Google. Our small team here based in California has been working with universities, research labs and industrial partners to harvest the last 10 years of research in robotics and computer vision to concentrate that technology into a very unique mobile phone. We are physical beings that live in a 3d world. Yet mobile devices today assume that the physical world ends at the boundaries of the screen. Our goal is to give mobile devices a human scale understanding of space and motion. This is going to allow people to interact with their environment in just a fundamentally different way. We can prototype in a couple of hours, something that would take us months or even years before because we didn't have this technology readily available. What happens if you have all of these pieces in a phone? How does that change what a phone is? We have created a prototype phone containing highly customized hardware and software designed to allow the phone to track its motion in full 3d in real time as you hold it. These sensors make over a quarter million 3d measurements every single second, updating the position and rotation of the phone, fusing this information into a single 3d model of the environment. We have a problem called navigation indoors and it's a solution to that problem. It tracks your position as you go around the world and it also makes a map of that. Imagine that you scan a small section of your living room and then are able to generate a little game world in it. I don't know of any other controller or gaming device that can do that at the moment. Putting all this together, they pulled in experts from all around the world and got them all working on the same project. People are very high caliber people. Why? It's very simple. I think actually people believe in the vision. Localization and mapping is there on your phone and you just use it. It's this ability to follow in other people's footsteps. And we can also benefit from what we do for the project back for the open source community. Use it for visually impaired, give them auditory cues on where they're going. You know, being able to map your home, check out, let me see how this furniture looks in my room. From windows to sort of different worlds. I mean, the possibilities are really endless. Over the next few months, we will be distributing dev kits to software developers to develop applications and algorithms on top of this platform. We are just in the beginning and we know there is a lot more work to do, but we are excited about where it is going to go. The future is awesome and we believe we can build it faster together. Well that was an inspiring and beautiful vision of our terrifying hellscape of a future where Google knows everything about us and our homes. And here to talk about it is Chris Ziegler. No, I'm still Ellis Hamburger. I look a little different. Google is so good at making videos. Yeah. It's unbelievable. I gave that in like, I'm actually super afraid of what's coming out of this. And I got to the end of the video and I'm like, yeah. So this is like, this is Google. Know about my house. It's ATAP. It's the advanced projects thing, which is part of Motorola. It's like the only part of Motorola that they kept, right? Right. It's got Johnny Chung Lee who was on the connect team and has done a bunch of cool. He did the thing with the Wii remote on top of his head. And Regina Dugan, who's like doing all the crazy tattoos to identify herself. They're the ones doing really insane stuff. Okay. So it's a phone that can map 3D space inside and using cameras and gyroscopes and sensors in the- Which is not especially insane technology. Like I met with a company months ago that had like an add on for the iPad that could do the same thing. And you just sort of, you like stood there, held the iPad and like spun around in a circle slowly and it would actually map the room. One Lighter has been doing this for, I mean, that's what Google is using for the self driving cars, right? You get like millimeter level accuracy. But to have it on a phone and like have it in your pocket and it's tracking you around. So the really obvious application to me, Google is being like intentionally very vague about where this is going to go because it's just a developer kit at this point. But you can see how this would have obvious implications for like street view and like whatever street view 2.0 is, right? You can see where, you know, you could just arm millions of people with these phones and you can map the interiors of buildings very easily and send that data back to Google. All of a sudden they've literally mapped every millimeter of every- Yeah. And the robots will know exactly where to go when they come to kill us. Right. Right. And they can just be like, I mean the crazy thing is like you can be like, I want Doritos and they can literally like direct you to Doritos. Right. And on the one hand that's awesome. And then the other hand that's super insanely terrifying. It is, it is. That is terrifying. But until they get to the point where they can direct me to a specific flavor of Doritos, does it even matter is the question. No, the answer to that question is always Cool Ranch. True. That's true. It just assumes that when you put in Doritos, it's like, did you mean Cool Ranch? Yeah. Did you mean Cool Ranch Doritos? Yes, I did. You put in Triscuits. Did you mean Cool Ranch Doritos? Cool Ranch is objectively the best flavor. I mean, that just isn't true, but that's okay. Well, okay. It's objectively the best flavor until like it gets in your head and I'm going to say this to you and you'll never eat them again. No, don't. Don't. Don't. Don't do this to me. Just a little flavor. Cool Ranch, if you just stop and smell it, you're like, Oh, dead fish. Just kind of rotting fish. Oh, that's not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I can live with that. Just a little bit of day old salmon smell. Is this really just Street View though? Is that like, is that? No, that's just an obvious application of it. But this is a Motorola project, not a Google project. So it's not like they were planning for that anyway, but you can see how that would make a lot of sense. Sure. But I mean, okay. So I get the things that occur to me are indoor maps, right? So you go to Macy's and they like tell you what's nearby. This I mean, on some level to me sounds like it's almost something like I beacon where they can be like, you're near this. Let us serve you ads. So assistance for the visually impaired instead of just like, right, don't run into things kind of technology. It would be like you could, they could convert it to something you could see, you know, see the space and Cool Ranch Doritos. End game seems to be the other thing. Like Ellis, Ellis points out her and like you've, you guys have seen this movie, right? No, I have not seen her. You know what I have seen though is the first four episodes of season two of house. So there's a scene in her where he's there. He's sitting on his couch playing a video game and the video game is not on a TV. It's just like literally in front of him. Is this a spoiler? No, it's fine. It's cool. You should watch it. It's good movie, but he's sitting there and like to make the guy move, he literally goes like this to like make him run up a hill and things like that. It's like when you have actual awareness of your surroundings, you can start to build things like that. That's not that big a step from, I know what your house looks like. Uh, but that seems like a weird thing for Google to do. Right. But then there's like Ingress. I Google makes no sense to me. It's essentially where I'm at right now. I have no idea what Google is doing. That is the beautiful thing. Google has no mission statement. Like here's what we do. Google's like stuff is cool. Let's do that. But that is what makes Google such an amazing company is that they can literally fund anything they want using ad ad sense revenue. Google has all of the money. That it, yeah, exactly. And so they're just like, let's go do some cool stuff. That's why, uh, X exists. That's why they're doing self driving cars, which aren't even commercializable. Internet balloons, internet balloons. Um, internet balloons makes sense, right? Cause it's, it's for them. Like the one thing that I sort of universally get about Google is that the more people they put online, the more people who use Google. Right. And that the more people use Google, the more money Google makes, which goes back to Facebook too, by the way. Right. No, I agree. But so those things are, I get those steps. So like project moon is, is on the one hand like a, you know, a lovely thing to do for people who couldn't get on the internet otherwise, but it's also, it makes really obvious business sense. Something like this. It's like, I mean, other than the scary thing, which is serving me ads every step I will take every single day. I don't see how this makes any sense for Google. Well, you can see how it's a, it other than to be like a cool look at us for Google. Right. But if you look at it the same way as you look at project glass, it's a moonshot where it's not commercialized. I hate to use the word. Did you just say that you use the word, duh. Stay with me. You've broken me. You used the term moonshot and didn't immediately like call out that you were being a run on fire. No, no, I, no, I called out that I was being non-ironic about it. Like I hate to borrow their PR term, but, but no, no, no. That was a disruptive innovation you just spit out right there. Well, I'm going to pivot. Okay. So project glass is not a, not a near term thing, right? It's a near term thing for a thousand nerds, us included, but it's not a near term thing for the masses. But you can see how in 30 years everyone is going to be wearing some form of heads up equipment on their face that will look completely normal. They'll look like Dieter's glasses. Sure. Well, normal. I was going to say. I meant that in a good way, not a bad way. But again, that's the same thing, right? Like that puts more people online more of the time and that's an obvious win for. What about the robots? Explain the robots. Yeah, no, that's the same. Explain buying Boston Dynamics. No, but go back to, go back to. Or the self driving cars. Go back to Dieter's. Right. And there's a vision impaired example. You can see how Google could end up making a device that basically leads you to all these retail establishments that, right. A little helper robot. Is that what you're saying? A little, a little, a little dog robot. A next generation Sony Aibo. Right. That leads you around and tracks you and everything Google does makes sense. They've never done a single thing that I didn't understand. No, I get it now. It's all tied together seems like more than anything Google has ever done. This seems like the minority report move where you like walk around and their ads just blaring at you all the time. Yeah. Because if Google then goes to businesses and is like, Hey, we know exactly where people are in your store all the time. Give us some money. No, no, that's such an unbelievable win. Think about that. Like if they can accurately map right immediately on the device, the 3d space on a computer, they can on a heads up display accurately project stuff onto that surface. Right. So like, like they can literally put an ad on that wall and that curved chair and whatever else. Yeah. And it's just, it's, they own this whole stack for advertising and it's, that's super scary. I mean, it's the same thing. Like I met with Apple about iBeacon forever ago and my question kept being like, you know, this can be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be. I was like, but you know, this could be terrifying, right? And they were like, yeah, but it won't be. It'll be fine. Are you excited about iBeacon at MLB this year? I guess. I mean, this is the same thing. Like there are ways in which it's super insanely handy where like I can, one of the things they were telling me about that I think it's just as a like high level possibility. I don't know if they're actually doing this, but they were like, we can figure out where the shortest bathroom line is or like where the right food is near you or we can, you know, figure out where you are if something goes wrong. And like, that's all really, really great. But you know what's going to suck is when you walk in and every single step you take, there's another ad from another vendor that's like, Hey, come save a dollar on your $13 beer if you come to our thing right now with your app, with your iPhone. I don't want that. Like I don't. But you, so you're saying you don't want to save a dollar on your beer? I don't want to save a dollar. No, I have no interest in saving a dollar. You just want to pay full price. I would rather pay a dollar more and not have them serve that ad. Fair enough. What ties together, I think a little bit, but definitely Facebook with that Disney metaphor and now Google. Sure. I mean, these aren't, we can't think of these companies the way that we used to. They're like, they're giant conglomerates now. It's like, I think you need to think of them like GE in the eighties that just did everything. Right. They bought NBC and everybody was like, yeah, okay, whatever. That's your GE. That's what you do. Right. Like that's what, like when Google does some crazy shit, we just have to be like, yeah, Google, let's do, we don't know. They got, I can't stop spending money and doing weird things. Yeah. It's weird that Apple is like the most cohesive of all of these and the biggest of weird, I guess. I mean, Apple, like of all companies to just how hard random things to see at Apple and be in charge of R and D and not just like release the weird crap you're making. Right. Exactly. Because they're, I mean, what's their, what's their cash on hand? Like $140 billion over a hundred billion. Yeah. Like Tim Cook could have rolled up with like a bunch of nickels and six WhatsApps. Yeah, exactly. Uh, and, and yet they, they don't, which is really interesting and I don't know why to be honest, because like this isn't, it's not a bad strategy. It's a conglomerate move where they're like, it's kind of a badge, but it's very high. It is, but Google and Facebook are both so big enough and their, their thing is so like fundamentally well known and well understood that there's no danger in branding. It's the same with Disney. Right. When you hear Disney, you think Disney world, that's just the thing. And they got so big doing that that they were like, we can do it. Everyone else we want. And people are going to think of our core. When I hear Disney, I think rescue Rangers. That's super weird. One of the reasons the GE, one of the reasons the GE has been around for a long time, I mean, for 140 years and still seems to be a fundamentally sound company is the fact that they have been hedged for so long. Like they're in so many different businesses that when one is up, the other is down and it just kind of all evens out. Yeah. That can't be said for a company like Apple, right? Which has virtually all of its eggs in one basket. Right. Um, and to your point, yeah. Well, they got like three baskets. Yeah, but three fundamentally similar baskets. GE's fundamental thing was light bulbs, right? Yes. And that's, see, that's the thing. I associate still with GE and like I, anything else that comes from GE, it's like, Oh, it's GE. They're like, they make light bulbs. Right. I don't even know if they make light bulbs anymore, but they were, they built a thing and did it and did it so big and complete that they then could do whatever else they wanted. Are you all known to remember their old tagline? Maybe we bring good things to life. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Checking. They used to have a really nice typeface too. Then they changed it and now their logo is terrible looking. I'm on their Wikipedia page. It's super. Is it still the curse of GE? Oh, that's awesome. It's a great idea. It's like a hundred years old, but it's like, it's also in like a washing machine and there's, it's like, I don't know. It's awesome. It's in a washing machine. It's in a GE washing machine. But yeah, so, so you can see how Google is just kind of like throwing stuff at the wall in every conceivable direction. And even if one of them, say for example, they figure out how to make people live forever, which is a business. Yeah, they're gonna be on the internet a lot if they live forever. Yeah. Is there anything that Google could do where you would seriously go like, I don't like really? If they bought Applebee's. If they bought Applebee's? Yeah. I don't know. I would, we would find a way that it made sense for them. They would just put fiber in all of the Applebee's everywhere in the world and you'd have super fast internet. You're right. And they would like kill the coffee shop office with Applebee's. By the way, can I just say that this, this seat where I'm sitting is Josh's seat and every Verge cast, he comes on and he complains about his hair. It's this seat. Cause mine just started going crazy. You didn't raise your mic at all. It's really upsetting. Like I don't even know how to look at your mic. Complaining about my mic. Yeah, no, but no, this seat ruins hair. I mean your hair does look terrible. It's just, be honest. What is going on with the, we should move on and talk about this is the worst. Should we talk about mobile world Congress? That's coming up next week. Well, no, we, we, we, yes, we should talk about mobile world Congress. We should talk about mobile world Congress. It's more exciting than the internet being the worst because the FCC has no guts. Can Google buy the FCC? Is that a thing? Oh God. Is that allowed? Kind of. Do I wish they would? I mean they capitulated to Verizon on wireless. They could certainly buy the United States in which case they would own the FCC automatically. That's a good point. How many WhatsApps do you think the FCC costs? Is this going to be the new thing? Everybody talks about it in terms of Instagram. Are we going to be like, they bought it for one 32nd of a WhatsApp. Yeah. Poor Kevin. That's awful. I feel so bad for the guys. Well, you know, it's funny the idea of Google buying the FCC because paying for it is actually the real problem because the FCC won't man up and classify broadband as a common carrier, like a telephone, like a telecommunications line. They're going for this middle path again and they're doing it because going the common carrier route would be World War III because of all the money from the cable industry in Congress. It is really funny that World War III is just like a bunch of really pissed off lobbyists. That's what they got to do. Like lobbyists throwing money at each other as World War III. If you look at, I think you can tell that Tom Wheeler, who is the recently installed chairman of the FCC feels very bound and tied by Verizon versus FCC, the ruling that came out recently, which we've written about extensively. Check out Eddie Robertson's coverage if you haven't already, because it's very good. She just writes like one really angry thing every 48 hours. It's really great. And it's great. Yeah. So you can tell that he feels unsure about how to proceed and he feels like the FCC is just like kind of dead in the water here. So he put out this long list. He had been saying for... See, you say unsure and I hear, I don't see that. I mean, I see that, but like behind it, I see fear, trepidation and something really slimy because he just came from the cable industry. The guy who used to be in charge of the FCC is back in the cable industry. I think that's a little unfair for a couple of reasons. I'm warming up to Tom Wheeler. There was a lot of trepidation about the guy when he took the office, which was totally fair. Well, you kind of need to consider the fact that when he was at NACDA, which is the cable organization, it was seriously the underdog, like all kidding aside, like the cable industry was a non-entity. Oh yeah, in the early 80s. In the early 80s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he left before they got big, but he was like fighting from the underdog position. And the same argument could kind of be made with the CTIA. Like he left in what, 2001, 2002, something like that. The CTIA is a wireless version of the cable industry as a group. Right. And then he's kind of been floating around in investment firms since then. Look, I mean. But anyway, my point, what I was getting to is that you put out this long list of things that FCC is going to do. And if you read through the list of bullet points, everything is kind of like, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. We'll consider this carefully. We'll talk about this. But there are no- No, that's fine. But it's like, we'll wait and see, we'll wait and see. You're saying that like it's a reasonable thing. No, I'm not. You're saying that like it's not completely obvious what the FCC should do here. Isn't it completely obvious what broadband is? Yes, no, it is completely obvious. So why does everybody see it except for who? Tom Wheeler. Tom Wheeler, chairman of the FCC and the cable companies. Well- I mean, I'm just doing the math. Right. I think that he is a realist about being a politician in Washington, DC. I mean, you've seen House of Cards. So that's what drives me crazy. It's all about the money. Yeah. Like that's, it just is. And they all have so much money. Yes, they do. So much money. He's being a realist. He's being very cautious is the way I- Sure. Give him the benefit of the doubt. Don't write him off yet. Okay. I have the tiniest, tiniest bit of non-desperate feelings. I'll take it. I won't call it hope. I won't call it- That's my love life right there. There's no question. There's no question. I think we can all agree without question that the state of the internet and of the internet industry right now as it stands is completely miserable and terrible, and makes us all want to die. It's a terrible thing. That's fair. And it's Tom Wheeler's job to fix that. And there's a lot of weight on his shoulders. Not just in the cable industry, but in the wireless industry, as there always is. Yeah. So we'll see. Fair enough. All right. Let's talk about Mobile World Congress. Yeah. So it's starting, what, like Monday? Sunday, Monday? It's going to be a bigger show than last year. Yeah. Well, we're expecting Samsung to actually announce something at the show, which we thought they were done. Some things, plural. Yeah. We thought they were done showing off big, important stuff at big shows. That's very surprising. And now they're like, nope, we're going to go ahead and do Mobile World Congress. I wonder if it's because Mobile World Congress was so bad last year that they were like, we can really take over the show and do it this year. No, you're absolutely right. It's cyclical. It's like when the shows get soft, they're like, oh, we can use it now. Right. When the show gets big, they're like, ah, screw this. We're going to do our own thing. Guess we're going to bail. So S5, the new Galaxy phone. Then apparently it's going to have a fingerprint scanner. We talked about this on the Verge Mobile show, which you should listen to. It's great. It's great. It's a fantastic program. It's terrible. Don't listen to it ever. We recorded it from a jail cell last week. It was amazing. We did. And then not one, but multiple Galaxy Gears, which didn't the Galaxy Gear just come out? Came out like three days ago. I mean, I guess good for Samsung for being like, OK, we screwed up. This is bad. Let's try again. You're giving them too much credit. There's no indication that the new Galaxy Gear will be any better. That's a fair point. This is like, we screwed up. Let's do it again. This is a company that had its second generation tablet ready to go. And then Apple announced the new super thin iPad that was the two that was ridiculous thin. And within a matter of like three weeks, they scrapped their whole tablet and came out with one of the same thickness. I mean, this is the insane thing about it. They just like turned it around. This is the insane thing about Samsung that is like the most underrated feature of Samsung is they can make anything unbelievably quickly at incredible scale. And so Samsung's ability to just like rinse and repeat is insane. And I think that's like eventually going to be the story of the Galaxy Gear. Like they're going to get to a point like they did with the Galaxy S phones where it was like it was bad, but then it was slightly better and then it was slightly better and it was good. And then it was really good. And they're like and now nobody cares because it's really good. And Samsung can do it so fast. It takes so many chances that it's not going to matter. Here's the difference though with the Galaxy S, the smartphone, the concept of a smartphone Galaxy S is pretty good too. Yeah, not bad. I captivate. But with the Galaxy S, the concept of what a smartphone was supposed to be was already well established. With wearables, there's still no clear indication what a wearable is supposed to be and what kind of wearable people want. Yeah. Samsung as leader is a lot less established. Samsung as fast follower is great. Sledgehammer to force people to... It's marketing Sledgehammer to get people to buy it smartphones. Like, okay, that doesn't affect my life. They've made such good ads for the Gear. Doing it with wearables though, I have to look at these stupid things. And PC people struggle with them. You don't like the digital boil? Dude, it's so bad. So anyway, multiple gears. It's the grossest thing I've ever heard. Multiple gears. Great. So you're saying that the PC is supposedly doing... Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But we need to discuss new Galaxy Gear ties in instead of Android. It's not... No, I don't care if it runs Android or ties in. Just don't suck. I mean, my... Like, I don't want ties in on my phone because I want apps, but there's no app ecosystem for wearable. So I don't care what operating system runs. As long as it plays nicely with your phone. As long as it plays nicely with your phone. As long as it's really good, it's gonna pick up an app ecosystem. You know what's going to... It's fine. It's gonna be a pebble thought in your heart. I mean, that's what Pebble has done, right? Right. Like, they have... Theirs is their own thing. I'm gonna put a nightmare of a thought in your heart and soul. Pebble running ties in? No, even worse. What's going to happen is Pebble is going to develop such a lead with their app ecosystem that the killer app for the Galaxy... The next Galaxy Gear is going to be a Pebble emulator. It allows you to run Pebble apps. That would be amazing. I'm all in. And then Google will buy them or Facebook will buy them and I won't have any idea why. But so HTC's ones are supposedly what's happening is what I'm very excited about. They're doing the phone later, March 25th. But they're potentially doing a watch based on the Qualcomm talk that you reviewed forever ago. I did. And I'm really hopeful that if this happens, it will not use the same wristband, which is the worst wristband in the series. It's really insane. It's so bad. There are two things that made it really bad. One was the fact that the band was touch sensitive. So you would just randomly touch it and things would happen. And then the battery was at the very bottom of the band for no reason. So it was really uncomfortable. The only good thing about that Qualcomm talk, the prototype, was the mirror cell screen, which is... I've been looking at mirror cell technology at trade shows since I started going to trade shows. It's been six or seven years. You trundle over to Qualcomm's booth and they'd have this little postage stamp thing and there'd be no backlight. Like, oh my God, it's a color screen with no backlight. It works. Because every year the postage stamp got bigger and bigger and now it's big enough to be a watch. So if they get rid of all the crappy parts about the Qualcomm talk watch, which is literally everything but that display and they make something with that display. If they just get rid of it. Sure. It's a solid name. Talk's not a bad name. No, it isn't. It's pretty bad name for a watch. On the back of the package, if I remember correctly, it says tech and then it shows like an old school watch and then it says talk. That's pretty good. It's pretty good. Yeah. No, but I think like mirror salt is just objectively like good. It's great. It was amazing. It's fate was to be in a smart watch. Yeah. Basically. I also really like that we are, our piece says there's just a sentence in this piece which Rich wrote for us based on a Bloomberg thing, which says, also says HTC has two other wearable devices in the works, including an electronic bracelet that plays music. Like what? What is that? This is a company that can't afford to make a bunch of random crap. Google can do whatever it wants. They can make balloons, fly into space and give you internet. You know what this thing is going to be called? HTC needs to focus. This is going to be called the boom wrist. No, no. I guarantee it. The boom wrist. You're so right. Yep. This is the most upsetting thing. HTC boom wrist. It's just going to have Beats logos all over it. Yep. No, I thought they were done with Beats. You're never done with Beats. No one's ever done with Beats. You can never escape Beats. It's like the hotel California of sound systems. Never ends. And then a Google Now smart watch, which seems super obvious in this lot of stuff. Apparently none of this stuff is going to be shown to humans at Mobile World Congress. Oh really? It's going to be like backroom meetings where they try and sell it. Is what I think the Bloomberg report said. So do you think with the Google Now smart watch, do you think it's conceivable that this is going to be like Google's Nexus smart watch? Do you think this will be an official partnership? That would be interesting. Wouldn't it be weird if that came from HTC though? Do you guys use Google Now? Yeah, all the time. Really? All the time. I just started again because I realized that it got a lot better than the last time I tried it. But it's still like, eh. But it's like terrifyingly good now. I use it most when I travel. It's fantastic for when I travel. I'll load it up and I'll be like, yo, your package got delivered. I'm like, I don't even know what package you're talking about. Sometimes I have packages. It knows really terrifying things about my life that I don't know. I agree. And the thing that I love about now is the little bits of things that are happening. It just reminds me of things I have to do today or emails that I have. Or here's the game you forgot was on. Here's the score. Yeah, right. No, it's great. And it's so much better than it used to be. And we've been saying for forever that since the beginning of Google Now, it was like, oh, this would be good for wearable devices. It'd be so nice if I could just look at my watch and it's like, here's what's next on your calendar and here's how long it'll take you to get there. And you remember Google bought Wim not long ago to do, presumably, exactly this. Yeah. And Wim did a decent job really early on. Well, decent is strong. Wim's fatal flaw was not including Bluetooth in the watch. It had Wi-Fi, but no Bluetooth. Whoopsies. Wow. Sorry, guys. So the last thing that we're really expecting is the Nokia's X phone, the Android phone. And what are we expecting this to be? It's going to be a phone that runs Android. Got it. No, but is this like... It's going to be low end, right? And it's not going to... But this is Nokia owned by Microsoft's Nokia. Well, not yet. Not yet. That's the thing. So they're going to make this phone... Nokia engineers are like, we made this and we're releasing it. God damn it. They're going to make it and then like 25 minutes later, Satya Nadella is going to come up and just smack it out of their hands on stage and be like, you shut up. No, because it's for the low end. Who cares? Well, so devil's advocate. And Tom has been... And by devil, you mean... I mean Tom Warren. Android? Tom Warren. Tom Warren's advocate. Yeah, Tom Warren's advocate. Trepid Microsoft reporter, Tom Warren. They have so fundamentally stripped... Presumably they have so fundamentally stripped this version of Android of its Androidness and replaced it with Microsoft services and Microsoft UI that... Or Nokia UI, I guess, technically, that no one will know that it's Android and there's zero chance that they will mention the word Android on stage at the WBC. Then why do it? That's a great question. You're asking the right questions, David. You should be a journalist. Because Android can run on lower end hardware than Windows phone can. I mean, that's... That's gotta be... That's the only reason I can think of. No, but is that seriously true? Like if you look at the Lumia 520, it's so cheap. It is so cheap. It's so not very good though, isn't it? Well, yeah, but neither is low end Android. Well, fair. No, but I just... I know, I don't get it. Like I don't get why this is a smart move. It's a hate release. Like a bunch of engineers at Nokia were super pissed that they didn't get to build their own stuff. So they built their own thing and they brought Steve Neal up and he's like, I don't know about this. I don't know about the job at Microsoft. He's like, ah, screw it. Just put it out there. I don't care. Well, so we were talking about this just a little bit on the mobile show. I think what may have happened is at some point Nokia was seriously working on Android across the range as a plan B in case Windows phone failed. And that project got smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller until eventually it was just like an Asha replacement. And then they're still using Windows phone on the high end, of course. But you can imagine how at one point they were like, yeah, we might need to bail to Android. That's a serious possibility. So they were exploring it across the range and now the scope just got smaller. I mean, but that ship sailed, right? Like they're not, they're not going to switch to Android. The platform was burning. They're all like Microsoft. They jumped into the ship and now the ship has sailed. I don't know. But it's still sort of slowly sinking as it sails. It's going very fast. And then it lights on fire because it's a burning platform. Yeah, right. It's like a Viking funeral. It's a burning sinking ship. Yeah. I've learned a lot. I've learned a lot about the ship. Yeah. I'm really curious to see how that goes down and even more than that to see how they talk about it. Because I think if they're like, they will never say Android once. You don't think? No, they will not say the word Android. What are they going to say? I mean, did Amazon say Android when they announced Kindle? I don't think so. Well, but they, they named it though. They were like, here's what, do you think Nokia is going to have their own name for whatever OS this is? Probably. Yeah. They'll call it X. I don't know. Just like every other phone out in the market. I hope something finishes completely unpronounceable. They should just call it Asha and just like hope nobody actually knows what Asha is and they just go for it. Yeah, they could. We were actually talking about... Asha is Nokia's low end phone line. Right. You remember, Dieter, I think you were at this Nokia world where they introduced Asha for the first time and they spent like half an hour talking about what Asha meant. Yeah. Like I can't remember what language it is, but it's like, you know, they described it. So yeah, maybe they'll do that. It's a lovely name. I Googled it and I get the American Speech Language Hearing Association. I don't think that was it. I feel like I'm close. I don't think that was it. Maybe not quite there. Yeah, we'll see. I mean, it's a weird move. We've been saying for years and years and years that if they had taken the Nokia like N9, which was their first new design language phone that was running Amigo, if they had taken that and just put like ICS on it, it would have been an amazing device. Yeah, we've been saying this for forever. Yeah. Like if they would just... Nokia builds better phones than anybody. We just reviewed the icon, which is not quite up to Nokia standards. Whoops. I can't say it for sure, so I can't like write it, but I am so sure that everybody at Verizon just like gets off on ruining good things. They're just like, oh, you made this really nice phone. No. Throw it in the dirt, make it twice as large and put 40 logos on it and then we will sell it in our stores. Make it an inch thick. Yeah. Or like they have some secret backdoor deal with Samsung where they're like, you can only sell ugly phones except Samsung. You know what, you're right. Think about the Samsung Continuum, which was the worst phone ever made. Oh God, the Samsung Continuum. Oh man. Wait, was that the one with the two screens? Yeah, it wasn't really two screens. It just had like a piece of plastic over the screen to make it look like two screens. Wait, okay, speaking of Samsung, I have a question for both of you. So I just reviewed this Galaxy Note Pro, the big tablet. Which is this big. It's a television. Yeah. It's right there behind your head right now. There it is. That is the Galaxy Note Pro. You used it as a literal like food tray. Yeah. In your review, which is amazing. You can carry things on it. It's lovely. But A, it's now just horribly broken. Thank you, Michael Shane. It's not his fault. I get to the end of this whole thing and I'm still like, this is what everybody thinks is about to happen, right? Is that we're gonna make tablets that are our primary computing devices, right? Like there are all these rumors that Apple's making a big thing or like somewhere between the MacBook Air and the iPad. Samsung's doing it. The Surface is sort of this like, is this a good idea? Do we want this? To make a reform factor? Are laptops dying? And eventually we'll just all have tablets and that'll be like the thing that we do? No. Yes. But like PC sales are down, right? Tablet sales are... I just, I don't know. We're at this weird inflection point where like people are writing that nobody cares about tablets anymore, but then tablet sales are growing and PC sales are dying. But here's what people do. And I just... But here's what people really want. They buy their iPad and then they buy a keyboard case for it. Just buy a laptop. Just do it. Just buy a laptop. That's the thing. But I think ultimately, I mean the trend seems clear that it's gonna be iPads and keyboard cases. And for the life of me, I can't figure out why for anyone who actually does anything ever. And I guess maybe that's my fundamental theory is that most people just want to like sit around and not do stuff. I know like this sounds fine. Like those things are different. Just buy a laptop. But if this thing right here, would have a little bit thicker screen and when you pulled it off, it turned into an iPad and when you put it on, it was a Mac. Would you not buy that? Yes, I would buy that. You would buy the hell out of that. So it's a hinge problem and it's a battery complexity problem. No, it's also a software problem. Right. If you can make a device... I mean, I also wanna like be able to chop off a corner and have it be my cell phone. But like, I don't know, all of these things, like I get... This is the Moto Atrix all over again. I said when the Moto Atrix came out, I was like, this is the best idea. This is the future. And I was just so wrong, just so wrong. Just because it was bad software. It was a terrible product. But what they did was they were like, we made a phone and you dock it into a tablet or you dock it into whatever you need it to be and then it works as that. But you also have weird feelings about the pad phone. I love the pad phone. I love it so much. I don't understand these feels. There's a new one coming and it's going to AT&T and I'm gonna get it. Don't, don't. It's gonna be the best. It's gonna be the best. I'm gonna use the pad phone station all day. Do not. All day. Don't do that. I learned what it's like to try and work on Android. You try, learn what it's like to work on Android that can actually let you have multiple things on the screen at the same time. It's not good. Yeah, I mean beyond everything else. It's not horrible. It's way better than what I expected. The multitasking on the Tab Pro is way better than what I expected, but I wasn't expecting much. Right. I mean, it's ultimately like I can sit here and like resize my browser and I can have eight apps open if I want to in there, however I want them to work. And it's just Android is a million miles away. You, I mean the bottom line is that. But if that thing, like if I could dock it into a keyboard and it would run Windows all of a sudden. Look at you try and drag Windows. That's so cute. That would be great. But that's, I don't know that that's possible. So that's like, that's straight up just a Haswell, it's a processor problem. Sure. OS problem. I mean this is also what like. And presumably we'll fix that. It's also the possibility of like Chrome OS and Android merging, right? Is that when I want it to be, it's an Android tablet and then I dock it in and it's a Chromebook. Right. But Chrome OS is only marginally more, in fact it's not even more functional than Android. In some ways it's more functional than Android. What? Like, come on. Like all I use is a browser anyway and to be able to have like a bunch of windows open and do stuff side by side and everything's a web app. I have a Chromebook. I love it. That's a window problem. It's not an OS problem. Yeah, but honestly I think at a, on some level the biggest productivity problems we have on these mobile devices are window problems. Yeah, lack of windows. Yeah. Like it's. Like button problems. Yeah. Like easy switching between stuff and window problems. And like Chrome OS is a small way of solving that. You're trying to make me say web OS aren't you? Damn it. It's true. No, we're going to look back in 50 years and be like, shit, they got it right the first time and then we just ruined it forever. No, it wasn't the first time. It was terrible, but not terrible, but not great. But that concept of panels that lost, that never got made. Well, it was the joke about the Irish. Like the Irish discovered civilization and then they had a Guinness and lost it. It's like, that's what web OS was. Well, Dieter, you're going to buy an LG TV for this very reason, right? No. Oh yes you are. Don't lie. No, I'm not buying an LG TV. I'm buying an LG TV for five years easily. I've got a TV that's like two, maybe three years old. No, it's two years old. I've got an Xbox one plugged into it now for Titanfall. Yeah. Which I can't play anymore, which I'm really bad at. And I didn't know the beta was going offline last night and I didn't play. And then I tried to play and now I'm really sad. I'm terrible at that game. I'm terrible. Just awful. Also the Xbox one is embarrassingly large. It's not. It's so big. Put it next to anything else. A cable box. A TiVo. I've got the, you know the... I could definitely live in the ocean on my cable box. IKEA is replacing an Expedit shelf line, which has got all the hipsters angry because it's perfect for holding records. And we use it as an entertainment center. Oh yeah, we wrote about that. Yeah. We use it as an entertainment center and we use it to have... We've got records in it because you have to have records if you live in Brooklyn. But underneath... You just moved here just immediately and bought a bunch of records. Yeah. And it had a little Expedit slot with an Xbox 360, a Wii and an Ouya. Everything was in there. I already don't trust you. It was cold. It was fine. This conversation is going south. I took all three of those things out and I'm like, I'm going to place all this with the one. It's going to be awesome. Nope. It has to sit on top of my entertainment center. Maybe that's why IKEA discontinued it. Yeah. Because they were like, crap, it doesn't fit the Xbox one. We got to try something else. It could be why. No, that thing is large. It's very large. Stupidly big. Yeah. It's super loud. It turns out. Yeah. Especially when I'm playing type. Literally every component of it has a fan. The power supply, the Kinect has a fan and the box has a fan. That's true. The Kinect fan is my favorite. Yeah. Wow. All right. I feel like... I think we're done. We're wrapping up. Yeah. So if you want to contact us, you can. You can email us. The email address is thevergecast at theverge.com. Is that right? Just Vergecast. There's no the. Just vergecast at theverge.com. We're also on Twitter. I want to thank Ellis Hamburger who was here earlier. He is at Hamburger. She's awesome. Which is the best. David Pearce is at Pearce David, which is the worst. Yeah, that's true. Objectively the worst. Just I'm telling you, please everyone berate whoever at David Pearce is on Twitter. He's actually a very nice guy. Don't do that. We've talked a few times because sometimes I berate him into trying to give me his Twitter. Very nice guy. But please everyone berate him into giving me his Twitter handle. Thank you. Chris Ziegler is asepower. I am at Backlon and there's a really good story behind that, which I'd love to tell you sometime. But until I do this weekend, your family keep Joshua away from.