Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the TechMe ride home for Thursday, January 16th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, Nintendo finally takes the wraps off the Switch 2. Everybody seems to want to give TikTok more time, but can they find a way to do it? A big new AI research lab, a check in with nothing. The company, I mean, and the weird story of when Walgreens tried to replace refrigerator doors with smart screens. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. We now know what the successor to the Nintendo Switch will be like, because this morning Nintendo teased the Switch 2 featuring a new kickstand design and backward compatibility for physical and digital games, with more details coming on April 2nd. Quoting the Verge, the console looks a lot like the original, but it's bigger. In the video, the Joy Con controllers are black with colored accents. They attach to the side of the console instead of sliding on and off. The Joy Cons appear to snap on quite easily. Leaks have suggested they could be attached via magnets. There's a new button under the Home button on the right Joy Con, which had shown up in leaks. The video also appears to show the Joy Cons being used similarly to a mouse, and the SL&SR buttons on the Joy Cons are bigger than they are on the original Switch's Joy Cons. On top of the Switch 2, there's a new USB C port next to the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack. The kickstand has a new design. It's shaped more like a U. The dock for the Switch 2 has a more rounded design and like with the original Switch, there will also be a separate controller grip that you can snap the Joy control into. End quote. Now again, Nintendo didn't actually say when this will be available to buy, beyond just saying 2025. And no details on the all important spec bumps that we're expecting. But there is going to be a Nintendo Direct on April 2nd as mentioned, so expect more details then. Plus, there are apparently a series of live events in New York, Los Angeles and Dallas in April where you can see more close up. And those will be ticketed events that you have to register for from Nintendo's website. The only game they teased seems to be a new version of Mario Kart, which would be, believe me, the most important news in this household. We haven't gotten a full Mario Kart fully updated version since 2014. The Mario Kart Deluxe on the Switch was just that, an upgraded version from the Wii U. That didn't stop Mario Kart deluxe from selling 64 million copies, though. Look, we're going to be stuck in this interregnum where the TikTok ban is coming. We expect something to happen to maybe mitigate that. But everything is up in the air. The Washington Post is reporting that Donald Trump is considering issuing an executive order once in office that would suspend enforcement of the TikTok sale or ban law for 60 to 90 days. And I interviewed Senator Ron Wyden yesterday for the show. You'll hear that this weekend. Or you can check the YouTube channel if you can't wait. And he said that there is a concerted effort behind the scenes to try to buy more time here in Congress, quoting the Post, Trump has been mulling ways to save the day for the wildly popular video app, talking through unconventional deal making and legal maneuvers such as an executive order that would unravel the law passed by Congress last year with bipartisan support, according to two people familiar with the deliberations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private talks. Trump has expressed a keen interest in being seen as rescuing a platform on which he's been told he's widely admired, leading political aides and business allies to scramble for options that would allow him to deliver on his campaign promise to save TikTok. As he has said repeatedly on his more than 14 million follower TikTok account, the main question is how. A law signed by President Joe Biden last year calls for the app's owner, the Beijing based tech giant ByteDance, to sell the app by January 19 or face an immediate ban. The Supreme Court, which considered TikTok's challenge of the law last week, is expected to allow the law to proceed as planned, but has not yet issued a ruling. The law is aimed at addressing Justice Department concerns that the Chinese government could covertly use the app to spy on Americans or broadcast propaganda. Trump, one of the people said, is eager to be seen as making a deal and signing an executive order soon after the deadline's passing just one day before his inauguration, would give the proceedings a cinematic flourish. But the strategy of using an executive order the kind of presidential decree that Trump dashed off in rapid fashion at the start of his first presidential term, has fueled doubts among some legal observers who argue the president's word can't entirely overcome a law that Congress approved with overwhelming bipartisan support. Executive orders, quote, are not magical documents, they're just press releases with nicer stationery, said Alan Rochenstein, a former national security advisor to the Justice Department now at the University of Minnesota. TikTok will still be banned and it will still be illegal for Apple and Google to do business with them, but it will make the president's intention not to enforce the law that much more official, end quote. An official says the Biden administration is, quote, exploring options to implement the law without causing TikTok to go dark in a matter of days, quoting NBC News. Americans shouldn't expect to see TikTok suddenly banned on Sunday, an administration official said, adding that officials are exploring options for how to imp the law so TikTok does not go dark Sunday. Deputy White House Chief of Staff Bruce Reed has been a point person on the issue and has received many calls from people urging the president not to let a ban go into effect, according to two people familiar with the matter. If the administration moves forward with any such plan, it would mean the popular apps going down would not define his last full day in office, and it would defer the issue to Donald Trump, who will be inaugurated Monday. Mike Waltz, Trump's incoming national security adviser, told Fox News on Wednesday that Trump is ready to intervene to preserve access to the Chinese owned video app in the America American marketplace. And Pam Bondi, his pick for attorney general, refused to commit to enforcing the ban when she was asked about it at her Senate confirmation hearing Wednesday, end quote. Meanwhile, sources say over 700,000 new users join Zhao Hongshu or RedNote in just the past few days. Sensor Tower says the app's US downloads were up more than 200% year on year this week. And I guess because of this, Bloomberg says that the biggest shareholders of Zhao Hongshu or RedNote are in talks to sell part of their holdings at a valuation of at least $2020 billion. Do we have a new big player in the AI space? AI researcher Francois Chollet and Zapier co founder Mike Knop launched NDIA, an AI research and science lab focused on developing and operationalizing AGI. Quoting TechCrunch we're betting on a different path to build AI capable of true invention, adaptation and innovation, chollet wrote in a series of posts on X. We believe we have a small but real chance of achieving a breakthrough through creating AI that can learn at least as efficiently as people and that can keep improving over time with no bottlenecks in sight. India plans to use a technique called program synthesis in tandem with other technical approaches to unlock AGI. Chollet thinks that program synthesis, which allows AI to generate problems it hasn't seen before from only a few examples, can help to overcome the most intractable problems in AI research. Program synthesis is traditionally compute intensive, but Chalet thinks this limitation can be overcome and that overcoming it will accelerate scientific progress. We are not alone in recognizing the potential of program synthesis. It's a technique every frontier AI lab is now starting to explore, reads a blog post on India's website. We are at the crest of a pivotal moment in scientific history and the world deserves every possible, direct, unique attempt to build AGI. End quote. They didn't disclose if they've raised any capital from outside investors, but they are hiring according to their social media posts. Chollei, who is the creator of the widely used Keras open source API for building AI models and machine learning systems, has established a non profit organization with Zapier founder Nop focused on developing AGI benchmarks. His departure from Google, announced in November following nearly 10 years at the company, adds him to the growing list of prominent artificial intelligence researchers who have left major tech companies to launch independent AI research laboratories in the past few years. Say goodbye to weak erections with Joy Mode's Sexual Performance Booster this all natural supplement is designed to enhance blood flow, giving you firmer, more reliable erections. But Joy Mode isn't just about better sex. Daily use supports healthier blood vessels, boosts heart health and enhances your athletic performance. 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Several newcomers have tried to challenge Apple's iPhone with new devices, but few outside of China have come close to rivaling the well capitalized market leaders. Nothing previously raised about $100 million in 2023. Nothing has gained fans with the unique design of its smartphones, which feature the startup is run by Carl Pie, one of the creators of OnePlus, a popular China based phone maker. Nothing sells phones ranging from $250 to $700, as well as several different earbuds and a smartwatch. In 2024, Nothing doubled its annual revenue to more than $500 million and recently crossed $1 billion in lifetime sales, the people said. It has also told investors that its margins have improved from a year ago and that IT has sold 7 million units across all product categories to date. Though customers in the US can buy Nothing devices, the company primarily sells its phones overseas. Nothing's biggest market is India, followed by Germany and the uk the people said. The top market for the company's audio gear is the US Followed by the uk, Germany and Japan. Nothing is focused on ramping up sales outside the US this year, but plans to make a bigger push into the American market in 2026. It's also exploring an expansion into additional product categories. The company has about 600 employees and manufactures devices in China and India. End quot finally today, an interesting legal dispute. Walgreens spent $200 million to replace refrigerator doors in its stores with smart screens, the better to show ads with and well. As I said, it's turned into such a fiasco that the courts are involved. Quoting Bloomberg. The refrigerated section at the flagship Walgreens on Chicago's Magnificent Mile was glowing with frozen food and bottled drinks. But not for long. Where the fridge cases were pre previously lined with simple glass doors, there were door sized computer screens instead. These smart doors obscured shoppers view of the fridge's actual contents, replacing them with virtual rows of the Gatorades, Bagel Bites and other goods it promised were inside. The digital displays had a distinct advantage over regular glass, at least for the retailer ads. When proximity sensors detected passersby, the fridge doors started playing short videos, hawking Doritos or urging customers to check out with Apple Pay. If this sounds disruptive in the ordinary sense of the word, not Silicon Valleys, that might have seemed a generous description in December 2023 when all the screens went blank. At first, the outage didn't arouse suspicion. These Internet connected fridge panels, developed by a Chicago startup called Cooler Screens, frequently flickered, crashed or showed the wrong products. Every so often they caught fire, but store managers were stuck with them. As part of a 10 year contract with Walgreens for a split of the ad revenue, Cooler screens had installed 10,000 smart doors at hundreds of US LOC like this one, it planned to install 35,000 more. By this point, Walgreens had already tried to pull out of the deal and get rid of the doors, blaming what it says were glitchy hardware and software. But Cooler Screens had temporarily prevented their removal the prior June by suing Walgreens for breach of contract, seeking $200 million and demanding its screens stay in place unreported until now, is that over the ensuing months of legal battling, during which Walgreens had countersued for monetary damages, Cooler Screens Chief Executive Officer Arson Avakian decided to try a different form of pushback. On December 14, Avakian's team secretly cut the data feeds to more than 100 Walgreens stores in the Chicago area. The dozen or so Smart doors affected in each of those stores either glazed over with white pixels or blacked out altogether. Customers could no longer see where the Coke and Red Bull and Hot Pockets and Heineken sat and either assumed the fridges were out of order or found themselves rummaging through. One by one, some staffers pasted pieces of paper on the opaque screens that read, for example, assorted sports drinks and coffee. Others filed service requests online with cooler screens, which had been marking all incoming complaints as resolved without fixing anything. By the time Walgreens caught on and persuaded a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against cooler screens, forcing it to restore the data feeds, the doors had been offline for a week. Before, it had been annoying for some screens to occasionally black out. It was much more painful for hundreds of them to crash simultaneously. Walgreens lawyers suggested this might have dented the company's quarterly grocery sales. This December attack, as they called it, mostly targeted Illinois, the home state of Walgreens Boots alliance, the pharmacy chain's parent company. This was a brazen pressure tactic intended to harm Walgreens business and customer reputation during the busy holiday shopping season and force Walgreens to capitulate to cooler screens demands, counsel for the retailer wrote in a court filing. End quote. In a way, you can lay the blame for all of this at Amazon's feet. You know how Amazon has spun up that advertising business that is making tens of billions of dollars a quarter. Not only Amazon make money selling you stuff, they can make money advertising stuff for you to buy. Traditional retailers like Walgreens, Target and Best Buy all want in on the action. They're all racing to transform their brick and mortar locations into digital advertising powerhouses, all eyeing their slice of what eMarketer projects to be a $166 billion market opportunity in 2024, a remarkable tripling from pre pandemic levels. This digital transformation hit a new milestone last month when Walmart strategically acquired Vizio holding primarily to secure a direct pipeline of scre advertising to its massive weekly foot traffic of 255 million store visitors. Cooler Screens was backed by tech giants Microsoft and Verizon to empower retailers who lack Walmart's massive scale and resources. They're expanding beyond just freezer displays to develop a comprehensive in store digital ecosystem with numerous potential clients allegedly waiting in the wings. Though specific details remain ambiguous. In the words of Cooler Screens Chief Executive Officer Arsen Avakian, as soon as we flip that page, which we will very shortly with Walgreens, they're all going to say, let's look at the core. Is this real s or is this bull S? However, consumers seem to be split on this whole technology. Despite Cooler Screens resuming its Walgreens partnership following the judge's ruling, technical issues persisted in early 2024, when digital displays malfunctioned at a Walgreens in Joliet, Illinois. Staff resorted to taping physical photos of shelf contents onto the blank screens, and a customer's viral Reddit comment captured the irony perfectly. If only there was some other technology that would let us see what's in there. End quote Hey, a lot of you have signed up for the Ad Free feed recently. Many thanks. Because not only do you get the show without the ads in the middle, you are supporting me directly. Like directly directly. 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