YATS 98: Colorado Closet

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“Speaking of wireless chargers…”

Welcome to YATS! It’s Yet Another Tech Show. This is the tech podcast to discuss the interesting stories in tech from the week. The difference, we bring it with plenty of humor and fun. The panel this week includes Mat Lee, Ant Pruitt, Larry Press and Nick Carroll. Click play at the top and scroll down to follow the show notes.

Let’s start this week’s tech discussion with some sport news. Yes. Sports. Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer bid and won the right to purchase the Los Angeles Clippers of the NBA. Yes folks, we are talking sport on YATS. This was a big story being that it’s the former CEO of a technology giant. Also, he’s not the first technology-minded professional sports team owner since there’s also the popular Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks; Ballmer becomes the second Microsoft legacy leader to own a professional sports team. Paul Allen owns the Super Bowl Champion Seattle Seahawks. We discuss if Baller is a good fit for this job.

In this week’s edition of Net Neutrality News, Larry takes a look back at some Netflix data stream stats. It had been well documented that Comcast customers experienced poor quality of service when watching Netflix. It’s ironic that the Netflix traffic got better flow when negotiations began to wrap up between them and Comcast, who has the infrastructure. Larry’s argument is, who is going to protect the consumer and invest in the internet infrastructure we need without this foolishness. He also shared a great parody video of the net neutrality debates. It’s a parody from HBO’s John Oliver, but it’s definitely thought provoking.

Image Credit: Washington Post

Image Credit: Washington Post

Speaking of Netflix, it seems to be sick and tired of its sketchy quality of service being blamed on them. Netflix is now pushing to have customized message prompts when your streaming begins to buffer. In a nutshell it will tell you that the problem isn’t Netflix, it’s your internet provider’s network traffic. Well played, Netflix. Well played.

Google is looking to give us even more connectivity outside of Google Fiber. Google is looking to invest into lower orbit satellites for transferring internet traffic. You’ll be looking at 100-200 millisecond transfer speeds, but that’s still a great feat.

Where are we with the Sprint and T-Mobile merger? Is this going to happen? We look at the chances of this going through and what the benefits could be for the two struggling mobile carriers. Oddly, both run different bands of spectrum. Fortunately, today’s hardware technology may be able to work with either in a single device.

Image Credit: Ant Pruitt

Image Credit: Ant Pruitt

According to BGR, Intel is looking to eliminate cables in computers within two years. Big talk from Intel, huh? We look at this and discuss our philosophical difference about the matter. I think there’s a bright future in this as it means there’s more innovation coming down the pipe. Mat is calling BS on it all.

Remember the rumors of the 3D smartphone? Well there is still floating the speculation. We are all “meh” on the idea. How could this really be useful for Amazon and the network providers?

Artemis has a write up on the development of pCells which is essentially hope to boost WiFi performance. The pCell deliberately use transmission interference to reproduce pCells and boost data transmission speed. Larry just tipped the iceberg with this and will follow up later with his findings.

Comcast is finally making an encrypted tunnel for email from its mail exchangers. Google recently called out online providers that aren’t encrypting mail traffic. Gmail to Gmail is encrypted. Comcast to Comcast will now be encrypted as well. Was this a reaction to the Google smackdown?

That’s it for YATS this week. Thank for watching the show and sharing with others. Be sure to check out all of our subscription options on the right of the page. Take a look at our community on Google+ and join in on our discussions each week and submit stories. We’ll catch you all on the next episode!

Check out the hangout video below. If you want to watch us live, check out YATS tv Wednesday nights.