Dave and Chris discuss real-time translation technology using smart glasses and earbuds, the death of the Amazon App Store for Android, Uber suing DoorDash, Ai and home automation, and more.
“News Pick of the Week” with Ralph Bond
Here’s some news for anyone experiencing a harsh winter right now. What if your winter clothing could boost its warming ability using sunlight only. Ralph Bond, our Science Technology reporter, has more on a remarkable new fabric breakthrough.
Rich in Purcellville, Virginia asked: “I have a question about mobile games. You’ve probably seen ads on your phone for these games that are free to play but have no ads. I kind of wonder how can they make money? They must be trying to rip off my data or something from me but I don’t see how they’re doing it.I wonder if you can explain that to me. And then theres the other category of game and these are the ones that you can supposedly play for a few minutes and win hundreds of dollars. It’s got to be a scam but I’m not sure what their gimmick is. If you can explain that to me too, I’d appreciate it.”
Rich, games without ads typically make money in two ways.
The first one is in-app purchases. You may have noticed if you downloaded any of these games that you can hit a wall pretty quickly and get to a point that you just cannot get past. The solution in those cases is usually some kind of paid item, be it a weapon, a vehicle, or anything else.
The bulk of the players that download these games quit at that point, but there is a small minority of players that will spend a large amount of money. Those players are the bread and butter of these apps.
The other source of income is exactly what you thought: your data. That can be more or less anything from demographic data to your habits.
As an example, years ago, before Elon Musk bought Twitter a former employee told the story online of how AT&T wanted to pay to know which of their clients walked into a competitors store. At the time Twitter anonymized and aggregated the data and sold it to them, then AT&T complained about it not being what they wanted. Back in those days Jack vetoed the attempts to get them the identifiers they wouldve needed to tell what specific clients walk into their competitors stores, but its something that is possible.
The same kind of thing goes for more or less any of your movements or habits since people are generally addicted to their phones.
As for games that pay you to play, the answer is pretty simple: They advertise paydays in the hundreds of dollars but dont really even pay that much a year and in the process you are typically exposed to ads or your usage is monetized in a different way. Theyre basically just scams.
Recently some had also been using users devices to mine cryptocurrency for them, but that seems to have died down since it was detected.
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Dave Graveline is the founder, Host & Executive Producer of "Into Tomorrow" in addition to being President of the Advanced Media Network".
Dave is also a trusted and familiar voice on many national commercials & narrations in addition to being an authority in consumer tech since 1994. He is also a former Police Officer and an FBI Certified Instructor.
When you participate on the show – anytime 24/7 – and we HEAR you with any consumer tech question, comment, help for another listener, tech rage or just share your favorite App these days … you could win prizes.