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Telegram messaging app brings video calls to Android and iOS, and other personal productivity and technology news this week!
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Headlines & Show Notes | Telegram Messaging App Brings Video Calls to Android and iOS
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Raw Text Transcript | Telegram Messaging App Brings Video Calls to Android and iOS
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:00
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community, welcome to anything but idle, the productivity news podcast. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:07
And I am Augusto Pinaud
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:08
And we’re your hosts for anything but idle. This is Episode 19. And we’re recording this on August 20 2020. Each week, we cover the productivity news headlines of the week. So you know what’s going on in the current research tools, services, products and more in the world of personal productivity. And so with that, let’s get into our headlines. First up Augusto, I see that Apple is extending Apple care plus, tell us a little bit about that.
Augusto Pinaud 0:33
I know Apple this week or early this week announced that they’re changing their Apple care plus policies to the United States and Canada, up to one year to purchase Apple care after buying the device used to you used to have 60 days to buy the apple care. Now they extend that to whole one year before you need to buy, extend, extend care or the apple care plus. So that’s a great news for anybody buying a new Apple device.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 1:01
Fantastic. Next up, Microsoft announced their Microsoft Surface duo product, both its price and release date. And we talked about that last week as our featured story. Well, this week, they told The Verge that they were going to be giving three years of Android updates, which in essence is the same as Google and Samsung is doing with their Android devices, which is three years of updates as well. And this is really fantastic. I think this is good parody across the ecosystem, so that Android users know that they’re going to buy high end products and continue to get updates. That is not just feature updates. I think that’s a good thing. But it’s really about the security updates as well, that I’m really always quite concerned about. One thing is that the article noticed noted that the article title noted that it was Microsoft Surface phone, I would just keep correcting everyone that Microsoft is calling the surface duo, a part of its do a product line, it is not calling it a phone. So I just took a little bit of umbrage With you know, the articles, flagrant use of phone the title
Augusto Pinaud 2:05
yeah i think i think Microsoft had a challenging time with phones and I think are wise not to call it a phone let’s let’s see if they if we break the curse on now we have some
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:15
to do with news the folks at dualist have launched a couple of new pretty important features on the platform. You want to tackle that gousto in terms of the first part,
Augusto Pinaud 2:27
yeah, one of them is boards and now you have our they have the better access to the board something similar to what you see on Trello and they are integrating the boards wizard to dues was a product that I think it’s really really interesting to be able to collaborate to drag the task from beginning to end and make it a really powerful thing. The second thing they did was it filters and now you will be able to get you know the today they overdo that Work they know, they know times, you know, seven days and waiting for created before 350 days or putting on things past and has more than a year old. And that’s probably out of the oldest filters, my favorite filter that they have, because I think that allows you to look, you know, at old stuff. So unlike that, you know, a bunch of other filters. So I think they did a really incredible job into making those filters really, really powerful.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 3:33
And those of you who want to join the beta program for to do list in order to get access to this boards feature. There’s a link in the show notes to how to join the beta program on the appropriate platform that you’re on. And yeah, this is really, you know, it’s in line with Asana and other platforms that have brought a board based or a carbon based interface to their systems and it’s great to see to do this. Go ahead. And join that esteemed crowd. And so with that, we’re going to take a break now and hear a word from our sponsor this week is aurvana, which you can [email protected].
Matt Plummer 4:11
As a young analyst at a leading strategy and management consulting firm I experienced when ambitious professionals experienced every week, I had a strong desire to get promoted as quickly as I could. And I wanted to take on exciting side projects. And I wanted to do all that while spending less time at work. So my life outside of work wasn’t limited to exhaustion and recovery. My observations of my co workers told me this wasn’t possible, but I knew there had to be a way I began to research and experiment and in two to three months, I had reduced hours I was working by over 15%, or placing myself on the path to a faster than average promotion. My success led to the creation of Nirvana, a tool designed to give you the edge at work and in life. It combines a diagnostic abbreviated courses and a habit tracker. Through a single application to enable you to get the most out of your time, in just minutes per week, you can start by taking the time finder diagnostic to find out how many of our hundred and 50 time saving behaviors you’re currently doing.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:13
And we’re back to the show. Now we’re going to be doing some Google News. And so what’s our next headline against
Augusto Pinaud 5:20
Google meetings is spreading to any TV using Chromecast. So now you will be able to enjoy more meats or more devices and you will be able to use the TV to to start getting, you know your Google meat conference, right? I mean, out of out of the chalk all of this it is good because as people will stay longer working at home and now we’re going to start adding schools and and virtual learning from the kids. I think it’s great that Google is adding this capability to the Chromecast
Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:50
I think this is phenomenal. And for those of you who don’t know Chromecast is as much a software platform as it is a piece of hardware technology. So many televisions actually come with Chromecast built into it. And if you don’t have Chromecast, you can always buy one of the little Chromecast dongles and add them to the television. And I just look forward to using meet now with family where I can actually set up the display to be able to see people in, you know, a larger environment, not on the tiny, tiny screen and just have a more natural living room experience with people who may not be physically situated with me. And I can think of all kinds of fun experiences where, you know, I have people over the house, and we’re together and people who are perhaps in other places and being able to bring them to the party, so to speak, together all in one space. I’m looking forward to seeing how this whole Chromecast capability goes forward. Looking forward to that. Okay, next up in Google News is Google is bringing group video chats, that is group video calls to the Google nest hub max devices. And so this is obviously a direct challenge to the market of Facebook portal and other other devices that allow for you to be able to bring people together. And so Google is now allowing for this to be available on their larger have their two hubs. So they have the nest hub, one of which I have on my desk right here, which does not have a camera on it. And so that is a display device. The Nest nest hub Max has a display display as well as a camera. And so now you’re going to be able to have duo and meet group video calls on them. I’m very much looking forward to buying a nest hub max now to put on my desk so that I can do that because it’d be really nice to be able to have the display available. Here, maybe one in the kitchen. Maybe one in the living room just depends upon, you know, where you want to be able to have those kinds of group discussions with family and friends, and I’m looking forward to seeing that come together. That
Augusto Pinaud 8:00
would be also good again, for the people who is looking for, for an affordable device for all these virtual learning. This will be a good solution if your school works in Google meet on the last news we have in here is Google is start rolling, rolling out his new G Suite Gmail integration. So now you are going to have Gmail integration with meat and rooms and the chat services and everything. And especially for the people working from home. Again, it is a great thing to have all integrated in in one solution instead of needing to go to three or four applications. I’m 141. Really looking forward to that.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:40
Yeah, so we talked about this in Episode 14. So if you want to jump back to that and see kind of the in depth review of these parts that Google are is rolling out within the Gmail interface, go check out Episode 14 and I am equally looking forward to seeing the pieces come together so that you can have a more seamless and experience productivity dashboard. inside of your Gmail experience if you want it. And so that closes out our headlines for this week. That takes us to our science of productivity segment with Matt Plummer of carvanha. And so Matt, take it away.
Matt Plummer 9:13
The science of productivity segment brings you scientific insights you can trust into how to accomplish your goals faster. In this week’s segment, I want to share new research that shows winning negotiations with colleagues or clients may actually hurt your productivity. It’s traditionally advised that you should negotiate as effectively as you can in order to drive the conclusion of the negotiation to decision most favorable to you. It stands to reason then that effective negotiators are most productive because they achieve their goals for collaboration, or at least get but closest. However, researchers from Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania found across six studies that negotiating can harm others post agreement performance that is there. The way They act and perform after the negotiation happens, people who negotiate become less motivated and productive on effortful and creative tasks than those who don’t engage in negotiations. In one study conducted by the researchers heart and Schweitzer participants who engage in negotiations completed 30% fewer assignments accurately than those who didn’t. When it came to writing essays, those who negotiated their payment beforehand wrote 28% fewer words than those who didn’t negotiate. The reduction in effort and productivity occurs because negotiations lead participants doubting the status of their relationship with the other party. And this perception of relational conflict causes people to feel less motivated to do work that will benefit their counterpart in the negotiation. Importantly, this effect remains even if participants in the study obtained more favorable agreements in the negotiation. Said simply, if we argue about how much you should pay for my services, I’m going to walk away from the conversation, thinking something is wrong in our relationship. And as a result, I will be less motivated to perform those services for you. Even if I get my way in the negotiation. This doesn’t mean that you should never negotiate with a team member or client. Just do so with caution if you need them to complete work that will benefit you after the negotiation. In some cases, it may be better to let them proceed the way that they wanted to or to just deem certain tasks as non negotiable rather than to SAP their motivation and productivity by debating it. When you don’t, when you do feel it’s necessary to sink your heels in and negotiate once an agreement has been reached. reassure the other person that from your perspective, your relationship is still strong, and you value their opinion and disagreement.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 11:59
That was our sign It’s a productivity segment with Matt Plummer from Nirvana. And with that, we are now into our new tools of the week, Augusto and I come across many personal development time tasks, project management and productivity, collaboration tools and services throughout the week, some we use, some are just really interesting. And so in this segment, new tools of the week, we each bring you a tool we think you might like. And so my tool this week is going to be a tool called narrow and narrow. What it does is it allows you to take pretty much any written document. That means a blog article, a PDF, or just text that you can email into the system, and it turns it into a podcast. So that you have this podcast feed you can add to your podcast app of choice, and then it in essence reads it to you. But it’s reading it to you as a podcast episode and this has really sped up my Long reads, digestion my consumption of those long read articles that, you know, I might not have time to sit down and really dive in deeply into an article that might be, you know, 2000 3000 4000 words. But now I can just have narrow capture it, turn it into a voice, a natural language voice that reads it to me. And then it’s in my podcast app. And now, you know, while I’m taking the dog for a walk, or if I’m doing something in the kitchen, I can now listen to that. And since I’m doing something fairly rote, I can then get involved in the article by listening to it and digesting it. And that really has allowed me to capture much more written content that I would not otherwise have captured and so narrow, there’s a link to it in the show notes. And it’s fantastic. I really, really like it. And it’s very inexpensive. I think there’s a free option but I use the paid version and it’s a nominal the cost to be able to do this, and it’s really, really helped me moved through my read later pile that was, you know, stuff that I had to get rid of. I mean, I just decided, you know what, I’m not going to read this because I don’t have time. And so I just archive it. And now I’m getting it through a lot more of those things. And that’s been really enriching for me to actually get access to that content that I was otherwise, discarding. Even though I wanted to read it. I just didn’t have time for it. Now, I’ve been able to make time through listening to it.
Augusto Pinaud 14:23
My tool of the week is an iOS app, and it’s called Berkeley and Berkeley is trying to quantify how much you’re reading what you’re reading, trying to give you a reminder, hey, go and read more The goal of the app, but then is to make you read more, or that at least is the goal that they that they claim. The app is free and you can start and they have also a pro version of that obviously, but the book will allows you to, you know, get or begin using so you can get the data Reading so you can start looking What are you reading but more importantly, start getting statistics on what is that so that way you according to them, you finish more books. So how many books you have read, you know, what is your best day in page readings and how many total time you have on the books and the reading and then also keeping track you know, the books you’re reading the last part, you know, it’s one of my favorite things I, I do that with another application, good reads. And it’s really fun to, to read and with the friends that I have that read, you know, being able to share books that way, but book, it’s a new way to do that. And they’re trying to be and have more statistics about it. So I wanted to share that application.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 15:44
And with that, those are our new tools of the week. And that takes us on to our featured story this week. Our featured story this week, I think a gousto and I are extremely excited about this, which is to announce that telegram has released video calls on their seventh birthday. And so if you don’t know what telegram is, it’s a chat app. It’s actually one of the top 10 most downloaded applications in the world. And telegram has had quite a number of, you know, kind of a little bit of notoriety. Russia had blocked it because of its end to end encryption and their inability to go ahead and utilize it. But then, of course, many Russian politicians themselves started using telegram and so then all of a sudden telegram became popular in Russia. And so it’s just this fantastic chat application. And I use the messaging application with friends with all of my clients, and it’s just a well featured app that can challenge WhatsApp, or Facebook Messenger or any of the others. It lacked video calls and now they brought video calls to the platform. So it’s an alpha version, and I’m looking forward to seeing what else they do with video. Agusta, what stood out for you regarding today. Graham’s video calls announcement.
Augusto Pinaud 17:03
You know, I think it’s really exciting. I’ve been using telegram for a lot, and I really, really like it. I like the security of it. And I think having the video calls, it’s going to be amazing when that does get added. Or what’s the group, the group video calls when that gets added will be fantastic. Just the video calls right now. It worked fantastically I work with and talk to a lot of people that is international. And you know, not everybody has an iOS thing. So having those kinds of things. It is really, really good and really, really useful.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 17:41
Yeah, so the video calls are unique in the sense that they are actually end to end encrypted. And so when you make a phone call and audio call in telegram, you actually see four emoji in the top corner of your screen. And you and that person can identify that you are in an end to end encrypted environment and that no one has intervened by virtue of being able to share those four emoji, yeah over the call. The same thing applies in the video calls. And so you can see that if you read those emoji to the other person and they have the same ones, you can then verify that you are in a secured encrypted call, which is just great. Some of the other features for video calls is just like any other video inside of the telegram interface, you can actually do picture in picture so you can actually just make your video call shrink. And then you can continue navigating around the telegram interface which is really nice and slick, because now you can be still screen time, you know, face is still looking at the screen and and still do things within the telegram application and share things and so on and so forth while you’re interacting with that person. It’s available on Android. It’s available on Android and iOS now, and so you know it’s an alpha but they’re going to be obviously bringing it up to A beta and then final version, as they bring out the group video calls in the coming months, and so on and so forth. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the video calls work and how many people will be capable of being in it and how they’re going to secure those group video calls. One other minor announcement that they made on their seventh birthday is more animated emoji. And so they’ve got some pretty funny emojis and you know, basic ones. And so, you know, they’ve added some some more animated emoji in here for people to be able to use and so good on them, and I’m looking forward to seeing telegram grow, and they’ve come really over 400 million users. And I’m sure with the addition of video calls that are end to end encrypted, we’re going to see even more people come onto the platform. So and so with that we have a couple of announcements for folks. And so, as you know, as Joe and I are making our way through the various news coming out of the personal productivity space, we come across items that are interesting to you like our first item up, which is that our Ivana is doing a 40 day challenge Matt Plummer is doing these things called willpower workouts. And so over the next 40 days starting on on today, August 24, when you’re hearing this episode, you will see them putting out daily challenges to build up willpower. And so if you check out the page that’s linked in the show notes, you’ll find the the you know area where you can sign up to get the daily emails and to be notified about those. Matt is also going to be doing daily videos as I understand it on YouTube on the YouTube channel so you can subscribe to the YouTube channel and access those there. A second announcement is that forte labs Tiago forte, he is doing his 11th cohort of his very popular program called second brain. And so the second brain course is is is starting very soon. So you should go ahead and check it out if that’s something that you want to learn about being more productive using an external tool, like Evernote, or Rome research or any of those other programs to really build out a second brain and very interesting program. And so you can find the the 11th cohort starting soon. For any of the stories that we didn’t cover this week, those are all captured under the section called extras on the episode page. So we culled together all the all the episodes, we can’t cover them all in the same episode. We can’t all cover them in one episode. And so each week, we capture the rest of those articles and we put them in the show notes for you to be able to capture just check out the extras section there on the episode page. And with that, if we did miss something, it’s possible, let us know go ahead and check out the contact page on anything but idle.com. You can also tweet or dm us on Twitter. Anything but idle. You can follow us on social media by finding those links on anything but idle. And if you can, please leave a rating or review on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts, if you if they give you the ability to provide a rating or review. And so thank you for helping us grow the anything but idle listening community. And finally, thanks for listening to anything but idle, the productivity news podcast until next time, here’s your productive life.
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