Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Wednesday, July 29th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough.

Today, a rundown of what the big tech CEOs told Congress this afternoon are Samsung and Google about to get a lot

more integrated. The biggest news in the ongoing streaming media transformation of Hollywood,

buying out Tik-Toc is going to be pretty expensive and Shopify's earnings blow the roof

off the place.

Here's what you missed today in the world of tech.

Today was the day as I record these words the big tech CEOs are still

testifying before Congress so I'm gonna have to do a summary of what I've seen just in

the first couple hours or so and leave some of the juicier question and answer

back and forth for tomorrow. First up a note on question and

a note on the format that we've been seeing.

Yes, all of the CEOs were testifying remotely.

They were using Cisco WebX as the video conferencing tool and it seemed to work fairly well at least right until this very moment as I turned off the stream to go into the booth to record this.

They took a 10 minute recess because apparently one of the witnesses

was having an issue with their stream or feed.

And I'm wondering if it might have been Jeff Bezos because at least thus far were almost an hour and a half into the testimony and he hadn't been asked a single question.

Anyway, back to the whole idea of testifying remotely, if I were going to do one of those

rate my video call backgrounds reports,

Bezos looked like he was in some sort of executive boardroom, lots of tasteful chachies behind him.

Pachai looked like he was in a conference room at a high-end law firm.

I couldn't tell what Zuckerberg was sitting in front of.

It looked like closed vertical blinds almost or like, I don't know, some sort of like a bunker, like if you're battening down your house for a hurricane. Tim Cook was in front of some sort of tasteful plant

...