TechFirst with John Koetsier: Recent Episodes
John Koetsier
Tech that is changing the world. Innovators who are shaping the future.
Deep discussions with diverse leaders from Silicon Valley giants and scrappy global startups. Plus some short monologues based on my Forbes columns.
What is it like to go to space?Today we have a special privilege: we’re talking to an astronaut who has spent 136 days in the International Space Station and completed 2 space walks.He’s also the mission director for the recent Intuitive Machines lunar lander, the first US mission to the moon in more than 50 years.His name is Jack FischerIn this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier interviews astronaut Jack Fisher, who spent 136 days on the International Space Station (ISS). Fisher describes the awe-inspiring experience of space travel, emphasizing the different perspective gained from 250 miles up. He humorously recounts adapting to zero gravity and the physical relief it provided for his neck and back. The conversation covers Fisher's role as mission director for the Intuitive Machines lunar lander and space missions' significance. They delve into the technological and cooperative efforts required for future Mars missions, including efficient propulsion and collaboration across industries. Fisher keeps the discussion engaging with anecdotes and enthusiasm for space exploration, highlighting recent advancements and the potential for a lunar economy.00:00 Liftoff: Journey to Space01:22 Experiencing Zero Gravity04:48 Adapting to Space Life10:57 Mission to the Moon: Intuitive Machines22:25 Future of Space Exploration29:48 Making Humanity Multi-Planetary36:31 Space Movies and Fun
Have we already achieved AGI?OpenAI just released GPT-4o. It’s impressive, and the implications are huge for so many different professions ... not least of which is education and tutoring.It’s also showing us the beginning of AI that is truly present in our lives ... AI that sees what we see, doesn’t exist just in a box with text input, hears what we hear, and hallucinates less.What does that — and other recent advancements in AI — mean for AGI?In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier discusses the implications of OpenAI's GPT-4 release and explores the current state and future of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) with Roman Yampolskiy, a PhD research scientist and associate professor. They delve into the rapid advancements in AI, the concept of AGI, potential impacts on different professions, the cultural and existential risks, and the challenges of safety and alignment with AGI. The conversation also covers the societal changes needed to adapt to a future where mental and physical labor could be fully automated.00:00 Exploring the Boundaries of AI's Capabilities01:36 The Evolution and Impact of AI on Human Intelligence03:39 The Rapid Advancements in AI and the Path to AGI06:38 The Societal Implications of Advanced AI and AGI09:27 Navigating the Future of Work and AI's Role14:52 The Ethical Dilemmas of Developing Superintelligent AI19:22 Looking Ahead: The Unpredictable Future of AI
If our planet turns to Dune, how will you survive?
We're already experiencing water crises in thousands of global cities, places like Flint Michigan, or even native reserves in Canada.
How can you ensure you'll get good, healthy, clean drinking water?
In this episode of TechFirst, we explore the critical global challenge of securing clean water, a resource essential yet scarce for over 2 billion people worldwide.
With a focus on innovative solutions, John Koetsier interviews Brian Sheng, CEO and co-founder of Aquaria, a company at the forefront of developing atmospheric water generators capable of extracting clean water from the air, ranging from 24 to 2,600 gallons daily. Sheng discusses the technology's workings, its potential to address water scarcity effectively, especially in areas with limited access to clean water, and the company's vision for scaling up to support communities and potentially entire cities with sustainable, clean water obtained directly from the atmosphere.
00:00 Atmospheric Water Generator
01:19 The Global Water Crisis: Challenges and Solutions
05:13 How Atmospheric Water Generators Work: Technology Explained
11:00 The Future of Water: Scaling Up and Making it Affordable
12:48 Comparing Water Solutions: Desalination and Atmospheric Water Generators
21:45 The Vision for a Sustainable Water Future
In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier explores the future of robotics and agricultural technology (agtech) with Kevin Dowling, managing director at Robotics Factory in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. They discuss the evolution of robotics in farming, from traditional methods to the modern use of drones, autonomous tractors, and AI-driven systems. Kevin highlights the diversity of robotic forms in agriculture, including wheeled, legged, flying, and swimming robots, and the role of morphology in determining the best tool for various farming tasks. The conversation covers the current trends in robotic investments, the potential of humanoid robots in agriculture, and the economic challenges faced by hardware startups in AgTech. Kevin predicts a shift towards smaller, more affordable robots for smaller farms and emphasizes the importance of technology in reducing environmental impacts, enhancing food production efficiency, and potentially democratizing farming. The episode also touches upon innovative startups in Pittsburgh, the challenges of introducing robotics into unpredictable farm environments, and the vision for future farming landscapes transformed by robotics and autonomous machinery.00:00 Exploring the Future of Robotics and Ag Tech00:46 The Evolution and Future of Robotics in Agriculture03:39 The Role of Humanoid Robots in Farming07:38 Challenges and Opportunities in Ag Tech Startups10:05 Innovative Startups Shaping the Future of Agriculture12:49 The Complex Environment of Farm Robotics15:30 The Potential of Indoor and Vertical Farming23:30 Envisioning the Future of Farming with Robotics
In January of this year, Peregrine Mission One launched with at least 22 payloads. One was intended to be the first American made rover to land on the moon since the Apollo days: 1972.It was called Iris, and it was also the first lunar rover constructed with carbon fiber. It was designed and built by students at Carnegie Mellon University.Today, we’re going to chat with them ...Despite a mission failure due to the lander experiencing a propellant leak and missing its lunar target, the Iris team achieved significant milestones. They successfully demonstrated that student-made rovers could survive space conditions, including the Van Allen Belt's radiation, and maintain communication and functions in space. This project, despite its setbacks, marks a significant achievement in democratizing space exploration and contributes to the broader vision of establishing moon bases and Mars bases as stepping stones for further space exploration.00:00 The Future of Space Exploration: Moon and Mars Bases00:42 Introducing can the Iris Lunar Rover Project05:17 The Team Behind Iris: Roles and Experiences09:00 Scientific Goals and Achievements of the Iris Rover12:58 Overcoming Failure: Lessons from a Mission Gone Wrong22:03 The Next Steps: Future Missions and Career Paths25:59 Reflecting on the Golden Age of Space Exploration
What happens after AGI?AGI is artificial general intelligence: it’s when AI achieves human-level intelligence nd likely quickly thereafter super-human abilities, maybe even ushering in the Singularity.I was recently at the Beneficial AGI conference in Panama. One of the speakers was the founder of Emerj Artificial Intelligence Research. He’s interviewed nearly 1,000 AI leaders, his name is Dan Faggella, and he has some good insight into what AGI might do.Or at least what the experts think about it …We discuss artificial general intelligence (AGI), the potential for post-human bliss through advanced simulations, and various perspectives on AGI's ethical and societal impacts. Fagella shares insights from interviews with nearly a thousand AI experts, outlining a matrix to categorize thoughts on AGI's future and human interaction. The discussion covers the balance between control, collaboration, and open-source development in AI, along with personal reflections on humanity's potential paths in an AI-dominated future. Themes include the ethical implications of AGI, the role of human values in AI development, and speculative futures where humanity merges with or is overshadowed by superior AI entities.00:00 Exploring Post-Human Bliss and the Power of AI01:31 The Matrix of AI Perspectives02:50 Exploring the Future with AI: Preservation, Progression, and Ascension04:26 Navigating the Path to AI: Control, Collaboration, Openness07:11 Personal Stances and the Future of AI19:00 AI's Impact on Society and the Future24:23 Envisioning a Post-Human Future: Choices and Consequences29:53 Reflections on Humanity's Path Forward with AI
If you have an iPhone, you've got a notch. Now there's tech that can get rid of that notch ... and the same tech can bring secure Face ID to Android: at a fraction of the cost.In this TechFirst, I chat with Metalenz CEO Rob Devlin about his meta surfaces product. Not only can they produce about 10,000 lenses on a single 30-centimeter wafer, just like computer chips, they can now decode polarization information on surfaces from the light reflecting off of that.That gives them data on what that surface is made from, and that is a huge advancement for biometrics, phones, medical devices, and robots.The technology, which can capture and process unique wavelengths and polarization information, enables the creation of smaller, cheaper, and more efficient optical systems. Metalenz's partnership with ST Microelectronics has led to the integration of metasurface optics in products that have been previously sold in over 150 different smartphone models. 00:00 Revolutionizing Optics with Metal Lens Technology00:30 The Journey of Metalenz: From Concept to Market01:34 Exploring the Impact of Meta Surface Technology02:39 Understanding Metasurfaces and Their Potential10:48 Introducing Polar ID: A Game-Changer for Biometric Security22:20 The Future of Polarization Technology and Its Applications22:33 Collaboration with Samsung and the Path Forward27:14 Envisioning New Horizons: Beyond Polar ID32:36 Wrapping Up: The Future of Metal Lens and Polar ID
Billions of robots within a decade? A similar growth curve to smartphones? We currently have about 30 million robots on the planet, not counting Roombas and similar small bots. RobotLab CEO Elad Inbar says that will hit BILLIONS with a B within 10 years.We discuss the exponential increase in commercial robots globally and predict billions of robots integrating into daily activities, from service industries to personal assistance, over the next decade. We chat about the evolution of robotics from novelty items to essential aspects of business operations, highlighting the role of robots in automating mundane tasks and their future potential in enhancing customer service and living standards. Inbar also emphasizes the importance of service infrastructure to support the widespread adoption of robotics technology, drawing parallels with past technological advancements like mobile phones and cars.
And we dive into specific applications of robots in restaurants, cleaning services, and healthcare, particularly for dementia patients, and the franchise model RobotLab is adopting to expand its reach and capacity to deliver robotics solutions.00:00 The Dawn of the Robot Decade: Envisioning a Future with Billions of Robots01:02 The Big Picture: Robots Transforming Business and Society07:10 The Current State of Robotics: From Hospitality to Manufacturing09:50 The Future of Work: Robots Filling the Gaps in the Workforce12:40 Enhancing Customer Service: How Robots are Changing the Game13:31 The Restaurant Revolution: Robots Taking Over Service Roles16:35 Exploring the Role of Robots in Restaurants16:47 Adapting Robots to Different Restaurant Environments18:18 Growth Areas Beyond Restaurants: Cleaning and Retail22:47 The Future of Customer-Facing Robots24:00 Robots in Assisted Living: A Compassionate Solution27:09 Unlocking the Potential of Robotics in Business
Is the Apple Vision Pro the future of surgical training?In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier discusses the transformative impact of virtual reality (VR) on surgical training, highlighting the cost-efficiency and effectiveness of VR in reducing the learning curve for surgeons. The conversation features Richard Vincent, CEO of Fundamental VR, who elaborates on how VR technology, particularly the Apple Vision Pro, is revolutionizing surgical education by offering rapid, repeatable training sessions without the logistical setbacks associated with traditional methods. They explore the hardware agnosticism of Fundamental VR's software, ensuring compatibility with various VR platforms, and delve into the new possibilities unlocked by the Apple Vision Pro's advanced features, including its intuitive control system, powerful compute capacity, and exceptional optics. The discussion also touches on the incorporation of haptics for a more immersive training experience, the potential of VR for remote collaborative training, and the broader implications of VR technology in the medical field.00:00 Unlocking the Future of Surgical Training with VR01:15 The Cost-Effectiveness of VR in Surgical Training03:13 Achieving Competence: The Role of VR in Surgery04:45 Hardware From Oculus to Apple Vision Pro07:04 The Revolutionary Apple Vision Pro in Surgical Training10:35 The Power of Haptics: Enhancing VR Training with Physical Feedback13:07 The Impact of Device Cost on VR Training Accessibility14:34 Expanding Horizons: VR's Role in Remote Surgery Training17:03 The Future of Medical Training and Collaboration with VR18:48 Apple Vision Pro: A Game-Changer for Medical VR Applications20:15 Closing Thoughts and Future Prospects
When will AI match and surpass human capability? In short, when will we have AGI, or artificial general intelligence ... the kind of intelligence that should teach itself and grow itself to vastly larger intellect than an individual human?According to Ben Goertzel, CEO of SingularityNet, that time is very close: only 3 to 8 years away. In this TechFirst, I chat with Ben as we approach the Beneficial AGI conference in Panama City, Panama.We discuss the diverse possibilities of human and post-human existence, from cyborg enhancements to digital mind uploads, and the varying timelines for when we might achieve AGI. We talk about the role of current AI technologies, like LLMs, and how they fit into the path towards AGI, highlighting the importance of combining multiple AI methods to mirror human intelligence complexity. We also explore the societal and ethical implications of AGI development, including job obsolescence, data privacy, and the potential geopolitical ramifications, emphasizing the critical period of transition towards a post-singularity world where AI could significantly improve human life. Finally, we talk about ownership and decentralization of AI, comparing it to the internet's evolution, and envisages the role of humans in a world where AI surpasses human intelligence.00:00 Introduction to the Future of AI01:28 Predicting the Timeline of Artificial General Intelligence02:06 The Role of LLMs in the Path to AGI05:23 The Impact of AI on Jobs and Economy06:43 The Future of AI Development10:35 The Role of Humans in a World with AGI35:10 The Diverse Future of Human and Post-Human Minds36:51 The Challenges of Transitioning to a World with AGI39:34 Conclusion: The Future of AGI
Can you use sentinel oysters and other mollusks to track water quality near your cities, beaches, or the Great Barrier Reef?Actually ... yes.In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier chats with the CEO of Moloscan, a company focused on bio-monitoring and protection of marine environments using live shellfish.The company uses aquatic bivalves, such as oysters, mussels, or clams to monitor the environment. These mollusks, which are filter feeders, react to changes in water conditions, helping to detect pollution and other disruptions in water quality. The discussion covers the technological developments and rigorous research necessary to map out the normal behaviour of these animals and provide accurate water quality ratings. They also discuss how this method is more efficient and environmentally friendly compared to traditional mechanical probes and lab tests. The CEO shares examples of installations in varied environments, ranging from oil and gas platforms to diverse geographical locations from Quebec to Qatar.00:00 Introduction to Sentinel Oysters and Water Quality Monitoring00:55 Understanding the Concept of Biomonitoring01:48 The Science Behind Mollusk Behavior and Detection02:43 The Journey of Developing the Monitoring Device04:24 Understanding the Sensitivity and Precision of Mollusks05:12 The Role of Mollusks in Detecting Water Pollution08:06 The Technical Aspects of Monitoring Mollusk Behavior10:43 The Real-world Application of Mollusk Monitoring15:34 The Challenges and Benefits of Using Mollusks as Sensors22:51 The Potential for Expanding the Technique to Other Biomes06:24 Conclusion: The Future of Biomonitoring
Do you need ChatGPT integrated into your new bike? How about an all-wheel drive bike? (OK: a 2-wheel drive ... but yeah, that's all-wheel drive!)In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier chats the CEO of Urtopia about their new AI-integrated 'smart bike with a mind'. The e-bike market is predicted to grow to about $26 billion by 2028, but Dr. Owen Chang explains how Urtopia is taking a different approach by developing most parts in-house to create a fully integrated, software-enabled product. He says their AI features, like ChatGPT integration, makes e-bikes safer and more personalised. It can also provide assistance including directions, making the ride safer and more enjoyable. Utopia is further developing its own version of GPT based on GPT-5, refining its potential functionalities.We also chat about the world's first e-bike that has drive motors on both wheels, providing more power and better traction.00:00 Introduction and Welcome01:06 Exploring the Fusion GT Bike01:47 The Design and Development Process03:53 The Power of Dual Motor and Dual Battery System06:51 The Future of Bikes: ChatGPT Integration?07:12 The Role of AI in Utopia's Bikes07:38 The Vision of Utopia: A Bicycle with a Mind16:48 The Future of Smart Devices and E-bikes25:30 Conclusion: The Bike as a Wearable Device
Can you deliver medical treatment by changing brainwaves instead of injecting drugs? Elon Musk has recently implanted his first Neuralink into a human patient. But can we get neurotech medical treatment without drilling holes in our skulls?Maybe ...According to Element, a startup with roots in MIT, we can. And they say they can read your brainwaves, manipulate them, and fix issues like sleep disorders, tremors, pain, as well as speeding up learning. Today we're chatting with Meredith Perry, the CEO and former NASA astrobiology Researcher, plus Dr. David Wang, co-founder and CTO, who has a PhD in AI from MIT.This technology could potentially treat medical conditions ranging from sleep disorders and tremors to learning difficulties. We also discuss the future of medtech, envisioning an 'app store for the brain' where individualized treatments can be downloaded like apps, focusing on promoting the most optimized state of health for any given individual through real-time detection and diagnosis.00:00 Intro to Neurotech and Neurostimulation00:33 Welcome and Introduction of Guests01:31 Understanding the Concept of Elemind's Neurotech Device02:59 Exploring the Form Factor of the Device04:23 How it works07:28 Effectiveness and Impact of the Device13:05 Future Plans and Vision for the Device18:52 Potential and Impact of the Device on Healthcare21:35 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Can someone hack your reality if you're wearing an Apple Vision Pro?In this episode of TechFirst, John Koetsier discusses the arrival of Apple's Vision Pro, a groundbreaking VR headset, and its associated privacy and security concerns with Synopsys principal security consultant Jamie Boote.They chat about how the device's advanced sensor systems can map out user environments, posing potential risks and security threats if hacked. Koetsier and Boote also consider Apple's past experience with hardware security and predict potential vulnerabilities and threats that may accompany this new technology.00:00 Introduction to Apple Vision Pro00:23 Privacy and Security Concerns02:02 Potential Threats and Vulnerabilities03:27 The Impact of New Technology on Security04:20 Trust in Apple's Security Measures06:25 Predictions for Future Security Issues07:46 The Evolution of Software and Security13:35 Final Thoughts and Conclusion
In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier talks to Dan Hollenkamp, the CEO of Toggled, about the future of smart buildings in 2024. They discuss the difference between devices that are smart and just remote controllable, the continuous improvement in building systems, and emphasize on the usage of data for smart devices. Dan sheds light on how buildings should assist in facilitating our tasks, be predictive, and become an active member of the grid to help stabilize the energy demand. They also discuss the role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in smart buildings, the idea of buildings moving from energy consumers to energy load managers, and the impact of work from home and return to the office on smart buildings. Join them as they delve into the evolving world of smart buildings and their part in our future.00:00 Introduction and Overview00:13 The Future of Smart Buildings02:23 Understanding Smart Devices vs. Remote Controllable Devices02:43 The Role of Data in Smart Buildings09:36 The Impact of Work from Home on Smart Buildings11:45 Buildings as Energy Load Managers15:54 The Role of AI in Smart Buildings21:53 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
In this end-of-year podcast of TechFirst for 2023, host John Koetsier explores the future trajectory of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, especially its potential in 2024. The podcast features Rolf Illenberger, founder & CEO of VR Direct, who believes that 2024 will be a critical inflection point for VR with wide-scale adoption, particularly in enterprises. There is notable discussion on different VR headsets including the Meta Quest Pro, Quest Three, and the upcoming Apple Vision Pro, as well as the role of AI in VR. The conversation also dives into the challenges and opportunities VR presents for both the consumer and enterprise markets, with an emphasis on the need for intuitive user interfaces and valuable use-cases. The podcast concludes with Rolf's prediction that by the end of 2024, it would be vital for every enterprise to have a VR strategy.00:00 Introduction and Welcome00:07 Discussion on VR Trends and Predictions for 202400:45 Interview with Rolf Dillenberger, CEO of VR Direct01:12 The Host's Personal Experience with VR01:44 The Future of VR: An Inflection Point02:48 Enterprise Applications of VR04:51 The Impact of Work from Home Trends on VR06:24 The Role of Apple Vision Pro in VR20:58 The Intersection of VR and AI21:52 The Inflection Point for VR in 202426:36 Conclusion and Farewell
You’ve probably heard of Bhutan, and you may have heard of Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness measurement, which is about measuring how happy a country is as well as how wealthy a country is.Now the royal family in Bhutan is establishing an AI center to teach AI to locals ... and maybe bring Bhutan happiness -- and ethics -- to AI. To bring, as the princess puts it, "Ancient Wisdom & Ethics" to artificial intelligence.In this TechFirst, I chat with Enrique Hernandez about his and Princess Wangchuk's goal of bringing an AI center to Bhutan.Subscribe to TechFirsthttps://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/Wangchuk AI Centerhttps://wangchukai.com/
Are you ready to dive into the emerging world of robot coworkers? In this video, originally recorded at Web Summit in Lisbon, I chat with special guest David Reger, CEO of Neura Robotics. We chat about what it will be like to work with robots, how we can ensure robots don't kill us (as is happening now, occasionally), and what will change about work and us in the process.We talk about: Working with Robots: A New Frontier The Future of Robot Partnerships Impacts on Different Industries Ensuring Safety and Trust The Role of AI in Human-Robot Interaction Transforming Work and Embracing Automation The Importance of Fairness and Equity Looking Ahead: Opportunities and Challenges
In this episode of TechFirst, host John Koetsier explores the global transition from traditional coil and magnet speakers to solid-state semiconductor alternatives with Mike Householder, a VP at XMEMS. The discussion includes the history of the speaker, the advantages of using solid-state semiconductors, and the future vision for sound technology. Mike also makes a big product announcement and provides insight into how his innovative technology will improve audio quality and enhance sound experiences in various devices like earbuds, phones, and home theaters.
00:00 Introduction to the Evolution of Sound Technology
00:31 The Limitations of Current Sound Technology
00:40 Introducing a New Silicon-Based Sound Technology
00:49 Interview with Mike Householder from XMEMS
01:12 Understanding the Old Tech: Coil and Magnet Speakers
03:08 The Advantages of Solid State Components
05:20 The Benefits of the New Tech for Manufacturers and Consumers
07:58 The Unique Sound Signature of the New Tech
16:32 The Path to Market Dominance and Upcoming Product Announcements
20:47 The Future of Sound Technology: Beyond Personal Audio
24:25 The Science Behind Ultrasonic Amplitude Modulation
30:02 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
In this episode of TechFirst, host Jon Koetsier welcomes Emmy award-winning XR director Michaela Ternasky-Holland to delve into the world of immersive storytelling through technologies such as virtual reality (VR).
Using her VR documentary project, On the Morning You Wake, as a case study, Michaela explains how the deeply immersive nature of VR can change the audience's perception of a global threat - nuclear weapons. She compares the engagement and impact of VR experiences to traditional 2D experiences, highlighting how the narrative and the audience's sense of agency play key roles in creating quality engagement. The discussion further explores the future of immersive storytelling, addressing their potential and challenges in the technology field.
00:01 Introduction and Context
00:34 Guest Introduction: Michaela Ternasky Holland
00:56 The Role of Technology in Storytelling
01:13 Discussing the Project: On the Morning You Wake
05:18 The Impact of VR on Audience Engagement
05:40 Challenges and Solutions in VR Accessibility
08:07 The Emotional Impact of VR Storytelling
10:55 The Future of VR and Storytelling
12:04 The Role of Research in VR Storytelling
19:07 The Intersection of VR and Gaming
21:30 The Ultimate Expression of Storytelling in VR
25:10 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
It all started with a stolen car. In 1983 Chicago resident David Meilahn's car was stolen. He bought a new one, a Mercedes Benz 280SL 2-seater. But then he needed to replace his old radio-phone ... and the sales rep told him there was something new: a cellular phone.He was one of the first few to be selected, then won a race to place the very first commercial cell phone call, which ended up being from Soldier Field in Chicago, IL, to Alexander Graham Bell's grand-daughter in Germany.This is his story, along with the story of Stuart Tararone, the AT&T engineer who helped build that system and still works for the company to this day.
Generative AI won't be building Falcon 9s or new space shuttles just yet. But can it help with all the work that goes into running an organization that builds the future?According to Kendall Clark, CEO of Stardog, yes.Generative AI that democratizes access to data and insight and knowledge speeds up organizations can help with launching space ships, or anything else. For NASA, a generative AI solution is apparently helping the team to do in days what used to take weeks.
How will generative AI impact work? And why are smaller companies adopting generative AI more than enterprises?
Generative AI is almost literally exploding: there are so many possibilities. But how is it changing work and business?
Recently GBK Collective, a consultancy founded by top academics at Wharton, studied 672 businesses in the US with annual sales over $50 million
In this TechFirst we're chatting with 2 of the authors to get a sneak peek into what they learned:
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Dr. Stefano Puntoni, Professor of Marketing at The Wharton School and Co-Director of AI at Wharton
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Jeremy Korst, former Microsoft and T-Mobile exec, now President of GBK Collective
Is equity, inclusion, and diversity in AI a solved problem?
I’ve written a lot of stories lately about AI. AI is critical to our future of automation ... robots ... relf-driving cars ... drones ... and … everything: smart homes, smart factories, safety & security, environmental protection and restoration.
A few years ago we heard constantly how various AI models weren’t trained on diverse populations of people, and how that created inherent bias in who they recognized, ho they thought should get a loan, or who might be dangerous.
In other words, the biases in the people who create tech were manifesting in our tech.
Is that solved? Is that over?
To dive in, we’re joined by an award-winning couple: Stacey Wade and Dr. Dawn Wade. They run NIMBUS, a creative agency with clients like KFC and featuring celebs like Neon Deion Sanders.
Who will win the race to have the world’s first usable general purpose humanoid robot?
I thought I knew all the companies making general purpose robots:
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Tesla
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Sanctuary AI
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Figure AI
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Fourier Intelligence
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Agility Robotics
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Boston Dynamics
I was wrong ... there’s probably a bunch I don’t know. But one that popped up as interesting is Apptronik. They’re based in Austin TX, they're partnering with NASA, and they're building Apollo, a 5’8” 160-pound robot.
In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Jeff Cardenas. And we learn that he has a completely different approach to building a humanoid robot than probably every other robotic company out there.
Could artificial intelligence make you MORE human? Help you become your best self? And, maybe, 10-15X your output?
In this TechFirst we chat with author, flow coach, and entrepreneur David Passiak, who has gone way down the generative AI rabbit hole and made tools like ChatGPT his CMO, CEO, CRO, chief strategy officer, chief content officer, and more.
He says it's 10X'd his output, but in some ways it's even more that that.
10Xing what you can do it one thing, but enabling what you could never do (like design, or software engineering) is yet another level of enabler.
We also get a little deep and talk about what it means to be human in a world where everything is gaining intelligence.
GPUs are rare and expensive right now. Every company doing AI model training needs more, and NVIDIA can't build enough, especially of the NVIDIA H100 GPU.
Run.ai CEO and co-founder Omri Geller says he has a software solution to this hardware problem.
The key: GPUs are mostly idle, even in high-demand settings. According to Geller, his software 2X to 4Xs your GPU capacity on existing hardware, simply by streamlining workloads and maximizing GPU usage time.
In this TechFirst, we chat about:
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the GPU shortage
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how many GPUs we need
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what Open AI is using right now
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whether OpenAI is getting dumber or not
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and much more
As always, get a full transcript and subscribe to the audio podcast at my website:
https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Dronamics just got a license to operate in Europe. Its Black Swan cargo delivery drone is the size of a 2-seater aircraft and carries 800 pounds for 1500 miles.
It's also 50% cheaper with 60% fewer emissions and 80% faster than standard airfreight.
In this TechFirst, host John Koetsier chats with Dronamics CEO and co-founder, Svilen Rangelov. Topics include:
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The Black Swan cargo drone
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Why is it so much cheaper, faster, and less polluting?
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Dronamics has raised $40M. One of its investors is the European Union itself. It now have a license. What are the next steps?
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Concerns and challenges of drone cargo delivery?
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Will the Black Swan ever be an EV?
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Safety and hacking ... how are you protecting this drone?
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What kind of ground support is required?
It looks like we will soon be delivering power wirelessly to NASA robots on the moon. Yank Tech just won a NASA contract to to develop wireless charging solutions for autonomous vehicles on the moon.
In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Josh Yank.
Topics we cover include:
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Wireless power on the moon ... how does it work?
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What’s the power source … solar energy?
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When will it be ready?
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When could it be used?
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What missions will this be used on?
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Any uses on earth?
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There's been a massive growth in humanoid robots … is this tech useful for them?
"ET phone home" has never been more relevant. We're seeing a wave of phone calls to space, or at least space connectivity from relatively ordinary cell phones.
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Apple added SOS
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T-Mobile is working with Starlink
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AT&T is working with AST SpaceMobile
Why? And where is this going?
To answer, we chat with a senior director from Ciena. It's a networking giant that supports 85% of the world’s largest telcos, with customers like AT&T, Amazon, Google, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, and the U.S. DoD.
Formerly with Nortel, his name is Brian Lavallée.
Right now might be the golden age of humanoid general purpose robot development.
Tesla, of course, is building the Optimus robot. Figure.ai is working on one as well, plus others like Chinese company Fourier Intelligence with the GR-1 Boston Dynamics, and Agility Robots.
So is Sanctuary AI.
Sanctuary says they’re on a mission “to create the world’s-first human-like intelligence in general-purpose robots.” They’ve recently released their 6th generation robot, called Phoenix, and have completed their first commercial deployment in March. They’ve raised over $100 million.
Today we’re chatting with co-founder and CEO Geordie Rose.
Elon Musk calls him "batshit crazy," but Dan O'Dowd has built software for the F-35 fighter jet, the B2 bomber, and to secure U.S. nuclear forces. He's also built a microprocessor for Mars, worked on the Mac at Steve Jobs' request, and completed a ton of test drives of Tesla full self driving.
His conclusion: it's worse than a drunk driver.
And: it does not recognize small children.
In this TechFirst we chat with Dan about his tests, what he thinks is wrong with Tesla, and why Tesla is falling behind General Motors and Google (Waymo) in full self driving.
Optimus, the Tesla bot, has been in development for 2 years and still can’t really do that much. There’s another dream team of engineers and roboticists who are building a humanoid robot that they call the “kinder, gentler” robot.
In this TechFirst we chat with 2 investors in Figure.ai: Jesse Coors and Gregg Hill.
They think humanoid bipedal robots could be one-to-one with humans in numbers "pretty quickly." Corporations will want thousands, and most of us will want at least one.
We also dive deep in the Figure.ai robot as I ask them these questions:
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Capability?
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Timeline to usefulness?
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Battery life?
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Cost?
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Where does a humanoid robot fit in the world?
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What does it do to our economy?
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Where do you see it helping most?
Can we get an open source medical AI that saves millions of lives?
Everywhere on the planet, health care is a problem. In the US it's too expensive. In Canada it's too busy. In much of Africa and India it's too rare, and in many other countries including Western Europe, it's overwhelmed and overrun.
AI could help, but only if we can get our act together, says HIPPO AI foundation founder Bart de Witte ...
ChatGPT is not actually generative AI, says Intel senior research scientist Ilke Demir.
In this TechFirst we chat with an Intel scientist who has been working on generative AI for years. We talk about the genesis of generative AI, which is as far back as the 1970s, and we talk about ethical uses of generative AI and how we can use neuromorphic computing to help reduce the massive computation cost of generative AI. Plus, we also talk about what Intel is doing with generative AI, including several projects around privacy.
I’ve done a lot of shows on alternative energy ... green energy sources like wind, geothermal, solar ... but should nuclear be in the mix?
Nuclear’s having a bit of a resurgence lately as a green option for reliable energy. To talk about why and where it might fit we chat with the founder and president of Nano Nuclear Energy, Jay Yu, and the CEO, James Walker.
We discuss Zeus and Odin, their two nuclear reactors, safety, disposal after their usable lifespan, and what the ideal mix of green energy sources might be.
Would you get a whole-body MRI scan to check for cancer and other problems even if you don’t feel any symptoms? Some have done just that and saved their lives.
Others simply find out that they're relatively healthy.
I seem to fall somewhere in the middle.
I recently did a 60-minute full-body MRI scan. I learned I'm mostly healthy, but there are some potential problems. The CEO and co-founder of the company that ran the MRI says that adopting these kinds of scans would be part of a switch from sick care to health care, and it could save both millions of lives as well as billions of dollars.
We chat about the technology, how it works, what it can do, and what it can't do. We also talk about why doctors are in general skeptical ... and why my doctor specifically didn't take the results super-seriously.
Apple's likely releasing its massively expensive VR/AR/mixed reality headset, Reality Pro, next week at WWDC 2023. One key VR competitor says he's much less worried about Apple winning than he is worried that Apple will fail.
Why?
That would devastate the consumer VR market, setting back the industry years.
In this TechFirst I chat with Varjo CEO and co-founder Urho Konttori, Finnish maker of one of the best VR headsets on the market. Their headsets are super-high resolution ("human eye resolution"), have a wide field of view, impressive color, and LiDAR for high-quality mixed reality without occlusion fails.
We chat about the state of VR, where VR is going, what Apple will do, what Meta will do, and how independents can compete with the kind of ecosystem Apple can bring to bear.
Generative AI is going to drive a 10X transformation in gaming, says Unity CEO John Riccitiello. It'll create truly believable worlds ... so believable it might even become more real that our "real world."
It will transform NPCs -- non-player characters -- into deep, intelligent, and differentiated characters who might be more fun to hang out with than your real friends. And it will make infinite worlds and infinite experiences more of a reality than a dream.
In this TechFirst we hang out with Unity's CEO and chat about how generative AI will change gaming.
We also discuss how Unity's runtime -- on 4 billion devices -- has an AI inference engine built into it ... one that Unity started making 5 years ago.
Huge chunks of our lives are already managed by AI. The songs we listen to, the routes we drive, the search results we see, the climate in our homes?When AGI takes over, will you even notice?In this TechFirst, we chat with Evan Coopersmith, a data scientist and AI researcher who says that when AI fully takes over ... we probably won't. And, he says, his bird can teach us a lot about what our future relationship with AI will be.
Imaging using an entire podcast as a prompt to GPT-5, or GPT-10. What would a massively capable generative AI do with a podcast?
Create a movie?
Score a soundtrack?
Build an immersive world?
John Gauntt is the host of The Augmented City podcast. He’s also a journalist, analyst, founder, and story teller who has been building an audio sci-fi ghost story about Seattle 100 years from now for the past half-decade
He created a video companion to the podcast with Midjourney.
In this episode of TechFirst, we'd going to learn how, why, and what it means for the future of podcasting and story telling. And we're also going to interview Beini Huang, the artist and designer on the project, as well as Keith Ancker, the audio engineer.
Enjoy!
Facebook isn't what it used to be. It's shedding staff, dismantling efforts to create the metaverse, losing ground to TikTok in short-form video, bleeding ad revenue thanks to Apple's privacy changes, and generally following rather than leading tech industry trends.
But it still has a massive number of users and some of the biggest apps on the planet.
What can Facebook do to regain its mojo? And ... honestly ... can Facebook regain its mojo?
In this TechFirst I chat with Brian Bowman, an entrepreneur and investor. He's focused on generative AI right now, but he's been in the ad space and multiple other spaces. He's a former Yahoo Executive, former CEO of Consumer Acquisition, and multiple other tech companies.
Is technology and AI out of control? Is AI already beyond our ability to manage and monitor?In this TechFirst, we chat with David B. Auerbach. He's a software engineer who has worked for Google and Microsoft and recently wrote a book. The title is a bit on the scary side ... MEGANETS: How Digital Forces Beyond Our Control Commandeer Our Daily Lives and Inner Realities.He says technology is already way out of control ... just like weather."Rather than treating these technological systems as based on algorithmic recipes that we can just debug, it's better to think of them like the weather. The weather is a classically chaotic system that we cope with, but nobody thinks that we can actually control ..."
Aimi is a generative AI application for music that make songs that are everlasting: collaborations between artists and audiences that start, but never have to end.
In this TechFirst I chat with Edward Balassanian, the CEO of Aimi, a generative AI for music that musicians can use to create, generate, and even code music ... while allowing audiences to add, customize, extend, and personalize the sound. There's free music, monetization for artists, and over 200 artists onboard who are creating something entirely new in music.
The 500-year ceramic geodesic dome home is now an actual physical reality.
I first wrote about Geoship's plan to build long-lasting, inexpensive, earth-friendly, community-centric homes about 3 years ago. Last year, Geoship showed me a prototype. Now there's an actual built, powered, and furnished dome home in Nevada City, California.
In this TechFirst, we chat with Geoship founder Morgan Bierschenk, see the dome first-hand, and get some insight into pricing, availability, technology, and livability.
The first dome home is the 18-foot diameter model. But ultimately, Geoship plans to make domes that are anywhere from 1500 to 3000 square feet. A large individual dome might be 1,000 square feet, but can be combined and connected with smaller domes for bedrooms, kitchens, home gyms, living rooms ... pretty much anything.
Is generative AI the beginning of the end for humans ... or the end of the beginning?
And, did you know generative AI has been around since 1972?
In this TechFirst we chat with Ilke Demir, a research scientist at Intel who is working on ethical generative AI applications, like a speech synthesis project that aims to enable people who have lost their voice to talk again, an open urban driving simulator developed to support development, training, and validation of autonomous driving systems.
And a privacy-focused face generator that allows researchers to mix and match facial regions (nose of person A, mouth of person B, eyes of person C, etc.) to create an entirely new face that does not already exist in a dataset, so that people can request anonymization in public photos.
We also -- of course -- talk about OpenAI and Chat GPT, and how Ilke feels that it is not actually generative AI.
On November 16th, revenue for skippable ads dropped 50%, 60%, even 90% for many YouTube creators.
They say YouTube variously admits it was a bug, says it was fixed or will be fixed, or claims the payment drops are due to invalid traffic: code for "you're cheating."
However, looking at their YouTube analytics doesn't support that claim.
In this TechFirst, I chat with 5 creators who say they were impacted by the bug ... including several who have been impacted so severely they're not sure if they're going to be able to pay their bills, or keep creating content on YouTube.
So I did a Twitter Space with a bunch of really smart people, and they said I could upload the results to TechFirst. The only thing ... it's literally over 3 hours.
So ... listen however long you'd like!
The people on the Twitter Space include the host, Robert Scoble, as well as:
- Bryan Talebi, CEO of Ahura AI
- Tiarne Hawkins, director of AI at WeLocalize
- Chris Nakayama from Nufa/Mimesis Labs
- Ajay Juneja, CEO of Speak with Me
- Adryenn Ashley, founder of Wow is Me
- Martine Paris, AI columnist
- Jon Swartz, senior reporter at Dow Jones
- Ben Parr, co-founder of Octane AI and former tech reporter
- John Bigs, former TechCrunch journalist
... and ... of course ... yours truly, John Koetsier!
Drone delivery is super-hot, but there aren't that many major players yet. Google's Wing is doing well, but Amazon is still just getting started, and few other significant players have major traction.
Tiny Irish drone delivery company Manna Aero, however, has completed over 100,000 drone deliveries, is expanding to Dublin shortly, and will be expanding to mainland Europe and the United States this year.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Bobby Healy, CEO of Manna Aero.
Imagine building a digital twin of an entire country: all inputs, outputs, activity, infrastructure, issues, challenges ...
That hasn't happened yet, but a client used Bentley Systems's tools to create a baseline digital twin for Singapore. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Greg Demchak, who leads digital innovation at Bentley.
Increasingly, the company is using digital twin technology, AI, and drones to monitor, protect, and maintain massive infrastructure projects including wind farms and power lines, and Bentley is helping build the ITER nuclear fusion plant in France.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
The wetware in a casket of bone that we each carry on our shoulders is 1 million times more efficient than the AI models run by services like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, or DALL-E.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat for a second time with Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain AI, which is building a neuromorphic artificial brain simulating the structure of our biological brains, and aiming at 10,000 to 100,000 greater energy efficiency than current AI architectures.
We also discuss "mortal computation" and a radical co-design of the hardware and software for AI systems, which could lead to much more efficient (and more effective) smart tools, machines, and companions.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
What will 2023 bring for mobile apps and games? We chat with Data.ai's Ted Krantz about 21 new billion-dollar mobile apps including Call of Duty Mobile, Bumble, and HBO Max.
We also chat about entertainment, about third-party app stores competing with Apple, and the decline in ad revenue growth for mobile apps.
One category that's growing fast: travel, hotel, airplane ticket booking, and rental car booking apps.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
A massive aerospace corporation cancelled an order for 40,000 Oculus Quest VR headsets when they saw the technology in this video.
In this very special TechFirst, I've received permission from TechBeach Retreat to share the first global unveiling of a technology called AirGlass from Mobeus HQ which, the founder Richie Etwaru says, is finally the Z-axis of tech: the depth to the horizontal and vertical of our flat screens.
The most interesting part to me is that AR/VR/MR headsets are bulky and limiting. This potentially works right on every computer's screen in the world: no additional hardware needed.
After Richie's demo of Airless 2, we chat about the consequences and uses of technology you can engage with physically, as well as get into some of the details of how it's made, including that it doesn't really touch the operating system but operates between the camera and the GPU in pretty much any computer.
Links:
Mobeus: https://mobeus.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
This year we saw consumers push back hard on BMW's decision to include heated seats in vehicles but only make them actually work if people paid a monthly subscription fee.
Why?
And how does the concept of ownership change when everything is smart, everything is remotely configurable, and everything can report its own level of usage?
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Zach Supalla, the CEO and founder of Particle. We talk about music, software, hardware, and buying versus renting ... everything. What does value mean, and when do we like paying monthly fees versus when do we prefer to buy something upfront and own it outright?
And what does that mean for our right to repair the products we think we own?
And does our new relationship with ownership of objects mean that the US government could force companies like Apple and Google to brick all iPhones and Android phones in Russia, if Russia used nuclear weapons?
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
We need more homes for people. We need them cheaper so people can afford them. And we need them eco-friendly and carbon-neutral and self-powering so that our planet doesn't die in the process.
Is the answer 3D printing homes?
Perhaps, partly.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the CTO of Mighty Buildings, Dmitry Starodubtsev. We talk about the fact that the construction industry in the US produces 600 million tons of waste annually, that we need robotics, automation, and 3D printing involved in home building, and we talk about Might Buildings, which says they have a solution that is 80% automated, 50% faster, and produces 99% less construction waste to create Net Zero communities: communities that produce all the power they need.
We also chat about Light Stone, which Mighty Buildings has pioneered, which the company says is lighter than concrete while 4X stronger.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
It's not every day that you get to interview a 357-year-old company founded by a king, and the company that ships 1 out of 6 things moved globally.
In this TechFirst I chat about how we're going to fix the $100 trillion global economy: make it smarter, make it faster, and make it much, much more planet-friendly.
This is a session I moderated at Web Summit in Lisbon about a month ago with Ursula Soritsch-Renier, the Chief Digital & Information Officer of Saint-Gobain, and Rotem Hershko, Senior Vice President, Head of Business Platforms for Maersk.
Enjoy!
We've seen it in tickets and gaming consoles. But now it's happening in diapers and food and consumer goods: bots buying, taking up all available supply, and driving up prices for the rest of us.
What can we do about it?
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Niels Sodemann, CEO of Queue-it, about bots, e-commerce, pricing, supply, and what we can do to fix the problem.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
In this special episode of TechFirst, I'm sharing the on-stage chat I had with Ghazi Shami, the Founder & CEO of EMPIRE, an innovative hip hop music label, and Wilfrid Obeng, the Co-founder & CTO of Audiomob.
We chat metaverse, gaming, NFTs that don't suck, and what the tie-in is between a hip hop label and an audio ads company.
Both also chat about their metaverse plans ...
Tesla CEO suggested Optimus, the Tesla Bot, would come in around $20,000. He's been wrong about pricing before.
But is Tesla the only company that can pull off humaniform robots with strong AI that can do multiple tasks? In this TechFirst we chat with Robert Scoble and Irena Cronin from Infinite Retina about what Tesla Bot is, what it can do, and whether it's possible.
Unity CEO John Riccitiello talks about playing his first game (Pong), coding his first game, co-coding his first game with his daughter, and of course all the other stuff:
- gaming
- game monetization
- ironSource acquisition progress
- Applovin attempt to get Unity to buy them
- the metaverse and the future of gaming
We’re seeing so much generative art today: text, images, even video created by AI. I can’t get the image out of my mind of “The Creation of Adam” by Michelangelo in which God reaches down to touch Adam and stir him into life.
In this TechFirst, we’re going to chat about generative AI
- What it can do
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What it means
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How it will change the world
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And how it might change us
Our guest is Alex Cardinal, CEO of Glimpse.ai. They have 2 AI projects … Article Forge, that generates articles on a topic based on a keyword
And WordAI, which will rewrite content uniquely in the same style.
Is Tesla Bot more than vaporware? Will it be useful and effective in general tasks and duties?
Most robots are designed to do one thing or a small subset of things well. Tesla Bot and Xiaomi’s CyberOne robot seem to be attempts to create general purpose smart robots that can follow complex orders. Elon Musk, for instance, suggested that you could tell Tesla Bot go to a store and get you groceries, and that it will “replace people in repetitive, boring, and dangerous tasks.”
MIT professor Daniela Rus, however, has her doubts.
MIT is working on multiple types of reconfigurable robots, including ones made out of reformable smart sand, but making a humanoid general purpose robot is counterproductive because, as Rus says, " the more you generalize, the less you optimize."
In this TechFirst, we chat about the future of robotics and automation.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
How do you define the future of augmented reality?
Is it a $2,000 headset from Apple or a $1500 Oculus Quest Pro from Facebook? Or is it a device that we all hold in our hands that can cost just a few hundred dollars. A device that there are literally five billion of on this planet? AR platform Blippar is betting on the latter while not ignoring the former, and in this TechFirst we chat with the CEO Faisal Galaria about exactly why.
And, of course, an integration Blippar just built and announced for Unity, the technology that underpins half the world's games and many of its immersive 3D experiences.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Who owns the AI that searches for the knowledge you need?
Who owns the AI that manages your home’s energy use?
Who owns the AI that lets you speak and get the music you want?
Artificial intelligence is clearly more and more central to our lives. We interact with it daily, in fact, moment to moment ... from the predictive text in our messaging ... to our web searches ... to most of our digital activity and commerce ... and in our homes.
In this episode of TechFirst, we’re chatting with someone who is building open source AI: AI that you can get the code for, use, add to and enhance, or just deploy for yourself.
Most of us won’t do that, of course, but it speaks to a future in which we might be able to get smart assistance from AIs that only work for our interests ... and not some corporations'.
Our guest in this TechFirst is Michael Lewis, CEO of Mycroft AI.
Links:
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Who knew, but maintaining state and level of progress on massive construction jobs is actually a really hard problem. Exyn Technologies has adapted their mine mapping level 4 autonomous drones to work on construction sites and feed completion data into construction software packages.
In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO Nader Elm and COO Ben Williams.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.
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When will we solve the “last-mile” problem of robotics? We’ve made robots that can go to the bottom of the ocean, that can operate in hard radiation in a melted-down reactor, and can go to Mars, fly or drive around, do basic science ... and so much more that humans can’t ...
But so many of our robots can’t do the simplest things humans take for granted, like pick up objects, handle them, move them, and work on them. Or identify by touch if an object is a flower or a nail.
It’s kind of the last mile of robotic capability
A company that’s building undersea robots for the Navy is working on exactly this problem.
In this TechFirst we chat with Jorgen Pedersen, who built RE2 Robotics in Pittsburgh, sold his company to Sarcos, and now serves as COO of the combined company.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.
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Sometimes you need a big drone. Sometimes a small one will do. Some deliveries are urgent. Others are far away. For each, a slightly different drone would be the optimal solution. That's why Google sister company and Alphabet portfolio company Wing has built an 'aircraft library' ... a vault of drone types it can pull out and get in the air relatively quickly.
In this Techfirst , we chat with Wing CEO Adam Woodworth about the company's 'aircraft library,' about drone development, about what drones will do to the delivery ecosystem, and about the future of Wing.
Questions we address:
- Why do we need drone delivery?
- Crystal ball: how big does drone delivery become? What percentage?
- You have unique aircraft: fixed-wing aircraft that are also drones … why?
- You’re releasing something called the aircraft library … what is it?
- What will it allow you to do?
- Where will that become useful?
- What are the critical technologies you’ve had to master to date to get Wing to this point?
- What remains to be solved?
- Expansion plans?
- When will drone delivery be as normal as an Amazon truck rolling the neighborhood?
Podcast links:
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Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.
- TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
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Data is the nuclear waste of the web and machine learning, Ghostery CEO Jean-Paul Schmetz tells me in the last TechFirst podcast. And big tech is redefining privacy to suit their business and cut out their competitors ... not to actually deliver privacy to people.
Today, our identities are as much digital as physical, maybe more. We are where we surf, what we watch, the apps we use, the games we play, the people we engage with on social.
So privacy is a big deal and getting bigger. That's true legislatively, especially in Europe, but also technologically. Big tech has been very eager to share how privacy sensitive it is: Apple has molded its whole brand around privacy, introducing App Tracking Transparency, and Facebook is keen to say you can trust us now … we’re Meta. Google is introducing Privacy Sandbox for web and Privacy Sandbox for Android, and killing the third-party cookie … the bit of data that websites you DON’T visit can put in your browser and track you around the web.
But they all have their own definitions of privacy, which often don’t mean you giving them less data … just their competition. And Ghostery says that Google’s Manifest V3 update to Chrome will break anti-tracking and ad-blocking services.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
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Plantiga makes sensor insoles for shoes that help people get better, faster, and healthier. They track how you run, walk, jump, and change direction, and Olympic gold medallist and on of the world’s fastest humans Andre de Grasse is a customer.
But smart soles might just be the first step on the path the Human OS, which takes data from your wrist (smartwatch), finger (smart ring), body (smart clothes), face (smart glasses), and also, likely, smart insoles for data on you feet ...
In this TechFirst we chat with Plantiga CEO Quin Sandler about what his company is building.
Links:
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Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work.
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Programming robots is so 2010. Providing the AI framework within with they can teach themselves is accelerating training and development of new behaviors from 100 days to 3 hours.
In this TechFirst, we meet 2 of the researchers behind making MIT's mini-Cheetah robot learn to run ... and run fast. Professor Pulkit Agrawal and grad student Gabriel Margolis share how fast it can go, how it teaches itself to run with both rewards and "punishments," and what this means for future robots in the home and workplace.
Links:
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When you plunk a $100 million wind farm down on 98,000 acres of varying terrain, you want to know a few things. You want to know that you’re optimizing the location of your multi-million-dollar turbines. You want to know that the turbines you source can handle the gustiest gust of wind they will ever encounter without shattering dramatically in a viral video. And you want to test potential uses cases and changes in software, which is cheap and changeable, rather than in hardware, which is expensive and hard to edit.
Which is why Siemens Gamesa, the global renewable energy company, is working with NVIDIA to generate AI-powered digital twins of its turbines.
In this TechFirst, I chat with Dion Harris, Lead Product Manager of Accelerated Computing at NVIDIA and Greg Oxley, Siemens Gamesa.
Links:
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Everyone wants privacy. Most of us also care about an environment in which businesses can grow too. But can both of these be reconciled?
If you are in the mobile app or marketing spaces, you know that over the past year there’s been a great disturbance in the force. Apple increased privacy regulations for apps, and that essentially killed how apps measured their growth, discovered new audiences, or sent you a reminder that those shoes you were going to buy are still in your cart.
Facebook complained this would hurt small business, took out big ads in the WSJ, and then life sort of went on and most of us forgot about it. But not those in the business.
Growth slowed and profitability went down: 40% down.
Now one company says they’ve solved it: figured out a way to drive growth via advertising that’s completely privacy-safe and Apple-compliant, but almost as good as the old days of abundant data.
In this TechFirst, I chat with Singular CEO Gadi Eliashiv.
Links:
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We desperately need more housing that is affordable, sustainable, and mass producible. Geoship thinks they've created exactly that, and have now actually built a full-scale prototype using their advanced materials science and construction methodology.
In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO and cofounder Morgan Bierschenk.
Way too many can’t afford homes right now, especially young people, and the homes we do build are generally horrible for the environment. Plus, the isolated wood boxes we build for people don’t tend to bring us closer together.
Geoship is building sustainable bioceramic domes. They're non-toxic, have a near-zero carbon footprint, are and designed to last 500 years. They’re also intended to be affordable, mass producible, and maybe even to be deployed in communities where people can live together, not apart.
Sounds idealistic? Maybe.
But the company has completed its first full-size prototype, has 500 orders, and is looking to enter full-scale production.
Links:
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Mojo Vision has been working on smart contact lenses since years. Recently the company announced its most advanced prototype ever, which VP Steven Sinclair told me has "all the elements that we need ... in a working system so that we can really push forward what we hope is the first product."
That includes:
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14,000 pixels per inch MicroLED display
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5GH ultra-low latency radio to stream AR content
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continuous eye tracking via custom-configured accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers
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medical-grade in-lens batteries
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eye-controlled user interface
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Sinclair about the technology, uses, augmented reality, timeline to purchasable product, and the fundamental breakthroughs Mojo had to make before achieving this latest prototype.
Links:
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What if the very things we want big social platforms to do to stop the spread of extremism, racism, propaganda, and lies is actually causing more problems than it solves?
Many of us want YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter to manage and moderate what people say. Others, who value free speech higher than social harms that its exercise might cost, say that muzzling people is unethical and in some countries illegal. The big social platforms are in the crosshairs either way, and that's one of the reasons Elon Musk is buying Twitter.
But where do people go when they get kicked off the big platforms for spreading covid misinformation or saying unacceptable things? According to some, they go places that just make things worse.
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Daryl Davis, a black musician who has convinced 200 KKK members to stop being racist, and Bill Ottman, the CEO of alternative social network Minds.com.
Our questions:
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why are we so divided?
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aren't we seeing more racism lately? why?
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should any speech be censored?
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should social platforms open source their algorithms?
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what's the solution to the division and anger we're experiencing?
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how do we bridge our reality bubbles?
Links:
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Who's winning in the media and entertainment battles? We are currently seeing an epic battle in the mobile space for consumer time, attention, and dollars.
Two of the biggest juggernauts are short video versus long ... think Netflix vs TikTok, Disney+ vs Reels, with many more combatants and some like YouTube and Facebook with stakes in both sides.
What’s happening here … and who’s going to win? And why did Tiktok just have the biggest quarter of any mobile app ever?
In this TechFirst, we chat with Data.ai CEO Ted Krantz.
Links:
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Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina has established a new Special Economic Zone where the tribe will provide space and regulatory certainty for crypto and fintech companies.
It's called the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, and the Catawba Corporation says it "can be prosperous thanks to the ability of Native-American Tribes under US law to have their own commercial code, regulation-making and administrative capacities." Catawba is a sovereign jurisdiction under U.S. law, allowing it to built a regulatory framework that is friendly to fintech, blockchain, and crypto companies, says Ronnie Beck, CEO of Catawba Corporations.
The closest similarity?
Estonia's eResidency program.
In this episode of TechFirst we chat with the CEO of the CDEZ, Joseph McKinney, and Thomas Trimnal, a VP at Catawba Corporations. Our focus: what will the enable, who will come, and how will this generate value for both companies and the Catawba themselves.
Links:
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BMW sells 2.5 million cars and 194,000 motorcycles annually, almost all in a traditional car dealership. But the 100-year-old car brand wants to sell cars online, just like Tesla.
Now BMW is embarking on a major project with Adobe to get "phygital" ... to be able to do business seamlessly across apps, websites, and physical car dealerships, however its clients prefer. That means data, insights, software, and a complete rethinking of how its thousands of car dealerships interact with customers.
And, of course, how customers interact with BMW ... including before they buy, when they buy, and for years of owning their vehicles. In this TechFirst, we chat with BMW SVP Jens Theimer.
Links:
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Will super-smart artificial intelligence be the ultimate cheat code for beating the market? Probably not ... but its could ensure you retire with 25% more than you otherwise would.
In this TechFirst we chat with the CEO of Qraft USA, Robert Nestor. Qraft is an AI company focused on investing. The company has a billion USD "assets under AI" in Korea and is expanding to the US. While the AI is active in crafting the strategy and execution, humans still make the final decisions.
The result, so far, is about a 1% improvement on what financial advisors would otherwise get. While that doesn't sound huge, that's significant over your earning and investing lifespan.
Links:
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Digital retail giant Amazon has over 200,000 robots helping deliver more than 350 million different products in an unceasing flood of billions of deliveries. Its fulfillment machine with both free and fast shipping has become a key competitive moat against other retailers: free shipping and 1-day or 2-day shipping is why Amazon customers chose Amazon.
So how can other retailers, whether giants like Walmart or smaller brands, compete? One way is by stealing a march on the e-commerce behemoth and automating themselves.
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Locus Robotics CMO Karen Leavitt. Locus Robotics robots-as-a-service will pick more than a billion items in warehouse, fulfilment centers, and logistics hubs ... and the company just added more.
Links:
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We have billions of smart things. How can we create a true internet of things with trillions? We won't ... unless we have a super-cheap, super-small, super-efficient chip that doesn't need a battery, has significant sensors and capability, and can be printed almost for free.
That "almost" is still a problem, but the Wiliot Pixel 2 is a computer the size of a postage stamp. There's no batteries. You don't plug it in. And it powers itself by harvesting the energy from ambient radio waves.
In this TechFirst, we chat with Wiliot exec Stephen Statler about the Pixel, about Wiliot's no-code applications in the cloud, and how he sees the future of IoT and IIoT. A big hint: expanding IoT at least 100X from where it is today to trillions of devices, not just billions.
And that is when we'll really see the benefits of smart matter, a smart supply chain, smart cities, smart factories, smart stores, smart homes, and much more ...
Links:
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COR is an infrared spectrometer that measures your blood health and how the food you eat and the exercise that you engage in impacts it. The first product of its kind, COR was created by a former Apple Health exec who wanted to know: is my diet good for me?
Because everyone's response -- even to theoretically healthy foods -- is different. Even genetically identical twins don't have the same metabolic response to things, recent studies have shown.
So the idea with COR is that you analyze your blood at home via infrared spectrometry about 4 times over a 3-week period, and you get specific data and recommendations back about what's good -- and what's bad -- for your health.
The result, CEO Bob Messerschmidt says, is potentially the ability to have another 15 years of healthy, productive life.
Links:
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MIT scientists are building ElectroVoxels, small, smart, self-assembling robots designed for space.
It's programmable matter, infinitely recyclable large-scale 3D printing, if you will, and it could be the future of robotics and machinery in space. In this TechFirst, I chat with MIT PhD student Martin Nisser
"Rather than building a robot or a structure in a top-down manner, we envision robots or structures as these modules of hundreds or thousands of small components or modules that can rearrange themselves with respect to their neighbors," Nisser says.
The mini-bots don't have actuators: they use "small, easily manufactured, inexpensive electromagnets into the edges of the cubes that repel and attract, allowing the robots to spin and move around each other and rapidly change shape."
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Is neuromorphic computing the only way we can actually achieve general artificial intelligence?
Very likely yes, according to Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain Neuromorphics, who is trying to recreate the human brain in hardware and "give machines all of the capabilities that we recognize in ourselves."
Rain Neuromorphics has built a neuromorphic chip that is analog. In other words it does not simulate neural networks: it is a neural network in analog, not digital. It's a physical collection of neurons and synapses, as opposed to an abstraction of neurons and synapses. That means no ones and zeroes of traditional computing but voltages and currents that represent the mathematical operations you want to perform.
Right now it's 1000X more energy efficient than existing neural networks, Wilson says, because it doesn't have to spend all those computing cycles simulating the brain. The circuit is the neural network, which leads to some extraordinary gains in both speed improvement and power reduction, according to Wilson.
Links:
Rain Neuromorphics: https://rain.ai
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Will NFTs be a trillion-dollar market by 2030? Or will they vanish in a blazing explosion of hate from all the naysayers?
(I might give even odds on each side, actually!)
In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Rarible chief product officer Alex Salnikov. And yes, he’s aware that there’s way too many bored apes, yacht apes, space apes, technicolor apes, and all other kinds of crypto mishmash digital art that are vying for the stupid money that is out there chasing NFTs.
But, he says, half of all digital commerce doesn’t need to have a physical component at all. And that would transform the future of commerce. Using, of course, the foundation built by today’s NFTs.
But we’re early. In fact, we’re just now in the “Cambrian explosion,” Salnikov says, which will birth a massive amount of innovation and completely change the face of commerce, crypto, and how we buy, own, and share the things we want.
Links:
Rarible: https://rarible.com/
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So you got a great deal on your brand-new mutant ape yacht puppy NFT? But is it legit?
DeviantArt is now scanning 5 million NFTs a week. Every month, it's finding 40,000 stolen, infringing, fraudulent NFTs. In other words, the people minting the NFTs don't actually own the images in the first place ... somewhat ironically since the whole idea of an NFT is prove ownership.
NFTs are clearly the new gold rush (you have mine, right?) But where there’s gold, there’s thieves and opportunists, and apparently, that’s just as true of NFTs as crypto in general.
DeviantArt is the world’s largest art community and has been around since 2000. It now has over 61 million members, and it's getting involved to ensure its members' art doesn't get stolen.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with DeviantArt CMO Liat Karpel Gurwicz and COO Moti Levy.
Sponsor:
SMRT1, a Smart Vending Machine Platform that transforms traditional vending hardware into "Smarter, Better, Faster" automated retail kiosks, a convenience store without the store.
Links:
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How soon will we have robot surgeons? Health care has gone remote lately, but in reality, most of it is fairly simple: video conferencing during Covid.
But just recently for the first time ever a robot surgeon at Johns Hopkins University performed abdominal surgery on soft tissue. Granted … it was on a pig, not a human … but STAR, or Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, was a success. And that means there's significant hope that robot surgeons are not only possible but a reality.
Unfortunately, it might be a decade or two before this is normal. But technology does advance quickly ... and we need it to. Healthcare is unevenly and inequitably available both globally and nationally, and cheap, fast, effective surgeries would be a huge boost to health care outcomes.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Tamir Wolf, CEO and co-founder of surgical intelligence platform Theator.
Links:
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Studies say you can prevent about 50% of mental health challenges if you catch and address them early. Doctors from Cincinnati Children’s hospital are using the world’s second-most powerful supercomputer to help solve mental health right at the start: when we're kids.
This is a big deal.
About 13% of us suffer from some form of mental health disorder ... that’s 971 million people globally. And it’s only gotten worse since Covid.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we meet and chat with Dr. John Pestian, who is leading the effort.
Links:
Cincinnati Children's hospital: https://www.cincinnatichildrens.org
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Thinking to type sounds interesting to most of us. Crazy and futuristic, yes, but also freeing and fast. But for those with massive spinal cord injuries or degenerative diseases, it's an absolute lifeline.
In this TechFirst, we chat with Marcus Gerhardt, CEO of Blackrock Neurotech, about a brain-computer interface they've invented, "installed" for people who cannot use their arms or legs anymore, and enabled typing, speech, and the use of robotic arms to feed themselves and more.
Blackrock's tech enables thought-to-text typing at 90 characters per minute with 94% accuracy (just imagine what Dr. Stephen Hawking could have done with this) and gives tetraplegic patients the power to move a prosthetic arm, grab a glass of water, and drink by themselves again for the first time since their tragic accidents.
Links:
Blackrock Neurotech: https://blackrockneurotech.com
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Can we save the coral reefs by 3D printing more? Not reefs themselves, of course: those are built by living creatures, the coral ... but by 3D printing the substrate that corals can attach to and kickstarting the process of reef construction.
In this TechFirst, we chat with marine biologist Astrid Kramer and 3D printing expert Nadia Fani about their crowdfunding startup, Coastruction.
Scientists say we've lost half the world's coral reefs, and that puts a quarter of the world's fish at risk. Astrid and Nadia are trying to help reverse that, with the help of 3D printing and local groups all over the planet. Their proposed 3D printer uses sand and other local materials, and can adapt the size and shape of the substrate to local needs as determined by depth, tide, waves, shoreline, and more.
Links:
Coastruction: https://www.coastruction.com
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Have you taken a flying Uber yet? We're in the middle of a flight revolution.
In the past two years, there's been $5 billion of investment in personal drones, multicopters, autonomous helicopters, and vectored thrust aircraft. 129 different companies are developing almost 170 different air taxi, cargo, vertical takeoff or landing craft. Many of these, 65%, are doing electrical power and 25% are going with hybrid power models.
So what's happening here? Why has investment almost 10X'd in a little over a decade? And why is cargo drones so hot, while air taxis are so cold?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're chatting with Daniel Shaposhnikov, partner at Phystech Ventures.
Links:
Phystech: https://phystech.vc
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What if plants could tell us when pests are attacking them, or they’re too dry, or they need more fertilizer. One startup is gene engineering farm plants so they can communicate in in fluorescent colors. The result: a farmer’s phone, drone, or even satellite imagery can reveal what is happening in hundreds of acres of fields …
That leads to better food, fewer crop failures, and more revenue for farmers.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we meet Shely Aronov, CEO and founder at InnerPlant, and chat about what plants say, and how farmers can understand their messages.
Links:
Innerplant: https://innerplant.com
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Five days ago, gaming giant Take-Two bought Zynga for $13 billion. But before that, Zynga bought Chartboost for $250 million.
What's going on?
Why is a gaming company buying an ad network?
And what does this say about the future of games and media?
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Zynga Chief Product Officer Scott Koenigsberg and Chartboost CEO Rich Izzo.
Questions we discuss:
Zynga bought an ad network for $250M. A decade ago that would have sounded insane. Why?
We know Zynga for games. But you’re not the only combination of gaming and adtech. What’s driving this merger frenzy and consolidation?
How does having Chartboost make Zynga better? How does having Zynga make Chartboost better?
Are there downsides?
Competitive issues?
What’s evolving in tech and platforms that is changing the competitive landscape?
What kind of platform that you can build will be well-optimized for the future state?
Zynga has acquired other gaming studios as well. What’s the goal?
Mobile was a phase-shift in technology that privileged some platforms and networks and deprioritized others. What’s the next one … do you have metaverse bets, and what kind of timetable to you envision there?
How will this change your business?
Planning to still be acquisitive?
Links:
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Livestream shopping is a $66 billion business in China, but only a $1 billion business in the U.S.
That’s likely to change soon if Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, TikTok, and many other massive platforms have their way. Tech giants are investing huge sums in building live-streaming shopping in the web.
Will it work?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Elma Beganovich, 50% of the iconic influencer duo Amra & Elma. Former lawyers and economists, now entrepreneurs, they started their own influencer marketing agency and have over two million followers.
A major focus now: livestream shopping.
We chat about why it’s happening. Who does it. Why people shop via livestream. And where it’s likely to go.
Links:
Amra & Elma: https://www.amraandelma.com
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Quantum computing currently costs $10,000 a qubit: just one of the reasons why it's hard and expensive to scale. SEEQC is taking a different approach to building scalable million-qubit machines that can actually deliver on the promise of quantum computers and revolutionize computing.
Will they succeed?
Hard to say, but SEEQC just announced that they are building a commercially-scalable, application-specific quantum computer for pharmaceutical drug development. Merck has bought one, and the company is partnering with Riverlane and Oxford Instruments to make it a reality.
The real challenge here is to take quantum computing from a V2 rocket era, CEO John Levy says, and bring it into the SpaceX era. In other words, to generate real, massive, lasting, and provable value from quantum computers ... which, let's be honest, we haven't really seen yet.
Links:
SEEQC: https://seeqc.com
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Drones are super-cool and fun. They could also be a terrorist's favorite weapon, allowing them to strike from a distance in safety.
But how do you defend against tiny, almost invisible flying machines that fly fast, elevate over fences, and can carry explosives or toxins into dangerous proximity to infrastructure and people?
In this episode of the TechFirst podcast, I chat with the CEO of Dedrone, which "dedrones" sensitive airspaces using sensors, AI, machine learning, and orchestration of defense and interdiction activity via lasers, jamming, and yes ... "putting lead on it."
Links:
Dedrone: https://www.dedrone.com
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Billions of people have jobs that require heavy lifting, and most of them will lose health and ability over years of repetitive stress. German Bionic thinks its Cray X bionic exoskeleton, powered, by AI, will not only help workers do their jobs safely, but also help others: sick, injured, or old.
Cray X helps workers lift with 66 pounds of lifting support, and uses rechargeable batteries so you can wear it all day. It's built with carbon fibre so it's light, and it's built-in AI learns your patterns to assist better.
Best part: at the end of the day the AI tells you how many tons you've lifted and what you've done ... essentially gamifying work.
Links:
German Bionic: https://www.germanbionic.com/en/home/
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It is NEXT YEAR PREDICTIONS time again :-)
This TechFirst we're chatting with App Annie CEO Ted Krantz about what's hot, what's big, and what's growing in mobile in 2022. Fintech, sure. Social monetization, yep. TikTok continuing to blast off, yes. Plus billions being spent in metaverse (yes! already!) and the ever-expanding billion-download-app club.
We also chat some Roblox, NikeLand, crypto, Subway Surfers (still around! still killing it!) and The Company Formerly Known As Facebook.
Enjoy!
Links:
App Annie: https://www.appannie.com/
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If crypto is the future of finance, the future sucks. It’s hard. Complicated. Easy to screw up. And when you do screw up, you can simply drop tens of thousands of dollars worth of crypto into the void, never to be seen again.
(And we haven’t talked about the scams or the hacks yet.)
Coincast is trying to solve that by making sending crypto as easy as texting. The genesis of the company: a techie trying to get his aunt to buy some crypto, back when Bitcoin was cheap.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Albert Renshaw, CEO of Coincast, and long-time mobile app developer, founder, and entrepreneur.
What we chat about:
-
Coincast
-
Cryptocurrency wallets
-
Crypto and stress
-
Gas fees
-
Business model
-
The future of crypto
-
And much more …
Links:
Coincast: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coincast-send-crypto/id1517543384
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Unity might be better positioned than any other company to usher in the Oasis ... AKA the metaverse.
71% of the top thousand mobile games are made with the technology. Half of all mobile PC and console games are also made with Unity. Unity is inherently open, running on over 20 different platforms. The world's already there: 2.5 billion people are playing games built with Unity.
So I'm wondering ... Unity has the planets, the rooms, the solar systems ... when is it going to build the galaxy, the corridors, the connections?
In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Julie Shumaker, who leads growth at Unity.
Links:
Unity: https://unity.com
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Adtech is in upheaval. We've seen 7 billion-dollar acquisitions so far this year and we've seen massive change: Uber Eats has an ad network. Doordash has an ad network. Gaming company Zynga owns an ad network. CVS and Walgreens recently launched ad networks too.
So what is an ad network these days?
And are emerging titans like Unity, ironSource, Applovin, and Liftoff+Vungle going to be able to challenging the reigning heavyweights: Google & Facebook?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I'm chatting with Mark Ellis, the CEO of Liftoff or … Liftoff + Vungle or … name-to-be-revealed-at-some-point-in-the-future ...
Links:
Liftoff: https://liftoff.io/
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Crypto is hard. Wallets are hard. NFTs are hard. Connecting to DApps, distributed apps, is hard. Brave is trying to make that simpler by building all of this functionality right into its privacy-safe browser.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave.
We chat about the new functionality in the Brave browser, why building a wallet natively into a browser is safer than doing it via an extension, and his vision of the future.
Links:
Brave: https://brave.com
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Photo by Executium on Unsplash
Most smart homes are aftermarket affairs: cobbled together bits and pieces of Alexa and Google and Apple HomeKit to make our lights go on, our music play, our security systems work, and our blinds to go up and down.
What about building it in from the start?
KB Home has built over 650,000 homes in the US. The company was the first builder to make every home ENERGY STAR® certified, and is now making a concerted effort to make every home smart. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier I chat with Dan Bridleman, the company’s SVP of technology.
Links:
KB Home: https://www.kbhome.com
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There are perhaps a billion buildings on the planet. Maybe a million of those are of significant size, and all of them are going to be smart at some point in the future.
The problem?
Every smart building is a one-off. Every building is unique. There's no way to make them -- or 10s of millions of warehouses or factories -- smart in the same way, at the same time, quickly, cheaply, easily.
That's a problem Mapped is trying to solve.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with CEO and founder Shaun Cooley (and his dog) about scaling the smartification of the world's buildings.
Links:
Mapped: https://www.mapped.com/
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How do CISOs sleep at night? By failing fast, apparently.
In this episode of TechFirst we chat with HP chief information security officer Joanna Burkey and Siemens USA CISO Kurt John on hacking, cracking, and yes ... even sleeping at night.
You are going to get hacked, says John. And yet, he can sleep at night because the point of his cybersecurity is to fail fast but fail noisily and recover quickly.
45% of workers are buying their own computers
68% say security wasn't a factor
74% of IT teams are seeing jumps in phishing
49% of us click on suspicious emails
70% of those don't report it to IT
It's tough out there. These two CISOs share their strategies for living and working in an era of increased hacking and security breaches.
Links:
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Can an entire farm be a complex multi-component robot? According to AppHarvest CTO Josh Lessing ... sure. Kind of.
AppHarvest builds greenhouses that know what's happening. Can control light. Control fertilizer and irrigation. Even control pollination, and when is the right time to harvest the crop. Plus, of course, actually harvest the crop by robot.
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat about the future of farming ... and there's a lot of technology involved.
Achieving 20-100X better productivity with 70% less water and far less CO2 emission is key. So is the development of Virgo, a universal picking robot that is designed to emulate the flexibility and control of a human hand for soft crops like tomatoes, strawberries, and cucumbers.
Links:
AppHarvest: https://www.appharvest.com
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Apple is complicit in Chinese censorship. There’s simply no other way to put it. Thousands of apps have been deleted from the Chinese Apple App Store, including recently a Quran app and a Bible app.
Plus hundreds of games, social apps, and more.
Apple has to do business in China. That's just realistic. And it has to obey the laws of countries it does business in. That's also just realistic.
Sideloading could enable both.
Links:
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The Carbon Robotics self-driving farm bot kills weeds with lasers: 8 150-watt lasers, to be precise. That’s pretty cool, but much cooler is that no toxic herbicides are required.
That’s safer for the farmer, better for the soil, and produces better crops.
In this episode of TechFirst, we check out the robot, talk to the CEO of Carbon Robotics Paul Mikesell, and see the results on the fields.
Links:
Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.com/
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0:00 Laser-powered weed killer
0:47 AI, computer vision, robotics
1:48 Herbicides and weeds
3:50 Health impact and food quality
5:42 Robots with lasers
8:18 How it works
12:13 Autonomous driving
13:08 Speed and ROI
15:11 Solar powered?
17:31 Lighting and computer vision
21:21 Future of farm robots
Do you want sushi by drone? Ice cream or coffee in 2 minutes? Wing is Google's drone division (OK, Alphabet's!) and is doing just that right now in three locations around the world.
They're planning to scale globally and in the U.S., but are working out all the kinks and regulatory permissions. And they just announced some exciting news: first of its kind rooftop drone stations at a mall.
You order on an app, a retailer preps your item, attaches it to a drone, and it flies to you at 110 km/hour.
In this edition of TechFirst, we're chatting with Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications.
Links:
Wing: https://wing.com
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0:00 50X more efficient
1:12 Rooftop delivery service
2:54 How long does drone delivery take?
3:59 How Wing's drone delivery works
6:34 What customers say
7:00 Retailers and drone delivery
9:01 Where's Amazon?
11:00 When will Wing scale?
Avi Bar-Zeev has been working on the metaverse for 30 years. He’s one of the key people behind Microsoft’s Hololens, co-founded Keyhole which became Google Earth, helped define Second Life’s technology, and has worked with Apple on, presumably, its rumored smartglasses.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Ari about the metaverse, what it is, what it isn’t, and how AR and VR connect (if they do).
We also talk about what AR should be, about how it could fail, and the very real dangers it could represent.
We discuss the one absolute necessity of the metaverse: interoperability. We ask whether a visual metaphor for the presentation of information is just unnecessary most of the time. We also we explore the future of life in an augmented reality rich environment, and the privacy implications of the metaverse.
0:00 Virtual enslavement
0:25 What is the metaverse?
4:52 Lessons of Hololens
7:05 Dangers of augmented reality
11:26 VR, the metaverse, and interoperability
14:22 Visual metaphors and metaverse
17:21 AR vs VR: convergence?
22:13 Life in the metaverse
26:10 Admin privs to your reality
28:07 Building the future
Links:
RealityPrime: https://www.realityprime.com/
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Here's (almost) everything Amazon announced for smart home just two days ago, including Amazon Astro, Ring Always Home Cam, Ring Alarm Pro, Ring Video Doorbell, and more Ring, Ring, Ring everything.
There's also the Echo Show 15 and the Amazon Glow.
But the big picture is how Amazon is competing with Google and Apple in smart home ... and it's not even close. Apple has almost nothing for smart home beyond HomeKit. Google has a few Nest products, but has been very slow to release more ...
Links:
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Can I only experience a Facebook metaverse in Oculus Quest? Can I only enter your virtual event with an HTC Vive Pro? Or can we build connections, doors, windows, and pathways through all digital realities that anyone can access with smartphone, laptop, or -- yes -- a VR headset?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Hans Elstner, the CEO of Rooom. Rooom offers the "first all-in-one platform for content in 2D, 3D, AR and VR." In other words: digital realities that anyone can access.
This is super-important in a era of silos and platforms and barriers. And if you want literally hundreds of thousands of people to attend your virtual event ... as Rooom did with IFA 2020.
Links:
Rooom: https://www.rooom.com/
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We know carbon fiber is strong: 60X stronger than steel. The problem has always been finding ways to 3D print it at speed, and for large objects.
Arevo says it's found the solution: "'the world's first high speed additive manufacturing system for continuous carbon fiber composite structures." It's literally the size of a shipping container, and it can print a volume about a meter cubed.
Companies pay hundreds to thousands of dollars per kilogram for carbon fiber products, and Arevo says it has the fastest and best way to make them on the fly. Stronger and better because it's true 3D printing, not 2.5D, and faster: a monocoque carbon fiber bike frame in about a day.
Links:
Arevo: https://arevo.com/
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0:00 60X stronger than steel
1:23 3D printing carbon fiber
3:40 Shipping container-sized 3D printer
5:11 Monocoque thermoplastic printing
8:55 $SMRT coin
9:25 3D printing speed
13:23 2000 3D printed bikes per month
15:40 3D printing vertically AND horizontally
17:01 Future of 3D printing
19:34 National security and manufacturing
21:55 3D printing ... 1 order of magnitude away
Epic sued Apple for the right to sell in-app purchases in Fortnite itself and not pay Apple a 30% cut. And it won ... but also lost, as the judge ruled in favor of Apple on nine of the ten claims Epic made.
But the big deal is payments in apps. And that changes everything.
Here are the most interesting rulings, findings, and facts unearthed in U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers' 185-page report.
Links:
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Some robots won't replace us. Some will augment us: make us faster, stronger, bigger, more capable. Sarcos Robotics has built both robots that you can wear and robots you can operate, and just recently unveiled the Guardian XT to complement the Guardian XO.
One you wear, and it helps you lift 200 pounds with minimal effort. The other you teleoperate in VRwhile wearing motion-capturing clothing. Weld, cut, lift, bolt ... you can do it all in dangerous situations from the safety of the ground, or your home.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Ben Wolff from Sarcos about the Guardians, how they work, and what they mean about the future of work.
Links:
Sarcos https://www.sarcos.com
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Contents:
0:00 Fleet of thousands
1:06 Robot avatars
2:11 Wearable robots
4:43 Merging human and machine
5:08 Where these robots work
8:41 Fine motor control
10:03 Power supply
10:58 Range of motion
13:30 Robots & work in 5 years
Four months ago I interviewed Lightmatter CEO Nick Harris on his photonic supercomputer. There are now almost 400K view and 2,600 comments ... with lots of questions. In this episode, Harris answers the biggest ones.
- is this real?
- does the chip do what Lightmatter says it will do?
- RGB vs CMYK?
- how do you do linear algebra with light?
- where can I get this?
- capacitance issues
- can it run DOOM?
- can it run Crysis?
- why hasn't NVIDIA done this already?
- how does this interface with quantum computing?
... and much more.
Links:
Lightmatter: https://lightmatter.co
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US President Biden said his goal is that 50% of cars sold in 2030 will be zero-emission vehicles: less than 9 years away. So … is that doable?
Maybe, but the US needs 10X more rare earths for magnets.
Currently, less than 2% of cars on American roads are electric. About 17-19M cars are sold in the US annually, and a little over 300,000 are EVs. So we’re at about 2%.
One of the things you need is batteries. The other is electric drivetrains, and for that you need rare earths for magnets: neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium. Plus, of course, lithium for batteries. It't not just electric cars ... the F-35 fighter jet needs a ton of rare earths. Wind power requires it, and so do batteries that power energy storage for green economy plans.
In fact, according to Pini Althaus, CEO of USA Rare Earth, the U.S. needs 10X more by 2030, and maybe 25X more by 2050.
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0:00 USA electric vehicle goals
2:00 Rare earths
5:06 China and rare earths
6:59 How much do we need?
10:50 Increasing production of rare earths
12:28 Environmental concerns
14:08 How China secures resources
15:24 Is there enough in the US?
17:41 National security implications
Presumably Tesla isn’t busy enough building “full self driving” or cars that have half-year waitlists for new buyers. (Or worse: anyone wondering where Cybertruck is?) Now CEO Elon Musk has revealed a new project: Tesla Bot.
Tesla Bot is a 125 pound 5’8” humanoid robot. Launch goal: some time next year.
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What could an AI-focused 22nd most powerful supercomputer in the world and 100 new AI faculty do for the University of Florida? I chat with UF provost Dr. Joseph Glover and NVIDIA's Cheryl Martin about what they're planning.
Short version: massive impact.
We're talking AI-driven climate change research, medical research and infusing artificial intelligence throughout the entire curriculum of a massive university that graduates 10,000 students annually.
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There are now seven mobile games that pull in over $100 million in an average month, according to a new App Annie report. And 810 scoop up more than $1 million every month.
In 2019?
Only two made over $100 million/month.
In other words, mobile gaming is huge and massive and still growing fast ... 16X faster revenue growth than PC/Mac gaming and home console gaming.
Links:
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App Annie's report: https://content-new.appannie.com/en/insights/mobile-gaming/2021-mobile-gaming-teardown
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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If I had a dollar for every 3D startup that has failed, I'd probably have ... a few hundred bucks. Getting no-glasses no-headset 3D right is insanely difficult.
But Look Glass Factory CEO Shawn Frayne says he's done it. It's shipping now, and I have friends who say it's the best thing they've ever seen. He's been working on it for literally half his life ... and it has the potential to revolutionize photography, memories, and maybe more.
Think collaborative work in 3D. Think your everyday monitor being 3D capable.
Or stop thinking. Just watch.
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0:00 Road to hell
1:32 Marty McFly and holograms
2:48 Why does holography matter?
4:35 Sponsored by $SMRT coin
5:31 3D is the next major paradigm shift
8:15 4K and 8K holographic displays
10:36 Interactivity
11:45 How the 3D tech works
14:49 Getting your photos into Looking Glass
15:55 Future of holography
Amazon is the beast, the bear, the devil that controls over half of digital retail in America. And they've copied successful products for Amazon Essentials ... because they see all the data.
But could that be a great thing for brands?
Perch has raised over $900 million to buy, build, and grow microbrands, mostly on Amazon. And executive Mike Frekey is pretty pumped about it, calling Amazon the largest platform brands have at their disposal for growth.
We chat about the future of retail, e-commerce, direct-to-consumer (DTC), and what Amazon is becoming. Also about shadow ratings on Amazon, advertising on Amazon and if that's pay-to-play, microbrands and their future, and much, much more.
Links:
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Guest: Perch https://www.perchhq.com/
Sponsor: Serial Marketers https://serialmarketers.net
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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0:00 Largest platform for growth
1:31 Microbrands at scale
3:57 Sponsored by Serial Marketers
4:30 Future of retail
6:10 Retail employees = engineers
8:15 Invisible Amazon product ratings
9:38 What is Amazon for brands?
13:50 Amazon Ads: Pay to play?
18:44 The future of brands
Will AI replace us, or make us better?
According to AI expert Slater Victoroff, AI is a bionic arm that's going to make us better and faster, whether we're a doctor, lawyer, data scientist, builder, carpenter, or care aide.
I also chat the Victoroff, the CTO and co-founder of Indico, about what work will look like in the future, how much white collar and blue collar work will get taken over by AI and robotics, and how we're using AI now for work ... and will be in the future.
Links:
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Indico: https://indico.io/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst
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Contents:
0:00 Work in a decade
1:00 AI in work today
3:50 GPT-3 and general AI
5:10 The human work "black box"
8:30 General AI and a personal Jarvis
13:11 An "AI lawyer" is not an AI lawyer
16:22 Enterprise AI adoption
19:24 AI and job loss
Mashing those buttons may not take massive muscles. But long-term success in eSports takes physical and mental fitness.
At least according to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive star JW, a member of the Fnatic esports team. With other eSports stars he's been working out with Freeletics, an AI-powered fitness program.
The biggest benefit? Faster, clearer thinking, JW says.
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Smart electricity startup Amber just signed a significant agreement with German giant Infineon to bring its technology closer to market. Amber's tech is a solid state solution for managing and controlling electricity, including transforming AC to DC.
That makes electricity software controllable: a 100-year leap in technology.
"By controlling the sine wave electricity and you can chop it and dice it and slice it and you can manipulate it and you can even turn it to a straight line DC by with the elimination of electrolytics, magnetics, transformers, relays, rectifiers ... that's mind-boggling to a lot of electrical engineers," says founder and CEO Thar Casey.
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Amber: https://www.ambersi.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
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Throw everything cool and techy in a blender and what do you get? Million Doge Disco. It's an augmented reality game similar to Pokemon Go with NFTs ✅ and blockchain ✅ and augmented reality ✅ and partying ✅ and Tamagotchi ✅ and Dogecoin ✅ and ... free money.
Or free Dogecoin, at least. One million free Dogecoin.
Which you have to capture, then dance with, and babysit while they increase in value.
Yes, it's insane. And so is (in a good way!) its founder and CEO Gary Lachance, who co-created the Distributed Dance Party and sees gaming as a way to bring about world peace.
Links:
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Million Doge Disco: https://dogedisco.com/
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There's a dirty little secret of most wearable tech, and the dirty little secret is ... it's not actually wearable. It's strappable, it's mountable.
It's not actually something that you wear in any traditional meaning of that word. One startup in New York, however, is trying to change that. Imagine smart thread woven right into all of your clothing -- no straps, no attachments, just clothing and data. To chat more and learn more, I'm talking to the CEO and founder of Nextiles, George Sun.
Links:
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Nextiles: https://www.nextiles.tech
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
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What if building a robot was like picking options on a car? I'll have the vision module, the speech module ... better give me a wheeled transportation package for this one, a flying navigation module for that one ... I'll take LIDAR and a natural vision module ... and so on ...
Ohmnilabs offers an modular robotics platform that lets companies configure autonomous robots. They have customers like Google, Amazon, Apple, and Toyota, and they 3D print components so you can test new versions quickly. The idea: pick your hardware, pick your software, build your robot.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Ohmnilabs' CEO Thuc Vu about how it works, what's possible, and how much faster/better/cheaper this model is ...
Links:
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Ohmnilabs: https://ohmnilabs.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Whether you want to be Dick Tracy or you want to just not take your phone on a hike, there is now a solution: Wristcam. It's the only camera available globally for Apple Watch, and I got a sample to test.
I also spent some time with the CEO and CMO of Wristcam chatting about what it does, how it works, what quality people can expect, and whether it's a boat anchor on your wrist.
You can take pictures, video, and yes ... even video chat live with Wristcam.
Links:
Wristcam: https://www.wristcam.com
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tec...
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoet...
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0:00 What is Wristcam?
2:02 Sample video and pics
4:33 Live demo
6:58 The technology
11:02 Feature - live video
12:53 Future of wearable video
Next-day delivery? Same-day delivery? Super-lame. What about 5-minute delivery?
That's Manna from heaven ... or manna from drones. Manna is running autonomous drone delivery right now in Galway, Ireland, and has the licenses in place to take the service across Europe and maybe Canada. This tiny startup is beating Amazon to the immediate delivery punch in Europe.
And the US? That's a problem: regulation is way, way, way behind.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Bobby Healy, CEO of Manna, about drone delivery, how it works, what it's accomplishing right now, and how soon you might see it in your backyard. Plus, what drone delivery as a service means for the future of commerce.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
Manna: https://www.manna.aero
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Medical AI has a bright future.
Apple’s focus on health data collected by wearable technology and new capabilities for streaming that data to doctors just guaranteed it.
I just posted to my Forbes column, and here's a few expanded thoughts on what we just saw at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference.
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If we thought crypto was polarizing, NFTs are 10X worse. Are they cool? Are they awesome? Are they nonsense? Are they a cash grab? Are they even anything real at all?
Well, even the Olympics have NFTs.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Harrison Schulman and Francisco Lopez, both co-founders of one of the newest NFT marketplaces, New Renaissance. New Renaissance is the first to create an NFT out of a major sports championship icon ... in this case, Danny Green's NBA championship ring.
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Humm is a small grey patch you wear on your forehead that boosts the normal electrical signals in your prefrontal cortex, making you learn faster, retain memories longer, and assimilate complex data quicker.
In research studies, subjects had a 20% boost in cognitive abilities.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Humm CEO Iain McIntyre. We talk about what Humm is, how it works, the benefits it provides, how he's planning to take it to market ... and why McIntyre (a dual law and physics major) is in this business at all.
Links:
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Humm: https://thinkhumm.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Pilot free level 4 drone autonomy? Exyn Technologies says they've achieved it, and in this episode we chat with CEO Nader Elm.
Topics: what drone autonomy means, what level 4 looks like, and, crucially, what this unlocks for search, rescue, research, security, surveillance, inspection, delivery, and many more drone operations.
According to Exyn, this is no longer point-to-point flight, but open exploration flight at double the speed with a smoother flight path and higher quality data accuracy.
Links:
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Exyn: https://www.exyn.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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iOS 14.5 is perhaps the biggest change in the mobile ecosystem in a decade.
While most iPhone owners might not see that much change, for the first time they are getting a choice about whether they allow adtech companies and brands to track them around the internet. For the first five years of mobile, anyone who wanted it got our hard-coded UDID, or universal device identifiers. After about 2010, anyone who wanted got our IDFAs, or identifiers for advertisers. There was an opt-out, but few saw it.
Now, we'll all be asked for permission to track, like GDPR cookie notifications on the web..
App Annie CEO Ted Krantz and I chat about what that means for apps, companies, and people.
Links:
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App Annie: https://www.appannie.com/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Imagine the ability to have a say in who I interview next. Imagine owning a token from your favorite creator or artist that gives you special access or a closer connection.
Now imagine it’s a currency that can grow as the community does. And can be used to purchase goods and services ... or even exchanged for US dollars
That’s a creator coin.
Recently Rally.io raised $57M to make literally a million of them. Including #SMRT coin, which is my creator coin.
In this episode of TechFirst I interview Bremner Morris, former Patreon executive and now chief marketing officer of Rally.io.
Links:
#SMRT coin: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
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Would you feel awkward wearing hearing aids?
About 20% of people have hearing loss. But only a third of them will actually wear hearing aids. Too many people just don't want the stigma of hearing aids. (Or all those finicky wires!)
But what if they looked just like regular earbuds?
Like for example, Signia Actives.
They look just like regular earbuds, and they adapt to different listening needs on the fly via an app.
Noisy room? There's a setting for that.
Music? No problem.
Need to hear what’s in front or behind? Just change a setting.
Need to hear what someone’s saying through a mask? There's a mode for that.
Need more volume? Less? Just turn a dial via the provided app.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
Signia Active: https://www.signia.net/en-us/hearing-aids/active/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Do you have to reinvent the wheel every time you build a robot? Or can you reuse significant components of functionality like vision, navigation, manual dexterity, and control software?
It turns out that the answer is that you don't have to continually reinvent the wheel. And the result of asking that question was the creation of what might be the world’s first robot venture factory
In, of course, Odense, Denmark, an island with perhaps the world’s greatest density of robotic startups and creators.
Links:
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Blue Ocean Robotics: https://www.blue-ocean-robotics.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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The X Shore Eelex 8000 cruises 20 hours on battery power. It knows when you fall overboard, it won't go beyond geo-fences that you set up. It offers autopilot and it goes 35 knots or 65 kilometers an hour flat out.
It has a modular design and will save you about $800 every time you "fuel up"
In this episode of tech first, we're chatting with Jenny Keisu, the CEO of X Shore, which has just released the ELX 8,000 electric boat and raised $17 million to bring it to a harbor near you.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
X Shore: https://www.xshore.com/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
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Clubhouse is the hot new social audio star. But Twitter Spaces is available to 30X the audience out of the box … and draws on a social graph you already own.
Does that mean it’s the new winner just waiting to be crowned?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Paul Armstrong, CEO and founder of Here/Forth … and owner of the very first sponsored show on Twitter Spaces … sponsored by a Fortune 500 global brand, too yet.
At least, as far as Armstrong knows.
Links:
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TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
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Punching something is probably a good way of blowing off steam, as long as it's an inanimate object and you're not hurting anyone. It's also a surprisingly good workout.
In this episode I try out Fight Camp's smart boxing fitness program and chat with the founder, former US National Team member Tommy Duquette ... now founder and CEO of Fight Camp.
Links:
Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
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Moore's Law is dead, right? Not if we can get working photonic computers.
Lightmatter is building a photonic computer for the biggest growth area in computing right now, and according to CEO Nick Harris, it can be ordered now and will ship at the end of this year. It's already much faster than traditional electronic computers a neural nets, machine learning for language processing, and AI for self-driving cars.
It's the world's first general purpose photonic AI accelerator, and with light multiplexing -- using up to 64 different colors of light simultaneously -- there's long path of speed improvements ahead.
Links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
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I take a virtual tour of a virtual learning environment from The Leadership Network based on a collaboration they're doing with Toyota. Is this the future, or is it more like Microsoft Mesh's rich, textured, augmented reality?
There's probably multiple modalities for the future of meetings and collaborative remote work. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I get a tour of TLN's Gemba VR learning and training environment, and compare it to Microsoft Mesh.
Episode links:
The Leadership Network: https://theleadershipnetwork.com
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
We have synthetic humans earning millions as influencers and models who are created by a computer. What’s driving this … and where’s it all going? To dig in, we’re chatting with Tyler Lastovich, who leads strategy at Generated Photos.
Generated Photos makes realistic faces via AI: generative adversarial networks.
They're growing incredibly fast, count most major gaming companies as their customers, and are talking to major social media outlets as well. The market right now is for synthetic models and characters, but in the future is probably as large as the world: avatars for all of us in an augmented reality and virtual reality world.
We chat about the growth, the implications, the ethical considerations, and much, much more.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Would you wear a computer on your head? In public? What if it made you more productive?
Today on TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Alex Castillo of
Neurosity, which just released the Crown. It's a brain-sensing computer you wear like a hat, and which … one day … may be a hat. Or … inserted under your skull like Elon Musk's Neuralink.
Episode links:
Neurosity: https://neurosity.co
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Nuport Robotics just landed a deal with Canada's largest retailer, Canadian Tire, and the Canadian government to test its self-driving truck capability. The technology uses lidar, cameras, and radar to guide trucks. And the company has a vision to make every truck self-driving ... not just brand-new ones coming right out of the factory.
That's a big deal, because there's about 80 million trucks on the planet right now that don't have self-driving capability. And transport companies aren't going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for new trucks just for some new tech.
Not, at least, if they can get it aftermarket.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with the CEO of Nuport, Raghavender Sahdev, about how his solution works, and what their new project with Canadian Tire means.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Nuport: https://www.nuport.ai
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Clubhouse is the media darling of the social audio world ... the hot date. Why? And … can Facebook and Twitter catch up?
To get some answers, we’re chatting with Josh Constine. He's a former TechCrunch writer and editor-at-large who is now a venture capitalist at SignalFire.
And ... Josh Constine is a Clubhouse influencer with 3.5M+ followers.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Can you think a sleep tracker you haven't even tried might just be the best sleep tracker ever?
Apparently yes.
But hear me out ... there's reasons :-)
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Forbes story: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/03/16/googles-new-nest-hub-is-the-sleep-tracker-i-want/
Late in 2019 two Theo Priestly and Bronwyn Williams brought together 18 futurists to share visions of tomorrow. I'm super-pumped to have a chapter in the book on our need for an AR cloud commons, and it's coming out in about a month.
(Can't wait!)
Now that book is available for pre-order. In this episode of TechFirst we chat with a number of those futurists and get some sneak peeks at what's coming. Plus, of course, chat with the editors: Theo and Bronwyn. In this podcast, beside those editors and me:
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Kristina Libby
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Nikolas Badminton
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Andrew Vorster
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Doug Vining
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Duena Blomstrom
Note: I don't make any money if you buy the book :-)
Episode links:
The book: https://www.amazon.com/Future-Starts-Now-Insights-Technology-ebook/dp/B08HWHV62G/
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
What is the future of technology? Mobile is the thing right now, but augmented/mixed/virtual reality via headsets and smartglasses is coming
But what about moving the tech right onto our body ... on our eyes ... with a smart contact lens.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with former Google and Apple exec, now SVP for Mojo Vision, Steve Sinclair about smart contact lenses.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Social audio is having a moment. We're seeing an explosion of players in the space: up to 30 at analyst and thought leader Jeremiah Owyang's last count.
And that's just the beginning. We'll see an explosion of hundreds of apps in social audio shortly, says Owyang.
I caught up with Jeremiah recently to chat about social audio: why it's hot, what's happening, what's driving this trend, who the key players are, why it's here to stay, and what innovation this new sector will give birth to.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Jeremiah Owyang: https://web-strategist.com/blog/
Do self-driving cars need LIDAR? Elon Musk says no, but most other experts say yes. And we’re going to talk to one of them today
Omer Keilaf, founder and CEO, Innoviz, who supplies lidar for BMW and other manufacturers, says LIDAR is essential, because water or mud or dust can disrupt visual sensors.
And, of course, all this is happening in an era when LIDAR is getting so cheap we can have it in our phones. Right now it's at $1000 for automotive uses; that's coming down to $100 or even less.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Would you let a robot make you prettier? The LUUM lash extension robot could soon do all kind of spa treatments ... and even do hair transplants. We have robot surgery, robot manufacturing … so why not robot aestheticians? Or … lash artists?
I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but getting fake lashes takes 2-3 hours. A new robot can do it in just 30 minutes ... snd could eventually do everything from makeup to hair transplants.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Philippe Sanchez, CEO of LUUM, and we watch his robot apply fake lashes to a client.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
In this episode of TechFirst we chat with Google director of engineering Ivan Poupyrev. He's making the world smart, starting with clothing (we buy 150 billion items of clothing a year, according to one estimate) released with Google's Jacquard technology.
That's going to help us all move beyond screens and make technology ambient in our lives, not central, he believes.
But the vision extends beyond clothing to every object in our worlds. Join this chat to see what Poupyrev is working on, and how he sees the world in 10 years.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Google Jacquard: https://atap.google.com/jacquard/
Digital security sucks, and it’s about to get much worse. The question is: can quantum computing save us?
In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Quantropi CEO James Nguyen, who has built the world's first non-photonic quantum key distribution over the Internet. He says that quantum computing is the next foundation of computing, period. And functioning, fast cryptography will open up our ability to use it, just like the internet unlocked PCs in the 90s.
At stake? $100 trillion in annual commerce. Global national security. Safety in internet of things devices. Medical privacy. And much, much, more.
Episode links:
TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
A new startup out of Harvard Labs has invented a way to print camera lenses 5,000 at a time just like computer chips, and in the same semiconductor foundries that make our computer’s CPUs. They’re 100X thinner than standard smartphone camera lenses, are simpler and cheaper to make, sense the full electromagnetic spectrum — not just visible light — and have excellent 3D-sensing capabilities that could bring Lidar-based dimensional sensing functionality that’s currently only on high-end phones like the iPhone 12 to smartphones across the price spectrum.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Metalenz co-founder Rob Devlin.
Could you learn trigonometry in 3 weeks if your life depended on it?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Josh Carroll, who volunteered with the US Army after 9/11 before he finished high school, did 3 tours of duty in Afghanistan, then came back and worked, among other jobs, as a high school janitor.
In the library of the high school he was cleaning he found A Brief History of Time, by Dr. Stephen Hawking, and rediscovered his love of science. Then he taught himself advanced math via YouTube on his path to becoming a physicist ...
Want more?
Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
Watch the video on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Biden’s Peloton vs national security: what’s risky about the president of the US using a Peloton or a Fitbit? And ... what does that mean for the rest of us?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with ex-googler Ben Barokas, founder and CEO of Sourcepoint, who is now running a privacy-focused company for, as he puts it "the sins" of his prior jobs in adtech.
Can forests be banks?
A new venture capital group is buying forests and wetlands. But they’re not cutting down the trees or starting farms ... they’re monetizing nature by selling carbon offsets, and looking to see increased value in the underlying assets.
The goal for land owners? The ability to do nothing while making money. In other words, NOT cutting down the trees, NOT putting in a mine, NOT draining the wetlands. The goal for businesses and people? The ability to buy carbon offsets ... and invest in the bank of nature.
Full transcript coming at:
https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Imagine a "rocket" that only uses electricity.
Have a ragtag group of physicists and engineers exploited a little-known feature of Einstein's equations to built a true propellant-less space drive that doesn't require reaction mass ... just electricity?
James Woodward, physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, thinks so. NASA has funded new research into it, and the result if successful would be the ultimate EV ... an electric vehicle that not only can propel a space ship to the planets and the stars, but also lift off out of gravity wells like Earth's.
PewDiePie is the top creator on YouTube, with over 107M subscribers and 26B views. Now he’s coming to Facebook, and we’re chatting with the cofounder of the company making it happen.
Jellysmack is an influencer platform whose creators have a combined 10 billion monthly video views and reaches 125M unique viewers just in the United States. Co-founder Michael Philippe chats with us about bringing PewDiePie to the platform: why, how, what content, what's changing, what's not, and who he thinks PewDiePie's fans will be on Facebook.
We also chat about the changing media/creator/influencer landscape, and what this is growing into.
We’re in a crazy, complex, almost alternate reality now. We see hacking from nation-states, hacking from criminals, hacking for fun, hacking for profit ... and there's probably worse that we don't see.
In that context, how does a Chief Information Security Officer function? We chat with Twitter's CISO Rinki Sethi and Info-Tech Research Group analyst Frank Sargent about information security in 2021.
Topics:
- Russia
- SolarWinds Orion and Supernova hacks
- Big tech
- Social engineering
- US elections
Most importantly, we talk about the stakes if we don't get this right ... to our power systems, to our government processes, to our military secrets, and to the companies that run the infrastructure that our lives depend on.
Intel's Loihi chip is a neuromorphic chip which tries to emulate the human brain. As far as we've come with convention computing, we are still way behind tiny organisms like insects and birds at understanding the world and adapting to it.
Now Intel is applying neuromorphic computing to autonomous drones: drones that can fly themselves at high speed in challenging, obstacle-filled environments. To do, essentially, what birds and bats and even tiny-brained insects can already do with ease. How? Partially, thanks to the Loihi chip, which implements probabilistic computing to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in in the natural world.
We chat with Mike Davies, who leads Intel's neuromorphic computing lab about how it all works ...
Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
My guest works at Intel: https://www.intel.com/
And you can watch the full video on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/c89S-oV-H1U
The internet of things sounds great, but has huge issues. Ubiquity is one. Battery power is another. Cost of sensors -- and sensing tech to sense the sensors -- is another.
But perhaps ... we're about to solve all the problems.
Wiliot makes a super-smart ARM-based chip with onboard sensors that harvests energy from environmental radio waves to enable battery-free IoT. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Stephen Statler, a senior VP at Wiliot.
The chip uses a custom-built operating system operating on nanowatt power and communicates to the cloud via standard Bluetooth. Cost looks to be an order of magnitude cheaper than RFiD.
We chat about what it can sense, how it works, what the use cases are, and much more.
Links:
- transcript: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
- Wiliot: https://www.wiliot.com/
- Stephen Statler's podcast, Mr Beacon: https://www.mister-beacon.com
Think about it: AI chooses your next song in Spotify, your next video in YouTube, your next news item in Flipboard, which updates from friends and family you see on Facebook, and more.
Recently I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion between three AI experts: Danny Lange, who led AI at Uber and Amazon before jumping to Unity; Beena Ammanath, Executive Director of Deloitte AI Institute and Founder of Humans for AI; Cindy Gordon, CEO of SalesChoice and a writer at Forbes.
We chatted about:
- How much impact AI has today
- Surveillance capitalism
- Reality bubbles
- Inclusion and normalization of bias
- Deepfakes and identifying what is real
- Building responsible AI
Please enjoy … along with a new intro style and new intro music!
What changes when quantum computing is mainstream?
Quantum computing is on the far reaches of science, using technology that accesses aspects of matter at quantum scales where physics almost overlaps with magic.
Classical computing is simple: deterministic. You have something, or you have nothing. Quantum computing is complex: you can have something, or nothing, or both something and nothing at the same time. If that’s hard to wrap your head around, you’re in good company. Even Richard Feyman, 1965 Nobel Laureate in Physics and one of the founders of quantum computing famously said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”
But we’re seeing major advancements in quantum computing today. You can now write a program and deploy it on quantum computers from anywhere. And D-Wave says that it's doubling qubits every 2 years.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Alan Baratz, president and CEO of D-Wave.
There’s a brand-new sensor in the iPhone 12 Pro, and it’s a big clue about the future of technology.
Already just 1 month after iPhone 12 launch, the phone accounts for 5% of new uploads to Sketchfab, the largest global platform for immersive and interactive 3D models. It's much faster, high-quality especially at room-scale, but not the best at small-scale objects.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Alban Denoyal, the CEO of Sketchfab about why.
And about the implications of 3D scanning: where it's used, what it can do, and what it's changing in augmented reality, mixed reality, VR, and more.
I've always wanted a Star Trek tricorder ... a mobile sensor unit that tells you all about the world around you. (Who doesn't?) Now a company in Germany, Trinamix, has partnered with Qualcomm to deliver mobile spectroscopy in mobile phones.
No attachments required. All onboard your smartphone.
The first applications are in skin care and cosmetics, but the tech can also sense what is on your plate to help you record your diet, or tell you the composition of just about anything around you.
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Dr. Wilfried Hermes, the director of IR sensing for Trinamix.
Do deepfakes foreshadow the fall of civilization and the end of all truth? Or are they just good fun?
Or is there a third possibility: that they're the foundation of a massive new opportunity to experience what could never be real (for most of us) and a massive new opportunity (for influencers and stars) to essentially become a merger of real person and synthetic being in millions of ways in dozens of languages for billions of people ... simultaneously.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Dima Shvets, one of the cofounders of Reface.ai, the viral app with almost 70 million installs.
We kick off with the app growth story. We move into the deepfake controversy. And we end with Dima's vision of the future: a merge of real and synthetic beings for brands, stars, and influencers.
Video: https://youtu.be/WwB8iHrHPGY
Transcript: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Are robot chefs the future of food? We chat with Buck Jordan, the cofounder of Miso Robotics, which makes Flippy … the robot that cooks.
We talk about the future of robots in restaurant kitchens, whether this is killing jobs or not, what's available now and what's coming next. We also chat about home kitchens: whether we'll get robots to cook all our food in our homes ... and when that might be affordable.
Buck's project: that's about 10 years away.
Did you know your computer transmits a log of every single app you open? Apple has made privacy a core part of the brand -- including entire TV commercials dedicated to it -- but as a self-described hacker and security researcher recently found, every Mac sends a stream of data about every app you open (and more) to Apple.
And ... sends it unencrypted. And … bypasses any local VPN software you’ve installed.
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we're chatting with Jeffrey Paul, the hacker who found and wrote about the problem. We chat with him about why Apple did this, who else could see the data, what Apple's changing, and what this means for the future of computers.
(Hint: it's not great.)
Former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold spent 18 months building a custom 100MP camera to take pictures of snowflakes. We chat with him about why :-) and how, which includes equipment from Japan and Canada and trips to Alaska and Yellowknife and Timmons, Ontario.
Myhrvold also chats about what drives him to continue inventing and learning.
He's a polymath, and while best known for being the CTO of Microsoft, he's the founder of Intellectual Ventures, has more than 850 patents to his name, and has written 1000s of pages of recipes for his cookbook series … published peer-reviewed research on planetary science plus written about paleontology … climate science … and worked with Stephen Hawking on quantum theories of gravitation.
We also learn about Nathan Myrvold's latest project: a massive high-resolution picture of the Milky Way galaxy.
In the future, most work might be done by robots, but right now, most is done by humans. How do we manage the transition? And, what does a humans + robots economy look like?
In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Lior Elazary, CEO of inVia Robotics.
Questions we discuss:
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What is robotics as a service (RaaS)?
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How can you ultimately get the best contributions out of what humans can do and what robots can provide?
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What kinds of productivity gains are you seeing from robots?
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What size of warehouse works best?
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Does this change how big warehouses need to be?
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What are we learning now about the future of automation?
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How do you see the world of work in 10-20 years?
Is AI, robotics, and … verticality … about to change farming as we know it? In this episode of TechFirst we chat with Nate Storey, the cofounder and chief science officer of Plenty.
Plenty grows food vertically, indoors, anywhere on the planet. A 2-acre Plenty farm produces as much food as a 750-acre traditional "flat farm." We chat about how Plenty uses AI and robotics to increase yield, what crops Plenty offers and will offer, and the company's plans for expansion.
In an era of massive budgets, invasive ads, buy now subscription models, and incessant noise, can the good guys still win?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat about Insight Timer. You’ve never heard of Insight Timer, but it’s ranked higher than TikTok, Facebook, Netflix, and Twitter for session durations, it has 5X the retention of better-known competitors like Calm, and it has 17M users.
All of which it achieve while spending $0 on marketing. And abiding by a "no selling" policy.
To learn how Insight Timer is changing the world one stressed person at a time, we’re chatting with CEO and cofounder Christopher Plowman.
An alleged YouTube bug has retroactively taken thousands of dollars in revenue away from YouTube creators. YouTube, however, has neither acknowledged the problem nor provide details to YouTubers who rely on the platform for income.
“There are people who can’t feed their families and pay their bills ... one girl I have been talking to ... had a breakdown,” Randy Lynch, who runs the Mid-South Slots YouTube channel, told me via Messenger. “[YouTube] admitted it was a bug, then backtracked, blamed us, and shut down all communication with us eight days ago.”
The 2020 US presidential election is insane and, frankly, proves that current election “tech” is trash. Days later we still don’t know who won for sure, and there’s plenty of allegations of fraud or miscounts, plus plenty of legal challenges already.
Can digital voting fix that? Can blockchain help?
To dig in we’re chatting with Tim Goggin, CEO of Horizon State. Horizon says they offer “fair, transparently verifiable, and ultra-secure voting” via blockchain technologies.
Is space the future of IoT? Australia-based Myriota has the world’s first low power, ultra-low cost global internet of things solution from space.
In this episode of TechFirst, we're chatting with VP of Engineering Steve Winnall about the company's 20-pound suitcase-sized satellites and its ground-based IoT modules, which cost on the order of hundreds of dollars.
The company's modules are used for wind farms, good-old-fashioned food farms, ships in the ocean ... and even rhinos in Africa.
A ad fraud scheme dubbed Matryoshka is preferentially targeting U.S. swing states in a reportedly Russian-owned mobile app that has historically been linked with white supremacism content, according to an ad fraud vendor.
Matryoshka, of course, are nesting Russian dolls.
The theft is of both advertisers’ dollars and users’ private data, mostly in the United States. Data that the Matryoshka fraud scheme targets is location data including longitude and latitude, device identifier data, and IP address, which can connect you to a specific neighborhood or even exact location. And while key U.S. swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin account for less than 10% of the activity in the affected app, they make up 35% of the attacks.
Could rural Montana be the next Silicon Valley? Check internet speed off your list of reasons why not.
Even though Elon Musk’s SpaceX says its expanded “Better Than Nothing” test is still a beta version of Starlink’s eventual capabilities, at least one early Starlink internet service customer says he is getting better than expected speed. Starlink says it should give you between “50 and 150 MB/s with 20-40 milliseconds of latency.” Starlink customer “FourthEchelon19” is getting 161 megabits/second download and 23 megabits/second upload speed.
In rural Montana.
Smartphone shipments dropped just 1.3% in Q3 according to a report from IDC, hitting 353.6 million: more than expected given the Covid-19 pandemic. Samsung was the largest smartphone manufacturer with shipment of 80.4 million phones.
The biggest winner, however, was Xiaomi with a massive 42% growth.
But its quick acceleration might be at risk.
Apple’s beta software program provides pre-release software for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, and Apple TV before broad public releases to everyone. It’s for greedy, impatient people like me who want new functionality before anyone else, and and are willing to put up with a few bugs here and there.
Right now there’s a lot of “here and there” going on.
For the last few days, Apple’s beta software program has been notifying my iPhone that there’s a new update for iOS 14. But there actually is no such update ...
File this one in the didn’t-expect-that department.
TikTok parent company ByteDance has launched a smart desk lamp for school kids in China. The Dali Smart Work Lamp is intended to provide a “better experience for children” doing homework with better illumination ... and constant surveillance.
(The “constant surveillance” part is not in the press release.)
The Forbes story for this episode is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/29/tiktok-owner-bytedance-selling-smart-lamp-with-camera-for-school-kids/
Imagine being able to get a driver's license, pay your taxes, get a fishing license all online. And: anything you want to do with your government, you can do online.
That's what the state of Oklahoma is currently doing. I chat with Matt Pinnell, OK's lieutenant governor, about how.
Can AI combine data from hundreds or thousands of smartphones simultaneously to make great videos?
IMINT algorithms are in 100s of millions of devices globally from smartphone manufacturers like Huawei, Vivo, Opportunity, Sharp, Motorola, Asus, and more. Now the company is working on a collaborative video system that will auto-create movies from the best clips of hundreds or even thousands of people.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we're chatting with Johan Svensson, CTO of IMINT
It’s the ultimate Covid product: fast, low-latency internet anywhere on the planet for just $99 per month, plus a $500 up-front payment to get the connection kit.
As long as you’re OK with occasional blackouts.
Elon Musk's Starlink is finally soft-launching in an extended public beta.
See the story on Forbes here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/27/starlinks-internet-anywhere-via-spacex-satellite-99month/
Facebook is launching a cloud gaming service to compete with Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Nvidia, Stream, and all the other cloud gaming services.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with head of Facebook Gaming Vivek Sharma about what makes Facebook's cloud gaming service unique and, in his opinion, better than other options.
Apple’s iOS 14 is probably the most privacy-safe mobile operating system on the planet. But a major part of the planned functionality was delayed until 2021. At the time, Apple said the reason was that mobile developers weren’t ready yet.
As it turns out, that might not be true.
And Apple has now admitted that its own advertising attribution software has two major bugs.
The Forbes story for this episode is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/24/apples-privacy-safe-mobile-attribution-solution-is-buggy-core-functions-missing-from-skadnetwork/
Apple has extended Apple TV+ for free for three more months for customers who bought an Apple product and received their first year free. The good thing is: now there’s actually content worth watching on the service.
“We’re giving you extra time to discover the latest Apple Originals and catch up on shows returning for a second season,” my email from Apple says. “You don’t have to do anything — just keep watching for free until February 2021.”
I watched almost nothing on Apple TV in the first few months of free service. But that changed recently ...
The Forbes story for this is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/23/apple-extends-free-apple-tv-3-more-months-and-now-theres-actually-stuff-to-watch/
This week the U.S. government filed suit against Google. Smart move, or just politics? And, which member of big tech -- Amazon, Facebook, Apple -- is next?
Google is a behemoth. It owns search in English and many other languages and, with Facebook, dominates digital advertising. But is it a monopoly? And should the government have filed antitrust charges?
To dive into the story, we’re chatting with Greg Sterling, VP of insights at Uberall. He's a former lawyer and journalist.
Raising $1.75 billion wasn’t enough to make Quibi a success. Nor was a massive spend on advertising.
The short-form video startup had a short six-month lifespan during which it spent at least $63 million on TV, web, and print ads, according to ad intelligence firm MediaRadar. While that’s a significant amount of money on marketing, it’s only good for fifth place in the streaming video category behind four other players: Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock.
So what did cause its ultimate failure?
58% of global e-commerce is concentrated in just six companies. And just four Chinese companies account for almost half of global digital sales.
Global e-commerce reached $3.4 trillion last year, according to a new report from Activate Consulting. Thousands of brands and retailers divvy up just 37% share of that, while six giants who are mostly Chinese companies vacuum up more than half of the pie.
The Forbes story for this episode is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/21/44-of-global-ecommerce-is-owned-by-4-chinese-companies/
Cinnamon is a new video platform with a couple of unique features.
First, you get paid for videos you upload. Second, it happens without ads. And third, it plans to bridge the gap between creators and viewers with a technology called Shorts that makes creators out of consumers.
To get the scoop, we’re chatting with the CEO, Róbert Tarabčák.
Apple is removing a browser app from the App Store that allows people to play Stadia, Google’s streaming game service, according to the developer.
“My app is being removed from the App Store,” Zachary Knox tweeted today about his Stadium Full Screen Browser app. “I was ‘extending WebKit’ by hooking it into the native GameController framework and thus Bluetooth controllers, which they didn’t like.”
The full story for this episode is on Forbes here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/19/apple-booting-browser-app-that-enables-google-stadia-streaming-games-developer-says/
Can the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool clean your air from smoke and soot?
That’s what I have been testing for parts of the past few months during the western fires that hit California, Oregon, and Washington State. They’ve been banished from the news cycle thanks to the impending election, but the fires this summer were devastating, horrific, and massive.
When you can’t breathe safely, few other things in life matter.
The Forbes story for this podcast episode is here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/18/dyson-hotcool-cleaned-70-of-smoke-particles-from-my-air-during-the-fires-in-california-oregon-washington/
Should social media censor free speech?
Something fairly unprecedented happened this past week: Facebook and Twitter both blocked a NY Post story.
Now … whatever you think about that story (and I think it’s pretty flimsy) blocking it almost immediately is pretty shocking. How should social media deal with controversial subjects … or false information?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of the open source social network Minds.com, about what big tech and big social should do, about algorithms, shadow banning, free speech, virality, and what Ottman is doing with Minds.com to fix it.
Do we now have near real-time gene sequencing? And if so … what does that unlock?
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Dr Roel Wuyts, principal scientist at IMEC and a professor at KU Leuven about gene sequencing, which used to take a lot of time.
Remember the Human Genome project? It started October 1, 1990 and completed in April 2003.
Now there’s a way of sequencing a whole genome in just 10 minutes for some sequences and a few hours for a whole human genome, which should unlock major new capabilities like personalized medicine and smarter treatment of currently deadly diseases.
Full transcript will go here:
https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes story will go here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
You might think the iPhone 12 starts at one dollar under $800. You might even have a distinct memory of seeing a price that looked suspiciously like $799 during the Apple special event yesterday.
And you’d be right on one of those two beliefs. (The latter.)
This story is live on Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/14/no-the-iphone-12-doesnt-actually-cost-799/
We watched almost 7.5 billion hours of live streaming content in the last three months, up 92% from last year. Amazingly, just one company owns a massive 91.1% share of all the hours streamed: the Amazon-owned Twitch.
So Twitch is definitely the 900-pound gorilla of the live-streaming category.
Or it is it?
This story is published on Forbes here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/07/livestreaming-youtube-facebook-destroy-twitch-in-at-least-one-critical-category/
Could Apple and Google soon be two of the most important companies in health? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with former Apple CEO John Sculley, who has invested in multiple health tech companies.
Apple owns the most popular healthtech wearable on the planet, and Google bought Fitbit to compete. Both are investing in health, fitness, and wellness technology. Current Apple CEO Tim Cook has even said that Apple’s greatest contribution to history will be in the field of health. Amazon's jumping into health too, with Amazon Halo.
We talk about who will win, who are the other players, and what Sculley sees as the future of health care in the U.S. and globally.
In the stone ages of mobile a couple of years ago, you actually had to tap on an app icon and open an app in order to access its functionality. While backwards, onerous, and tedious, this ensured that if I was ordering Air Jordans from Shoe Giant #1 or a Big Mac from Ronald McDonald, I would have at least a couple of interactions with the Nike brand or McDonalds.
Now, now so much.
This story is live at Forbes here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/08/developers-google-siri-alexa-are-an-abstraction-layer-over-your-apps/
Drone deliveries won’t be common until we figure out distributed charging. But maybe … we already have ...
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Leonid Plekhanov from Global Energy Transmission (GET). GET has a last-mile in-air fast charging solution for drones (and another for undersea drones).
Amazon’s been touting drone delivery for years. And this summer, Domino’s delivered a pizza to a customer on the beach via drone. But really, no-one's doing this at scale. With the ability to charge your drones wherever they go, the much-needed last-mile solution might now be here.
Full transcript will be here:
https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
Forbes story will be here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Is the future of robotics in the cloud? In this episode of TechFirst we're chatting with and Amazon exec, AWS Robotics general manager Roger Barga, about how Amazon’s “fake” robots are making real robots smarter, faster.
We’re seeing more and more robots in manufacturing, services, hospitality, and almost every other industry ... but there are still huge gaps in software to run and manage and coordinate all our robots and drones. Amazon's reducing the cost to train, test and deploy robots by a factor of perhaps 1,000 thanks to AWS RoboMaker and WorldForge.
We chat about companies like iRobot that are vastly improving their robots, the future of robotics in both the near and far term, and how Amazon 'eats its own dog food' by using AWS RoboMaker to train and deploy robots in its own warehouses.
Health and fitness apps are winning the Covid-19 era, thanks to closed gyms. But a certain kind of health and fitness app is winning mobile, according to a new report from Apptopia.
“Six out of ten of the top Health & Fitness apps are apps that offer video workouts or video-guided exercises,” Apptopia says. “If non-workout apps like Calm, Headspace, and Flo were not included here, the ratio of video to non-video fitness apps would be even greater.”
This story is currently live at Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/05/the-top-10-health--fitness-apps-of-2020-have-one-thing-in-common-mostly/
Can you share personal photos online … without sharing your face with the giant global database that is the internet? And, can you share photos of crowds of people, or demonstrations, without subjecting everyone in those photos to AI-driven searches and privacy violations?
Brighter AI thinks they have a solution, and in this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the CEO, Marian Glaeser. Essentially, his technology replaces every face with an AI-generated substitute to ensure you can share your pictures in a privacy-safe way.
What becomes a question, however, is how real your photos are now ...
Are 50 million YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch creators the new founders? And … are they far more numerous and economically important than we think?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Yuanling Yuan (AKA YY), a senior associate at SignalFire. She recently did a massive study of the creator economy, finding that of the more than 50 million “creators” in the world on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok, two million of them are professionals, earning a full-time living.
And that number is growing fast.
Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/
YY on Twitter: https://twitter.com/YuanlingY
SignalFire: https://www.signalfire.com
There’s now a Google TV as well as an Apple TV. A new Chromecast. Google Home is now Nest Audio, and there are now new Google Pixel smartphones.
Google released not quite a googolplex of new consumer hardware and software services today in its “Launch Night In” event. Here’s a rundown ...
My post on Forbes, with pictures: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/30/everything-google-announced-including-pixel-4a-5g-pixel-5-google-tv-chromecast-nest-audio/
Imagine the perfect custom talk radio station tailored exactly to your unique likes, with a never-ending flow of great content.
That’s exactly what Apple could soon be delivering with its recent podcasting acquisition, Scout FM. Because that’s precisely what Apple has achieved already — in the music sense — with its new personalized music stations in iOS 14.
Get the story in my Forbes column here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/25/heres-how-apple-could-use-new-podcasting-acquisition-scout-fm/
And, if you'd like to ping me (check the last 30 seconds of the podcast), here I am on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
I was not a fan of App Clips when Apple announced them for iOS 14.
And wow ... was I wrong.
This story is also available in my Forbes column here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/28/apples-ios-14-app-clips-seemed-stupid-theyre-awesome/
And, usually, transcripts show up on my personal site here:
https://johnkoetsier.com
I happened to see my wife’s screen time analytics on her phone recently. She’s spending an average of over seven hours a day on her phone.
And she’s not alone.
Apparently, I'm not too far behind, when you add in time from other screen, watching sports and a few TV shows.
Full story:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/26/global-online-content-consumption-doubled-in-2020/
Amazon's new flying home security drone does not have lasers. Nor can you mount a gun on it, much to the dismay of many, apparently.
But will you buy it?
To chat about the Ring Always Home Cam and Amazon’s other announcements we have repeat guest Brian Jackson, who is an analyst, researcher, and consultant with the Info-Tech Research Group.
A week ago Facebook announced it was working with Ray-Ban on a multi-year deal to build and ship smartglasses. Mark Zuckerberg says they’re “the next step on the road to augmented reality glasses.”
So why does Irena Cronin say they fail?
She is the CEO of Infinite Retina, an xR consultancy, and a co-author of "The Infinite Retina: Spatial Computing, Augmented Reality, and how a collision of new technologies are bringing about the next tech revolution."
We chat about Facebook's smartglasses, Project Aria, North (which Google acquired), Snap and its Spectacles, and Apple's coming smartglasses product.
Want to work at Tesla? Apple? Reddit? Netflix? You’re not alone.
Most people want to work for a company that is doing amazing work in the forefront of their field. And while we typically think of a brand as something that is relevant to customers and buyers, it’s also critically important to companies that are looking to hire the best available talent.
So Hired surveyed 4,100 tech professionals about the companies they most want to work for ... and I chat with two tech execs about the results.
In this episode of TechFirst, we'll chat with Vanessa Camones, a brand and communications expert and CEO at AnyContext. and Suzie Weitzman, former comms at Apple, now a senior VP at eBay.
Get the full story in my post at Forbes:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/22/the-top-40-brands-people-want-to-work-for-in-the-tech-industry/
And ... here's the lists, if you're interested:
Here are the top 20 public companies people want to work for in the tech industry, along with their ranking in Hired’s “brand positivity index.”
- Netflix: 86
- GitHub: 85
- Google: 84
- Slack: 81
- Microsoft: 78
- Apple: 77
- Tesla: 74
- Twitter: 73
- LinkedIn: 72
- Dropbox: 69
- Square: 65
- Amazon: 64
- Shopify: 63
- Adobe: 62
- Facebook: 60
- Lyft: 57
- Walt Disney: 57
- BBC: 52
- Salesforce: 50
- New York Times: 48
And here are the top 20 private companies in the tech industry that people want to work for:
- SpaceX: 75
- Gitlab: 72
- Airbnb: 69
- Stripe: 66
- Hulu: 64
- Reddit: 62
- Kickstarter: 57
- Robinhood: 54
- Bloomberg: 50
- Jet Propulsion Lab: 50
- Coinbase: 49
- Quora: 48
- Instacart: 47
- Squarespace: 47
- Indeed: 46
- Hyperloop One: 42
- PBS: 41
- Whole Foods: 41
- NPR: 40
- Sigma: 36
This is episode 100! Thank you so much for subscribing to TechFirst. I very much appreciate it.
In a year we've taken this podcast to a top-100 podcast in the tech category in the U.S., and much higher in some other countries (#4 in Austria!) :-)
That's because of you, and what you've done. Thank you!
I've decided to celebrate by doing a 100th-episode giveaway ... check the details in the podcast. And, let's connect wherever you're online:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnkoetsier/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnkoetsier
iOS 14 is a game-changer in more than a few ones. One of them is definitely privacy.
I've been writing a lot about privacy, Apple, and what Apple's been doing with the IDFA (identifier for advertisers), so I was invited to speak at the Mobile Growth Summit about it. Here we talk about what's changing, why, what the implications are, and what Google will do as a result.
What I chat about:
- Why Apple made the change
- What's dangerous about IDFAs
- What motives might be behind Apple's decision besides privacy
- Apple's IDFA policy and how it potentially conflicts with GDPR, CCPA (California's privacy law), and other privacy statutes
- Why Apple delayed full implementation until 2021
- How Facebook influence those decisions
- Where Google might go with GAID
- And ... what the long-term impact to mobile and advertising is likely to be
Is iOS 14 fundamentally changing what kinds of apps can be successful? And … with iOS 14 … is Apple building a fundamentally different future for software?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Nick Hobbs, the former head of Google’s iOS app. Hobbs says that iOS 14 is fundamentally different and that it will benefit certain kinds of apps while de-prioritizing others.
We chat about when Google's traffic from iOS massively dropped, and what will happen this time with games, Facebook, Google, and more. And, of course, we also chat about The Social Dilemma.
Literally five minutes ago I updated to the new version of Safari, version 14. Then I browsed Forbes, hit up Techmeme, checked Twitter briefly, went to Fox News (first time, I think), clicked over to Slashdot, and finally read a story on ZDNet. Oh, and I checked for a picture for this story on Unsplash.
In that five minutes, Safari prevented 90 trackers from profiling me.
Let me repeat that. Five minutes, 90 trackers.
Read this story in my Forbes column: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/
Could smart contact lenses grant millions the gift of sight?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier with chat with Andrés Vásquez Quintero, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, where researchers have just presented an artificial iris embedded in a smart contact lens.
It has an artificial iris, an all-day battery, an on-board ASIC, or application-specific integrated circuit, and a very small LCD screen. And it can do very basic augmented reality for people with limited vision.
PLEASE NOTE: the wifi at Ghent was not great, so Andres' audio and video is pretty sketchy.
As always, full transcripts will be available at: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/
I used to think that Apple Music was an enormous treasure chest filled with amazing things that you could never really get out.
And I used to think that Spotify’s biggest advantage over Apple Music was not its free tier, but its user experience and playlists.
Not any more.
Consumer Report says extensive testing on Tesla’s “full self-driving” capability shows that it falls short of its name, isn’t worth the $8,000 price tag, and actually makes Tesla drivers less safe.
“Tesla has repeatedly rolled out crude beta features, some of which can put people’s safety at risk and shouldn’t be used anywhere but on a private test track or proving ground,” says William Wallace, manager of safety policy for Consumer Reports.
Get the full details in this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier ...
Also, see my written column at Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/08/4-ways-tesla-self-driving-falls-short-in-consumer-reports-testing/
It’s been a little challenging to get fitness equipment lately, hasn’t it?
Scammers have noticed too.
That’s why there’s been a proliferation of scammy-looking fitness product ads on Facebook lately. I’ve personally seen literally dozens of ads for fake Bowflex products, often from “stores” with unpronounceable names and obscure but extremely similar websites.
So I bought some fake Bowflex weight from a fake store. And here's what happened ...
When you generate economic activity on an iPhone, Apple wants a piece.
That’s not changing in the new App Store review guidelines Apple released this morning. What is changing is that Apple cracked open the door to off-platform purchases.
The question will be whether that applies to everyone, or only smaller developers.
Apple and Epic, makers of the hit game Fortnite, have been locked in a battle over payments. Epic wants all the revenue when players purchase an upgrade or enhancement in its game; Apple wants a 15-30% cut on purchases and subscriptions. After they could not come to terms, Apple removed Fortnite from the App Store, as did Google from the Android equivalent, Google Play.
While the matter is now before the courts, Apple updated the rules that govern the App Store this morning.
How do you automate risk 8 billion times a year? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Anjali Dewan, American Express’ VP of Risk Management.
Credit card companies have some serious challenges ... with trillions of dollars in transaction volume, they’re target #1 for fraud. But customers expect everything to work perfectly every time.
So American Express started managing every single risk decision on risk using AI in 2015, which makes them much faster. They can now make billions of decisions in nanoseconds, using what might be the largest commercial machine learning system on the planet (probably excluding Google and Facebook)
We talk a lot about self-driving cars. But what about autonomous robots, doing work that isn’t safe for people? We’re talking environments like mines a mile deep … nuclear reactors … remote locations.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're chatting with Nader Elm, CEO of Exyn Technologies. Exyn is building robots that have to think for themselves and communicate with each other where they don't have GPS or radio communication. Exyn just signed a deal with a Finnish mining to provide drones for autonomous mapping and exploration.
TransPod, a four-year-old company with roots in Canada and France has signed a memorandum of understanding with the government of Alberta to study the feasibility of linking the provinces two major cities, Edmonton and Calgary, by a hyperloop-like system.
Top speed would be over 1,000 kilometers/hour, or about 620 miles/hour, and the Hyperloop would be an above-ground enclosed tube.
Since Edmonton and Calgary are just under 200 miles apart, travel time would be about half an hour.
Are smartwatches becoming table stakes for modern health? Chatting with Fitbit's VP of product, Larry Yang, about the new Fitbit Sense.
Arguably the first smartwatch was invented in 1927 ... you could buy little map scrolls and find your way around. The first digital watch came out in 1972 … calculator watches in the 1980s … and fitness trackers on your wrist launched in the early 2010s … including Fitbit.
Apple Watch launched 2015, and now about 1 in 4 wear a smartwatch and/or a fitness tracker. Now Fitbit is launching the Fitbit Sense … which is widely viewed as a full-on assault on the Apple Watch.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we dive into health and smartwatches and get the story behind the Fitbit Sense ...
The safest country in the world for COVID-19 is now Germany, according to a recently released ranking. Germany is followed closely by New Zealand and South Korea. Switzerland, which was first, has dropped back to fourth. Japan is fifth, and Australia and China are sixth and seventh.
The United States now ranks number 55, still behind Hungary, Vietnam, China, Malaysia, and Bulgaria.
The most dangerous nations?
Somaliland, South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Mali.
Get the full ranking in my story at Forbes ...
The history of advertising recently has been one of identity ... specifically, knowing identity across sites and apps.
That’s changing: the third-party cookie is dying, Apple’s identifier for advertisers is going opt-in, and Google's GAID might as well. What does that mean for the future of advertising? And … what does it mean for the ad-supported services we’ve all come to enjoy?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Sheri Bachstein, Global Head of Watson Advertising and The Weather Company.
Covid-19 was the 'digital accelerant of the decade,' pushing brands' digitization strategies up an average of 6 years. In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're chatting with Twilio chief customer officer Glenn Weinstein about a major report Twilio put together on digital transformation.
COVID-19 is clearly a medical and economic disaster, but it also vastly accelerated technological change and changed how companies think about the tech that drives their business. In this discussion we chat about who's winning and who's losing in the fight to stay relevant as customer behavior changes massively.
In iOS 14, Apple is making the IDFA opt-in. Is this a privacy power move or a cash grab?
The IDFA is a device identifier that advertisers use to know who's engaging with their ads. It also helps ad networks target ads. In previous version of iOS, the IDFA has been default on, but users can turn it off. In iOS 14, keeping the IDFA on now means that each app must ask individually for permission to use the IDFA.
That's probably good for privacy, but it's tough on marketers and advertisers.
The question is: is Apple doing this primarily to increase privacy, or because what's bad for advertising might be good for in-app purchases and subscriptions ... which Apple takes a 30% cut from?
We chat with Abhay Singhal and Sergio Serra from InMobi, an ad network, about their perspective.
Late last week Amazon announced Halo, an AI-powered health service. In doing so it beat Apple to exactly what Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly told us the company was focusing on over 18 months ago.
Oh, and Amazon wants your underwear selfies.
Plus, recordings of everything you say.
Today Elon Musk unveiled more about his mysterious brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink, showcasing a pig named Gertrude with a “Link” installed and sharing that Neuralink has received a “Breakthrough Device” designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One of the abilities he teased was being able to summon your self-driving car — a Tesla, of course — with a thought.
But Musk’s ambitions extend much farther.
And his Link isn’t intended just for early adopters, niche technophiliacs, or bleeding-edge cyborg wannabes. Rather, Musk intends this device for almost everyone.
How do you build 10X products and 10X startups with the potential for exponential growth? In this special episode of TechFirst, we chat with the chief product officer of Asana, Alex Hood.
Asana has over 75,000 customers including customers like Google, Slack, Twitter, Harvard ...
So today we're chatting with Asana's chief product officer Alex Hood about his playbook for building high growth products: How does it work? What's it look like? And frankly, what can we copy for our own startups?
iOS is safer than Android, right? Usually ... because getting on the iOS app store is harder than getting on Google Play. There’s more scrutiny of apps, their code, and functionality.
But now, for the first time ever, security researchers have found an ad fraud network on Apple iPhones that uses click injection to steal potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s in over 1200 apps with billions of downloads, and has been since mid 2019, in apps like Talking Tom, Asphalt 9, PicsArt, Gardenscapes, and Helix Jump.
It works by spying on your activity on the phone and sending fake clicks on ads it sees you engage with. To learn more, we’re going to chat with the man who found it: Danny Grander, Co-Founder & Chief Security Officer at Snyk, a digital security company.
Welcome to TechFirst with John Koetsier.
Apple announced this morning that it has launched two new “radio” stations on Apple Music: Apple Music Hits, and Apple Music Country.
Apple is investing significantly in its Radio product, with major stars and shows that are part talk radio, part Casey Kasem, part podcasting. An important question for stars to ask, however, is how broad an audience they can get by focusing on a single platform versus allowing their shows to appear on every platform simultaneously.
Or ... if they’re better off opening up their content on a freely available service.
Lama Nachman is an Intel scientist who built Stephen Hawking's communication system. Now she's helping another scientist and roboticist, Peter Scott Morgan, who has Motor Neuron Disease (like ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), to live and communicate with a more advanced version.
It uses gaze control and AI to essentially control a computer that allows him to talk, write, control his environment, and retain some measure of independence. Most of the technology is open source, and the next version, which senses brain waves, only uses a few hundred dollars worth of equipment.
Morgan's vision is using AI and technology to essentially cyborg himself (eventually, perhaps with help of a robotic exoskeleton). Nachman is using AI, including GPT-2, word prediction, and more, to help him communicate. Sometimes the result isn't just him or just the system, but a combination of both.
Should we ban all foreign apps?
President Trump might have a lot of support from Americans who want to do precisely that. In a poll run by TapResearch this week, 30% of American adults said they that the U.S. should ban all foreign social media apps. Another 40% said that the U.S. should ban all apps from countries that have an interest in spying on Americans.
“Our findings show that many people support banning apps developed by foreign companies,” TapResearch says.
Phone calls suck, right? It's always the IRS or your "bank" or some other scam. Well ... can a custom verified caller visual save phone calls? As in a guaranteed way to know who's calling AND WHY before you pick up?
There's just way too much voice spam, so most people don't pick up calls from unknown numbers.
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with First Orion CTO Mark Himelfarb about phone spam, verified visual caller IDs, and more. The question is: will it be good enough to save phone calls?
Epic Games, the maker of the hit multi-platform Fortnite game, has sued Apple for anti-competitive behavior, alleging that Apple monopolizes the App Store payments process and gouges developers for 30% of their revenues.
At stake is billions of dollars in revenue for Apple.
And potentially billions for Google too.
“At a market cap of nearly $2 trillion, Apple’s size and reach far exceeds that of any technology monopolist in history,” the lawsuit says.
In a tech-driven economy, you could argue that developers rule the world. If so, you could argue that Github rules developers, 50 million of whom are on the platform.
3 million organizations too, from NASA's Mars Rover team to enterprises to ... yeah ... me.
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub, as I interview him for Traction Conference. Things we cover:
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how he started working for IBM because he could "lift heavy things"
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10X growth (of course)
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how sometimes, the most important stuff is what you do NOT build
-
prioritization
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where to start as a non-technical founder?
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finding coworkers, cofounders, and employees
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managing teams
-
working remotely
-
setting goals
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achieving organizational alignment
-
Jason's biggest fear as a leader
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getting unfiltered feedback
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and SO. MUCH. MORE!
Where do Google, Microsoft, and IBM go for training data and data enrichment?
AI is driving innovation, competitive advantage, and speed to market ... but what if you don’t have enough training data? And what if your data is raw, not enriched, and you have no metadata to help your AI engine make sense of it?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Wendy Gonzalez, President and CEO of Samasource, which supplies training data for Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a quarter of the Fortune 50.
Apple’s App Store dominance is under fire like never before, thanks to its own desire for control of its platform, antitrust regulation at home and abroad and the vagaries of an American leader who has signed executive orders faster than any president in history.
Two things in particular are major challenges:
1) Donald Trump’s recent executive order on TikTok owner ByteDance and WeChat owner Tencent
2) Russia’s new Federal Antimonopoly Service ruling against Apple
Both hit at the heart of one of Apple’s current major competitive advantages: the company’s sole control of the App Store. Each does it in an entirely different way. And Apple can only escape the consequences of these moves by opening up the iPhone to “sideloading” apps.
Or, in other words, smashing the single biggest law of the App Store.
Is Apple playing fair?
Apple looks to be giving its own ad network a leg up on competitors with customer data that other ad networks can’t access. In iOS 14, Apple Advertising appears to have a separate settings panel with a default-on setting. Other advertisers and ad networks on iOS, however, need to ask permission every single time.
“It’s preferential access to users’ data,” mobile expert Eric Seufert says. “Now they’re best-positioned to gain market share in mobile app install ads.”
That’s close to an $80 billion industry that Google and Facebook currently dominate.
There’s a new app that can tell your heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, respiration or breathing rate, and mental stress just by taking a short video. Soon, blood pressure is coming too.
Sounds crazy, right?
In the episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're joined by David Maman, CEO and co-founder of Binah.ai, to find out ...
President Trump wants to ban TikTok in the U.S., but he’ll consider allowing a U.S. company to purchase it. As long as, in a novel twist, the U.S. government gets a cut. Meanwhile, U.S.-owned Triller is positioning itself as the biggest beneficiary to India’s TikTok ban, with 40 million new installs, and by extension, the likely winner of an American ban.
But in this latest episode of Meet the Kardashians, White House edition, they’re all potentially being played.
Because the fastest-growing non-TikTok short-form video entertainment app is also Chinese-owned. Economic and trade policy, meet Whack-A-Mole.
Two things have grown like crazy in 2020: Coronavirus, and the global app economy. 2020 has been crazy, but there’s been massive growth in some sectors, and mobile is one of them
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Lexi Sydow, a senior market insights manager at App Annie, about the state of the global app economy.
The good news: some newbies are winning and it’s not all the rich becoming richer. And, mobile isn’t just about what happens on your phone anymore.
We talk about:
- downloads and growth
- countries that are growing in time in apps and on devices
- surprises in the data
- time for new apps to get on to top downloads and top grossing lists
- why new apps are getting so big so quick
- new features apps are adding
- the overall economic impact of apps
A high school student at Jericho High School in New York has built an AI framework that can predict air pollution levels with 92% accuracy using neural networks, random forest, and other techniques.
That ... could be better accuracy than most weather forecasters.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Richard Ren about his framework, including how he learned to code, why he got into AI and machine learning, what data he's using, what technologies he's implementing, and what data is most predictive of high pollution levels.
Wind power has been around for a long time. For commercial applications, there are massive turbines with wings the size of 747s.
For home, there have been a number of options, but durability has been a concern, as well as bird safety. Solar has seen much wider adoption, but it doesn’t work everywhere ...
Now there’s a solution from an Icelandic company that looks safe and affordable. To learn more, we chat with Sam Gerbus from IceWind “extreme energy solutions."
Alexa, Siri, Google: which is the smartest? Dumbest? Most useful? Growing the fastest?
And ... what capabilities will AI assistants have in the future? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Brian Jackson from Info-Tech Research Group.
On the one hand … Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are amazing technology ... on the other, they face-palm on some ridiculously simple tasks. We chat about:
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which are leading (and getting smarter faster)
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Google Duplex
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Alexa and smart home
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Privacy
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Why Apple's challenged to make Siri truly smart
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Smartglasses ... how they'll work with AI assistants
If you’ve been around marketing, you'll have heard the phrase "customer journey." It's what people do when they buy ... or don't buy.
Naturally, marketers want to optimize that trip, and Adobe has developed an AI system that finds out where those journeys break. Theoretically, that will help brands sell more.
Our guest this episode: Steve Hammond, a director at Adobe Experience Cloud.
A staggering 40% of the top 20 TV shows and series in the U.S. are produced, owned, and delivered on one network that isn’t available over the air or on standard cable TV and didn’t exist much more than two decades ago.
It’s Netflix, of course ....
The Android DJI Go 4 app lets you fly your drone. It also contains sophisticated hidden functionality that can “phone home” every hour to Sina Weibo, one of the most popular Chinese social media sites, asking for fresh commands.
Those new commands could include installing new apps on your phone for almost any purpose.
In addition, the app restarts itself automatically when you try to quit it.
Ads suck and we all know it. They’re invasive, they track us, they create horrible user experiences, and most of the time, they’re incredibly annoying. The future’s not like that ... and here's why.
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich (co-founder/CEO of Brave Software) and Carolina Abenante (founder of NYIAX).
Using micropayments, permission, edge AI, blockchain, and crypto, they're creating a future in which you only see ads from brands you want to, you don’t sacrifice privacy when you see an ad, and you get paid for your attention.
In a lot of ways, that future is now.
Apple’s App Store has reasonable commission rates that are roughly comparable to other online services, significantly cheaper than traditional offline retail, and are generally in line with commissions at art auctions, consignment shops, and car dealerships. At least, according to a new report written for Apple by hired competition and antitrust experts.
Two things the report doesn’t mention?
Only the two biggest elephants in the App Store room.
During COVID-19, we can't really go to the gym. So many of us are working out in our (new?) home gyms. Is that making us fitter? And, can an AI coach motivate us?
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Freeletics CEO Daniel Sobhani about what we're doing to stay fit during Coronavirus, what's working, and how men and women are reacting differently ... including with regard to mental health.
We chat about:
-
the biggest ways fitness changed during COVID-19
-
what are people doing differently
-
how Sobhani's AI coach for fitness works
-
how the AI coach compares to a human coach?
-
how the AI works, at a high level
-
what’s different about working out at home?
-
how meditation is up, and how men vs women deal with mental health differently
-
what people are doing with regard to investment in new equipment
Facebook is one of the two most dominant companies in an $80 billion industry that impacts hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, in consumer spend. But a huge percentage of that revenue is now at risk, thanks to an obscure privacy move by Apple at the company’s World Wide Developer Conference in June.
The move?
Deprecating a mobile device identifier called the IDFA. That threatens billion in Facebook revenue.
And Google could be next ...
The electricity that powers our digital future is very, very analog. Is that about to change?
We don’t think a lot about the technology that drives our computers and homes ... we flip a switch and get to work, or turn on the TV. But the actual mechanics of what happens in our walls and wires is very 18th century.
One company is working on making it better. In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re joined by Thar Casey, founder and CEO of Amber, to dive in and check it out.
Everyone is investing in India lately.
In April, Facebook announced it was investing $5.7 billion in India. In January it was Amazon, investing $1 billion in India. Today’s it’s Google (or its parent company, Alphabet) investing $10 billion in partnerships, infrastructure, and ecosystems.
Since China’s closed, the giants have to invest elsewhere, apparently.
TikTok was THE mobile phenomenon of 2019 with almost 700M app installs. But with the ban talk getting louder and louder ... are other contenders poised to steal its thunder?
We chat with one of the owners and board members of Triller, which has over 100M installs ... and just got a bump of 40M new installs in India after the TikTok ban.
Triller thinks TikTok will get banned in the U.S, as well as in India. And Triller is trying to take full advantage of that by poaching all of TikTok's creators and helping the monetize 2X more on Triller than they did on TikTok ...
Ads suck and we all know it. They’re invasive, they track us, they create horrible user experiences, and most of the time, they’re incredibly annoying. The future’s not like that ... and here's why.
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich (co-founder/CEO of Brave Software) and Carolina Abenante (founder of NYIAX).
Using micropayments, permission, edge AI, blockchain, and crypto, they're creating a future in which you only see ads from brands you want to, you don’t sacrifice privacy when you see an ad, and you get paid for your attention.
In a lot of ways, that future is now.
Can AI help us connect trillions of smart devices? There are currently perhaps 20 billion devices connected to the internet: things like laptops, phones, smartwatches, TVs, smart speakers, smart home devices ...
In a decade, that could be 50 billion … and a lot of it is enterprise IoT.
In this edition of the The AI Show with John Koetsier we chat with Intel and the National Science Foundation, which has funded $30M+ into projects to use AI to figure out how we'll manage ultra-dense wireless networks ... how we'll keep it secure, and how we'll keep everything connected.
Joining me in this episode:
Vida Ilderem, VP, Intel Labs
Thyaga Nandagopal, National Science Foundation
Pu Wang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
3.8 billion people on the planet don’t have access to the internet. But that could be about to change soon. While Elon Musk’s SpaceX is building internet access from satellites 340 miles off the earth in space, Google’s Project Loon is doing something similar.
In Loon’s case, however, internet access comes from just 12 miles up in the stratosphere.
Via balloons floating in the wind.
Recently Apple blocked updates to the Hey email app on the iOS App Store and threatened to delete it. What does this tell us about App Store guidelines? And unwritten rules?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat about Apple's App Store guidelines with Denys Zhadanov, a VP at Readdle. Readdle has 7 top-30 apps in the App Store including the Spark email app which competes with Hey.
There’s always been controversy that Apple isn’t allowing competition for its own apps and services, and the EU antitrust division is looking into it now. We dive in with an App Store insider.
50% of the food produced globally is wasted. At the same time, a child dies from hunger every 10 seconds, and 25,000 people starve to death every single day. Another billion, almost, are malnourished and don't have enough food.
Can AI fix this?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with SPRK.Global CEO Alexander Piutti, who is a finalist in Samsung's Extreme Tech Challenge startup competition.
Are subscriptions the new retail? We know digital retail is way up, thanks to COVID. But … surprisingly ... subscription purchases are way up too.
Streaming: jumped up to 89.8%
Consumer goods: growth of 105%-145%
Education: growth as high as 60%
SaaS/Cloud: subscriber growth peaked at 51%
That's interesting because we tend not to want long-term commitments especially during a downturn. We chat about all the details with Dan Burkhart, CEO of Recurly.
Can we design AI that will teach itself how to drive a car?
Self-driving cars will unlock trillions in market value and probably change our lives with fractional car ownership, better ride-sharing ... maybe even cars that pay for themselves. Also … they'll give us back months if not years of our time that we currently spend driving.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski.
Helm.ai has developed a new AI technology it calls "Deep Teaching" which it says will make it 100,000 times cheaper to train self-driving car AIs.
What can we learn from the queen of LinkedIn about telling stories for warm robots?
If you’ve been around LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed Goldie Chan. The green hair makes her stand out … but her consistent calm, positive, and supportive content help you center and ground and ... sure, even feel good about yourself.
Goldie started doing video on LinkedIn, and never really stopped. She has the longest daily video streak on LinkedIn, and got shoutouts from top execs there as well as elsewhere, which has turned into an amazing career in speaking, consulting, writing for Forbes and ... telling stories.
A couple of weeks ago I spent some time with Goldie on her show. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, Goldie's coming on TechFirst to share what she does best.
At WWDC this year Apple essentially killed the IDFA, the identifier for advertisers. It’s not completely gone … but it’s now opt-in with a big scary warning.
Now we’re wondering … will this kill modern mobile marketing as we know it?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Eric Seufert former VP of User Acquisition for Rovio. He runs Mobile Dev Memo, QuantMar.com, and is a consultant.
What we chat about:
Is this a mobile marketing apocalypse?
Attribution
Look-alike audiences
AEO and VO: Facebook
tROAS: Google
Retargeting
Ad-based monetization
Segmentation & cohorts
LTV modeling
Fingerprinting
Facebook & Google
Ad networks
SSPs
DSPs
Need offbeat growth tactics for uncertain times?
These are definitely uncertain times. COVID would have been enough, with its massive health and economic consequences. Add George Floyd’s murder as a flashpoint to decades of simmering racial inequities, and we’ve got a perfect storm. In the middle of all this, we’ve got people trying to do their startups afloat in one of most challenging times ever.
In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Michele Romanow, who co-founded Clearbanc, helped raised over $300 million, serves as its President, and is a star on Canada's Shark Tank: Dragon's Den.
We chat about:
Customer acquisition tactics
Keeping your customers happy
Business models
Raising money while preserving your equity
Hiring and team building
Product development
Growth (yes, even now)
And much more …
Can virtual reality make your home gym less boring ... and maybe improve your workouts?
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Eric Malafeew, former chief architect of Guitar Hero. He's worked on Mars landers and the Xbox Kinect, among other things, and now has VZfit, a VR app that makes workouts feel like a game
I’ve been using Beat Saber to get a bit of a workout at home in VR. But according to Malafeew, VZfit can make your workouts better … longer … more frequent ... and more intense without you even really feeling like you're working out.
The idea is that you bike on your stationary bike and, thanks to VR, go anywhere in the world … fight tanks … drive Formula 1 ... face off at the OK Corral ... and much more.
Can we really decentralize the internet with blockchain? The internet was originally designed to be decentralized ... and that’s how it was supposed to work for emergencies and disasters. Lately, it's been getting more and more centralized controlled by major corporations, as well as countries like Russia and China.
One company thinks it has a solution. In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with the cofounder and CEO of ThreeFold, Kristof de Spiegeleer, who thinks the internet should be like electricity: available and almost-free everywhere. But with a key difference: enabled by all, in a sort of mesh networking scenario.
His not-so-secret weapon?
"Technically we have 18,000 CPU cores and 90 million gigabytes, which is a lot of capacity. It's probably between five and ten times more than all of the capacity of all the blockchain projects together."
What are the top reasons you want to keep working from home after Coronavirus? Here's what about 150,000 people said in a survey.
- Time with family (34%)
- No commute (29%)
- Flexible schedule (17%)
- Saving money (11%)
- More productive (5%)
- Less office politics (4%)
Listen to the show for the full story, or check it out in my Forbes column.
Why games are making record revenues in a recession, with Unity VP Julie Shumaker. In a recession revenues generally go down. That’s not been the case in 2020, at least for games. Games have been seeing record-high revenues over the past few months ... we'll chat about what's hot and why ...
What we talk about:
- First off, what happened with games over the past 3-5 months?
- What kind of games grew the most?
- Weekends and weekdays kinda flipped. Why?
- Revenue was up … how?
- What’s different about “pandemic gamers?”
- Could you basically track COVID-19 across the world in game downloads and sessions?
- Are games recession-proof?
And … the world-famous TechFirst 10 in 5 … 10 questions, 5 minutes
- Favorite piece of tech gear in your house
- Can’t-do-without-it tech that you wear
- Android or iOS?
- EV or gas?
- Mac or Windows?
- GIF or JIF?
- Favorite tech news source?
- Do you want a self-driving car or do you want to drive yourself, forever?
- Elon Musk offers you a trip to Mars. In or out?
- Alexa or Hey Google or Hey Siri?
Switzerland is the safest country in the world right now for COVID-19. South Sudan is, according to a massive 250-page report, the most dangerous nation.
The United States?
It ranks number 58, just behind Romania, and two places ahead of Russia.
The Forbes story I reference in this episode is available here:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/06/05/the-100-safest-countries-in-the-world-for-covid-19/
The full report, with methodology, is here:
https://www.dkv.global/covid-safety-assesment-200-regions
Glasses haven’t changed much in 500 years: Take glass, grind it to a shape, refract the angle of light impacting your eye … see better, hopefully.
But a new Apple patent, however, seems to indicate that Apple is working on glasses that will change as your prescription changes. And just maybe … do even more.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we’re joined by Robert Scoble, now former Chief strategy officer, Infinite Retina, and co-author of "The Infinite Retina: Spatial Computing, Augmented Reality, and how a collision of new technologies are bringing about the next tech revolution."
Everyone in my family uses a Mac, most of them on laptops. That includes my two sons, one in university and one in high school, both of whom are doing school from home these days.
So I didn’t think when I ordered a new MacBook Pro recently I’d have to return it almost immediately. And I didn’t think Apple would completely and utterly ignore the meaning of the word “Pro.”
Unfortunately ... both are true.
Is 5G safe or is it dangerous to humans, animals, and the environment?
There are a lot of concerns and worries about 5G. Pictures of dead birds near cell towers. Even snake oil products to protect you … USB sticks with a "bio shield."
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we’re going to get the facts by talking to a research scientist in Belgium. What we'll talk about:
- is 5G dangerous
- what is the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation?
- how much RF radiation does 5G expose you to?
- is that dangerous, over time? How much would be required to be dangerous?
- does 5G give users more radiation than non-users?
- should we stop the 5G roll-out?
- how are you testing the effects and impact of 5G?
You’re an NBA all-star ... what do you do when the league’s shut down thanks to Coronavirus?
If you’re Chicago Bull and 2-time NBA dunk champion Zach Lavine … you work out … you play Call of Duty or Apex Legends, and apparently … you give away free JBL headphones.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Zach as well as JBL VP Chris Epple and learn more.
We also get Zach's take on some of the most important matters in tech ... GIF or JIF ... EV or gas ... Windows or Mac ... iOS or Android ... and whether he'd accept a free ride to Mars from Elon Musk.
Massively social platforms built around gaming or video or news might be our new way to experience entertainment. We've already seen concerts in Fortnite -- Travis Scott, a month or so ago. Now we're going to see movies being screened in Fortnite.
Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker behind Inception, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar will be bringing “one of his iconic films” to the massively popular Fortnite game this summer.
And guess what:
No risk of COVID-19!
(cross-posted from my future39 podcast)
Today we plug our computers in to power. Tomorrow, we might plug ourselves into them.
AR and VR are changing how we see the world. AI and augmentation and brain-machine interfaces will change how we live, how we work, and how we play.
Cathy and I chat about HTC Vive, Magic Leap, Oculus Quest, brain-machine interfaces, Upload (the new show on Amazon Prime), and augmented intelligence. We also talk about Apple and where Apple's upcoming product will fit, as well as the convergence of AR and VR.
How do you survey 330 million people across 4M square miles?
Every 10 years: the United States government is constitutionally required to take a census, which then gets used as the basis for distributed hundreds of billions of tax dollars.
In 2010, doing the census cost $12 billion. They printed 17 million pages of paper maps and 50 million paper questionnaires.
In 2020, the Census Bureau is going digital in 59 languages. Good timing too: COVID-19 happened, and the Census Bureau had to cut back some of their door-to-door surveying.
In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the US Census Bureau live on the 2020 digital census ... what kind of technology do you need to build for that? What's the required capacity? How do you secure it all? How do you protect it from bots and hacking?
And, how do you run a census during Coronavirus shutdowns?
Joe Rogan is getting $100M+ to move to Spotify exclusively. But that might just be less than he's worth ...
Dan Ariely is working with Wisdo on a 25 million student study. The question: Are we losing our young people to depression, anxiety, and loneliness thanks to COVID-19?
Dan is a 3-time NYT bestselling author ... my favorite book of his is Predictably Irrational. He's also a professor at Duke University.
We discuss his horrific injury, why he wears half a beard, and what that taught him about power, control, depression, and all the challenges that we're facing now with a global pandemic. Specifically, we focus on problems that college students and young people are having right now: more abuse, more loneliness, more anxiety.
And ... we talk about what people can do to combat those problems.
I work from home. Many others do too.
But not many companies with 55,000 employees with a million clients in 52 countries. Especially fintech companies managing the flow of $10 trillion via 95 billion transactions annually.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with the chief risk officer of FIS, Greg Montana.
We talk about the company moved to working from home, what technology it takes, how they've managed security, and how Montana views the back-to-work timetable.
Three years ago Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs floated visions of smart self-driving cars and smarter technology making Toronto, Canada, a leader among smart cities.
Last week, that all died.
Sidewalk Labs canceled the Quayside project on May 7.
But we lost something when that happened. In fact, we lost at least nine things, as I discuss in this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier.
To read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/05/13/9-things-we-lost-when-google-canceled-its-smart-cities-project-in-toronto/
Texting is nice. Zoom is great for work and birthday parties. And Facebook works for our wider circle of friends.
But there's something about good old-fashioned audio that has us returning to voice calls on our phones during quarantine.
TextNow says its users spent more than 450 million minutes talking on the phone in the first full month of shutdown, March. While once that might not have been a shocking thing to say, it’s up 36% more than the previous month, and totals 313,000 days or 850 years of cumulative time talking on the phone.
Haircuts, pedicures and massages are big business in Georgia again.
Restaurants, too.
The state started re-opening businesses on April 24 and dropped its shelter-in-place order a week later. Now mobile data shows that visits to nail salons, spas, tattoo parlors, and barber shops is back up to 80% of pre-Coronavirus levels. Visits to restaurants are also up. With dine-in service allowed again, Georgia restaurants are now at 75% of their former pre-COVID levels of service.
We know how to get people to work together. How do you get robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and smart systems to collaborate?
Welcome to TechFirst with John Koetsier. No jobs are simple ... getting a pizza requires multiple steps, processes, and hands, not to mention a car. Everything in factories takes steps and processes too. If we're going to get to an autonomous reality ... smart machines need to work together.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we talk to Kumardev Chatterjee, CEO of Unmanned Life. His company is working with Walmart, Vienna, Deutsche Telekom, and other companies to help drones and robots work together.
One example? Drones that take off from fire trucks and fly ahead to help in search and rescue operations, which Unmanned Life is doing now with the city of Vienna.
Will your next home be a bioceramic dome? They last 500 years, are bugproof, don't rot, mold, or rust ... and they're carbon-neutral. They're also much cheaper, according to Geoship.
I interview the CEO, Morgan Bierschenk, on live social video. We talk about construction, materials, permitting, whether they're built on-site or off-site, and what kind of maintenance they need. We also talk about new models of living: how they can be joined, and how you can form communities with bioceramic domes.
And, of course, we chat about the cost.
The full transcript will be available at johnkoetsier.com, and you'll be able to subscribe to the podcast at anchor.fm/techfirst.
Fake news: the truth about lies .... what is fake news? How can you spot it? And what can we do about it?
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Mitch Chaiet, who is the Media Innovation and Entrepreneurship Coordinator at the University of Texas at Austin.
We'll discuss computational propaganda, reality bubbles, and Misinformation, Disinformation, and Malinformation, as well as how to spot fake news and how to fight fake news. (Including how to bring it up with Uncle Bob, who won't like it if you tell him his news is fake.)
We'll also talk about who creates fake news, and why. (Hint: there's a lot of money in fake news.)
Are WiFi, Bluetooth, massage, adjustable positions, and built-in speakers essential for a good night’s sleep? For the past few weeks, I've been sleeping in a adjustable position bed with more tech than my whole bedroom used to have.
In this episode of TechFirst, we talk to Intellibed CEO Colin House about the $70 billion sleep industry, what technology matters (and what doesn't) and what works best for sleeping.
Hint:
According to House, it's different for men and women.
Today we're stuck at home. Wouldn't it be great to virtually wander the world in virtual reality? (At least until we can go out for real again!)
In this episode of TechFirst we chat with Simon Che de Boer from New Zealand’s Reality Virtual, who took 4,000 photos in Queen Nefertiti's tomb and digitally reconstructed King Tut's mask.
They're working on technology to virtually re-create real physical locations, make them available to all, create ways for people and organizations to contribute to sort of a Wikipedia of virtual places, and tele-present us in more real ways than ever before.
How?
A ton of machine learning, generative adversarial networks, and a lot of computer. Graphics processing tech from Invidia helps, as did a big grant from Epic Games.
Just one health-care startup had 139,000 new doctors join and 1.35 million patients use telemedicine last week. Is this temporary or the evolution of a trend with staying power?
In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with the CEO of Vonage, Alan Masarek.
Some of the increases he's seen:
-
Total video traffic up 6.5x in last six months
-
Total video traffic up just over 2x in the last 3 weeks of March
-
Healthcare is specifically up more than 20x
Jeff Pulver created VOIP and founded the $3B Vonage. Now he's reinventing video, voice, and text communications online to fix security issues with Zoom and other platforms.
Is secure, private communication a complete pipe dream?
Jeff Pulver literally created VOIP. He also got the US government to issue the Pulver Order, which ensured that voice over IP was not restricted. Now he's working on a blockchain-based communications platform that could reinvent video, voice, and text communications online ... and make it much more secure.
We dive into the details ... along with what's happening with Coronavirus and COVID-19.
Mobile app spend in Q1 2020 was the highest in history. And mobile app use was up 20%.
In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I talk about a story I just published at Forbes based on a new App Annie report. Lots of apps, especially social, education, business, and fitness, are up and to the right.
But will this last?
Coronavirus is leaving our elders alone, lonely, and frightened. In this episode of TechFirst, we dive into the tech you need to stay connected.
I talk to photographer and technologist George Krieger about the tech he's set up for his dad, who built the Iomega Zip drive. It includes a remotely controllable PC, a camera, a TV that shows who he's talking to on a large screen, a wearable device called Tempo from Care Predict, an Echo Show from Amazon, and smart plugs to control lighting.
The result: much more peace of mind. Less stress for seniors, and much more connection and safe socialization, even when you're shut out of the care home thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Instacart is getting record downloads. Uber and Lyft are seeing record lows.
How is Coronavirus impacting the app economy?
Will Coronavirus be the death -- or the savior -- of our digital economy? Welcome to TechFirst with John Koetsier.
COVID-19 is changing everything. When it comes to mobile apps, some industries are way up, and some are way down. With us today to discuss which is which is Adam Blacker from Apptopia.
Airlines are in tough. So are hotels, but the drops are not completely consistent. And Uber and Lyft are experiencing record lows for app installs and usage. Delivery apps like Instacart, however, are way up, breaking download records every day for about four days straight. But ready-to-eat food delivery apps are down, Blacker says.
Is technology making us lonely, stressed out, insecure, and narcissistic? In this TechFirst with John Koetsier we dive into a 2,000-person study on the impact of technology and mobile devices on:
- mental health
- loneliness
- narcissism
- social isolation
The news is not great ...
I chat with futurist Nikolas Badminton and researcher Nick Black to go through their study.
Coronavirus is changing how we work ... most tech companies are now telling their employees to work from home.
Well, if you work from home, you need tools to do that.
One company says it’s going to offer a free productivity suite to everyone. Zoho created a product literally this week called Remotely, which it is offering for free for all.
We’re chatting with Raju Vegesna, the Chief Evangelist at Zoho.
What is it like to be living and working in China right now, during the coronavirus epidemic? What's different?
We chat with James Ren, who’s currently living and working in Beijing, China. He leaves his home every three days for food and hasn't seen his family for weeks, but he's trying to do business, meet clients virtually, and keep working through the crisis.
What we talk about:
What’s the status in Beijing right now?
Are there any conferences that you’re planning to go to? Or, have they been canceled?
Are you restricting your movement? Meetings?
What information are you getting from medical authorities on what to do and what not to do?
How are you continuing with business?
What’s the impact on your business?
How long do you anticipate this continuing?
Ad fraud costs billions each year.
Why does that matter to you … and how can we stop it? Welcome to Tech First Draft, with John Koetsier
Ad fraud is huge ... I’ve seen estimates from $10B to even $40B a year, globally. Just today, Google kicked 600 apps with 4.5B downloads out of Google Play.
Luke Taylor, the founder and COO of TrafficGuard, is going to tell us how it works ... and … how to stop it. And yes … we’ll even talk about how ad fraud impacts you, or any average person.
The types of fraud we'll talk about include:
-
App install farms
-
SDK spoofing
-
Misattribution (i.e. click spam, click injection; where ~80% of ad fraud occurs)
-
Domain spoofing
-
Cookie stuffing
-
Hidden ads/ads stacking
-
Bots & servers
- Malware engagement
We now have almost 8 billion people on the planet ... what kind of digital growth are we seeing from those billions on social, mobile, and the internet as a whole?
Welcome to Tech First Draft, with … yours truly ... John Koetsier
Hootsuite just put together a massive series of reports -- 200+ pages -- about everything, basically, in terms of digital growth … social adoption … mobile penetration … top social networks ... emerging trends ... you name it.
So we’re going to dive into all that … we’re going to chat with: Simon Kemp, who wrote the report, and Henk Campher, a VP at Hootsuite.
- Fake reviews are killing our ability to google for the truth
- Two of the top 9 google suggestions for “fake reviews” are “fake reviews generator” and “fake reviews generator free”
- So we know that it’s hard to trust reviews for consumer products
- What about reviews for B2B software?
- Consumer products might cost $50 to $500
- B2B software? Could be $500,000, and easily more with multi-year contracts
- Today, we’re chatting with TrustRadius CEO Vinay Bhagat about a new program to kill fake reviews
Are your headphones not providing the quality sound that they might actually be capable of? Can you get audiophile quality sound with hardware that doesn’t cost thousands of dollars?
This company says it can make your headphones better … with software.
Welcome to Tech First Draft.
See all TFDs here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first-draft/
My guest, Matthias, is from Dirac: https://www.dirac.com
My name is John Koetsier, and today we’re speaking with Mathias Johansson, the CEO of Dirac.
He’s fixing crappy audio with software, and we’re going to find out how ...
What we talk about:
-
You’re on a quest to fix bad audio. Why?
-
What is the problem with most headphones/earbuds sold today?
-
You are trying to fix it in software … via an app. How?
-
What headphones or earbuds do you support right now? Will you eventually support all brands?
-
Your software learns or adjust to different hardware … how? Do you test all different types of hardware in the studio?
-
How close are you right now … you’re in beta still, right?
-
When I tested, it sounded great. But podcasts had some echo … perhaps because of lower-quality recordings?
Why is technology so important for the next decade of business?
Why is every company a tech company?
And how are expectations changing over the next decade?
I talk about State Farm, NASCAR, Allbirds, and TikTok in an interview with Sean Moffit of FutureproofingNext.
- Let’s start with TikTok. It gained over 500 million new users just last year. Why is it growing so quickly?
- When you’re on TikTok -- and other, similar social platforms -- there’s an almost compulsive view and flick, view and flick as you scroll through bits of content. What’s happening in the brain while this is going on?
- And … what does this do to people? Does it kill their attention span? Does it ruin them for anything requiring deep focus?
- As a culture, we have a long history of crying wolf at the next new media platform, claiming it will ruin kids, ruin society, destroy education, kill the future workforce. Contextualize TikTok and other similar platforms for us within this history.
- But are digital platforms fundamentally different than previous shifts?
- How do you see people changing as we grow up with technology and media like this?
- What are the good things that come out of this?
Intro to guest
- Christoph Burkhardt is the CEO of OneLife
- They’ve developed a revolutionary new air purifier that they’re releasing at CES 2020
- We’re getting a sneak peek
What we talk about:
- What are the worst problems with indoor air?
- What percentage of people even know that they might have a problem?
- There’s a lot of existing air purifiers out there … what’s wrong with them?
- Replaceable air filters … one reason why people don’t buy purifiers?
- Talk about OneLife … what makes your solution better?
-
PM1 … how small is that, really?
- And … those are the most numerous particles, right?
- Wireless? Battery?
We’re chatting with Apptopia’s VP of Insights Adam Blacker about the top 100 apps of 2019. Which made the cut … what surprised us … what this means for tech giants like Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and all the others in 2020 ...
Mobile app categories we hit:
- Games
- Social/messaging
- Entertainment
- Food & drink
- Dating
- Shopping
- Music & audio
- Health & fitness
- Finance
Companies and apps we talk about:
- TikTok
- Helo
- Netflix
- YouTube
- Twitch
- HBO
- Disney
- McDonalds
- Uber
- Tinder
- Badoo
- Wish!
- AliExpress
- Pinduoduo
- Spotify
- Apple
- YouTube ... Google
- Amazon
- Samsung
- Xiaomi
- Sberbank
We’re talking about autonomous driving ... specifically … how soon we can expect self-driving cars? And what changes will they bring in our economy and our society?
My guest is Blair Lacorte, the president of AEye, a Silicon Valley company that “develops advanced vision hardware, software and algorithms that act as the eyes and visual cortex of autonomous vehicles.”
He says: we’ll have self-driving cars within 3 years.
What we cover:
- Many experts say that full self-driving is many years away. Some say we’ll never get there. Talk about how you think we’ll get there in 3 years.
- You also say we’ll need to redefine what self-driving means … maybe redo the Levels of Automation. How so?
- What’s unique about your technology? You have something you’ve call iDAR … what is it, and how does it work?
- Who are you working with right now on this?
- Elon Musk says we don’t need LIDAR. Agree?
- How important is critical mass of instrumented cars and shared data to accelerate the AI that we need for self-driving cars?
- Robotaxis … will we see fleets of personal cars roaming the roads as taxis? Other models?
- There are those who say that autonomous cars -- and their development -- is unsafe. How do you respond?
- Anything else?
We talk to Robert Scoble about iOS spellcheck: is it really that bad (yes), why it's that bad (privacy?), and how this will impact Apple's competitiveness against Google and Android.
"80% said it got at least a little worse than before than two years ago"
"Swipe is a good new feature that comes with this system, but it's an immature system. It hasn't been trained very well."
"I had dinner with the guy who runs Siri at Apple. He said ... Google is beating us ... we see Google's learning at a faster rate."
You either love Cybertruck or you hate it. Designer Fede Ponce has worked for Nissan and BMW. He's currently consulting with Mercedes, and won awards for his work on the Iron Man and Thor movies. He's worked on autonomous vehicles and heads-up displays. Hear why he's ordered a Tesla Cybertruck.
chat with Amazon VP of smart home Daniel Rausch about:
- what’s in HIS smart home
- what drives consumer adoption
- why voice is better than phones for a smart phone hub
- the growth of the Alexa universe
- Amazon’s new “Certified for Humans” program, which lets you set up device by voice alone
- Alexa’s new “Did You Mean” feature
- Making smart homes … actually smart
- Alexa Guard, which makes your home look like you’re home … even when you’re away
- Privacy
- Adding Alexa to anything
- How Amazon grades itself on its progress with Alexa and Echo
Are we wasting billion on smart home technology? 70% of smart home tech that gets returned ... has nothing wrong with it. TechSee CEO Eiten Cohen surveyed smart home owners to find out what the biggest problems are ... and gives us the goods.