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 compla...
May 19, 2022•17 min•Season 1Ep. 249
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 fo...
May 14, 2022•25 min•Season 1Ep. 248
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: - 14,000 pixels per inch MicroLED display - 5GH ultra-low latency radio to stream AR content - continuous eye tracking via custom-configured accelerometers, gyroscopes, and magnetometers - me...
May 11, 2022•27 min•Season 1Ep. 247
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 ...
May 04, 2022•50 min•Season 1Ep. 246
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 wi...
Apr 29, 2022•12 min•Season 1Ep. 245
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...
Apr 22, 2022•12 min•Season 1Ep. 244
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. A...
Apr 19, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 243
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,...
Apr 09, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 242
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 ...
Apr 04, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 241
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 ...
Mar 26, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 240
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 bl...
Mar 17, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 239
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 rearrang...
Mar 15, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 238
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...
Mar 08, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 237
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 al...
Mar 04, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 236
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 appa...
Feb 24, 2022•16 min•Season 1Ep. 235
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 mig...
Feb 18, 2022•17 min•Season 1Ep. 234
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. Joh...
Feb 10, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 233
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 tec...
Feb 07, 2022•25 min•Season 1Ep. 232
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. Ast...
Jan 29, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 231
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 ...
Jan 27, 2022•15 min•Season 1Ep. 230
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...
Jan 19, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 229
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 game...
Jan 15, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 228
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, t...
Jan 10, 2022•16 min•Season 1Ep. 227
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 compa...
Jan 04, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 226
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 defe...
Dec 20, 2021•21 min•Season 1Ep. 225
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 patt...
Dec 15, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 224
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! Li...
Dec 05, 2021•15 min•Season 1Ep. 223
(Sponsored by my creator coin: $SMRT . Get some here: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ .) 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...
Dec 01, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 222
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...
Nov 24, 2021•20 min•Season 1Ep. 221
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 Ko...
Nov 22, 2021•12 min•Season 1Ep. 220
