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 gam...
Sep 11, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 92
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 bi...
Sep 10, 2020•14 min•Season 1Ep. 91
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 prov...
Sep 10, 2020•16 min•Season 1Ep. 90
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....
Sep 07, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 89
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...
Sep 05, 2020•20 min•Season 1Ep. 89
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 For...
Sep 05, 2020•8 min•Season 1Ep. 88
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...
Sep 03, 2020•17 min•Season 1Ep. 86
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...
Sep 02, 2020•14 min•Season 1Ep. 85
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 ques...
Sep 02, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 84
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.
Aug 31, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 81
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 technoph...
Aug 29, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 80
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?...
Aug 26, 2020•57 min•Season 1Ep. 77
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, Gardens...
Aug 24, 2020•33 min•Season 1Ep. 76
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 op...
Aug 21, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 75
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, whi...
Aug 18, 2020•35 min•Season 1Ep. 74
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.
Aug 17, 2020•4 min•Season 1Ep. 73
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 t...
Aug 14, 2020•10 min•Season 1Ep. 72
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.
Aug 13, 2020•6 min•Season 1Ep. 71
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: - how he started working for IBM because he could "lift heavy things" - 10X growth (of course) - how som...
Aug 13, 2020•59 min•Season 1Ep. 70
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 F...
Aug 11, 2020•18 min•Season 1Ep. 69
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...
Aug 11, 2020•7 min•Season 1Ep. 68
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 c...
Aug 07, 2020•10 min•Season 1Ep. 67
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 ...
Aug 07, 2020•26 min•Season 1Ep. 66
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...
Aug 06, 2020•4 min
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 ab...
Aug 06, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 64
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 wha...
Aug 05, 2020•14 min•Season 1Ep. 63
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."
Jul 31, 2020•15 min•Season 1Ep. 62
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: - which are leading (and getting smarter faster) - Google Duplex - Alexa and smart h...
Jul 30, 2020•22 min•Season 1Ep. 61
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.
Jul 29, 2020•23 min•Season 1Ep. 60
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 ....
Jul 29, 2020•5 min•Season 1Ep. 59
