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 entrepr...
Apr 22, 2023•27 min•Season 1Ep. 279
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 ba...
Apr 17, 2023•35 min•Season 1Ep. 278
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 some...
Apr 11, 2023•18 min•Season 1Ep. 277
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 livabi...
Mar 22, 2023•26 min•Season 1Ep. 276
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...
Mar 17, 2023•44 min•Season 1Ep. 275
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'...
Mar 10, 2023•30 min•Season 1Ep. 274
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 Swa...
Mar 01, 2023•3 hr 36 min•Season 1Ep. 273
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....
Feb 17, 2023•25 min•Season 1Ep. 272
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 i...
Feb 07, 2023•27 min•Season 1Ep. 271
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 computa...
Jan 20, 2023•16 min•Season 1Ep. 270
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 c...
Jan 02, 2023•13 min•Season 1Ep. 269
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 li...
Dec 23, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 268
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 ....
Dec 17, 2022•24 min•Season 1Ep. 267
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 print...
Dec 13, 2022•22 min•Season 1Ep. 266
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, Senio...
Nov 30, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 265
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/...
Nov 16, 2022•20 min•Season 1Ep. 264
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 ...
Nov 11, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 263
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.
Oct 22, 2022•35 min•Season 1Ep. 262
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
Oct 14, 2022•31 min•Season 1Ep. 261
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 - What it means - How it will change the world - 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...
Oct 06, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 260
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...
Sep 29, 2022•34 min•Season 1Ep. 259
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...
Sep 15, 2022•23 min•Season 1Ep. 258
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 wh...
Sep 08, 2022•18 min•Season 1Ep. 257
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 worl...
Aug 23, 2022•19 min•Season 1Ep. 256
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 m...
Aug 05, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 255
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 dron...
Jul 20, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 254
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 l...
Jul 08, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 253
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 TechFir...
Jun 28, 2022•17 min•Season 1Ep. 252
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 a...
Jun 03, 2022•28 min•Season 1Ep. 251
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 expens...
May 26, 2022•26 min•Season 1Ep. 250
