TechFirst with John Koetsier

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 li...

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 c...

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 coor...

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...

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 Gla...

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 p...

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-annou...

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:...

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 te...

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 ab...

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....

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...

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 cha...

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...

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, a...

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, m...

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...

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 b...

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 managi...

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 oth...

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...