TechFirst with John Koetsier

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...

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, tran...

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 us...

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 s...

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 w...

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...

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 i...

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 o...

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-anywhe...

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 e...

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 — ju...

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 wit...

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 beh...

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...

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.”...

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 oth...

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 Koetsie...

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 who...

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/2020/10/0...

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...