TechFirst with John Koetsier

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...

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 ver...

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 r...

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 s...

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 H...

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 a...

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: - ho...

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 an...

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 Tence...

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...

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 ...

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 Kar...

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 t...

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...

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 lear...

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...

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.

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 ....

The Android DJI Go 4 app lets you fly your drone. It also contains sophisticated hidden functionality that can “phone home” every hour to Sina Weibo, one of the most popular Chinese social media sites, asking for fresh commands. Those new commands could include installing new apps on your phone for almost any purpose. In addition, the app restarts itself automatically when you try to quit it.

Ads suck and we all know it. They’re invasive, they track us, they create horrible user experiences, and most of the time, they’re incredibly annoying. The future’s not like that ... and here's why. In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich (co-founder/CEO of Brave Software) and Carolina Abenante (founder of NYIAX). Using micropayments, p...

Apple’s App Store has reasonable commission rates that are roughly comparable to other online services, significantly cheaper than traditional offline retail, and are generally in line with commissions at art auctions, consignment shops, and car dealerships. At least, according to a new report written for Apple by hired competition and antitrust experts. Two things the report doesn’t mention? Only...

During COVID-19, we can't really go to the gym. So many of us are working out in our (new?) home gyms. Is that making us fitter? And, can an AI coach motivate us? In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Freeletics CEO Daniel Sobhani about what we're doing to stay fit during Coronavirus, what's working, and how men and women are reacting differently ... including with regard to mental health. We...

Facebook is one of the two most dominant companies in an $80 billion industry that impacts hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, in consumer spend. But a huge percentage of that revenue is now at risk, thanks to an obscure privacy move by Apple at the company’s World Wide Developer Conference in June. The move? Deprecating a mobile device identifier called the IDFA. That threatens bil...

The electricity that powers our digital future is very, very analog. Is that about to change? We don’t think a lot about the technology that drives our computers and homes ... we flip a switch and get to work, or turn on the TV. But the actual mechanics of what happens in our walls and wires is very 18th century. One company is working on making it better. In this edition of TechFirst with John Ko...

Everyone is investing in India lately. In April, Facebook announced it was investing $5.7 billion in India. In January it was Amazon, investing $1 billion in India. Today’s it’s Google (or its parent company, Alphabet) investing $10 billion in partnerships, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Since China’s closed, the giants have to invest elsewhere, apparently.