TechFirst with John Koetsier

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.

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

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 Ale...

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,...

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 C...

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 acti...

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: http...

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...

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...

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 p...

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 clot...

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 it...

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 ca...

Everyone wants privacy. Most of us also care about an environment in which businesses can grow too. But can both of these be reconciled? If you are in the mobile app or marketing spaces, you know that over the past year there’s been a great disturbance in the force. Apple increased privacy regulations for apps, and that essentially killed how apps measured their growth, discovered new audiences, o...

We desperately need more housing that is affordable, sustainable, and mass producible. Geoship thinks they've created exactly that, and have now actually built a full-scale prototype using their advanced materials science and construction methodology. In this TechFirst, we chat with CEO and cofounder Morgan Bierschenk. Way too many can’t afford homes right now, especially young people, and the hom...

Mojo Vision has been working on smart contact lenses since years. Recently the company announced its most advanced prototype ever, which VP Steven Sinclair told me has "all the elements that we need ... in a working system so that we can really push forward what we hope is the first product." That includes: - 14,000 pixels per inch MicroLED display - 5GH ultra-low latency radio to stream AR conten...

What if the very things we want big social platforms to do to stop the spread of extremism, racism, propaganda, and lies is actually causing more problems than it solves? Many of us want YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter to manage and moderate what people say. Others, who value free speech higher than social harms that its exercise might cost, say that muzzling people is unethical and in some countrie...

Who's winning in the media and entertainment battles? We are currently seeing an epic battle in the mobile space for consumer time, attention, and dollars. Two of the biggest juggernauts are short video versus long ... think Netflix vs TikTok, Disney+ vs Reels, with many more combatants and some like YouTube and Facebook with stakes in both sides. What’s happening here … and who’s going to win? An...

Catawba Indian Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina has established a new Special Economic Zone where the tribe will provide space and regulatory certainty for crypto and fintech companies. It's called the Catawba Digital Economic Zone, and the Catawba Corporation says it "can be prosperous thanks to the ability of Native-American Tribes under US law to have their own commercial code, regulation-ma...

BMW sells 2.5 million cars and 194,000 motorcycles annually, almost all in a traditional car dealership. But the 100-year-old car brand wants to sell cars online, just like Tesla. Now BMW is embarking on a major project with Adobe to get "phygital" ... to be able to do business seamlessly across apps, websites, and physical car dealerships, however its clients prefer. That means data, insights, so...

Will super-smart artificial intelligence be the ultimate cheat code for beating the market? Probably not ... but its could ensure you retire with 25% more than you otherwise would. In this TechFirst we chat with the CEO of Qraft USA, Robert Nestor. Qraft is an AI company focused on investing. The company has a billion USD "assets under AI" in Korea and is expanding to the US. While the AI is activ...

Digital retail giant Amazon has over 200,000 robots helping deliver more than 350 million different products in an unceasing flood of billions of deliveries. Its fulfillment machine with both free and fast shipping has become a key competitive moat against other retailers: free shipping and 1-day or 2-day shipping is why Amazon customers chose Amazon. So how can other retailers, whether giants lik...

We have billions of smart things. How can we create a true internet of things with trillions? We won't ... unless we have a super-cheap, super-small, super-efficient chip that doesn't need a battery, has significant sensors and capability, and can be printed almost for free. That "almost" is still a problem, but the Wiliot Pixel 2 is a computer the size of a postage stamp. There's no batteries. Yo...

COR is an infrared spectrometer that measures your blood health and how the food you eat and the exercise that you engage in impacts it. The first product of its kind, COR was created by a former Apple Health exec who wanted to know: is my diet good for me? Because everyone's response -- even to theoretically healthy foods -- is different. Even genetically identical twins don't have the same metab...

MIT scientists are building ElectroVoxels, small, smart, self-assembling robots designed for space.  It's programmable matter, infinitely recyclable large-scale 3D printing, if you will, and it could be the future of robotics and machinery in space. In this TechFirst, I chat with MIT PhD student Martin Nisser "Rather than building a robot or a structure in a top-down manner, we envision robot...