TechFirst with John Koetsier

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...

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 ren...

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 vert...

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, t...

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...

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 So...

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: TechFirs...

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 ...

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...