TechFirst with John Koetsier

Is neuromorphic computing the only way we can actually achieve general artificial intelligence?  Very likely yes, according to Gordon Wilson, CEO of Rain Neuromorphics, who is trying to recreate the human brain in hardware and "give machines all of the capabilities that we recognize in ourselves." Rain Neuromorphics has built a neuromorphic chip that is analog. In other words it does not simu...

Will NFTs be a trillion-dollar market by 2030? Or will they vanish in a blazing explosion of hate from all the naysayers? (I might give even odds on each side, actually!) In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Rarible chief product officer Alex Salnikov. And yes, he’s aware that there’s way too many bored apes, yacht apes, space apes, technicolor apes, and all other kinds of crypto mishmash digi...

So you got a great deal on your brand-new mutant ape yacht puppy NFT? But is it legit? DeviantArt is now scanning 5 million NFTs a week. Every month, it's finding  40,000 stolen, infringing, fraudulent NFTs. In other words, the people minting the NFTs don't actually own the images in the first place ... somewhat ironically since the whole idea of an NFT is prove ownership. NFTs are clearly th...

How soon will we have robot surgeons? Health care has gone remote lately, but in reality, most of it is fairly simple: video conferencing during Covid. But just recently for the first time ever a robot surgeon at Johns Hopkins University performed abdominal surgery on soft tissue. Granted … it was on a pig, not a human … but STAR, or Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot, was a success. And that means the...

Studies say you can prevent about 50% of mental health challenges if you catch and address them early. Doctors from Cincinnati Children’s hospital are using the world’s second-most powerful supercomputer to help solve mental health right at the start: when we're kids. This is a big deal. About 13% of us suffer from some form of mental health disorder ... that’s 971 million people globally. And it’...

Thinking to type sounds interesting to most of us. Crazy and futuristic, yes, but also freeing and fast. But for those with massive spinal cord injuries or degenerative diseases, it's an absolute lifeline. In this TechFirst, we chat with Marcus Gerhardt, CEO of Blackrock Neurotech, about a brain-computer interface they've invented, "installed" for people who cannot use their arms or legs anymore,...

Can we save the coral reefs by 3D printing more? Not reefs themselves, of course: those are built by living creatures, the coral ... but by 3D printing the substrate that corals can attach to and kickstarting the process of reef construction. In this TechFirst, we chat with marine biologist Astrid Kramer and 3D printing expert Nadia Fani about their crowdfunding startup, Coastruction. Scientists s...

Have you taken a flying Uber yet? We're in the middle of a flight revolution. In the past two years, there's been $5 billion of investment in personal drones, multicopters, autonomous helicopters, and vectored thrust aircraft. 129 different companies are developing almost 170 different air taxi, cargo, vertical takeoff or landing craft. Many of these, 65%, are doing electrical power and 25% are go...

What if plants could tell us when pests are attacking them, or they’re too dry, or they need more fertilizer. One startup is gene engineering farm plants so they can communicate in in fluorescent colors. The result: a farmer’s  phone, drone, or even satellite imagery can reveal what is happening in hundreds of acres of fields …  That leads to better food, fewer crop failures, and more re...

Five days ago, gaming giant Take-Two bought Zynga for $13 billion. But before that, Zynga bought Chartboost for $250 million. What's going on? Why is a gaming company buying an ad network? And what does this say about the future of games and media? In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Zynga Chief Product Officer Scott Koenigsberg and Chartboost CEO Rich Izzo. Questions we discuss: Zynga boug...

Livestream shopping is a $66 billion business in China, but only a $1 billion business in the U.S. That’s likely to change soon if Facebook, Google, Amazon, Twitter, TikTok, and many other massive platforms have their way. Tech giants are investing huge sums in building live-streaming shopping in the web. Will it work? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Elma Beganovich, 5...

Quantum computing currently costs $10,000 a qubit: just one of the reasons why it's hard and expensive to scale. SEEQC is taking a different approach to building scalable million-qubit machines that can actually deliver on the promise of quantum computers and revolutionize computing. Will they succeed? Hard to say, but SEEQC just announced that they are building a commercially-scalable, applicatio...

Drones are super-cool and fun. They could also be a terrorist's favorite weapon, allowing them to strike from a distance in safety. But how do you defend against tiny, almost invisible flying machines that fly fast, elevate over fences, and can carry explosives or toxins into dangerous proximity to infrastructure and people? In this episode of the TechFirst podcast, I chat with the CEO of Dedrone,...

Billions of people have jobs that require heavy lifting, and most of them will lose health and ability over years of repetitive stress. German Bionic thinks its Cray X bionic exoskeleton, powered, by AI, will not only help workers do their jobs safely, but also help others: sick, injured, or old. Cray X helps workers lift with 66 pounds of lifting support, and uses rechargeable batteries so you ca...

It is NEXT YEAR PREDICTIONS time again :-) This TechFirst we're chatting with App Annie CEO Ted Krantz about what's hot, what's big, and what's growing in mobile in 2022. Fintech, sure. Social monetization, yep. TikTok continuing to blast off, yes. Plus billions being spent in metaverse (yes! already!) and the ever-expanding billion-download-app club. We also chat some Roblox, NikeLand, crypto, Su...

(Sponsored by my creator coin: $SMRT . Get some here: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ .) If crypto is the future of finance, the future sucks. It’s hard. Complicated. Easy to screw up. And when you do screw up, you can simply drop tens of thousands of dollars worth of crypto into the void, never to be seen again. (And we haven’t talked about the scams or the hacks yet.) Coincast is trying to solve...

Unity might be better positioned than any other company to usher in the Oasis ... AKA the metaverse. 71% of the top thousand mobile games are made with the technology. Half of all mobile PC and console games are also made with Unity. Unity is inherently open, running on over 20 different platforms. The world's already there: 2.5 billion people are playing games built with Unity. So I'm wondering ....

Adtech is in upheaval. We've seen 7 billion-dollar acquisitions so far this year and we've seen massive change: Uber Eats has an ad network. Doordash has an ad network. Gaming company Zynga owns an ad network. CVS and Walgreens recently launched ad networks too. So what is an ad network these days? And are emerging titans like Unity, ironSource, Applovin, and Liftoff+Vungle going to be able to cha...

Crypto is hard. Wallets are hard. NFTs are hard. Connecting to DApps, distributed apps, is hard. Brave is trying to make that simpler by building all of this functionality right into its privacy-safe browser. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave. We chat about the new functionality in the Brave browser, why building a wallet nativel...

Most smart homes are aftermarket affairs: cobbled together bits and pieces of Alexa and Google and Apple HomeKit to make our lights go on, our music play, our security systems work, and our blinds to go up and down. What about building it in from the start? KB Home has built over 650,000 homes in the US. The company was the first builder to make every home ENERGY STAR® certified, and is now making...

There are perhaps a billion buildings on the planet. Maybe a million of those are of significant size, and all of them are going to be smart at some point in the future. The problem? Every smart building is a one-off. Every building is unique. There's no way to make them -- or 10s of millions of warehouses or factories -- smart in the same way, at the same time, quickly, cheaply, easily. That's a...

How do CISOs sleep at night? By failing fast, apparently. In this episode of TechFirst we chat with HP chief information security officer Joanna Burkey and Siemens USA CISO Kurt John on hacking, cracking, and yes ... even sleeping at night. You are going to get hacked, says John. And yet, he can sleep at night because the point of his cybersecurity is to fail fast but fail noisily and recover quic...

Can an entire farm be a complex multi-component robot? According to AppHarvest CTO Josh Lessing ... sure. Kind of. AppHarvest builds greenhouses that know what's happening. Can control light. Control fertilizer and irrigation. Even control pollination, and when is the right time to harvest the crop. Plus, of course, actually harvest the crop by robot. In this episode of TechFirst, we chat about th...

Apple is complicit in Chinese censorship. There’s simply no other way to put it. Thousands of apps have been deleted from the Chinese Apple App Store, including recently a Quran app and a Bible app. Plus hundreds of games, social apps, and more. Apple has to do business in China. That's just realistic. And it has to obey the laws of countries it does business in. That's also just realistic. ...

The Carbon Robotics self-driving farm bot kills weeds with lasers: 8 150-watt lasers, to be precise. That’s pretty cool, but much cooler is that no toxic herbicides are required. That’s safer for the farmer, better for the soil, and produces better crops. In this episode of TechFirst, we check out the robot, talk to the CEO of Carbon Robotics Paul Mikesell, and see the results on the fields. Links...