TechFirst with John Koetsier

Pilot free level 4 drone autonomy? Exyn Technologies says they've achieved it, and in this episode we chat with CEO Nader Elm. Topics: what drone autonomy means, what level 4 looks like, and, crucially, what this unlocks for search, rescue, research, security, surveillance, inspection, delivery, and many more drone operations. According to Exyn, this is no longer point-to-point flight, but open ex...

iOS 14.5 is perhaps the biggest change in the mobile ecosystem in a decade.  While most iPhone owners might not see that much change, for the first time they are getting a choice about whether they allow adtech companies and brands to track them around the internet. For the first five years of mobile, anyone who wanted it got our hard-coded UDID, or universal device identifiers. After about 2...

Imagine the ability to have a say in who I interview next. Imagine owning a token from your favorite creator or artist that gives you special access or a closer connection. Now imagine it’s a currency that can grow as the community does. And can be used to purchase goods and services ... or even exchanged for US dollars That’s a creator coin. Recently Rally.io raised $57M to make literally a milli...

Would you feel awkward wearing hearing aids? About 20% of people have hearing loss. But only a third of them will actually wear hearing aids. Too many people just don't want the stigma of hearing aids. (Or all those finicky wires!) But what if they looked just like regular earbuds? Like for example, Signia Actives. They look just like regular earbuds, and they adapt to different listening needs on...

Do you have to reinvent the wheel every time you build a robot? Or can you reuse significant components of functionality like vision, navigation, manual dexterity, and control software? It turns out that the answer is that you don't have to continually reinvent the wheel. And the result of asking that question was the creation of what might be the world’s first robot venture factory In, of course,...

The X Shore Eelex 8000 cruises 20 hours on battery power. It knows when you fall overboard, it won't go beyond geo-fences that you set up. It offers autopilot and it goes 35 knots or 65 kilometers an hour flat out.  It has a modular design and will save you about $800 every time you "fuel up" In this episode of tech first, we're chatting with Jenny Keisu, the CEO of X Shore, which has just re...

Clubhouse is the hot new social audio star. But Twitter Spaces is available to 30X the audience out of the box … and draws on a social graph you already own. Does that mean it’s the new winner just waiting to be crowned? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Paul Armstrong, CEO and founder of Here/Forth … and owner of the very first sponsored show on Twitter Spaces … sponsor...

Punching something is probably a good way of blowing off steam, as long as it's an inanimate object and you're not hurting anyone. It's also a surprisingly good workout. In this episode I try out Fight Camp's smart boxing fitness program and chat with the founder, former US National Team member Tommy Duquette ... now founder and CEO of Fight Camp. Links: Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https:/...

Moore's Law is dead, right? Not if we can get working photonic computers. Lightmatter is building a photonic computer for the biggest growth area in computing right now, and according to CEO Nick Harris, it can be ordered now and will ship at the end of this year. It's already much faster than traditional electronic computers a neural nets, machine learning for language processing, and AI for self...

I take a virtual tour of a virtual learning environment from The Leadership Network based on a collaboration they're doing with Toyota. Is this the future, or is it more like Microsoft Mesh's rich, textured, augmented reality? There's probably multiple modalities for the future of meetings and collaborative remote work. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I get a tour of TLN's Gemba V...

We have synthetic humans earning millions as influencers and models who are created by a computer. What’s driving this … and where’s it all going? To dig in, we’re chatting with Tyler Lastovich, who leads strategy at Generated Photos. Generated Photos makes realistic faces via AI: generative adversarial networks. They're growing incredibly fast, count most major gaming companies as their customers...

Would you wear a computer on your head? In public? What if it made you more productive? Today on TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Alex Castillo of  Neurosity, which just released the Crown. It's a brain-sensing computer you wear like a hat, and which … one day … may be a hat. Or … inserted under your skull like Elon Musk's Neuralink. Episode links: Neurosity: https://neurosity...

Nuport Robotics just landed a deal with Canada's largest retailer, Canadian Tire, and the Canadian government to test its self-driving truck capability. The technology uses lidar, cameras, and radar to guide trucks. And the company has a vision to make every truck self-driving ... not just brand-new ones coming right out of the factory. That's a big deal, because there's about 80 million trucks on...

Clubhouse is the media darling of the social audio world ... the hot date. Why? And … can Facebook and Twitter catch up? To get some answers, we’re chatting with Josh Constine. He's a former TechCrunch writer and editor-at-large who is now a venture capitalist at SignalFire. And ... Josh Constine is a Clubhouse influencer with 3.5M+ followers. Episode links: TechFirst transcripts (in about a week)...

Can you think a sleep tracker you haven't even tried might just be the best sleep tracker ever? Apparently yes. But hear me out ... there's reasons :-) Episode links: TechFirst transcripts (in about a week): https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/ Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/...

Late in 2019 two Theo Priestly and Bronwyn Williams brought together 18 futurists to share visions of tomorrow. I'm super-pumped to have a chapter in the book on our need for an AR cloud commons, and it's coming out in about a month. (Can't wait!) Now that book is available for pre-order. In this episode of TechFirst we chat with a number of those futurists and get some sneak peeks at what's comin...

What is the future of technology? Mobile is the thing right now, but augmented/mixed/virtual reality via headsets and smartglasses is coming But what about moving the tech right onto our body ... on our eyes ... with a smart contact lens. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with former Google and Apple exec, now SVP for Mojo Vision, Steve Sinclair about smart contact len...

Social audio is having a moment. We're seeing an explosion of players in the space: up to 30 at analyst and thought leader Jeremiah Owyang's last count. And that's just the beginning. We'll see an explosion of hundreds of apps in social audio shortly, says Owyang. I caught up with Jeremiah recently to chat about social audio: why it's hot, what's happening, what's driving this trend, who the key p...

Do self-driving cars need LIDAR? Elon Musk says no, but most other experts say yes. And we’re going to talk to one of them today Omer Keilaf, founder and CEO, Innoviz, who supplies lidar for BMW and other manufacturers, says LIDAR is essential, because water or mud or dust can disrupt visual sensors. And, of course, all this is happening in an era when LIDAR is getting so cheap we can have it in o...

Would you let a robot make you prettier? The LUUM lash extension robot could soon do all kind of spa treatments ... and even do hair transplants. We have robot surgery, robot manufacturing … so why not robot aestheticians? Or … lash artists? I wouldn’t know from personal experience, but getting fake lashes takes 2-3 hours. A new robot can do it in just 30 minutes ... snd could eventually do everyt...

In this episode of TechFirst we chat with Google director of engineering Ivan Poupyrev. He's making the world smart, starting with clothing (we buy 150 billion items of clothing a year, according to one estimate) released with Google's Jacquard technology. That's going to help us all move beyond screens and make technology ambient in our lives, not central, he believes. But the vision extends beyo...

Digital security sucks, and it’s about to get much worse. The question is: can quantum computing save us? In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Quantropi CEO James Nguyen, who has built the world's first non-photonic quantum key distribution over the Internet. He says that quantum computing is the next foundation of computing, period. And functioning, fast cryptography will open up our ability...

A new startup out of Harvard Labs has invented a way to print camera lenses 5,000 at a time just like computer chips, and in the same semiconductor foundries that make our computer’s CPUs. They’re 100X thinner than standard smartphone camera lenses, are simpler and cheaper to make, sense the full electromagnetic spectrum — not just visible light — and have excellent 3D-sensing capabilities that co...

Could you learn trigonometry in 3 weeks if your life depended on it? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Josh Carroll, who volunteered with the US Army after 9/11 before he finished high school,  did 3 tours of duty in Afghanistan, then came back and worked, among other jobs, as a high school janitor. In the library of the high school he was cleaning he found A Brief...

Biden’s Peloton vs national security: what’s risky about the president of the US using a Peloton or a Fitbit? And ... what does that mean for the rest of us? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with ex-googler Ben Barokas, founder and CEO of Sourcepoint, who is now running a privacy-focused company for, as he puts it "the sins" of his prior jobs in adtech.