The Tech Jawn: Black Tech Enthusiasts Covering The Week's Tech News And How Tech Affects Black Culture

Khaby Lame is now the biggest TikTok creator in the world with over 142.8 million followers. Even with all the positive stories of black women getting into I.T., the pay gap between white men and black women Is actually widening.  Eminent Future and it is black founder and president Isaac Barnes were recently awarded a $13.4 billion defense contract with the U.S. Airforce and the U.S. Spacefo...

We’ve got a special Juneteenth edition of the Tech Jawn where this week, we are joined by serial entrepreneur, business consultant, and Web3 strategist, Florcy Morisset to talk to us about Web3 and what's in it for us. But, before we get to the interview we talk about how only a couple of tech shows made it into a Top 100 Black Podcast list and we ponder if gunshot location systems actually do mor...

Is Google’s artificially intelligent chatbot generator LaMDA showing signs of sentience? Most likely not, but, AI, in general, is getting awfully good at fooling humans. Jack Dorsey and Jaz-Z are teaming up to launch a bitcoin-focused financial literacy program. The Bitcoin Academy will launch in Brooklyn’s Marcy housing projects, have free in-person and online classes, and provide parti...

Apple held its WWDC22 Keynote and we recap some of the new hardware and software coming out in the coming months. Tesla and about 50% of other companies want their employees back in the office 100% of the time, but, many employees are willing to change jobs and even careers to not have to go back to commuting 5 days a week. Oregon is shutting down its automated Child Welfare algorithm which dispro...

Normally, The Tech Jawn crew records new episodes on Mondays, but, with the long Memorial Day weekend, we decided to take a little hiatus and will be back to you with a new episode next week. We didn't, however, want to just leave you with nothing to listen to so we chopped up a few clips from some of our favorite episodes and we're dropping the Best Of The Tech Jawn. Hope you enjoyed yo...

Will Apple be found liable for the permanent hearing loss suffered by a 12-year-old boy wearing AirPods during an Amber Alert? Google does an about-face when it comes to allowing users to keep their free legacy G Suite Accounts. It does make you jump through a few hoops though. The Great Resignation is real and it is creating real opportunities for underrepresented communities in IT. &nb...

What legal and moral responsibilities do social media companies have to remove violent content from their platforms? Does Elon Musk really want to buy Twitter? The deal is currently on hold and public spats with the CEO have analysts wondering. USB-C may be coming to the iPhone 15 next year. And we dive into Google i/o. Google announced new hardware, new software, and the company seems to be for r...

AI used in a Northwestern study of police departments is showing that a small percentage of officers own a disproportionate share of the misconduct. The “Chip Shortage” is actually making the chip shortage worse because chip manufacturers can’t get the chips they need to make the chips we need. The Amazon union saga is far from over as it fires managers who “didn’t prevent” the Staten Island wareh...

What things should we do to manage our digital footprint after we die?  We probably should have a plan for all of our data, all of our accounts, and all of our financial information to make things easier for the loved ones that we leave behind. No one really likes them, but, ads in our media, social and traditional, work better than you might think they do. And, Apple’s Self Service Repair is...

Elon Musk secured financing for his $46.5 billion takeover bid of Twitter and Twitter’s board has reconsidered and accepted his offer. Patreon creates the new “Pull Up” incubator for creators of color and offers resources, training, and funding for marginalized small business owners. The recently launched CNN+ streaming service calls it quits barely 3 weeks after its debut.  And, the EU...

Details on how Twitter’s upcoming edit button might work have surfaced and we all have different takes on how we feel about it. Slack-like communities are coming to WhatsApp Messenger and this could give the super-popular messaging app more of a social media app look and feel. Flossing on the Gram is not really a good idea right after you have just filed for bankruptcy. And we interview Jeremy But...

Elon Musk and Twitter had a heck of a week.  Musk buys 9.2% of the stock becoming the biggest shareholder, is offered a seat on the board, but turns it down.  Twitter also announces that it is adding an “Edit” button to the platform.  They’ve been working on it for over a year and the feature will first come to Twitter Blue subscribers. Dall. E is a neural network AI that can create...

Facebook’s News Feed was doling out misinformation for months due to a bug in its ranking algorithm that affected as much as half of all views. Elon Musk purchased a 9.2% stake in Twitter becoming the company's biggest individual shareholder. Apple and Meta shared user personal data with hackers pretending to be law enforcement. And Amazon workers on Staten Island voted to form a union. We’ve got...

Will Smith smacking the taste out of Chris Rock’s mouth at the Oscars isn’t necessarily a tech story, but it needs to be discussed.  Proposed EU legislation may require messaging platforms to interoperate, but the bigger issue may be getting the carriers to roll out a standard like RCS. Is an Apple hardware subscription plan a good thing for consumers? And Tesla is straight buggin when it com...

Facebook locks a bunch of users out of their accounts for not turning on Facebook Protect.  The problem was that Facebook’s email notification looked like a phishing scam which was largely ignored. The global chip shortage is getting real and it's getting worse.  First it was graphic cards that became impossible to buy.  Now some SUVs are shipping without the chips that control seat...

Instagram introduces Enhanced Tags which should make it easier for professional accounts and influencers to receive credit for their work.  Apple Announces the M1 Ultra, the new Mac Studio, and the 5K Studio Display, and they all sound kind of awesome. And we interview Gary Joanis , Pharmaceutical Consultant for Viral Vaccines & Advanced Therapeutic Medicines for Sequoia Consulting Group,...

Apple’s Privacy Update wiped out over a quarter trillion dollars in market cap from 4 of the big social media companies. Google is thinking about privacy too, but it ain’t going quite as hard as Apple. Michael Jordan and son’s NFT project Heir is doing “OK” out the gate but it did have to pull back from initial projections. YouTube is offering up $50,000 in cash to popular podcasts to convert...

We kick off this week’s episode of The Tech Jawn with talk about TikTok and its new 10-minute time limit on videos. Is it time to move beyond passwords?   We discuss efforts to get rid of passwords completely and if everyone should be using password managers until we get to that day. A social media star with nearly 150,000 followers has been charged with armed robbery, after his very col...

Some people are outraged that the New York Times has added ad tracking to Wordle, but, should they really be though? Privacy settings on your social media won’t protect you from snitching on yourself as authorities in Wisconsin use Facebook to identify suspects in acts of property damage after the Jacob Blake police shooting protests in Kenosha. And what is the proper protocol for online redemptio...

It was Superbowl weekend and although we weren’t blown away by many of the commercials we did notice that Google is putting real marketing behind Real Tone. A black couple opens the world’s first autonomous grocery store in Atlanta, and it even has delivery robots that keep your food hot or cold. TikTok missed the mark with its Black History Month event leaving black creators out of the conversati...

In this week’s episode of The Tech Jawn, we interview Ekow Sanni-Thomas, founder of Inside Voices , an online platform that helps job-seekers figure out how companies treat people of color by hearing from current employees. But, before we get to the interview we talk about how Atlanta is becoming quite the Tech Hub and why Yelp has only used its Racist Behavior consumer alert twice in 16 months. L...

It’s Black History Month and, for at least the second year in a row, Apple is highlighting black voices throughout the month of February.  Meta might want to change some of its policies and controls in the Metaverse as it relates to sexual harassment. A 43-year-old British woman claims she was virtually groped by a gang of male avatars within a minute of logging in. Flexible Work from An...

We kick this episode of The Tech Jawn off with a tech story or two, but, we’ve got a special guest interview for you this week. We chop it up with Shawn Gunn , co-founder and CEO PLLAY , an Artificial Intelligence-driven wagering and data analytics platform for video gamers.  Shawn has also played a key role in helping multiple companies successfully exit, having raised over $50 million...

There is a new game word game taking the internet by storm.  It’s called Wordle, It’s completely free, and, by design, it’s not a time suck. Is the next wave of watching sports a courtside VR experience?  With the Oculus Quest 2, you may be able to “be at the game” without actually being at the game. Rebundle, a black-owned, women-founded, haircare startup that creates plant-based hair e...

Google is concerned that Apple allows iMessage users to bully Android users.  If true Google is probably just as much to blame. Timnit Gebru launches the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute to focus on how bias in Artificial Intelligence harms marginalized groups. Due to the pandemic CES this year still wasn’t the CES of old, but, that didn’t stop the auto manufacturers fro...