TechFirst with John Koetsier

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, 50% of the iconic influencer duo Amra & Elma. Former lawyers and economists, now entrepreneurs, they started their own influencer marketing agency and have over two million followers. A major focus now: livestream shopping. We chat about why it’s happening. Who does it. Why people shop via livestream. And where it’s likely to go. Links: Amra & Elma: https://www.amraandelma.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

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, application-specific quantum computer for pharmaceutical drug development. Merck has bought one, and the company is partnering with Riverlane and Oxford Instruments to make it a reality. The real challenge here is to take quantum computing from a V2 rocket era, CEO John Levy says, and bring it into the SpaceX era. In other words, to generate real, massive, lasting, and provable value from quantum computers ... which, let's be honest, we haven't really seen yet. Links: SEEQC: https://seeqc.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

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, which "dedrones" sensitive airspaces using sensors, AI, machine learning, and orchestration of defense and interdiction activity via lasers, jamming, and yes ... "putting lead on it." Links: Dedrone: https://www.dedrone.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

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 can wear it all day. It's built with carbon fibre so it's light, and it's built-in AI learns your patterns to assist better. Best part: at the end of the day the AI tells you how many tons you've lifted and what you've done ... essentially gamifying work. Links: German Bionic: https://www.germanbionic.com/en/home/ Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

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, Subway Surfers (still around! still killing it!) and The Company Formerly Known As Facebook. Enjoy! Links: App Annie: https://www.appannie.com/ Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier 

(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 that by making sending crypto as easy as texting. The genesis of the company: a techie trying to get his aunt to buy some crypto, back when Bitcoin was cheap. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Albert Renshaw, CEO of Coincast, and long-time mobile app developer, founder, and entrepreneur. What we chat about: - Coincast - Cryptocurrency wallets - Crypto and stress - Gas fees - Business model - The future of crypto - And much more … Links: Coincast: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coincast-send-crypto/id1517543384 Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1 

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 ... Unity has the planets, the rooms, the solar systems ... when is it going to build the galaxy, the corridors, the connections? In this episode of TechFirst I chat with Julie Shumaker, who leads growth at Unity. Links: Unity: https://unity.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

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 challenging the reigning heavyweights: Google & Facebook? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I'm chatting with Mark Ellis, the CEO of Liftoff or … Liftoff + Vungle or … name-to-be-revealed-at-some-point-in-the-future ... Links: Liftoff: https://liftoff.io/ Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier

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 natively into a browser is safer than doing it via an extension, and his vision of the future. Links: Brave: https://brave.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier Photo by Executium on Unsplash

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 a concerted effort to make every home smart. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier I chat with Dan Bridleman, the company’s SVP of technology. Links: KB Home: https://www.kbhome.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coins: https://rally.io/creator/SMRT/ Buy $SMRT to join a community focused on tech for good: the emerging world of smart matter. Access my private Slack, get your name in my book, suggest speakers for TechFirst ... and support my work. TechFirst transcripts: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes columns: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/  Subscribe to the podcast: https://anchor.fm/techfirst  Full videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/johnkoetsier?sub_confirmation=1  Keep in touch: https://twitter.com/johnkoetsier