TechFirst with John Koetsier

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 problem Mapped is trying to solve. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with CEO and founder Shaun Cooley (and his dog) about scaling the smartification of the world's buildings. Links: Mapped: https://www.mapped.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 

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 quickly.  45% of workers are buying their own computers 68% say security wasn't a factor 74% of IT teams are seeing jumps in phishing 49% of us click on suspicious emails 70% of those don't report it to IT It's tough out there. These two CISOs share their strategies for living and working in an era of increased hacking and security breaches. Links: 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

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 the future of farming ... and there's a lot of technology involved. Achieving 20-100X better productivity with 70% less water and far less CO2 emission is key. So is the development of Virgo, a universal picking robot that is designed to emulate the flexibility and control of a human hand for soft crops like tomatoes, strawberries, and cucumbers. Links: AppHarvest: https://www.appharvest.com Support TechFirst with $SMRT coin: 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

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.  Sideloading could enable both. Links: 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

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: Carbon Robotics: https://carbonrobotics.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  0:00 Laser-powered weed killer 0:47 AI, computer vision, robotics 1:48 Herbicides and weeds 3:50 Health impact and food quality 5:42 Robots with lasers 8:18 How it works 12:13 Autonomous driving 13:08 Speed and ROI 15:11 Solar powered? 17:31 Lighting and computer vision  21:21 Future of farm robots

Do you want sushi by drone? Ice cream or coffee in 2 minutes? Wing is Google's drone division (OK, Alphabet's!) and is doing just that right now in three locations around the world. They're planning to scale globally and in the U.S., but are working out all the kinks and regulatory permissions. And they just announced some exciting news: first of its kind rooftop drone stations at a mall. You order on an app, a retailer preps your item, attaches it to a drone, and it flies to you at 110 km/hour. In this edition of TechFirst, we're chatting with Jonathan Bass, Wing’s head of marketing and communications. Links: Wing: https://wing.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  0:00 50X more efficient 1:12 Rooftop delivery service 2:54 How long does drone delivery take? 3:59 How Wing's drone delivery works 6:34 What customers say 7:00 Retailers and drone delivery 9:01 Where's Amazon? 11:00 When will Wing scale?

Avi Bar-Zeev has been working on the metaverse for 30 years. He’s one of the key people behind Microsoft’s Hololens, co-founded Keyhole which became Google Earth, helped define Second Life’s technology, and has worked with Apple on, presumably, its rumored smartglasses. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Ari about the metaverse, what it is, what it isn’t, and how AR and VR connect (if they do). We also talk about what AR should be, about how it could fail, and the very real dangers it could represent.  We discuss the one absolute necessity of the metaverse: interoperability. We ask whether a visual metaphor for the presentation of information is just unnecessary most of the time. We also we explore the future of life in an augmented reality rich environment, and the privacy implications of the metaverse. 0:00 Virtual enslavement 0:25 What is the metaverse? 4:52 Lessons of Hololens 7:05 Dangers of augmented reality 11:26 VR, the metaverse, and interoperability 14:22 Visual metaphors and metaverse 17:21 AR vs VR: convergence? 22:13 Life in the metaverse 26:10 Admin privs to your reality 28:07 Building the future Links: RealityPrime: https://www.realityprime.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

Here's (almost) everything Amazon announced for smart home just two days ago, including Amazon Astro, Ring Always Home Cam, Ring Alarm Pro, Ring Video Doorbell, and more Ring, Ring, Ring everything. There's also the Echo Show 15 and the Amazon Glow. But the big picture is how Amazon is competing with Google and Apple in smart home ... and it's not even close. Apple has almost nothing for smart home beyond HomeKit. Google has a few Nest products, but has been very slow to release more ... Links: 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

Can I only experience a Facebook metaverse in Oculus Quest? Can I only enter your virtual event with an HTC Vive Pro? Or can we build connections, doors, windows, and pathways through all digital realities that anyone can access with smartphone, laptop, or -- yes -- a VR headset? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with Hans Elstner, the CEO of Rooom. Rooom offers the "first all-in-one platform for content in 2D, 3D, AR and VR." In other words: digital realities that anyone can access.  This is super-important in a era of silos and platforms and barriers. And if you want literally hundreds of thousands of people to attend your virtual event ... as Rooom did with IFA 2020. Links: Rooom: https://www.rooom.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

We know carbon fiber is strong: 60X stronger than steel. The problem has always been finding ways to 3D print it at speed, and for large objects. Arevo says it's found the solution: "'the world's first high speed additive manufacturing system for continuous carbon fiber composite structures." It's literally the size of a shipping container, and it can print a volume about a meter cubed. Companies pay hundreds to thousands of dollars per kilogram for carbon fiber products, and Arevo says it has the fastest and best way to make them on the fly. Stronger and better because it's true 3D printing, not 2.5D, and faster: a monocoque carbon fiber bike frame in about a day. Links: Arevo: https://arevo.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  0:00 60X stronger than steel 1:23 3D printing carbon fiber 3:40 Shipping container-sized 3D printer 5:11 Monocoque thermoplastic printing 8:55 $SMRT coin 9:25 3D printing speed 13:23 2000 3D printed bikes per month 15:40 3D printing vertically AND horizontally 17:01 Future of 3D printing 19:34 National security and manufacturing 21:55 3D printing ... 1 order of magnitude away