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.

Can forests be banks?  A new venture capital group is buying forests and wetlands. But they’re not cutting down the trees or starting farms ... they’re monetizing nature by selling carbon offsets, and looking to see increased value in the underlying assets. The goal for land owners? The ability to do nothing while making money. In other words, NOT cutting down the trees, NOT putting in a mine, NOT draining the wetlands. The goal for businesses and people? The ability to buy carbon offsets ... and invest in the bank of nature. Full transcript coming at: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/

Imagine a "rocket" that only uses electricity. Have a ragtag group of physicists and engineers exploited a little-known feature of Einstein's equations to built a true propellant-less space drive that doesn't require reaction mass ... just electricity? James Woodward, physics professor emeritus at Fullerton, thinks so. NASA has funded new research into it, and the result if successful would be the ultimate EV ... an electric vehicle that not only can propel a space ship to the planets and the stars, but also lift off out of gravity wells like Earth's.

PewDiePie is the top creator on YouTube, with over 107M subscribers and 26B views. Now he’s coming to Facebook, and we’re chatting with the cofounder of the company making it happen. Jellysmack is an influencer platform whose creators have a combined 10 billion monthly video views and reaches 125M unique viewers just in the United States. Co-founder Michael Philippe chats with us about bringing PewDiePie to the platform: why, how, what content, what's changing, what's not, and who he thinks PewDiePie's fans will be on Facebook. We also chat about the changing media/creator/influencer landscape, and what this is growing into.

We’re in a crazy, complex, almost alternate reality now. We see hacking from nation-states, hacking from criminals, hacking for fun, hacking for profit ... and there's probably worse that we don't see. In that context, how does a Chief Information Security Officer function? We chat with Twitter's CISO Rinki Sethi and Info-Tech Research Group analyst Frank Sargent about information security in 2021. Topics:  - Russia  - SolarWinds Orion and Supernova hacks  - Big tech  - Social engineering  - US elections Most importantly, we talk about the stakes if we don't get this right ... to our power systems, to our government processes, to our military secrets, and to the companies that run the infrastructure that our lives depend on.

Intel's Loihi chip is a neuromorphic chip which tries to emulate the human brain. As far as we've come with convention computing, we are still way behind tiny organisms like insects and birds at understanding the world and adapting to it. Now Intel is applying neuromorphic computing to autonomous drones: drones that can fly themselves at high speed in challenging, obstacle-filled environments. To do, essentially, what birds and bats and even tiny-brained insects can already do with ease. How? Partially, thanks to the Loihi chip,  which implements probabilistic computing to deal with uncertainty and ambiguity in in the natural world.  We chat with Mike Davies, who leads Intel's neuromorphic computing lab about how it all works ... Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ My guest works at Intel: https://www.intel.com/ And you can watch the full video on my YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/c89S-oV-H1U 

The internet of things sounds great, but has huge issues. Ubiquity is one. Battery power is another. Cost of sensors -- and sensing tech to sense the sensors -- is another. But perhaps ... we're about to solve all the problems. Wiliot makes a super-smart ARM-based chip with onboard sensors that harvests energy from environmental radio waves to enable battery-free IoT. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I interview Stephen Statler, a senior VP at Wiliot. The chip uses a custom-built operating system operating on nanowatt power and communicates to the cloud via standard Bluetooth. Cost looks to be an order of magnitude cheaper than RFiD. We chat about what it can sense, how it works, what the use cases are, and much more. Links:  - transcript: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/  - Wiliot: https://www.wiliot.com/  - Stephen Statler's podcast, Mr Beacon: https://www.mister-beacon.com

Think about it: AI chooses your next song in Spotify, your next video in YouTube, your next news item in Flipboard, which updates from friends and family you see on Facebook, and more. Recently I had the opportunity to moderate a discussion between three AI experts: Danny Lange, who led AI at Uber and Amazon before jumping to Unity; Beena Ammanath, Executive Director of Deloitte AI Institute and Founder of Humans for AI; Cindy Gordon, CEO of SalesChoice and a writer at Forbes. We chatted about: How much impact AI has today Surveillance capitalism Reality bubbles Inclusion and normalization of bias Deepfakes and identifying what is real Building responsible AI Please enjoy … along with a new intro style and new intro music!

What changes when quantum computing is mainstream? Quantum computing is on the far reaches of science, using technology that accesses aspects of matter at quantum scales where physics almost overlaps with magic.  Classical computing is simple: deterministic. You have something, or you have nothing. Quantum computing is complex: you can have something, or nothing, or both something and nothing at the same time. If that’s hard to wrap your head around, you’re in good company. Even Richard Feyman, 1965 Nobel Laureate in Physics and one of the founders of quantum computing famously said, “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.” But we’re seeing major advancements in quantum computing today. You can now write a program and deploy it on quantum computers from anywhere. And D-Wave says that it's doubling qubits every 2 years. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Alan Baratz, president and CEO of D-Wave.

There’s a brand-new sensor in the iPhone 12 Pro, and it’s a big clue about the future of technology.  Already just 1 month after iPhone 12 launch, the phone accounts for 5% of new uploads to Sketchfab, the largest global platform for immersive and interactive 3D models. It's much faster, high-quality especially at room-scale, but not the best at small-scale objects. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Alban Denoyal, the CEO of Sketchfab about why. And about the implications of 3D scanning: where it's used, what it can do, and what it's changing in augmented reality, mixed reality, VR, and more.