You might think the iPhone 12 starts at one dollar under $800. You might even have a distinct memory of seeing a price that looked suspiciously like $799 during the Apple special event yesterday. And you’d be right on one of those two beliefs. (The latter.) This story is live on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/14/no-the-iphone-12-doesnt-actually-cost-799/

We watched almost 7.5 billion hours of live streaming content in the last three months, up 92% from last year. Amazingly, just one company owns a massive 91.1% share of all the hours streamed: the Amazon-owned Twitch. So Twitch is definitely the 900-pound gorilla of the live-streaming category. Or it is it? This story is published on Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/07/livestreaming-youtube-facebook-destroy-twitch-in-at-least-one-critical-category/

Could Apple and Google soon be two of the most important companies in health? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with former Apple CEO John Sculley, who has invested in multiple health tech companies. Apple owns the most popular healthtech wearable on the planet, and Google bought Fitbit to compete. Both are investing in health, fitness, and wellness technology. Current Apple CEO Tim Cook has even said that Apple’s greatest contribution to history will be in the field of health. Amazon's jumping into health too, with Amazon Halo. We talk about who will win, who are the other players, and what Sculley sees as the future of health care in the U.S. and globally.

In the stone ages of mobile a couple of years ago, you actually had to tap on an app icon and open an app in order to access its functionality. While backwards, onerous, and tedious, this ensured that if I was ordering Air Jordans from Shoe Giant #1 or a Big Mac from Ronald McDonald, I would have at least a couple of interactions with the Nike brand or McDonalds. Now, now so much. This story is live at Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/08/developers-google-siri-alexa-are-an-abstraction-layer-over-your-apps/

Drone deliveries won’t be common until we figure out distributed charging. But maybe … we already have ... In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Leonid Plekhanov from Global Energy Transmission (GET). GET has a last-mile in-air fast charging solution for drones (and another for undersea drones). Amazon’s been touting drone delivery for years. And this summer, Domino’s delivered a pizza to a customer on the beach via drone. But really, no-one's doing this at scale. With the ability to charge your drones wherever they go, the much-needed last-mile solution might now be here. Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes story will be here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

Is the future of robotics in the cloud? In this episode of TechFirst we're chatting with and Amazon exec, AWS Robotics general manager Roger Barga, about how Amazon’s “fake” robots are making real robots smarter, faster. We’re seeing more and more robots in manufacturing, services, hospitality, and almost every other industry ... but there are still huge gaps in software to run and manage and coordinate all our robots and drones. Amazon's reducing the cost to train, test and deploy robots by a factor of perhaps 1,000 thanks to AWS RoboMaker and WorldForge. We chat about companies like iRobot that are vastly improving their robots, the future of robotics in both the near and far term, and how Amazon 'eats its own dog food' by using AWS RoboMaker to train and deploy robots in its own warehouses.

Health and fitness apps are winning the Covid-19 era, thanks to closed gyms. But a certain kind of health and fitness app is winning mobile, according to a new report from Apptopia. “Six out of ten of the top Health & Fitness apps are apps that offer video workouts or video-guided exercises,” Apptopia says. “If non-workout apps like Calm, Headspace, and Flo were not included here, the ratio of video to non-video fitness apps would be even greater.” This story is currently live at Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/05/the-top-10-health--fitness-apps-of-2020-have-one-thing-in-common-mostly/ 

Can you share personal photos online … without sharing your face with the giant global database that is the internet? And, can you share photos of crowds of people, or demonstrations, without subjecting everyone in those photos to AI-driven searches and privacy violations? Brighter AI thinks they have a solution, and in this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the CEO, Marian Glaeser. Essentially, his technology replaces every face with an AI-generated substitute to ensure you can share your pictures in a privacy-safe way. What becomes a question, however, is how real your photos are now ...

Are 50 million YouTube, Instagram, and Twitch creators the new founders? And … are they far more numerous and economically important than we think? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we’re chatting with Yuanling Yuan (AKA YY), a senior associate at SignalFire. She recently did a massive study of the creator economy, finding that of the more than 50 million “creators” in the world on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Twitch, and TikTok, two million of them are professionals, earning a full-time living. And that number is growing fast. Full transcript will be here: https://johnkoetsier.com/ YY on Twitter: https://twitter.com/YuanlingY SignalFire: https://www.signalfire.com

There’s now a Google TV as well as an Apple TV. A new Chromecast. Google Home is now Nest Audio, and there are now new Google Pixel smartphones. Google released not quite a googolplex of new consumer hardware and software services today in its “Launch Night In” event. Here’s a rundown ... My post on Forbes, with pictures: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/09/30/everything-google-announced-including-pixel-4a-5g-pixel-5-google-tv-chromecast-nest-audio/