TechFirst with John Koetsier

Raising $1.75 billion wasn’t enough to make Quibi a success. Nor was a massive spend on advertising. The short-form video startup had a short six-month lifespan during which it spent at least $63 million on TV, web, and print ads, according to ad intelligence firm MediaRadar. While that’s a significant amount of money on marketing, it’s only good for fifth place in the streaming video category behind four other players: Amazon Prime, Disney+, Hulu, and Peacock. So what did cause its ultimate failure?

58% of global e-commerce is concentrated in just six companies. And just four Chinese companies account for almost half of global digital sales. Global e-commerce reached $3.4 trillion last year, according to a new report from Activate Consulting. Thousands of brands and retailers divvy up just 37% share of that, while six giants who are mostly Chinese companies vacuum up more than half of the pie.  The Forbes story for this episode is here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/21/44-of-global-ecommerce-is-owned-by-4-chinese-companies/

Cinnamon is a new video platform with a couple of unique features. First, you get paid for videos you upload. Second, it happens without ads. And third, it plans to bridge the gap between creators and viewers with a technology called Shorts that makes creators out of consumers. To get the scoop, we’re chatting with the CEO, Róbert Tarabčák.

Apple is removing a browser app from the App Store that allows people to play Stadia, Google’s streaming game service, according to the developer. “My app is being removed from the App Store,” Zachary Knox tweeted today about his Stadium Full Screen Browser app. “I was ‘extending WebKit’ by hooking it into the native GameController framework and thus Bluetooth controllers, which they didn’t like.” The full story for this episode is on Forbes here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/19/apple-booting-browser-app-that-enables-google-stadia-streaming-games-developer-says/

Can the Dyson Pure Hot + Cool clean your air from smoke and soot?  That’s what I have been testing for parts of the past few months during the western fires that hit California, Oregon, and Washington State. They’ve been banished from the news cycle thanks to the impending election, but the fires this summer were devastating, horrific, and massive.  When you can’t breathe safely, few other things in life matter. The Forbes story for this podcast episode is here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/10/18/dyson-hotcool-cleaned-70-of-smoke-particles-from-my-air-during-the-fires-in-california-oregon-washington/

Should social media censor free speech? Something fairly unprecedented happened this past week: Facebook and Twitter both blocked a NY Post story. Now … whatever you think about that story (and I think it’s pretty flimsy) blocking it almost immediately is pretty shocking. How should social media deal with controversial subjects … or false information? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Bill Ottman, founder and CEO of the open source social network Minds.com, about what big tech and big social should do, about algorithms, shadow banning, free speech, virality, and what Ottman is doing with Minds.com to fix it.

Do we now have near real-time gene sequencing? And if so … what does that unlock? In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Dr Roel Wuyts, principal scientist at IMEC and a professor at KU Leuven about gene sequencing, which used to take a lot of time. Remember the Human Genome project? It started October 1, 1990 and completed in April 2003. Now there’s a way of sequencing a whole genome in just 10 minutes for some sequences and a few hours for a whole human genome, which should unlock major new capabilities like personalized medicine and smarter treatment of currently deadly diseases. Full transcript will go here: https://johnkoetsier.com/category/tech-first/ Forbes story will go here: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/

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.