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TechFirst with John Koetsier

Latest episodes

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Aug 14, 2020 • 10min

Phone spam is worth a massive $100B/year .... can custom verified caller visuals save old-fashioned phone calls?

Phone calls suck, right? It's always the IRS or your "bank" or some other scam. Well ... can a custom verified caller visual save phone calls? As in a guaranteed way to know who's calling AND WHY before you pick up? There's just way too much voice spam, so most people don't pick up calls from unknown numbers.  In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with First Orion CTO Mark Himelfarb about phone spam, verified visual caller IDs, and more. The question is: will it be good enough to save phone calls?
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Aug 13, 2020 • 6min

Billion-Dollar battle: Fortnite-maker Epic sues Apple for payments ‘monopoly’

Epic Games, the maker of the hit multi-platform Fortnite game, has sued Apple for anti-competitive behavior, alleging that Apple monopolizes the App Store payments process and gouges developers for 30% of their revenues. At stake is billions of dollars in revenue for Apple. And potentially billions for Google too. “At a market cap of nearly $2 trillion, Apple’s size and reach far exceeds that of any technology monopolist in history,” the lawsuit says. 
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Aug 13, 2020 • 59min

CTO of Github Jason Warner on how to build 10X products with exponential impact

In a tech-driven economy, you could argue that developers rule the world. If so, you could argue that Github rules developers, 50 million of whom are on the platform. 3 million organizations too, from NASA's Mars Rover team to enterprises to ... yeah ... me. In this episode of TechFirst, we chat with Jason Warner, the CTO of GitHub, as I interview him for Traction Conference. Things we cover: - how he started working for IBM because he could "lift heavy things" - 10X growth (of course) - how sometimes, the most important stuff is what you do NOT build - prioritization - where to start as a non-technical founder? - finding coworkers, cofounders, and employees - managing teams - working remotely - setting goals - achieving organizational alignment - Jason's biggest fear as a leader - getting unfiltered feedback - and SO. MUCH. MORE!
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Aug 11, 2020 • 18min

If data is the new oil, where’s the refinery?

Where do Google, Microsoft, and IBM go for training data and data enrichment? AI is driving innovation, competitive advantage, and speed to market ... but what if you don’t have enough training data? And what if your data is raw, not enriched, and you have no metadata to help your AI engine make sense of it? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Wendy Gonzalez, President and CEO of Samasource, which supplies training data for Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a quarter of the Fortune 50.
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Aug 11, 2020 • 7min

Apple vs Trump, Russia, and China: Will sideloading save Apple?

Apple’s App Store dominance is under fire like never before, thanks to its own desire for control of its platform, antitrust regulation at home and abroad and the vagaries of an American leader who has signed executive orders faster than any president in history. Two things in particular are major challenges: 1) Donald Trump’s recent executive order on TikTok owner ByteDance and WeChat owner Tencent 2) Russia’s new Federal Antimonopoly Service ruling against Apple Both hit at the heart of one of Apple’s current major competitive advantages: the company’s sole control of the App Store. Each does it in an entirely different way. And Apple can only escape the consequences of these moves by opening up the iPhone to “sideloading” apps. Or, in other words, smashing the single biggest law of the App Store.
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Aug 7, 2020 • 10min

Apple ad network gets special privileges that Facebook, Google won’t on iOS14

Is Apple playing fair? Apple looks to be giving its own ad network a leg up on competitors with customer data that other ad networks can’t access. In iOS 14, Apple Advertising appears to have a separate settings panel with a default-on setting. Other advertisers and ad networks on iOS, however, need to ask permission every single time. “It’s preferential access to users’ data,” mobile expert Eric Seufert says. “Now they’re best-positioned to gain market share in mobile app install ads.” That’s close to an $80 billion industry that Google and Facebook currently dominate.
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Aug 7, 2020 • 26min

Remote health revolution: heart rate, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, stress rate, all via video

There’s a new app that can tell your heart rate, heart rate variability, oxygen saturation, respiration or breathing rate, and mental stress just by taking a short video. Soon, blood pressure is coming too. Sounds crazy, right? In the episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we're joined by David Maman, CEO and co-founder of Binah.ai, to find out ...
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Aug 6, 2020 • 4min

Don't tell Trump, but TikTok’s top competitor is also Chinese owned

President Trump wants to ban TikTok in the U.S., but he’ll consider allowing a U.S. company to purchase it. As long as, in a novel twist, the U.S. government gets a cut. Meanwhile, U.S.-owned Triller is positioning itself as the biggest beneficiary to India’s TikTok ban, with 40 million new installs, and by extension, the likely winner of an American ban. But in this latest episode of Meet the Kardashians, White House edition, they’re all potentially being played. Because the fastest-growing non-TikTok short-form video entertainment app is also Chinese-owned. Economic and trade policy, meet Whack-A-Mole.
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Aug 6, 2020 • 23min

State of the global app economy: growth, diversity, and real-world impact

Two things have grown like crazy in 2020: Coronavirus, and the global app economy. 2020 has been crazy, but there’s been massive growth in some sectors, and mobile is one of them In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Lexi Sydow, a senior market insights manager at App Annie, about the state of the global app economy. The good news: some newbies are winning and it’s not all the rich becoming richer. And, mobile isn’t just about what happens on your phone anymore. We talk about:  - downloads and growth  - countries that are growing in time in apps and on devices  - surprises in the data  - time for new apps to get on to top downloads and top grossing lists  - why new apps are getting so big so quick  - new features apps are adding  - the overall economic impact of apps
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Aug 5, 2020 • 14min

High school student builds AI framework to predict air pollution with 92% accuracy

A high school student at Jericho High School in New York has built an AI framework that can predict air pollution levels with 92% accuracy using neural networks, random forest, and other techniques. That ... could be better accuracy than most weather forecasters. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Richard Ren about his framework, including how he learned to code, why he got into AI and machine learning, what data he's using, what technologies he's implementing, and what data is most predictive of high pollution levels.

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