Everyone is investing in India lately. In April, Facebook announced it was investing $5.7 billion in India. In January it was Amazon, investing $1 billion in India. Today’s it’s Google (or its parent company, Alphabet) investing $10 billion in partnerships, infrastructure, and ecosystems. Since China’s closed, the giants have to invest elsewhere, apparently.

TikTok was THE mobile phenomenon of 2019 with almost 700M app installs. But with the ban talk getting louder and louder ... are other contenders poised to steal its thunder?  We chat with one of the owners and board members of Triller, which has over 100M installs ... and just got a bump of 40M new installs in India after the TikTok ban.  Triller thinks TikTok will get banned in the U.S, as well as in India. And Triller is trying to take full advantage of that by poaching all of TikTok's creators and helping the monetize 2X more on Triller than they did on TikTok ...

Ads suck and we all know it. They’re invasive, they track us, they create horrible user experiences, and most of the time, they’re incredibly annoying. The future’s not like that ... and here's why. In this edition of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the creator of Javascript, Brendan Eich (co-founder/CEO of Brave Software) and Carolina Abenante (founder of NYIAX). Using micropayments, permission, edge AI, blockchain, and crypto, they're creating a future in which you only see ads from brands you want to, you don’t sacrifice privacy when you see an ad, and you get paid for your attention. In a lot of ways, that future is now.

Can AI help us connect trillions of smart devices? There are currently perhaps 20 billion devices connected to the internet: things like laptops, phones, smartwatches, TVs, smart speakers, smart home devices ... In a decade, that could be 50 billion … and a lot of it is enterprise IoT. In this edition of the The AI Show with John Koetsier we chat with Intel and the National Science Foundation, which has funded $30M+ into projects to use AI to figure out how we'll manage ultra-dense wireless networks ... how we'll keep it secure, and how we'll keep everything connected. Joining me in this episode: Vida Ilderem, VP, Intel Labs Thyaga Nandagopal, National Science Foundation Pu Wang, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

3.8 billion people on the planet don’t have access to the internet. But that could be about to change soon. While Elon Musk’s SpaceX is building internet access from satellites 340 miles off the earth in space, Google’s Project Loon is doing something similar. In Loon’s case, however, internet access comes from just 12 miles up in the stratosphere. Via balloons floating in the wind.

Recently Apple blocked updates to the Hey email app on the iOS App Store and threatened to delete it. What does this tell us about App Store guidelines? And unwritten rules? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat about Apple's App Store guidelines with Denys Zhadanov, a VP at Readdle. Readdle has 7 top-30 apps in the App Store including the Spark email app which competes with Hey. There’s always been controversy that Apple isn’t allowing competition for its own apps and services, and the EU antitrust division is looking into it now. We dive in with an App Store insider.

50% of the food produced globally is wasted. At the same time, a child dies from hunger every 10 seconds, and 25,000 people starve to death every single day. Another billion, almost, are malnourished and don't have enough food. Can AI fix this? In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with SPRK.Global CEO Alexander Piutti, who is a finalist in Samsung's Extreme Tech Challenge startup competition.

Are subscriptions the new retail? We know digital retail is way up, thanks to COVID. But … surprisingly ... subscription purchases are way up too.  Streaming: jumped up to 89.8% Consumer goods: growth of 105%-145% Education: growth as high as 60% SaaS/Cloud: subscriber growth peaked at 51% That's interesting because we tend not to want long-term commitments especially during a downturn. We chat about all the details with Dan Burkhart, CEO of Recurly.

Can we design AI that will teach itself how to drive a car?  Self-driving cars will unlock trillions in market value and probably change our lives with fractional car ownership, better ride-sharing ... maybe even cars that pay for themselves. Also … they'll give us back months if not years of our time that we currently spend driving. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier we chat with Helm.ai CEO Vlad Voroninski. Helm.ai has developed a new AI technology it calls "Deep Teaching" which it says will make it 100,000 times cheaper to train self-driving car AIs.

What can we learn from the queen of LinkedIn about telling stories for warm robots?  If you’ve been around LinkedIn, you’ve probably noticed Goldie Chan. The green hair makes her stand out … but her consistent calm, positive, and supportive content help you center and ground and ... sure, even feel good about yourself. Goldie started doing video on LinkedIn, and never really stopped. She has the longest daily video streak on LinkedIn, and got shoutouts from top execs there as well as elsewhere, which has turned into an amazing career in speaking, consulting, writing for Forbes and ... telling stories. A couple of weeks ago I spent some time with Goldie on her show. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, Goldie's coming on TechFirst to share what she does best.