TechFirst with John Koetsier

Late last week Amazon announced Halo, an AI-powered health service. In doing so it beat Apple to exactly what Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly told us the company was focusing on over 18 months ago. Oh, and Amazon wants your underwear selfies. Plus, recordings of everything you say.

Today Elon Musk unveiled more about his mysterious brain-to-computer interface company Neuralink, showcasing a pig named Gertrude with a “Link” installed and sharing that Neuralink has received a “Breakthrough Device” designation from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. One of the abilities he teased was being able to summon your self-driving car — a Tesla, of course — with a thought. But Musk’s ambitions extend much farther. And his Link isn’t intended just for early adopters, niche technophiliacs, or bleeding-edge cyborg wannabes. Rather, Musk intends this device for almost everyone.

How do you build 10X products and 10X startups with the potential for exponential growth? In this special episode of TechFirst, we chat with the chief product officer of Asana, Alex Hood. Asana has over 75,000 customers including customers like Google, Slack, Twitter, Harvard ...  So today we're chatting with Asana's chief product officer Alex Hood about his playbook for building high growth products: How does it work? What's it look like? And frankly, what can we copy for our own startups?

iOS is safer than Android, right? Usually ... because getting on the iOS app store is harder than getting on Google Play. There’s more scrutiny of apps, their code, and functionality.  But now, for the first time ever, security researchers have found an ad fraud network on Apple iPhones that uses click injection to steal potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s in over 1200 apps with billions of downloads, and has been since mid 2019, in apps like Talking Tom, Asphalt 9, PicsArt, Gardenscapes, and Helix Jump. It works by spying on your activity on the phone and sending fake clicks on ads it sees you engage with. To learn more, we’re going to chat with the man who found it: Danny Grander, Co-Founder & Chief Security Officer at Snyk, a digital security company. Welcome to TechFirst with John Koetsier.

Apple announced this morning that it has launched two new “radio” stations on Apple Music: Apple Music Hits, and Apple Music Country. Apple is investing significantly in its Radio product, with major stars and shows that are part talk radio, part Casey Kasem, part podcasting. An important question for stars to ask, however, is how broad an audience they can get by focusing on a single platform versus allowing their shows to appear on every platform simultaneously.  Or ... if they’re better off opening up their content on a freely available service.

Lama Nachman is an Intel scientist who built Stephen Hawking's communication system. Now she's helping another scientist and roboticist, Peter Scott Morgan, who has Motor Neuron Disease (like ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease), to live and communicate with a more advanced version. It uses gaze control and AI to essentially control a computer that allows him to talk, write, control his environment, and retain some measure of independence. Most of the technology is open source, and the next version, which senses brain waves, only uses a few hundred dollars worth of equipment. Morgan's vision is using AI and technology to essentially cyborg himself (eventually, perhaps with help of a robotic exoskeleton). Nachman is using AI, including GPT-2, word prediction, and more, to help him communicate. Sometimes the result isn't just him or just the system, but a combination of both.

Should we ban all foreign apps? President Trump might have a lot of support from Americans who want to do precisely that. In a poll run by TapResearch this week, 30% of American adults said they that the U.S. should ban all foreign social media apps. Another 40% said that the U.S. should ban all apps from countries that have an interest in spying on Americans. “Our findings show that many people support banning apps developed by foreign companies,” TapResearch says.

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?

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. 

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!