You’re an NBA all-star ... what do you do when the league’s shut down thanks to Coronavirus? If you’re Chicago Bull and 2-time NBA dunk champion Zach Lavine … you work out … you play Call of Duty or Apex Legends, and apparently … you give away free JBL headphones. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with Zach as well as JBL VP Chris Epple and learn more. We also get Zach's take on some of the most important matters in tech ... GIF or JIF ... EV or gas ... Windows or Mac ... iOS or Android ... and whether he'd accept a free ride to Mars from Elon Musk.

Massively social platforms built around gaming or video or news might be our new way to experience entertainment. We've already seen concerts in Fortnite -- Travis Scott, a month or so ago. Now we're going to see movies being screened in Fortnite. Christopher Nolan, the filmmaker behind Inception, The Dark Knight, and Interstellar will be bringing “one of his iconic films” to the massively popular Fortnite game this summer. And guess what: No risk of COVID-19!

(cross-posted from my future39 podcast) Today we plug our computers in to power. Tomorrow, we might plug ourselves into them. AR and VR are changing how we see the world. AI and augmentation and brain-machine interfaces will change how we live, how we work, and how we play. Cathy and I chat about HTC Vive, Magic Leap, Oculus Quest, brain-machine interfaces, Upload (the new show on Amazon Prime), and augmented intelligence. We also talk about Apple and where Apple's upcoming product will fit, as well as the convergence of AR and VR.

How do you survey 330 million people across 4M square miles?   Every 10 years: the United States government is constitutionally required to take a census, which then gets used as the basis for distributed hundreds of billions of tax dollars.   In 2010, doing the census cost $12 billion. They printed 17 million pages of paper maps and 50 million paper questionnaires.    In 2020, the Census Bureau is going digital in 59 languages. Good timing too: COVID-19 happened, and the Census Bureau had to cut back some of their door-to-door surveying.   In this TechFirst with John Koetsier, we chat with the US Census Bureau live on the 2020 digital census ... what kind of technology do you need to build for that? What's the required capacity? How do you secure it all? How do you protect it from bots and hacking?    And, how do you run a census during Coronavirus shutdowns?

Joe Rogan is getting $100M+ to move to Spotify exclusively. But that might just be less than he's worth ...

Dan Ariely is working with Wisdo on a 25 million student study. The question: Are we losing our young people to depression, anxiety, and loneliness thanks to COVID-19?   Dan is a 3-time NYT bestselling author ... my favorite book of his is Predictably Irrational. He's also a professor at Duke University.   We discuss his horrific injury, why he wears half a beard, and what that taught him about power, control, depression, and all the challenges that we're facing now with a global pandemic. Specifically, we focus on problems that college students and young people are having right now: more abuse, more loneliness, more anxiety.   And ... we talk about what people can do to combat those problems.

I work from home. Many others do too.  But not many companies with 55,000 employees with a million clients in 52 countries. Especially fintech companies managing the flow of $10 trillion via 95 billion transactions annually. In this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier, I chat with the chief risk officer of FIS, Greg Montana. We talk about the company moved to working from home, what technology it takes, how they've managed security, and how Montana views the back-to-work timetable.

Three years ago Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs floated visions of smart self-driving cars and smarter technology making Toronto, Canada, a leader among smart cities. Last week, that all died. Sidewalk Labs canceled the Quayside project on May 7. But we lost something when that happened. In fact, we lost at least nine things, as I discuss in this episode of TechFirst with John Koetsier. To read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2020/05/13/9-things-we-lost-when-google-canceled-its-smart-cities-project-in-toronto/

Texting is nice. Zoom is great for work and birthday parties. And Facebook works for our wider circle of friends.   But there's something about good old-fashioned audio that has us returning to voice calls on our phones during quarantine. TextNow says its users spent more than 450 million minutes talking on the phone in the first full month of shutdown, March. While once that might not have been a shocking thing to say, it’s up 36% more than the previous month, and totals 313,000 days or 850 years of cumulative time talking on the phone.

Haircuts, pedicures and massages are big business in Georgia again. Restaurants, too. The state started re-opening businesses on April 24 and dropped its shelter-in-place order a week later. Now mobile data shows that visits to nail salons, spas, tattoo parlors, and barber shops is back up to 80% of pre-Coronavirus levels. Visits to restaurants are also up. With dine-in service allowed again, Georgia restaurants are now at 75% of their former pre-COVID levels of service.