The Irish Tech News Podcast

Intelligent and heads up conversation with Jay Palter about how to manage your social media profile in a strategic way. Jay is a digital business strategist, specializing in the strategic use of social influencer networks for building online visibility for business leaders and technology brands in B2B settings. He works with businesses and individuals, helping practice professionals, executives and owners to develop social selling programs and productive business relationships with established influencers in their industry. His business experience spans over three decades, during which he has held a variety of leadership positions in financial services, software development and marketing. Jay is a sought-after public speaker at industry conferences and a published columnist in a variety of publications on the topic of social networking strategies for business professionals. He also publishes an annual list of top Fintech influencers that is widely respected as the most authoritative in the industry, along with a wide variety of other sector specific influencer lists. For more information, contact: Jay Palter, Chief Engagement Officer Jay Palter Social Advisory – http://jaypalter.ca/ Email – jay@jaypalter.com Phone – 587-586-8433

Enjoyable and informative conversation with award winner nature writer Ben Goldfarb. More about Ben I’m the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing), winner of the 2019 PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award.  More about Ben's book Eager for Beavers -> Eager reveals that our modern conception of a natural landscape is wrong, distorted by the trapping of millions of beavers from North America’s lakes and rivers. The consequences of losing beavers were profound: streams eroded, wetlands dried up, and species from salmon to swans lost vital habitat. Today, a growing coalition of “Beaver Believers” — including scientists, ranchers, and passionate citizens — recognizes that ecosystems with beavers are far healthier than those without them. From the Nevada deserts to the Scottish highlands, Believers are now restoring these industrious rodents to their former haunts. Eager is the powerful story of how one of the world’s most influential species can help us fight drought, flooding, wildfire, extinction, and climate change — and how we can learn to coexist with our fellow travelers on this planet. See more on his website here, and check out great pictures on his twitter feed also https://twitter.com/ben_a_goldfarb

An interview with Trey Rutledge, Director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships,  on DragonChain and the Digital Fortress. Dragonchain was birthed at Disney. Back in 2014, the Disney Corporation, as befits an innovator in many tech areas, wanted to look at building a private blockchain for its own use. The corporation approached Joe Roets, who is well known in industry circles and less so in media terms. Joe’s career would explain that as he has held senior positions at Lockheed Martin, the FBI, Homeland Security and the Department of Defense. His experience is tightly guarded under a stealth cloak. Joe came on board with a mandate to build a private blockchain for Walt Disney’s theme parks and cruise lines. In 2014 he began R&D into the space and by 2015 he was developing a hybrid platform. He also managed to persuade the notoriously conversative corporation to look at building an open source project which was hived off into a separate entity by 2017 and self-funded by a successful ICO that raised $13 million in funds. Part of the innovation undertaken by Joe was to address issues head on. While still under the Disney mantel, rather than cherry pick solutions, he went to all areas asking executives for problems they needed solving. This resulted into 23 live and case studies where Joe and his dev team applied blockchain technology to issues that had previously proven unsolvable. “They really got under the hood across a variety of departments – making good use of their time within the corporation, finding tough issues and fixing them,” explains Trey in this interivew about how Disney and Dragons made a blockchain Jillian Godsil is your host. Jillian is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author - find out more here: https://persons-of-interest.io/

We catch up with Jamil Hassan to learn more about the world's number two crypto currency.  Here are some of the questions we look at: # why there is more to crypto than bitcoin, what is ethereum and it's own digital currency ether & the the alt coins, including erc20 built on this platform + what is the difference between ethereum & ether? + who is Vitalik Buterin & why, unlike the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto is it a factor in ether + ethereum + what are erc20 tokens and the other flavours that exist too + what trends might we see in the future in terms of the ethereum platform + who are the possible ethereum killers, what are they, why are they possible e-killers? It was an interesting and informative conversation, we hope you enjoy it and find it useful. See more about Jamil on twitter https://twitter.com/CryptoHipster and on his website here https://jamilconnects.com

How do students in Ireland manage when the pandemic has closed colleges and universities? Well, HEAnet and Eduroam are providing the connectivity that allows students to attend all their online classes and do all their coursework. Ronan talks to Kerrie Power the CEO of HEAnet. Kerrie talks about HEAnet started, their partnership with Eduroam, and how  Longford becoming the first Irish County Council to introduce Eduroam Wi-Fi in town centres. Kerrie also tells Ronan if HEAnet has seen a greater increase in usage during the pandemic and what's next for HEAnet. More on Kerrie: Kerrie Power was appointed Chief Executive of HEAnet CLG by the Board of Directors in June 2017. Kerrie has over 15 year’s leadership experience and a strong track record in the technology sector. Before joining HEAnet, Kerrie worked in Google in Dublin and New York and also Facebook. More recently, she has headed up technology start-ups in Dublin including Nordeus Games and YouPass Technologies. Kerrie is a graduate of WIT, with a Bachelor of Science in Applied Computing and holds a Master of Business Administration from Liverpool University, a Professional Diploma in Organisational Change and Transformation, a Professional Diploma in Strategy Development and Innovation. She is currently completing a third Professional Diploma in Leadership as well as completing her final year of Masters of Science in Business Practice and Leadership at UCD Michael Smurfit Business School. Kerrie represents Ireland on the GÉANT General Assembly and was elected to the board of GEANT in Nov 2019. She is also on the Board of HEAnet’s subsidiary company EduCampus. Kerrie was also invited by the Department of Higher Education to join the Covid 19 TES Steering group as a subject matter expert, and currently chairs the connectivity sub-group of the Covid 19 TES Steering group.

Is college education a ticket towards prosperity and job security — or a bottomless pit of student loan debt? If you live in the U.S., that is a $1.7 trillion dollar question. Student loan debt impacts all financial aspects of a consumer; and the burden is amplified for first generation college students and people of color, who don’t typically have access to generational wealth. With wage disparities induced by systemic bias, such gaps continue to grow even after employment. In this episode of One Vision, Theo and Bradley chat with Tobin Van Ostern, founder of Savi, a public benefit corporation focused on tackling the student loan challenge faced by America's 46 million student loan borrowers. While policy reforms are long overdue, we believe that private sector innovation can still play a crucial role to provide much needed immediate relief.

Interesting conversation with Glen Hiemstra who has been a futurist since 1980! More about Glen See his website here. If you listen carefully, you can learn what the future is telling you. Before the Internet was even a public network Glen Hiemstra, Futurist, studied how it would change human and organizational communication. In the mid-1980`s he was describing the coming economic growth of the Pacific Rim countries. Glen told audiences about global warming and climate change...in 1987. He previewed nanotechnology...in 1989, and described genomic science and biotechnology even earlier. Glen wrote about the age wave and the end of classic retirement...in 1995. By 2001 Glen described the coming energy transformation as the greatest economic opportunity of the next half-century. As early as 2006 Glen told people why the debt bubble would burst, as it did more than a year later. Before the Internet was popular Glen had the foresight to register Futurist.com and become Founder and CEO of the site that is now visited by people from 120 nations each month. To deal with breakthrough trends like these Glen helps large and small companies, educational institutions, government agencies and communities re-think their future vision. This is why audience members for Glen`s keynote speeches and clients for his long-range planning  A writer as well as a speaker and consultant, Glen is the author of Turning the Future into Revenue: What Businesses and Individuals Need to Know to Shape Their Future (Wiley & Sons 2006). Previously he co-authored Strategic Leadership: Achieving Your Preferred Future and his new book Millennial City was published in Fall 2014. Glen has also served as a technical advisor for futuristic television shows and appeared in future oriented documentaries. Glen has worked with many leading companies, government agencies and organizations across a wide variety of domains. These include international clients like Saint Gobain and Certainteed, Sonae of Portugal, Ambrosetti of Italy, Lundbeck Pharmaceuticals, Huawei of China, The World Future Forum-The Hague, GHD Engineering of Australia, Russian Railroad, Toyota, and others like Boeing Commercial Airplanes (most recently designing and leading a “Next 100 Years” strategic foresight project), Microsoft, The Home Depot, Adobe, Ernst & Young, PaineWebber, ShareBuilder, Club of Amsterdam, REI, Weyerhaeuser, Hewlett Packard, Novo Nordisk, U.S./Mexico JWC, APAX Partners, Atlanta 2060, Tulsa 2025, , FHWA Advanced Research, Eddie Bauer, Procter & Gamble, ACE Hardware, IHOP, John Deere, Lexis Nexus, Land O Lakes, Mass Mutual, Mutual of Enumclaw, ING, Colorado League of Cities, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and others. Transportation clients include USDOT, FHWA, Idaho Transportation 2030, Michigan DOT 2030, Louisiana DOT, Texas Transportation Forum, and various auto, trucking and rail related businesses including America Trucking Association, Great Dane Trailers, Union Pacific, Toyota, Great Western Insurance, and others.

We check in with Dinis Guarda to learn more. Dinis is an author, speaker, entrepreneur, advisor, and CEO Chairman and co-founder ztudium group that owns the companies techabc and open business platform. Dinis authored, “4IR - How to Reinvent a Nation”, "How Businesses and Governments can prosper with Fintech, Blockchain, and AI" and "Blockchain, AI, and Crypto Economics – The Next Tsunami", among others. Dinis runs a fast growing Youtube Podcast series https://www.youtube.com/c/DinisGuarda/videos where he passed 4.2 million views in the first 6 months and has interviewed 100+ personalities so far including leading AI personalities, a Minister from Japan, Leading CEO, Fintech, AI, Crypto, Blockchain personalities and Bollywood stars. Dinis is a global renowned thought leader listed continuously as number 1, 5 and 10 positions as global influencer in B2B, business continuity, fintech, blockchain, AI, and social media industries. He has been advising governments, working closely with UN departments and responsible for digital strategies for countries like Malaysia where he created the concept of Malaysia 5.0. In the past he has supported the building of the Fidelity Asia Bank (a digital bank between Asia and Africa) and through his company has developed leading-edge technology around AI, Fintech and Blockchain PaaS for central banks and global organisations. https://www.linkedin.com/in/dinisguarda/ Dinis Guarda is an author, writer, artist, academic, B2B2C tech influencer, inventor and serial entrepreneur. Dinis is a world-renowned thought leader, strategist, futurist and speaker, an International Bestselling Author, and a media personality who covers the present and future of business, technology and society. Dinis is a World Class Leader in multiple fields and has a passion to push ideas, action and technology together to create better solutions, narratives and paths. Dinis Guarda specialises in the crossroad between strategy, ideas, business, poetry, technology and how 4IR, AI, Fintech, digital transformation and Blockchain are changing Humanity. Dinis Guarda has decades of experience in international business, C level positions and digital transformation. Dinis has worked with new technologies, cryptocurrencies, and has created some of the first global ICOs, while working with major regulators, compliance, legal international teams and law firms. Dinis has also been involved in the inception of some of the top 100 digital currencies. He was behind a crypto digital assets and exchange both in Europe, Switzerland, USA, Latin America and Asia. Dinis has created various companies such as Ztudium tech platform a digital and blockchain startup that created the software Blockimpact (sold to Glance Technologies Inc) and founder and publisher of intelligenthq.com, hedgethink.com, tokensdna.com and tradersdna.com. He has been working with the likes of UN / UNITAR, UNESCO, European Space Agency, Davos WEF, Philips, Saxo Bank, Mastercard, Barclays and governments all over the world. He has been a guest lecturer at Copenhagen Business School, Group INSEEC/Monaco University, where he has coordinated executive Masters and MBAs. He supported in creating the business school office and operations in San Francisco, USA and Silicon Valley. He is ranked as one of the most influential people in B2B, AI, Fintech, Business Continuity, Cryptocurrencies, Blockchain in the world by Right Relevance as well as being listed in Cointelegraph’s Top People In Blockchain and Rise Global’s The Artificial Intelligence Power 100.

Don Tapscott is the co-author with Kirsten Sandberg and Anthony Williams of the 2021 paper ‘New Direction for Government in the Second Era of the Digital Age’ on strategy, policy, and action for the Biden/Harris Administration. Produced in collaboration with the Washington DC based Chamber of Digital Commerce, and with a foreword by Tony Scott, Don considers the report a landmark of his decades-long career as a digital technology researcher, advocate, and thought leader. Don needs no introduction to the Blockchain community but just in case let me point people to his 2016 TED Talk in which he explained how Blockchain is changing money and business. This is one of these most viewed TED talks, certainly in Blockchain, with 5 million views so far and more than 5000 views per day, up by multiple of five since the price of Bitcoin caught the public’s attention again. Listen in today to hear Don's thoughts on how cryptocurrencies and government can collide with impact. Jillian Godsil is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author - visit here for her latest book https://persons-of-interest.io/

In this podcast Melanie Boylan had a chat with Kevin Wagner a NASA Sagan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Astronomy and Steward Observatory.  They discussed his successful work with the experiment/instrument is called “NEAR”: New Earths in the Alpha Centauri region. Dr. Wagner's research focuses on directly detecting and studying planets around nearby stars, with a specific focus on finding and characterizing potentially life supporting planets. His team’s recent work has enabled imaging planets that are approximately Neptune-sized in the habitable zone of the closest Sun-like star, Alpha Centauri, which shows that imaging smaller, potentially Earth-like planets is closely within reach. Dr. Wagner grew up in Kentucky, USA, and in his spare time enjoys exploring the mountains and deserts that are also home to the observatories and giant cacti of Southern Arizona. kevinwagner@arizona.edu