The Irish Tech News Podcast

Ronan talks to Aled Miles the CEO of San Francisco based Sauce Labs. Aled hosted the keynote event at the Welsh Emerging Tech Fest and also sourced the other guests. Aled talks about his background which is wide and varied, his role as Welsh Envoy to the United States, what Sauce Labs and how they raised just over €190 million over the past 3 years, building a sustainable business during the dot com decline and a pandemic and placing technology in the hands of everyone in a simple easy more efficient way. More on Aled: Aled is the President, CEO and board member of Sauce Labs. In September 2020 he was appointed as the Welsh Government Envoy to the United States. Before he joined Sauce Labs he was CEO and member of the board of TeleSign Corporation, and he had been a Senior Vice President at the global security firm, Symantec. He is a graduate of St Mary’s University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Enjoyable interview with the highly impressive Steve Davis. Steve Davis is a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He serves as co-chair of the World Health Organization’s Digital Health Technical Advisory Group and is a member of numerous boards and advisory committees. He is the former president & CEO of PATH, a leading global health innovation organization; former Director of Social Innovation at McKinsey & Company, a global consultancy; and former CEO of Corbis, a digital media pioneer. With degrees from Princeton University, University of Washington and Columbia Law School, he speaks and writes regularly about the intersection of innovation, technology and social impact. He is the author of the forthcoming book Undercurrents: Channeling Outrage to Spark Practical Activism. He lives with his family in Seattle, Washington. See more about his book here https://www.undercurrentsbook.com/

Talent is equally distributed. Opportunities are not. According to the latest Money Tree Report, startups in the top three states in the U.S. (California, Massachusetts, and New York) raised 74% of funding in 2020. This begs the question, how will entrepreneurs in other states get the necessary funding and support when the pie is not equal? How does the imbalance in turn impact local businesses and economies? And will the momentum behind remote work prompt necessary changes to turn the tide? In this episode of One Vision, Theo and Bradley chat with Wayne Miller, Executive Director of the Venture Center, on their efforts to drive corporate innovation and startup ecosystem development in Little Rock, Arkansas, U.S.

We catch up with Nigel Walsh to discuss his most recent annual review of Insurtech trends and his own self assessment of his own predictions too, how many did he get right in 2020? As a Partner in Deloitte Digital, Nigel leads on a number of areas for the firm including Global Future of Insurance to InsurTech. He has contributed to a number of books on insurance and technology including The InsurTech Book and the AI Books published by Wiley.  He also co-authored a report on the Sharing Economy – ‘Squaring risks in the sharing age’ with Lloyds of London.  He has a background in end to end technology transformation from core systems through to digital transformation initiatives including helping clients to identify and launch new products to market and establish new businesses from scratch, for insurers and more recently non insurers. You can find Nigel talking about Insurance online here LinkedIN, giving out about escooters on twitter here, or as a co-host of InsurTech Insiders here.

We talk with Steve Allin who is a sustainable Hemp consultant. See more about Steve on his website here. Teacher, Writer and Activist. Steve has enthusiastically pioneered and promoted the use of Hemp as a building material since 1997 when he first used it on his own home which he was in the process of constructing. He furthered his involvement when he wrote the first book on the subject “ Building with Hemp”in 2005 after being deluged with requests for information. He has subsequently gone on the form the international Hemp Building Association in 2009 and has worked as a consultant focussing on establishing hemp production and use as a building material in many parts of the world including, Costa Rica, Baltic States, Scandinavia, Haiti, Nepal, the USA and from his home in Ireland. The is often a speaker at conferences and is currently working on a new book featuring Hemp Building projects. Steve Allin has enthusiastically pioneered the use of hemp in building in Ireland and internationally since 1997 & is the author of the pre-eminent book “Building with Hemp” (2006) 2nd Edition, 2012. He provides an online consultation service, wherever you are located in the world, to discuss design options and other issues relating to your proposed project, new build, residential extension or refurbishment. He also has extensive expertise in building process and material development. He offers a special advisory option to students with an international focus.

5G usage increased in Ireland last year and 2021 is set to be the year of 5G.  Ronan talks to Russell Keating head of IM Sales at Samsung Ireland about this, the role of technology throughout the COVID pandemic, the latest camera phone technology, and how Samsung's ecosystem of devices is enabling more remote working. More about Russell, he has spent the last 17 years in the consumer electronics sector. Before he joined Samsung, he spent 10 years with Sony and his passion for new technologies and bringing them to market shows..

Jillian Godsil talks with Dr David Koepsell, CEO and founder of EncrypGen, a blockchain platform that allows people save, share and even sell their DNA. Currently big companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry provide DNA services; people use them to find out where they come from but as they are purchasing the service, they are asked will they agree to permit their data be shared for science. An innocuous enough question except that the tests are loss leaders and in turn these platforms sell on the DNA data for hundreds and thousands of dollars. In an unregulated market, is it right for corporates to make money off people’s personal data? It's a complex area but David and EncrypGen are looking to make it safer, more transparent and even allow people make money directly from their data. Check out https://encrypgen.com/ for more information. Your data, your DNA and your money. More on David: In 2017 David launched EncrypGen  and went live in 2018. The platform is a marketplace for people to record their DNA and sell it to pharmaceutical companies. The reason he set it up was as an antheses to a billion dollar business that had sprung up around DNA since the human genome was first mapped at the turn of this century. Commercial companies such as 23andMe and Ancestry.com are huge multimillion-dollar businesses that provide genome sequencing for individuals at a very low cost. Indeed, the cost of obtaining your genome is around $90 which is a loss leader. In an industry that is pretty much unregulated, it is estimated that this data is sold at least 200 times over. The industry on the consumer side is termed recreational, but each person is asked at time of purchase will they allow their data to be ‘used for science’. It is understood that some 80% of people comply. This then allows the testing companies to sell the data for commerce. It is mostly sold to pharmaceutical companies which in turn use it for science but this middle section is pure commerce and the space which EncrypGen wishes to disrupt. “There is no transparency as to the path the data sets take after being purchased. This has other implications for use which is why we want to offer a marketplace that uses blockchain to track the transactions – and returns control to the people who submit the data as well as monetary rewards.” More on Jillian - Jillian is an award winning journalist, broadcaster and author. She is passionate about blockchain. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08NS1LXG8

A business and technology hybrid, XJ is building AI-powered tools to make venture capital faster, better and equitable. Her mission is to raise more money for female founders and founders of color, as well as help investors make better investments faster. She also mentors and invests in startups. She is a management major and worked as a consultant. XJ's toolset includes rainmaking, business and data analytics, mixed-method research, front-end programming and writing verses she calls poetry.

We chat with Marisa Porges about her varied and impressive career, which has now lead to her aiming to inspire the next generation of young girls learning how to make their way and express their opinions in a confident and forthright way. We review her book here also. Marisa Porges, PhD, author of What Girls Need: How to Raise Bold, Courageous, and Resilient Women, is the eighth Head of School at The Baldwin School, a 130-year-old all-girls school outside of Philadelphia renowned for academic excellence and for preparing girls to be leaders and change-makers. Dr. Porges served as senior advisor in the Obama White House; was a research fellow at Harvard Kennedy School and the Council on Foreign Relations, where her research focused on counterterrorism; and served in the U.S. Navy as one of eight female aviators in an air wing of about two hundred. She lives in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, with her family. Known for her work on leadership, education, and national security, Porges combines lessons she learned throughout her career with the practices she is developing at The Baldwin School, to help today's girls cultivate the skills they need to become tomorrow's leading women. The ways we define leadership are changing, and the women now stepping into leadership roles are mapping new paths to inhabiting traits such as grit, resilience, audacity, and self-confidence. The lessons Porges shares in WHAT GIRLS NEED prepares the next generation to confidently hold their own later in life in whatever fields they enter and no matter what challenges they face. WHAT GIRLS NEED demonstrates how to celebrate and own the traits which might have been undervalued in the past but which are more critical than ever today and will make the biggest difference in decades to come – including empathy, collaboration, and adaptability. Given the added pressure now placed on children because of school closures and the unfolding public health crisis, there is no better time to ensure parents know the most effective strategies for nurturing their daughters’ courage and resilience.

In our podcast today Melanie Boylan and Xavier Gomez sat down to chat about Digitalisation, AI, ML and they even covered ethics in both.  COVID19 has sped up innovation and he goes into some detail as to what he sees coming up in the next year. Xavier Gomez is founder & COO of INVYO, INVYO is a pan-European platform that combines semantic analysis and machine learning to enable all company sizes to create value leveraging their internal and external data. They leverage the power of data contextualization by using advanced technologies to process and classify millions of unstructured data coming from both video and text documents. He earned a Master from ISC – Institut Supérieur du Commerce (Master Graduate School Management – Finance) in 2000. He also holds a certification from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) specialization Fintech (2016) and is a graduate of HEC Paris in Private Equity (Leadership Executive program in Private Equity in partnership with France Invest (ex-AFIC) - French Association of Investors for Growth) in 2017. In 2000, he started his career at Credit Suisse (private banking) in Paris as a portfolio management consultant (2000-2004), selling structured products in Zurich, Switzerland (2005-2007), assistant vice president If you would like to contact him, find him on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/Xbond49