Marketplace Tech

By Marketplace

Technology

What's Marketplace Tech about?

Marketplace Tech host Molly Wood helps listeners understand the business behind the technology that's rewiring our lives. From how tech is changing the nature of work to the unknowns of venture capital to the economics of outer space, this weekday show breaks ideas, telling the stories of modern life through our digital economy. Marketplace Tech is part of the Marketplace portfolio of public radio programs broadcasting nationwide, which additionally includes Marketplace, Marketplace Morning Report and Marketplace Weekend. Listen every weekday on-air or online anytime at marketplace.org. From American Public Media. Twitter: @MarketplaceTech

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Does human resources still ...

06.21.2021

You’d think one line of work that would be safe from the robot takeover is human resources. But some companies are working on it. A recent New York Times investigation laid out how Amazon’s automated systems for managing warehouse workers ...

Marketplace Tech episodes:

06.21.2021 Does human resources still need humans? You’d think one line of work that would be safe from the robot takeover is human resources. But some companies are working on it. A recent New York Times investigation laid out how Amazon’s automated systems for managing warehouse workers ...
06.18.2021 A critic of Big Tech is now one of its biggest regulators This week, the White House appointed Lina Khan to chair of the Federal Trade Commission. The announcement came just hours after she was confirmed by the Senate to be a commissioner. At just 32, she’s the youngest-ever FTC chair. Khan ...
06.17.2021 Buy now, pay later. What’s the catch? If you do any shopping online, you’ve no doubt seen offers to pay for that sweater or mattress in installments using services from Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna and other fintech companies. These “buy now, pay later” startups got a boost from ...
06.16.2021 What the authoritarian crackdown on social media means for global activism It’s been more than a decade since the revolution that came to be known as the Arab Spring, when protesters across the Middle East challenged — and in some cases overthrew — authoritarian governments. Social media played a central role ...
06.15.2021 Can we print our way out of the affordable housing crisis? The cost of building a new house has gone up sharply over the past year. Not just because of lumber, but because steel, insulation, windows and appliances are all harder to get and more expensive because of high demand and ...
06.14.2021 What the failure of a construction startup tells us about SoftBank SoftBank launched its first, $100 billion Vision Fund in 2017. Just last month, the Japanese conglomerate led by Masayoshi Son said the fund had delivered record profits for the quarter. But there have been some big failures too. The modular-construction ...
06.11.2021 How tech might clean up concrete Las Vegas hosted its first in-person convention this week since the pandemic. It’s called World of Concrete, which normally attracts some 60,000 engineers, architects, masons and contractors. Not quite a full turnout this year, but Marketplace senior reporter Matt Levin ...
06.10.2021 A boost for TikTok and those who make money from it President Joe Biden on Wednesday rescinded a series of executive orders from the Trump administration that had tried to ban the Chinese-owned apps TikTok and WeChat here in the United States. The orders had been blocked by federal judges. Instead, ...
06.09.2021 Massive online courses got a boost during the pandemic. Will it last? When a couple of Stanford professors founded Coursera in 2012, they promised to democratize access to higher education by making courses from prestigious colleges available online. Nearly a decade later, many of us were thrust into the world of online ...
06.08.2021 Amazon’s Ring changes how police get doorbell footage More than 2,000 police and fire departments have partnerships with Amazon to use surveillance video from its Ring security cameras. This week, the company changed the way law enforcement can access that video. Now, departments will have to post public ...
06.07.2021 Big Tech is mining our medical records for patterns Hospitals and other health care systems are eager to find patterns in their patient data that can help treat and prevent illness and cut costs. In England, the National Health Service is collecting the medical histories of up to 55 ...
06.04.2021 Insurance for ransomware payments is getting harder to come by Throughout the pandemic we’ve seen hospitals, pipelines and other critical infrastructure hit with ransomware attacks. Just this past week, meat processor JBS and a ferry operator in Massachusetts were targets. Hackers often target companies with insurance because they know they’re ...
06.03.2021 More houses are being sold without ever hitting the market, furthering inequality One promise of technology is open access to information –– if that information is shared. The tight housing market has led to a rise in what are called “pocket listings,” where a home is for sale but only offered to ...
06.02.2021 3 years after Europe’s GDPR, what’s changed in tech privacy? It’s been three years since the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, took effect. At its core, the law was meant to give consumers more control over how companies collect, share and use their personal data. It was ...
06.01.2021 Battling climate change and climate misinformation all at the same time So far, most of our conversations about disinformation have been about politics, the 2020 election and, during the pandemic, misleading posts about COVID-19 and the vaccine. Facebook and Twitter have gotten more aggressive about fact-checking, labeling and removing posts or ...
05.31.2021 Bias in facial recognition isn’t hard to discover, but it’s hard to get rid of This episode originally aired on March 22, 2021. Joy Buolamwini is a researcher at the MIT Media Lab who pioneered research into bias that’s built into artificial intelligence and facial recognition. And the way she came to this work is ...
05.28.2021 Companies keep overpromising about AI The insurance company Lemonade is all about automation. To file claims, customers upload a selfie video and Lemonade’s chatbot, AI Jim, will handle some claims automatically. On Twitter this week, Lemonade got in trouble suggesting that AI handles fraud detection ...
05.27.2021 Amazon’s business dominance is a many-tentacled thing It’s a big news week for Amazon. First, it got sued by the District of Columbia on antitrust grounds. The lawsuit accuses the company of preventing sellers on its marketplace from offering better prices elsewhere. Then, in another part of ...
05.26.2021 The Apple-Epic antitrust case was a spectator sport Legal arguments between Apple and Epic Games wound down this week in federal court. Some have called it the Super Bowl of antitrust cases. No flashy halftime show, though, but the trial did have mighty opponents, wild fans and a ...
05.25.2021 Changing venture capital from within, a deal at a time The tech industry, like most of America, is grappling with its lack of diversity and its systemic inequality. At the top of that pyramid is venture capital. In the VC industry, it’s hard to break through as either a startup ...
05.24.2021 The tech industry promised to diversify last year. Has it delivered? This week marks one year since a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd. The year has seen national, even global, protests, demanding justice for Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black victims of police killings as well as a racial reckoning ...
05.21.2021 Self-driving cars might never be able to drive themselves The California Department of Motor Vehicles said this week it’s reviewing whether Tesla is telling people that its cars are self-driving when, legally speaking, they’re not. This follows fatal crashes that may have involved its Autopilot feature. Tesla advertises a ...
05.20.2021 To solve big problems, sometimes you need a contest Ninety-four years ago today, Charles Lindbergh took off from New York for Paris on the first solo non-stop flight across the Atlantic. One of the reasons that happened was $25,000 in prize money. The Orteig Prize was one of the ...
05.19.2021 Pandemic relief money is bringing internet access to places that didn’t have it We’ve been talking for more than a year now about how the internet is everything. And there are still places in the U.S. where there basically is none. For example, Allendale, South Carolina, a town of around 3,000 people that’s ...
05.18.2021 That AT&T-Discovery deal is about the battle for broadband It’s been not quite three years since AT&T; completed its $85 billion merger with Time Warner, with the hope that investing in content would drive customers to consume that content with AT&T;’s internet and on AT&T; phones. Now, that deal ...
05.17.2021 Smart devices are listening to more than our words Picture this: You’re not feeling so hot and you say to your smart speaker, “Robot, I’m hungry,” and you cough. And the device says, “Would you like a recipe for chicken soup?” And then, “By the way, would you like ...
05.14.2021 Even criminal enterprises have reputations to think about The FBI says a group called DarkSide was behind the ransomware attack that forced Colonial Pipeline to shut down operations last week. DarkSide is believed to have roots in Eastern Europe, possibly Russia, and is fairly new. But like a ...
05.13.2021 Cryptocurrency miners snap up so many computer chips that mining has become a market Wednesday on the show, we talked about cryptocurrency’s impact on the environment. Thursday, we talk about its impact on the semiconductor shortage. Miners and gamers are competing for high-powered graphics chips, or GPUs. These are incredibly hard to find right ...
05.12.2021 Some states lure crypto miners to keep their coal plants alive Lately, there’s been a lot more debate about cryptocurrency and how much energy it uses to be produced. Bitcoin, in particular, uses as much energy per year as the Netherlands, its carbon footprint is estimated to be the size of ...
05.11.2021 China is leading the digital currency pack. Do we need to keep up? China is rolling out its own digital currency. It is not a cryptocurrency, it’s an all-electronic version of the yuan, designed to replace cash in circulation, and it’s controlled by China’s central bank. The country has been testing it in ...
05.10.2021 Is the Facebook Oversight Board something anyone actually needs? As you’ve probably heard, Facebook has an oversight board. Last week, it upheld the company’s ban of former President Donald Trump, with caveats. The board, created by Facebook and paid for by Facebook, has received such attention and been treated ...
05.07.2021 New president, new FCC, new net neutrality rules? Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been focused on how the internet is everything. This week, we’re talking about the policy that affects the internet. One policy issue that has haunted every Federal Communications Commission in the past decade, and then some, ...
05.06.2021 The government is making broadband more affordable — for now. How do we make that permanent? Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been focused on how the internet is everything. And this week, we’re talking to the new head of the Federal Communications Commission, which creates most of the policy that affects the internet. Access and infrastructure are ...
05.05.2021 There’s a new boss at the FCC. Let’s talk about the internet, shall we? Throughout the pandemic, we’ve been focused on how the internet is everything. When it comes to federal policy governing the internet, the Federal Communications Commission is everything. Among other roles and responsibilities, the FCC maps out broadband access nationally and ...
05.04.2021 Should kids be taking Fake News 101? From politics to COVID-19, we have a big problem with false information on the internet. There’s been a lot of discussion about what platforms like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can do to stop it from spreading, or if the government ...
05.03.2021 If the U.S. is going to get serious about cybersecurity, it should start with hiring The Joe Biden administration is planning to issue an executive order intended to help the country better defend against cyberattacks. One thing the federal government might want to do is just … hire more people to work in cybersecurity. The ...
04.30.2021 When it comes to stopping misinformation, it’s not the speech. It’s the algorithms. What you see on social media isn’t there by accident. It’s there because of an algorithm, the programs that use data to decide what content will keep you online for the longest possible time — so that you’ll see and ...
04.29.2021 President Biden says green hydrogen is key to a lower emissions future. So, what is it? We’ve now been covering potential climate solutions on the show for about two years and yet, we must confess, hadn’t thought much about green hydrogen until President Biden brought it up at the climate summit last week. Biden thinks hydrogen ...
04.28.2021 App stores are under fire, but they might be necessary A recent Senate antitrust hearing focused on smartphone app stores and the fees Apple and Google charge developers: 15% for small developers, 30% for larger ones. Companies that create apps, like Match and Spotify, said the fees were too high ...
04.27.2021 Biden sees net zero emissions in our future, but the plan relies partly on magic Carbon capture is the talk of the climate scene right now. That’s technology that removes planet-warming carbon dioxide from the air and sequesters it in the Earth. President Joe Biden on Earth Day laid out a vision of net zero ...
04.26.2021 Schools sometimes share confidential student data with police The federal government is looking into whether a Florida school district violated privacy law by sharing student data with the county sheriff’s department. An investigation by the Tampa Bay Times found that the Pasco County School District shared grades, disciplinary ...
04.23.2021 Well, AI got quite the talking to this week The Federal Trade Commission issued a strongly worded post Monday, warning companies against unfair or deceptive practices in their use of artificial intelligence as well as violations of fair-credit rules. It told companies to hold themselves accountable for their algorithms ...
04.22.2021 Smartphone video was the key to convicting George Floyd’s killer. But why did it have to be? As you’ve heard this week, a jury found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in the killing of George Floyd. The key to that case was the video taken by teenager Darnella Frazier with her smartphone. ...
04.21.2021 Amazon hasn’t had much antitrust scrutiny compared to other tech giants. That may be about to change. The Senate is scheduled to hold a hearing Wednesday on Lina Khan’s appointment to the Federal Trade Commission. Khan is an associate law professor at Columbia University. She published a paper at Yale in 2017 that laid out a new ...
04.20.2021 The global chip shortage is hurting startups dreaming up new products The shortage of semiconductors that has shut down some car factories isn’t going away anytime soon, even though chipmakers are building new factories and promising to ramp up production. The thing is, computer chips are in everything these days. Look ...
04.19.2021 The right to fix your own stuff is finally having a moment in state legislatures About half of U.S. states are considering right-to-repair bills. They would require manufacturers to publish manuals so that anyone can make repairs on electronics and appliances — everything from iPhones to tractors to ventilators. Some of the bills focus on ...
04.16.2021 As if fighting disinformation wasn’t hard enough, there’s a language gap, too Facebook and other social media companies get plenty of criticism for allowing too much disinformation on their platforms, especially when it comes to elections, pandemic misinformation and untruths about COVID-19 vaccines. Now, critics say, even as the platforms are taking ...
04.15.2021 Microsoft’s latest acquisition shows speech recognition is big business Microsoft this week announced it will acquire Nuance, a Boston-based speech recognition and artificial intelligence company, for around $16 billion. It’s the company’s largest acquisition after LinkedIn and a big bet on speech recognition technology. Nuance is used most in ...
04.14.2021 What new regulations for Chinese giant Ant Group mean for the fintech industry abroad The Chinese company Ant Group does a lot of things. It provides loans, mobile payments through Alipay, credit scores, and it acts as an investment platform. Last year, it was headed for what might have been the biggest initial public ...
04.13.2021 Don’t look now, but Bitcoin is going mainstream Cryptocurrency is still kind of niche and a little confusing. The fact that it’s so beloved by eccentric tech billionaires doesn’t make it seem totally normal. But despite being developed as a decentralized alternative to government-created currencies, cryptocurrency is getting ...

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