Marketplace Tech

By Marketplace

Technology

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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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Wired gets the tea on three...

08.16.2019

Google, as a company, has a long history of internal disagreement and activism. But in recent years that internal culture, where employees are encouraged to argue with executives, with each other and to protest decisions and policies they don’t like ...

Marketplace Tech episodes:

08.16.2019 Wired gets the tea on three years of struggle at Google Google, as a company, has a long history of internal disagreement and activism. But in recent years that internal culture, where employees are encouraged to argue with executives, with each other and to protest decisions and policies they don’t like ...
08.15.2019 Robots help humans save water as climate change makes every drop count As the effects of climate change grow, the market for technology to monitor and adapt to those impacts grows as well. In this installment of our series “How We Survive,” reporter Daniel Ackerman explores the use of robots in service ...
08.14.2019 How networking can lead to more diversity in tech There’s been more attention lately on who’s part of the tech boom and who’s not. At Facebook, Google and Apple about three in four technical employees are men — the coders, engineers and developers. African Americans make up a tiny ...
08.13.2019 The CES tech conference aims to improve its reputation with women We’re months away from the next CES, the huge tech trade show that draws almost 200,000 people to Las Vegas every January. In 2020, for the first time, sex tech startups will be officially included at the conference and booth ...
08.12.2019 Money doesn’t exist in the “Star Trek” universe. So how’s that work? A lot of science fiction shows present a darkly dystopian view of the future, where humans battle for limited resources and are starkly divided between the haves and have-nots. But some views of the future are far more utopian and ...
08.09.2019 Are new electric vehicle models real competition for Tesla? Tesla still swings wildly between profits and losses from quarter to quarter. But sales of its more affordable Model 3 sedan are strong. It was Western Europe’s biggest selling battery car in the first half of 2019. In the U.S., ...
08.08.2019 On the fence: Are gig workers contractors, employees or other? Uber and Lyft report earnings this week, and the biggest long-term threat to profits for both of their businesses is drivers. Currently, of course, drivers aren’t classified as employees with benefits, overtime or workplace protections. They’re technically independent contractors with ...
08.07.2019 Cloud over Pentagon plan to move all data to one network The Department of Defense is looking for a company that can turn its patchwork quilt of cloud networks into one giant cloud. There’s a big contract on the line — $10 billion. Amazon was the front-runner until last week when ...
08.06.2019 When online forums become terrorist networks, how do we deal with them? The online forum 8chan was mostly offline yesterday. It was booted from several big web platforms after the weekend’s mass shooting in El Paso, Texas. The Walmart rampage was at least the third mass shooting this year to be announced ...
08.05.2019 As climate change brings more fires, how do we keep the air clean? The effects of last year’s Camp Fire stretched far beyond the Northern California town it destroyed. The smoke traveled hundreds of miles, exposing millions to toxins and pollutants. As climate change extends wildfire season, keeping indoor air clean and healthy ...
08.02.2019 We know tech is designed to be addictive, but should there be a law against it? This week, Sen. Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri, introduced a bill that would ban features that are supposed to keep us using tech for longer periods of time — like endless scrolling, autoplay videos and techniques like the Snapstreak ...
08.01.2019 SoftBank’s Vision Fund remade the tech industry. What will the sequel bring? The Japanese conglomerate SoftBank shook the tech and investment landscape over the last two years with its $100-billion Vision Fund. This week, SoftBank announced Vision Fund 2, which aims to raise $108 billion. Previously, a good-sized venture fund was less ...
07.31.2019 To get broadband to every American, you need to know the rules in all 50 states The digital economy depends heavily on access to the internet, and that is still not a solved problem here in the United States. Over 30% of Americans don’t have access to broadband internet — defined by the Federal Communications Commission ...
07.30.2019 Creators have more ways to make a living than just YouTube There are a lot of different ways to have a career on YouTube that go beyond cat videos or comedy. Kati Morton found that out when she started uploading videos about mental health. She’s a licensed therapist and had a ...
07.29.2019 The Trump administration wants access to encrypted messages Law enforcement officials generally aren’t fans of what’s called end-to-end encryption — messages that can only be read by the sender and the recipient. They call it “going dark” and argue that encrypted communications make it harder to investigate or ...
07.26.2019 U.S. regulators are getting serious about Big Tech. Or are they? This week, the Federal Trade Commission fined Facebook $5 billion, ordered changes to the company’s board and handed down some data security requirements that Mark Zuckerberg personally must monitor and confirm. The FTC is also investigating Facebook for potential antitrust ...
07.25.2019 How do private companies get research projects into space? A new resupply mission is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station on Friday. But these days, missions to the ISS are as much about business as they are about science. Seventy percent of the cargo in this week’s ...
07.24.2019 Celebrating the wisdom that comes with age, in a youth-obsessed industry The tech industry has well-known diversity issues around gender and race. Its lesser known, but age is the industry’s huge blind spot. In fact, 40 is the top age curve at a lot of tech companies. Google just settled more ...
07.23.2019 Payment apps are all fun and easy, until you get burned by a typo PayPal reports quarterly earnings tomorrow. We’ll get an update on Venmo, the popular peer-to-peer payments app that PayPal owns. But as services like Venmo, Square Cash and Zelle have gotten more popular, there have been some growing pains. Fraud and ...
07.22.2019 The design legacy of Apple’s Jony Ive is iconic, but eco-problematic Apple is known for beautiful, expensive products that get replaced often, either for status or because the battery is dying. When longtime designer Jony Ive left Apple last month to form his own design company, a lot of people reflected ...
07.19.2019 The U.S. is talking, and the EU is regulating. Is any of it slowing down Big Tech? This Friday’s “Quality Assurance” segment takes a deeper look at the different approaches the United States and European Union are taking to regulate Big Tech.
07.18.2019 Nature: the next big thing in climate adaptation technology? To many, the term infrastructure conjures roads, pipes and walls—pretty much the antithesis of nature. But some scientists and engineers want to reverse that impression by harnessing nature as infrastructure. The idea that plants and soil can prevent flooding and ...
07.17.2019 A tailored ride-hail service with special needs in mind It seems like Uber and Lyft are everywhere these days. And for many people, it’s great because those services make it easier — and often cheaper — to get where you need to go. But they don’t work for everyone.
07.16.2019 If you love Amazon Prime Day, you probably don’t work in a fulfillment center It’s Amazon’s fifth annual Prime Day. Or days? It’s 48 hours this time. Customers are expected to spend more than $5 billion, which means millions of orders processed in giant warehouses, which Amazon calls fulfillment centers. This work is increasingly ...
07.15.2019 Electric vehicles are getting noisier, for safety’s sake One of the strangest things to get used to about electric vehicles is how eerily quiet they are. It makes you realize how much we associate engine noise with driving. That lack of sound can be problematic — even deadly. ...
07.12.2019 YouTubers, influencers and big business converge at VidCon 2019 The masses have flocked on Anaheim, California, for VidCon, where industry executives and fans get to interact with their favorite influencers. And, of course, take selfies with a giant rainbow slide and Barbie’s glittering Dream House. Marketplace’s Jed Kim also ...
07.11.2019 Margaret O’Mara’s book “The Code” brings hidden Silicon Valley history to light Marketplace’s Jed Kim continues his conversation with Margaret O’Mara, whose book “The Code” is out this week. Think of it as a biography of Silicon Valley — all the circumstances over more than half a century that made it what ...
07.10.2019 We love stories about Silicon Valley success, but what is its history? We’re fascinated with tales of visionary entrepreneurs, trillion-dollar companies, the American tech success story. Foreign leaders are keen to understand and replicate the innovation juggernaut that is Silicon Valley. But little has been written about the entirety of it — ...
07.09.2019 Biomimicry draws on nature’s billions of years of R&D for design solutions If you’ve got a design problem you need to fix, you could lock a bunch of engineers into a room to help brainstorm. Or you could look to the natural world, which is called biomimicry, the practice of replicating adaptations ...
07.08.2019 On the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11: How did the space race influence today’s tech? This month marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 crew landing on the moon. PBS is releasing a six-hour documentary series about it, “Chasing the Moon.” Marketplace’s Jed Kim watched the whole series and calls it thrilling, even though ...
07.05.2019 When Facebook bought Oculus did it make the VR firm less relevant? Virtual reality company Oculus was going to revolutionize VR for gaming back in 2014. The Oculus Rift headset was for gamers by gamers, end of story. But then Facebook bought the company for about $2 billion because it had a ...
07.04.2019 We were all supposed to have virtual reality headsets by now, but Oculus stalled Virtual reality is the technology that keeps on promising. For the past decade, the promise has seemed so much closer, especially when Oculus came along looking like such a game-changer that even Facebook invested $2 billion on it in 2014. ...
07.03.2019 “The Weather Machine” explores the army of scientists and supercomputers behind our forecasts We couldn’t always predict the weather. It took huge strides in physics, atmospheric science, computer science and engineering to connect the dots between what’s going on in the sky at any given moment to whether we’ll have a rainstorm next ...
07.02.2019 Amazon is 25 years old. What will the company’s next chapter look like? Amazon turns 25 this week. Who would’ve thought back in 1994 that a tiny online retailer that just sold books might turn into a company that touches pretty much every aspect of our lives — what we buy, how we ...
07.01.2019 Bot? Or not? New California law requires disclosure A new California law goes into effect today, requiring any online chat bot that’s trying to sell you something or get you to vote a certain way to disclose that it’s a bot. No pretending to be a person trying ...
06.28.2019 When a tech columnist digs into the secret life of his data Most of us have this kind of vague sense that our devices and tech services are trading our data for advertising. But it’s still shocking to find out exactly how much our gadgets and services, and even our browsers, are ...
06.27.2019 Tech takes the field at World Cup soccer It takes very little to get a soccer game started. Two or more people kicking at something, make a goal out of some chairs or maybe even just a gap between trees, and it’s on. Soccer can be very low ...
06.26.2019 2020 campaign update: Targeted ads are definitely following you Wednesday and Thursday night in Miami, the Democratic presidential candidates will gather to debate on TV. But that’s the old-school version of how presidential candidates will try to reach you. Campaigns are already spending a lot more on digital advertising ...
06.25.2019 If we live forever as digital souls, how would we treat our digital world? Science fiction author Neal Stephenson has a new book out called “Fall,” exploring how technology might mean the end of death. In the book, a billionaire who made his fortune in video games has his digital conscious uploaded after he ...
06.24.2019 Is social media tearing us apart? Author Neal Stephenson joins host Molly Wood to discuss his new book, “Fall,” and how he had previously underestimated the dark side of social media.
06.21.2019 What happens if the trade war hits the tech industry? If a fourth round of tariffs is imposed on goods from China, tech companies will be targeted. That means the prices of our gadgets could go up.
06.20.2019 Forced tech transfers happen. But how do they actually work? Forced technology transfer is hard to track. For example, there’s usually no explicit request from a Chinese official to hand over a trade secret… or else. Instead, it’s murkier, perhaps a verbal request for sensitive information behind closed doors as ...
06.19.2019 Facebook’s crypto dream Facebook is planning to launch a cryptocurrency in 2020. It’s called Libra, and Facebook already has a bunch of high-profile partners lined up — Uber, Spotify and, notably, big players in the payment space, like Visa, Mastercard and Paypal. The ...
06.18.2019 AI for Earth helps researchers get more granular with climate data Marketplace Tech has been covering how technology helps us adapt to climate change through the series “How We Survive.” To start, you have to understand the problem and create smart solutions. Host Molly Wood spoke with Jeffrey Allenby, director of ...
06.17.2019 Sharing cars with ride-hailing was supposed to cut congestion. It hasn’t. There’s a saying that you’re never in traffic, you are traffic. The early vision of companies like Uber and Lyft was that they’d help pull drivers away from using their own cars, but in today’s reminder of the power of ...
06.14.2019 Would you buy cellphone service from your cable company? Cable companies are some of the new players in the cellphone business. Since 2017, Comcast has offered cellphone service with Xfinity Mobile. Charter Communications offers Spectrum Mobile and Altice will soon be offering cellphone service as well. The service is ...
06.13.2019 Looking back at what the movie WALL-E has to say about how we live It's a commentary on consumption, via one lonely little robot.
06.12.2019 On the ground at Huawei’s headquarters: anger and polite robots Marketplace got a look inside Huawei's campus in Shenzhen, China.
06.11.2019 Video games went from virtual currency to real money, and it changed the business In-game transactions are growing revenue, but not without controversy.
06.10.2019 SpaceX satellites lit up the night sky… too brightly Astronomers worry all that light could mess with their data.

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