Marketplace Tech

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Monday through Friday, Marketplace demystifies the digital economy in less than 10 minutes. We look past the hype and ask tough questions about an industry that’s constantly changing.

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One year of ChatGPT, fast f...

12.01.2023

On today’s Tech Bytes: apologies, profanity and accusations of blackmail. It’s just another week in the life of Elon Musk. Plus, ultra-fast-fashion retailer Shein confidentially files for an IPO and seems to be trying to bolster its image. But first, ...

Marketplace Tech episodes:

12.01.2023 One year of ChatGPT, fast fashion’s plan to go public and more trouble for Elon Musk On today’s Tech Bytes: apologies, profanity and accusations of blackmail. It’s just another week in the life of Elon Musk. Plus, ultra-fast-fashion retailer Shein confidentially files for an IPO and seems to be trying to bolster its image. But first, ...
11.30.2023 Big advertisers flee X as Musk spotlights antisemitic content This time of year, companies tend to open their wallets and choose where they choose to advertise. Those ad dollars are the lifeblood of X, the former Twitter. In the last quarter of 2021, almost 90% of Twitter’s revenue came ...
11.29.2023 The bust after the boom hits the video game business This week, TikTok parent ByteDance said it’s retreating from mainstream video games altogether. Earlier this year, Epic Games, the maker of Fortnite, a game that has had more than 400 million “unique registered users” since its 2017 launch, announced hundreds ...
11.28.2023 Being an influencer sounds great, but is it really that glamorous? From being your own boss to doing work you actually like, the perks of influencer life have drawn in plenty of creators to an industry valued at $250 billion. Take Sid Raskind, whose goofy lifehacks have earned him millions of ...
11.27.2023 Menopause technology could finally be having its moment Despite half the world’s population being female, there are still few technologies on the market to help manage the symptoms of menopause. Why is there a reluctance to invest in “menotech,” and is that changing? The BBC’s Elizabeth Hotson looked ...
11.24.2023 What venture capital is thinking after a week of high drama and shakeups in tech This week, the shakeups and confusion at OpenAI have come to a conclusion. Sam Altman returns to his position as CEO at OpenAI after its board fired him, which upset most of the company’s staff as well as others invested ...
11.23.2023 Older video games are in danger of going extinct (rerun) For the most part, it’s not too hard to get access to movies from the last decade or even the last century. But if you want to experience a video game from before, say, the ancient era of 2010? Good ...
11.22.2023 Kids prep for YouTube careers at content creator camp Do you remember what your dream job was as a kid? We’re guessing that “YouTuber” was not on the list. Well, turns out vlogger/YouTuber was the top career choice for almost 30% of 8-to-12-year-olds who were surveyed a few years ...
11.21.2023 Why OpenAI’s board fired CEO Sam Altman It’s been a chaotic few days for the folks at OpenAI, including now-former CEO Sam Altman. To recap, on Friday the company’s board announced it had let Altman go, citing a lack of confidence in his “ability to continue leading ...
11.20.2023 How is crypto doing in a post-Sam Bankman-Fried world? By now you’ve heard that the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried is over. What was the verdict for the founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX? Guilty on all seven charges, including fraud, money laundering and campaign finance law violations. Bankman-Fried ...
11.17.2023 Google and Apple’s complicated relationship, and Meta’s chance to return to China On today’s Tech Bytes, our review of the week’s biggest headlines, Meta strikes a preliminary deal with Chinese videogame maker Tencent, giving the company a chance to return to China 14 years after Facebook was banned there. We also talk ...
11.16.2023 When work communication tools distract from the actual work The soundtrack to the modern workplace sounds a lot like a cacophony of familiar pings and notification sounds from digital communication tools like email, Slack, Zoom and Teams – all of which are supposed to make us more productive. But ...
11.15.2023 The autonomous vehicle industry hits another roadblock Back in August, the autonomous vehicle industry was riding high. Fast-forward three months, and the California DMV has suspended the robotaxi company Cruise from operating anywhere in the state. Federal regulators have also opened a probe into multiple incidents involving ...
11.14.2023 What it takes for Mexican coders to cross the cultural border with Silicon Valley Every tech company needs a good origin story. The startup garage, the dorm room and the hacker house are firmly embedded in American tech mythology. For hacker-entrepreneurs in Mexico, the border with the U.S. looms large. A subset of them ...
11.13.2023 After years of explosive growth, is China’s livestream shopping industry slowing down? In just a few short years, shopping by livestream has become all the rage in China. Think QVC online and on steroids. Influencers, brands and retailers have swarmed apps like WeChat and Douyin — the Chinese version of TikTok — ...
11.10.2023 WeWork files for bankruptcy, Meta’s plan for election-related AI and ad blockers get blocked It’s Friday! Which means it’s time for our week-in-review show: Marketplace Tech Bytes. Meta announced this week that starting in 2024, Facebook and Instagram will start labeling political ads that use images generated by AI. But no… it’s hardly an ...
11.09.2023 Moneyball: the Oakland A’s and the transformation of baseball data “Stay in Oakland!” was the plea from many a diehard Athletics fan in the stands of the Oakland Coliseum this past baseball season as the team planned its move to Las Vegas. Some potential hurdles to a move remain unresolved, ...
11.08.2023 Technology, community, insurance: How California hopes to mitigate future wildfires
11.07.2023 Social media and “eSIMs” help Gazans stay connected amid war and blackouts Tuesday marks one month since the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killing 1,400 people and taking hundreds of hostages. Israel has responded by bombarding the Gaza Strip and killing more than 10,000 people there, according to the Ministry of ...
11.06.2023 Military service members’ personal data is for sale. Is that a threat to national security? Remember when President Donald Trump tried to ban TikTok? He called attention to the risk that American users’ data could fall into the hands of Chinese authorities who have ties to the app’s owners. A judge blocked the ban, but ...
11.03.2023 Global AI concerns, slumping EV sales and Netflix’s ad gamble This week, electric vehicle sales are in a slump. Last year, the competition among EV buyers was fierce, with consumers paying premium prices to drive one off the lot. But despite federal tax credits aimed at making them more affordable, ...
11.02.2023 AI vs. AI: Automated programs are writing better scam emails, and AI is spotting them According to the FBI, email phishing attacks accounted for nearly $51 billion in losses over the past 10 years — and the number is only expected to grow with the introduction of artificial intelligence. Dina Temple-Raston from the “Click Here” ...
11.01.2023 You realized the AI you’re creating may be dangerous. Now what? It’s been about seven months since leaders in tech signed an open letter calling for a temporary pause on artificial intelligence development. The gist was that the risks of advanced AI are too great for developers to keep tinkering with ...
10.31.2023 Biden’s executive order aims to limit the harms of AI In 2017, then-MIT graduate student Joy Buolamwini shared the challenge of getting facial analysis software to notice her. “Hi camera, can you see my face? You can see her face. What about my face?” she asks the program as she ...
10.30.2023 Why default settings are important to a search engine’s success It was declared the winner of the search-engine wars way back in 1998. Fortune magazine said the company was poised for much bigger things. That company was, actually, Yahoo. As it turned out, that prediction didn’t age well. Of course, ...
10.27.2023 Policymakers take on AI, deepfakes and Meta’s effects on kids This week, Marketplace Tech is introducing a new regular Friday segment called Bytes: a week in review, where we’ll dive into the major news stories of the week, giving you the context and information you need. And what a week ...
10.26.2023 Ageism in China’s tech sector has workers fearing the “curse of 35” Here in the U.S., big tech is having a good earnings season as companies release their quarterly report cards this week. This, after a year marked by layoffs, with many tech workers going through the first industry downturn of their ...
10.25.2023 How teens are being blackmailed with sexting scams on social media Last year, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) got more than 10,000 tips about minors extorted in sexting scams. The number is even higher so far this year. And what authorities are noticing is that in a ...
10.24.2023 As New York cracks down on rentals, Airbnb hosts go underground As recently as August, Airbnb was doing brisk business in New York City, with more than 22,000 listings there. Two months and a citywide crackdown later, that number has fallen to just above 3,000, a decrease of more than 80%. ...
10.23.2023 CRISPR pioneer Doudna envisions ending asthma, aiding climate The technology known as CRISPR is considered one of modern biology’s biggest breakthroughs. It allows scientists to edit genes, similar to how you cut and paste text in a word processor. More than a decade after pioneering CRISPR, Nobel laureate ...
10.20.2023 Workers in Israel’s dynamic tech sector are joining the war effort. That’s affecting the industry, and the economy. Thousands of Israelis and Palestinians have lost their lives since Hamas gunmen staged their surprise raid on Oct. 7. In the wake of the attack, Israel’s defense forces have called up more than 350,000 reservists, about 4% of its population. ...
10.19.2023 The potential return of net neutrality and the future of the digital divide The talk of late at the Federal Communications Commission is whether to restore net neutrality. When the Barack Obama administration put those rules in place in 2015, the idea was to ensure that internet service providers — or ISPs — ...
10.18.2023 Bacteria could be the key to a safer, greener way of processing rare-earth metals The word “bacteria” doesn’t exactly evoke positive images, but scientists at Cornell University recently discovered a novel way to replicate and use a bacterium from Oneida Lake in New York state. It’s called Shewanella oneidensis, and it has a special ...
10.17.2023 How the IRS is using $60 billion to make filing taxes less painful If you asked for an extension on last year’s taxes, the bad news is the filing deadline was yesterday. The good is if you got it in, refunds are expected to reach you faster than they have in recent years. ...
10.16.2023 The game-changing work of Jerry Lawson (rerun) When you think of the early days of video games, the Fairchild Channel F console might not be the first brand that comes to mind. The Fairchild Channel F was released in 1976, before the more famous Atari released its ...
10.13.2023 The race for China’s electric vehicle market Chinese automaker BYD is now the most popular EV in China and could soon beat Tesla as the No. 1 EV globally. As the Chinese auto market moves to electric, the playing field is getting crowded.
10.12.2023 Fraud influencers, phishing and scams — account takeovers are on the rise Whether it’s for travel, meals or event tickets, it’s hard to deny the allure of a good deal. And providing discounts through fraudulent means is a thriving business online. Once mostly relegated to the far reaches of the dark web, ...
10.11.2023 San Francisco is becoming a tech hub again, Y Combinator CEO says They say it’s harder to get into than Harvard: Y Combinator, YC for short, is “startup school” for tech founders. It takes applications twice a year. Being among the 230 startups accepted out of 24,000 means getting a half-million-dollar investment ...
10.10.2023 X’s misinformation woes get worse during the Israel-Hamas conflict Last weekend, when Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel, people around the world flocked to Twitter — now X — for up-to-the-minute information. What they found was a site crawling with misinformation: images captured months or years earlier in ...
10.09.2023 As SBF sits in court, is cryptocurrency on trial too? Almost one year after FTX collapsed, founder Sam Bankman-Fried is on trial for fraud. Crypto’s value has mostly recovered; users hope its reputation will too. Marketplace’s Lily Jamali spoke with Vicky Huang, a crypto reporter at The Wall Street Journal, ...
10.06.2023 Streaming data transparency a vast and contested terrain for Hollywood creatives The lucrative NBC sitcom “Cheers” featured a washed-up baseball-player-turned-bartender, a spunky waitress and a bunch of regulars who hung out at the bar. By the end of its 11-season run in 1993, the show was getting 26 million viewers a ...
10.05.2023 California bill could lead the way in diversifying venture capital investments Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park is often referred to as the main street of venture capital. Funding from these influential firms can launch a startup into the big time — sometimes unicorn status. But just 2% of ...
10.04.2023 The beauty industry generates a lot of waste. Technology can help. The beauty industry is getting bigger and more lucrative, but beauty brand Olay says that with about 80% of beauty products going unused, there’s an ugly side to that growth. Startups in Sweden and Finland hope technology can reduce cosmetic ...
10.03.2023 Are state and local governments embracing or banning generative AI? A couple of weeks back, the news broke that a school district in Mason City, Iowa, was using ChatGPT to implement Iowa’s ban on books that include descriptions of sex acts. One book flagged was Buzz Bissinger’s classic “Friday Night ...
10.02.2023 The history of the keyboard is filled with battles, controversies and lasers The humble keyboard is the unsung hero of our tech lives. It’s the thing that almost every great modern book or screenplay or even Instagram caption was first written on. And yet, very few people are writing about it. Designer ...
09.29.2023 How California’s Delete Act could impact the business of data brokering There’s an entire industry built around making money off personal information that’s gathered online. Companies known as data brokers collect it, then sell it to other parties. California tried to tackle this problem a couple of years ago, giving consumers ...
09.28.2023 After a decade, the EU draws the curtains on its Human Brain Project In making the case for the Human Brain Project back in 2009, neuroscientist Henry Markram noted that 2 billion people are affected by some kind of mental disorder. It was time, he said, to explore fundamental questions about how the ...
09.27.2023 What the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit means for Amazon According to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states, “Amazon is a monopolist.” They say Amazon uses strategies that prevent sellers on its online marketplace from lowering prices on other platforms and compels them to ...
09.26.2023 What’s happening in the Google antitrust trial? It’s kind of a black box. We’re going on Week 3 of Google’s high-stakes trial over allegations that it bought its way to dominance in internet search. The Department of Justice and several states allege that the tech giant has maintained a lucrative monopoly through exclusive ...
09.25.2023 How countries around the world shape their data policy It’s impossible to quantify the volume of data generated by citizens around the world. Make no mistake, though — data has become a commodity to the companies that monetize it. At the same time, governments are making laws around how ...

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