Marketplace Tech

There are two long-standing trends in the tech industry that have intensified over the last couple years: there are more jobs than workers to fill them, and there’s a need to diversify this workforce. More and more companies are rolling back degree requirements that were part of many job descriptions. Today, we’ll hear how that dynamic has given new opportunities to people like Stanley Omotuyole, who left Nigeria a couple of years ago, giving up a degree program in laboratory science to join his dad in Seattle.

Scraping data from public websites is legal. That’s the upshot of a decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier this week. LinkedIn had taken a case against data analytics company hiQ, arguing it was illegal for hiQ to “scrape” users’ profile data to analyze employee turnover rates under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). Tiffany Li, a technology attorney and professor of law at the University of New Hampshire, joins our host Meghan McCarty Carino to talk about how the CFAA fits into today’s world.

The internet can be a scary place for women, from mansplaining and unwanted advances to coordinated harassment campaigns, doxxing and physical threats. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Nina Jankowicz, author of a new book about this, “How to Be a Woman Online: Surviving Abuse and Harassment, and How to Fight Back,” which comes out Thursday. Jankowicz says women are bearing most of the burden of fighting online trolls.

Accessing mental health care has long been difficult  and the pandemic has further increased the strain. And there are thousands of mental health apps — about 20,000 and counting — designed to tackle the problem. They range from mood trackers, guided mindfulness exercises and apps with chatbots that teach coping skills. Spending on them has grown quickly since 2019 and is predicted to reach about $500 million this year, according to a report from Deloitte. But not all these apps are backed by science. Stephen Schueller is a professor at UC Irvine and the executive director of One Mind PsyberGuide, which provides expert ratings for hundreds of wellness apps. He talked to host Meghan McCarty Carino about how the apps are rated.

Netflix will give investors a glimpse of its growth Tuesday with the release of its quarterly earnings report. It’s been hard to sustain the pace of 2020, when the world was stuck at home on the couch. But now the company is chasing a new market: video games. And it’s a big one. Mobile gaming generated an estimated $90 billion in 2021. Over the last year, Netflix has bought up small, independent gaming studios— it acquired a third one last month. The company now offers multiple titles free to subscribers, including a card game, bowling, an upcoming first-person shooter and two based on its popular show “Stranger Things.” Leveraging a company’s intellectual property for games is nothing new, but how well can Netflix play this game? Michael Pachter is a research analyst with Wedbush Securities. He told “Marketplace Tech’s” Meghan McCarty Carino that Netflix’s catalog of hit shows might not lend itself to this strategy.

Thousands of vendors on Etsy are staging a strike this week after the company announced it would hike transaction fees for sellers by 30%. It’s the latest in a series of changes that Etsy says will help it compete with e-commerce giants like Amazon by improving customer service, attracting more buyers and strengthening the brand by policing listings for mass-produced items, something sellers have been asking for. It’s a topic for Quality Assurance, where we take a second look at a big tech story. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Samantha Close, a professor of communication at DePaul University.

We’ve got bitcoin, dogecoin, litecoin. Every day a new coin. These are known as cryptocurrencies, unregulated digital coins that live outside the banking system in blockchain technology. Recently, the U.S. Federal Reserve said it was exploring the possibility of a central bank digital currency, or CBDC. It would be issued, regulated and backed by the government, just like paper dollars. Some countries are already experimenting with this, like the Bahamas, Nigeria, Sweden and China. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Eswar Prasad, professor at Cornell University. He’s the author of a recent piece in MIT Technology Review: “Money is about to enter a new era of competition.” And he explains what it would look like for all these currencies to coexist.

Google and Apple have been slow to relinquish the hefty commissions they charge on app payments. Developers have been pushing for alternatives to the payment systems run by those tech giants, hoping they could save some money. In South Korea, Google is now required to let app makers use alternative payment systems, but the tech company will still take almost the same commission. For instance, in cases in which Google takes 30% of revenue, it will charge developers that use other systems 26%. Here in the U.S., Spotify recently reached an agreement with Google to charge subscribers through a non-Google system a smaller fee than usual, but there’s no word yet on how much smaller. So will these changes actually spur competition, as intended? Meghan McCarty Carino of “Marketplace Tech” put that question to Eric Seufert, an independent analyst with the website Mobile Dev Memo. He said such small tweaks might not be worth very much.

The metaverse is coming — so we’re told — though it’s hard to know exactly what that means. There are companies using virtual reality to recreate office life down to the conference rooms, for some reason. And, of course, VR is big for gaming and other diversions. But VR is also increasingly being used in health care, especially as more services go remote. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Brennan Spiegel, the director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. He said about 200 hospitals in the U.S. are using virtual reality tools to not only help train doctors, but also to help manage patients’ pain from surgery, irritable bowel syndrome or cancer. And recently, this technology’s applications have expanded from treating patients to diagnosing conditions like glaucoma.

The pandemic sent grocery shoppers online like never before, and federal food assistance programs are trying to keep up. The main food stamp program, known as SNAP, rolled out online shopping pre-pandemic, and it’s now available in almost every state. That hasn’t been the case for WIC, a similar program that gives credit to moms and kids for healthy foods, like milk, fruits and vegetables. The USDA started a pilot program late last year for WIC online shopping in a handful of states. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino speaks with Brian Dittmeier, senior director of public policy at the National WIC Association, which provides education and advocacy. He said it will be years before the program expands nationwide, but it’s important that it does.